In my crib, around 2, seeing a pattern on the linoleum floor that looked like a ghost to me. I was able to tell where the crib was located in the room when I told Mom about it years later, and she confirmed I had it right. I don’t have other snippets until 3, and I have plenty of those. Now about yesterday…
Listening to Michael Jackson and playing with Purple Pie Man and Sour Grapes (Strawberry Shortcake villains) dolls with my sister when we were three. Listening to Billy Ocean in the back seat of our mother’s car, and Stevie Nicks. I remember remembering these times more now, since the music jogged my memory at five and six.
It’s the only one I know of that uses Birds-eye pictures taken from airplanes.
My mom was a single, working mom once my parents divorced, so she had to find a place for me to be during the day.
What we now call “day care” was unknown at the time. Instead, there were “nursery schools”…though not many of them. Mom enrolled me in one that was just starting up; I was their second student.
I very clearly remember her taking me there before the school actually opened so she could discuss things with the proprietress (who was to become my beloved “Aunt Ruth”). The school was in the main floor and basement of their very large home — Aunt Ruth and Uncle Bob lived on the upper floor.
In the room where they were talking were four or five low, round tables with smooth wooden tops where the students would sit, several at a time. As Mom and Aunt Ruth talked, I walked around and around, going from one to another as I ran my hand across the table tops.
I was 2 1/2 at the time. I have countless other wonderful memories of the nursery school, where I later attended kindergarten, and later still, day camp during the summers. But that very first one has been with me for nearly 60 years now.
My mother said I started walking at ten months. I don’t know if that’s true but my first memory is of pulling myself up on a vanity table and shitting a coil into my diaper. I knew it was going to be messy when I sat in it but thankfully don’t remember plopping back down.
My very first memory is of standing, taking a couple steps, falling, crawling, standing, taking a couple steps… I was trying to follow my brother and sister into a field, but I just didn’t have the whole walking thing down pat. I remember once I got standing, I looked up, and there was a magical, wondrous thing floating on a string, and I was transfixed. I HAD to watch this thing that descended, landed on my forehead **(and bit me.) ** I described this memory to my mother many years later, and apparently, that was when the spiders marked me, and they have hated me ever since!! (I admit, I am a little bothered that I had an obvious bite on my forehead, and my parents let their child sleep for a day and a half without bothering to take me to a doctor.)
My next memory, (Mom said I must have been about two years old,) all I know is by then I was walking. I have brief memories of walking across a field, and a BIG blue car parked in the road. They were not supposed to do that, cars only moved on the road. A pair of knees got out of the car, and left the door open, which was strange, the door is supposed to be closed on the road. The knees were walking towards me, then I heard my mother SCREAMING, and when I turned to look, she was running across the field. My mother, running!! (And she was scared. Mom, running, and scared!? Never! Unheard of!) The knees belonged to a big kid, and a man was driving the big blue car.
I described this to Mom many years later, and she told me that my father had been telling me he would take me to the grocery store when he went. I was busy playing when he was ready to go, so he decided to go without me. The only thing Mom could figure is that once I figured out he had left without me, I decided to walk there and meet him/find him. She went to the end of our street (there were 3 houses on the street,) and saw me in the field.
I saw my sister’s first steps, or maybe second steps (my brother claimed he was first, but I remember disagreeing with him at the time). My sister would have been 1 year old, making me 3 years old (our birthdays are almost exactly two years apart).
I don’t think I have any earlier memories, but I have plenty of when I was 4 and 5.
My earliest memory is being awake at night in a hospital. The bars in the crib I was in were chrome and the white sheets were glowing purple, so I guess I was under a UV lamp. This was from my 2nd birthday when I had my tonsils removed.
When I was 2, my family lived in East Africa. One night, a gang of robbers broke into our home armed with machetes.
My father was out so it was just my mother, my sister who was only a few months old, and I.
It was a horrible experience for my mom, but I had no memory of it at all.
She woke up to strange noises coming from the living room.
Thinking my father must have returned, she got up and started walking that way when she saw only the light from a couple of flashlights in the darkness.
They caught her.
Apparently, I woke up and came running out of my room just as she was struggling to get away and run back towards the alarm, with a couple of the guys behind her.
One of them was holding on to the back of her robe.
In a panic, she quickly took off her robe, grabbed me in her arms and managed to lock herself in one of the rooms (it had a metal door with bars that she bolted).
She pulled the alarm; they took whatever they could manage and fled.
We moved to a different area shortly after that.
When I was 16 years old and living in a different country, I had a dream- I dreamt that I woke up and saw a man in my room searching through my drawers, throwing everything all over the place.
In one hand he was holding what looked like a big knife.
I woke up calm; it wasn’t a nightmare or anything.
Without telling her about the dream, I started asking my mom questions about my childhood bedroom.
It turns out, I was able to describe it in detail: the colour of the walls, where the bed was, where the chest of drawer was, a Minnie Mouse sticker on the closet…everything had been exactly as in my dream.
To this day, I don’t know for sure if it was an actual memory that came back to me in a dream or just my subconscious latching on to the story that I’d heard, but to her it was a definite explanation as to why I had woken up and ran out of my room that night.
It was in the early 60’s and I had been taken to get a smallpox shot. I just remember a big ugly needle and that I was upset because it hurt. Probably I was around 1 year to 18 months old.
Another from that time is following my mother near a downtown department store and looking in the store window. I also recall a lunch counter and cinnamon rolls. To this day I’m still fascinated by those things.
Walking through the grass, holding my mom’s had, going to see my grandpa in the hospital. I would have been three or four.
I have memories of a house we used to go to, but those memories are jumbled because that same house appeared in one of my recurring dreams for years. It was. A cool old farmhouse. Red with a big porch. And there were dogs. In my dream, the house has lots of crazy rooms, and I am playing hide and seek, but I can never find anyone. Their voices and laughter are always just ahead of me.
I remember my grandmother baking cookies - she died when I was two.
I vividly remember being told to move out of the way of the TV when the moon landing happened. That was three months before my third birthday.
I remember walking with my mother and grandmother at the elementary school in my hometown (where my grandmother worked and I later attended) on the tennis courts. My mother asked me if I wanted a little brother. My brother was born a week before my third birthday, so I would guess I was around 2 1/2 years old at the time. That’s the oldest memory that I can fairly accurately estimate when it happened. I also got the impression that she was asking me to decide if she should just go out and get me a brother, so I later thought that my brother was adopted.
I’ve read that some people can actually remember being born and was hoping someone here did. I’m curious what such a memory would be like.
As far as I know some children are able to remember their births…
I have a vague memory, perhaps created, of when I would have been three. I’m being put to bed and a strap on my leg, attached to my shoe, is removed. When I was born my foot was slightly twisted, so I wore a special shoe and the strap gradually pulled my foot straight forward.
Now I do remember for sure an incident when I was four. I tried to pick up two one-gallon glass milk bottle and carry them upstairs from the basement. They “tinked” together and the glass broke, letting two gallons of milk cascade down the stairs.
I was fourteen when men landed on the moon, so I remember THAT vividly. I was so excited, so keyed up, that when the picture was actually showing my eyes could not make sense of what was there. It was just blobs of black and white. I had to wait for a repeat to really “see” it.
We moved shortly after my 2nd birthday. I have some distinct memories of the new house (before the air conditioner, before our neighbors installed their fence) that my family says would put them before I turned 2 1/2.
Stepping on a heating grate in the floor of our house and burning my foot. I was about four.
I have a memory of the Kennedy assassination. I was 2 yrs 8 months old.
I also have a memory of the street that we lived on. And we moved when I was 3 yrs 3 months old.
I have a vague snapshot memory of visiting my brother in hospital when he got his tonsils out, he’s five years older than me and I’m pretty sure he had them out before he was 8.
I remember waking from a night terror after falling asleep one evening in a chair at our house and being in a terrible panic once I woke up. I still remember the dream/nightmare/whatever that caused it and can still describe it. Age: probably mid-3’s.