How many childhood memories do you have?

[HourlyTime]

A friend asked me if I had school dinners or took a packed lunch when I was a kid - I couldn't remember.

Either Primary or secondary school, I have zero memories of eating, I couldn't tell you - I can't remember any friends I had, or outside school what I did in the summer holidays or weekends.

I realised I have very, very few childhood memories at all.

Is that normal/common?

I can remember a lot. Lots of very clear memories of school dinners in various schools and packed lunches on trips. I can even remember the fake birthday cake they used to bring out with candles on at nursery school. I would say I have thousands of memories.

@HourlyTime hey there OP, just wanted to check you're doing OK since you started this thread?

My response to your last post was quite abrupt because I was really sleepy and going to bed, but I didn't want to just leave the thread saying nothing, so I rushed something out.

You said that you think it's probably best not to go poking around in your past, which sounds like it was a very hard time for you, and there may be a very good reason you can't or perhaps shouldn't try to recall it. So I completely respect that.

This post is full of a mix of really lovely and some quite harrowing childhoods and memories. I just hope that you're OK, and if it has brought up anything for you, that you have someone to talk to.

really depends the person every person is different .I recall images but no sound ,i cant remember what my mother sounded like

I think my earliest is looking at my mother as she is holding a pink rabbit. I got hold hold of the food dye =p

Most of my memories of childhood are from school. I have very few of being at home. We went on loads of holidays but I only have scraps of memories from them.

I have a lot of early memories and have wondered about why that is. There was a nasty amount of trauma in the family and I'm also a twin which might make the memories stick as we spent so much time together.

I remember learning to walk. Me and twin, wearing just nappies, and standing opposite each other, we held out our arms towards each other, took two steps and then sat down hard. Our pushchair where we sat one behind the other, our cot and playpen. Learning to dress ourselves and the unhappy complication with the putting on of socks, where we'd reach out to each other's feet and try to get the sock the right way up, but it never seemed to work. Eventually we'd start crying and a giant grown up would come into the room and show us how to do it properly.

School dinners, classes, the playground, other kids especially the one whose nose was always running. Before school, in autumn, I always had a solitary morning walk around the garden to stare at dewy cobwebs and had to be chivied indoors, shoes and socks wet from the heavy dew. Could have spent all day staring at those cobwebs.

Being in hospital for three weeks, aged three, on a ward full of children. I was on the side of the ward where it was all cots and older children were in beds on the other side. The nurses wore little white cardboard hats that looked like cake boxes. The baths were tanks with white tiles lining them and there was Dettol in the water, which I didn't trust because I thought the water was dirty rather than cloudy and I howled the roof down trying to avoid being put in. A high point is that it was on that ward that I first tasted blackcurrant jam, the most delicious substance I'd ever had in my life. Still love blackcurrant jam.

Very similar to me, also military. However the one thing I cannot remember is the names of people in my classes. I can recall perhaps a dozen names from senior schools where I went for 3 years. Primary schools I can’t remember any. But I vividly remember memories of events.

strange

I'm not OP but what a lovely comment 😭

Thanks.

This thread has been really interesting to me to see how differently other people's memories work, what they can or can't remember, and the possible reasons that some don't form many memories. However, I have become mindful that rummaging through our childhoods can be lovely and comforting, or it can be like opening Pandora's box. I feel for all people on here who don't like travelling to their past.

Travelling to my past wasn't something I ever wanted to do but, for whatever reason, my subconscious had other ideas and one day shouted 'It's time!'. For a few years, from around 2016, I had a relentless onslaught of absolutely masses of trauma that I'd tried very hard to forget and move on from. Stuff kept coming up and every time I'd dealt with one horror, there would be a brief respite before the next one popped up. I realised that 'the only way out was through' and I needed to deal with it or break. It was nasty but I learned to manage the situation and work through the buried issues and unwelcome memories. It took about five or six years of continuous hard work, pushing rocks uphill in the dark, and was, frankly, fucking awful and utterly exhausting but I think, and fervently hope, that I am actually 'through' that part.

So, yeah, it was Pandora's Box alright and feels like I aged about 50 years in the process. We're told to move on and only look forward, but sometimes that's not the way to go.

Thousands, going back to age two. Not even always of particularly special or memorable events, sometimes just moments, feelings, smells, how things looked, little snippets of very dull conversations between adults.

My mother remembers very little before age 7.

"Normal" is somewhere in between probably, but I suppose it would be an impossible thing to really measure or know.

I have strong memories of primary school. The tuck shop, the smell of the dinning hall, the sound of the teachers voices. The names of all the teachers and even the ladies which worked on the office . The smell of warm milk in glass bottles which I hated. The playground games, the songs, the plays, the horrid scratchy tracing paper loo roll and the sickly school soap smell….. I could go on :) but weirdly I remember almost nothing about middle school and only bits about high school. I’m. It sure I was very happy at either of these schools.. but the earlier year have stuck with me