Before my experience with, well, death, I considered myself a cranky old lady who was a mild version of the ‘well, actually’ dude that everyone hates. I had a mania for the truth in part because I grew up with very unreliable narrators (my parents). My mother forgets the bad things that happen or spins them in a way to make them positive. Years later, when i mention the original incident, my mother will look at me incomprehensibly as if I had grown another head. My father, on the other hand, has selective memory as well as genuine memory issues. He will forget things even if you tell him several times–and that’s something he’s interested in. If he has no interest in it in the first place, then you can forget about him even attempting to remember it.
As a result, I am overly nitpicky about details that don’t matter. That actually runs in the family, but I’m the only one who will admit it. I didn’t realize until I was in my late thirties that I could not rely on my mother’s memories any more than I could my father’s. It was a jolt, but it also was a relief. I spent so much time wondering if I was crazy because my mother would out-and-out deny things I knew had happened. One minor example is when I graduated from college, I was magna cum laude. I was pretty damn proud of that. After my graduation ceremony, my mom said that if I hadn’t gotten a B in my Intro to Psych class, I probably could have graduated summa cum laude. Needless to say, that deflated me and I was no longer proud I had graduated magna cum laude.
I asked my mother about it several years later and she had no recollection of ever saying it. In fact, she claimed that there was no way she could have said something like that. When I insisted that she had said it, she replied, “Well, if I did say something like that, it was probably to make you feel better in case you were feeling bad about not getting summa cum laude.” Which is utter horseshit, of course. It was clearly something she had made up on the spot and even if it were true, it’s not a good rationale for saying something like that. It’s my mother in a nutshell, though. Introducing something superfluous into the conversation, based on a worry that she has or would have.