I have two distinct memories about learning to read. In the first, my exasperated father told me that he was tired of reading **Green Eggs and Ham **and Three Billy Goats Gruff, so he was going to teach me how to read the books so I could read them myself whenever I wanted. And I also remember getting my library card when I was four: you had to be able to write your name and the numbers 1-10 before they’d issue it to you.
All my life I thought that these two memories were just a couple of weeks apart. Or three weeks, maybe.
Until on Father’s Day when I mentioned it to my brother, and Dad interrupted me. “You weren’t four when I taught you to read.”
Confused, I asked him what he meant.
Both memories were true, turns out, but they were a lot farther apart than I’d always believed… nearly a year apart.
“They refused to give a three-year-old a library card, so we did take you for one the week you turned four like you remember. But you’d been able to read for nearly a year by then,” Dad explained, making me realize he’d taken books for me out on his card before I could myself. “I always tell people the best thing you can do is teach a kid to read as soon as possible, so then they can entertain themselves,” he added.
I guess this is just more evidence that I’ve never had a good grasp of time
How about you - ever learn that something you knew didn’t quite happen the way you always thought it did?
One of the few things our mother, a science major, was wrong about: turtles are among the cleanest animals. We had them as pets. Another is that good pizza should be gummy (didn’t know about mozzarella back then.)
Our father, a lawyer, likes to get his facts straight but he also slips at times. In gold processing, he told us the gold ore is finely ground in mills. And then acid is poured to remove the gold. He wouldn’t know about the cyanidization process.
A python unhinges its jaw in order to swallow large prey.
When I was a pre-schooler, we had a collie, then we didn’t. I had always believe we had to give up Lady because my sister was afraid of dogs. I resented her for years because of that.
Turns out Lady was “visited” by a roving horn-dog and was impregnated. My mother wasn’t at all interested in dealing with a pregnant dog on top of 3 pre-school kids, so Lady got a new home.
And my sister isn’t so much afraid of dogs and cats as she just flat-out doesn’t like them. So, yeah, she’s a mutant…
Not something I remember wrong, but something I can’t remember at all.
My mother recently mentioned that my brother Ed didn’t want to read until our parents banned me from reading him at bedtime. I don’t remember reading to him at bedtime, but apparently I did. I do remember my younger brother Jay taking over bedtime-tale time because “you’re telling it wrong!”, so in that case I guess I sort’a remember being the one in charge of bedtime-tale time.
Instances like these used to bother me, until I did some researchand found out just how fluid memory is (though I prefer the technical term “loosey-goosey”). The retrieval system is not just opening a file cabinet and pulling out the “Reading, Age Six” folder. It’s a scavenger hunt to reconstruct it from snippets of second-hand data.
So I’m much more patient with myself when I remember something wrong.
Like I just found out I’d been wrong for years on how big our childhood dog was… sheesh, after years of me telling tales of our massive “Clifford” dog in the presence of my siblings and parents, NOW they tell me it was normal size.
Don’t even get me started on how many Sci-Fi short stories (all I read from 2nd-8th grade) I’ve conflated in the intervening decades.
Too many to list. I’d resent my parents for gaslighting me, but I have a six-year-old daughter whose memories of things verge on the bizarre. So maybe my childhood memories are wrong, too.
Throughout my childhood I thought I had only been scared by a horror movie once. I was impervious to any movie screen or televised attempts at terror and use to watch them for laughs. But there was one scene I recalled of a throat cutting that use to terrify me whenever I thought about it. I spent considerable time in my late teens (pre-Internet world) trying to figure out which movie that throat cutting scene came from. Finally, my aunt told me the truth. I witnessed a murder when I was a child, but had been considered too young to be called as witness during the trial (though I was questioned by the police). Aside from the usual social reasons nobody talked about it around me because everyone hoped I would forget.
When I was about 7 or 8, I remembered a year or two earlier seeing a stone or concrete footbridge high above the water below at Letchworth State Park in upstate New York. It had picnic tables not far from one end and a cemetery not far from the other. I was told by an older brother and sister and my mother that the memory “must have been a dream” and that nothing remotely similar had ever happened. It turned out I was more right than they were, but I got some of the details wrong. It wasn’t a masonry bridge but a steel bridge with a wooden deck. And it was at Watkins Glen State Park, not Letchworth. My mother confirmed that we visited Watkins Glen when I was about the right age, but had no memory of the bridge. My siblings still have no memory at all of visiting that park, let alone crossing the bridge. I’ve been there since and I’m absolutely sure that’s the place from my memory.
I thought I had the chicken pox twice because I remember having them while on a camping trip with my parents and their friends then also while visiting my cousins, because my oldest cousin had them at the same time. Like 30 years later my mom said no, that was the same holiday, we went camping first then to visit family.
I recently informed my son he had a false memory. He said he felt guilty about playing video games during his grandfather’s funeral. I don’t know what he was conflating or remembering, but I pointed out “Grandpa died in 2006. You got your DS for your birthday in 2007. It’s simply not possible for you to have played games during the funeral.”
This isn’t something that I remembered wrong but something I can’t remember at all!
I have a pretty good memory - I’m always asked: “I can’t believe you remember that?”
I was very shy and quiet in school. Wasn’t involved in anything extra.
My best childhood friend and I got together a few years ago and were doing the usual, “remember when we did…”. She says to me, “Remember when we wrote and directed the play in 6th grade?” I responded, “What!!!” She went on to tell me who we cast and how funny it was. I have absolutely no recollection of it at all. With me being so introverted, something like that would have been such a huge event. I can’t believe I have no memory of it.
In the spirit of the OP: When I was young, I had a few dreams that were vivid enough that for a while, I thought they had really happened. One was that I dreamed I had been run over by a car. The other was that we had a balcony at the edge of our attic, and if you looked over the edge you could see down into the basement. When I was young, I mentioned both of these events to my parents at one point, and they told me that I was wrong, that had never happened. They must have been dreams, but I still have them as faint memories even though they didn’t happen. I still remember the look on my mom’s face after I got run over by a car, and how I saw my brother playing the toy xylophone in the basement when I looked down from the attic.
I spent a lot of my years from birth to age 7 in two houses; one in Dallas and one in Houston. Problem is, I get the two houses blended together in my mind. I envision the living room and bathroom from the Houston house, but the bedroom from the Dallas house, and in my mind they’re kind of mixed together as the same house.
A new set of neighbors had moved into my parents neighborhood late last year and as a sign of goodwill they had invited the new neighbors over for tea and crumpets just before Christmas. Basically our whole extended family was there and everyone was just chit-chatting and snacking on pastries and other homemade niceties. Your fudges and cookies and whatnots. I, as usual, was bragging about how awesome I was and telling the father of the new family how I had gotten a perfect score on the SATs when I was six, finished high school in nine weeks, graduated from Princeton when I was 10 and completed med school four years later. My mom started laughing and said, “No sweetheart, that was Doogie Howser. You’re dumb as doorknob.”
Not exactly something that I remembered wrong, but I was recently able to push back my earliest reliably-dated memory by almost 2 years.
Until a couple of months ago, it was May 18, 1980 : the eruption of Mount St. Helens. Specifically, I remember seeing the volcano with the enormous eruption column above it on the news as I was going to bed and being freaked out by it. My dad calmed me down by telling me that it was happening far, far away from our home.
I had other very ancient memories, though, including undergoing two minor surgeries when I was very little (tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy) but I had no way to know when they took place exactly. There were mere flashes but particularly vivid.
Then, when my parents sold their house in April, they gave me three big cardboard boxes with stuff from my childhood and teenage years. That’s how I found a notebook in which my mom wrote all the health issues that I’d had as a toddler (it seemed that it worried her a bit) and the dates of the operations were listed : one was in late 1978 and the other around Spring 1979. That surprised me a bit because, while I suspected that they were earlier than the eruption, I had no idea that they were that much earlier.
Now, if I could just know the date of that morning where I was playing with my plush toys in the bed rail while looking at the grey clouds out of the skylight, it could beat that…
