Someone asked me the other day what was my earliest memory. While this is no doubt not the absolute first thing I can remember, it is the first thing for which I know a definite date:
My mother was hugely pregnant, so the year was 1973 and I would have been barely four. Fixated on the soon-to-be existence of my sister, somehow I came to the conclusion that our family was destined to raise a child with dark skin. Despite her best efforts my mother could not convince me that this new baby had no chance of satisfying that requirement. How do you know, I asked over and over and over to the point that she surely considered duct tape or banishment to my room for life. You haven’t seen it, have you? How do you know the baby won’t be black? A quick lesson in genetics modified for the pre-school set would likely have satisfied this curiosity but I recall that none was given, leaving me in desperate hope that my mother would be proven wrong at the birth.
“Interesting,” said my companion. “And did this come into play in your adult life?”
Hm, I said. I guess it kind of did.
So now I ask the same question of you. What’s your earliest memory? And did it in any way affect you later?
My absolute earliest memory is of standing in the upstairs hallway of our house as it was raining. It was prior to starting kindergarten, so I was probably three. I had the window in the hallway open, and my Miffy book in my hand, and I was *winces at the thought* tearing out the pages and letting them flutter out the window and down onto the fruit trees in the garden.
Yeah, I got a spanking for that. Did I affect me later? Well, I have an intense adoration of books, and treat them very well. And, well, I do quite like being spanked, too.
xx Dee
Pages gotta fly, man! They gotta be freeeeee!
Besides, I’m sure that the citrus fruits were extra juicy that year after receiving Miffy goodness from the skies :)
xx Dee
For me it’s hard to determine what is an actual memory for myself, and what is something prompted by all the photos in our albums.
I have no idea how old I’d be in either memory, and my mom has no recollection either (ah, the joys of fibromyalgia, forgetting everything). I have a snapshot memory of being small enough to take my now-late father’s padded outdoors-vest and set it on the floor standing up and crawl inside of it like it was a teepee. Seeing the vest now (for I’ve made my mother keep it all these years) I realize I must have been quite tiny, as the vest isn’t as big as memory made it to be.
Another one is laying on my bedroom floor and having my binky taken from me, and being told that I couldn’t have it back until Daddy was done testing it at the lab (they both worked in lab type settings) for some bad things, they said it was making me sick. LIES ALL LIES. I’m gonna guess I was 3 or 4. To be fair, sucking on that thing for so many years did fuck up my front teeth.
And has given me a terrible oral fixation.
Oh the binky! How hard it is to give up!
I don’t know what is my earliest memory. I have bits and pieces from when I was three, and one vignette of my mom hugging my daddy in a train station. He was wearing an Army uniform. That is probably the earliest, because he never wore his uniform after the war. (WW II) I am guessing it must have been when he came home. I would have been just barely two. I don’t know that it affected my later life, but it certainly affected theirs; they were together until his death in 2003.
I’m sitting in my high chair and there is spaghetti and sauce on the wall. That’s the whole memory. What had happened is that my prince of a father had upended the dining room table, sending dinner flying through the air to land on the wall. I don’t remember that part.
I have no idea how old I was, but I could only have been two or three at the most.
I have no idea if I truly remember this but I can see it in a blurry sort of way. My mother bathing me and at one point she held me under water and I had a sense of calm and did not fight her. Total trust of a child I guess. But I just remember looking up at her under the water. Obviously she did not drown me but came close to it.
Years later I was told that my mother had sever post partium depression that brought back some of her nightmare experiences and at times relived them. She could not handle me because I was to spirited and stubborn for her. My father had to keep me away from her.
Becoming an adult and stopping the insanity of my parents abuse, I have found that being a parent I need to stop the cycle and so with my children they know they are loved at all times and we discuss feelings and our pasts so that it is not repeated ever again.
I’m two or three, and I’m dreadfully ill. Pneumonia. My very first memory is of being balled up in misery in a chair at my grandparents’ place, then a few snippets of my hospital stay. Something about playing with the plastic bowling set in the hospital playroom.
First really clear memory: I’m four, and my great-grandmother (in her nineties and quite senile) keeps asking me the time, which I have to ask other people, because I don’t know how to tell time.
When I was 3 (in 1964), my family took the train to California to visit my mother’s family for the first time. (in this day and age can you imagine not seeing your first grandchild til age 3?) My dad was a railroader, so the conductor made a big deal over my baby sister and me. My grandparents had an orange tom cat and grandpa collected and repaired clocks. I was fascinated by his cuckoo clock and he would lift me up to let me “help” wind it and watch the little birdie pop out.