This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

Thinking about the difference between school and practice, books and life. What you think things are going to be like and how they actually are.”

“For the moment’s all there is, my darling.”

How did you teach your small human that it’s what’s inside that counts when the truth was everyone was pretty preoccupied with what you put on over the outside too?

But Rosie was also used to conflicting emotions, for she was a mother and knew every moment of every day that no one out in the world could ever love or value or nurture her children as well as she could and yet that it was necessary nonetheless to send them out into that world anyway.

People get sick, Howie, people’s families get sick, even doctors’. That’s why we have sick leave and personal leave and family leave.”

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.

“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.”

“Because you know what’s even better than happy endings?” “What?” “Happy middles.” “You think?” “All the happy with none of the finality. All the happy with room enough to grow. What could be better than that?”

She felt that truly she could be perfectly content sitting at her kitchen table eating ice cream with her family and listening to this conversation go on forever. These kids, her multitudes, they could grow up. They could move Away. They could—they would—become new, become changed, become actual adult people in progress, people she wouldn’t recognize, people she could not imagine. People remade. They would undergo miracles. They would transform. They would make magic. But they were her story, hers and Penn’s, so however wide they wandered, they would always be right here.