Robyn Fivush
speaker
93 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Robyn Fivush’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thank you. I'm so privileged to be here. I really am looking forward to this interview.
Well, my father died when I was quite young, and my mother was in a very, very bad car accident. She went through the passenger side window of the windshield, was thrown out of the car, and she was actually in a coma for six weeks. So she was in a coma when my father died.
And she had a lot of bodily fractures, as you might imagine. She was in a body cast. But she also had a lot of cognitive damage and was essentially in and out of hospitals for a number of years. So my grandparents raised me and my sister for most of my childhood. And during that time, we spent, frankly, quite a lot of time in hospital waiting rooms and
Not spending time doing many of the typical activities of childhood.
He died of cancer.
I was three years old.
You know, it's interesting. It's one of the things that actually got me interested in studying memory is I was very young. And most people can't remember things that happened before they were about three or three and a half. That's a very strong research finding.
When you ask adults to recall their earliest childhood memories, they almost never remember anything that happened before they were three. But I have this unfortunate marker in my childhood that I know if I remember my father, it had to be something that happened before I was three. And I actually have two memories of my father. They are very strong images and sense perceptions of being with him.
One is actually we were visiting... Caverns, underground caverns in upstate New York. I believe they're called house caverns. My sister is about three years older than me. This is my mother, my father, and I was on my father's shoulders. And I remember the feeling of being on his shoulders and then suddenly things going very dark because they turned off all the lights in the cave and feeling safe.
And that's it. That's the whole memory.
I was sitting on his shoulders. And of course, obviously, that's a super meaningful memory to me because I have so little of my father, so little of that security of having my father there to protect me and support me. The other memory is much more mundane. I remember him giving me a bath.
I'm sure it was devastating. You know, I was three. So my experience was just my life was yanked out, but I didn't have a full cognitive understanding of the context and what was going on. And So my memories from that period are very fragmentary and really not very coherent in the way, and frankly, my family, their way of dealing with it was just never to talk about it.
I think that is part of it, and I want to come back to that. I think for my family, that was definitely part of it. The other part of it was just, frankly, my grandmother's personality. So she went through a lot of hard times, and her way of dealing with all of it was, we just don't revisit that. We just don't go back there. It's not worth revisiting.
Quite frankly, when I would ask her questions about her past, my past, my family's past, the answer was always, why do you need to know that? It's over. It's past.
I didn't really notice it until... I didn't notice it until I met my first husband's family. And I started to spend a lot of time with them. And they were a huge family, a family storytelling family. They told stories... like many, many families, all the time. But they had all the kinds of family stories. They had the everyday, tell me about your day-to-day, what happened, sharing their home.
Remember, this is like when we went to the beach last summer. And they had the big, iconic stories. Every Thanksgiving, every Thanksgiving, the story about how One of the uncles crashed the car through the trees when he was a teenager, had to get told. And it had to get told the same way with the same punchlines every year.
And I started to realize how important that was to keep that family cemented as a happy, healthy family.
Everybody knew every detail of this story. If you told it the wrong way, everybody would correct you.
I think it was obvious. I mean, it was such a contrast that it was so different than the way my family interacted.
I was interested in how families, particularly mothers, talked with their three-, four-, five-year-old children about the events of the child's life. So we did a lot of work where we would visit families in their homes and hang out with them. And then we would explicitly ask mothers to sit down with their child and talk about some things that have happened, some special occurrences.
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