This is my first memory. If I close my eyes, it’s like it happened yesterday.
I was in the 1st grade and found a little bird on the asphalt under a tree. It was all translucent and pink with darker spots where the eyes were. Its little body was trembling and I could see that it needed help. I picked it up and put it in a napkin and carried it carefully to the nurse’s office at school because I thought that she would be able to help it.
I explained to her what I had found and she extended her hand to take it from me. Then she tossed it right in the trash beside her. I peered in over the rim of the container to see it’s little body lying there. And back up at her face that met my gaze, and then dismissed me. My mind was reeling. She didn’t care and she didn’t even bother to conceal it from me. I knew that she would not let me retrieve it from the trash either. I remember walking away very slowly wondering if she had just thought that it was just too small to save.
I also remember wondering if she would think I would be too small to save if I got hurt.
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I came across an article calle “The culture of memory” a couple of weeks ago:
http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep05/culture.html
A quote from there:
“…Any earlier than about 3.5 years is, for most of us, a blank slate. We all have what Freud first called “childhood amnesia”–an inability to remember our earliest childhood.
Ask a Maori New Zealander about his or her earliest memory, though, and you might find that the childhood amnesia ended a bit sooner. A Maori’s first memory might be of attending a relative’s funeral at 2.5 years old. A Korean adult, on the other hand, might not remember anything before age 4.
Of course, memory varies widely from person to person. But over the past decade, researchers have also found that the average age of first memories varies up to two years between different cultures.
“We think that this is a function of the meaning of memory within a particular cultural system,” says Michelle Leichtman, PhD, a psychologist at the University of New Hampshire who studies childhood memory. In other words, the way parents and other adults discuss–or don’t discuss–the events in children’s lives influences the way the children will later remember those events.
People who grow up in societies that focus on individual personal history, like the United States, or ones that focus on personal family history, like the Maori, will have different–and often earlier–childhood memories than people who grow up in cultures that, like many Asian cultures, value interdependence rather than personal autonomy…on average, Asian adults’ first memories were later than Caucasians’ (57 months as compared with 42 months). But she also found that Maori adults’ memories reached even further back, to 32 months on average.
So, what would be my first memory? I guess I was around four. I remember I was sick. My mother took me to hospital by slades. I was completely covered in blankets and my head wrapped in my grandma’s shawl. On the way back from hospital my mother bought me a car to play with. I built for this car a track and ramp from my books. I was so excited playing with them I pissed in my knickers. I was afraid my mother would blame for this, so I went up to the radiator of central heating. It was mounted by the window, so I climbed on my little stool and pressed my knickers against it. It was in the winter, so the radiator was quite hot. I stood like this for a while, watching snow falling and people making their way on the icy pavements, and cars stuck in the snow… until my knickers got dry.