Happy and You Know It

by Laura Hankin

At times like these, Claire thought that maybe God did exist, not as some benevolent being or terrifying father, but as the omniscient equivalent of a prank show host.

To Claire, babies were like seeds. Interesting for what they might grow into but, for the moment, just dry, dull kernels. If she had to stare at a seed all day, she’d go insane.

She was pretty sure she didn’t want children at all. The idea of a tiny person’s life depending on her was enough to make her queasy.

To date, through a lethal combination of neglect and fear, she’d murdered her childhood goldfish (RIP, Princess Leia), six houseplants, various romantic relationships, and her career.

Introducing two people who were both grade A excellent was one of life’s great joys.

they weren’t primed from birth like women were, told that they could be anything they wanted to be while handicapped at every turn by invisible forces, told that they were more than just their looks while also culturally programmed to believe that their value was tied to their desirability. Men aged into silver foxes while women aged into obsolescence.

Because even though fathers stamped children with their last names, the world didn’t ask as much of them. No one really expected fathers to consider giving up their careers to put their children first, to stop managing a company and start managing a household. Women had to grapple with a choice that men never did while remaining uncomplaining and generous so that they didn’t nag their husbands straight into the arms of less complicated lovers.

Modern women of privilege had to claim that their manic exercise routines were about strength, not a body ideal; that their beauty regimens were all natural, designed for emotional balance and skin health,...

the same old patriarchal bullshit dressed up ...

But a woman could be charming, immensely intelligent, ambitious, strong, and head-turningly gorgeous, and if she screwed up her parenting, the world deemed her a piece of shit.

Maybe, over the course of even the best marriages, you acquired a collection of secrets that you walled off in a little section of your heart where your partner would never be allowed to go. And you did everything you could to keep the walled-off section small, to keep the secrets from slipping out of it and pervading all that was good and open and free in the rest of your heart, and you just made it work.

God, maybe that was why people had children. Because they wanted someone who had to sit with them and feed the ducks, no matter how doddering or uninteresting they got.

They knew they were supposed to shoulder their transformation uncomplainingly and selflessly, like “good” mothers, while also maintaining the body weight and grooming habits of a Disney Channel ingenue. It made a lot of them a little crazy, and it made some of them a lot crazy. Sometimes, a mother couldn’t hack it. She gave up and scared the shit out of everyone else.

Amara took Charlie to every outdoor activity for children that she could find, plowing through her exhaustion like it was a cornfield and she was a motherfucking tractor trailer.