Infant memory

Earliest memory from childhood is when I was 18 months and running outside to greet the postman (I was madly in love with the postman) with my dummy in my mouth and he saying "[my name], only babies use dummies" and taking my dummy from me. I remember bursting into tears from utter mortification and his trying to give it back to me, telling me he was only joking... I remember my parents trying to give it back to me so I would sleep after that and I kept saying "no no.. the postman said only babies use dummies".. my parents also remember my not sleeping for about 2 weeks after that.

Then I remember when I was 3 years of age and my fathers uncle had passed away and at the viewing at his house.. I was playing outside with my cousins that evening and my aunt (sadistic cow), forced us to come inside to pay our respects. And I remember the utter fear I felt when seeing him lying there dead with a rosary clutched in his hands. I was so scared I peed my pants and I remember my aunt yelling at me about not being respectful and I remember my father rushing into the room and dragging me outside while telling his sister she was insane... then trying to comfort me. My parents did not know she had forced me inside to view the body and had not wanted me to see it.

Again at 3 years of age I remember my father in hospital after an ulcer operation and my aunt (same aunt.. damn cow) dragging me in from the waiting room where I had been sitting with my cousin's to come and see my father. My mother had left me outside so I would not have to see my father with a huge tube coming out of his mouth where they were pumping things from his stomach.. and I remember screaming when I was dragged into the room and my mother jumping up from my father's bedside, my father waking up and looking scared and groggily trying to wave me out of the room and my Grandfather scooping me up and rushing me outside. That would have to be the most vivid memory actually. I was terrified that my father was dead.:bawl:

I also remember my cousin's and I stealing our grandmother's tamarind jam and using her good sheets to build a cubbyhouse behind her wardrobe.
 
wow you are so lucky Bells...that your remember so early from your childhood...it will help you later in life...or maybe that later is close by...
 
draqon said:
wow you are so lucky Bells...that your remember so early from your childhood...it will help you later in life...or maybe that later is close by...
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Indeed. It helped me in that I took my son's dummy away from him when he was 6 months old.. so that he would not remember.:)
 
Bells said:
Earliest memory from childhood is when I was 18 months and running outside to greet the postman (I was madly in love with the postman) with my dummy in my mouth and he saying "[my name], only babies use dummies" and taking my dummy from me. I remember bursting into tears from utter mortification and his trying to give it back to me, telling me he was only joking... I remember my parents trying to give it back to me so I would sleep after that and I kept saying "no no.. the postman said only babies use dummies".. my parents also remember my not sleeping for about 2 weeks after that.

Then I remember when I was 3 years of age and my fathers uncle had passed away and at the viewing at his house.. I was playing outside with my cousins that evening and my aunt (sadistic cow), forced us to come inside to pay our respects. And I remember the utter fear I felt when seeing him lying there dead with a rosary clutched in his hands. I was so scared I peed my pants and I remember my aunt yelling at me about not being respectful and I remember my father rushing into the room and dragging me outside while telling his sister she was insane... then trying to comfort me. My parents did not know she had forced me inside to view the body and had not wanted me to see it.

Again at 3 years of age I remember my father in hospital after an ulcer operation and my aunt (same aunt.. damn cow) dragging me in from the waiting room where I had been sitting with my cousin's to come and see my father. My mother had left me outside so I would not have to see my father with a huge tube coming out of his mouth where they were pumping things from his stomach.. and I remember screaming when I was dragged into the room and my mother jumping up from my father's bedside, my father waking up and looking scared and groggily trying to wave me out of the room and my Grandfather scooping me up and rushing me outside. That would have to be the most vivid memory actually. I was terrified that my father was dead.:bawl:

I also remember my cousin's and I stealing our grandmother's tamarind jam and using her good sheets to build a cubbyhouse behind her wardrobe.
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Yeesh. Those first two are shitty, Bells.

Family are arses. Not to be OT (never me) but on the issue of idiot relatives and kids, I remember my father-in-law insisting and insisting that my eldest (Matthew) learn to skate so he could play hockey like grandpa. The wife pushed it too so I was all "ok, fine" but Matthew wasn't really into it and didn't want to skate and so the old prick flipped his wig a bit and told Matthew he wouldn't be getting any priviledges and so on and being right pissed. My steam came up - I never liked that little asshole - and my wife juuuuust about became an orphan that day. Man. Idiot distant family who think they have a right to stick theirs in. I'm still seeing red thinking about it.

Anyway - topic. I remember running down the hall on the day I turned four and yelling "I'm four! I'm four!" after asking my dad. Before that, a large scarily strong guy - my grandfather - picking me up. Scared hell out of me. Maybe he could sense immorality.

Mostly after that it's just the usual crap everyone experiences after four. You know: dragged to family quilting bees, under the quilt playing with cars and surrounded by baggy old women's legs. Fighting with cousins and dogs in some kind of idiot's battle royale for the backyard swing-tree. Typical stuff. Holding flaming fireworks to shower a field in a construction site at 2 AM as cares drove slowly by, wondering what was going on. Losing my virginity to a one-legged Belgian prostitute. (No relation to TDI...probably.) In the summer, we made meat hats. The usual sort of adolescent hijinks. Nothing too special.
 
Heh I was just telling you of my "infant memories".. :p

Childhood memories are plentiful. Like jumping in a boat, anchored near the family beachside holiday house, and finding it full of dried up fish bones and the fisherman coming to tell us off.. Stealing cigarettes at 6 years of age and smoking till our throats were raw in my cousin's garage and opening up the garage door afterwards and trying to distract their mother while the smoke billowed out. Being chased by my cousin's demented pet monkey across the yard. Being chased by a rabid deer that same cousin had as a pet.. damn fool had so many weird pets it is a surprise he made it into adulthood.. Falling off my cousin's motorbike at 5 years of age when he decided it would be "fun" to do a wheelie (my father nearly flayed him alive for taking me on his bike and then riding it like a hoon). Stepping on a sea urchin and having the spines break in my foot at 5 years of age... damn I still get chills remembering that pain..

Falling out of my grandparents avocado tree and trying to hide the evidence of the broken branch I had fallen from by wrapping it in sticky tape (we'd been banned from climbing said tree). Falling off the roof and thankfully into soft shrubs at the beach house my grandparents went to every summer.. that was when I was 6 and had been dared to do somersaults across the roof by idiotic cousins... sadistic little turds daring me knowing I would never turn down a dare:mad:..

So many memories.. It is a miracle I'm still alive and with all limbs intact.

As for your father-inlaw, yes I know what you mean. Meddling relatives are the worst. I have just taken up the habit of saying "no" in a particular voice that if they push it, I will ask them to leave. If I know my child is not interested, I will simply say no to the relative and they know now to not push it.. even my husband knows when not to push..
 
Childhood memories are plentiful. Like jumping in a boat, anchored near the family beachside holiday house, and finding it full of dried up fish bones and the fisherman coming to tell us off.. Stealing cigarettes at 6 years of age and smoking till our throats were raw in my cousin's garage and opening up the garage door afterwards and trying to distract their mother while the smoke billowed out. Being chased by my cousin's demented pet monkey across the yard. Being chased by a rabid deer that same cousin had as a pet.. damn fool had so many weird pets it is a surprise he made it into adulthood.. Falling off my cousin's motorbike at 5 years of age when he decided it would be "fun" to do a wheelie (my father nearly flayed him alive for taking me on his bike and then riding it like a hoon). Stepping on a sea urchin and having the spines break in my foot at 5 years of age... damn I still get chills remembering that pain..
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Ho-hum. A fairly standard Aussie upbringing, innit? :shrug: Fighting off crocodiles?

I remember being shot in the stomach by the neighbour's pellet gun when I was six. I was visiting with Canadian cousins and we'd been standing beside the cans their next-door neighbour was shooting at. I was just about to say "shouldn't we be standing somewhere else" when ping the pellet richocheted off and hit me. Nothing serious, obviously, but I realized I'd been hit and I didn't know how powerful they were and the last thing I recall was thinking "well, I've been shot...I guess I'm meant to be dead then" and then I fell over. Kind of odd. They begged me not to tell anyone; I was fine with it, just glad to not have to be dead.

Curiously enough, the next year I was back I got bit by their dog. Still have a wierd scar on my knee. Hadn't really been doing anything. Ah well.
 
Well of course.

You can't get into dwarf tossing until you're at least eight.

;)
 
I don't remember much at all up until about 6 years of age. I have no recollection whatsoever of kindergarten.

Probably my earliest memory was when I was about 3 or 4. It was a hot day, and I was awfully thirsty. So I managed to reach up to one of the counter and get a hold of that children's liquid Panadol, the raspberry flavoured stuff.

My memory of what happens afterwards is hazy, up until the bit that I'm in ER, being made to throw up. That might explain why I'm a bit of an emetophobe today.
 
mountainhare said:
I don't remember much at all up until about 6 years of age. I have no recollection whatsoever of kindergarten....
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I only have 1 memory of kindergarten. Raymond Gunhammer was my one true love. Then one day he wasn't there anymore. His brother had gotten drunk and was arrested for something he's done. He hung himself in jail. Raymond's family moved back to the reservation that very night. I remember sitting in my teachers lap crying and crying that raymond was gone.
 
My earliest memory is when i was around 2 or 3 and i ate a load of chewitts and then threw them up in the kitchen.

Another one (and load people don't believe me and i have my doubts too) when i was 3, i thought my pillow was John Major (the white haired man on TV) and like an imaginary friend i guess.
 
All right. So what have we learned?

Women's infant memories are driven by love: Bells loves postmen (no comment), Sam loves food and Orleander loves strangely named Norsemen.

Lots of people remember barfing and fighting; Red can recall primitive terrorialism.

I conclude, therefore, that all behaviour is ingrained: women mostly like nice stuff, because women are made out of flowers and candy, except witches, which are made out of wood. Men, by contrast, are mostly interested in fighting and ramping BMX bikes onto roofs. And vomiting, during or before.

Thankyou.
 
S.A.M. said:
It would appear that there is not much difference between adult and infant memory storage; so it may merely be a matter of retrieval.
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And resistance to the impact. The ego or conscious mind protecting itself from what might seem like a threat to identity. I've had memories (new ones) from different periods in my life, some really early some not. Often the person I was or the way I experienced things (myself, the world, other people) was so different it was jarring. Very early memorys can have a lot of emotion and feeling in the broad sense. We were very different than or seemed to be. I feeling this is resisted by the conscious mind.

I remember my circumcision. Not that all early memories need to be that charged, of course. It took a lot of work for me to relax and stay with this memory. Part of me just wanted to close it off. I think sometimes memories can come primarily as images, almost like a movie without a soundtrack, but if the feelings are attached and the feelings were not good or overwhelming in other ways the conscious mind does not want to deal with them.

I recently spent time with a very young infant, a friend's child. The absolute direct way he would express happiness is something most adults have trained themselves not to do. So even emotions that are positive may be too much for the conscious mind, it cuts against our training.

A baby's perceptions would also be rather other, completely immersed in the now, often without understanding wider contexts. This is a state many people avoid also. 'To remember' is to some degree 'to be' what seems like another person/ another mode of being.
 
GeoffP said:
All right. So what have we learned?

Women's infant memories are driven by love: Bells loves postmen (no comment), Sam loves food and Orleander loves strangely named Norsemen.

Lots of people remember barfing and fighting; Red can recall primitive terrorialism.

I conclude, therefore, that all behaviour is ingrained: women mostly like nice stuff, because women are made out of flowers and candy, except witches, which are made out of wood. Men, by contrast, are mostly interested in fighting and ramping BMX bikes onto roofs. And vomiting, during or before.

Thankyou.
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I think we have learned that there is a hitch between memory storage and retrieval in some individuals. :D
 
Orleander said:
LOL
did you miss the 'moved to the reservation' part? ;)
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Clearly it was a Norse reservation of some kind. I understand that several Norsemen visited Labrador in the 10th century; ergo, I deduce you must have been living on Labrador when this occurred.

S.A.M. said:
I think we have learned that there is a hitch between memory storage and retrieval in some individuals. :D
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Hmmm - I can think of one such. Have you others? ;)
 
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