Every time I meet people who say they do not recall much of their early childhood, it strikes me as very odd. Maybe it is because I DO remember moments in my early childhood very vividly. “How can anyone not?” — this thought has sprung to my mind more than once.
Obviously, different people have different reasons for not recalling much of their early years. The strongest one of these reasons could be that they simply do not recall any of it, full stop. This phenomenon is described by professionals of the mind as childhood amnesia. It is usually applied to the very early age of being a baby, but some individuals are affected way beyond two or three years of life.
One possible way to explain childhood amnesia is found in the evolution of the mind with progressing age. Some people simply outgrow their own minds, as the article you may find under the above link suggests. There are several other reasons you can discover, should you care to read up on it.
I am going to write about MY memories here. Those lucky individuals who have no memories and who were able to leave the past where it belongs: behind them may even regret they do not have any. Well, the grass is always greener at the other side of the fence, isn’t it!
The fact that I do recall many incidents might all be due to the fact that they were not very positive events. Feelings, which were aroused when living through those incidents, are now my memories and they keep coming back when it suits them. Being born as a girl, could also have added to this capacity, as another article suggests.
Let me tell you a little bit about my experiences. However, you must know that I would always leave it to professional opinions to classify or diagnose the impact they have or have not had on me in any medical or psychological way of speaking. Whenever I use the term “fear” in this context, it is merely the best way I have at hand to describe how I feel now or felt back then, and how I think it affected me.
Mini-ME — the Fearful Sue of the Past
The onset of my early memories would have to be pinpointed down to the tender age of three years, maybe just below. I believe to be knowing this so precisely, because of the following incident:
I remember the time when my mother and I were out one day. My younger brother was still a baby then. He is two years and four months younger than I am, hence his baby year was when I was in my third year of life.
On the day in question, the pram my brother was in had fallen over and he had dropped out of it onto the road. I remember my mother picking up the baby and putting the pram upright again. It had tilted when she was trying to push it down a kerb in order to cross the road. I think she also stumbled and fell, but I do not know this for sure. I do not recall my brother screaming or crying, either. The memory is totally non-verbal, only visual, actually.
It was a very emotionally charged series of moments for my mother that day, as you can imagine. She was in pieces about my brother having fallen out. He had some nasty scratches on his cheek. I remember what they looked liked just after it happened, too, all bloody.
Nothing more serious happened to my brother after the incident, but it obviously had a huge impact on me, because otherwise I would not be remembering the incident with such vivid pictures and an uneasy feeling still attached to it. I even see the pram in front of my inner eye right now: an ugly brown colour, big wheels, metal frame. I see how my mother grabs the baby, struggles to put the pram upright again, and how she takes a look at the damage done to my brother. That is the whole, muted sequence I can recall.
I can tell you that I remember all sorts of negative incidents like the one described above. I lived through many more during my early childhood, but I will only tell you about a few of them, those with the biggest impact on me.
The episode I told you about above, actually meant more in terms of affecting me negatively than just recalling what I had lived through, or so I believe. I do not know whether other people feel the same way. Are most of their memories of the negative sort? Research does not suggest for this to be the case in general. All I can say is that many of mine, if not the majority of my really early memories, ARE of negative events.
Back to the past
When I was a little kid, the most prominent feeling I had was that of uneasiness. I was not really having a good time, or at least that is what seemed to underlying constantly. I got acquainted with it while I was growing up, but it accounted for many a moment of doubt, pain, fear in general and fear of people in particular.
I believe now that it could have been due to the fact that I was born in the shadow of an elder sister, who had died a few days after her birth.
My parents must have been in a lot of pain when I arrived in this world, which was about a year after the sad event. I assume this to be so, because instead of being able to put it into the past and concentrate on their two kids who were actually living, my parents would frequently talk about our would-have-been sister throughout my and my younger brother’s childhood.
We would go to visit her grave at least every three months or so, to make sure it was clean and tidy. My parents would plant fresh flowers, while my brother and I were playing around the graveyard premises, always careful not to step on any of the graves by accident, of course.
My parents would also tell us every year on her date of birth that this day was what would have been our sister’s birthday. They would talk about her calling her by her name, Iris, as if she had really existed in our lives. But she never did, did she! Not to us siblings, who had been born after her death, who never saw her or a picture of her, for that matter.
Talking about her only stopped when the child’s grave had to be given up, this being due to the graveyard’s policy, not because my parents wanted it to disappear.
Does the fact that a young child had to deal with the death of a loved one when she was little strike you as sinister, weird, or even unnerving in any way? Well, it did to me when I reflected upon it years after. I believe now that it would have been better for us kids, if our parents had shielded us from their pain. However, I do not hold any grudges against them for doing what they did. They tried to deal with the loss the best they could.
The good news is: Youngster-ME grew to be strong, nevertheless
I never suspected at the time that I might turn out to be a fearful person in later life, because contrary to my mother’s obsession for safety and security, I was not a very fearful child at all, as far as having accidents myself was concerned. Not until later in life.
I did some pretty scary stuff, I must admit. Stupid things that only youngsters could think of. Reckless is the best word I can come up with to describe Youngster-ME!
My friends and I, or my brother and other kids from the neighbourhood and I, would climb up walls, bridges, scaffolds, trees — all very normal, I suppose when you are around six to fourteen years old. If we knew we were not supposed to climb up on some garage roof top, we would sure be doing it! Physically agile kids just do this kind of thing!
We would play around building sites when no workmen were there, ignoring the signs put up to avoid children doing just that. We would also play on and around railroad tracks, even when trains were coming past, just beside the tracks, still feeling the rush of adrenaline from knowing that the train was coming soon while we were still ON the tracks.
We once crossed a particular sewage canal walking along a metal, scaffold-type bridge — probably THE most dangerous thing of all the ones I did. Falling into the sewer below, it would have meant death, no doubt. They put the sewage canal below earth years later, by the way.
Growing up in the nineteen seventies and eighties meant that we were left to roam about freely in the neighbourhood and in the close-by woods. It made it pretty easy to be doing all this stuff. My mother, funnily enough, did not have a problem with it at all, maybe because it was very normal for all kids to do so back then. She would, however, not allow us to go to a long list of places and do a long list of things. Did we care?
Do you remember the 1986 film “Stand by me”, with River Phoenix? You can picture us in the same way — kids just having a good time. Thankfully, the worst thing we ever encountered was a dead bird or frog, never a dead person while doing so, unlike the kids in said film. And none of us kids ever died, or had any serious accident, either. Thank God for that!
Another reason from my early childhood to account for my turning out fearful in later life, or so I believe, is the fact that my parents had a serious car accident before having kids. It left them hospitalized for weeks, months in the case of my mother.
I suppose you will agree without further ado that being involved in a serious car crash keeps affecting a person for a very long time. They did not receive any counselling or therapy, they just got on with their lives.
I think we can agree that my parents’ accident might also have contributed to my early notion of life not being enjoyable to such an extend as being able to really have FAITH in a happy life being possible at all.
Hence, my mother would always be scared of going at any speed on the motorway, and she would be particularly concerned about us kids having an accident, or simply fearing that something might happen to us, even as we grew older. I did not understand why she was so afraid of everything back then. I was not able to connect the dots. I am able to now.
The reason I want to talk about these memories now years later, is precisely that when I myself arrived at a childbearing age and had kids of my own, Maxi-ME, or my personality, took a change for the worse. At least, as far as FEAR is concerned.
The Fears Adult-ME had to battle with
My mother was not the only person to have lost a child. I have also lost a child, at the beginning of the fifth month of pregnancy to be precise. This happened after I had already had one very early miscarriage. And later on there would be another early miscarriage — meaning that I have lost the total amount of three pregnancies.
In my past I had felt, in a way, more connected with the thought of what death and dying meant, rather than what life and living might mean. My would-have-been-sister and my parents’ accident were were not the only reasons for this to happen, but they were most certainly the earliest ones.
I actually had to deliver my baby stillborn. This chapter of my life caused such a great deal of pain that it took me a few years to recover from the blow, and the other two miscarriages.
Please feel free to take a wild guess as to what I might have gone through when pregnant with my two daughters! And please feel free to imagine what I am prone to these days regarding the safety of my own kids! At this point, I do not want to go into detail about it, but I am sure you can imagine that I turned out to be pretty protective of them.
Be my Guest Affronting my Fears with Me
When I was about 25 years old, a Tamil priest, who was my student in a language class back then, read my palm. He said I was a person whose hand revealed that I displayed an “innate fear commonly not present in European folks”. Coincidence, fate, nonsense?
It is important to note that this year, 2022, towards the end of it, I will turn 50 years of age. So, I have been walking the face of the earth with this particular piece of knowledge accompanying me for half of my life.
I also believe that my life has reached its numerological peak, i.e. the point in time when half of my life is over, hence the other half is still to come. I am expecting to live to tell the tale of a centenarian — 100 years of age. I do reserve the right to change that wish at my own pleasing. The reason I am writing about it now is that I am really hoping it helps to build up the FAITH necessary to actually get there despite my mind playing tricks on me.
Having said that, I have also decided that the first step should be to come to terms with those early childhood memories. I should put myself into a position where they can no longer have a harming impact on me. HOW?
Getting Rid of Grief takes Wanting to!
I think you might have gotten a good glimpse of what kind of negative thoughts crossed younger Sue’s mind.
If you have read any of my earlier posts, then you might also know that, with the onset of Coronavirus, I have marked the beginning of my very own NEW AGE — #P.C-Post Corona.
In the light of this, I decided at the start of this current year 2022 —which is the beginning of Corona year #3P.C. — that I need to make sure Future-ME is going to get detached from early Sue’s past bad memories still causing fears at worst and awkward feelings at best while attaching themselves to many of my new experiences — just like coronavirus is getting attached to someone’s cells once they are infected with it.
“Time to turn into a faithful and fearless version of ME!”
What better day than TODAY: I have found out that I have tested positive for coronavirus. That in itself is reason enough to feel just a little uneasy.
As a matter of fact, that does not describe it accurately: Waves of fear keep washing over me! One second I believe it is going to be alright. The next I picture myself in the ICU of a hospital.
Anyway, here I am writing about it now, so it must mean that I am not letting my fears get the better of me… Hurray!
My thoughts in January of the year 3#P.C. — Post Corona!
Sue
