How much of your childhood do you remember?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I’m really astonished at some of the memories that have been posted here. Sights, smells, feelings from before you were three? That’s unthinkable to me; I can barely remember a single teacher name from high school. I have maybe four dozen passwords that I can recall on demand (no exaggeration), can remember phone numbers, quote paragraphs of favorite texts, song lyrics to songs I haven’t heard in two decades, and facts that struck my fancy from throughout my life, but I have maybe ten memories of my life between ages twelve and seventeen.

Bizarre…

22

My earliest first-hand memory is from when I was three. My mom and dad had just moved into their first appartment together, and it was heated with bare coil-type radiators.
I remember very clearly my mom telling me not to touch them because they were very hot. Then, one day when I was playing, I fell against the radiator in the livingroom. It wasn’t hot. I thought about it for days. I remember staring at the radiator while thinking: “Mom said it’s hot, and mom’s never wrong, but it’s not hot…” So, one day about a week later, after staring at it again, I walked over and grabbed right on to it. The heat was on, this time. It was so hot that it raised a nasty blister in the palm of my hand.
Nobody ever knew about it, because until it healed, I hid it from everybody. I’m really lucky that it didn’t infect or something.
I remember thinking that I deserved to be hurt, because I did something that mom told me not to do. The reason that I hid it wasn’t because I thought I’d get a spanking or something (I only had one spanking, ever), it was because I just knew that mom would be sad and disappointed that I didn’t do as she said. I never, never wanted to make my mom sad, so I didn’t tell her. At the same time, I was happy that I got burned. I remember thinking: “It was hot, so mom was right. It was hot when she told me, and other times too. She just wanted me to understand.”

After that, I have a whole bunch of memories that I can place by where I was living, and I don’t really start to remember sequentially until about 10 or 11. All of the memories I have are because of things that I felt, and the emotion and the thoughts that I was thinking are the largest part of the memories, though the regular stuff is there, too.

I remember having just learned about ‘infinity’. I was less than three because we were living at my gramma’s house. My mom was taking me to get my shots (but she said that I could get a popscicle after, so I was cool with that). I was looking at all the trees and counting them, when it occured to me to wonder how many trees there were. So I asked my mom.
“How many trees are there in the world?”
Mom said that she didn’t know, but that it was a lot.
The little lightbulb went on over my head. “So, that means that there’s infinity trees in the world then?” I was terribly proud of myself, and sure it must be true.
“No, there isn’t infinity trees in the world.” Mom said.
“Well, how many, then?” I was getting really frustrated.
“I don’t know.” Said mom.
“If you don’t know how many there are, how can you say that there aren’t infinity?” I demanded - on the edge of tears, really. It felt like she either really did know how many trees there were, or was just jerking me along somehow.
“I don’t know how many there are, because I never counted them all. If you count them, then you can tell me.” I still thought that it was all one of the stupid things she was always doing to me - like “how many pieces of bread go in a sandwich” or “how many pieces do we have to cut the pie into”.

I know that I wasn’t that articulate when I was two, but that’s what I was trying to say, and that’s what I remember saying. My mom says that it’s not too far off, anyway. In that one, it’s the frustration that makes me remember. That and the feeling that I was an object of amusement and I didn’t get the joke.

My sister actually has a (very mild) form of D.I.D. that manifests by her having no memory of her childhood. She’s 24, and she can’t remember more than 1 or 2 memories from before she was 17 or so with adults in them. Mostly she can remember the ones that are just us kids.

23

what was the title of this thread again? oh forget it!

24

Hey, Gravity, that reminds me of when I was three-ish. I became interested in mid-conversation in something my Dad was saying to my Mom because he was describing something as going “drip…drip…drip” and that caught my attention. I wanted to ask him what he meant, what he was referring to, so I did ask…as best I could formulate it at the time:

He looked over and me and replied, “I did?” Then went back to talking to my Mom. As with you, it was the frustration, I think, that caused me to remember, and one day when I was perhaps 14 I thought to ask him what he was (or most likely might have been) talking about all those years ago and he said that since I remembered the conversation as taking place in the kitchen it must have been the water heater, which was old and rusted and did drip a lot.

25

There have been two threads entitled “How far back can you remember?” (the first started by me) in the last few months. These concern of course the point of earliest memory. Those interested in that topic can do a search (and drag the board to a crawl).

I used to be able to remember a lot, I currently can remember a lot. But for a while, during A Bad Time, not so much. I specifically worked on recovering positive childhood memories to help bring me out of it.

So I tend to equate “few childhood memories” with negative mental states (or experiences). I urge those who don’t have much memory to try and recover more, it might have positive impacts on your mood.

26

I remember most of it back to fairly early years, but as I’ve gotten older (I’m 41) I’ve noticed that the memories are starting to change into emotional rememberances, rather than stark photographic memories of places and people like they used to be.

My earliest memory easily goes back to 2 or 3 years old. I’ve got some VERY vivid memories from ages 4, 5 and 6 - but they all center around significant events like Birthdays, Christmases, first day of school, big trips we took as a family, that sort of thing. On the other hand, I guess most of a 5 year old’s life is made up of “significant events” isn’t it?

The odd thing is that I’ve managed to forget most of my TWENTIES! That decade in my life kinda sucked and nothing much really happened, so I guess I’ve just let most of it fade.

27

I try to keep those memories safely repressed. My childhood was basically 12 years of being told how stupid, useless, and ugly I was., and getting hit–punched in the face, slapped into the wall, and so on.

28

I remember clearly many episodes from when German was occupying Norway during WWII. I was born in 1942, in January, and the Germans surrenderend on May 8th 1945. I can remember that we went into shelter in our basement, with my Grandmother there, and she did not live with us after I was about 2 I think. I also remember German soldiers in our street, they lived in a house not far from us and gave us candy, which we were not allowed to accept! I also remember standing on the plane of a truck on the 7th May, before the surrendering! waving a Norwegian flag in the face of a Norwegian soldier. I was then 3 years and 3 months. I have many clear memories from my childehood after this.

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For those interested:
How Far Back Can You Remember? I

How Far Back Can You Remember? II

Welcome to the board huldra; and thanks for the memories!

30

If you asked me cold (and I guess the OP did!), I would say I remember a lot of things from my childhood.

However, I was recently proctoring a exam at work. This is probably the most tedious work in the world, because you can’t do anything but stand and/or walk around the exam room for five hours. To keep myself mildly occupied, I went through each year of childhood, and listed all the specific things I could remember about that year. I was a little amazed that for most of the early years, I didn’t have that many things on my list.

Two things in particular stuck me about my childhood memories that might be of interest to those people who regret not having more memories – first, when I was drawing a complete blank, I would try to ask myself specfic questions – what did my lunchbox look like in first grade? Who did I sit with at lunch? In regular life, if I couldn’t remember these things I would just shrug and move on, but since I didn’t have anything else to do, I found that if I did give the questions some thought, I eventually came up with more answers.

Also, I realized that the things I remembered the most clearly were those things that were reinforced by other people – usually by stories that my parents told over and over (hence, most of the more mortifying memories), or things that were captured in photographs. Our family moved out of our first house when I was two years old, but I remember my bedroom very clearly. It’s probably no coincidence that my mom has always displayed a photo of baby me and mom and dad standing in that bedroom, so I saw that over and over while I was growing up, even after we moved to a new house.

My younger brother has always been surprised that I remember more about early childhood than he does, and it’s notable that my parents took TONS more pictures of me, the first baby. (“Look, she ate a pea! Take a picture! She ate another pea! Take another picture!”) By the time they had him, some of the novelty wore off. Two little kids, my mom going back to work, they probably had less time to keep up with taking pictures and getting film developed. (I read somewhere that this is fairly common, with each kid, families tend to have fewer photos of day to day events, although the same number of special events, such as birthdays or holidays.)

I’ve also been surprised over the years to realize that my memory has been incorrectly informed over the years because of photos. We have one of my grandmother and me in the backyard, sitting on a pink lawn chair. I REMEMBERED that chair as part of my grandmother’s backyard. But fairly recently, my mother was looking at that picture, and recognized a car in the background, and said “you know, this isn’t grandma’s backyard, this is (some random neighbor)'s backyard.” Huh, no pink lawn chair, I guess.

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Shakespeare couldn’t have said it any more poignantly, Eve.