This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:
Describe an item you were incredibly attached to as a youth. What became of it?
I really struggled with this question: I couldn’t think of anything that I was especially attached to as a kid.
Maybe it was just that I couldn’t think of anything; that the memory was lost to time and age.
So I did the obvious thing… and reached out to my mum.
It turns out that apparently my recollection is correct: I really didn’t have any significant attachments to toys or anything like them. I didn’t ever have any kind of “special thing” I slept with. I recall in my later childhood being surprised to learn that some people did have such things: like all children, I’d internalised my experience of the world as being representative of the general state of things!
Why, I wonder, are some children different than others and get this kind of youthful attachment to something? Is it genetic?1 Is it memetic, perhaps a behaviour we subconsciously reinforce in our children because we think it’s “normal”?
I’ll bet that some clever psychologist has done some research into this already2, but that sounds like a different day’s exploration.
Footnotes
1 I’m not genetically-related to our kids: they’re biologically the children of my partner and her husband, but consider all three of us to be their parents.
2 And that a dozen other psychologists have reinterpreted this research in completely different and incompatible ways.
I perfectly understand this. I did not have anything specific that I was attached to (my parents are sadly no longer with me, so I could not consult with them). However, I had collections: my stamps and my scrapbooks. One specific thing? No, I didn’t either.
PS Your Mum looks lovely.