Siblings having different memories of childhood experiences

[bloodyhairy]

Spoke to my sister on the phone last night. She was understandably upset with our mother, who will drive a considerable distance to see our other sister, but not suggest meeting up with her (for a walk in the park!). Both sisters live only a few streets apart. Not an issue for me really, as I live about an hour away. To be fair, mum and other sister do work together sometimes, hence the drive.
No jealousy there as such. As sisters, we are close. And it's obviously not our sister's fault that mum chooses to prioritise in this way.
Anyway, the conversation last night turned to childhood memories. Our mum was very distant when we were growing up. As in, not present emotionally. She was cold, grumpy, depressed probably. We were given nutritious meals, were well turned out, and the house was immaculate. Our physical needs were met, but she's not particularly maternal and we weren't nurtured. I have to say in mum's defence, that she did get better as we got older (as in teens). Having young children dependent on her is really not her bag. Or anyone really, as she struggles with having to be there for her elderly mother.
For a while, we attended a primary school in a deprived area of Glasgow. It was quite a stressful experience looking back, as it was pretty rough. Think kids threatening to beat you up after school!
My sister, whose long-term memory is admittedly far superior to mine, remembers vividly that we used to walk home some lunchtimes (I am 4 years older than her). According to her, we would knock on the door, and mum would ignore us from the inside. Then we would give up and walk back to school. Dad would be at work.
We would have been roughly 10 and 6. Sister claims she was inside as she heard sounds coming from our flat.
I have absolutely no memory of this lunchtime thing happening. Sister swears blind it's true. Our mum wasn't the best, but she wasn't cruel. And wouldn't my sister have been too young to leave school for lunch anyway?! This would have been early 80s. Sister is a good person, and completely normal. Definitely not the type to fabricate vindictive lies about our mother because she's currently pissed off with her!
I'm not sure what to believe, but will let it go as it's in the past.

Have you and your sibling(s) ever had completely different memories of something that may have happened in childhood?
Random question I know , but the whole thing has got me thinking this morning.

@bloodyhairy my siblings and i have different memories of things too.
I think it's normal.

It has caused conflict for us on occasion too. I'm the one with the "abusive" memories and my siblings find it difficult to believe. It did affect my relationship with my parents. For now we have just agreed to differ.

WRT walking home from school I walked home from school for lunch from P1onwards accompanied by other children from our street in the Strathclyde Regional Council area in the early 80s so that aspect of the story if totally believable to me.

My mother was overly strict - quick to find fault and too free with the back of her hand. When my parents split she moved back to France and took us with her. Luckily, at the age of 14 I came back to the UK and went to live with my grandparents on their Dorset farm. My older brother went on to Vet's school in Edinburgh but both my sisters and my step sister stayed in Provence, and their memory of my mother is if they are talking about a totally different person. My father maintains she had schizophrenic episodes (although it didn’t stop him leaving us in her custody) as I still have the scar above my left eye where she threw a plate at me. I still have nothing in common with her and I haven’t seen or spoken to her in years. Strange how people have differing memories.

Thanks everyone, for sharing your experiences.
Have accepted that the walking home thing probably was permitted, so that can now be settled
I don't think mum did the whole Mumsnet thing of ignoring the door, but obviously can't remember! What I do know is that she was unhappy and resentful.

Siblings can have a very different memory of the same event.

We unusually had a big fall of snow when I was about year 1. School was about 40 minutes walk away, right the far end of the village.

I remember the great fun of the trek across the village. It felt a real artic adventure. Throwing snowballs as we went and waving at others. We arrived at school to find that hardly any of the teachers had made it in, and only about 1/3 the pupils. That meant we all joined in together, across the years and did fun games, and all went out in the snow.
It was amazing fun, and I remember feeling very sorry for the children who hadn't made it in. What's more the school milk had been delivered so we had as much as we wanted-and I seem to remember even got to take some home.

Dsis (year 4) remembers it as mean mum taking us to school when "everyone else's" parents let them stay at home, and the things in school were boring and the teachers were all cross.

I don't think either memory is wrong. Simply we perceived it differently.

But I will say that our primary let children go home for lunch (80s) from reception alone. Lunch time, if they went home (very few) they'd get their coat and go home on their own, and come back at the end of lunch.

I dont live in the UK and it is completely normal here still for children to walk home for lunch. You wouldnt normally see a 6 year old going home buy themselves, but a 6 year old with a 10 year old is completely normal. So I can easily imagine it being standard in 80s UK. I think also, we dont tend to remember every moment of our lives. So if you walked home and your mum wasnt home/didnt answer the door you may well have shrugged, gone back to school and it would have made no more impression on you than the colour of your teacher's dress that day. Your younger sister could have been much more upset by it (especially if it happened more than once) and therefore remember it still.

I think having different child hood memories, especially with a 4 year age gap is very common.

Also, going home at that age in the 1980s, very common.

My sister does not agree that my mother was a nasty, abusive arse to me and my step brother.

Step brother lived elsewhere but as ‘not allowed in the house’ and had to eat his meals in the garage, such was her hatred and jealousy.

She wasn’t much better to me.

My sister denies any of this happened. The problem is, it all happened before she was born. She’s thick as mince. Denies that, too.

@SingingLoud

I think it’s unlikely that a school would have let a 10 and 6 year old leave at lunchtime?

How old are you? It was the norm in my school days, loads of kids went home for lunch.

Yeah we weren’t soft in our days, no door to door lift in a 4x4 for us. We’d walk miles, & that was after we’d been down pit.

Miss asked those who were going home for dinner to put their hands up, it suddenly dawned on 5 year old me that she had no idea. So off I went, I ran about a mile home & across 2 busy main roads. I just missed my mom, & felt that I couldn’t manage a full day without her. THe school didn’t even know I’d gone until my mom escorted me back.

If you have no reason to think your sister was lying or misunderstood the situation then I’d accept that her memory is what it is.

To be fair my memory is generally rubbish but I have a few memories that are very vivid from a fairly young age in relation to using things my mum said. I think some things stick in your memory.... maybe for your sister this is something that sticks with her because it was a moment she really felt let down/unloved/scared or whatever.

My brother is 5 years older and so we have different memories. My cousin who I was close to remembers much more of our childhood than me..... though I usually remember what she is talking about when she mentions it. Recently she was talking about a post office set I had when we Were about 6. I swore blind to her I never had one......2 weeks later clearing out my parents attic I find the post office set she described!!

Not only do I think it is entirely possible for siblings to have different childhood memories, I think it is also possible for siblings to have genuinely different experiences.
My dm is the oldest of her siblings. Thanks to ww2, there is about a decade's age difference between her and the youngest sibling. My mum was treated abominably by her mother. The sibling closest in age to her agrees, having witnessed some of it. The youngest will not believe my mum or the other sibling. Youngest will not have a word said against their wonderful mother. The truth of it is that they were simply too young to have understood what was going on, and by the time they would have been aware, my mum was married and away from the situation.
Whilst it is a side issue, I can confirm that when I started school in the 1960's, my mum took me and collected me for the first week but thereafter, I walked to and from school alone. Nobody thought anything of it back then.

I grew up with a lot of emotional and verbal abuse. My siblings and I are all in agreement with that. However we still experienced it from different angles. As the eldest I was my mother’s confidante re her unhappy marriage and I played the fixer who would try and keep mum calm by cooking and cleaning even at 10yo to lessen chance of her having a rage day.

It was different for my brother and sister but they suffered in their own ways too. My mother hates men and used to rant about how the world would be a better place without them. Great message for my brother to hear repeatedly as he grew into a man

Could she be remembering a dream? I vividly remember a dream that my neighbour’s house was on fire. I was probably about 7 at the time. I still remember seeing it through our window even now. Except I didn’t because it was a dream. If I didn’t have quite obvious proof it was a dream I would have sworn it was true!

Why would your sister make it up? Many went home for lunch in those days. And if your mum was so emotionally detached, why wouldn't she ignore her and not let you in.
It all sounds totally plausible to me. I'm staggered that you are questioning it!

Staggered that I'm questioning it?
Maybe because I have absolutely no recollection of it ever happening in the first place ...

This is really common.

We think of our memory as being reliable and accurate but it’s far from it. It’s easy for several people to be at the same event and each remember it differently - it’s about what we pay attention to, the emotional context, how much we retain and how long it lasts for among other things. Childhood memories are particularly susceptible to be inaccurate because of the way we develop. Memories attached to significant emotion are often remembered more strongly.

It’s perfectly possible your sister saw this on a film and remembers it as her own experience, or had a vivid dream. It’s also possible she remembers it clearly because she was really upset by it but you weren’t that bothered by it so it didn’t get encoded into your memory - just a lunchtime walk with your sister so not worth your brain holding onto it. All sorts of reasons really.

No way of knowing which memory is the most accurate without your mum fessing up if it did happen but it can be very invalidating to challenge someone’s memory of something painful. Empathising without corroborating or taking sides is probably the way I would go. May be talking about how you have different experiences and memories and that’s ok. Both are valid.

Oh yeah, memory is a funny thing indeed.

I can absolutely remember the house I was born in, we left it when I was 18 months, there are just two memories though... one, crawling backwards down the step from kitchen into the lean-to garage attached, and the other is the cupboard doors, a bleurgh 70s or even 60s shade of dingy green - they were in the kitchen and then when my dad put in a new kitchen they were moved into the garage/workshop.

I've no reason not to think those are real, we have no colour photos of that house, my parents lived there only three years and only bought it as it was an end terrace next to my Grandma, Dads mum.

At almost 2 I remember going to visit her in a care home or hospice, there was a road roller on the way there and she wouldn't let me have a pink wafer out of the biscuits we brought her.

Why those events and objects are more important in my memory than say, the day my sister was born (18 months, literally a week after we moved and a home birth), moving house etc, I don't know!

My sister was a fairly traumatic child to live with and she would push our Mum around (and she was a fairly traumatic person to live with too!)...

Sister swears she remembers Mother falling or slipping off her bed and cracking her head on the bed frame and passing out, and then she apparently ran around yelling for help...

I remember seeing my sister KICK her off the bed, where she did knock herself out on the way down, and my sister calmly getting up and walking out of the room. They had been arguing, I think my sister would have been about 11 or 12 perhaps. I sorted it out, and then found my sister downstairs watching tv as if nothing had happened.

She swears her version of events is true, however at 17, during an argument with ME, she threw a dumbell at my head (4lb), and whilst I was passed out (only briefly) on the sofa bleeding, she ran off. When i came round and went to get help she snuck back in, tried to clean the blood off the white sofa (failed) and then... went to the pub with MY FRIENDS claiming she'd no idea where I'd gone, thought I'd gone to hang out with a different friend...

I had her arrested for that, to her shock, but she was held two days and then juvenile court and I was bullied into letting it drop by literally everyone.

She still claims she thought I was putting it on (I had a minor fracture of the skull and needed 6 staples in my head, I had bled sufficiently to ruin three sofa cushions and the blood was pouring out even after I had come round and gone to find help) and so she went out!

I have no idea if she really knows what happened and is still bullshitting at nearly 40 years old or if she blocked these things out.