The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus

by Emma Knight

Rare is the mother who forgets the Goldfish crackers and is cannibalized in her minivan. More common is the one who devours herself.

He must have thought she was too young to remember. But children remember everything. It’s adults who forget.

She had the impression, as they ran through the train station parking lot and into the shelter of the big car, that Christina did not need to look outside of herself very often for proof that she was living in the right way. But she displayed none of the smug self-satisfaction that one might expect to accompany this apparent peace of mind.

“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.”

“The octopus is the most intelligent animal on the planet without a backbone.”

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

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