Heidi Julavits
“Every situation with a child that irks me, I try not to be irked by thinking: How many more irksome moments like this will I have? My son is four and a half. My hours of rubbing his back while he weeps are numbered. I moved my hand from his shoulder blades to his tailbone, and then I swooped it in reverse. Down up, down up; it was like sharpening a knife, or polishing a bowl. I tried to commit the movement to muscle memory. Whenever I am trapped in a situation, I think of how this entrapment might qualify as work. I am so worried about ever wasting time that I cannot let any small amount of it escape without defining for it a use or a purpose or extracting from it a lasting lesson. I tried to think of how this motion might, in the future, come in handy. I thought, If my son dies, I will sit at the shore, and swoop my hand like this back and forth over a smooth rock that has been warmed in the sun and feels humanlike as a way of remembering him. Then I thought this was melodramatic and gruesome. I thought instead: Maybe I’ll write a story in which a character’s son dies, and she could, as a means of coping, go to the shore and do this. Then I thought this was melodramatic and stupid. I thought instead: I must remember to do this when I am seventy. I must remember to find a rock that feels exactly like my son’s four-year-old back. I must remember to close my eyes and imagine that I am me again, a tired mother trying to teach herself how to miss what is not gone.”
- Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock
