The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus

by Emma Knight

Astonishing, the worlds our fathers create

for themselves to live in, isn’t it?”

smoking was bad, but to litter would have been out of the question—and

She did not want to see her behavior from any point of view but hers.

She had understood, all at once, how little control she had over what people thought of her.

He tried to tell himself he was not hurt, could not be truly hurt, by Alice’s unfaithfulness, because he could only love one person, and that person was Emily. The rest was merely mechanical, a release of tension, both infinitely replaceable and morally neutral.

Alice had sworn that she’d told her friends nothing, that she’d taken pains to disguise their time together. He’d believed her because the other option had been to stop seeing her. In the end, she’d held all the power, he thought, smiling. And she’d known it, the bitch.

In the absence of her friend, she appeared to be inviting him to reconsider.

At this age, girls took friendship so very seriously.

We leave so much garbage behind, she thought. If we didn’t let ourselves forget about most of it, we’d go insane.

Sapere aude—dare to know.

It was necessary for me to be selfish in order for both of us, George and me, to survive. But people don’t understand that. There is little room for a mother’s self-interest in the narrative. There is only the selfish monster and the octopus.”

senescence,

“The mother who insists on keeping that inner self of hers alive is monstrous. No one blinks when a father continues devoting himself to whatever it is he most wants to accomplish in this world. But a wife and mother who has priorities of her own and refuses to put them last? Hers becomes a life of conflict,

between who she is and what is expected of her. Society deems her selfish and unnatural. If she lets herself believe it, she’s doomed, and so are her children.”

“I don’t think you’re right,” Pen said quietly. “Maybe that used to be the case, but no one thinks it’s selfish or unnatu...

Getting to choose for oneself is a gift so vanishingly rare that one must never squander it.”

“It’s so that she doesn’t compete with her children for food,” said Christina. “Or eat them by mistake. Or otherwise get in the way of progress. It’s common enough, in nature, this stepping

aside after reproducing. The parents have had their turn, they’ve lived their lives, and their death gives the next generation a fighting chance to survive. The hatchlings have everything they need by that point. The lessons of the past are in them already. It’s time for their stories to begin, unencumbered by guilt or duty or expectations.”

Parents don’t become redundant right away. But we do become so, eventually, if we’ve done our jobs at all well.”