This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

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.

Poppy’s transformation, she would have told people, if she told people, was no more miraculous or astonishing or, frankly, absurd, than any of the others, nor any more apparent to her rainbow mama eyes. 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.

Everyone’s someone else sometimes. Everyone transforms. Maybe not in quite the same way as you, but that’s sort of the point, the curse if you will. It happens to everyone but not to any two people in the same way, and no one likes it, no matter who’s waiting inside.

“I feel like that should be the subtitle. Parenting: Pick Your Battles.”

And though Penn worried that she was so upset her hands were shaking, that was only so until she had Roo on the table in the treatment room. Then her hands steadied and her eyes focused, and she laid a line of stitches at which even Howie, when he came to check on all of them, whistled in appreciation.

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.

Penn promised himself this was the year: this was the year he’d finish the DN, get it done, get it good, get it off. It was time. It was past time. It was time.

“Sweet,

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

Rosie went to call Yvonne to cancel all her appointments for the day. Penn held his sobbing child against his chest and wondered at this moment come at last, come anew, come again.

“Guys get beat up for everything. Asking how you are. Caring how you are. Using big words. Pronouncing them correctly. Wearing colorful things.” “Really?” “Oh yeah. And that’s just the beginning. If you’re too smart, too dumb, too cool, too worried about being cool, too nicely dressed, too hiply dressed, not hiply enough dressed, listening to the wrong music, listening to the right music on the wrong device, asking stupid questions in class, asking smart questions in class, asking questions in class that lead to more work in class, slow in gym, nice to a little kid, nice to a teacher, nice to your mom on school grounds, too good with computers, too often reading, or discovered during a field trip to Washington, DC, to be in your hotel room watching a movie with subtitles, if you’re a guy, someone’s going to beat you up.”

“He’s just … he’s writing a story instead of living our life.” “Maybe he’s doing both.” “He can’t do both, Mom. Both isn’t an option. They’re irreconcilable. Our kid is an actual person and therefore can’t be a character in a story. Penn thinks everything that’s wrong is just prelude to the magic, and one day soon, we’ll all get to forget what’s past and live happily ever after.”

The patient was euphoric, weepy-grateful. K and Rosie too and the other waiting, watchful patients on their wooden platforms all around them. All was miracle and celebration.

“What do you do?” she said to K. “Next case,” K said. “We just let her die?” “Not let,” said K. “We watch, help ease, be witness. Next time be better.” “The next patient?” K shook her head. “Next life.”

But she possessed those most important of skills: reflex without panic, action without alarm, cool head and cool hands, mild grace under extreme pressure.

the thin, tatty linoleum, its bluebells and buttercups faded to rumor,

Interrogating him was probably a pretty good way to learn English, and Claude didn’t have a better idea, but he put a stop to it anyway. They couldn’t ask very many questions before they were ones Claude wouldn’t answer, answers they wouldn’t understand even if he were willing to give them, even if he knew the answers, which he did not. He didn’t want to think about those answers, or even those questions, anyway.

This was loss that ruined your life leading straight to gain that saved it. It wasn’t silver lining; it was a whole silver sky.

Her

So it was this skill Rosie started employing, a few weeks into Thailand, a few weeks into Claude 2.0, not so much looking for remedies on palm trees as looking for them where she hadn’t been looking before.

The trick was neither to make peace with medical intervention nor to eschew it altogether. The trick was to doctor a palm frond to help Poppy and Claude find their way in the world.

But sometimes he really was fine because none of it was possible, and this was a comfort.

“Of course.” Penn played nonchalance, but even over grainy, laggy Wi-Fi, he saw his child spark. His daughter spark. For the first time since what had happened, there was a glimmering there. Seeing it was like a benediction. Seeing it was like a laceration. There were too many miles in between them to reach across and cup his hands around this precious flame, his arms around this precious child. This precious girl.

“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.”

“Some things do stay the same. Like how we love you no matter what.” Penn thought how much easier it was to say things from halfway around the world sometimes. It wasn’t because it was on a computer instead of in person. It was because remote love hurt but gave you clarity. Sending your child to a jungle seven thousand miles away was oddly elucidating. “And some things change because it’s good and natural that they do. Because it’s time. And you wouldn’t want to stop them.”

“I think maybe we waited too long to tell everyone how special you are. We tried to keep you a secret, but why would we keep anything as wonderful and remarkable as you a secret?” “So everyone at school isn’t thinking about what’s in my pants.”

But Claude felt better. 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.

Which parts not what matter. Is soul, how move, how dress, how love, how be. Just like Poppy, I am female soul so do not matter to me or Choochai or sons or daughters or anyone what is under pants. Makes sense?”

“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.”

That is the story. Learn mistake and fix and tell.

Each temple had legions of Buddhas. Oodles of Buddhas. Buddhas galore.

What was clear, however, was that the Buddha was born male, then cut off all his hair one day and got enlightened, then ended up looking like a girl. And as if that weren’t enough, the Buddha also seemed to feel that even things as unalterable as bodies were temporary, and what mattered was if you were good and honest, and forgiveness solved everything. That was how, whatever else they were, Claude and Poppy became Buddhists for life.

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.

They needed their fear dispelled, she and Penn and Claude and Poppy, because they could not live in fear anymore. But everyone else needed their fear dispelled too because that’s where all the trouble was.

They needed their fear dispelled, their seas calmed, their storms allayed. And the person to dispel the fear was Rosie. She couldn’t cower anymore; she couldn’t wait; she had to leap. Ten-year-olds were not so scary, after all, and this one before her was coming clear and clearer. It didn’t do to make lost children find their own way out of the woods. This child, this tender child, was young yet and new in the world. The way was hard, and help was called for.

There’s a fork in the road. It seems like there are only two choices. It seems like the task is to figure out which way to go, left or right, forward or back, deeper or safer, but in fact any of those choices is easy compared to the real trick. The real trick is you have to forge your way straight ahead through the trees where there is no path.”

“Maybe it is in the long run? Maybe it takes time. Maybe peaceful and easy turn out to be opposites.” She thought of the whole lifetime it takes to grow up and become an entire person. She thought of the day she and Penn—a family of two at the time—painted the nursery yellow, the color of either way, of dispelling fear, of not-knowing. The color of Monday.

I miss Poppy not because I miss my happy, strong, laughing little girl but because I miss my happy, strong, laughing child.

It’s not that Poppy’s the girl and Claude’s the boy. There’s boy and girl in both of them.

“Because Poppy is the happy child, but Poppy is also the way through the trees I think. You have to be—you get to be—Poppy, even though it’s hard. What was wrong at home wasn’t being Poppy. What was wrong was trying to make it easy to be Poppy. Being Poppy isn’t easy. What we have to do is help you be Poppy even though it’s hard.”

“It’s not that easy.” Grumwald felt his lungs scritching to become one in his chest. “I can’t just share my secret. It’s hard to explain. It’s hard to understand. It’s complicated.” “Of course it is. It’s life.” “So how do I do it then? How do I share my secret? What do I tell?” “Your story.” The witch didn’t even hesitate. “You tell your story. That is what we all must do.” “That’s not magic,” said Grumwald. “Of course it is,” said the witch. “Story is the best magic there is.”

“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?”

“I’m all of the above.” Poppy couldn’t help smiling, which was kind of like magic because then Aggie couldn’t help smiling back. “And I’m also more to come.”

Rosie smiled at Penn. 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.

The novelist in me is inspired by how much raising children is like writing books: You don’t know where they’re going until they get there. You may think you do, but you’re probably wrong. Corralling and forcing them against their will to go where you first imagined they would isn’t going to work for anyone involved. Never mind you’re the one writing and raising them, they are headed in their own direction, independent of you. And scary though that is, it’s also how it should be.

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 greatest power we have, to bring that world into being.