What's Your Earliest Memory?
We all have one, even we haven’t looked for it lately.
My husband’s earliest memory is of sitting in the kitchen sink while his mother is giving him a bath. He thinks he must have been about 18 months old. He has seen an old photo of himself in that sink, but he’s pretty sure that isn’t what gave him the idea because he can definitely recall looking at his mother as she washed him, and he can still smell the soap she was using. For him, the photo was simply confirmation of an actual memory.
My earliest memory is of lying on my back in what must have been a baby bassinet, looking up at faces that were bending over me. I don’t think I would have been comfortable claiming that as a true recollection though, had it not been for something my mother once said.
I told her what I thought I remembered, and I pointed to a corner of the dining room. I said, “I have a feeling that I my bassinet was sitting right over there,” and she nodded and said, “Yes, that’s where it was.”
My sister’s first memory is from when she was about two years old. She said, “Mama was standing over a floor heater in the hallway, and I was looking up at her as she told me that I was soon going to have a little brother or sister.” At the time, my sister didn’t have any particular reaction to what our mother was saying because it didn’t mean much to her. Still, for some reason, she has never forgotten it.
A friend of mine said, “I think my first vivid memory was one of purposely tumbling head first down a flight of stairs when I was about three. It was on the second floor of our house in Cleveland, and the stairs had blue carpeting, as I recall. I remember wondering what it would be like to roll down the stairs, so I decided to do it. I didn’t like the results and I remember sitting at the bottom of the staircase, crying.”
I’m no psychologist, but surely we all have tons of imprints on our brains that we carry around like luggage, many of them locked securely away from recall. I also assume that those imprints, remembered or not, affect our personalities, character and behavior in more ways than we could possibly imagine.