What's your earliest memory?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

The clearest memory I have is standing in the kitchen of my old house, looking up at my parents. I remember distinctly being short enough to fit with room to spare under the handles of the old refrigerator, which had a set of those big old vertical handles on the doors. And I’m ANNOUNCING LOUDLY to all within hearing, “NOW I’m FIVE!” And long-suffering Dad replies, “Alllllmost!”

That was a ritual I went through for a bit every morning – several days in a row at least, until I got tired of doing it.

I was a bit young to get the concept that birthdays only came once a year. :smiley:

62

My earliest memories are all associated with “traumatic” incidents:

When I was three years and a few months, my mom was hugely pregnant with my sister. I really wanted to play with my farm animals set with mom, but she wasn’t feeling well. This is the first of a million times I resented my sister’s existence. Trauma: my mom chose my sister over me, and she wasn’t even born yet!

When I was around four, I was scheduled for surgery to remove the wires holding my once-broken jaw together.

Part A of this memory is touring the hospital with my mom. She pointed out some half-drawers made of clear plastic and told me that is where I would be put after the surgery was finished.

Part B is picking the scent of gas that would put me to sleep. I chose chocolate, and after they put it on I changed my mind. I asked for strawberry, but they said no. I have a feeling I might have had yet another scent before chocolate, but I’m not sure about that. Anywho, I remember them telling me to watch the monitor and soon I would wake up in a different bed. I thought of the shelf-drawers while I watched the spiky green mountain-like lines on the beige monitor.

Part C: When I woke up, I was disoriented. I wasn’t on those shelves, and that had me extremely concerned. I was in a “huge” bed with a large clown blanket and there was a television mounted on the wall above me (in my memory it seems like it’s twenty feet above my head, but it was probably more like seven). I don’t remember what I said to my mom (probably nothing since I’d just had jaw surgery), but I remember conveying to her how upset I was.

Part D: I don’t know how long after the surgery this was. I had to rinse my mouth every day “until the pink stopped coming”. I wasn’t bothered by it until a friend (perhaps Emily) was over and was pretty disgusted by what I had to do. I started resenting rinsing my mouth then.

So, trauma: part A doesn’t fit on its own, but then comes not getting my way, having my mom lie (!!!) to me, and having to do stuff my friends won’t like me for.

My last early memory that I can think of right now also happened when I was 4 or so. My parents picked a new daycare that was in the house of a lady. She had a very large tree with low-hanging branches in the front yard where the kids would play. I remember the house was small and box shaped with peeling white paint. A while after I was left there by my parents on the first day, I was thirsty. I wandered into the kitchen and asked the ladies making lunch if they would get me a glass of milk. They said no, you can have one cup of water, and then you have to wait for lunch. I sulked while I drank the water. It didn’t do the job. (Really; I remember still having a dry throat after that cup.) I asked for more; they said no. After lunch I ended up hiding under the tree by myself for the rest of the afternoon. My parents picked me up early that evening and I told them that I refused to ever go to that daycare again. They actually listened to me, that’s how upset I was. Trauma: being deprived an essential need in my daily life. (My four year old mind seriously thought that I might die. If my parents gave it to me at home without saying a word, it must be good for me. If the sitters will not give me what is good for me, they must want me to get ill. Illness causes death. So does thirst. Cheers for four-year-old logic!)

63

Peeling the wallpaper off the wall beside my crib. I told my mom about this and she said I was about 6 months old at the time; she had just rewallpapered my room and she had no idea I would have had the ambition or the motor skills to even attempt that.

I remember it pretty well. I was lying on my back looking at the wall, and I saw a little ripple in the seam of the paper. So I reached up and picked at it and it got bigger. So then I grabbed the free edge and pulled and a big piece came off. I was very proud of this accomplishment. I remember thinking something along the lines of: “Wow! That’s really neat! Let’s see if more comes off!” So I pulled. And pulled. And pulled.

My mom says she walked in later to discover a whole panel ripped off, and me standing in my crib, smiling, surrounded by paper scraps and waving one around in the air. :smiley:

64

Why do I remember doing this before?

I have a clear memory of my mother and my little sister coming home after Margi’s birth. We lived in government quarters at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, a pink stucco house . Mother was on a stretcher and some men were maneuvering to get it up the stairs to the second floor. My father was there and was giving instructions. One of the men turned to him and said, “Captain, would you please get out of the way.” That was in September 1944. I was two years and three months old. The men must have been medical corps enlisted men from the hospital. That is a distinct memory.

I have a somewhat vaguer recollection of men who spoke a funny language I could not understand mowing the lawn while soldiers with big guns watched them. The men doing the lawn were POWs from the Africa Corps.

65

Most of you seem to have me beat. The earliest thing I can clearly remember was last Tuesday.

Seriously though, I have two memories from preschool and I don’t know which came first (bummer.) I was 4 for both of them.

I remember looking out the window of my preschool. It was raining that day and I remember wondering about why it rained. Man. I was such a nerd, even then.

The other memory was the class sitting around in a circle and talking about what we wanted to be when we grew up. I said that I wanted to be an astronaut. Then a few minutes later, my friend, Griffon, said he wanted to be a knight and the teacher told us we would have to call him Sir Griffon when he was a knight.

66

My earliest memory is from the age of 2. I only know this because I was having a discussion with my daughter about the age of her earliest memory last easter when we were visiting my mom. My position was that it couldn’t have been before 3 or so. We moved on to my earliest memory which was being in a large white crib in the hospital with my mom and godmother there standing over me. I know from being told that it was a hospital and I was there to have cyst removed from the base of my right ring finger, (ok, I know which finger because I still have a scar). When I told my daughter this my mom laughed at me, because I was 2 at the time of the surgery, so there went my position on the subject in a puff of smoke.

67

I was three, and staying in the village where my grandmother was living. For some reason, I’ve several memories of this time and place, where, according to my mother I only stayed for a very brief time (maybe a couple week) , and then it jumps to at least one year later.

The clearest one is being forbidden from watching a firework from a close distance and having to watch it from long away, behind a window. To this day, I still love fireworks.

The others memories from the same place include seeing cow’s carcasses hanging from a ceiling in a kind of barn, being very affraid of the flight of stairs leading to my grandmother’s appartment, and being chased by a little girl because I was riding her horse on wheels and didn’t want to give it back to her.

68

By the way, some years ago, while I was perusing old photos at my mother’s, I found one depicting me with a rather large donald duck toy in my arms. I’m not sure when this picture was taken, but I think I was probably 4 or so.
When I saw the picture, not only I suddenly remembered the toy, but more weirdly, I remembered the feel/taste of munching on its beak (something I wasn’t doing on the picture).
I found that very weird, and I’m wondering how many memories as accurate are still stored somewhee in my brain, ready to surface if given a chance. I’d like to have more of such “flashbacks”.

69

By the way, I’ve known a man who used to told me that his earliest memory was a very late one (maybe when he was 10 or so). According to him, he remembered nothing that has happened before, then there’s this particular memory where he was standing by the fireplace, and after this he remembered everything clearly (well…as clearly as anybody else, at least).

70

The earliest memory that is still very vivid in my mind happened when I was just a couple of months shy of my 3rd birthday.

I remember my mother was wearing a red ELVIS t-shirt. Elvis was spelled out on her shirt with shiny, metallic multicolored circles (about the size of a dime).

I was sitting on her bed watching TV and the phone rang. She picked it up to answer and then she just started wailing. I had never heard anything like it… She started yelling in the phone “YOU’RE LYING, IT’S NOT TRUE, HE’S NOT DEAD!!!” over and over again. She cried so hard that her face turned red and her nose started bleeding. I watched as the trail of red stuff trickled down her face and onto her Elvis shirt, staining the shiny circles with blood.

I didn’t know what to do, so I just put hand on her back and patted her and told her it would be ok.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the phone call was from someone telling her that Elvis had died.
My mother was one of his biggest fans.

71

I was about two and a half. My mother was pregnant with Little Brother of Mine. She was at the hospital and my father and I had to stay at his sister’s house because we were in the process of moving (for the fifth time in my life at that point). My father gave me a catalogue for some store and told me that he’ll buy me anything I wanted from the Toys section of the catalogue. I asked for a cartoon video of some sort. Then, the next day, we (me, my father, my grandparents, my two aunts, my two uncles, and the two cousins I had at the time) went to the hospital and visited my mother, who was lying in bed. I started crying because I thought she was dying (which, I thought at the time, was going away forever) and she laughed and said she’d never leave us.

72

I remember telling my mother my earliest memory once and she said it was impossible because I was one when we moved out of that house. The memory is of an outside lounge chair and me crawling underneath it to chase the cat. I remember describing it in vivid detail to my mother and she said that there was no way I could remember that and that she must have told me about it, but why would she tell me about something as mundane as me crawling under a lounge chair to chase the cat?

My next earliest memory is from when I was about 3 or so and I told the little boy next door that I would marry him. Our bathroom had a built in laundry bin at the end of the bath and he and I used to climb in there to play. I still remember his name, Graeme Dicks. They moved away when I was about 4.

I also remember visiting Lesotho with my parents and my sister trying to play wheelbarrow with me in the bathtub and nearly drowning me. I can’t have been more than 3 or 4 at the time.

73

I was two or three when I was knocked over by a wave at a beach in Southern California. I can still feel myself tumbling around in the foaming wave. The strongest part of the memory is visual: I opened my eyes as I was going head over heels and saw the water swirling like a washing machine. I was so fascinated by what I was seeing that I guess I forgot to be scared. At some point, Mom and my sister kiffa plucked me out of the water.

74

I vividly remember Christmas Day 1961, which was the last one the family spent in the awful 2-room slum on Albert Road. I was 2 years and 2 months old.

I have a few other memories of that place but the next major memory is in November 1962, moving to the Council flat about 200 yards away (where we spent the next 30 years). Yet oddly I have absolutely no recollection of early 1963 when London was in the grip of a mini Ice Age - the temperature never got above freezing for about 3 months and the place was covered in snow & ice.

75

My earliest is a fuzzy memory of my second birthday party. There was this ‘thing’ that I was fascinated with. It was a plastic flexible tube that I could crawl through. Made of a stretchable plastic over hula hoop like ribs. It seemed to go on forever but must have only been 10’ long. I know there were other kids at my party, but all I remember of them was they kept getting in my way as I crawled through the tube.

My clearest early memory was sometime between 2 and 3. I had woken up early one weekend morning and wanted to play with my parents, but they were still asleep. So I patiently waited in the hallway outside their room at the top of the stairs. I got a toy out of the closet and played with it, but I wasn’t really interested in the toy, I was just killing time until they woke up. The toy was a bag of these little plastic ‘flowers’ with notches between the petals. (This must have been in 1970, and it was a very ‘hippy’ sort of toy) Line up the notches and they’d hold together. Keep adding more to the structure to make weird shapes.

Hrmm… reading others comments about childhood logic and what they wanted to be when they grow up makes me want to share something else, but it doesn’t fit the OP… <dashing off to start a new thread…>

76

I have tried hard to recall anything specific earlier than one thing I’m sure of. I would have been approaching 4 years old. The front page of the Montgomery Advertiser had a picture of the bomb exploding over Hiroshima. August, 1945, wasn’t it?

Before that one image I get confused because my father (who was in Germany in WWII and therefore away from me many of my earliest years) took hundreds of pictures of me and my family in all sorts of places. So when I look at those photos I can’t help but merge those images with whatever is left of my real memories. I think I have some memories of smells and things like the way a summer night felt or that sort of thing. Just nothing specific until that scary picture in the paper.

77

This is one of those posts that makes me wanna call “bullshit” when I read it from someone else. I can’t cite this, obviously. However…

This has come up in family conversations. I described vividly being rolled around in an old-style rectangular baby pram and peering over the edge and seeing the row of garage doors behind my parents row-house in Philly. I described the colors of several- one of which was bright pink. ( this was the early 1960’s ).

My Mom was quite surprised when I shared this memory fragment. The neighbors who had that garage door and house trim painted pink moved when I was less than a year old. I apparently have a memory from my first year of life. I can close my eyes and still see a bit of it. Weird.

After that,…hmm. Memories of First Day school at Quaker Meeting, around age 3.

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