My daughter’s sound-activated monitor goes off at weird times throughout the night.  Most of the time, it’s just a fluke.

Perhaps I tossed the comforter the wrong way, interrupting the reception.  Or maybe my daughter has moved loudly.  Or I’ve farted.  Or she’s farted.  Or there’s a sudden solar flare.  Who knows why, but it’s rarely because she’s up and needs assistance.  9 times out of 10, it’s nothing.

Still, even knowing this track record, I get startled when I hear her monitor go off.  My chest gets that familiar nervous feeling I used to get when she was a baby and I’d hear the crackle of the monitor.  The one that signaled an end to my “nap” and the beginning of a long night.  It was later replaced with a sense of dread, thinking “what illness or nightmare is waiting for me?”

All of this got me thinking that I can’t even remember what her cries were like when she’d wake at night as a baby.

Were they needy? Angry? Whimpers, or full-on she-devil screams?

I can’t remember. It’s funny how your mind blocks all that out after only four short years.  I can remember a handful of really bad moments where she was screaming at the top of her lungs.  But the like-clockwork sounds of her readiness to eat?  I don’t recall what they were like.  You would think, after hearing them for over a year, I’d have them committed to memory.

She was not an easy baby at first.  She was intense.  Not colicky, but a girl that, from birth, knew what she wanted and what she didn’t want.  Meaning, most of the time, she wanted Mommy, and those who were not Mommy were not allowed in her inner circle of comfort and trust in the wee hours of the morning.

And while I remember a couple of moments when she seemed like the most unhappy baby in the world, when I think back to her infancy, what comes to mind now is how happy she was.

Was she really? Am I suffering from Mothering Amnesia Disorder (a.k.a. MADness)?

Or is it that she’s just so bubbly now that it has replaced any kind of negative memory I have of her?  That her Big Girl verbal requests when she needs us in the middle of the night are far more welcome than the screeches she’d utter as a baby?  That I’ve grown so accustomed to this preschooler who has long since outgrown her initial clingy-ness that the other memories are irrelevant?

Really, it doesn’t matter. I’ll take these happy memories over the frustrated ones from her first year any day.  I’m comfortable not remembering what those cries sound like.  They’ve been replaced with giddy laughter and nightly secrets of “I love you.”

And these sounds?  I want to remember them forever.