I’ve confirmed with my mom that my two earliest memories are from about the age of 2. I guess they were both somewhat traumatic which is why they stuck with me (traumatic for a 2 year old, anyway!)
I remember being at the pool where my brother was taking swimming lessons – we were sitting up in some kind of balcony, my mum holding me, and I had some kind of baby board book and I dropped it over the edge. It had some kind of bear picture on the cover and I remember staring down at it (it looked as far down as the ground from the top of the CN Tower) and the bear face staring back up at me.
The other one is a memory of being pushed down a tiny hill in the park near my parents’ house in a stroller. Apparently my brother thought he would give me a fun ride and let go of the stroller (either that or he wanted to do away with me, haha – but no, genuinely my brother was always very fond of me and apparently was quite upset by this incident.) When I say “hill” it wasn’t really that – just a tiny, very short slope. But the stroller turned over! I have a very vague memory of things going upside down.
I am 99% sure those memories are genuine. I do have other memories between the ages of 3-7 or so especially where I’m not sure if I actually remember them, or if I saw photos or someone told me about it. This is especially the case because our family travelled a lot from before I can even remember and it’s sometimes hard to say what I do and don’t remember.
Memory is a mysterious thing. I’m not sure overall if mine is particularly good or bad. Probably just average. I always find it a strange sensation when a memory has apparently been gone from your mind (at least your conscious mind) for years, and then someone reminds you and it pops back in fully formed and you think “how did I forget that?” One of my best friends from high school has the funniest memory for random things (it’s 13 years since we graduated.) He reminded me recently of how a group of us used to go for coffee and I would eat sugar straight from the packet. It all came screaming back to me when he said that