What is the first thing you remember?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Smashing my face on a metal chair.

I was probably 3 or 4.

I was horsing around at Grandma’s house. Jumping around on furniture and whatnot in the kitchen.

There was a pound of hamburger defrosting in the microwave. I don’t know why I remember this detail.

Anyways, I jumped from a stool in front of the microwave towards a chair at the kitchen table. I misjudged though, and landed hard. My upper jaw caught the back of the chair and bore the brunt of my landing. I remember the shock of the impact very vividly, though not the pain. It broke several teeth.

I remember knowing it was serious when my grandfather held me in my lap comforting me. He’s always been a pretty emotionally aloof guy; having him try to comfort me told me (even at that age) that I was hurt pretty badly.

Later I remember being restrained in the emergency room while the doctors stitched me up. I remember screaming like a banshee.

The next day I remember being restrained again at the dentist while he surveyed the damage.

I got dentures that young because I had messed up my teeth that badly. These lasted until my adult teeth grew in. One of the broken teeth developed an abcess shortly after and I had to have a few teeth pulled. My adult teeth are mostly ok (after years of orthodontics) but the one where I struck hardest came in discolored and stunted. Also crooked - I have a permanent record of that face-smash :smiley:

I brought up the incident a year ago with my grandmother. Sort of an attempt to say “Ha ha, remember when I smashed my face?”

To my surprise she started weeping. She’s a very tough lady, this caught me completely by surprise.

She said - “I remember. I’ll never forgive myself. You just kept crying. Said that you could handle the pain but just wanted ’ your tooths back’”

Strange how that seems to have hurt her more than me.

22

I remember a christmas morning. I looked outside the glass patio door into the yard, and told my mom that it couldn’t be Christmas because it wasn’t snowing. I was maybe 3? 4? I don’t have a ton of really young memories.

23

Hanging out at the hospital with my grandmother while my mother was pregnant with my sister. I was about 2 1/2 years old.

24

Getting a bath in the kitchen sink. Age? I have no idea.

25

Visual memories - the pattern of the carpet and the backs of the chairs in the dining room of our first house. We were two when we left there, so younger than that.

Very deep snow, my parents making an igloo and me being frightened to go into it which annoyed my mother after all the work she’d put into it. I think that was the winter after I was two, as my dad said that 1968 was a cold winter.

Verbal memories - my brother and I at my spinster great aunt’s house. She told my brother not to touch the fire but it just had a little heap of grey ash in it, so he stuck his finger right into it and it was badly burned. I remember him screaming and screaming as my mother held his hand under the cold tap as my father went to get the car, and turning to look at my aunt as she said with great satisfaction and a sort of twisted smile on her face “I TOLD you not to touch it.” I remember the jolt of shock as I realised she didn’t care at all that my brother was hurt, only that he’d got his come-uppance for being being disobedient. (We never visted there much again… my mother was livid.) That was the winter we were three.

When we were three and a half, my father told us that when we woke up in the morning it would be a new decade. I remember asking, “What’s a decade?” So that must have been new year’s eve 1969, so I can definitely remember the '60’s!!

26

The first thing I can remember is a night I was having trouble sleeping and was probably crying, so my mom picked me up and carried me out to the living room. It was dark and all I could see was the light shining in from the street light outside as my mom held me while sitting in a recliner. I couldn’t have been even two years old yet.

27

I’ve said this before, but I don’t really have any memories before age 5 or so. This depresses the heck out of me - I spet my first four years elsewhere, and would love to have some memories of it. It seems like a very happy time for me. But coming to the States I guess was a big enough shock that it was all buried somewhere inside me.

28

Seeing my mother smoosh an egg onto my father’s white dress shirt, we were living with his parents while our house was being built. I think Mommy was a tad stressed! LOL I was still in a highchair.

Getting a wading pool/kiddie pool for my 2nd birthday. I remember running out into the backyard to get to it.

29

My first memory is of waking up from a nightmare and staring at the end of my crib. In the dream, there was this horrible buzzy lightbulb on the end of the crib. When I looked, it wasn’t there in real life.

It must have been before I was four, but I don’t remember just when.

30

When my brother was born and came home from the hospital, I was 2 years 11 months old.

31

I remember climbing the staircase to help put the tree topper on our family’s Christmas tree, which was particularly tall that year. It reached to the second story balcony overlooking the family room.
My mom told me we moved out of that house after my younger brother was born in 1981, so that means this happened during Christmas of 1980, putting me at about 2 years, 3 months.

I also have memories of moving into the next house, specifically my older brother and I playing with the chess set we found there. There was the sound of a vacuum in the background.
What’s weird is that I have NO memories of my younger brother as a baby, or even a toddler. It’s like he doesn’t exist in my head until he’s in the first grade.

32

What is typical for memories? How young can we normally expect to remember to? From the tiny sample in this thread, it sounds like 2-3 is fairly normal.

I have read that typically we don’t remember anything before age 2. Does anyone know if this is correct?

33

I remember laying on the ground with my father, using a yard stick to get the puppies out from underneath a car. My Mom told me later that they were the first litter of Australian Shepherds that we raised, the beginning of a long and wonderful line of dogs. Apparently our Great Dane scared them and ran then under the car. At least that is what my parents remember. One of the puppies turned out to be Delilah, my beloved Aussie, that lived to be just over 17, I was almost 18, when we had to have her put down. Actually all my first memories are connected to animals, mostly Delilah. I was around 3 at the time.

34

Memories are arranged and accessed by context. Although the brain forms memories within the womb such memories cannot be consciously or deliberately retrieved because there is no “hook” by which to retrieve them. Most people do not have distinct or chronologically linked memories before the age of three; however, it is not uncommon to have isolated memories before this time. Such memories are easily conflated or unintentionally manufactured from later description by other people. Oliver Sacks relates a memory of an incendiary bomb that exploded outside his childhood home during the Blitz, only to later discover that his brother had seen the explosion and related it to him as he was not in London at the time.

Stranger

35

I remember moving from Jacksonville to South Florida when I was 3, and my brother being born when I was 3.5.

36

I remember my mom standing above my crib and being very pleased at something I’d just done.

I remember my grandma holding me and making baby noises at me (“goo goo ga ga” and all that). I didn’t like it.

I have another memory which seems like it can only be of the day I was adopted. I would only have been a few weeks old, though, so I doubt it’s genuine.

37

I recall waking up from a nap on the sofa and going down to the basement laundry area to see my mother. I must have been around 2-3 years old. The really peculiar thing about it, however, was that I distinctly remember it being the first thing I could remember at the time. I knew that it was my house, and its layout, and where my mother would likely be, but I remember being conscious at the time that I had no narrative memories, or even memories of images… A kind of “Wow, so this is what life is like” feeling. I recognized my mother, but had a distinct sense of not having seen her before. Later we visited my grandmother, and I referred to us as going to “meet” her. I realized that my mother thought I was simply misusing the word, as we’d already seen her many times, but I knew that I hadn’t, and didn’t really know what my grandmother would look like until we saw her.

I’ve heard of various psychological disorders, some discussed by the previously mentioned Oliver Sacks, in his books, wherein people lose short term memory, or the ability to recognize faces, or become convinced that everyone they know has been replaced by a double, or things to that effect. I’m not sure whether my experience was a transitory version of a similar disfunction, or a false memory fabricated entirely after the fact, or something more weird and metaphysical, like a replacement consciousness taking up residence for some reason.

38

One of my earliest memories is falling on the floor furnace, which for some reason had a board to walk across? I was very little, cause it’s before we moved to Brookhaven, so 3ish? It HURT (which is probably why I remember it.) I know I wasn’t allowed out of my room unless Momma came to get me, I think I remember that, but I might have been told, and I was still in a crib - probably for that reason, to corral my busy butt so she’d have time to fetch me before I got out on my own, which I must have done. I know I was in a crib in this house long after I was old enough to be in a bed, cause Mom told me that part. Plus, I’ve never seen a floor furnace in any other part of the world but the deep South, and this has just occurred to me now, at age 40!

Not sure if it’s earlier, but I think so…flashes of my mom knitting (she crocheted most of her life, so knitting would be fairly early on), flashes of the top of my Daddy’s convertible, flashes of the black with little flowers robe I wore to the drive in where I slept in the back seat, and the little mosquito burning thing (spiral thing, light it on fire, makes smoke, that thing, no idea what it’s called.)

Earlier still, the smallest memory of lying with my head on my mom’s knee on a bus or train seat - vinyl, brown, smelly seat. That would be the trip from MS to CA to see my grandparents. Train and bus the whole way, but that’s literally ALL I remember from it.

I don’t have solid, full on playback memories (except for the floor furnace thing, but that’s just a few seconds, I don’t remember the actual fall or getting off it, but I have a VERY clear memory of lying there screaming for mom) just short flashes and I can’t remember clearly how old I was. Sometimes I can date them by where I am and who’s there, but not always. I was just…very young, is all I can say for sure.

So I’m not sure what my “first memory” is. shrug

39

That is pretty fascinating… in a general way, it’s similar to what I wrote about in the original post – the sense of things suddenly seeming really different. But mine was more like what they call “presque vu”, and yours was “jamais vu”.

40

I’ve no idea how old I was at this time. It is totally a visual memory. I think my parents were having some kind of party at our house. Lots of people in the living room & dining room. I, however, had been laid down to sleep in my crib. What I remember was that I was crying. No idea why, but I was. I can remember my bedroom door opened by my mother. I could see into the lit room through the bars on my crib. Don’t know why I remember that.

When I was approximately 2yo, I was visiting relatives in rural Tennessee. I had fallen into a deep water-filled hole (well?). I remember bobbing once to the surface and seeing 3 or 4 adults running towards me, and my vision was all watery/blurry. I really should ask my father about that incident.