This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

thank you for trying to protect him. That’s

“Easy is nice, but it’s not as good as getting to be who you are or stand up for what you believe in,” said Penn. “Easy is nice, but I wonder how often it leads to fulfilling work or partnership or being.”

You have to make these huge decisions on behalf of your kid, this tiny human whose fate and future is entirely in your hands, who trusts you to know what’s good and right and then to be able to make that happen. You never have enough information. You don’t get to see the future. And if you screw up, if with your incomplete, contradictory information you make the wrong call, well, nothing less than your child’s entire future and happiness is at stake. It’s impossible. It’s heartbreaking. It’s maddening. But there’s no alternative.”

They say it is what you never imagine can be lost that is hardest to live without.

verdant

room

Penn was worried Poppy somehow felt like Roo did, that they were keeping her secret from shame rather than shelter. Maybe it was that they were still angry, still had much to be angry about. Maybe it was the layer-upon-layering of all of the above. Whatever the reason, they missed it again, Roo’s warning, Roo’s wisdom, Roo’s mysterious ability, myopic though he was, to see far down the tracks to what was steaming inexorably ahead.

“Marnie Alison’s already making fun of me, and she doesn’t even know about the transgender fish.”

Blockers meant Poppy’s time of being Claude was all behind her, never to resurface. She could stay child-Poppy until she could become adult-Poppy, Poppy-entire. Penn understood all of Rosie’s careful doctor points. But they were nothing compared to the capacity of magic.

Marnie pushed Jake, who pushed her back playfully like what they were doing here was a game rather than ruining Poppy’s careful, perfect life.

He realized this was what his father had been up to all these years, not entertaining his children but perfecting his world. If you wrote your own characters, they didn’t disappoint you like real people did. If you told your own story, you got to pick your ending. Just being yourself never worked, but if you made yourself up, you got to be exactly who you knew yourself to be.

“You keep remember: all is change.”

“All life. You are never finish, never done. Never become, always becoming. You know? Life is change so is always okay you are not there yet. Is like this for you and Poppy and everyone. The people who do not understand are change. The people who afraid are change. There is no before and no after because change is what is life. You live in change, in in between.”

Dispelling fear. Taming what was scary not by hiding it, not by blocking it or burying it, not by keeping it secret, but by reminding themselves, and everyone else, to choose love, choose openness, to think and be calm. That there were more ways than just two, wider possibilities than hidden or betrayed, stalled or brokenhearted, male or female, right or wrong. Middle ways. Ways beyond.

wide world of not-yet-enlightened people were nothing more or less than scared. They needed their fear dispelled,

is you want the former to be perilous, unpredictable, full of near misses and heartbreak and disasters narrowly averted. The latter? The latter you want to be as plot-free as possible. So here’s what’s true: This book is fiction. My child is neither Poppy nor Claude. I am not Rosie. Do we share some things in common with them? Yes. But this book is an act of imagination, an exercise in wish fulfillment, because that is the other thing novelists do. We imagine the world we hope for and endeavor, with the