Day 14, My Earliest Memory

So I think so far with these 30 day challenge posts I have been able to keep positive and I haven't had to talk about anything sad, well I guess a couple posts have had a sad topic, but for the most part I have tried to avoid getting too deep into anything sad from my past. So since I was looking to keep with up beat topics when I was trying to think of my earliest memory I tried to think of a story that would be cute or funny and I thought of a lot of cute and funny stories but they weren't my earliest memories but I was going to type them up anyway because they were all that I could think of. Well right before I clicked on "new post" I thought of what really is one of my earliest memories but it is going to require me to open up a little bit so here we go.

My earliest memory is from when my parents and I , maybe my sister was born, were living in either Provo or Orem Utah. We were living in a townhouse and since they were in Utah my parents had a lot of friends with kids my age so I was always playing with someone. One day I remember that I was hanging out with one of my friends, a boy, and we were playing on a grass area just him and me. I don't remember what we were doing but I do remember something that happened.

As we were playing a man drove up next to the curb by where we were playing and rolled down him window and he asked us if we wanted any candy. At that moment I remembered how in preschool I had learned to never take candy from a stranger and if a stranger offers candy to you then you should scream and run away. From what I can remember my friend started to walk to the car but I turned to him and told him that he needed to scream and run home and I did the same and of course the man drove off not wanting to have to deal with the police.

I was terrified and apparently I had not told my mom about it until a month later so nothing happened with the police. I do remember though having the same nightmare all throughout my childhood. In the nightmare the scene from that day would play but when I would run away walls would appear around me stopping me from being able to get home.

I know that this is the origin of my fear of being kidnapped. It has been something I have had to deal with my whole life and now as mu daughter is getting older and I am having to think about how I am going to have to send her out into the world in a few years to start school I am worried out of my mind because I will not be able to be there to protect her all the time and I am so scared that something like this will happen to her and she will either get taken from me or she will develop the same intense fear that I have developed throughout my life. I will be determined though to make sure I teach her what to do if something like this ever happened so she will know what to do just like I had known what to do.

I hope this wasn't too upsetting for anyone. I think it was good for me to be able to share this with anyone who reads it and hopefully convince parents of the importance of teaching their children the same lesson that I learned as a child to never take candy from a stranger! That lesson may have saved my life!