Very Early Memories

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Does anyone else have a lot of memories of their early childhood, possibly even from infancy? How young do you think your earliest memory is from?

Another thread made me remember that I've seen things suggesting people with autism are more likely to retain memories from early childhood, but I don't really know if that's true, since to me having a few memories from infancy and many from toddlerhood has been normal to me my entire life. Typically developing people I've talked to throughout my life seem to usually say that they don't remember things from as early as I do though, so maybe that is a thing.

I personally remember a lot from around probably age two/three and up. I'd say I actually at least recall more things from being a toddler than the rest of my childhood for some reason. Also, my earliest memory is from infancy. I obviously don't know exactly how old I was, but I was able to sit up at that point. My parents and other family members have also been able to verify a lot of the memories I've brought up to them, so I don't think I'm falsely recalling things like people have suggested to me before.

i remember being in a hospital, something impalpable tells me this is around the time my sister was born.

this would have been 1999. i was two and a half at that time.

another memory, of being at the house which my grandmother used to live in, and soon became my own home f̶o̶r̶ ̶1̶8̶ ̶f̶u̶c̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶y̶e̶a̶r̶s̶
i was watching the world trade center collapse on TV. if this was the real deal, i was a little over 4 and i hadn't moved in yet. it could also have been an early anniversarry, probably after i did move in in '03

who knows.

I remember a brief memory when I was 4 days old going doen an unusual hospital corridor and lots of other early memories from a memory of my first words which was very early (My mother says 6 weeks old?). I said three words very clearly, and I remember saying them to this day, and then I said nothing at all until normal speaking age.
I remember a Western diesel coming into my local train station and the last time one came inon a regular passenger service was when I was a year old.
I remember my pram which was claustrophobic and my Mum says she didn't use it after I was six months old, as she then had a pushchair.
Lots of early memories.
My youngest brother remembered a scene from about an hour after he was born. My Mum said not to be silly as no one can remember that. He then described the room in detail and my Mums mouth fell open! She said it was the room she was put in to recover after she had had the sisarian (She had an eclamptic fit while in the car just before giving birth). She said it was the only time she had ever been in that room and it was only for a short time of just a few hours... He described the shade of colour of the walls (The only hospital room to have the unusual dark green matt colour walls) and the clock on the wall etc...

Yes. I have some quite early memories. My mind works exceptionally well in pictures. When in school and trying to do my maths. It was all in picture form in my mind adding and subtracting multiples of dots. I could never show workings out as I didn't know how! I would do the workings out after I had reached the answer and had to work backwards to do them.

My earliest memory is standing outside the hospital with my uncle the day my brother was born, in late 1998. I would’ve been about 2.5 years old at the time, and had just recently started talking.

1959: I was trying to take apart a night-light while it was still plugged in ... somebody grabbing me ... a lot of yelling ...

What I believe to be my earliest memory was in 1969 when I was 3 years old. My aunt and uncle came to visit and I greeted them at the porch. According to my family there were a lot of other things around that time that I have no memory of such as getting lost in a cornfield and jumping head first into a stream to go after a frog.

I remember before I could walk, I was happily laying on my father's lap, when he suddenly put me down and rushed from the room. He may have had to answer a call I did not recognize. That is my only memory of him before he became disappointed in my development.
The first time I crawled off a blanket and discovered dew on the grass, I was startled, but my memory of it was reinforced by a home movie I saw of it.

BTW, when I was on a bike tour, there were two pictures I didn't stop to get because I wanted to maintain momentum. Those two images are the ones I remember best, because I thought of them as I rode away, while forgetting about anything recorded.

My earliest memory that I can accurately date was at the age of 2 years 3 months old. I remember my parents leaving my sister and I in an orphanage. And I remembered quite a few details about the event. So around 50 years later, I asked my mom why she abandoned us. She said, What! It never happened! Then around 6 months later, she asked me how I remembered that. She said it was true and gave me the back-story.

My mother was expecting her third child, David. We lived out in the country, 30 miles from Buffalo, New York. My dad bought a farm for $10,000 of over 300 acres. He used the nest-egg money he saved from the Army to purchase this foreclosed farm. The land was immense. It stretched from one small mountain to the next with a valley down below. There was a farmhouse and a creek. Dad always bought old junk cars on their last legs for $50. He worked on them and squeezed 6 more months of life from them before they were sent to the scrap heap. Winter was fierce in Buffalo with sometimes 6 feet of snow. And winter was coming on and mom was scared. What if the child came in the middle of a snowstorm! What could she do if she was alone and my dad was far away at work! She met with her relatives and tried to arrange for one of them to watch her children as time was getting close to delivery. But they all refused. They told her they would take my mom in but not the children. In desperation, she went to a Catholic orphanage and arranged for them to watch my sister Kathy and I for a few weeks. We were brought to the orphanage and dropped off. It was horrible. I was just old enough to know what an orphanage was. All I knew was one day I was a happy boy in a happy family and the next day I was abandoned and an orphan. It was a nice place full of children and toys. But I would have none of it. I tried to explain to my younger sister Kathy (1 year 3 months old) our predicament but she didn't understand. She ran around having fun playing with the other children. And I was so frustrated that I couldn’t convey to my sister what was going on. So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I cried and cried. I cried all day, all night, the next day, and the next night. And then the nuns in the orphanage contacted my parents and told them to come and get us. My parents came back for us and I was glad.

beware ( possible trigger content )remember being in a crib and the mobile above it butterflys ,it disappeared one day possibly cause , it was easy to get me out of the crib without it in the way. Remembering crying for warmth of parents , when my oldest brother appeared normally , several times , in which , i presume my parents sent him into distract me. But instead , he commenced to strangling me . This occurred much more than once .
second time he appeared i screamed harder .. To try to alert anyone of what happening . Learned early to tense neck muscles so tight , which required all focus i had ,to consequently would stop screaming. never knew if i went unconsious , think i did . Do not remember seeing him leave.
was a wonder when i could get up and get into my parents bedroom nextdoor , and sleep between them . After six months of that , they tired of it . after further attacks on me while i was not quite awake . . i turned to sleeping under the bed most often. with a blanket .. No one ever asked why, i was under the bed this went on for years. Also remember symptoms of a severe illness on several occasions .
This memory was returned to me one day in elementary school ,When a large girl knocked me down sat on me and started choking me. Just clenched some very strong neck muscles tendons , and laid there and smiled up at her. As she broke into a visible redness and a sweat in her frustration , eventually it stopped a nun showed up. This was not meant to trigger just a earliest memory .
Oddly enough one might wonder how i managed to hate violence of anykind growing up.
To this day have trouble , relaxing my neck muscles . Odd how memories can be triggered .
Remember seeing broadcast of JF Kennedys assasination.Noticing dramatic changes of sound in the room, went away, Understood the TV early on thanks to a good father, Figured out that something had happened , and Asked out loud, if he was related to us. just before leaving the room . Fond memories of a room addition, being built onto family home. All the wonder how the dirt then cement grew into a room and the smell of fresh paint. In that dormer sized room.

I don't remember much before I was 3. I think the earliest memory I have is of waking up one morning in my cot, staring through the bars at the rug on the floor. That is the only memory I have of being under 3. In fact I might have been 3 already, just before I started sleeping in a bed.

Mind you, my mum told me that when I was 2 my arm kept dislocating from it's joint, and although I don't remember that happening, I do remember the little sling I had to wear to keep it in place.

I remember being in a stroller that had the brand name on the footrest. I was still in the Bronx, and probably under 3.

I remember feeling very unpleasant taking a bath in a sink in the Bronx. I remember the ever-present smell of vomit. And being constantly yelled at. Again, toddler age.

I remember running into our new Queens apartment at age 3 years, 4 months. It was a 2-bedroom. The Bronx apartment was a single-room for 4 people.

I remember being too young to estimate sizes, as is normal. I tried climbing the ladder on a toy fire truck, and sitting in doll furniture.

~ Looking through the bars of a baby crib and trying to teleport a stuffed penguin to me, from across the room. I was frustrated that it wasn't working. I think I was about two or three but I have no idea. (Entire memory is 1-2 seconds long --just a flash).

~ The chug chug chug of our cabin cruiser boat backing up out of its slip, and the smell of the exhaust. Feeding bread to ducks from the side of our boat in my dusty old lifejacket. Age 3 or 4. Probably 4. I don't have a visual for this - just the sound and the smells, and my love of ducks. One time someone brought an incubator of ducklings on the boat. I don't actually remember it, but I remember telling my friends and bragging about it. I kind of remember the smell from the heat of the incubator. Likewise when someone brought a monkey on our boat. I remember telling people and I thought the monkey smelled bad.

~ Climbing in my grandfather's junkyard / workshop which was in an open field of tall grass behind our house and his. The workshop was full of rusted tools, old appliances, car parts, scrap metal and discarded furniture from the 1940s - 1950s. I was allowed to go there alone, or else with my brother, around age 3 or 4. One day I found a broken sliding door from a bathtub enclosure. It was made of frosted glass with a design of fish blowing bubbles etched into it. Everything smelled like hot tar, grease or dust, and I still love those smells. I liked to climb the piles of junk and sit on top of the roof. I have no solid memory of what this place looked like and I've never seen a photo because it was all demolished when I was five. I've been seeking some type of photo from family members for at least 30 years, to no avail. I have one split-second visual memory of sunlight going through a broken window in the workshop, and a basic memory of those fish blowing bubbles. All my other memories of this location are sensory-based, or else I can remember what I was thinking despite having no visual picture. One time in the field I was thinking that my body didn't exist and I was just a floating mind. I didn't think I was a "real" person like everyone else.

~ When I was five we moved houses. I don't remember our first house from above ^ but I remember house-shopping for the second house with a real estate agent. We saw one house with a goldfish in a bowl and I wanted that house, because I thought I would get to keep the goldfish. Then I remember being in the back of the real estate agent's car as he rounded a turn to the house that we bought. My mother was in the front with the agent, and I was trying to climb between the two front seats to get my first glimpse of our new house. I flash back to this memory every time I drive past that specific spot of the road. I know exactly where the car was, likely within one meter.

Is it normal that I barely remember ANYTHING up to about age 7-8? Even then it's sketchy. Most of my memories (if any) are sensory, or else I remember a few thoughts and feelings. I don't seem to remember anything in a visual form or a story format until I was about 13. I know what things happened, but I can't picture any of it.

I have about 5 or 6 memories of playschool when I was age 3-4:-

I remember playing with toys from a large tub of water, with some other children, just after my mum had dropped me off, and I wanted to have a meltdown because of my mum leaving me, but I tried not to and just carried on playing, knowing that she will be back soon.

I remember playing with a dolls house but feeling uneasy because a little girl was having a huge meltdown because of her mother leaving, and she was kicking the door.

I remember having the runs on the toilet and I started crying because I wasn't expecting it. I don't think I was well though, I must have picked up a virus.

I remember one snack time a little girl at my table started being sick.

I remember coming out with my mum and a kid was climbing up a steep bank that was nearby which wasn't very safe for a small child, and I wanted to climb up there too and I kind of pulled my mum's hand but she held on to my hand tightly to stop me from doing it.

I remember playing on the swings outside and a little boy fell off one of the swings, and then I was afraid to go on the swings after that in case I might fall off, even though the only reason he fell off was because he wasn't holding on.