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.

Or maybe Rosie and Penn just liked babies, their promise and chaos and mess, the way babies all started the same and almost instantly became entirely different. Rosie loved the high-pitched

pandemonium of her big, sprawling family, muddled love filling up their farmhouse-clubhouse, a cacophony only she could make out, a whirling storm with her and Penn, grinning together, spinning together, at the center.

“I didn’t say I wanted to date a poet. I said one should date a poet. A theoretical one. A theoretical poet. Everyone in my program is hooking up with everyone else in my program, and then you’re dating some overcaffeinated, overextended, exhausted egomaniac who finally gets a day off and uses it to study. My point was date someone who sleeps instead, someone who thinks slowly and deeply and talks in words that don’t need to be memorized from flash cards. A poet. But I didn’t mean it. I don’t have the energy or the time. That’s why residents are always sleeping with each other. They’re the only ones who fit into each other’s schedules.”

Three of his four children were naked, which, while one step closer to pajamas, was still a long way off from bed.

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.

“Never,” Penn agreed. “Not ever. Not once. You never know. You only guess. This is how it always is. 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.”

They were, bless them, too self-involved to be invested in Claude’s identity crisis.

This is also everyone always. "people are mostly thinking about themselves."

They liked to chase each other around the house but in tutus and high heels, and when they caught you at the end, they just hugged you and giggled and laughed together instead of making a big thing about who was a loser and sitting on your head and farting. Poppy could not understand why everyone in

the whole world didn’t want to be a girl.

you don’t have to like everyone. Find who’s fun and smart and safe, and stick with them.

“You? Nothing. You’ve done too much already. She has to do. And she’s already done. Step one is come out.” “Done,” she conceded. “However unwillingly. What’s step two?” “Step two is get rejected by lots of people and feel just terrible about it.” “Also done. What’s step three?” “Step three is where it gets fun. Step three is moving on.” “How long does that take?” she sulked. “It takes a whole lifetime”—Mr. Tongo sounded overjoyed as usual—“so it’s a good thing she’s starting early.”

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.”

“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.”

As she took her husband in her arms, Rosie also took a moment to savor the smell of him, the feel of his hand in her hand, the way in which he was hers, for sure and forever. She remembered the high school years when she didn’t have a boyfriend and the college years when she had one but he was mean to her and the first years

again, and she remembered the feel of the wall on her back at the middle school dances when her friends got asked and she didn’t and the boy she liked chose someone else, and she felt how it was all worth it if it earned her, if it won her, if it resulted, karmically, narratively, miraculously, in Penn at last, Penn forever, Penn who was always and only and always hers, certain as sky.