The following essay has been written especially for Mommybloggers.com by Liz, of Badgerbag fame.

My own early memories from 4, 5, 6 years old focus on the details of objects of daily life. I can remember the small details of the grey hollow concrete blocks that held up the shelf for our record player, with a thin sheaf of albums underneath. The porcelain curves of a particular lamp with birds and cherubs, on my grandmother's nighttable; how it felt to be looking along the curb for bottlecaps and to find a new one undented, to grub it up from the gravelly muck and put it in my pocket.

People are fuzzier or else there's specific physical details - often something grotesque like a hairy mole, or big age spots, or the ways that grownups had huge pores... People were smells, like rose lotion, or Coppertone, or beer and aftershave.

The people grew into composite photographs of incidents, small kindnesses or traumas, which began to crystallize into my visions of them as people separate from their roles as mom, grandma, aunt, mom's friend, teacher. I was just thinking that those moments that I realized someone was a person were times when their roles broke open, for good or bad.

I was remembering my mom and dad in this post about Jo Spanglemonkey's daughter and my long-ago visit to the Smithsonian bathroom with my dad and uncles. At that moment last week outside the bathroom door, I was overcome with the realization that Sophie would remember me from this day, perhaps some minor moment that didn't register for me but that for her was a great injustice! My own childhood memory of the Smithsonian Bathroom Incident was of a light breaking open in my mind as I realized my dad was fundamentally clueless about what was going on in my head and about the most basic parent-child care of me. But from an adult perspective what stands out to me now is how disdainful I was of my mom's inability to run around enjoying the museum - and how it wasn't clear to me that she had a 6 month old baby to lug around. How interesting it is that the same memory becomes different over the years! Will it look different to me when I'm 60?

Anyway, since I'm kind of morbid I wonder sometimes: If I died today, what would my son remember about me? Who would I be? And since we're going to operate on the assumption I'm not dying anytime soon, what will he remember of me anyway, from this time when his conscious memories are forming?

So I still have the same memory-pictures and feelings about my own mom - her lap, or how she'd push me off it - how she'd watch me color or paint and help me with endless patience, putting newspaper all around and then hanging up my paintings - how she looked in the early morning with her coffee and crossword puzzle, frowning and knitting her brows and not to be bothered - how she'd snap at me for stepping on the heels of her sandals or getting underfoot - the precise motions of how she'd blow-dry her hair or crack an egg into the pan - awful moments of having my hair pulled back too tight in braids while being hissed at not to fidget or cry - how she knew just how I liked my toast buttered - her voice reading me books. Those memories look so different now that I'm doing those same things!

How many of those memories revolve around mundane daily services and caretakings! I think of them as annoyances... will Moomin remember me as the impatient person who yanks the sweater painfully over his ears at 7am? Will he remember the trip to Sea World as "That time you yelled at me for spilling the juice in the car and it wasn't my fault"? Or our daily life as "When Mom was always ignoring me and saying she was working on the computer when actually she was just blogging"? Will he cut me any slack? I'm not going to become more patient, and I know I'm a good parent! But it seems impossible to know if the nice-Badger-mom moments outweigh or balance out the grumpy-Badger-mom moments.

Maybe they just don't balance that way... but instead layer together... I don't mean this at all to result in a feeling of "OMG I must suddenly become absolutely perfect!" because, well, no, that's an endless hamsterwheel of guilt I'm not climbing onto.

What if I never noticed all the things my mom wished I would remember? What if I only noticed what was trivial to her? In other words, translating into my own life... what if the things I wish Moomin would remember about me aren't the important things to him? It's terribly unsettling! In adult relationships, the other person gives feedback so that you can see how you appear to them. With children it's more of a mystery.

I wonder sometimes, as Jo and Squid's and my kids reach sentient web-surfing age as well as memory-age, how much of my blogging is trying to make excuses for any of my Mistakes to the future people they'll become... As mommybloggers, we worry about violating our kids' privacy, or about telling embarrassing stories, but I think we worry more that our personhood will disappear under theirs, in our own eyes. Maybe part of feminist motherhood is insisting on our own subjectivity.

Read more from the fabulous Liz at Badgerbag.