Mud & Mayhem

I can’t stop thinking about this.

My oldest is four and a half. Which means, if the research is right, he is right at the age where his first core memory could be forming. The thing that sticks. The thing he carries with him for the rest of his life as the earliest piece of himself he can actually access.

And I have absolutely no idea what it’s going to be.

I find myself hoping. Genuinely, actively hoping that it’s something good. Something at the cabin — running toward the lake, sand on his feet, pure unbothered joy. Or chasing ducks at the park. Or the splash pad on a hot Tuesday when we had nowhere to be. I want it to be something that makes him feel the way I want him to feel about his childhood.

But here’s what I’ve learned from my own memory — it’s never the big thing.

I have a handful of early memories, and the timelines are hazy in the way early childhood memories always are. I can’t fully trust which one came first. But there’s one that’s clearer than the rest, and it wasn’t a trip to Six Flags or a holiday or anything you’d circle on a calendar.

I used to pretend to be asleep so my dad would carry me to bed.

That’s it. That’s the memory. And it’s not hazy the way the others are — it’s specific in a way that still catches me off guard when I think about it. The feeling of being picked up. The way he smelled. The particular warmth and safety of being carried somewhere by someone who would always come back for you. I remember it at a level of detail that doesn’t make sense for how young I must have been.

It wasn’t a production. It probably didn’t register for him as a moment at all. Just a kid pretending to be asleep, a dad playing along, a small ordinary thing happening in a small ordinary house on some unremarkable night.

And it became the earliest piece of me I can find.

That’s what gets me. That’s why I can’t stop turning this over. Because the moment my son is building right now — the one that’s going to stick, the one that’s going to be the earliest version of himself he can remember — I have no idea which one it is. It could be happening right now. It could have already happened. He could be carrying it around already and I would never know.

I hope it’s warm. I hope it’s safe. I hope it has the same feeling mine did — the specific, wordless feeling of being completely okay.

And I want to know — what’s yours? What is the earliest memory you can access, and what do you think made it stick? Because I genuinely believe the answer says something about all of us.

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Drop your first memory in the comments. I want to know every single one.