I have a memory from infancy, which I know sounds strange.
I don’t remember anyone ever telling me about it, and I don’t remember seeing a photograph that could have somehow created the memory. I simply remember being there.
In the memory, my view is low, somewhere around counter height, and I’m moving toward the far wall of what I know is a hospital nursery. There are cabinets along the wall with a countertop and more cabinets above. I think there is a sink. There is also a baby scale, the kind with a curved surface where you would lay a baby down. I can sense that there are other things around me, but they aren’t clear enough for me to describe.
As I get closer to the counter, my perspective suddenly changes and I’m looking up.
There is a woman standing over me, lowering me onto the scale, and my mother is standing behind her, just over her right shoulder. I remember the feeling of my back touching the curved surface of the scale and beginning to cry. Both women respond at almost exactly the same time with a sympathetic, “Aw.”
And that’s it. That’s the whole memory—or at least all of it that I still have.
I don’t know enough about how memory works to explain why something from so early in my life would have stayed with me when so much else has disappeared. I also can’t know for certain whether there are pieces my mind filled in later. But I’ve carried this memory for as long as I can remember, and it has never felt like a story someone told me or an image I created after the fact. When I think about it, I feel like I remember actually being there.
What has become especially interesting to me as I’ve gotten older is that this memory would have come from a time before I had the language to explain what I was experiencing. I was simply looking, feeling and taking in whatever was happening around me.
Maybe that’s part of why the memory has stayed so interesting to me. It makes me wonder how much we notice before we have words for what we’re noticing, and how much we may have known or sensed before we learned what was possible, what was impossible, or what we were supposed to believe.
Sometimes I wonder if growing older is less about learning how to perceive these things and more about remembering how to notice them again.
