After I found out I was going to have a baby, I started filming one second of every day. I used an app that allows you to select one second from a video, add it to a calendar, and then, when you’re done, mash the seconds into one single video. I wanted to show the little person inside me—the little person who’d taken a year and a half and artificial insemination to conceive—what life was like in the year before his birth: how often we traveled (we took 18 plane rides), how we prepared for his arrival (spoiler: we forgot to buy diapers), how our lives made room for his precious life. I got eight months of footage before he decided to arrive early, so there’s a little bit of a gap, but I kept going after he was born. His first bath, nap, babble. Firsts turned into regular days.
The video compilation of his first year is very misleading. There is only one video of him crying, for instance. I wanted to capture his little goat cry, the helpless little wail of an infant, but even though he cried practically every day (what infant doesn’t?), once felt like enough. There are only a few of me, too, and yet the two of us were inseparable. Maybe I just didn’t like the way I looked most of the time; after all, I was postpartum, swollen, tired, hormonal. Video makes it easy to be completely honest and selective, all at the same time.
Most of the clips are of him—his name is Riley—looking up at me or his dad, batting at toys, tasting things like avocado and sweet potatoes for the first time, balancing a spoon in his chubby baby grip, wobbling to a stand, cruising along the furniture, and for the last few weeks, sitting on a blanket in the park with us. Those last few weeks were the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but in the videos, it looks like we’re just enjoying spring mornings in the desert. In one clip, you can hear me say “another Saturday in quarantine,” but that’s the only clue you’ll find. We were completely isolated. Where is that world captured? Maybe it doesn’t need to be. After all, the world of a baby is no larger than as far as they can see, which for much of the first year, isn’t that far away at all. Honest, and selective.
As the years go on, so does Riley. His first year of miraculous changes turned into year two, and three, and four, and five. I don’t know how long I will do this, this daily memory-keeping. It’s kind of an obsession now. As of his sixth birthday next month, he will have 2,462 seconds, his entire life compressed as I wanted to remember it, into approximately 41 minutes.
*****
In 1885, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus created a memory model called the forgetting curve. The curve, which looks more like a ski slope, falls precipitously for the first few days after learning or experiencing something new and finally flattens out around day four. We lose half of what we learn within the first hour; 70% within the first few days; and 90% within a week. The 10% that remains is just a mere shadow of what we experienced. The rest is lost, somewhere, like old footage on a camcorder no one can play anymore.
That is, of course, unless we make an active attempt to recall it. Active recall must be motivated, at least by something. Relevance, interest, connection. Cognitive science knows this; it’s why so much talk in our education circles around creating meaningful experiences for students; intrinsically motivating them; creating relevance to their lives with the course material; assigning work between class sessions to help preserve important facts learned in class. All of these strategies are aimed at combating the forgetting curve, even just a little bit. Because the truth of it is, we will forget. We always do.
The loss, I know, sounds devastating. But it is part of what allows us to be human: imagine if you remembered every detail of your life, down to the second, and it all took up precious space in your brain? The people who do claim to remember every single day of their lives—people with hyperthymesia, or the extraordinary ability to recall every day of their lives—also tend to suffer from the weight of what they carry. Imagine never being able to forget a single embarrassing thing you said; imagine never being able to forget the words in a fight you had with an old boyfriend; the weather on May 12, 2011; the homework assignment you did in 1991; the t-shirt your son was wearing when they cut him out of it in the emergency room when he was having his first seizure.
I knew as soon as I gave birth that I was forgetting things more rapidly than ever before. Motherhood amnesia is real. So was the ephemeral nature, I realized when I started this project, of every single moment. It’s why I didn’t stop. With every day that passed, there he grew. There he changed. I wanted to keep all of it, every moment, hold onto each piece of it as it was slipping right from my hands. Was I doing it to preserve my sanity? Was it a mechanism for survival? What I wanted most was to keep his little voice, the way he picked up blocks, his beautiful blue eyes, accessible to me forever. Because we tend to believe that memory operates like a video camera, we tend to believe that video is a complete and accurate representation of time exactly as it unfolded.
But what about when there is no visual? Our son’s first year was not all firsts we wanted to capture, first when he couldn’t stop vomiting for months, and then when he started having seizures. There is a reason there are no videos from the ambulances, the medics, the many specialists trying to diagnose his tiny body that first year. There are no videos of me crying, of his dad desperate for answers, of little Riley vomiting in my arms for days on end. I didn’t film those days. What happened in the background—those terrifying moments—slipped away, too, just as his babyhood and toddlerhood.
The t-shirt had a turtle on it, by the way. Video or not, that is one detail I have not forgotten.
*****
A few months ago, I found a pile of VHS-C tapes crammed into the back of a cabinet at my parents’ house. These tiny tapes were the compact version of a VHS tape, about the size of a palm, and they went into video cameras in the 1990s. To play them, you had to tuck them into a converter that was the size of a VHS tape, and pop the converter into the player. I took them home with me and had someone from special collections at the university where I work digitize them for me. Nobody knew what was on any of them.
The first video is from 1989. When the crackling stops, my dad comes into focus, and he’s actually on the phone with a Samsung customer service agent asking why he can’t get the date to show up correctly on the video camera. Apparently, it’s on the European setting, with the day first and then the month. I don’t know who is filming him or why (I’m assuming it’s my mom?), but the camera follows him around the kitchen, chronicling the most ordinary, unexceptional moment one could ever imagine. This is our family’s first video footage.
The camera clicks off, clicks back on, and then: my mom. Standing there, in her early 30s, younger than I am now, bashfully asking if she looks OK as my dad tapes her for the first time. The way she stands there, in the kitchen, in a kitchen in 1989 that looks exactly like the kitchen in 2025 except that there’s a black table from Pottery Barn instead of a plastic one with rounded edges and metal chairs. It’s the way she laughs, effortlessly, and how she asks if she should make the video more interesting and opens the brown refrigerator door, rummages around until she finds a Diet Coke, its 1980s font just like I remember it, and tilts it toward the camera before smiling and taking a big sip. It’s the way she talks to my dad, rolling her eyes at him, putting her hands on her waist, but in a playful way. She rolls her eyes at him differently now, nearly forty years later.
The video fascinated me. I watched it at least six times, analyzing it more closely each time. Who was the mom in this video? When I think about my mom when I was little girl, I simply see a mom larger than life, a mom who—even though I’ve seen her in hundreds of photographs—had no age, no insecurities, no awkwardness, no vibes of a thirty-something who had just lost her own mom to cancer and quit her job, a job she loved and still talks about, to move across the country with my dad and raise two little girls. I had heard the stories before—I’d heard the stories about working at the bank in Pittsburgh, about finally deciding it was time to have kids, about the decision to move to Atlanta with dad, hundreds of times—but I realized while watching those videos that I had never really pictured her, a version of her before my memory begins, in the story; all that time, she was just telling me about a story. This is the story playing out in real time. I see her as a woman—so recently a girl—trying to feel comfortable in her new home in the South, thousands of miles from her dad and sister. I see the cancer diagnosis she would get—and beat into remission—twenty years later differently now.
And then there was my dad. I was fascinated with him for a different reason. After my mom’s debut, my dad gets his moment in the kitchen. But this time, he’s not on the phone. It’s the way he creeps over to the white porcelain cookie jar with the blue COOKIES on it and sneaks an Oreo. I watched that part again and again, his mischievous grin, flexing his muscles and cracking a joke about looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger since he’d just mowed the lawn. I couldn’t stop watching because he still makes that joke and he still sneaks cookies exactly like that, today. It was like watching an AI-generated video of my 72-year-old dad as a 37-year-old dad. Which one is really my dad? Are both of them?
*****
The history of home videos is an interesting one. Archivist Rick Prelinger, who has been collecting American home videos since the 1980s and whose archive boasts more than 15,000 home videos, will tell you that the allure of home movies lies in the way the subjects look at the camera—or rather, the person behind it. It’s a gaze, he says, more affectionate, more intimate, than anything we’re used to seeing on screen.
Prelinger also believes that we are drawn to home videos because they are structurally unique. They aren’t narratives with clean beginnings, middles, and ends, with conflicts and resolutions and characters we can readily identify and understand. The stories are the videos, as random, intimate, and unpredictable as they are. Within them, they hold thousands of little narratives about the unfolding dynamic between the person shooting and the person shot, Prelinger said in an interview, “about performing for the camera and watching people perform; about family mysteries we may never solve.”
The history of home video, like anything with technology, is related to wealth and class. In the 1920s and 1930s, when 16mm film was introduced to the masses who could afford it, it would cost a family about $1,400 in today’s dollars to get one hour of film shot and processed. In 1933, Kodak introduced the 8mm film and cameras started coming down in price; by the 1940s and 1950s, a broader class of Americans were filming themselves. Prelinger’s archives feature Black families filming themselves as early as the mid-1930s; soon after, he has footage of Mexican-American farmworkers in Yuma, Arizona in the 1940s, and then of a native family filming their favorite tribal fishing grounds on the Columbia River in the 1950s. Most of them were shot by women, an unsurprising fact if we think about the fact that women are often the family chroniclers, the keepers of scrapbooks, the bedtime storytellers, the makers of quilts depicting family histories and stories.
As much as he believes videos tell the tiny histories of our lives, he is well aware of the selective histories home videos also contain. For one thing, home videos are of an overwhelmingly positive world. “There are very few home movies of tragedies or traumatic events,” he says. The beauty of home videos, he says, is that they create “history from the bottom up,” preserving the moments we took the time to pick up the camera and film of our daily lives—moms doing laundry, workers on the job, families on road trips, children performing at school—because we zeroed in on the events we want to remember. The first time Riley spelled his name; that day we went up to the mountain the snow after I broke my foot; a picnic in the park with friends on a sunny afternoon.
*****
I spent a summer in Malta as a camp counselor in 2004. I remember everything about it so vividly, as if the entire summer happened last week. I was twenty years old, still in college, on the cusp of declaring a comparative literature major and deciding I wanted to become a travel writer. That summer, those two things became set in stone; that would be my future. When I think back on those days, that summer is more vivid than any summer of my life.
My friends and I have all stayed in touch. A few weeks ago, one of our friends sent us a WhatsApp message and told us he’d found his digital camera from 2004. I’d already seen all of his pictures from 2004 because everyone had mailed me copies of negatives and SIM cards after the local photo store burned all nine rolls of film from that summer in their printing machine.
“You won’t believe this, guys,” he wrote, “but this thing did video. I didn’t even remember that.”
He sent them, one by one by one.
None of the videos had any sound. They were fuzzy in the way video quality on early-generation digital cameras were fuzzy—dreamy, sometimes a little choppy, pixelated, blurred around the edges.
The last video is a longer one that spans about a minute. I know exactly where Marcin was sitting when he filmed it—on one of the sofas facing the far wall that was replaced years ago. The view is of the lobby, a hundred teenagers milling around hauling suitcases (it must have been one of the arrival or departure days), the hotel receptionist, waving papers and pointing kids in random directions, and all of us group leaders, some of us sitting on the other sofas, some of us showing kids which way to go. And then someone must have called out to us, because all of a sudden, we all smile at each other, get up, walk outside, and turn left. The video ends.
What I remember from that day—what I have always remembered—is the moment after the video, the moment standing outside, me in a yellow spaghetti-strap shirt and a flowery skirt, tan and blissful, all of us posing outside the hotel. It’s the photo we always come back to when we talk about Malta back then. It’s the one photo of all of us, together, and it’s been frozen in time for me for twenty years. Seeing the moments before—if we believe video is truer than all my methodical journal entries from that summer—expanded the memory into an entirely new one.
Social psychology has taken up this work. In a study on how video alters the way we see ourselves, Libby and Eibach (2011) looked at how watching yourself in third-person on video changes how you emotionally interpret and recall events. Seeing yourself in the past doesn’t connect us more fiercely to it; in fact, it changes our perspective so much that we are no longer the eyes witnessing the memory; we become the observer, watching every mannerism, shift in tone, vocal inflection, facial expression. We aren’t part of the memory anymore; we’re observing it.
Did we stand around that much? Did I fiddle with my hair that much? Did we hang out in the lobby that much? What memory experts call flashbulb memories—the recollection of an isolated moment in time where there’s no metaphorical film running before or after—happened every time I looked at that photo of us. After I watched the videos, studying our mannerisms, seeing the day around it unfold and expand after 20 years, it occurred to me that one day these videos I’m making might expand Riley’s memory into the nooks and crannies of ordinary moments, those that aren’t activated like flashbulbs.
*****
When my husband and I got married in 2013, I insisted—no matter what else had to go in the budget—that we have someone videotape our wedding. Our friend Art, who was, at the time, building his videography business, agreed to do it for us. He put the entire 4-hour event on a series of DVDs and edited the best moments into a 10-minute highlight reel for us.
Our son is now aware that he comes from somewhere; he doesn’t know where, or how, but last year he started asking a lot of questions about his great-grandfather Bobo, who died at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic because he could not get into a hospital. His great-grandfather was a force, a man who walked into any room with a hearty, infectious laugh, and who lived a wild life, going from traveling salesman to millionaire more than once in his 83 years. Riley and Bobo met a few times, but only briefly, when Riley was an infant. He has no real memories of him, of course.
One afternoon, we pulled out the wedding video. Somehow, as soon as he heard Bobo’s laughter, Riley squealed, “That’s him!” How did he know? I don’t know how he would know that. Can a sound live inside of us, recalled from an infant’s mind?
We showed him, too, his other great-grandparents. I no longer had any grandparents when we got married, but my husband still had all of his. We lost almost all of them during the pandemic, all within a year, in the year after Riley was born.
I think about this a lot as I compile Riley’s videos. I’m meticulous about including as many video clips as I can of my son and his grandparents. Every time they read him books before bed, I peek around the corner and film it. Every time they are playing ball together outside, I pull out my phone and film it. Every time Riley and my dad play virtual games together on the tablet, I film it. At first, I thought it was because his grandparents are a big part of his life and we live far away from them, but I think it’s more than that. I think a part of me knows that one day, these videos will help him remember this sweet, precious time. Or show him what I know he one day likely can’t remember, because he is only five years old.
Prelinger talks about the value of home videos in the way they distinctly preserve deep records of body language, movement, voice. How adults related to one another…to children…how we interacted at parties…how we moved around different spaces. As he says, home videos are “an encyclopedia of past realities from which we might pick and choose elements of the future we hope to live in.” An excavation of the parts, like the sound of a laugh, that we miss in photographs.
*****
There’s something else about those 1-second-everyday videos. They might not even be honest and selective. Just selective. In year four, I had a complete nervous breakdown. These breakdowns happen every few years, usually brought on by stress or difficult decision-making. I was undergoing both. In 2023, after our landlord decided to give his home back to his kids, we scrambled to find our first house and ended up buying a 75-year-old ranch that kept a lot of dirty little secrets in it. It was a badly done flip that had floors like lasagna layers underneath it, all that had to be excavated because the flippers poured concrete on top of lumpy, thick Saltillo tile (that was on top of five other layers of floors). The roof blew off in a monsoon three weeks after we purchased it. The old kitchen cabinets fell apart when we drilled up the floors. It was an actual, literal mess.
There is footage of it, of course, the occasional snippet of the kids looking out onto the rubble, or Riley tiptoeing into his new room for the first time. You can see that we had no kitchen at all for the first six months we lived there, but you never see that we had to traipse outside to hose down cups and plates in a plastic utility sink or that a microwave was our only appliance for five months. In one video, the cabinet bottoms have arrived, and the kids are putting toys on top of them, and in the video, it looks joyous.
It was not joyous. I was stretched to the brim, failing emotionally as a mom, a spouse, and a teacher. I couldn’t cook for months, regretted every decision I had made, poured all the money we had saved up into a house that was falling apart around us. My anxiety medication failed me; I started having regular panic attacks like I had years before. Mercifully, I did not film myself—nor anything else—on those days.
When I watch his year 4 video, the year I lied to myself and changed a few dates so that I’d have a video for every day, I know those dark moments are also in there, in-between the cracks. There is so much joy in the videos, in the beauty and innocence of being four years old and not caring whatsoever if you have a roof that peeled off like a piece of tar paper or a functioning oven. Secretly, though, it is hard for me to watch that year because I know what really happened during those months. My son won’t know unless he asks me. Maybe that’s OK with me.
*****
Sometimes, I wonder: what will survive of Riley’s childhood? What story will the videos tell, what narrative will they shape? What’s left of our pasts, always, are fragments of memory, pieces fractured and put back together, as we construct and reconstruct our lives.
We have known for a long time that memories are not static things in our brains; they are alive and subject to change. Creating memories is a three-part process: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Most psychologists agree on this, as it involves encoding the information (recognizing that an experience is happening), storing it (pulling it together as a pattern in your brain), and retrieving it (recalling it again). This is practically true for any type of memory, whether it be semantic—knowledge of facts about the world, like the capital of Nebraska; procedural—like tying our shoes; or episodic—the events of our lives, from which autobiographical memory comes.
In recent years, there has been increasing interest in examining how photographs are not simply “cues” but instead meaningful artifacts around which our accounts of the past are constructed. In a study on cued recall, researcher Tim Fawns examined how people responded to looking at old photographs. Once the memory was activated, it changed: first, it is susceptible to the stimulation of feelings and emotions, then to narrative production, then to association, interference, and eventually meaning-making.
What has always fascinated me about this process is the last part. When we activate, when we recall, we open up our memories to change. Memories of our lives are delicate, like petals on the stalk of a flower; they are not things, like instructions for tying our shoes. The synapses connect and reconnect when we think about them. Memory is not a video camera, and a video camera does not capture all. As we grow older, we see memories differently every time we recall them. Sometimes, we mix them up with other ones. Sometimes, we remember things that never really happened. We’re good at convincing ourselves of things.
But what happens if the person does not actively remember the events from the visual cue? What if they had already lost those memories to the mysteries of childhood amnesia, never coded them into their sense of self in the first place? Do the memories become activated, do they shimmer to life in our brains, somehow, or do they just explain why things are the way they are?
*****
In the video of Riley’s 5th year, something starts to happen, something I’m not sure I would have noticed had I not been filming him every single day. He starts wanting to film his own life, the world from his perspective. “Mama,” he’ll say, “let me film this cool bug.” Or: “mama, take a video of me kicking the ball!” He is starting to involve himself in his narrative, which I guess happens to any child at some point or another, but it’s especially interesting to watch it unfold on camera. Sometimes, he wants to film me, or his little sister. I wonder if he is starting to form his own sense of self, his own set of memories, his own narrative. It will be, no doubt, different from mine.
I’ve been trying to include some of these little shifts in perspective into Riley’s videos. After all, an emerging sense of self is worth documenting, too. His growing awareness of the world, his zooming in on its little details, endlessly fascinates me. Will he want to see himself marveling at a bug one day? Probably not—it might be the furniture behind the bug that’s more interesting to him some day—but a love for bugs is as much a piece of him today as anything else.
Piecing together memory is an act of survival. For a writer like me, for a mom like me, these details are everything. The way Riley points and says “bucket truck!;” the way he pops out of bed after nap and says, “Riley wake up!” The inflection, the sweet grammar, the innocence in stating the beautiful obvious, it is part of a past version of himself, one version that gave way to this version.
This version that will give way to tomorrow’s version, and the next, in all the little boys and young men yet to come.
*****
In Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s 2011 Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, he argues that digital cameras and social media have upended centuries-old practices of retaining and forgetting moments in our lives. Nowadays, it takes much more time and effort to simply forget something. We get pinged on our phones. Google Photos compiles an old video for us. We scroll back through someone’s feed. Forgetting is far from a passive act—it’s a skill.
We have to forget, Mayer-Schonberger reminds us. We have to let things go. It helps us prioritize and keep the important things important. And yet, the year his book came out was also the year that Facebook turned the “wall” into a “timeline,” a reverse chronology of our online lives, and the year that prompted the development of nostalgia apps like 1 Second Everyday and Time Hop. The internet never forgets.
Perhaps we have gone overboard for one simple reason: we can. Before the digital era, memory was fleeting. Our memories were kept in journals and printed photographs. Before that, journals and sketchbooks. Before that, stories we told at bedtime. Now that we have the tools to visually preserve our lives, we go overboard; we haven’t learned how to temper our insatiable appetite for memory.
In one study examining how taking photos can impair recall (Henkel, 2014), participants who toured a museum and took photos remembered fewer objects and their locations on a memory test than those who’d taken no photos at all. The reason, the researcher believes, is that taking photos is a kind of cognitive offloading, where we rely on the visual as a kind of external memory to do the work for us. It’s encoded there, we think, relieved; we don’t have to actively remember it right now. But here’s the thing: Henkel also found that our memory was not impaired when people zoomed in and focused on specific elements of photographs during picture-taking.
I’m not recording video all the time, filming everything. Over the past six years, I’ve become an expert at filming small moments in Riley’s life, his tiny accomplishments, his emerging handwriting, painting, art. I know I am trying to tell a story, a story of becoming, a story that is maybe a little rosier than it was. Maybe that’s the version I want for him, and maybe that’s OK, too. I zoom in pretty carefully in the hours and hours it takes me to go back through every video I’ve taken and select each second and put it into the app. Do I remember more about this time in our lives than I would if we were born a hundred years ago? Is taking a 1-second video of my child every day a zooming in, or a cognitive offload? More importantly, does it matter if I’ve created the past I want to recall, that I want all of us to see?
*****
When my daughter Zoey was born, two years after my son, I started filming one second every day of her life, too. The process is a little harder this time, as if I’m trying to isolate two moments from every day that are different, and still important. But I persist. Her own story is emerging, slowly and uniquely. I don’t know how long I will do this, but I hope the day I stop is not because the world has taught them their bodies are uncomfortable, strange things.
Will the videos survive? I hope so. I’m saving them in multiple places. If YouTube takes down my videos, I also have them on the Cloud, and in my iPhone. But what survives in 30 years—when Riley and Zoey look back to see what mom was like when she was younger than them—may largely be by accident.
My son, my daughter, my parents, me, all of us. The days keep marching on. We are not one self; we are, as we know, many selves; each giving way to the next in unending, unpredictable chapters. But they are knotted together, infinitely. They create the foundation of the conscious self: this is who I am. This is who I am becoming.
This is who I was.
