What is your worst childhood memory

When i was 8, mum and dad 'lost me' in St. Peters square in Italy. I was feeding the pidgeons, turned round and they were gone.All my family had disappeared. A guy tried to take me inside a building to an English speaking woman. Me, thinking i was been abducted, started kicking, biting and screaming at this guy. 2hrs later, but what seemed a life time, i was found.

This is one of my worst childhood memories, so come on, i shared mine. Whats yours?

I was mauled by a dog when I was three. It's one of my first memories. All I remember is rushing water in my face, then being in the hospital being prepared for sugary.
I then remember my birthday, I had a Mohawk, and my Mom put moose in it to make it spiky.

Ooooo that sounds horrible. As much as i love dogs, i hope it was put down. Any animal that can turn like that on a young child needs to be.
I bet you were spoilt rotton on your birthday though.

One time I was running down the sidewalk holding a tonka truck..bending down rolling it long..and I didn't see a raised sidewalk block that I ran right into..

Next thing I knew, my face my planted into the concrete and there was blood everywhere!! I could TASTE all the blood running down my face.

That happened again when I was a young teenager, but from falling off a bike

Oh, I almost forgot the time a pervert showed me and my friend his you know what in the forest....AAAAAAAAH!! That was traumatic too!!

Well, most traumatic memory that I am willing to tell is, after my mom passed away and my sister and I were cleaning out the shed of her house, we found a naked picture of her! Yes! Naked! Of my mother! Gross! But I did survive this without any visable scars!

We were moving to Quebec - I was about 8 - and my mother told me we couldn't take Zorro, our cat, because he hated car rides (no kennels back then) so they found somewhere he could live while we were gone. They knew that I was going to refuse to budge unless they said something like that! When we moved back to Ontario, the first thing I asked for was Zorro - my parents told me he wasn't our cat anymore! I still remind my parents about that one, although they don't remember it!

Oh lets see when I was about 7 years old I got hit by a car No wait I ran into the car didn't really get hurt but got a ride in the Ambulance that was good

When I was 9, it was just the start of the school summer hoildays. Me, my Brother, Dad, Nan and Grandad, went to large park, in Telford. (I think thats how it's spelt) And after we had a picnic together I went on a climbing frame and a kid pushed me off and I ended up fracturing, my left elbow. I spent the rest of the summer hoildays in a plaster cast

My mum asked me to stay by my sister's pram while she went into a store that wasn't big enough for her to get the pram into and I started talking to another girl from school, in the mean time some woman came along with the exact same pram and stopped to look in the window. She turned around and walked off with my sisters pram and about 45 mins later when 'my sister' started crying we realised that we had a little boy and not a little girl - thankfully the other woman noticed at the exact same time and they almost knocked each other out with the prams rushing to the service desk in the mall to make an announcement / call the police etc. But I will forever be known for trying to get rid of my sister at 9 months!

I'm a survivor of child abuse, so there are many.

Originally Posted by Natalie_ca

I'm a survivor of child abuse, so there are many.

Click to expand...

I'm going to guess you and I are not the only ones.

Probably any of the times I was sexually molested by an older cousin. The only person who knows is John and you guys now.

You guys are brave for going through those incidents.
The worst childhood memory I can remember is when I was running down a gravel path when I was about four, and ended up tripping and losing the skin on my knees. I have lots of scars on my knees now.
The other thing didn't happen to me, but to one of my brothers. We were walking along our fence and my brother fell into the alley and a nail got stuck in his leg.

Can't say I have had too traumatizing a life.. THANK GOD! I am so sorry you ladies had to go through abuse and molestation. What horrible things to happen to children.

There was this one time my family was travelling somewhere and my younger sister and I were riding in the camper. A cupboard had opened up and so she went to go close it. Well we went over a bump or something and she fell and got the wind knocked out of her. Freaked me right out!

I have so many. I witnessed the abuse more than I was actually a part of it. I guess the worst memory of them all was the night that my father tried to kill my Mom right in front of me. I think I was 7 or 8. He had the cord of the phone around her neck and was hitting her in the head with it. He finally stopped, and luckily Mom wasn't hurt too badly, that time. Through out that time frame in my life he broke her arm, a couple of ribs, her nose, busted her left ear-drum, blacked her eyes, fractured her cheekbone, amoung other things, and I was usually the witness to all of this. She left him as soon as she could safely get us all away. The memories still haunt me to this day and makes it very hard to have any compassion for this man who is now battling a terrible life-threatening disease. I still think about these times and wish I would have done something, anything to help her. Most of the time, I just hid and listened, or stood frozen and watched. Sorry Mom.

My worst memories involve an older man with wandering hands (I was six) and my stepfather's fondness for the word "useless" directed towards me.

Originally Posted by 4crazycats

Probably any of the times I was sexually molested by an older cousin. The only person who knows is John and you guys now.

Click to expand...

I've remembered the physical beatings from my mother all of my life. She had a wicked temper and used to go at me with whatever she happened to have in hand... wooden spoons, brooms, fly swatters, leather barber belt with the metal end, pots... you name it I was hit with it at one time or another.

The worse incident was when I was 9 and she was in a blind rage over something and had locked her and me in a bathroom and was whipping me with the metal end of a leather barber belt. I was crouched in the tub covering my head while she kept hitting me. My brother who was 15 I think, managed to get the door off the hinges and stopped her before she could kill me. I was full of bleeding welts.

I ran out of the house in -40 degree weather in deep snow in my bare feet without a coat and only wearing a nightgown. I ran blocks and blocks up and down streets trying to find where my dad had moved to. My parents had separated a year or so prior and I had been to my dad's lots, but he had moved very recently again and I didn't know (I had forgotten it) the address or even the street. All I knew is that it faced the front street and it was on the second floor. So I ran blocks and blocks looking for his cactus plants in the window on the second floor of a house. I don't know how I managed, but I found it! I stayed there a few days and then the courts ordered me to be returned to my mother.

As for the sexual abuse, I didn't remember that until 1994 when I was in my 30's. I started to have flashing images of events, but I couldn't see a face. One day my cousin picked me up to take me to a funeral out of town and we had to stop in a small town on the way and pick up his brother. His brother sat in the back seat and was leaning forward with his arms on the back of the front seat talking to us. As we were driving down a highway I was hit with an image that seemed to start far away and zoom in and "hit me in the face"...the face was that of my cousin who was sitting behind me. I nearly opened the door of the car and leaped out!

I talked to one of my aunt's about what I was starting to "remember' and told her that I was losing my mind. She like a mom to me mother after my mom died when I was 15. She told me that this cousin had lived with my family for about 6 months when I was about 9 years old or so. I had no memory of that, but I do now.

I called the child abuse registry and without even looking it up, the detective I talked to recognized the name of my cousin. Apparently his wife had left him after she caught him abusing their 5 kids. One of his girl friend's had left him after she caught him abusing their 3 kids. However, no charges were pressed for whatever the reason.

The only other person I told back then was my brother. I kept silent because I had deep respect and love for this guys mother who was my Aunt through marriage. But after she died I no longer kept the secret. My whole family knows... cousins, aunts, uncles... you name it, they all know what he did to me. And they all believe me and support me and other female cousins when they hear what he did to me now say that he tried "stuff" with them too, but they were afraid to say anything at the time.

I am very vocal and open about what happened to me because I feel that the more I speak up and talk about it the more healing I get, and I also let others know that they aren't alone and that it wasn't their fault. I have nothing to be ashamed or embarrassed about and I won't keep his secret. All keeping the secret does is protect him and I won't do that now that his mother is dead.

Wow.
Not much I can say but send comforting vibes to all of you who have had such difficult childhoods.


For me, the worst memories were not so much things happening to me as psychological. I can remember being depressed as a child and a teenagers. I remember one night crying myself to sleep because I thought it was unfair that the Smurfs were always so happy and I wasn't (I couldn't have been very old!)
I also have bad memories of my mother loosing patience with me and telling me things like "why aren't you more like your brothers?" or somehow implying that there was something really wrong with me (why else would I refuse to keep my bedroom clean? ).
I can also remember when my pet bird died and I felt really bad about it. My brother made fun of me saying something like "of course he died, it's not like you took good care of him" I cried and my parents stood there and said nothing

The most traumatising for me and it still sometimes haunts me, is when i was about 4 or 5, i was at the front door calling for help, and none of my neighbours came out to see what it was going on!
Just that image of me standing there screaming for help still comes into my mind over and over again each time my mother is drunk.

I remember wearing my pretty yellow dress

When I was little me and my cousins were playing hide and seek at my Gramma's house. I opened the door to go down to the basement to hide and starting running down the stairs - only to have a nail go clear through my foot. It had been sticking up out of the old stairs.

Needless to say, the next day my dad and his 4 brothers went back over there to tear down those stairs and build new ones.