My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

I thought about Heidi and smiled. She invariably wanted to be carried. If it was up to her she would never walk a single step. She had always been like that, right from the start. I was so close to her then, after she was born. Vanja was jealous and claimed Linda’s attention as much as she could, while I carried Heidi around until she was eighteen months and John came along. It stopped then, our closeness to each other. Every now and again I felt a twinge of sadness about it. But that was how kids were, everything came in phases, and phases came to an end. Before long they would be grown up, and the children they used to be, whom I had loved, would be gone. Even seeing photos of them from as recently as a year before could make me feel sadness at the fact that the children they were then no longer existed. But mostly they took up so much of our lives now and whirled up our days with such intensity there was no room left for such feelings. It was all here and now with them.

Accurate about parenting