28th Apr 2008
Manufactured Memory
This afternoon, my four-year-old daughter manufactured her first memory.
She has a cow-shaped book with a little microchip and button setup; when you squeeze a certain part of it, it says (surprise) “MOOOOO”. Since we were on a fairly long road trip, she didn’t have a lot to do except push the button over and over and over and over.
MOOOOO
MOOOOO
MOOOOO
MOOOOO
MOOOOO
Amazingly, I didn’t go bat-shit insane during 10 minutes steady of MOOOOOing. After a while, though, we noticed that the cow seemed to be getting a little tired.
MOOOOo
MOOOoo
MoooOO
MooOOo
So, I used this as a great excuse opportunity to preserve the cow’s power, and told my daughter it needed to take a break or the battery would die.
This fascinated her, and she discussed how hard it would be to change the battery. I agreed it would be hard (cutting the book open, figuring out the little circuit and where its battery lived, replacing the battery, fixing the book) and thanked her for stopping.
Five minutes later, she was discussing how when she was a baby, she had made the book MOOOOO so much that the battery had died. “No, dear, that hasn’t happened yet. I asked you to stop so that battery wouldn’t die.” She kept insisting I had already replaced it once, though.
I suppose I’d far rather have her recovering inventing a memory like that, than twenty years from now deciding we’d put her through extensive physical and sexual abuse.
Leave a Reply