Memories are funny things, aren't they? Sometimes we can be so convinced that something happened, but it was just a dream. Or we can be adamant that we remember an incident first-hand but actually it's just a constructed memory based on photographs or re-tellings of a story.
It has been a long-running joke in my family that I can remember way farther back than I really ought to.
Apparently, as a young child I would claim that I remembered being born. And to be honest, I do have recollections of the house I was born in, even though we moved shortly after my birth and we have no photographs. I specifically remember the front door, from the inside, and what I always thought were the sounds of paramedics knocking to be let in. I then remember my birth father coming through the door and my grandma, who delivered me, saying, "watch the baby" as if he might have stood on me or something. Without giving my identity away, I was born in the hallway of that house, and it's entirely possible that that could be a memory, just not really that it should be mine. The vantage point I see it from would be my brother's, but memory-sharing isn't a thing, as far as I'm aware!
The alternative would be that I had a vivid imagination and I pieced together this "memory" from stories I'd heard - my birth was very much out of the ordinary and so it came up a lot. It's possible that I only think I remember it, but I don't.
No, the first memory that I know for certain is a memory and isn't something anyone told me or I'd overheard, is from a short while later. I must have been aged 1-2 years old. My brother and I were in the car with Mum and our birth father. They were probably arguing or something, and the next thing I knew, he reached over and opened her door and pushed her out. We were going over a bridge at the time and he just carried on driving. I believe, though I don't recall this part, that he just drove around the block and then went and picked her back up as some kind of threat or manipulation tactic.
The fear I must have felt at that time isn't something I specifically recall, but the traumatic effects of that incident have been something I've carried with me ever since.
Like most people, I'm a little afraid of bridges and high structures, and I do tend to have an irrational fear worry about falling out of a moving car, but the real fear goes way deeper than that.
As a child I would have nightmares which would follow me into the day. Unwanted thoughts would creep up on me and I would be paralysed with fear, I couldn't shake the image that there would be some kind of earthquake or sink hole, something that caused the ground to separate with a huge uncrossable chasm in the middle, and I would be stuck on one side with my Mum on the other, and no way to get to her. Every time I ventured a little farther than our allocated "play-zone" on the front of our street, I would get this image in my mind and worry that I wouldn't be able to get to her in this emergent natural disaster from my dreams.
Apparently, they used to nickname me "limpet" as a child, because I was always stuck to my mother's side.
And I'd bet that this memory is why.
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