My son remembers the hospital as the place with the fish tank

Dear Delyara, When my son was four, he spent six weeks in hospital with a serious infection. I remember terror. Blood tests. Sleeping upright beside his bed. Doctors speaking in corridors. The moment his oxygen level dropped and five people entered the room at once. He is twenty-two now. We drove past that hospital today and I asked if he remembers it. He said, “Yeah, the lobby had the massive fish tank.” That is his memory. Fish. He remembers naming one orange fish Kevin and getting a popsicle after blood draws. I almost corrected him, as if he had misunderstood his own childhood. Then I realized I am grateful. I carried the fear so perhaps he did not have to. Parents sometimes believe shared events create shared memories. They do not. I lived six weeks believing I might lose my child. He lived six weeks watching fish and discovering nurses kept stickers in their pockets. Tonight, I found an old photograph of him beside the hospital aquarium. He is smiling. I am behind him looking twenty years older than I had six weeks earlier. For the first time, the photograph comforted me. Maybe the difference between our memories is not evidence that he forgot something important. Maybe it means childhood protected one small corner of him while the adults did the worrying.