Why We Sometimes Forget the Happiest Moments of Our Lives (And What To Do About It)

One recent morning, I was sitting with my son in the dining room, peeling a banana for him as he looked at me grinning his five-toothed grin. We have been struggling with baby-led weaning, as he seemingly rejects any solids that are actually food (though he’ll gladly chew zippers, cardboard, and the dining room chair leg). “Maybe we should try the foods that his sister liked at this age,” I thought to myself. And then paused. At that moment, I could barely remember a single thing we had fed my daughter at nine months.

Why couldn’t I remember how my daughter (now age 3) had liked her bananas at this age? I did a quick memory scan and drew yet another blank. How had she eaten bananas as a baby? Sliced? Pureed? Gripped in her sticky little hand like my son? I had a hazy memory of something to do with yogurt and maybe some Cheerios, but other than that I was staring into a void of emptiness when it came to the elaborate culinary creations I seem to think I prepared for her.

I drifted into a benign motherly spiral. It was part shame for forgetting something I was certain was important to the story of my children’s childhood, and part frustration that as a mother I couldn’t remember something so seemingly simple as what food I had fed my first baby. As I surfaced (and handed my son his banana, which he promptly and without ceremony, threw on the floor), I realized that what upset me the most wasn’t necessarily what I had forgotten in that particular instance (who cares about the banana), but that I was forgetting things at all that I thought I should remember, and what I knew had been some of my happiest times—sharing family meals—as a mother to boot.

Forgetting Happy Memories and What To Do About It

Forgetfulness and lapses of memory are not unique to parents and can be so mundane yet remarkable that they even make the news. As a recent example, various outlets have reported on the phenomenon of “post-concert amnesia” being experienced by Taylor Swift fans of all ages after attending the Eras Tour—a quirk of memory affecting some of Swifties’ most joyous reflections.

As an “elder Swiftie” who was lucky enough to see her perform at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, I was disconcerted driving home from the concert. The evening was a blur from the moment we entered the stadium gates, even though my ears were still ringing with refrains from Midnights, and I could still remember the warmth on my cheeks when flames lit the stadium during “Bad Blood.”

How memory works

Robert N. Kraft, Ph.D., a professor of cognitive psychology at Otterbein University, recently discussed this phenomenon in an article for Time Magazine. He says we often expect too much of our memory, and it’s not fair to expect to remember minute details of every experience, even our happiest ones.

“We generally remember general impressions and a few distinctive moments for any kind of event, and that’s usually accurate enough for our purposes,” he says. “We get an overall impression and then we retain some selective images.”

Discussing how this applies in particular to some of our happiest moments in life like wedding days, pregnancies, the birth of our children, and their first steps, Kraft notes that it’s quite normal for our memories to feel like snapshots from these days.

“Just because you’re excited throughout does not mean you’ll remember that, that’s not how memory works,” he says. Instead, your brain “looks for events that deviate from the baseline.”

Forgetting is misunderstood

Kraft highlights that we also often misunderstand forgetting, especially those of us who tend to see losing memories as a fault instead of the gift it can result in: that of living in the moment fully. He recounted an anecdote about a young man who had a picture-perfect memory. Every morning he would wake up and tell the complete and perfectly detailed story of what had happened the day before… only to find it took him 24 hours to recount his entire day.

“Forgetting is its own system,” Kraft, who has written in praise of forgetting for all that it allows us to accomplish in our lives, says. “It allows us to experience the world more fully, unencumbered by memory. It allows us to take in things in an immediate way and to really live life fully. And to later condemn ourselves for living in the moment and for the natural selectivity of memory I think is unfair to us.”

The best way to safeguard memories

While Kraft encourages us to look at our forgetting in a more benevolent light, he also knows from personal experience that forgetting something personally meaningful can be upsetting. Luckily, for those truly special moments (even the mundane daily events you may find meaningful), there are tactics we can employ to help us remember our happiest days for many years to come.

Journal

As a photographer and a devoted documenter of every special event for my family, I was certain that Kraft would suggest taking more pictures or even a video if we truly want to remember something in detail. However, his top suggestion for parents who hope to capture family memories is to journal about them.

“I strongly advocate for keeping a pregnancy and early parenthood journal,” he says. “It’s more effective than photos in some ways because when you’re writing, you’re rehearsing [the event], you’re thinking about it and then you’re reviewing the journal.”

As we journal, Kraft notes that we’re not only recording these memories, but creating a narrative from them and our unique perspective, full of details that only we may have noticed.

“You’re working these events into narrative memory which is what we use most of the time—the story of your life and your child’s life and it allows you to remember what you thought were the first steps or the first words. And when you go back to the journal you’ll not only remember the event, but you’ll also remember writing in the journal about it.”

Kraft says that he loves photographs, and knows how meaningful certain family snapshots can become over the years. However, when snapping dozens (or hundreds) of photos, the image of course comes from the camera. We generate memories ourselves and recording them with our own hands in a journal has the potential to hold even more meaning for us down the line.