1997 (2/3)
The third thing I remember in this life was likely from 1997. I was sitting at the dining table, drawing, while my mother prepared lunch in the kitchen.
That was the year my brother was born. Another VHS tape captures his baptism, showing the lunch held at our house and a cake my mother had made for the occasion. In one part of the tape, I’m playing with other children inside the house. At one point, I began playfully repeating, “An-drew!” because the cameraman had been saying it too.
1998 (3/4)
A year later, in 1998, my sister was born, and winter arrived. I started going to kindergarten. My father would wake me up at 6:30 in the morning, and it was always uncomfortable to get out of the warmth of my bed during the dark, cold part of the day. I would begin my mornings by washing my face and having breakfast.
My father worked at a local military base, so he would drive me to kindergarten before heading to work. I was among the first children to arrive. There, I met local kids from the suburbs. Some became my friends, while others didn’t seem to like me—they looked down on me.
We spent our time making drawings, and I had some good ideas, like creating an imaginary landscape with multiple levels of flat surfaces, featuring green grass, trees, and blue waterfalls. When the teachers saw what I drew, they were stunned. The kids who had looked down on me seemed jealous. I didn’t understand why they felt that way.
Some of these children were older siblings of my friends—kids who were about to start school. When we played with toys, they always claimed the best ones. In a way, it felt fair because they were older, but they also did it possessively. I sometimes wished I had an older brother to take care of me, just like those older kids took care of their younger siblings, who were my age.
Kindergarten was an interesting time in my life. One of the teachers was an elderly lady who could be quite rude, often using phrases like, “Where is your damn mother?” or “Damn it, behave decently!” I often wondered how someone like her was hired as a kindergarten teacher, but it became the “new normal” for me, so I accepted it.
Speaking of the “new normal,” sometimes the teachers would put VHS tapes into the VCR under the TV, and we would watch Hollywood movies. One of them was Commando (1982), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. While it was essentially a childish action movie with a predictable plot, it was also violent. Looking back, I realize it was inappropriate for children. We were exposed to violence from an early age, and it became normal to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger defeat his enemies in the most brutal ways. There was a sense of “normalcy” about the violence at the time, especially considering the ongoing war in parts of Croatia, which lasted from 1991 to 1995.
Not everything we watched in kindergarten was inappropriate, though. We also saw Baby’s Day Out (1994), which tells the story of a 9-month-old baby who escapes from kidnappers and embarks on an adventure all over New York City.
@Limbo 
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