One advantage of moving often - easily cataloged memories

 I have two memories from before or around the time of my first birthday.  My younger daughter, Sage, has no memories of Brazil, where we lived until she was more than three and half years old, and no memories of China, where we live until she was over a year old. 

Psychology Today, in an online article by PhD Vanessa LoBue, published April 11, 2022, states that it is impossible for me to have memories from my first year and a half of life; these memories are constructed from photos or stories of the older people around me. When I told me daughters that I thought it was odd that Sage had no memories from Brazil, my older daughter, Solveig, told me it is because babies' brains have not developed their hippocampus, the region of the brain that stores memories and creates a sense of time.  LoBue, our PhD psychologist from Rutgers University, explains in her article (which I looked up after Solveig told me about underdeveloped hippocampuses) that memories come in different types. Babies first develop recognition and procedural memory before they develop autobiographical memory. Autobiographical memory is generally tied to a sense of self and of time passing and comes around 18 months of age. In addition, LoBue explains that memory, especially autobiographical memory, is not fixed. These memories are malleable, can change with time and under new circumstances, have the ability to be manipulated by outside forces. This is more true in children than in adults, but happens across all age groups. Interesting. 

I do plan to return to LoBue's conclusions when I write about an American prisoner case I dealt with as a vice consul in my first tour as a foreign service officer in Shanghai, China. The American, a first grade teacher at Shanghai's French School, was arrested and convicted of sexually abusing several of his students. For now, I'll just focused on memories in my family. Happily, they do not include child sexual abuse. 

My first memory is of falling of the porch of our home in Homer, Alaska. There was snow on the ground, which broke my fall. I can begin to place the relative age and date of this memory based on two items: Alaska and snow. I was born in Alaska, lived there until I was approximately sixteen months old. My Dad then moved us to Casterton, Australia, for a one-year teaching exchange program. I know I was a toddler, and that my twin brother and I were held back from our Mom, who was leaving by car, by an accordion style child's gate on our home's second story porch. We were super connected to our Mom. I have vague memories of screaming at this particular separation, not being able to get past the child's gate, then the ground rushing up to meet me and being buried in the snow. My Mom talked about this event on occasion for the remainder of her life to illustrate how Leif and I were such mama's boys. Maybe I created the memory from her stories. I don't think so. The memory of the ground rushing up, the confusion of struggling in the snow, is my memory, not part of the story she tells.

Photo from the same winter as the fall from the porch. This was the winter of 1975/76.

My second memory is of hitting a tree. Again it is in Alaska, and there is snow. We were on a sled going down a hill. We were supposed to roll out of the sled before it went into the trees. I can see my older brother, Tor, doing just that, explaining to us that's how to do. The next thing I remember is my face smashing into a pine tree trunk, the bark scratching my face, blood. The first part of the memory perhaps comes from stories from my Mom and Tor. The second part, my face hitting the tree, is all mine. I thought it was a memory form age three, but as an adult my Mom told me no, Leif and I were one. It happened before we moved to Australia, not after. Damn, that memory is so typical of us three brothers. Tor the talented adventurer. Leif and I the blundering boobs. 

Solveig's first memories are from Malaysia, probably close to her second birthday. I passed a Chinese language test for the States Department and was invited to join the 164th foreign service officer generalist class when we still lived in Malaysia. We travelled to Idaho, then Colorado just after Solveig's second birthday. She remembers her grandfather, who she calls Gong-gong (this literally means paternal grandfather in Mandarin Chinese, which I encouraged because Gong-gong had no other grandchildren at the time, and Sage was his second and final grandchild) putting her in the the basket of his motorbike and giving her a ride around the neighborhood. This happened before Solveig's second birthday

Sage has a variety of fun memories from Virginia, where we moved after our tour in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She was over three and a half years old then and says she has no earlier memories. I feel like Sage had a super happy-go-lucky life in Rio. She had an oldish nanny (baba) named Raquel who was big, gregarious and loving and then moved on to a very loving, nurturing, and creative preschool up the hill from our apartment. It was all very Rio-style; lush (or big-bosomed and big-assed in the case of Raquel), artistic, musical, joyful. Sage doesn't remember any of it. 

I though one of the advantages of moving so often was to help with memory. I can categorize memories based on distinctive places I have lived, then place the memory in time. It works for me. It doesn't work for Sage. From birth to the age of thirteen I moved nine times to seven different small towns: Homer, Casterton, Spearfish, Virginia City, Sandal, Alpine, and Valdosta. I generally feel this is a curse, but I'm trying to find some advantages in it. The most stability I had in my life was six-year in Valdosta, Georgia. That is odd, because Leif and I were like ducks out of water there, never felt at home. Home is where the heart is.