What is your earliest memory?

Peeing on the daycares bath tub wall with a friend. Unlike Ghost busters we crossed the streams.

As odd as it may sound, I cannot remember one damn thing prior to kindergarten (5 years old). I can only attribute this to absolutely nothing of consequence occurring before that.

I remember in kindergarten having a crush on a little girl named Marthy. As a married adult, I happened to meet someone who grew up as a very close friend to Marthy.

Sometimes, life is just so strange

I remember the house where we lived until I was three. I sat on my brothers’ bunk beds and played with toy airplanes while my mother ironed. My brother and I walked to the A&P to see “the Batmobile” and it was a disappointing little shopping center mechanical ride. Batman was there and his suit was too baggy to be the real thing.

I don’t think I remember anything before I was 5.

Waking up in my crib, looking at the cow jumping over the moon design on the curtains.
I then heard my mom telling my sisters not to make noise and wake me up.
I’m guessing I was 2.

My first was when I was three and strapped (I’m talking tight wrist and leg straps so I could barely move) to a hospital bed to get a tumor in my larynx removed. I wasn’t pleased and was thrashing around as we were going in the elevator to operating room. My grandpa told me that they didn’t need to do the operation anymore and that we were going back down. This calmed me down. Then the fucker ran off.

Then I got the happy mask…

Standing up in my crib.

I think it is when my mom explained to me why she had the pillow beneath the mattress for my infant sister. I would have been 3 years old probably. I have some memories of nursery school, and that would be 3 or very young 4 also.

I remember walking down the long hallway that led from my bedroom to the family room after waking up one morning. I was dragging my all-important Blankie on the floor behind me over my shoulder. I came through the doorway into the family room and my mom was sitting on the couch, and she reminded me that I ought not to drag Blankie cuz he’d get germy. I was probably about 3. A weirdly inconsequential memory to recall.

Two years and six months, we lived in Cow Hollow in San Francisco. I played at the Cow Hollow playground and fed the swans at the Palace of Fine Arts.

Donald Duck. I had a stuffed toy of him with the words “You quack me up” on his shirt. The weird bit it that I “remember” always being able to read those words, even from within my crib.

That’s the thing about memory though, the more you recall it, the more you alter it. It’s likely that nobody’s “first” memory went down just like they remember.

A black-and-white dream with only a tree branch swinging in the wing. The thing is, I had never seen the scene in real life before. It was a very surreal experience, like the branch was both there and not there.

I parked my tricycle in the driveway behind my father’s car. He backed over it when he went to work. Totally destroyed it. I was almost three.

Scuba diving in the womb with a view…early speech impediment aside.

When I punched into my creator’s chest and ripped his heart out.

I have some memories from before I was three, and several vivid memories afterwards.

Mother and I had gone shopping and when we returned home she found that she had forgotten the key to our front door, which locked itself when closed. However, she found that a front room window was unlocked and had me climb inside and open the door; she was several months pregnant and could not do it herself.

I remember putting my head on her belly and feeling the baby moving inside.

I remember mother became so ill during that pregnancy she was hospitalized and I was sent to live in foster homes. I have clear memories of each of the three places I stayed at for nearly a year, knowing that she might die and I might never see her again. I returned home the Christmas just after my fourth birthday when I met my three-month-old baby sister.

My parents’ first house over 70 years ago. Likewise my grandparents’ house during the same period.

@Bill1939: That must have been a scary time for you, as a little child, being with strangers and not knowing whether or not you’d be returning to your mom.

Moving into our new house (it was really an old house, but new for us). But I don’t remember anything about the house we moved from!

Swimming lessons when I was about 4 or 5 years old. I remember using a water noodle in the middle of class because I couldn’t swim very well. I was put in time-out for talking back to the instructor

It might be: being chased around a preschool playground by some boys who thought it was funny (my friend and I did not, and we had made that very clear), while the teachers and parent aides chatted in a circle and ignored our attempts to get their attention… I don’t remember what the boys promised to do when they caught us, but I remember it was something I didn’t want. My friend and I were both quicker than the boys, though, and had better endurance. This happened every day. I was only at that preschool for part of one year.

I didn’t remember how it ended until my mom told me: my friend left for another preschool, and the next morning I lay in bed and told my mom I didn’t want to go to school anymore. She finally pried out of me what was happening, was a bit upset I hadn’t mentioned it earlier, and found a different preschool for me.

Or it might be: riding my bike around and around a block as my dad tried to get me to stop leaning outward on the turns… I kept tipping my head in, but let the rest of my body get pulled with the curve, and if not for the training wheels I would have fallen much more than I did. I remember I was tired, and frustrated, and sick of falling—even with my helmet and the pads on my joints. It felt like we’d gone around dozens of times, and we weren’t going to stop until I stopped leaning out, and I couldn’t figure out how to stop doing that.

Or it might be: in the backyard, blowing bubbles for the family dog (she would chase them and bite at them, and I thought it was a lot of fun). I watched in slow motion as the one she was tracking switched directions in the air, and floated towards my right knee. She bit at it, but it was so close to my knee at that point that her teeth scraped me, and I started to bleed. She jumped back, startled. I ran inside to get my mom to put a bandaid on it. I remember feeling surprised, and upset, a little angry at the dog, but also feeling like I needed to explain that it was an accident, that she didn’t mean it.

I think I was between 3 and 4 years old in all of these memories.

I have a lot of reconstructed memories from my second year, based on my parents stories, but I always see myself in the third person in those.

Nope, just kidding: my first memory is of how I broke my collar bone. My dad was insisting on wiping some food off my cheek, and I didn’t want him to, and so I turned my head and ducked it under the table… Lost my balance, and my clavicle hit the table leg. Oddly, I don’t remember anything past that, even though that’s when would have gotten painful. I was 2. Apparently after that, I kept asking for bandaids to “fix the owie.”

That’s enough about me, though!

My first memory was just a couple of weeks after I turned 3. I remember dad picking me up to look in a bassinet. I remember getting excited. Turns out there was a baby in that bassinet. I remember thinking, when saw it, “It’s just a baby! What’s the big deal??”
Well, it was my little sister, duh. Spent the rest of my kid life saving her life, and the life of our youngest sister who was 4 years younger than me. No. Really. I did.

I don’t think I had started school yet and I recall having the mumps, whooping cough and chicken pox. I was still sleeping in a crib with at least one of these illnesses. The next super clear memory was of tying my new brown shoes for my first day in kindergarten. I was so happy and excited. I am so old that I am pretty sure my brother had the job of ice cream man who traveled the streets on a HORSE. But I could have dreamed it. I love questions like this.

My first memory was around age 15 months or so. I remember climbing out of my crib and falling onto a throw rug that slid me about 6 feet across the room on the hardwood floors and under my parents bed.
I remember it being dark under the bed and I was just rather stunned. haha
Then my mother bending down and peering at me under the bed and exclaiming ” HOW did you get under there?!”

I couldn’t talk yet, but I remember that moment clearly all these years later.