“Our first memories are like creation stories that tell humans…this is who I am because this is how I began.”
~John Kotre
I am reading Tell it Slant, on writing creative nonfiction.
In it, they discuss this, the importance of your first memory.
It got me to think about what mine is.
Sometimes it is hard to ascertain what truly are my memories and which ones I’ve adopted through stories told to me and about me.
But the one that I recall and that was often recounted by my parents was the following:
I am three years old. My parents have sold our trailer/mobile home, that sat on my Grandma Donelson’s property, the land where my father grew up. We are going to move into his childhood home, built by my grandfather in the 1930’s.
Most children would probably be happy or excited by this move.
Undoubtedly the new home was nicer, bigger, and probably cooler. It was also familiar to me, since it was my grandmother’s and we visited her often.
I wasn’t even moving off the land, the only home I knew.
But still, I was pissed. Truly. I was an enraged kiddo—barely more than a toddler.
As a little girl, I would get red-faced and I would scowl, so much so that my mother worried that I would later have temper problems like my alcoholic father.
I do not, and often times wonder if I seemed to at points because it was the strongest display of voicing one’s opinions, expressing oneself and one’s emotions that I ever saw modeled to me. My mother bottled it inside, growing silent.
Though she did try to talk to me about healthy displays of anger, and emotions, as I grew up, as a child, do we not demonstrate what our parents do? In all the good ways and less than healthy ways?
What strikes me as especially poignant about this moment now is that I was infuriated, in ways that amused my parents.
I yelled and screamed at that driver, the person taking the trailer, until it was out of sight, being hauled off, up the road.
“Don’t you take my trailer!” I screamed, again and again.
I don’t recall much from that age, but I do recall that last image of the trailer being led away, up the road. And I continued to yell at this poor person, just doing their job.
The other part of this I find so interesting is how representative the memory is in terms of my emotional inheritance.
Gatlin Atlas discussed how our parents’ personal experiences, hardships and trauma, especially their unresolved business, will continue to play out in their children’s lives.
As a child, my mother had no home. Undoubtedly, these are some reasons why she became a hoarder, why she stuck with my father, though he didn’t provide much of a “home,” as a safe haven, in the deeper sense of the word.
Still, what is so interesting is this—
I am certain that my parents, or my mother, at least, would have told me what was happening, that we were moving into my grandmother’s house.
I doubt she said we won’t have any home.
But still, that is what my three or four year old mine believed, what I processed was happening.
Why?
As a small child, I was never without a home. We weren’t homeless or unhoused, ever. While a trailer was not the lapse of luxury, I don’t ever recall being without a roof over my head, nor did I ever hear any stories to suggest that. I didn’t have personal, lived embodied experiences to suggest I should respond to this moving, transiting to a different home, in such a rageful, terrified manner.
Still, I reacted that way.
I find it very interesting. I find it very representative both of my own anxieties as a child, the outlet of emotion I saw demonstrated and believed was how we express fear, as well as the inner turmoil and deep-ceded fear that I would not have a home.
Did a three year old absorb that? On a cognitive level, I think not.
But, epigenetically? my emotional inheritance?
Absolutely. That I believe so.