Why do people assume your childhood was OK?

This month, I bought my amazing husband many birthday presents, including The Ultimate Date Night Game: a series of cards featuring questions designed to connect a couple and bring them closer.

Unfortunately, as we were playing it during our honeymoon, one of the cards asked me: ‘What street did you grow up on?’

My husband couldn’t remember. Then I refused to remind him, which initially upset him: ‘You aren’t meant to withhold information!’

Until I explained that it was traumatic for me to remember — and then he immediately understood. I didn’t want to think about the street I first grew up on during our honeymoon, which was meant to be the happiest week of my life, because it was one of two places where I was abused by my dad.

A few days later, I logged into Substack and enabled two-factor authentication. Substack duly asked me to fill in the answers to three security questions, one of which was even worse: ‘What was your earliest childhood memory?’

Because that memory was of being abused, aged three and a half — roughly dragged down a hallway and thrown into bed, where my head cracked against the wooden headboard.

Of course, the Substack security question setter couldn’t have known that, but it might have been wise to consider that other people may have had different first childhood memories to them — less nostalgic and more upsetting.