The #NaBloPoMo18 prompt for today is "What is your earliest memory?"
In my earliest memory I was a month away from my third birthday, and we were bringing my baby brother Ryan, who was born about nine months after my mom and dad got married, home from the hospital.* We stopped by my aunt and uncle's house to show them the baby. Mom and Dad took the baby inside and I had to stay in the car and wait. It was June, and I remember looking out the open back window and watching them walk away.
Two things I have to explain about this memory. First, I'm not sure it really happened the day we brought Ryan home from the hospital. I've always remembered it that way, but I was so young I might have mixed that day up with another day, although I'm sure I was alone in the car, so the baby probably was Ryan. We didn't have car seats back then, so they couldn't leave a baby in the car regardless of when it happened.
Second, the car was often our babysitter back then. I grew up in a safe, small town in Iowa, and nobody thought twice about kids left in cars. The winter my grandma broke her hip and was in the hospital for several weeks (this was before hip replacements), my mom would leave us kids (three or four of us by then) in the car in the hospital parking lot with the engine running every night while she visited Grandma in her room on the second floor. Kids weren't allowed in the hospital back then, and my dad didn't babysit. We sat in the car and stared out the fogged-up window, and she'd look out every so often and wave at us.
Another time when we were older and we were visiting the same aunt and uncle, Ryan was left in the car, and he was pretending he was driving the car (which was running because people often left their cars running while they ran errands or stopped for short visits). Somehow he kicked the car into drive (or so he claimed) and the car ran up over the sidewalk and hit my cousins' swing set. It toppled end over end across their back yard. Fortunately nobody was playing on it at the time. I'm not sure why I was outside of the car watching. Just lucky, I guess.
So that's my first memory, and I wasn't going to write this, but here's the rest of the story. In my mind it's the first time I realized I was the odd one in my family. That they were a family now, and I was a peripheral part of that, not a fully wanted member. That's a feeling that has never left me. My friend Chicken Grrrrl hates it when I call myself a red-headed bastard stepchild, but for me it's a succinct way of describing my feeling of never quite belonging, never quite being as wanted as the four other kids in our family. My feeling of being that two-year-old sitting alone in the car while the new baby goes inside with our parents to be shown off has never left me.
I don't have any other specific memories until I was five and went to school. Do any of you care to share your first memory? I'd love to read about them.
*My dad was technically my step-father. My parents married when I was two.
