Ready…Steady…GO!

*** not the actual tape but it looks just like this one.

My parents have an old BASF audio cassette tape with a collection of recordings of me at about two years old singing and talking and saying nursery rhymes. It was recorded on an old brown cassette player which was the height of techno-gadgetry back when I was a toddler. It’s funny when you think of all the modern ways there are now to capture your child’s every move and utterance. This generation of children won’t be able to get away from images and recordings of themselves at every stage of their growing up but back then that cassette was as good as it got.

Listening to the tape I’m struck by how much like Eve I sounded. I’m told all the time that she looks like me at that age but it’s strange to hear my voice from all those years ago and for it to be like listening to Eve. The thought that gets me the most though is that my first memories start somewhere in there. I don’t remember being recorded, but I do remember that brown casette player. I have hazy memories of some of the people I talk about on the tape and of being the flower girl at my aunt’s wedding just a few months later when I thought I was getting married to the page boy. It gets me because it means that any time now Eve might have her first memory.

It’s not like the other firsts we’ve already had…first word, first step, first tooth…for some reason it seems far more important. It’s as if everything up to now has been the warm-up because our mistakes won’t be remembered. So if we were to, say, accidently fall down the stairs with her, well it’s ok because she wasn’t hurt and she’ll have no memory of it. Not so now! Anything we do might become that first recalled incident and if we mess up then it’ll stick.

It’s as if we’ve just left the Ready, Steady portion of parenting and we’re into the GO!