This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

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. Rosie’s number-one concern was: what would make Claude happy? Penn’s number-one concern was: what would make Claude happy? But happy is harder than it sounds.

“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.” “Easy probably rules out having children,” Rosie admitted. “Having children, helping people, making art, inventing anything, leading the way, tackling the world’s problems, overcoming your own. I don’t know. Not much of what I value in our lives is easy. But there’s not much of it I’d trade for easy either, I don’t think.”

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.” “Sure there is,” she said. “What?” “Birth control.” “I think that ship has sailed.”

There are few children more treasured than ill-behaved ones who belong to someone else.

“Parents choose one kid over another all the time.” “That’s not what we—” “You missed most of seventh grade while your sister was sick.” Her mother talked right over her protestations. “You spent most of year twelve in a hospital room. At a time when I felt bad about everything, that was just one more layer of guilt. I had to let it go. Poppy needed extra care, and she needed her big sister with her. Daddy and I needed you there too, needed to not worry about school and homework and Girl Scouts and parent-teacher conferences. You didn’t need much of anything right then. When your needs arose, afterwards, then they got addressed. It’s a good thing people’s needs don’t all arise at the same time; otherwise we wouldn’t be able to meet them all. When you left Wisconsin, it was Poppy’s turn. Roo’s is coming.”

Parent time is like fairy time but real. It is magic without pixie dust and spells. It defies physics without bending the laws of time and space. It is that truism everyone offers but no one believes until after they have children: that time will actually speed, fleet enough to leave you jet-lagged and whiplashed and racing all at once. Your tiny, perfect baby nestles in your arms his first afternoon home, and then ten months later, he’s off to his senior year of high school. You give birth to twins so small and alike, they lie mirrored, each with a head in the palm of one hand while their toes reach only to the crooks of your elbows, but it’s only a year before they start looking at colleges. It is so impossible yet so universally experienced that magic is the only explanation. Except then there are also the excruciating rainy Sundays when the kids are whiny, bored, and beastly, and it takes a hundred hours to get from breakfast to bedtime, the long weekends when you wonder whose demonic idea it was to trap you in your home with your bevy of abominable children for a decade without school.

Parent time is magic: downtempo and supersonic all at once, witch’s time, sorcerer hours. Suddenly, while you aren’t paying attention, everything’s changed.

the one where suddenly your kids know more than you do about something they’ve discovered all on their own, something real and important not just cartoons or video games. Amazing was exactly what it was.

“You just said it was made up.” “Just because it’s made up, doesn’t mean it isn’t real,” said Penn. “Made up is the most powerful real there is.”

Parenting in the dark was something Rosie remembered from when they were babies. It was all so much harder in the middle of the night. In the dark, you couldn’t see them clearly, the pallor of their skin, the brightness of their eyes. When they cried during the day, she could tell from another room if the hurt was physical or emotional, to be attended or ignored. But after midnight, all cries were cries of terror, all augured alarm. Were they warm from fever or from sleep? Confused by nightmare or premonition? Might there actually be someone hiding in the closet? You couldn’t treat patients in the dark of course, but Rosie had always imagined ERs were so well lit because during the day, fear stayed at bay and sensible perspective reigned. In the dark, only the horror stories rang true.

“It’s your story, sweetheart. Not just your story to pass on. Your story to make up as well. Over time, stories change; they shift; they become something new but with elements of the original and elements of what’s to come.”

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.