Think back to when you were 5 years old...

hollydolly said:
or whatever age where you can remember being you... ...can you really believe that was you ? Does it feel like it was someone else ?

When I think of when I was 2 or 3 ..I remember these clearly because so many things happened to me in childhood , most years have some significance to them so I know how old I was when those things happened.. .. and then again when I was 5/6 and 7... or even 12 years old... it just seems like it was me... but in a different life... not this one..:unsure:
Plus it seem like an eternity ago... and yet my adult years have gone so quickly.. but looking back to when I was 5.. seems like a hundred years ago.. and another life


How about you ?
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Same here. Could I ever have been so small? I remember feeling life and hopes pulsating in me, the world was full of possibilities. I greeted each day with giddy excitement. Running, hopping, skipping, rejoicing in my wellbeing and energy.

As time went by good things did happen. However, bad things were far more the case and life kicked me down again and again. That strength that enabled me to get back up and keep forging ahead was incredible. I truly wonder how I got through some things.
 

Rose65 said:
Same here. Could I ever have been so small? I remember feeling life and hopes pulsating in me, the world was full of possibilities. I greeted each day with giddy excitement. Running, hopping, skipping, rejoicing in my wellbeing and energy.

As time went by good things did happen. However, bad things were far more the case and life kicked me down again and again. That strength that enabled me to get back up and keep forging ahead was incredible. I truly wonder how I got through some things.
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yep absolutely...same here..

I look back at pictures of me as a child.. and of my brother ( we were very close in age ).. and I can honestly say we were the unhappiest children I've ever seen.. not one smile ..in any photo..not that there were many photos..but we had such a dysfunctional family, and we were expected to pretend all was hunky dory when visitors came... and we didn't know how

..but the photos were taken only when we had visitors, and always by their cameras.. so we were not used to having a photo taken, and were always told to ''look up''.. we were bemused by this.. it was just another order to obey and my 2 year old brother followed the instruction literally.. .
My brother and I age 3 and 2...

me-and-A-1958.jpg
 
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My earliest memories, all before becoming school aged, are of dreams and of staring at the wall beside my bed during compulsory nap time. I would see faces and shapes in the textures. I remember wondering if my mother could read my mind probably because she was so good at knowing what was on mine. I remember playing outside our navy housing in San Diego and taking walks in a nearby canyon. Surprising how safe I felt and that the feeling must have been pretty widespread since I was allowed to wander.

I feel essentially the same as I always have down deep.
 

Pepper said:
Looks like you're in a war zone, like the background had been bombed. Where are you two?
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Outside our ground floor flat. It was a new build in the 50's after the war .. the garden was Clay so nothing grew there... the photo was taken in '58. The fact is it was their first house after living in a studio flat.. they'd only been married 3 years and they got a Corporation flat..this one.. as most people did back then.. so they were not about to refuse it even tho' it wasn't in a nice area . We moved from there when I was 7 years old.. moved cities, as well.. No other photos after these ones were taken of me by my family...

The next was this one with my brother and me age 18 & 17, at a photo booth.
me-and-A.jpg


I wasn't cuddling him, I was just leaning in to make sure I got in the camera. The photo was taken to send to a friend of ours who was in the RAF.. ..but this was the only other photo taken of us since we were toddlers
 
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JustDave said:
Were the Germans done bombing England by then? 1942 seems too early for them to be in retreat. Of course, I wasn't even born then.
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I wasn't born either, but my mum was 8 in '42, and my father 14... and they told us they played in the bomb sites. They were kids they had to play somewhere and they played right in the middle of tenement buildings that might have been standing just a few days before..

Our cities were bombed out of all recognition, so children had nowhere else to go to play

In fact by the time I came along.. many years later..in the mid 50's..there was still devastation in many places because they just didn't have the money to rebuild
 
I never thought about it before. My young memories are mostly of emotions, such as, the scary dog barking at me when I was walking home from kindergarten, and the nice owner bringing me into her kitchen and giving me a cookie while she called my mom. Or having fun stomping in the gutters with my dad and siblings during a torrential rain.

It's sort of me but not me the way adult memories are.

Probably the difference could be explained by psychology. When I was reading child development and adoption books before/during adopting my daughter, I remember one book said it was important the child was informed of any significant circumstances (such as having been adopted, being the result of incest, etc) before puberty because the sense of self develops during that period of life and finding out information later is a psychological shock and uncomfortable.

Or just plain old abstract and deeper types of thinking develop at different ages like 9 1/2 yrs for math abstraction, and 15 yrs for something (I forget what was called, I'm thinking it was a type of philosophical thinking about the world but I forget exactly).

So it would certainly make sense that our memories at 5 years wouldn't involve "self" in the same way. Perhaps some people include a lot of analysis in later memories that make the young memories extra separate, and maybe other people build their memories with a lot of physical and sensual feelings that might leave less distinction between older and newer memories?
 
Pepper said:
Holly's childhood pic reminds me of South Bronx. Looks poor. Kudos to you for working so hard to break free, and have a good, productive life.
Black and White Photos of Bronx Boys ...


Photobooth pic of holly & bro: 2 nice looking kids.
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this picture is pretty much how we were living. In very poor areas. My mother married down.. and out of her class.. and was determined if she could to drag him back up to her level.. but she managed to get us better housing eventually... but it was all fur coat and no knickers because despite the fact that he worked always.. and she sometimes depending on her depression... we were dirt poor.
 
I feel like 2 different people. I was a working farm kid until I was 15, and then I was a working city kid....two very different lifestyles centered around two very different classes of people.

And as an adult, I think I mostly chose tough physical-labor jobs because other types of jobs seemed soft and boring compared to farm work.
 
Murrmurr said:
I feel like 2 different people. I was a working farm kid until I was 15, and then I was a working city kid....two very different lifestyles centered around two very different classes of people.
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This is how I think..because at various time of my life I was living a very different life. One with a dysfunctional violent family, in poverty , and at other times in foster care with middle class familes
 
I feel like the same person as I was in my first memories. My first memory was in my crib and my mother asking me what kind of doll I wanted for Christmas. To this day, I can go back into my memories and remember how I felt in certain instances. As well as the details of the houses or places I was in at the time.

I am not sure why I remember all this. My brother doesn't though he will pretend he does and makes it up as he goes along. The one event I do not remember is when our dog bit me on the face when I was 2. I have tried to remember that happening and never could.
 
My first memories are of the place we lived before going to Hawaii. My brother got a puppy, an HO gauge train and skiis for Christmas. The puppy died of distemper shortly after the holidays:cry:. The train had boxcars with sliding doors, and they were filled with candy. I don't remember anything that I got that year. Overlooked.

I remember windmill cookies that we snuck out of the cookie jar while my mother was napping and remember walking to kindergarten. The only way there was past a house with a mean dog that bit me. I was scared to go any further and scared to go home so I sat on a neighbor's back steps until the other kids started going home for lunch. In trouble.

I remember wearing patent leather shoes and walking through mud to school during the rainy season in Hawaii because the streets in civilian housing weren't paved. Learned then to let them dry, then brush off the dried mud and treat the patent leather with Vaseline. In trouble again.

I remember going shopping with my mother and an aunt. My brother got a sailor suit. I got a red cardigan. The sweater was "we bought a sailor suit for Jay so we need to get something for Babe." We had our picture taken in front of the shop. He's decked out in his sailor suit and saluting. I was wearing the sweater. It was in the summertime. The sweater for me was an afterthought.

My dad was supposed to pick me up from Girl Scout camp at the end of a week there. One of the counselors lived in the same hometown and was going home for the weekend so she drove me home because my dad forgot. Overlooked again.

I was usually either overlooked or in trouble. Not in trouble anymore but often feel like I did then, overlooked.

Most of the time I was lonely in spite of having a multitude of brothers and sisters.
 
katlupe said:
I feel like the same person as I was in my first memories. My first memory was in my crib and my mother asking me what kind of doll I wanted for Christmas. To this day, I can go back into my memories and remember how I felt in certain instances. As well as the details of the houses or places I was in at the time.

I am not sure why I remember all this. My brother doesn't though he will pretend he does and makes it up as he goes along. The one event I do not remember is when our dog bit me on the face when I was 2. I have tried to remember that happening and never could.
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it's funny you should say about the memory of the crib.

I had similar memories as my first memories. One was being held as I later discovered by my first Foster Mother..( I was age 14 months) and watching as my mother waved from the back window of a cab ... the second memory was the same foster family. Standing in the crib, crying staring at a closed door, and the son of the family aged (in retrospect about 9).. coming in, picking me up, and dropping me from the top of the stairs to the bottom.

I don't remember anything after that at all.. but when I first told my mother of this memory I was 15 years old. This foster family had never been spoken of in our household.. and so she was shocked when I recounted both stories given my young age..exclaiming that it ''couldn't be possible for me to remember''. but in fact it was true..

Since than I've thought the reason maybe for me retaining those memoires at such a young age..apparently most children don't recall anything until the age of 3.... was because they were both traumatic events..

Again my second clear memories are of me aged 2 years old..allowed out to play in the street..yep 2 years old.. and being abducted by a woman on a bike with big shopping basket on the front .. I clearly remember her to this day bending down and picking me up.. after that I remember nothing... but the police found me at midnight drugged lying in the middle of the main road after a bus driver called the police when he stopped before he ran over what he thought was a bundle of rags..

The 4th memory again I was 2 years old, I;d been sent to a convalescent home in the country to recover from pneumonia... I used to watch the trains go by at the bottom of the garden, and wave to everyone on the train hoping my mum was on it and coming to see me, she never was.. šŸ„ŗ
 
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hollydolly said:
yep absolutely...same here..

I look back at pictures of me as a child.. and of my brother ( we were very close in age ).. and I can honestly say we were the unhappiest children I've ever seen.. not one smile ..in any photo..not that there were many photos..but we had such a dysfunctional family, and we were expected to pretend all was hunky dory when visitors came... and we didn't know how

..but the photos were taken only when we had visitors, and always by their cameras.. so we were not used to having a photo taken, and were always told to ''look up''.. we were bemused by this.. it was just another order to obey and my 2 year old brother followed the instruction literally.. .
My brother and I age 3 and 2...

me-and-A-1958.jpg
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Such misery, I'm so sorry. I too had misery as my companion until finally getting away. It
I wish life was like in The Walton's, but it just isn't.
 
Some might find this hard to believe but I remember being born. It was a traumatic experience ; the chord was wrapped around my throat so I couldnā€™t breathe. Then each time my mom tried feeding me , I had projectile vomiting, so she hated feeding me. I was often left in my crib until my dad came home from work. When he came home I was let out cause he wanted to see me. My mom was jealous of having another female in the house. She hated caring for me. My mom never ever said she loved me.

We lived on a hill and when I was three I jumped off a porch 1/2 wall onto my brothers shoulders and broke his collarbone.
It was an accident. It wasnā€™t done intentionally.

I remember my mom leaving me at home while she went shopping at the convenience store. She was having a conversation with the store owner and I walked in. I got in trouble for that. At that age my brothers were in school.

At four years old I attended school and started learning to read. I remember the word LOOK had two circles for eyes. We stayed there for lunch and there were fresh bottles of milk for us to drink and a hot meal made for lunch. There was a concrete wall around the play ground. I liked going to school. It wasnā€™t an all day thing but I liked that they fed us.

At four years old, I got a fever and had a temperature of 105. Thatā€™s when I discovered I was allergic to penicillin. The penicillin swelled up my esophagus and I was hospitalized for a week. During my fever I hallucinated.

I remember we had two black cats as house pets. When I was younger I tried eating their food. ( donā€™t all kids ?)

At four is when we flew on a BOAC plane to Canada. My father got a job and we all moved. We stayed at someoneā€™s apartment for the first couple of months. I hated the elevator and had to share a room with my brothers.

We purchased a house when I was 4 1/2 years old and I got my own room. At first I loved having my own room. Later I discovered there were downsides to it.

At five I discovered I could sing. My dad bought a piano and learned how to play. He was actually really good at it. He played Chopin really well and popular music which I learned to sing to. This part of life I really enjoyed.

My mom stayed home until I went to school . I remember making cakes with her. That was something I really enjoyed also. I began to dislike when my dad came home. My mom poked fun of all the attention Iā€™d get from him . Most of you know the outcome of that. My mom ā€˜hatedā€™ having a baby girl. She viewed it as competition.

At five I went to kindergarten for a half day. Luckily I made quite a few friends and everyday after school Iā€™d walk home with my best friend and stay at her house until they told me to go home. Lol

The friends I made really changed my life.
My parents werenā€™t evil people. They clearly had undiagnosed mental disorders. I still loved them. There were many good memories.



IMG_5430.jpeg

I didnā€™t answer the question. It feels like ages ago that I was 5. Probably cause it WAS ages ago. Hereā€™s a picture of me at 5 years old giving Mr. Squirrel some of my licorice.
 
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I remember little detail before I was 5. At that age my family moved to a small mountain town it was before I began going to kindergarten. I don't recall the move, but I have fairly good recall of where we lived, our home, backyard, sidewalk where I learned to ride a bicycle, etc. etc. The town was in the mountains, and we had tons of snow in winter (not unusual to have 2' or even 4' of fresh snow). So sledding, ice skating, and skiing have always been something I enjoyed doing.

I recall playing in the snow making snowmen, building forts and throwing snowballs and getting really cold before I went in to get warm. We actually built big snow forts in our school yard and had big snowball fights during recess or before school. Can you imagine this now? This small town I grew up in played a very large part of my life and how I feel and act.

All good stuff, very little bad. e.g. I still say hi to most people that are strangers, I have little distrust of people, I have always worked hard and played hard, and I expect others to do the same. I have never had a lot of friends. Acquaintances yes, but not friends. But the friends I have a really good lifelong friend.

I prefer to walk where I am going if I can. I like small towns and live near a small town. Yep, I was lucky!
 
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Odd that I have so many bad memories and so few good ones. Maybe there were so few good that they got lost in the shuffle. There's a poem by Christina Rossetti (Remembrance) where she says "Better by far to forget and smile than to remember and be sad."

My older brother was all that. All that. Fluent in five? seven? languages (including English, of course). Won a state-wide competition in French after just one year of study. Did complicated math problems in his head. Skipped all but a couple of months of his last year of high school and was still a National Merit Scholar. Every class I was in that he'd been in the year before? I was greeted by the instructor with "Jay's sister? I'll expect great things from you." I'd give up before I even started.

I changed schools in the middle of my last year. Two cousins before me were also National Merit Scholars and had gone to the same school. If I was enrolled in classes with instructors they'd had, I got the same greeting. They both became Rhodes scholars. One earned a Ph.D. and was a professor, the other was a state senator.

I heard a lot of "Why can't you be like Jay?" and "Why can't you be like your cousins?" It was tiring living in other people's shadows and being expected to be them.

Willing to bet money that my younger brothers and sisters didn't hear those things! One of my sisters also became a National Merit Scholar. Come to think of it, all except one of the brothers and one of the sisters who were younger than she didn't finish high school. Maybe they got tired of expectations, too.

I couldn't wait to get the heck outta there as soon as I had that diploma in my hot little hand, but I've still never quite felt like I was enough.

This thread got me thinking and trying to remember the good things. Most of the good ones involve aunts or grandmothers, rarely my mother or dad. Hm. Poor pitiful me.
 

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