This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

“I don’t know how you do it.” Heather. Her neighbor. This was another thing people always said, criticism disguised as compliment.

that odd paradox he’d observed at Newark International that lay at the heart of waiting—that even when what people were waiting for was the worst news of their life or the best, even when the waiting was heavy with implication and consequence, waiting people still transformed into cranky toddlers, impatient and frowning and red-faced infuriated with vending machines that dispensed the wrong thing, and kids who did not use their inside voice.

Sick kids defied all narrative theory he’d ever known. There was nothing redemptive about a dying child. There was nothing that could be learned from a kid coming in shot or beaten that made it worth a kid getting shot or beaten.

“There’s nothing good that can come out of a child being sick.” “No.” “There’s nothing that makes that fair or worth it.” “No, there isn’t.” “It’s narratively insupportable,” Penn explained. “It’s weird how little narrative theory there is in hospitals,” said Rosie. “Yours might be all there is.”

“The armor wasn’t empty. The armor was full. What was inside the armor was a story, a story wanting to get out.” “Why did it want to get out?” “That’s what all stories want. They want to get out, get told, get heard. Otherwise, what’s the point of stories? They want to help little boys go to sleep. They want to help stubborn mamas fall in love with dads. They want to teach people things and make them laugh and cry.” “Why would a story want to make someone cry?” Ben was so much more serious than his brothers. “Same reason you cry anyway,” said Penn. “You cry and then you feel better. Your owie stops stinging. Your feelings get less hurt. Sometimes you feel sad or scared, and you hear a sad or scary story, and then you feel less sad and less scared.”

“Stories aren’t circles,” said Roo. “Stories are all circles,” said Penn.

Girls in fairy tales are always losing stuff.” “Nuh-uh,” said Claude. “Yuh-huh. They lose their way in the woods or their shoe on the step or their hair even though they’re in a tower with no door and their hair is like literally attached to their head.” “Or their voice,” Ben put in. “Or their freedom or their family or their name. Or their identity. Like she can’t be a mermaid anymore.”

So she stayed in Phoenix and held the weather to her heart as a talisman, clutched to her breast against all counteroffers.

“You’re too old to be open-minded and tolerant,” said Rosie. “I’m too old not to be.”

“You are prophylactically ruling out purses and peanuts,” said Rosie.

“It means you are banning peanuts and purses just in case they might cause problems even though they’ve caused none yet and despite the fact that doing so may infringe on the rights and well-being of your student citizens.”

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?

And it had to be a good snack. Penn recognized peanut butter on a celery stick for the bullshit it was. Blueberry pancakes. Chocolate banana pops. Zucchini mini pizzas. These were snacks.

Like Penn before them, no one could ever be convinced to leave, to wait at home, that there was nothing they could do here and they were very in the way. Staying equaled fidelity and faith, true friendship and true love. Leaving betrayed perfidy and doubt, wavering fear, which, to the college-aged mind, had no place in a hospital. Had they asked the adults in the room, the wounded worriers ten years their senior who waited for news of aged parents or broken kids, they’d have gotten this advice: if you get the chance to leave, take it. But the college students never asked anyone’s advice.

If they went out for brunch instead of dinner and had book club during the day, no one thought it was strange she could never do anything in the evenings. “She was in a book club?” said Poppy. “Everyone’s in a book club.” “Like with wine?” Poppy was intrigued. “It’s not a book club if there isn’t wine.”

And indeed, when she went to her, the witch was unfazed. “It happens to everyone,” she assured Princess Stephanie. “It does?” Stephanie doubted it. “Sure. 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.

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

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.

But those are more or less medical issues. This is a medical issue, but mostly it’s a cultural issue. It’s a social issue and an emotional issue and a family dynamic issue and a community issue.

Maybe we need to medically intervene so Poppy doesn’t grow a beard. Or maybe the world needs to learn to love a person with a beard who goes by ‘she’ and wears a skirt.” “But that’s not going to happen.” Penn spoke so softly she wouldn’t have heard him if she didn’t already know what he was going to say. “In which case maybe she—and you and I—need to learn to live in a world that refuses to accept a person with a beard who goes by ‘she’ and wears a skirt and be happy anyway. Maybe our response to that world should not necessarily be to drug and operate on our daughter.” “How?” He looked up at her. It felt like a long time since their eyes had met. “How what?” “How do we learn to live in that world and be happy anyway?”

the difference was this: fairy tales were set in forests, never jungles. The van slogged through enough miles of this wilderness for Claude’s brain to arrive at the reason why: it was because you could get lost in the forest and come out the other side. If you got lost in this jungle, you got lost forever.

“Truck” was a generous term. It was more rust than engine, more dirt than vehicle, and not the kind of dirt you could just wash off with a good scrub either because Rosie had a feeling this dirt was load bearing.

She listened to see, to peer with her ears, to force them into servitude as organs of imagination, precognition, and miracle. She tried to hear in the too-fast, too-loud, panicked pulse a story, tale and detail, what it meant and what it foreshadowed, its history and backstory. But she couldn’t make it out.

And she saw what she always saw, what she had always seen—what sick children did to their parents, what aged parents did to their kids, how worry and fear and lack of options finished off what mosquitos and land mines and bacteria began.

“Where I make mistake?” “What do you mean?” “If I do not light fire every night, mosquitos come, bring malaria. If I do not go to fields every morning, first light, I cannot feed family. If I bring daughter to fields with me, she do not learn, run, play. If I do not let her have book, she never get better life. But book make her see ashes is snow. Fire to keep away mosquito and disease no matter if she burn. I make mistake. Where?”

She tried to be doctorly. “The harder the choice, the less likely any of the options are good ones.” “Here, so many bad thing. You can protect from some but never all.” “Here and everywhere.” This was true. But here it was truer. “And always. You’ve done well by your family. Her burns will heal, and someday she will see real snow. You’ve saved that for her. And you’ve saved her for that. You’ve done very well.”

Instead, there was a wall of humidity and an infinity of screaming insects and a daughter—son—nowhere in evidence. And this was a poor trade indeed.

The trick was neither to make peace with medical intervention nor to eschew it altogether.

“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.”

“Not just middle way between male and female. Middle way of being. Middle way of living with what is hard and who do not accept you.” “How do you do that?” “You keep remember: all is change.” “All what?” “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.”

this was what stilled for her, smooth and clear as glass. 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.

Nasty fifth-graders and violent college students and ignorant playdates and people who gave you rude looks in the grocery store and missing-the-point school administrators and proponents of the hedge enemy and a wide world of not-yet-enlightened people were nothing more or less than scared. 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.

One sign had a blue person in pants. And one sign had a red person with a cute flip hairstyle in a skirt. And one sign was half of each, a person whose left, blue leg was in pants and whose right, red leg came out from under a skirt. Claude—and Poppy—stood for a long time looking at it, making sure it wasn’t a trick, making sure they understood. It seemed impossible, but here it was. For the first time in their whole, whole lives, there was a right door.

You could not avoid being who you were, could you? You could not avoid being who you were, and sometimes it destroyed you.

Poppy was going to require some repair, some mending and figuring. Life always required mending and figuring.

Rosie would have laid her hand on the woman’s shoulder to commiserate: Oh the things that hide secretly in our children, lying in wait, doing untold damage, yearning to be free. Alarming us beyond all measure.

Dispelling fear, Rosie thought. Choosing peace and calm instead of battle.

She knew that what came out of kids was often terrifying, but its coming out, rather than staying inside, was the happy ending.

They could be mindful of what was hard for everyone, not just what was hard for Poppy, the trouble all humans in the whole world had knowing who they were and what they needed and what would help the mysterious, unknowable, miraculous beings in their care. Their lives would be a different kind of fairy tale, less magic and more ambiguity, less once-upon-a-time and happily-ever-after and more in between. A middle way. In the meantime, they had to live with not knowing, got to live with not knowing, got to help other people with what they had to live with too. Tell their stories, dispel fear, let be. Amend as necessary.

“Betwixt is more complex, more twisted threads, more layers than in between.”

So instead I tried the opposite: write it down, carve it in stone. Or, if you like, paper’s just as permanent once you send it out into the world. It seems like it closes the story, settles on one ending eliminating infinite possibilities, fixes it in place, in voice, but no, it does the opposite. You write it down so others can read it, and then it can grow. You nail it to a moment so it can pass through time. A book is just a foundation. Like us. You write it down to build upon. Our love, our magic fairy-tale love, is what supports the rest of it.

The novelist in me was inspired in the first place by the debate about treating trans kids with puberty blockers, by the way loving, open-minded, well-intentioned people could reasonably come down on what seem to be opposing sides of this issue. Hormone suppressors are miracles for kids who simply cannot live in the body into which they were born. I would not suggest otherwise. Trans and gender nonconforming kids and adults suffer a suicide-attempt rate of more than 40 percent. Drugs which avert that qualify as miraculous indeed. But that doesn’t make them the only miracle on offer. Wider ranges of normal make the world a better place for everyone. To me, both those positions seem self-evidently true. Other people frame them as opposites. That’s the kind of stuff that makes you want to write a book. The novelist in me was inspired by the metaphor too, how no matter the issue, parenting always involves this balance between what you know, what you guess, what you fear, and what you imagine. You’re never certain, even (maybe especially) about the big deals, the huge, important ones with all the ramifications and repercussions. But alas, no one can make these decisions, or deal with their consequences, but you. High stakes plus unknowability equals great writing fodder.

We imagine the world we hope for and endeavor, with the greatest power we have, to bring that world into being. I wish for my child, for all our children, a world where they can be who they are and become their most loved, blessed, appreciated selves. I’ve rewritten that sentence a dozen times, and it never gets less cheesy, I suppose because that’s the answer to the question.

For my child, for all our children, I want more options, more paths through the woods, wider ranges of normal, and unconditional love. Who doesn’t want that?