I just never forgot.
I have lots of memories from when I was a baby, a toddler. Mundane things, like sitting in a high chair eating Cheerios and drinking juice from a sippy cup, playing with my toys, crawling around the house. More impactful ones, like when my parents were trying to get me to walk, which I didn’t want to do, but couldn’t argue yet, so I kept attempting to show them that walking was foolish because I could crawl much faster. My first word, “trash,” which I picked up from watching my mother sort the mail, and initially thought applied to everything made of paper. How I figured out how to escape my drop-side crib, and would wander around the house at night while my parents slept. When my mother came home from the hospital with my younger sister and I first held her, and promptly dropped her, when I was just shy of 2. How jealous I was that my mother weaned me because of the new baby. Teaching my sister how to escape the crib, so she could play with me at night. Being angry that she wasn’t careful like me, and got caught escaping the crib. My first day of pre-school, which I desperately did not want to attend. Starting a fight in pre-school, I beat a boy with a wicker basket because he tried to play with the building blocks I was using.
You don’t need language to think, or form memories. Small children often are able to remember and recount these sorts of things, they just forget them as they age.
Oh, I just recalled a good one. A memory of a word from before I could speak.
My mother had gestational diabetes, and I was born a very large and fat baby. For the first few months of my life, my parents called me “Baby Huey,” a reference to a 1950s cartoon character. They stopped calling me that long before I could speak, and then forgot they ever had.
I brought this up later in my childhood, because I wanted to know what a Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopter, the only Huey I knew about then, had to do with baby me.