A memory bubbled up from the depths last week, I can’t figure out why.

Kindergarten. 1990. I had a necklace of rainbow plastic beads with a pink plastic heart in the middle. It seems out of character for me now, but I loved that necklace and wore it to school frequently. The necklace broke one day during recess, an accident.

The beads were tearfully gathered. Mrs. France (“Mrs. France, do the boogie dance!”), the teaching assistant who must have been in her sixties, put the necklace back together for me, but–despite asking me several times if she was doing it correctly–she strung the beads on in the wrong order.

This was not her fault. I told her it was right even though it wasn’t because I was in that long stage of my life during which I could not tell an adult that they were wrong about something. This was the same year that my teacher called me “Cassie” for several months because I could not correct her. The necklace was never quite right after that, but I still wore it.

This sounds like a sad memory, but it’s actually very sweet. What I remember most is how patient Mrs. France was about the whole thing. There’s a tenderness about fixing a small child’s beloved plastic junk jewelry in the middle of your workday. She retired not long after that, and is surely gone by now, but that moment lives on in my mind.

I have probably ten memories total from Kindergarten, and that is one of the clearest.

I was thinking about childhood memories a lot when we went to Disney World earlier this year. I went to Disney World for the first time with my dad in 1994 when I was ten years old, and my clearest memories from that trip are as follows:

1. Picking out a ceramic orca to purchase at Sea World
2. Sitting in front of the TV in the hotel room doing a lice treatment (because my best friend had been diagnosed with lice right after I left on this trip) and eating a massive amount of Hershey’s Kisses
3. My first McDonald’s breakfast experience
4. Haunted Mansion, which was the coolest thing I had ever seen

With the exception of memory number four, these are probably not the memories my dad expected me to collect on that trip.

I spent a lot of time at Disney World this year wondering what exactly my ten-year-old and eight-year-old would remember. We work so hard as parents to provide meaningful traditions and plan amazing trips in hopes that our kids will cherish these core memories for the rest of their lives. But I suspect that instead of remembering the first magical time that they went on Peter Pan’s Flight they actually remember stupid shit like trying to catch lizards at the resort.

We don’t get to curate our kids’ memories the way we might want to, and I hate that. I wish I could go in at night and surgically remove all the memories my children carry of the times I yelled and screamed and was a terrible parent. I wish I could surgically remove my own memories of these occasions as well. In the end, I can only hope that they will have their own Mrs. France in their head, sorting and stringing beads and smiling kindly the whole time.