\n<\/p>\n
My bottle-fed daughter of nine months is getting jealous of the other kids eating solids for lunch, so I\u2019ve agreed with her part-time nanny to pack her a lunchbox.<\/p>\n
Three days a week, I spend an entire morning engineering lunchtime joy, like I\u2019m packing a tuck box for a war recruit who can\u2019t chew. Carrots in the shape of a skull and crossbones, cucumbers trimmed into a Star of David. As I gourmet away my morning, this unsalted arrangement of baby crudit\u00e9s (salt being our secondary nemesis after screens) has a chokehold on my aesthetic mind. Don\u2019t ask me why, but my baby\u2019s boxed lunch has to be some kind of moment.<\/p>\n
This weekday ritual, this mild artistic psychosis in the quest for an edible still life, has, of course, got me thinking. When the baby gets home in the afternoon, I will pur\u00e9e anything (unsalted) into a lumpless gruel, administered more often by slingshot than spoon. She has the most messy, un-glamorous soft dinner in a backwards waterproof coat before I dip her in suds and it\u2019s off to bed. There is no pursuit of high-end or even mid-range aesthetic excellence here\u2014and yet her lunch has to be some kind of way.<\/p>\n
The same is true of trips out. At home we\u2019re fairly slobby. Shat your pants? We can have a commando afternoon. Spilled milk? No use crying over it. But leaving the house has a sense of, if not \u201cSunday best,\u201d then at least an after-work-on-a-Wednesday energy. I seem to be constantly readying the baby for the promise of an occasion.<\/p>\n
I find it impossible to dress her in a way that I wouldn\u2019t dress myself (if I were a foot tall and technically colorblind)\u2014a nod to something bigger than florals and practicality. Christmas sent us into hyperdrive: velvet and white ballet tights and ironic office-party hats. But it\u2019s not just her appearance that I uplift; our social appointments are also very carefully planned. Saturdays are about the sensory sensations of Sea Life, the kaleidoscopic tropics portioned into tanks. We took her to the Imperial War Museum because we like planes, and maybe she could be a pilot?<\/p>\n
In France last week, there was a lot of speculation in the supermarch\u00e9 over which new toys felt adequately baby\u2019s-first-beach-holiday. Ultimately, we went for rakes, hoes, and a lawnmower over the more traditional (pedestrian) bucket and spade. Maybe she\u2019ll be a landscape gardener, I said to myself as I planned the sort of afternoon that she could one day recall in soft focus in her vaguely autobiographical debut novel. Then we arrived at the picturesque French waterside, only for my daughter to snub the tide and hyperfixate on licking what I can only assume was the delicious taste of salt off the stones.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s something both noble and faintly unhinged about all of this: the way we try to choreograph childhood into a highlight reel, even when we have no intention of posting it. I find myself parenting not just the girl in front of me, but the woman she\u2019ll become, furnishing her past with charming details. I\u2019m building a universe that, in theory, could calcify into something she might describe as magical<\/em> to her teacher (or, better yet, her therapist). But it\u2019s increasingly clear to me that I am creating memories for someone who will not remember them. I am producing a film she isn\u2019t actually watching. I am an unmemorable cog in the soft tyranny of making memories.<\/p>\n Ages ago, I read that we remember trauma more acutely than pleasure\u2014it\u2019s nature\u2019s way of stopping us putting our hand into fire twice. So\u2026the baby will remember the first time I drop her (relax, I haven\u2019t yet), or that smell of a car seat on a hot day, or getting chased by bees and jumping into the lake (a My Girl<\/em> ref for the real ones)? I certainly remember my mum\u2019s chip pan fire with alarming clarity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n