Please State Your Earliest Memory, and Your Gender

First (verifiable) memory was moving from Jacksonville, FL to Stuart, FL when I was three. I’m female. Next (verifiable) memory was at 3.5, when my baby brother was born.

Male, I have several distinct memories from when I was 2 years of age. They were all audiovisual novelty sort of things… playing with gift-wrapping and ribbon, seeing a windmill in the neighbor’s yard, seeing one of those cat clocks with the bulb eyes that oscillate back and forth, and the suckers from bathtub mats. I was fascinated by those bath-mat suckers. I can place all these memories by the dates I lived in the house where I remember them occurring.

Strangely, I can also remember the names of a number of our neighbors at that time. I thought it might be a false memory because it seems so unlikely, and the names I remembered are somewhat absurd-sounding. But my parents have confirmed that we did have neighbors with those strange-sounding names.

This was probably a month after I turned three.

I can remember playing on the kitchen floor while my mother and my aunt were making Thanksgiving dinner. They had given me some kitchen untensils to play with and I decided to stick a can opener (one of the old-fashioned flip-top ones) into an electric outlet to see what was inside. I discovered electricity did not play well with others.

Male.

I remember being in a crib and my brother, who was eleven months older than me, stealing my bottle and me being frustrated about it. I was between one and one and a half. And I’m female, BTW.

Several candidates. I remembered when Alaska became a state at age 6 (I asked what it was before that). I also remember when we got a new car, though I don’t know how old I was then. I recall when my grandfather bought a boat and my parents asked me what to call it (I said “Summersault.” Still don’t know why – it just popped into my head). I had to be younger than five, since we moved out of the house where it happened around my fifth birthday. It could even have happened when I was three.

I’m a man, yes I am.

The watergate hearings on TV. My mother was addicted to watching them.

Hmmm, this might explain my general cynicism about government.
Male.

It is as still as vivid now as it was then, and will be for all my life.

My dad, mom and I were driving to Niagra Falls along Lake Erie. My parents (this is in the days before carseats-borderline negligence now) put down my crib mattress in the backseat for something for me to play and sleep on. I remember looking up and out the left-hand side window at this glorious orange sunset, which looked exactly like a tiger to me (yes that word popped into my head at that exact moment). It was like my consciousness “clicked” on, or something.

After carefully quizzing my mom about it years later, she confirmed that we took just such a trip in May of 1963. I was born in July 1962, which makes it ten months.

A Zelazny fan, Mr. Corey? :cool:

I have lots of memories from the house we lived in when I was 2 and 3. I think I remember the carpet from the house we lived in when I was bornuntil I was one, but I can’t be sure I haven’t just seen pictures or whatever.

My favorite early memory is one from the winter when I was 3. It was a snowy day (somewhat rare here in OK), and I was in the front yard with my Dad and older sister, helping to build a snowman. Dad sent me inside to get a carrot for the nose from Mom, who was cooking dinner in the kitchen. The contrast of coming in from the cold, overcast outdoors into a bright, warm and cosy kitchen has stuck with me. It’s a very happy memory from a very happy childhood. (Thanks, Mom & Dad!)

I’m a girl, BTW.

I’m female.

I vaguely remember being rocked in a rocking chair, Grandma would sing “bayou bayou” and I associated the word “bayou” with the top corner of the rocking chair (what I was looking at over her shoulder).

I remember my mother getting angry when I peed when she changed my diaper.

I remember getting bathed in the sink and in a blue baby bathtub that sat in the sink.

I remember playing with a busy box that hung on the inside of my crib, and sleeping in my crib.

I think the rocking one was earliest, but I don’t know how old I was.

I remember being at an elderly neighbor’s house with my family. That neighbor died before I turned 5, so 4.

Male.

Also. . . Johnny Carson recounted once that in a previous interview with Lee Marvin, Marvin mentioned that he remembered being in the womb.

Lee also was known to have tossed back a few from time to time.

I was about 2 or 3, and my giant rabbit balloon popped very noisily in the hallway. I remember being scared to death at the noise. Male, 34.

Joe

I remember being held on someone’s shoulder in the back yard among a group of family. They were pointing at the sky and trying to get me to look up and see “Sputnik”. I was afraid that “Sputnik” was some kind of horrible monster and I hid my face and wouldn’t look.

That puts me at about 2.5 years old, I think.

Falling off an inner tube in an indoor swimming pool, and staring at the ceiling lights from underwater. Happened around age 3, I think. I’m female.

Why the curiosity about gender as connected to early memories? Is there some sort of psychological experiment taking place here?

Even as an older child, I noticed that I had a greater degree of early-childhood forgetfulness than most people. I remember absolutely nothing before kindergarten, which I started at age 4.75. – male

3 years old, male. My mom dropping me off at my morning pre-school, only for the building to be on fire when we arrived. After that we had pre-school in the basment of the YMCA in the next town over, and by the time it was repaired and reopened, I was ready for kindergarden. Things from then until I was 7 (which was when we moved…things get much easier to remember after we were in a different home) were sketchy in my memory.

To this date I have a childish fear of fire and smoke.

Getting Chicken Pox at age 3. Female

I vividly remember sitting in my high chair watching my mother go about her business in the kitchen. The kitchen in question is the apartment building my parents first rented when I was born. I couldn’t have been more than 18 months old. I even remember the style of the high chair and its pattern on the cushion.

Oh, and I’m female. :wink:

I’m female.

My earliest memory is of my mother pointing to a man speaking on TV and saying, “That’s President Kennedy.” I think the only reason I recall this incident is because my second earliest memory is of asking my mother why she was sad, and her answering, “Because President Kennedy died.” I was 3 years and 4 months old when his assassination occurred, so the first memory is some unspecified time (days? weeks? months?) before the second.

I’ve got a memory of being 2-ish years old and playing in a playpen. It was in the living room, and the playpen was maybe 20 feet away from the TV. My mom was walking around the room doing something, and I was playing with toys and banging on the edges of the playpen to keep myself amused. I must have been having a good time, because I remember being very happy. (I actually didn’t remember this detail until just now, when the memory came back to me).

I’m a girl.

I ‘remember’ being carried out to the clothesline by my mother to be put in a baby-basket beside her whilst she hung out the washing on a very sunny day - and I would have been very, very young when this occurred.

The memory consists of a series of very, very vivid flashes, like:

flash:being held on my mother’s shoulder as she walks out to the line, it is very sunny and I can hear birds
flash: being placed in the basket
flash: looking up at the sky - it is clear blue and part of the clothesline is within my field of vision
flash: the clothesline is turned and a portion with some black and blue clothes on it goes whizzing across my field of vision

It all feels very, very real. If I let the memory play out in my head, I can almost physically feel my mother and also the warmth of the sun on my skin.

As a teenager I told my mother I thought I remembered this and she said that what I described was exactly how she did that. She would always take us (first me, later my little sister) with her when she had to do some chore outside, unless it was raining. To take the washing out, she would first take the basket of clothes and the baby-basket outside and place them near the line - then she would return and carry the baby out, put it in the basket and then hang out the washing. She was surprised that I could remember something so close to reality because I would have been a very young baby when this happened regularly. By the age of 2, she would happily leave me in a pen or cot for a few minutes while she did that sort of chore.

What I also remember about this is suddenly just having this memory when I was 5 or 6. I wonder if maybe, because it’s something that would have happened to me in more or less the same fashion roughly once or twice every week that I kind of possessed a generic memory, an amalgamation of all of those times, that kind of lived dormantly in my brain and that perhaps it accidentally surfaced in a dream I had at 5 or 6. And that because of it’s ‘roots’ in real life it seemed so real I felt like I remembered it as an actual event.

But I’m no psychologist, so I’m just theorizing blindly because I myself also find it unlikely that I would possess a genuine memory of such clarity from such a young age.

Aside from that - I went into hospital for a kidney operation just after turning 5 and for some reason I remember a crapload of small, household events that took place in the few weeks prior to my admission.

I’m female.