One of my first memories is tap dancing on the platform of a fireplace in the middle of a magnificent palace.  It was under construction, so it was a skeleton of pillars and beams reaching to the open sky, light pouring through the holes in the frame that would soon become windows.  Clouds of sawdust and sheetrock puffed at our feet as my sister and I ran through the site.  It was a vast, empty playground that echoed and stretched for miles.

The year was 1976, and in reality, this palace was the beginnings of a tiny raised ranch that I would eventually grow up in.  But in my three-year-old mind, it was the whole wide world in the making.  And before this memory, everything goes black.

Three: the year our babies transform into expert kids—when potty-training is perfected, phrases turn into full sentences, and their neuron connectors meld together to turn fleeting, short-term memory into something more permanent.

When my kids were babies, I used to stare into their faces through the soft glow of a single string of Christmas lights, which I lit all year round during night feedings.  And for each I’d think about how, if I were to fall off the face of the earth within the next three years, my baby would grow up without a single memory of me.  After all those sleepless nights together, our long, leisurely strolls, our animated conversations over mashed carrots—and later on, falling into my arms after braving her first steps, lifting the head on top of her first snowman, and letting go of my hand on her first day of preschool—if I were to die before her third birthday, all those memories would fade back to a blank slate.  One thinks these morbid thoughts while in the throes of sleep deprivation, when it’s just baby and oneself and a symphony of crickets and peepers blaring through the windows.

The last of my babies, Anna, turned three today.  At some point this year, all those random pictures of her head, voices, life experiences and jumbled thoughts will merge together in logical succession, etching their way into her long-term memory, where she can draw from them to reflect, learn, laugh, cry, formulate opinions, cast judgments, recall all of our parental victories and mishaps, and use them to raise her own children accordingly.

I should probably stop running around the house in my underwear and green avocado masks belting out ballads from the House of Hair.  Some memories can be life scarring.