I don’t know what the earliest age is that memories are supposed to form. There are a few things that I can distinctly remember from childhood that no one would have ever discussed with me, like the smell of the plastic tent that I used to set up in the living room or sitting on my mom’s lap when we were on a shuttle bus at Disney World and thinking that her legs felt prickly, but those are all generic enough things that in retrospect, I could have filled them in after the fact. 

The things that should be distinct about childhood tend to be discussed enough by parents to become memorable, even if they weren’t, like my parents telling me about when I was three and swam up to my brother in the pool and bit him on his stomach hard enough to draw blood, or the time when I was two and we drove by a cemetery and I asked if that was where they buried people’s bones. Either of those things could have taken place to another child my parents had for a few years before I was switched in and suddenly started to have memories that are definitely me around the age of six.  

One place where this story can start is with one of the few glimpses that I have of being a toddler. The only part of the memory I remember is that there are people in suits and they are taking our computer away. They’re fixing it. That memory makes sense. It was the early 90s and my family was upper middle class. I don’t know how computers used to be fixed, but it seems reasonable that it was something like that. 

In a version of this memory constructed after the fact, I’m standing in the backyard of my parents’ house, the only house I ever lived in during my childhood, and where my parents still live for 182 days per year. 

I’m in front of the swing set, about thirty yards from the house. In my version of the memory, it was sometime between winter and spring, when nothing in Connecticut is green except for the grass and you hear birds but don’t ever see them. Standing outside in the wind, I could see the people in suits in the computer room. Through the big picture window at the back of the house I could see my mom walking back to the kitchen. 

The people in the house at the computer looked professional, a word I most likely didn't have as a three year old. They looked more professional than my father, who looked like a doctor, always in earth tone slacks and a button down with a tie, but never a jacket, and never black, gray, or navy. They took the computer and put it in their van, which was like our van, but white and without windows, and drove away. 

I had no emotions about them taking the computer. I used it sometimes to color in blocky pictures of ninja turtles or to play a game where you stacked monkeys of various sizes to get them from one side of the jungle to the other, but I had analog versions of both those things that were more fun. The computer was just a thing in another room in our house that I would only go to sometimes. I have no memory of not having a computer in the house, except for the memory of it being taken away to be fixed. 

If it ends here, it’s not really important. It’s just one of the countless things that confirms that my childhood was more privileged than most. In 1993, we not only had a computer, but could have professionals take it away to get it fixed. 

The story can also start in the same house, sitting at the kitchen table in 2015, twenty-two years after the computer was taken away. If it starts here, it ends up being more than just a misplaced memory of privilege.

In 2015, we’re sitting at the kitchen table, and my mom casually mentions that I was home when the FBI raided our house, (raid doesn’t sound like the right word, but I think this is what most FBI raids are like:  reasonable people coming and carefully taking away things that are reasonable to take away).

I tell her that I don’t remember, and she says that makes sense because I was three.

She describes me sitting on her lap, people arriving in a van, people wearing suits, and how she moved me outside.

I ask if they took our computer.

“Yes.”

My mom describes that while we sat at the kitchen table in 1993, she heard a van pull up to the front of the house. She lifted me off her lap, and most likely I didn’t feel the prickliness of her legs because it wasn’t summer and we weren’t at Disney World. My brother was at school, so the house was quiet. 

When my mom went into the front living room (a room that I have no memories of as a young child outside of hiding under the couch because it was quiet, oddly bright, and the right height for me to lie under) and watched the van pull into the driveway. 

I don’t have any amount of confidence in narrating my mother’s version of this story, and even as an adult I have no way of conceptualizing what she was feeling or thinking, and I’ve never managed to ask. All I know is that twenty-two years later, she told me that her first thought when she saw the van without windows and the people in suits was excitement because she thought that she had won one of the giant checks from Publishers Clearing House. The part of me that I don’t like is judgmental of the fact that she ever applied for that.

I don’t know if she got excited and came to tell me anything, but for her sake, I hope she didn’t. When the people came to the door, I imagine it was uncomfortable for them to see a smiling, excited woman, instead of a cautious or concerned woman, which is probably  what you most encounter as an FBI agent raiding someone’s home. I don’t know how the situation was clarified, but it seems too devastating and embarrassing to ever ask about that. 

I don’t know if my mom asked questions. I don’t know if she cried, but I’m assuming she didn’t. I don’t think that she expected them because I don’t think she knew anything. I’m guessing that she politely let them into the house and then asked me to go play outside in the backyard, an action, the first of her many actions, to protect me from the situation. 

That’s how I ended up in the backyard, standing, looking inside, after probably sitting on the swing for a few minutes, moving my feet in the dirt. Our yard was quiet and isolated and no one would ever suddenly ask me what I was thinking about or doing, which would happen inside or when I was around other people. I liked the backyard. 

I don’t know if I asked what had happened when I came back in the house, but I probably didn’t because I was three. I don’t know if I noticed that my mom was upset in some way. I don’t know if she immediately called my dad to tell him what happened or waited until he got home. I don’t know if she knew anything about what he did (insurance fraud) before that. I don’t know if she called her mom to tell her. I don’t know if she went in her room and cried and then came and got me from outside. I don’t know if I wandered into the house after a while and she managed to act like everything was normal and we went back to sitting at the kitchen table doing whatever we were before, but most likely, that is what happened. 

The interesting thing about memory is that the most important and emotional parts of this didn’t register, but only that the computer was gone and people in dark suits took it. It’s odd to realize that a sliver and fragment of the memory exists, and more so, that the memory is tied into the singularly defining childhood experience for me of having my father go to prison. 

For me as a thirty year old, this is where those series of memories now has to start, with this realization as an adult that I can’t quite trust the memories of my childhood, something that somehow had not been obvious before then, and the realization that my mom created such a sense of normalcy for me that I didn’t register any of that day as troubling or traumatic, something that she managed to keep doing for the rest of my childhood.  

The memory of people fixing the computer was something I always viewed as odd, something that was just there and didn’t make sense, and probably never happened:  a false memory that existed for an unknown reason and that would surface only to make a moment feel uncanny. Only because my parents referenced it by chance, did I realized it was real and oddly important to the rest of my life. That FBI raid would, in conjunction with other investigations, lead to my dad’s arrest, conviction for insurance fraud, and eventual time spent in federal prison.

That’s why the story starts there, because it’s the earliest memory I have around my father going to prison, and because it’s only half accurate.

As far as I can tell, the singular most consistent thing about having a parent in prison is the secrecy around it. Rather than any of those other memories that you discuss or see pictures and videos of, no one discusses or documents a parent’s incarceration, and no one really helps you understand what is going on (partially to protect you, partially because who knows if you’ll understand it), so your mind fills in the gaps. It makes it so that as a rational adult you figure that the people in suits were doing home visits to fix computers in the early 90s because that’s relatively logical. 

That’s how the rest of these memories are structured too. They are all around the experience of having a parent in prison, but they might only be half accurate and are not in any distinct order, and to a certain extent that doesn’t matter, because an unconscious part of me felt the need to remember details of what happened, but the rational part of me is not quite sure how to fit all of that together, and in this case, the unconscious part is more important.