Fault Lines

by Emily Itami

kids, surely, are like people. Some of them are fantastic, and some of them are shitbags.

But as soon as the children were born it was blindingly obvious—your heart can’t break unless it has something to love. The way you love your children, they take your heart with you everywhere they go. Suddenly you realize just how cruel, just how loud and brash and harsh and illogically cruel, the world is, and it turns out that other mother was right. When they laugh, when they cry, when they’re ill, when they grow, every moment they adore you and every step they take away from you—the whole thing is completely heartbreaking.

My mom followed the Japanese rule book with her progeny. The rule is, modesty to the point of self-flagellation, and since our offspring are an extension of ourselves, everything they do is subpar.

I know it has started, the end of it, like we always knew it would. The end of it was in the beginning of it.

But I suppose that’s part of love, or young love anyway—the deep desire to roll the dice and find out, always with the absurd hope, flying like a kite, that you might just be the ones who manage to hold on to each other through it all.

This is what we always do: say nothing, accept our fate, the fact that we have always known that this was in the cards.

I wish everything could go back to before the earthquake.