My earliest memory is a birthday party. Many years later I was talking to my mother about it, and based on the people I remember being there she was able to identify it as my 3rd birthday.
I also remember standing in the middle of the big bench seat of my dad’s car and helping him shift gears. He got rid of that car when I was 4, so that memory also must have been from some time in my 3rd year.
Before anyone has a fit, baby seats and seat belts weren’t exactly common back then.
That same year, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I remember watching it on an old black and white TV we had at the time. I remember my mom making a big deal. Men were walking on the moon! She kept asking me if I understood what that meant. Sure I understood. Men on the moon. Big deal. I didn’t know what was normal and what was a big deal back then. I was only three. Men walk on the moon? Ok, if you say so. Milk comes from cows? Ok, if you say so. It wasn’t until later that I really figured out the significance of it all.
My first memories were of the neighbor boy. We were pretty much glued at the hip from the age of 2 and a half to 4. We spent all day almost every day together. He shared his Transformers with me. And I would share my Barbies and My Little Ponies with him.
The only other really early memory is the only one of my biological father before my parents got divorced. It was snowing but not too cold. We went out to play in the snow, just the two of us. I remember helping him by pushing the ball of snow around, and then watching him sculpt it with his hands into a little girl on her knees praying. He said it was me. I remember it being perfect, but I’m sure it was actually pretty crude. I think I was around 3 for that one.
My first memory is an unpleasant dream. I was probably four. I won’t tell it to you (or just about anybody else), but it was like a short story involving a temple, a giant, and death. Since then I’ve read about 18 volumes of C.G. Jung’s Collected Works, for instance, so I guess it sparked an interest.
I remember climbing up upon that old desk we had for year after, to look out a window at my younger brother being belted with olive pits by my older brothers.
They, my brothers, of course, deny doing any such thing.:dubious:
Usually someone will insist on it, and the thread turns into an argument from that point. I’m quite surprised it hasn’t already happened here.
My earliest datable memory (there are a few others that I believe may be earlier, but can’t reliably determine), is of being bathed in the kitchen sink alongside my sister; I posted the account in another thread; this is C&P’ed from it:
I can remember being in my crib, in the first house where we lived, until I was two. I remember the bars, and the ceiling was angled - the building was a barn converted to two apartments. I can also remember sitting in the high chair in the kitchen.
Much later in life, I confirmed with my mother what the place looked like, the colors of the kitchen, the flower-shaped clock on the wall, the layout of the rooms, where the bathroom was, the landing on the stairs, etc. It has to be memories from before I was two, because there are no pictures from the inside of that house.
My brother, who is 20 months younger than I, had a crib in the middle room of the three upstairs rooms. My first memory is climbing into his crib to play with him one morning, and my father coming in on his way to the bathroom. My brother definitely couldn’t stand or probably crawl much yet. This was probably late 1953 early 1954. After that I vaguely remember going to the old library with my mother, well before I went to kindergarten.
I have a very early memory. It wasn’t something anyone ever talked about but I can distinctly remember looking up a stairwell and seeing my sister crawl around after a babydoll. I remember turning because my Mom came to pick me up and I fought her because I wanted to join my sister. I described it to my Mom a few years ago and she told me that it was my grandparents old house and it burned down right before my first birthday. This was my paternal grandparents and shortly after that we lost touch with them because my parents divorced and we were adopted. My Mom never talked about that side of the family and my sister refuses to talk about it as well. There are no pictures of the old house because my parents were very poor when we were little. It’s very strange but I can close my eyes and see it plain as day.
I can also remember my sister’s first day of school. She was 6 when she started and I was either 3 or 4. I remember crying and being upset that my sissy was being taken away from me. My Mom had to bribe me with letting me have ice cream for lunch to calm me down. Vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup. It didn’t help, chocolate might have made it better but I doubt it.
Mine would be when my older brother first went off to pre-school, in about January or February 1967. I would have been about two and a half years old. I remember how bored I was while he was away during the day since there was nobody to play with. My mother used to have a nap in the afternoon and I can remember sitting in the lounge room, still and warm in the summer heat, looking at the clock on the wall and knowing that it somehow had something to do with how long it would be before my brother came back.
It’s not just any “someone” who came up with that idea, it was Freud! We read something in one of my college classes in which he made the outrageous claim that people could not remember anything before the age of seven. Obviously this was true of him and he committed the sin of using himself as a model for what’s normal for humans in general.