The Fallacy of Memories
As my birthday approaches, and as I'm expecting our last baby, I've been thinking about my own birth, the months leading up to it, and my earliest years. I realize that I know almost nothing about my father (his choice) and more surprisingly almost as little about my mother who raised me. I know that my parents never married. I know that my mother planned to put me up for adoption. But the rest is really vague and blank. I have two very early memories--one from my first birthday and one from about four years old. However, I recently begun to question whether either of these is a "true" memory. I took enough psychology classes to understand episodic memory, how it forms, is recalled and recognized. But I also know that memories from these ages is highly uncommon. And the details which I remember are very minute. And I remembered my mother validating the one memory when I was older, say 14 years old. And then it hit me: Are these my memories, or are these stories that w