This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

That’s not what worried Penn, though, who’d ordered them carefully so Rosie could see the progression. In each picture, Claude seemed to be shrinking. He had a big family, yes, so it was hard to fit everyone on the page, and he was the littlest of them, true, but Claude got smaller and smaller. He was smaller than the smiling dog. He was smaller than the stemless flowers. In one, he had wings and was flying in the sky, and he was smaller than the clouds. In another, he was lying in the garden loomed over by a snail. In some, Rosie couldn’t even find him. She had to play Where’s Waldo until she located tiny Claude, half a centimeter high, behind the chimney of a house or in the corner of the chimp enclosure at the zoo. Or everyone in his giant family—including Jupiter, including the butterflies, including the house itself—had giant smiles, but Claude’s frown was so pronounced it dipped over the edges of his chin like a handlebar mustache. Or everyone else was in full color, and Claude had drawn himself in gray or once, worse, white on white. Or everyone was in clothes—hats, scarfs, sweaters, costumes, bathing suits, party dresses, and Claude was wearing nothing, not naked, just a stick figure, just an outline, just a sketch. And then, soon, Claude was nowhere. Rosie Where’s-Waldo-ed for fifteen minutes and failed to find him at all.

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.”

“You find out you’re not alone. And so does everyone else. That’s how everything gets better. You share your secret, and I’ll do the rest. You share your secret, and you change the world.”