New blog about Struggling with separation anxiety? This woman remembers being 1-year-old
Once, when my firstborn son was 1-and-a-half-year-old, I drug his highchair into our bathroom. I had to shower, and he could not handle me being out of view. I’m sure the sight of me jumping in the shower and then popping my head out every minute to assure my strapped in, crying baby I hadn’t disappeared forever was ridiculous, but I didn’t know what else to do.
I also didn’t get why this was happening. Up until that point in his life we’d done pretty well. He hadn’t freaked when I wasn’t in view when he was 6-months-old, and most wonderfully he slept through the night at about 6-weeks-old. But here, 18 months into it, he was crying for me at night and it felt like we were making backwards progress.
Naturally, I did some reading on separation anxiety, but as adult I felt it hard to sympathize with.
“Come on, kid,” I wanted to say. “We did fine before. What the heck is going on with you?!”
It’s only now, after the unique opportunity of reading about a woman who remembers going through it as a baby, that I think I finally get it.
Rebecca Shamrock, a woman living in Australie is one of just 60 people in the the world who has Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM). She can remember nearly every single day of her life — all the way back to just 12 days old.
In a post for Omni she recently wrote:
“My earliest memory of which I can date is from when I was twelve days old. My parents carried me to the driver’s seat of the car (my father’s idea) and placed me down upon it for a photo.
As a newborn child I was curious as to what the seat cover and steering wheel above me were. Though at that age I hadn’t yet developed the ability to want to get up and explore what such curious objects could be.”
Rebecca is currently writing a book about her extensive memory, called My Life is a Puzzle. When she read in a newspaper it was “impossible” for people to remember things before age 4, she felt it was nonsense. In fact, “memories of events up to the age of 4 fill a very long chapter” of her book.
Among the earliest things Rebecca can remember is lying in her crib, looking at a fan in her room, and being dressed in an itchy satin dress on her first birthday.
The part of what she shared that fascinated me the most, however, was this:
“When I was about 18 months old (assumably because it was before my second birthday yet I was out of my crib) I began to dream whenever I fell asleep. At that age I thought that I really was leaving home each night, so I’d always want my mum with me while I was sleeping.”
Whoa! I don’t think it ever occurred to me until now that when everything in life is new, dreams could be so confusing. Though I’m not sure if reading about Rebecca’s memories makes it any easier to deal with separation anxiety, it does give me a deeper understanding of what babies and toddlers may be experiencing.
To be honest, I’m eager to read Rebecca’s book. It’s so rare we hear what it was like to be a baby, and I can’t wait to discover more.
Images by UnSplash/Les Anderson, Bastien Jaillot
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