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.

Pen, in the vastness of her inexperience, was surprised to see that someone like George, who last night had held court on a dozen subjects, could be so diminished by a being so tiny.

You’ll notice when you have a baby—if you have a baby—that people stop asking you things that don’t relate to nappies and sleep schedules. I don’t mean to sound resentful. I mostly want to talk about Danny anyway. But after twenty-six years as a separate person, it’s almost funny how completely the world’s perception of you shifts.”

There is little room for a mother’s self-interest in the narrative.

“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.”

THIS THIS THIS.

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

Not everyone would be suited to the life I chose. But I chose it freely; it’s mine. 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.”