It is, all things considered, a complete mercy that nature does not allow you to remember your earliest moments in life. I am sure it's not by chance that conscious memory seems to kick in at about the time you can make a good fist of dressing yourself, attend to your bodily functions and have a decent stab at fixing your first dry Martini.
We all know someone who claims, completely fraudulently, to remember being in the cradle or the face of the surgeon greeting them following the emergency caesarian. More common are those that have a load of improbably precocious memories all of them triggered by baby photos. My earliest memory is of being carried precariously on my father's shoulders as he descended the stairs in our first house. This was also my first experience of motion sickness and the outcome was definitely not one for the family album.
It's no bad thing the regular bouts of screaming that punctuate even the happiest babyhood exist in memory limbo. The downside is that while you will never forget your baby's gurgling joy they will never know it. As a new parent you are marked very deeply in a wholly conscious way by your child's earliest experiences. They by contrast soak up all those experiences like a sponge. The outward appearance of them does not betray what they have absorbed and it is only when they are wrung out that you see what has been poured into them.
I have written before about baby milestones and how tedious all the conventional ones are of measurement, movement and utterance. There is one milestone that no parent can ever know, still less record, and that is their child's first memory. If I was a scientist I would devote my life's research to discovering what it is that triggers a child's ability to remember, for the first time, a particular moment in time.
Of course because we can't predict it we are forced constantly to be on our best behaviour. You might be a model of parenting kindliness for 99 days from you child's 3rd birthday and on the 100th your exhausted patience slips and for the rest of your child's life their earliest recollection is of a sharp rebuke.
Memory is a mystery and a constant reminder of how much there is still to know about what makes us what we are.
We all know someone who claims, completely fraudulently, to remember being in the cradle or the face of the surgeon greeting them following the emergency caesarian. More common are those that have a load of improbably precocious memories all of them triggered by baby photos. My earliest memory is of being carried precariously on my father's shoulders as he descended the stairs in our first house. This was also my first experience of motion sickness and the outcome was definitely not one for the family album.
It's no bad thing the regular bouts of screaming that punctuate even the happiest babyhood exist in memory limbo. The downside is that while you will never forget your baby's gurgling joy they will never know it. As a new parent you are marked very deeply in a wholly conscious way by your child's earliest experiences. They by contrast soak up all those experiences like a sponge. The outward appearance of them does not betray what they have absorbed and it is only when they are wrung out that you see what has been poured into them.
I have written before about baby milestones and how tedious all the conventional ones are of measurement, movement and utterance. There is one milestone that no parent can ever know, still less record, and that is their child's first memory. If I was a scientist I would devote my life's research to discovering what it is that triggers a child's ability to remember, for the first time, a particular moment in time.
Of course because we can't predict it we are forced constantly to be on our best behaviour. You might be a model of parenting kindliness for 99 days from you child's 3rd birthday and on the 100th your exhausted patience slips and for the rest of your child's life their earliest recollection is of a sharp rebuke.
Memory is a mystery and a constant reminder of how much there is still to know about what makes us what we are.
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