By Every Family’s Got One Founder — Barbara Herel
I remember falling out of a car.
It is a slow-moving car on a busy thoroughfare. Somehow the passenger door opens and I can feel myself falling out of the car, head first, in slow-motion.
For most of my life, I’ve had this reoccurring dream.
Now, I don’t remember…
ever falling out of a car as a child.
There is no family lore. No charmingly hilarious story about the time Barbara fell out of a car and landed on top of her head on, say, Stuart Avenue.
But I’ve had this car dream so many times that I thought, like Rosemary in “Rosemary’s Baby” that “This is no dream! This is really happening!”
That maybe this “dream” was more…
then just a symbol of me making reckless choices or being a passenger in my own life. Maybe the oddly familiar feeling upon waking was because it really did happen.
I finally asked my mom about it…
when I was visiting her and my dad for a weekend. I was 35 at the time, living in New York City.
I also had just been dumped by my boyfriend, was depressed, and couldn’t have felt more like a passenger bouncing around the interior of an out-of-control car. So clearly my timing was perfect.
“Mom, did I ever fall out of a car?”
“Oh my God, you remember that? You must have been three,” my mom said nonchalantly. (A little too nonchalantly actually.)
“I fell out of a moving car?!”
“Nooooo. It wasn’t moving. We were parked somewhere on Hempstead Turnpike.”
Me and my head
Then mom calls downstairs to my dad…
“Ron! Where were we when Barbara fell out of the car?”
“McDonald’s.”
“We went to McDonald’s?!” she yelled back at him. “I don’t think it was McDonald’s, Ron!”
“It was McDonald’s, dear,” he bellowed.
“No, it wasn’t!” she whispered to me, clearly more annoyed at my dad for not remembering the location of their parenting blunder rather than the actual blunder itself.
“Anyway”…
my mom continued on, “we just came from Sears, and we pulled into a parking lot somewhere on Hempstead Turnpike, it was not McDonald’s, and the cashier gave us back too much money and we didn’t want her to get into trouble so we went back.
You were little so you in the front seat standing between us.
(This was the 70s people.)
We got to Sears, and, well, I thought Daddy had you and Daddy thought I had you. And you just walked right out of the passenger side of the car and – Boop! Fell on your head. You had such an egg on your head. I guess we must have taken you to the hospital.
Oh well, so much for doing the right thing.”
Even though it was highly alarming…
how casually the events were presented to me, except for the very upsetting McDonald’s/parking lot debate, I must say it did my mind a world of good to know that I really did fall out of a car onto my head.
That it wasn’t just…
some self-defeating, negative-thinking pattern drilled into my subconscious. (And it was certainly a far better outcome than what happened to poor Rosemary.)
It was a real memory.
My first memory actually.
Sure, it might have been nice if my first childhood memory wasn’t some blunt-force head trauma that haunted my dreams for 30-odd years, however…
This truthful knowledge makes me the tiniest bit stronger – I was three and fell out of a non-moving car onto my head.
I can survive anything.
Did you ever fall out of a car, moving or otherwise?
What is your first childhood memory?
My memory is vague. I was probably about three. It was a Hudson and I must have opened the back seat door. I kind of remember my mother screaming “stop the car’. No childproof locks or in those days.
“Stop the car” that’ll stick in your memory for certain. We’re lucky we survived! Haha
It was 1980. I was 4 and my sister was 2 or 3. We had just been to the hospital to visit my dad. (He had bacterial meningitis.) We were in my mom’s 1979 Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser. My sister and I were on the floor behind the driver’s and passenger’s seats, playing with the big, chunky door locks. My mom stopped at a red light. She looked back and said, “Where’s your sister?”
I looked. She wasn’t in the car.
“I don’t know.”
My mom looked in the rear view mirror. There was a crowd gathering at the intersection 2 lights back. My mom pulled a U-turn. My sister was lying on the street. South Main Street, actually. We were only two blocks from the hospital, so we had to go back. We went to the emergency room.
My sister was fine.
My mom thought my sister must have opened the door when she was stopped at that light. Then, when my mom could start driving again, the force dumped her out of the car.
To this day, my sister insists I pushed her out of the car. I did not. I actually have a very good memory, going back to when I was 3. I wasn’t paying any attention to her. I was pretending the door lock was a steering wheel, and I was really driving the car.
What a great story Robyn!!! Love that you recall all these details. Amazing.
I have a great memory for things that happened before 2003.
Omg, I totally remember falling down the stairs running to the doorbell on Halloween. I had to have been around 2 or so. I thought for the longest time that couldn’t have happened. But then I finally asked my mom a few years ago and sure enough similar to what you described it indeed did happen and one of my earliest memories, as well from when I was so little. My mom told me the story like it was no big deal and once it was over and they thought I was fine they just went on with Halloween and Trick-or-Treating later that day like nothing. But seriously, was definitely a different time and place as nowadays I can only imagine how a kid falling down the stairs would have been treated by our generation’s parents. Seriously, though loved your recollection here and at least I know it wasn’t just my family by any means way back when 🙂
There is much comfort in knowing you aren’t alone! Falling out of a car, falling down stairs — I love how these earliest glimmers involve falling on our heads!