by feathers

Created on: May 22, 2008

I am lying on my tummy and all around me it's white. It's white and I'm hot. There is something I want but I can't reach it. This frustrates me.

My earliest memory has been caught in black and white by Mum's box brownie camera. I'm about two months old and lying on my parents' bed with my toy mouse just out of reach. Obviously lacking language at the time, I still recalls the intensity of feeling. Of wanting that toy mouse.

I am in water. In the kitchen, my bath on the table and Mum washing me. Dad comes in. He makes me laugh. He makes funny faces at me and I like that, I like it a lot. He's always the one who makes me laugh. He has something with him. Something black that he holds in both hands. He disappears and I am worried. He comes back and makes that funny noise again and I laugh.

Again I am only a few months old. Again there are photos. The baby bath on the kitchen table, Mum in her summer dress, and my expression of curiosity and delight as Dad takes the photos. He "disappeared" behind the camera. Inexplicable to my mind at the time, but I recall the fear when he "vanished", the relief when he "returned".

I often wonder if these are real memories, or just created memories, prompted by the photos in Mum's album. So many of those photos come with a recollection of what I was doing at the time, what I was feeling. There are so many photos in that big old album of Mum's and each one of them brings back a part of my life, but I don't always remember, and that's what makes me think that maybe the memories are real. Maybe I really can go back that far, to when I was just a baby. To those times before I even had words to describe myself.

There are no photos that remind me of the day I drank my sister's formula. Mum and Nana standing in the kitchen, trying to get my baby sister to take her bottle. Checking how many ounces she'd had. Worrying that she hadn't had enough. At two and a half I knew how important it was to eat all your dinner, but obviously for all the wrong reasons. I helped out by finishing off the formula for her. For some reason they weren't delighted. I still remember the taste.

There are no photos of the day the dog bit me. I was two, and I still have the scar to remind me, but my feeling at the time was not anger with the dog but guilt at my own bad behaviour. I'd been told not to tease him and now he was getting into trouble for doing what I'd known he was going to do (though I didn't realise it was going to HURT!)

But there are so many photos. Me, with that grumpy expression, in Dad's arms. We are standing beside a big family group of uncles and aunties and cousins. I had been busy playing. I simply hadn't wanted my photo taken. Me, wearing that stripy jumper Mum had knitted, the corduroy overalls she'd sewn. She obviously had no idea how difficult it was, crawling while wearing overalls, they bunched up under my knees and pulled at my neck.

Other prompts kept memories fresh. For years I stared at a scribble on the wall beside my bed, always delighted with how much that mark resembled a piece of pie with a slice cut out of it. At the age of two I'd had the foresight to smuggle a pencil with me for my afternoon nap. Afternoon naps were BORING. I'd decided to entertain myself with a bit of drawing, but my fine motor skills weren't all that good, at two. Still, I'd done a scribble and it had come out looking like such a wonderful drawing of a pie.

Maybe my soul was captured in those photos. Maybe a little bit of it comes back to me, every time I remember.

Learn more about this author, feathers.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.