Early Memories

Recent research into memory tells us that memories are disturbingly unreliable. Moreover most people hold on to certain memories as reliable but in reality are fiction. So as I tell you that my early memories are true, I allow you some skepticism also. Friends of mine have told me that their earliest memories go back to four or five years old. I don’t know why but I have memories that go back much further. In writing about memory, I must interject that these memories are more likely memories of memories. Otherwise I would have likely forgotten them over so many years. As to the reason I have retained these experiences for so long, I do not know. I have no memory of my birth but I have a memory that reaches back before I was born. As one would expect there are no words attached, and the best way to describe it that I can muster is an experience of consciousness. There is no sense experience of sight, smell, taste, etc. ;but if put into words would be “What is this?”

I have definite memories from infancy. They are memories that one would expect of an infant, mainly feeling of comfort and discomfort. There was another being in these experiences, who, at the time, I did not like at all. Strangely enough or perhaps as one would expect, it was my mother, I would realize much later. I found myself to be resting or sleeping quietly and she roused me. She would roughly pick me up, put me on a cold surface, and wipe my butt, face, hands, bathe me, or put me into uncomfortable clothing. I do not remember any times when she soothed me or made me feel more comfortable. Mothers may have the idea that their infants love them. My experience is that they feel nothing but distain. Whoever that person is, who pulls them from a quiet resting spot into the world of discomfort, babies distain. Maybe other mothers were gentler, and I ask my dead mother to forgive me for this indictment, but babies like comfort. Babies feel touch most acutely but cannot love back, at least that’s how I behaved.

The growth from infancy to childhood goes slow for children. Every day is a long adventure. I have memories of being in a high chair in the kitchen. My mother is jabbering, talking unintelligibly to another woman in the kitchen. Of course they are intelligible to each other, just not to me. I remember hearing talking, talking, and talking and not understanding anything. I knew that they were communicating but what were they saying? Gradually I starting picking up the meaning of many of those words, but never all of them. I learned to understand before I learned to speak.

I remember looking up to adults. They are such tall beings. I remember that I liked it when someone would pick me up. I remember that it did not matter to me who picked me up. I was not shy. By that time I still felt that I only knew a few people, my mother, father, older sister and uncle. I remember my father kindly tucking me into bed and seeing a globe on a high shelf in my closet. I wondered what it was. Strangely enough, I remember the least about my sister at that time. These are all memories from four years of age or before. I know that because we moved from our house on West 54th Street when I was four.