The meaning of memoir - 10 minutes: GO!

How do I write my memoir? Where do I begin? Which part of my life story is the important one - the crux, the kernel, the source of the meaning of my life? What makes my life more meaningful or worthy for the telling of it? Is it because I grew up in Africa, lived my formative young adult years in Israel, and then the remainder of my life in the United States? Does it matter that I lived on three continents in different countries? Why would that matter? Perhaps it helped me become more understanding of differences in attitude, culture, perception. Perhaps. Although I am sure that the teachings in my earliest childhood formed many of my prejudices and biases that I've had to negotiate throughout my life. Longing for my black African nanny as the one true source of love and acceptance of me as a child. And then there is the whole story of growing up and becoming an adult. Learning about my value as a woman, as a member of my family - a family where there were different fathers and siblings from each one, and a dominant mother who demanded strictest loyalty at the cost of independent thought, feeling, or desires. Is that the part I write about in my life story? How about the part where I became a mother and how that affected my life? How the birth of my son was the greatest moment in all of my life story. Nothing can be compared to that moment when he came into the world. Nothing can be compared to the moments after his birth as he lay in his basinet next to my bed in St Mary's hospital in Manchester, England on a summer afternoon. I was lying in my bed gazing at him in awe, and he lay there quietly and looked back at me. I thought to myself, "He is sizing me up. He is wondering if I will be good to him, if I am worthy of him, if he is pleased and satisfied to be with me as his mother." Those were profound moments as we lay there staring at one another just moments after he arrived on this earth. Do  write about my dreams of becoming a journalist, a singer, an actor, and the fact that the only thing I thought I was good at was caring for and educating young children? How I longed to become a psychologist but then changed to a professor - a teacher educator of students of early childhood education. But then all I wanted to do was help teachers understand themselves in order to best understand children and allow them expression of their feelings - mainly because I was denied that right - first as a young child in my mother's house, and then with the men I tended to be attracted to, and in general because of the lousy self worth I had developed throughout those years. And now as I become a senior and enter the last phase of my life story I wonder which part to tell. Could I write about the aging process, the understanding that death awaits us all and how I might want to meet that moment? There are so many parts to one's life. Each one as different as the other. Each one with different meaning although as I become older I often wonder if any of it has any meaning at all. For, lately, the opening of a flower on my orchid plant seems to fill me with such satisfaction that I wonder why I did not know that all along. Holding still in meditation, gazing at the wintry sky, or experiencing the deepest joy just being in my granddaughter's presence - these all have so much more meaning than all those long histories of the years up until this time. How did I not know that all along? How do I write about all this? I wonder.