When We Were Seven

a creative exploration of remembering being seven years old

I love telling stories about my life; a habit I inadvertently honed each night as I tucked my daughter into bed. Sometimes it was related to a character in a book we’d read or to a topic she brought up. Then inevitably I’d say, “When I was your age…” and off I went. My daughter confessed in her teen years that she learned to just ask me about my childhood and get me “monologuing” to stave off bedtime. It only encouraged me.

When I started an MFA program in creative nonfiction, some of my first memoir writing centered on a traumatic event, a gymnastics accident, that happened when I was 7 years old. 

Except I wasn’t 7.

I was six years old. A fact easily confirmed, once I slowed down to write about it. I was learning through my classes that memoir writing allows a good bit of forgiveness for the fallible human memory. But I was disturbed by the error and started paying very close attention to every assumption I’d made and discovered I’d also incorrectly attributed several other events to being age 7:

• I learned to dive off the diving board. (nope, I was six)

• I started writing short stories (nope, I was eight)

• My dog died (nope, I was nine)

Then I saw a school portrait photo from age 7 that I’d never seen before (uncovered as we sorted through almost eight decades of my late mother’s photos). Or at least I believed that I didn’t remember seeing it, but this too was demonstrably false. Twice a year, I slid a white envelope with the cellophane window full of school pictures into my backpack—I logically had seen that photo before. 

I obsessed over the photo: Another layer of baby fat gone. My ever-darkening blonde hair, pulled back with barrettes and trailing down my back. An uncomfortable half-smile, my two front teeth pressing into my lower lip.

I studied this face I had forgotten and wondered what she could teach me about myself. Could age 7 in particular have a unique message to share? What was the gravitational pull of age 7 that trapped all my memories there? Is there some universal common experience of being 7 years old beyond generalities of “childhood” memories?

Once I became obsessed with age 7, it became a frequency illusion—appearing everywhere—in the books I read, the writing prompts with school, essays on Substack, in my favorite Instagram accounts. So naturally, I launched an instagram account to share whenever I came across adults remembering being age 7. That was just over a year ago and I’m finally ready for a When We Were Seven substack.

At a minimum, it will be the same content as Instagram but delivered in email, an easier to read format, where you don’t have to hunt for links in the bio. But I’m hopeful the obsession will only grow, after all, everyone who's made it to adulthood was once 7 years old.

I invite you to subscribe to When We Were Seven. Read more about why to subscribe, who I am, and how much for a subscription (spoiler: it’s free).

“Childhood is where we live; adulthood is where we make sense of it.” ~ Todd Brewster

We don’t control how memories are recorded or revised while we’re busy growing up. The first draft of childhood is written by someone with limited life experience and no context of their place in the story. It is only in adulthood where we can choose to study, translate, and share the story—often to the benefit of our younger selves.

~ Jen Machajewski