Gravity Is the Thing

by Jaclyn Moriarty

Raising teenagers is all about deception. Give teenagers the illusion of freedom. It’s like when you’re playing the triangle. If you clutch the bar, it will make an ugly clang. However, if you dangle the triangle in the air from a fine, fine string, it will chime out its sweetness. It believes it is free, you see, even though you’ve got it by the string. Convince the triangle it is free.

I used to hear people complaining about the questions children asked, all their whys. And I thought: So easy! Just answer! What’s the issue, you strange, complaining parents? That’s what I thought. Now I want to claw out my eyes sometimes, at the questions, the days and days of questions. Life is a constant pop quiz, and I’m always failing. The cognitive dissonance, the limits of my knowledge, the exposure of those limits when the four-year-old demands answers in a lift, say, a quiet, crowded lift, everyone waiting, with interest, for my reply. To be left with I don’t know, to slip listlessly into I’m not sure.

There were two important things about the approaching year 2000: first, the pressure that the artist formerly known as Prince had placed on us by defining the ultimate party as that which takes place on the last day of 1999; and second, the fact that the world was going to be wiped out by the millennium bug (presumably while throwing Prince’s party).