Our memories vs the ones of the others

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I just saw a similar topic on another board and decided on posting mine here. So my question is: did it ever happen to you that you share some memory with other people but what they remember has nothing to do with how you recall the event? I'm talking here specifically about our memories from our earliest childhood because those get so really very easily distorted, due to their being so far away in time.

So let me start: when I was a toddler, I used to live in a worker hotel and there lived also some guy who was mom's buddy and a policeman by profession. I remember he gave me a toy gun once and that once he broke his leg and mom and me went to visit him. But mother, when asked, remembers no such a man at all - there was no policemen living there, no friend of her ever broke a leg then and she generally had no male friend like that at all. But I know I'm right.

Do you have similar memories?

When I was a toddler, I remember living in an apartment complex and being allowed to wander around with the neighborhood kids. My best friends were a pair of fraternal twins, a boy and a girl, who were either my age or slightly older. The twins taught me a nursery rhyme that went, "teeter totter, bread and butter, wash your face with dirty water". I kept saying "bread and water" instead of "bread and butter" and it frustrated them. The girl had lots of Barbies and we played with them together. One time a preteen/teenage girl was babysitting them (I think) and she was showing us around the neighborhood. We found a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest and died and we wanted to touch it, but she told us not to. Another time my friends and I were playing in the yard and we heard a woman on the 2nd story singing opera, when my mom called us in for grilled cheese sandwiches. A Speedy Gonzales cartoon was playing on TV inside my house.

Up until last year or the year before, I felt pretty confident that these events had actually happened. But when I mentioned the twins to my mom one day, she said that I was never friends with any twins and she never allowed me to wander around like that. This means that most of the memories I have of my time as a toddler could be fabricated. It's kind of scary, actually, because how many of my other memories are distorted or outright fabrications?

Maybe your mom just didn't pay attention to you being friends with the twins and when you wandered around with them, it was without her permission - you just left house when she was not looking and she didn't know where you were, she thought you were in another place.

You shouldn't assume that you have fabricated memories. This is a phenomena I stumbled across in group therapy. People often remember X happened but their sister/brother/mum/dad say Y happened. Usually it's some childhood incident. My own Mum would argue with her sisters about which one of them was forced to sit next to the window in the car when their father drove. (He chewed tobacco and would spit out the window.) Psychologically it's probably due to how we all 'filter' what happens to us.

I remember my mom pouring milk and water into the same glass to teach me and my brother how sin clouds the purity of our lives and relationships with God. It was right before dinner and we had no idea why she did it... she just did it randomly.

I was five.

She swears she would never do something that stupid. But in other conversations my mother will say she was far too legalistic and religious instead of being more like Jesus.

It wasn't spoiled milk either because my brother and I could (and usually did) go through a gallon of milk every two days.

This has happened to me. I'll remember many details, but when I ask my brother, he will remember absolutely nothing about it. Same with my parents sometimes. My brother says he used to wonder if he had suffered a head injury or something because I could remember so many things he couldn't.

I remember a lot of things from a very young age through my childhood and adolescence. I ask my parents and sister if they remember the same experiences, and they tell me that they don't remember. That frustrates me because I to share those memories with them, but I can't. It's hart to share memories with people who only have an average or below average memory.

My brother is the same way - he's always amazed at all the little details that I remember about our childhood. He says he barely remembers anything about being a child, even though he's 3 1/2 years younger than I am.

Since I have no living members of my family, I have no way of telling how much I really remember and how much I may have invented. I just try and sort through it all.