Ever have that moment when you look at a question and think 'I have the most awesome automatic answer to that question?'. Well I am having one of those moments with Plinky today (I just wish I could have another of these moments when I get to that maths test on wedenesday).
The question is 'What is your earliest memory?'. This is fun because it has a story linked to it. You know those stories which your parents tell repeatedly because they are humorous (and more than a little embarrassing?). At the same time I can be sure that my memory doesn't have anything to do with the story... I hate when people claim to have memories which are clearly just an ingrained family story - what you have is a memory of a story about an event not of the event itself.
The story revolves around cutting paper. However my memory is less defined than that. My memory relates to the colouring in table at my kindergarten, that word means different things to different people in this case I'm talking about 3 years of age.
In my memory I am sitting at the table doing art the the way all normal small children do. Most significantly I remember the little boy beside me, his name was John. Anyway so I'm there doing my craft and the teacher comes up to me and (without memory of the exact conversation) tells me I'm not allowed to do craft any more, I need to go and do some other activity. Why me? What am I doing that is so wrong? JOHN doesn't have to go and be shown the puzzles. HE gets to keep colouring. All these years later this is still a perfectly vivid memory.
Now I thought about this from time to time for years. As you do with all memories, particularly the ones where you have been wronged in some way or another. The was always that unanswered question 'Why me and not John?'.
I would have been about 14 when my mother solved this question for me. She was the reason I had been taken away from the crafts table, she had requested through the kindy staff that I be persuaded to do something else with my time at kindy. Why? I had been cutting paper for 8 weeks. As in scissors in hand cutting paper into smaller and smaller pieces. Pretty well all day every day.
It was the kind of kindy where they let the children 'choose their own adventure' I guess you could say. Children were allowed to decide what they wanted to do. Supported and supervised but never pressured outside of the 'lets go outside, lets go inside, lets eat now' sort of routine matters. For me that had until my mothers intervention consisted solely of cutting paper.
The strangest thing perhaps is I have no recollection of the the paper cutting. Only the shock and frustration of not being allowed at the colouring in table. I can only remember that John was colouring in. Nothing about small pieces of paper or of me having been doing anything different to him anywhere in my memory.
So there you go. Mental scarring which traces all the way back to kindergarten ;P. To think both myself and my mum remembered the event without realising that the other person knew anything of it. That is both my earliest memory and coolest proof that I have always been a bit weird.
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