by Anum Shaharyar

My Earliest Childhood Memory

I’d be the first to admit that I have a horrible memory. If you know me at all, you know that half the time anything that I’m saying I’m making up on the spot. Answers, evidence, validations and counterarguments, I’m coming up with stuff as fast as my mouth can spit them out. It’s a play with words, and its something I’m good at. But memories? Dates and names and places, those are definitely not my forte. I’ve been known to give blank looks and uneasy head nods when meeting long lost school friends, randomly related older aunties and even, in the odd, uncomfortable situation, someone I was actually pretty close to and managed to forget too easily.

So then. The first memory? No way, was what i first said. No way could I possibly remember that. I can’t remember what I had for dinner two nights ago, much less memories which stretch back twenty years or so. But memories, if you don’t know this by now, aren't tangible. They aren't real and solid and easy to hold and immerse yourself in. Memories are tricky little beasts, fuzzy and blurred and capable of producing such strong, exaggerated emotions.

Bear with me here. I’m not trying to be over-emotional, but you have to admit memories are pretty powerful things. We kill in their name; we wage wars and write treaties based on the memories of what was. So for people like me, blessed with an uncanny ability to forget after a certain time limit, what to do?

Ask my  mother. Duh.

So I went looking for her. “Mother dearest,” I said, in not quite those words. “What do you think my earliest memory is?”

“Probably of you crying because you realized you had a much cooler older brother you would never be able to compete with,” said, who else? My brother.

I rolled my eyes at him. Twenty plus years of living together has reduced us to eye rolls and withering looks, but before I could go back to asking my mother again, I was interrupted again.

“That wasn’t it,” my sister argued. “Her first memory is realizing that she was blessed with such an awesome younger sister when I came into the world.”

“This is a serious assignment,” I tried to explain, but there was as yet one missing component to the conversation.

“It’s probably of you waking me up in the middle of the night with your crying and wanting to sleep on my lap,” my father said, his these-are-the-wise-stories-i-tell face on. “That must be your first memory because that is pretty much all you did the first three years.”

I sighed. I grimaced. I gesticulated and tried to bring the conversation back on track, but after this we were off into past-embarrassing-stories territory, and there was no bringing my family back. I gave up, and ended up enjoying the presence of people who have known me longer than I've have known myself.

And the story of what my first memory really is? I did end up sneaking up to my mother and asking her. She said, and I quote, “Shouldn’t you know?”
Yes, mother. Yes, I probably should. But I didn’t, and I had to write something. Thank God for irritating, overly affectionate family members.