Memories...

I have the vaguest memory of my paternal grandmother helping me unwrap a Christmas present when I was two. Only memory I have of her, she passed soon afterwards. I have no memories of my other grandmother,  I was seventeen months old when she passed.

My earliest memory was sitting on the floor playing with what I think were wooden shapes that fit into the holes on a board.  I’m not real sure about that.  I was wearing a onesie and I desperately wanted my parents to get me out of it but they just sat there.  I definitely remember not wanting to have that onesie on me.  The rest of it’s a very vague memory for me.

I have another early memory that’s super weird.  I remember I totally freaked out my parents.  My dad was asking me what happened before that and I said something like “I was inside of mommy”.  I guess he thought that was pretty fascinating. One would think he would’ve stopped there but for some reason he kept going with the “What happened before that?” line of questioning.  The only thing I remember was my dad asking me what happened before that and my mom was freaking out, but Dad still remembers what he was asking me.

My next answer was something like “Before that, everyone was a different colored ball floating around.”  He asked what happened before that so I told him I was somebody else, I was a mom of two kids, then I died.  He probably should’ve stopped there, but he asked what my name and address were and apparently I remembered them.  I absolutely don’t remember that, but dad tells me I gave him an actual address in Colorado.

Apparently, I remembered that stuff when I was four years old or so, but now I absolutely can’t remember being inside the womb and definitely not anything before that.  Dad still says he’s sorry he ever asked.

My old neighborhood according to four-year old me, lol










This post was edited by Livvie at July 18, 2022 5:01 PM MDT

My earliest memory is when my brother was  born when I  was 18 months old and I  stayed with my aunt and uncle while our mother was in the hospital. I don't remember the entire stay, just two or three specific incidents. I have lots of memories from before I was five and I can pinpoint the timeframe because we moved to a new home just before I turned five.

I have fuzzy memories of the bedroom I shared with my big brother in an apartment we moved out of when I was about 4. That was in 1964, and I also vaguely remember being taken to the New York Worlds Fair that year.

I mind the nurses in the maternity ward. 

 

  I don’t know how old I was, but since my younger brother is in this memory, and he’s thirteen months my junior, I must have been about three or four years old, because he was already walking and running. I remember the exterior of the apartment house we lived in, it was painted white, it was one story high and there may have been about five or six apartments in a row. Ours was not on either of the ends, and the whole length of the grassy front yards consisted of a big hill that fed right to the street. We were only allowed to play on the top of the hill and not on the slope because of the cars whizzing by below.

  My elder brother, younger brother and I were with a bunch of other kids running around playing, and I remember being absolutely terrified of the hill because it seemed so steep to me. We feared getting close to the edge where the slope began, we thought we’d roll down it and wouldn’t be able to stop, ending up getting hit by cars. We were in awe of older children and adults who had no fear of the hill at all.

It was a cold winter day, my little brother’s nose was running and he didn’t seem to care because he was having so much fun, I thought, “What a big baby”.  A few seconds later, my mother or my sister (four years older than I) yelled at both of us from the front door of our house to clean our noses. I guess my nose was running too and I hadn’t even noticed it. LoL.

  Side note: we only lived in that house a year or two, and I have lots of other memories there after the one above. We moved to another part of town far from there, and over the years lived in three separate places before I turned eighteen and joined the Marine Corps. I have never again lived in my hometown from that day on, but as an adult, I traveled back there on leave many times. On one such trip, I went back to where we lived in the story above. The apartment homes were still there, everything that had seemed enormous to me as a two-year-old seemed like miniatures to me then, especially the “killer hill”. It was no more intimidating than a stair step, but I could see how a tiny children would be afraid of it. 
~

I don't know which is my first memory, but I do recall that my mom helped me establish that I definitely have memories from age three. 

I have a brother one year older and had a sister two years older than I. My earliest memory was showing them that I could walk under the dining room table without my head touching, and they couldn't. Close in time to that, I remember one day they were teaching me how to slide my feet on the rug to make a spark when I touched the radiator. All of my earliest memories include my brother and sister. We were a team.

My earliest "full" memory is of my sitting in a classroom in either Pre K or Kindergarten.  I remember I was sitting "on the side", away from the rest of the general class.  I remember there was a lot of commotion and the assigned teacher(s) was attending to the rest of the class while I was left pretty much unsupervised.  I remember sitting there feeling completely saddened and forlorn being away from my family and my home for one of the first times in my life.  I then remember clearly saying to myself the infantile version of, "Screw this!", and proceeded to get up and walk out of the classroom, down the hallway and into the principal's office.  I sat in a chair for quite a while; I guess I figured that someone would see me, figure I didn't want to be there, call my parents and they would come pick me up and take me home.  Well, to cut a long story short, I learned that day that this is not how things worked as one of the administrators saw me, asked me who my teacher was and proceeded to take me back to class.

I have no memories prior to this incident. I was walking home from kindergarten at age five. Cherry Elementary. I got up onto a short brick lawn border fence and while walking on it, I slipped and fell, cutting my head. When I got home, my face was covered with blood. Quite vivid.