Fault Lines

by Emily Itami

I shudder. “That would be me,” I lament. “I’d be worrying that I’d look like a dick if I ran away too fast, so I’d stay and die instead.”

Surprisingly, I’m not indiscriminately into children and babies—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.