My bottle-fed daughter of nine months is getting jealous of the other kids eating solids for lunch, so I’ve agreed with her part-time nanny to pack her a lunchbox.
Three days a week, I spend an entire morning engineering lunchtime joy, like I’m packing a tuck box for a war recruit who can’t 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 crudités (salt being our secondary nemesis after screens) has a chokehold on my aesthetic mind. Don’t ask me why, but my baby’s boxed lunch has to be some kind of moment.
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 purée 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’s off to bed. There is no pursuit of high-end or even mid-range aesthetic excellence here—and yet her lunch has to be some kind of way.
The same is true of trips out. At home we’re 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 “Sunday best,” then at least an after-work-on-a-Wednesday energy. I seem to be constantly readying the baby for the promise of an occasion.
I find it impossible to dress her in a way that I wouldn’t dress myself (if I were a foot tall and technically colorblind)—a 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’s 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?
In France last week, there was a lot of speculation in the supermarché over which new toys felt adequately baby’s-first-beach-holiday. Ultimately, we went for rakes, hoes, and a lawnmower over the more traditional (pedestrian) bucket and spade. Maybe she’ll 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.
There’s 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’ll become, furnishing her past with charming details. I’m building a universe that, in theory, could calcify into something she might describe as magical to her teacher (or, better yet, her therapist). But it’s increasingly clear to me that I am creating memories for someone who will not remember them. I am producing a film she isn’t actually watching. I am an unmemorable cog in the soft tyranny of making memories.
Ages ago, I read that we remember trauma more acutely than pleasure—it’s nature’s way of stopping us putting our hand into fire twice. So…the baby will remember the first time I drop her (relax, I haven’t 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 ref for the real ones)? I certainly remember my mum’s chip pan fire with alarming claritys.
Otherwise, I guess most of my daughter’s memories will be the incidental moments out of my control. Oh, God, maybe that’s the point of this column? I can control the fruit-cutting and the ballet tights, but not much else. Whatever she wears, whatever she eats, whatever my pastoral aspirations, the outside world is coming for her, and I don’t get to decide what she remembers. My job is going to be to provide stability and respite from the tribulations beyond our threshold, to be one of the not-bad things that happen to her in a life where bad things inevitably will. (She did seem nonchalant about the imperial wars and the museum, so there’s that.)
Still, I think the memories we’re (barely) making now are small and meaningful in their very meaninglessness. They’re important precisely because they’re not. They’re about cementing us together, showing care without a return on the investment, even if they look, from the outside, like nothing much at all.