Like the corners of my mind

After reading petite anglaise's blog entry today about her earliest memories, I naturally got thinking about my own and noticed a rather sad pattern, which is that the bad memories are far more vivid than the good. Why is it that we tend to focus more on the problems in life?

Earliest good memory: being rocked in the rocking chair by my mother. I wasn't an infant but probably a toddler and I have a very fuzzy recollection about this.

Earliest bad memory: getting tonsils out at age 4. Having a big scary black rubber thing put over my face (gas mask?) and later being in a metal crib in a darkened room at night, alone without my mother (mommies weren't allowed to stay overnight with their little ones in 1964) but with a plastic Woody Woodpecker toy for company (Woody was a big deal in the 60's). Why I didn't have a stuffed animal or something more cuddly, I have no idea - or maybe I just don't recall having one. But what is crystal clear is that black mask coming at me and lying in the crib looking out at the room (probably a pediatric ward) and not liking being in a crib at all, given that I was 4 years old. I don't recall my parents coming to hold me and comfort me, which I know they did. I just remember the part where they weren't there and being scared at night in that strange ugly place.

Good memories of my early childhood are vague and sparse, not because my early childhood was awful, because actually it was probably pretty good overall. I remember certain playmates... a misty image of the pre-school I attended until I started getting a lot of colds (maybe that's why I got  my tonsils out?) Coming home from school with my mom at home (she didn't work in those days) and having a snack and finding something special on my bed, something my mother bought for me while she was out and about during the day. Even new clothes were an exciting after-school find!

The bad memories are burned into my memory as if with a flaming hot branding iron: TRAUMA. SHAME. FEAR. EMBARASSMENT. CONFUSION. If there was a negative association with some event, I can recall it almost like it was yesterday. Falling while running on a path in the woods (we were on a family picnic) and tripping over a tree root, falling flat on my chest and not being able to breathe with the wind knocked out of me. Having "the crocodile nightmare" (he was under my bed, I SWEAR!) Being forced to square dance in the second grade (I never did like Miss Rush, and it's because she was always coming up with lame activities, like this one, for 7-year-olds). Also in Miss Rush's 2nd grade class, having to be the APPLE in some stupid play, and Scott C. having to be the pumpkin. (We both ended up being short and ROUND... and I fully blame Miss Rush for putting the curse on us with that casting choice.) Deciding to go swimming with my friend Cathy in her parent's pool, but without parental permission or supervision, and putting on life jackets (Cathy fortunately insisted on that, it was "The Rule" at her house) and jumping in, and only THEN realizing I didn't know HOW to swim yet and I thought I was a goner.

And the most traumatic one of all, the night my father moved out when I was 10 and my sister 8, without any warning (to us kids, at least... my mother and he had been having some problems but they never fought in front of us), where I can still recall with perfect hindsight not only the visual imagery but also the raw emotional pain and fear and confusion of waking up in the middle of the night and knowing something was very, very wrong. I snuck down the hall and peeked out into the living area, where I could also see down into the kitchen. I saw my mother there, talking to a man who was tall with dark hair, like my father. Only... hold on a minute... that's not MY daddy because that man is wearing a red shirt and my daddy doesn't have a red shirt. And looking around the house and not seeing my father anywhere and knowing he is gone but not why, and sitting down in the hallway and crying until my mother heard me and came and got me. The man with the red shirt? A good family friend and business associate of my dad's, who was one of apparently THOUSANDS of people who paraded thorugh our house that night during the crisis to give my mother emotional support and try to reason with my dad, including my father's parents who tried to talk some sense into him but probably should have smacked him around a bit (but ministers and their wives don't resort to physical violence, I guess). This was the first of what became all too many clear and painful "divorce" memories for the next two years, until at age 12 I suddenly decided I had had enough, as did my sister, and we decided on a "dad embargo" where we no longer wanted any more "visitation" and contact.

After that my memories are what any teenage girl focuses on: friends, social activities, and boys, boys, boys. Totally normal stuff.

I used to assume that the reason I have so few clear memories, and especially happy ones, BEFORE age 10 was that it was a coping mechanism, like I shut down the old brain computer and blocked out any family-related memories of happier days. After age 10, most of my memories, both good and bad, are a lot easier to recall -- maybe it's a function of being older and better able to retain what you saw and experienced. I used to sort of worry about this but as I've gotten more life wisdom under my belt I just chalk it up to "this is the way it is" and have stopped wondering where all my early memories actually went.

But after reading Petite's post and some of the comments that followed, I'm seeing something quite interesting emerging... other people seem to recall their bad memories better than their good ones. It's not just ME.

What a relief. Here I thought I was in need of more psychoanalysis and frankly I've done the ink-blot thing already. And I've made my peace with my father.