I read a quote recently that goes something like, people who knew the older version of you would not recognize who you are now. This might be true, although I believe a person’s essence never changes, and by that I mean, warts tend to hang around—but so does what’s good in each of us, I think, and the good can even blossom if we let it.

I’d been noodling on these ideas when I plugged in the little thumb drive my David brought home the other day. It’s the second piece of a Christmas gift he gave me, a bit of home video transferred from old tapes. He’s been preoccupied in recent weeks sorting through piles and piles of photos and slides and video tapes, and gifting some of them to family members. I had no idea he’d included me in this effort, but that is just like him and one of countless reasons I love him so much.

Turns out we both had the same kind of video recorder during our first marriages, and we each had cassettes hanging around with who-knows-what on them. Problem is, they’re a weird format that no longer exists. So he dug into some research and found you can’t play them back without the actual camera, and the cameras no longer exist—not on eBay, or anywhere. Nor is there a type of VHS case thingummie to drop this small, specialized tape into (a Maxell 8, not the same as a Super 8) and play it back on a conventional device, like you can with other kinds of media, for example. Fortunately he found somebody locally to move the footage we have, his and mine, onto thumb drives.

I digress.

He gave me the first drive on Christmas of video shot thirty-one years ago on another Christmas, in 1993, when my son was not yet walking. He’d have been just about ten months by then. He was pure sweetness and there are some heartwarming images and moments, and I’m so glad to have this brief glimpse into my history and his, and to see moving images of my baby when he was still a baby. Then came Christmas ’94 and a mobile child whose speech development was well underway and who was into everything. It was also a nice record of my great-grandmother Gracie’s house, where we brought our new baby home in March of 1993, and would soon take our leave for greener pastures.

The second drive arrived last week and includes video somehow so different and so much more poignant, and I’m still unpacking all the emotions and trying to figure out why that is so. It was 1995 and much had transpired in our lives in twelve months. We, my ex-husband and I, had moved into an exquisite Tudor Revival home in an historic and highly sought-after Knoxville neighborhood, a walkable neighborhood where there were plenty of young families like ours. It was here that our taproot really took hold. His business had begun to flourish, we’d announced our intentions of founding an Episcopal school, and were already deeply tied to a community that felt like home.

Likewise so much had transpired developmentally in our son in just one year. I’d forgotten his tiny voice, his speech mannerisms, how his little body moved and how well coordinated, fine and gross motor skills right on track—and his will of cast iron. I’d forgotten how funny and charming my ex was when we were young (I was doing the camera work on this one, so there is a lot of him in the twelve or so minutes of footage), forgotten how my own voice sounded, like a stranger’s, utterly unrecognizable to me now. I sounded smart and funny, too, but was definitely a different version of myself today.

My old self also sounded distinctly Southern. In these videos I am speaking in a lilting dialect that is unlike the more punctuated Appalachian ‘Hill’ dialect of my late great-grandmother Gracie and my living East Tennessee family, I am guessing because I grew up in Memphis, where more of a true Deep South dialect is cultivated in the population. Instead, my voice sounds calm and soft and steady. I swear there is no way I could possibly sound like that now, although once in a while something comes out so, so drawly that even my ear catches it. My Yankee husband says I sound vaguely Southern, but it is not pronounced. Mostly I think of my voice now as sanitized of any dialect, but sure wish I could get it back. Somehow if I did, though, it would seem contrived and inauthentic, wouldn’t it.

I think what’s most profound about viewing that particular time capsule now, Christmas 1995, is knowing what was to come. It’s tough to process, though dog knows I’ve had plenty of time to. Could I but rewind that tape, so to speak, what would I change? Would I have turned around back in 1985 and run fast in the other direction, from the man who would be my husband for a quarter century? Had I done that, I’d never have enjoyed the singular experience of adopting and parenting my child. I’ve often reflected on how that outcome might have changed dramatically had he grown up in a household bereft of the resources he desperately needed, and we surely had them.

And speaking of parenting. Knowing what was coming, the behavioral disorder that would emerge the next year, our child’s unceremonious expulsion from the school that would take shape three years later, by the time he’d almost reached fifth grade, the daunting challenges his middle and high school years would visit upon our family—would I do things any differently?

An emphatic yes, is the answer to that. I have no way of knowing whether or how a different approach would’ve reshaped and formed the boy. And I can say now, he ‘turned out’ exceedingly well, against all odds, so there is that. But already I saw mistakes we both made in those brief moments captured on the tape—too much stimulation, too much urgency albeit in earnest, well-intentioned parents, aimed at child development. So many other observations.

I’ve shared with my son that I have these home movies and can’t wait to show him. I’ve told him how impossibly beautiful he was as an infant and how adorable and precocious as a toddler. All of this makes him exceedingly uncomfortable. I get single-syllable reactions from him, like, Huh. I understand some of us feel the need to bury the past, and maybe he does. But if he never watches any of these shorts of his early life, that will be too bad for him—he’ll miss important insights into the little boy he was before he became the fantastic man he is now.

There is one more cassette to move onto a drive and it is labeled, ‘Christmas in Highlands 1992, Misc. at home at Topside, and Misc. Faces, DO NOT RECORD.’ Some of this will not have included my little peanut, since he’d not yet arrived. But the ‘Misc Faces’ bit was an effort his dad made to document his face every day for the first year in his life. I know he dropped the project before the end of the year because life has a way of insinuating itself into long-term projects, and there were other fish to fry I suppose, and seeing a thing to its end—that always seemed to be such a challenge. But if the tape is still intact enough to salvage, how special it’ll be to see what is there.

Harry Connick, Jr. was belting out Christmas carols in the background at my house on Christmas Day 1995, and alas, might be forever ruined for me now. I am surely different, we all are different creatures. And here is truth: By the time my marriage ended, I no longer recognized my husband. David and I have lamented on many occasions how we wish we’d met sooner. (Would we have liked who we were back then?) Instead, each of us was busy in distant towns writing the important first chapters in the adult lives that shaped us, the versions of ourselves we fell in love with later, and who we are now.