What Do You Remember from Before You Were Three?

A television. A neighbor’s hedge. What do you remember from before you were three?

Helen Keller, at Age 8, with Her Tutor, Anne Sullivan

When my son was about five, he overheard me telling a friend that he had not turned over until he was nine-and-a-half months old.

The normal age is four months.

Diagnosticians at the Falls Church, Virginia, Easter Seals Child Development Center, which specializes in developmental delays, usually caused by cerebral palsy and autism, neither of which my son had, had given me several exercises to do with him.

He turned over the day after their testing, after one day of exercises.

They said we would probably never know why this basic skill was delayed, as he was normal in all other respects.

What Do Your Children Remember?

“I know why,” said my son.

“You know why what?” I asked.

“I know why I didn’t turn over.”

“Really?” I said skeptically. “Why?”

“Because I turned over and fell down the stairs and it hurt.

Dimly, I remembered an accident where I had carelessly left him on his back, drinking a bottle of milk, lying at the top of carpeted stairs.

His screams brought me to the bottom of the stairs, where, with no way to know if he’d broken his neck, I simply checked him for protruding bones and picked him up to calm him.

I watched him through a subsequent nap, and then, I forgot it had happened

He must have been about six months old.

What Did Helen Keller Remember?

Some years ago, I read Helen Keller’s autobiography, Helen Keller: The Story of My Life.

I was curious about what she could remember before she could sign.

She didn’t remember much in the first seven years of her life, before Anne Sullivan came into her life and connected her to the world through signing.

She remembered walking through her family’s garden, the smell of the flowers, the wet dew, running and playing. But, it was all largely an undifferentiated blur.

What Does This Have to Do with Einstein?

I’m now reading the book, “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything,” by Joshua Foer.

I’m not at the part, yet, where he explains what Einstein has to do with memory.

Foer has already told us, however, that after a year of coaching from Ed Cooke, a Grand Master memory athlete, as the community of people call themselves who learn how to memorize random lists quickly and reliably, Foer goes on to win the U.S. Memory Championship.

I am at the part where he suggests that one of the reasons we don’t remember much before we are three is because we have no language to describe and understand our world yet, just as Helen Keller did not have language until she was seven or eight.

My son’s fall down the stairs was memorable because it hurt. And, perhaps, because, at five, it was still a relatively recent memory.

As I continued to tell the story over the years, he said he no longer remembered the incident itself, only the story that I had told about it.

What Are Your Memories?

I remember living in Indianapolis, Indiana, when I was between one and two, where we only lived for a year, during which my brother was born.

We got our first television and I remember seeing someone bring it into the house.

I remember there was a tall hedge between our house and our next door neighbors.

When we went back to visit on a college-hunting trip when I was 17, not only did the owners who had bought the house remember my Dad and me, but so did the next door neighbor.

I did not remember them, but the hedge was still there.

What are your memories before the age of three? Before five?

Where did you live?

Were your brothers and sisters born yet?

Have you compared memories with them?

Mondays through Wednesdays, we write blog posts designed to jog your memories, so you can tell your stories to your grandchildren.

Click here to get our posts in your Reader.

To you and sharing your memories with your grandchildren.

Carol Covin, Granny-Guru

Author, “Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers”

http://newgrandmas.com