My Earliest Memory

Picture in your mind a stark white room with very bright lights.  That room is my earliest memory.  I was lying on a table and the lights were in my eyes.  My parents were in the room and so was a man in a white outfit.  He put a tissue over my eyes and told me he was taking a picture.  That is all I remember.

My parents tell me what happened that day.  This part is not my memory but theirs.  It was a Sunday morning and I was 2 years old.  My parents bed was next to a window and I was jumping on it.  Then I fell and hit my forehead on the window sill.  Apparently I bled a lot.  So they took me to the emergency room. I got a butterfly type bandage, no stitches for the tiny cut in the middle of my forehead just below the hairline.  The scar is still there but you have to be looking for it to see it.

So, just a few years ago I asked my mother about that picture they took.  I told her what I remembered about the tissue and the man placing it over my eyes.  I wanted to know where it was.  Did she have it?  I don't remember her exact words, but no she did not have that picture.  That was an x-ray, not an actual picture.  I was, I don't know the word I'm looking for here, but I was upset that the picture didn't exist!  Wounded or mortified?  One of those words.  How dare them!  Not my parents but the doctors.

That memory is so vivid that I truly believed there was a picture somewhere I had not seen.  Between 2 and 4 years of age, I have no vivid memories like this at all.  The trauma must have somehow caused me to remember that incident above all else.