what_is_your_first_memory
ClairE I think my first memory was when I was almost three, at a nursery school Halloween party. I wore a Minnie_Mouse mask, and the darkness frightened me. Take it off, or leave it on? I didn't want to ruin the costume.

Already I had trouble making decisions.

In the end, my mom took it off. I was mad at myself for the rest of the party.

Story_of_my_life.
030507
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Annie111 my parents test driving used cars to buy when we first moved to melbourne when i was 2. my dad drove this yellow toyota, and he pulled out of the garage and drove up the hill and i thought he wasn't coming back and i got really scared. 030507
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shivers i was watching my mom do laundry in our old house. the basement was kinda scary and i didnt like going down there alot. i actually was scared of basements for the longest time 030507
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6am watching this kid next to me eat a fly in kindergarten. he took it apart and ate it piece by piece, it was disgusting. i have several earlier memories but im not sure if their actual memories or stories i made up from pictures, this one i know for sure happened. 030507
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birdmad being two years old and slipping in some mud at my grandma's house just moments before an overweight eight-year-old cub-scout whose parents were friends with my parents, slipped right after me and fell on top of me breaking my left femur, flashes of the hospital stay, and the itchy toddler body-cast that the doctor had me in...it was like a pair of plaster overalls 030508
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User24 the first memory I can attach to an age is my fourth birthday, where my friend ate a whole mars bar, and I had some jelly babies. 030508
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splinken outside los angeles, unable to breathe, 18 months old, my father carries me past a christmas tree and into a hospital, they put me in an orange oxygen tent, i'm scared. 030508
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jane three years old, pumpkin patch field trip in preschool. i remember looking at a grinning boy with crazy curly brown hair. he was my brother's friend but i can't remember his name.

in english last semester we all had to write down our first memories. a few of us went up and shared it with the class (yes the teacher ran the class like we were in kindergarten, but it was comforting in some way). she said that mine was interesting because of the seasonand what it represented. a time of pivotal change. and something about pumpkins struck her--something about pumpkin seeds and how those represented growth.
i personally thought she was reading into it a bit much, but it was nice to hear that i was going to change the world
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phil the doctor 030508
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ellie drawing a flower for my mother in preschool 030508
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*silent screams My brother and I were playing in the sand pile in front of our house with our dog. We both got up to make sure the dog wasn't going to cross the street to bother the neighbors. With a screech that could've shattered windows, our dog was laying dead in the road right before our eyes. I still remember the man getting out of his truck to apologize, my parents running out of the house to see what happened, standing there with anger, trying to fight the overwhelming sense that the best dog in the world would no longer wake me up with wet kisses. I still remember standing there as tears streamed down my face, finally giving into to the reality of everything...watching my father and the other man put the lifeless body on the back of a truck, and leaving to bury the animal, who was probably my best friend in the world at the time.

I don't think thats my first memory, but its the one thatz remained the most vivid in my mind.
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-Jessica- Being at preschool and hating every moment of it so much that I cried everyday when my mom would leave me there. 030508
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rubydee waking up on a hammock
sleepy dusk of evening encroaching
feeling the impressions in my cheek
from the jute

age 3
030508
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Toxic_Kisses I can't rember witch one's came first but I know @ the time I wasn’t 3 yet so I had to (obviously) be 2 or younger

Playing hide and seek w/ my parents in the house b4 I'd go to bed, it was a simi-regular thing.

My mom sitting in the door painting her toe nails as I came up to her to show her my new ouchie, and she kissed it and it actually felt better,

Dad singing me to sleep in his arms

One of those three was my first memory but I'm not sure witch one.
030509
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night sitting at the top of the stairs listening to my parents yell. i had left my favorite doll at daycare and they were argueing about whether they should drive back to get it. my mother had her way and we did get it, so i could sleep. my dad left two weeks later. 030509
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Rotten77 i think i was about two and i opened my drawers and just started throwing my clothes all over the room, trying to get them stuck on top of the curtain rod and stuff. my mom came in and got mad at me for making a mess, like i knew she would, but i didn't care cuz it was worth it. 030510
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pobodys nerfect The farthest I can remember back is age 5, and I have all sorts of ones from then.
There was the time when I went to the basement steps to swing from my arms(I did this all the time)and crashed my legs into a new glass fronted cabinet my father had just brought home that night. I was barefoot, so I had to tell my parents "watch my feet!" as they came down the steps to get me.

Then there were the times I played on this map thingy outside the kindergarten entrance. It was this big rectangle that was sunk into the ground and all the continents were raised,so when it rained,only the continents were dry. Everyone would try to jump to the different countries. There were many times when I got soggy shoes and socks trying to make it to Australia. :D
030510
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celestias shadow waking up in my bed on the second floor to hear very loud noises outside. at eight in the morning. stepping out of bed, feeling the warm spring air around my legs. peeking over the windowsill i was just barely tall enough to see over. leaning out the window. construction vehicles were on my street.

i learned many years later that they were putting the curb on our street. i was three.
030902
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Freak Christmas morning when we lived in Wisconsin. I remember walking into the room and seeing everything under the tree. It is my only memory of my parents being together. At least it is a good one. 030903
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mon i_can't_remember 030903
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unhinged for the first like three years of my life we lived right up the street from my grandma's house in the town where my dad worked because he was/is a firefighter and at the time there was some kind of residential radius rule thing where they had to live in the town for recall purposes; they ended up extending the radius and we got the hell out of dodge cause it's one of those weird towns, villages even, where politics and last names and gossips and old ladies ran rampant and my grandma had run against the then and still incumbent mayor who likes to think he's a mobster so my last name was like shit in a sewer in that town, but anyways....

the house we lived in had a bunch of woods down behind it and there were known to be wild dogs and snakes and all sorts of other scary things living back there. at the time we had a huge dirt mound in our side yard that of course became a snake house. i was about two. i was riding my tricycle up and down the drive way and the sidewalk right in front of the house. it was my pretty red and white tricycle. with one of those boards across the back two tires so when you got too big to sit and pedal you could kind of push off the board with one foot like a skateboard with a steering wheel. i turned back into the driveway to go down it to the garage and a snake came out of the mound across the driveway and reared up at me and started hissing. i was stunned frozen in the driveway and one of my parents ran to come get me.

many years afterwards i had a dream of this exact event. and when i woke up i couldn't think anything but 'that REALLY happened. i know it did.' so i asked my mom and sure enough, it really happened.

and of course three months before my fourth birthday my brother was born so i remember everything after that. they moved me upstairs all by myself. the bastards. and me being scared of the dark and all and the staircase looking like a big shadowy gaping monster mouth at night when it was dark. they kicked me out of my nice yellow room right across the hall from my mom and dad. i promptly and accidentally flooded the bathroom upstairs and my dad thought i did it on purpose and smacked me so hard on the ass that he left a handprint. and even he realized how scary and excessively he reacted when i started bawling and apologized. my dad rarely apologized when i was a child.

yes, i miss that front lawn with the dip in it that made it seem like a mountain when i was barely four. i miss the black walnut tree in the next door neighbors' back yard that attracted all the stupid squirrels and the green way black walnuts smell when they first fall from the tree. we never needed baseballs or stones cause we always had walnuts. and the stupid squirrels always forget where they buried them so there would always be tiny little treelets popping up in our backyard that my dad would run over with the lawn mower that would then turn into dangerous spiky barefoot traps. i couldn't walk barefoot in the backyard after awhile. i hated those squirrels. and so now i hate all squirrels. those bastards.

it took me forever to learn how to ride a bike. i wet my bed. i sucked my thumb. i danced and sang and made up songs all the time; before i could read i would 'read' my birthday cards at family birthday parties. i spent most of my childhood inside reading books and my family always made fun of me for it. 'it's a nice day. don't you want to go out and play?' 'nnnn...' from the couch with my book and my thumb in my mouth.

all the yards were so close together in our second neighborhood which is really more like my first because i only have the one memory from the first place (which totally set me off on a wide arcing tangent of my childhood) that we would just run around back and forth all day; when i did go out to play sometimes more than likely i was down with the old german lady five or so houses down in her backyard taking to her about roses and helping her pick her cherry tomatoes.

but that neighborhood started to go to shit and we moved what seemed an eternity away. but i'm used to the 45 minute drive now. sometimes we go back to the house i grew up in. the lawn is dead; the lady that bought the house doesn't take care of it. the plum trees in the back yard are barren and black. i half expect to see my cat (that died last year) sitting in the window like she always used to. i liked that small cozy house that looked like all the other small cozy houses on the street with their tiny yards. but i was a kid then; it didn't seem so tiny to me.
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tyger I remember sitting in a car seat in the back of my parent's dark green station wagon. We were stopped in the mountains somewhere. I couldn't have been more than about 2.

I also have a memory of being put to bed and looking out through the bars of my crib where I could see the window and the sky. The sun was setting and it was turning the glass and the window frame reddish.
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misstree i don't remember if i fell asleep or read through the night... the first seems likelier, but i was under the impression that it was the second... it was the nursery rhyme about old king cole... i remember waking up with the book on my chest...

i also remember that i was the first child to learn to read... was it preschool? kindergarten? but the teachers had me come to the front and read for the class... i was a loner already, other children were little aliens to me... i was confused and a bit scared, but i did okay at it... cursed myself for every mistake...

from that same time i remember a dream of walking into a cave... on both sides there were a bunch of side-caves... on one side were bad monsters, things that come get you in movies... on the other side were good monsters, like the count from sesame_street... and at the very end in the center was spiderman.
031219
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white_wave when my sister was born and I was 4 years old. i remember picking flowers for my mom and bringing them to the hospital. I remember my sister coming home and I would sit and look at her while she was sleeping. I thought she was wonderful. 040221
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reue my first memory is a feeling. i don't know what it means. i used to sit in bed at night as a child thinking about it. trying to validate it somehow. years later i'm still wondering. the feeling doesn't come as often anymore. its so distinct, so different than anything i've ever felt before. i'm at a complete loss on its meaning. at times i think its best that i don't find out, would it really be different... to change my perspective on things? my earliest image that i can consistantly remember is my 5th birthday. is that late or normal? on occasion i can remember images of earlier, but they're far and few between... nothing substantial. its like everything before 5 is just a blur, a jumbled mess that i can't sort out. i guess given time i'll know. one way or another it'll come to me i'm sure of it. some things just can't be rushed. 040221
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sameolme It was summer, we were down at the shore.
I was lying on my back inside the house and everybody else went outside. They were all pointing up at the sky.
I started crying because I felt left out. My sister came in and got me.
Up in the sky there was a blimp.
040404
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z very magnified view of moss
the kind that looks like little trees
my arms and hands denting it
just an image
not a event memory

my first real memory is of hiking with my mom and friends to a swimming hole in the woods, climbing down slippery black rocks and floating with her in the foaming cold water. later standing at the rim of the ravine looking at everyone swim. mom says i was 2
040405
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pigeon i don't remember how old i was, but i know where i was living, so it was definately pre-school age... probably about 3. my mom's best friend and her boyfriend came over for the weekend, and her boyfriend climbed up the big oak tree in the back yard, he lost his grip and slid all the way down. he was covered in scratches and all cut up. he came inside and was all bloody and sweaty. i saw him fall from my bedroom window. when i got down stairs i asked him "why did you cover yourself in butter?" i'm not exactly why i thought he was covered in butter. but that's my first thought. 040804
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spiffy i was just one or two, sitting in the corner of a closet, putting toys into a bucket. it's not much, but it's vivid. i can see the white wall to my right. i can see the brownish/tanish colored carpet. i can see the little silver metal thing that the door would slide across as it would open and shut. i can't really make out the toys. i can see my hands holding them though. 040804
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Deomis I was 4 years old and lived in England. Me and my friend Nicholas had decided to make up a new game. It was a stupid game.You remember how in the cartoons, you always see the characters slapping each other silly? We had decided to play that. We had covered our faces with our hands then allowed the other to slap them.
I was impatent and had slapped Nic before he could cover his face all the way. He started to cry. I told him that I was sorry but he was still crying. My mother came in and told him to stop crying. He didn't.
I must have slapped him too hard....
She told him to go sit in the corner.
I told my mom that it was my fault he was crying and that I should be in the corner. She didn't listen. She just made me go sit in the other corner.
He was mad at me for the rest of the week.

Maybe this is why I dislike my mother so much. My first memory... of her.... and she didn't listen to me.
040805
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ivyducktwilightseto Well I'm not quite sure, it's a little foggy. I think I may have been two because I remember recalling it when I was three (heehee.)
I was sitting in my living room on christmas eve. I remember the dim red glow of the christmas tree lights and a few candles around the room. Some pine needles brushed up against my face... that's all.
I think someone had picked me up so I could hang on ornament on the tree.
So there ya have it... my first pseudo memory.

.
040805
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pete memories... anyone remember where i put my wallet five minutes ago? damnit.. 040806
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anomalous june 1982 050425
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falling_alone chuck e. cheese's ball pit 050425
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XxBored_ChickxX i was three and my brother and i were playing outside...then i hit his forehead with a baseball bat..im not sure why i did it...he still has a scar there. 050917
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daxle I was 3. I was at dance class. They turned the lights off and then put on all these disco lights. This was new and scary. I didn't want to go dance. My mom told me that if I didn't I couldn't go to dance lessons anymore. So I tried be brave but I was still too scared.
I hated both of us for it.
050917
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no reason eating a hard-boiled egg on a train. it's the only thing i remember about being on the train. i'm not sure exactly how old i was. 051026
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