I have read exactly one-third of Yes Please by Amy Poehler. Let me tell you, I have not stopped laughing since I picked it up, except for when I almost cried.
On page 61 of her new memoir Poehler asks you to flip to the next page, call your parents (if you still have them) and write down the story of the day you were born.
I was on the bus when I came to page 61 and it floored me. This would be a story I would never be able to know, let alone tell, because my mom is dead. Pages 62 and 63 would forever be empty for me.
Crap is that a depressing thought.
It’s not Amy’s fault that she asked this question or that it almost made me cry. In all honesty this was just something I’d never thought about and then suddenly being forced to think about it overwhelmed me.
Last week, as I was writing something else, I started doing the math and realized that my mom had my brother when she was about 23 (one year older than I am now) and she had me when she was 34. What a world my mom must have lived in. I wonder what was happening in the world, what was happening in her world, when she was pregnant. For some reason this didn’t get me thinking about the day I was born – what happened, when her water broke, how long labor took.
I have a million pictures of when I was a baby, but I can attest that I’ve found the one situation in which a picture is not worth a thousand words — when you have no one to tell you the stories behind the captured moments. I can “thank” Amy Poehler for making me think about sad things or I can actually thank her for showing me the importance of capturing moments for posterity. (I choose the latter.)
I may never write a memoir, but I’ll be recording key moments in my life if only so that those around me can read them.
Check back next week for a the top things I learned after reading Yes Please. Expect many.
Image: Amazon
