Are We Now Who We Were at Three?

I am almost four and I am in a strange bed in a very large room. Actually it is a crib and I feel embarrassed and mad because I am too old for a crib. There are seven other cribs in the room. Some of them have other children in them but I am not interested in them or why they are here. I want to go home. 

My crib is by a window that looks into a hallway. I can see out the window because it is big and not too much above my head when I sit up.  I spend my time waiting for my mother and father to come. I hope they do. I feel afraid that I have been forgotten and will never be fetched from here.

This morning I have made a nurse very mad at me because I won’t eat the blobby bowl of oatmeal she has thrust into my crib. She does not know that something very awful will happen if I have to swallow it.  I watch her walk across the floor straight toward me looking like she’s going to make me do something I do not want to do. But my mind is made up. I will not eat the oatmeal. As she stands over me looking very mad and talking to me mad-like, I think I might start to cry. But then the nice nurse comes to my rescue. “Why,” she says, very kindly “Would you like some frosted flakes? I think we have some frosted flakes in the kitchen.” “Yes, please,” I manage to squeak out. “But I don’t want any milk on them.”  Something awful will happen if I have to swallow mushy cereal too.  She looks at me like she’s puzzled but she brings me some frosted flakes in a bowl. No milk. The mean nurse shakes her head, still looking mad-like but goes away and leaves me alone and in peace to eat my dry cereal… just the way I like it.

I am in this place with all the cribs because I have a kidney infection. I don't know what that is. But I know I have it because my family – my mother, my father, and my little sister who is two – has just driven home from Florida after visiting my grandma and grandpa. My father gets mad when I say I have to go to the bathroom too much, and so I don’t tell him. I hold it. But I’m not supposed to do that any more. 

Later, a lot of men in white coats come in to the big room and hover over me in my bed. They lift my right arm high above my head and look at it closely under a big light above my bed. I feel a lot of little pin pricks on my arm. I don’t know what they are doing and they don’t talk to me about it at all. I only know I want them to finish soon because they are hurting me. I want them to go away and when they finally do, I spend my time worrying that they will come back.

When it is finally time to go home, after five long days and nights, lots of people are standing around in that room looking at me as I am dressed in my real clothes. Someone asks me which nurse is my favorite. I hesitate a minute and point right to the nice one who’d rescued me. I know immediately it wasn’t nice to have done that, because, after all, the mean nurse is standing there too. Later in the car, I will be told that, in fact, it had not been very nice of me to express my preference. I was not sure what I should have done.  

This story springs forth from a seminar on gerontology that I am taking this semester. During a lively discussion this week about the process of aging, my professor quotes a writer who states that beyond age 30, our characters are firmly set. One of my classmates laughs and counters that by three our characters are set. “What do you think,” Dr. C asks. “Does anyone remember being 3? Are you who you were at 3... or 4?”  We sit in silence for a few minutes, each of us drawing on our own first memories. And then some of us begin to nod our heads.

So – what about you…. Are you now who you were at age 3?