We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

A child needs your love most when he deserves it least. —Erma Bombeck

What we talk about is what we think about, is what our lives are about.

Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.

After all, now that children don’t till your fields or take you in when you’re incontinent, there is no sensible reason to have them, and it’s amazing that with the advent of effective contraception anyone chooses to reproduce at all.

So I wasn’t only afraid of becoming my mother, but a mother. I was afraid of being the steadfast, stationary anchor who provides a jumping-off place for another young adventurer whose travels I might envy and whose future is still unmoored and unmapped. I was afraid of being that archetypal figure in the doorway—frowzy, a little plump—who waves good-bye and blows kisses as a backpack is stashed in the trunk; who dabs her eyes with an apron ruffle in the fumes of departing exhaust; who turns forlornly to twist the latch and wash the too-few dishes by the sink as the silence in the room presses down like a dropped ceiling. More than of leaving, I had developed a horror of being left.

is silence more than the complaint itself that makes the emotion so toxic, like poisons the body won’t pee away.

If its shine had tarnished, this was still a life I loved, and one into which children didn’t readily fit.

This woman was fuming, Franklin; she clearly muttered about her abdominal muscles when she seethed down the street. Yet at no point did she mention the name of her child, its sex, its age, or its father.

My approach to parenthood was conditional, and the conditions were strict. I did not want to mother an imbecile or a paraplegic; whenever I saw fatigued women wheeling their stick-limbed progeny with muscular dystrophy for water therapy at Nyack Hospital, my heart didn’t melt, it sank.

All very easy for you to want to be a Daddy, to buy into all that stuffed-bunny schlock, when I was the one who had to blow up like a sow, I was the one who had to turn into a goody-two-shoes teetotaler sucking down vitamins, I was the one who had to watch her breasts get puffy and bloated and sore when they used to be so neat and close, and I was the one who would be ripped to ribbons ramming a watermelon through a passage the size of a garden hose. I did, I hated you and your little coos and mumbles, I wished you’d stop patting my brow with that damp washcloth as if it made the slightest bit of difference, and I think I knew I was hurting your hand.

In the very instant of his birth, I associated Kevin with my own limitations—with not only suffering, but defeat.

But if I extracted one lesson from my tenth birthday party, it was that expectations are dangerous when they are both high and unformed.

Most of all, he seemed hidden from me, while your experience was one of sunny, leisurely access.

One too many sojourns—this one launched less in a spirit of exploration than simply to make a point, to prove that my life had not changed, that I was still young, still curious, still free—was only proving beyond doubt that my life had indeed changed, that at forty-one I was not remotely young, that I had truly sated a certain glib curiosity about other countries, and that there was a variety of liberty of which I could no longer avail myself without sinking the one tiny island of permanence, of durable meaning and lasting desire, that I had managed to annex in this vast, arbitrary sea of international indifference.

But in retrospect, I do feel obliged to observe that I was at my most passionate about our son when he was not there.

While a cruder name for this process is lying, one could make a case that delusion is a variant of generosity. After all, you practiced rounding up on Kevin from the day he was born.

They were in hell, too, but it was everybody’s hell, this big, shoreless, sloshing sea of toxic waste.

You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good.”

Our case—his case, really—was pearled around the proposition that I had been a normal mother with normal maternal affections who had taken normal precautions to ensure that she raised a normal child. Whether we were the victims of bad luck or bad genes or bad culture was a matter for shamans or biologists or anthropologists to divine, but not the courts.

An intelligent child takes the calculus of this-time-I’m-serious-so-last-time-I-wasn’t to its limit and concludes that all his mother’s warnings are horseshit.

I craved some physical emblem of my earlier self if only to remind me that I had deserted that life by choice and might return to it at will.

I was proud of my life, and while I told myself that through an accomplished mother Kevin might find pride in himself, I probably just wanted him to be proud of me. I still had no idea what a tall order for any parent that could turn out to be.

Two inches. Does anyone ever give the woman credit for the twenty-four-hours-minus-three-minutes a day that she has watched that child like a hawk?

For the months, the years’ worth of don’t-put-that-in-your-mouth-sweeties, of whoops!- we-almost-fell-downs? Oh, no. We prosecute these people, we call it “criminal parental negligence” and drag them to court through the snot and salty tears of their own grief. Because only the three minutes count, those three miserable minutes that were just enough.

“It’s always the mother’s fault, ain’t it?” she said softly, collecting her coat. “That boy turn out bad cause his mama a drunk, or she a junkie. She let him run wild, she don’t teach him right from wrong. She never home when he back from school. Nobody ever say his daddy a drunk, or his daddy not home after school. And nobody ever say they some kids just damned mean. Don’t you believe that old guff. Don’t you let them saddle you with all that killing.”

“It hard to be a momma. Nobody ever pass a law say ’fore you get pregnant you gotta be perfect. I’m sure you try the best you could. You here, in this dump, on a nice Saturday afternoon? You still trying. Now you take care of yourself, honey. And you don’t be talking any more a that nonsense.”

In a country that doesn’t discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.

What Kevin did Thursday and what I did in Claverack’s waiting room today depart only in scale. Yearning to feel special, I was determined to capture someone’s attention, even if I had to use the murder of nine people to get it.

But trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one.

Your blindness to the fact that Kevin displayed neither interest nor aptitude in any of these sports nagged me a bit, but I was mostly disappointed that you didn’t ever covet the same quality time with your wife.