A few nights ago, my son Lorenzo woke up in the middle of the night. He stood up in bed and started making sounds that referred to some of the experiences he’d had during the day. Miaow, miaow, he said, recalling a cat that had come through our garden. Auto, auto, vroom, vroom, he added, demanding I stand up and take him to the window from where he can see our parked car.
Lorenzo is almost a year and a half old now. He has memories and can even share some of them with us. Wow. It’s a gamechanger. Experiences and people have a longer-lasting effect on him, and I’ve become more aware of that.
When I started as a First 1,000 Days correspondent here at The Correspondent, I was immediately fascinated by the idea of memory. How is it possible that we don’t remember some of the most grounding years of our lives?
I wrote about childhood amnesia, the inability of children to store long-term memories before the age of three and a half. It’s a complex process that involves the ongoing development of brain structures, and I explained it in detail in this article I wrote last October.
Knowing that Lorenzo won’t remember his current experiences in the long run makes me preemptively nostalgic. Every now and then, I try to write le…