Status Updates From A Lie Someone Told You Abou...

When she finally settles in a lap, she looks like a hen roosting. But before she lies down, she plumps them like a pillow, working her paws, rhythmically, a behavior said to derive from kittens kneading their mothers before nursing. Perfectly normal, the internet says. Some cats will do this—to men and women alike—all their lives. Suddenly he intuits the comfort of keeping a pet even after the child leaves home.

‘But why do we give in and get them the pets?’ he wonders.

‘Because we love to see them love! Can’t get enough of it. I used to think it’s because they can never love us enough. But that’s not it. Their love for pets is a promise that they’ll love their own kids. And buy them pets! The circle of frigging life . . .’

He doesn’t feel guilty, the writer, for writing about his grandmother, or about his parents as he has also done. Who else will tell a parent’s story if not a child, after all? How else will they be remembered? To him it seems the natural order of things. Writers write against death, it is said, for posterity, for immortality. But not necessarily, or primarily, their own.

‘There is a difference between a shaky or outof-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.’ Or, as Einstein wrote in agreement: ‘One cannot get around the assumption of reality—if only one is honest.’ Both of them loath to believe that atomic randomness could give rise to real-world uncertainty. If only, the father thinks.

'Everyone’s a critic,' his wife reminded him. 'Everyone’s a critic of every-
thing.' And this is also what the internet is for, he thinks. If online porn universalizes shame, social media universalizes judgment. Both exercises in self-gratification.

Pregnancy, he recalls his wife complaining, is so fucking public. [...] People, strangers, feel free to comment on your body, to ask when you’re due, to touch your belly. She hated that, the invasion of privacy, the presumptuousness, the taint of the salacious. And babies are public—everyone craning to see into strollers, offering congratulations [...] They know one thing about you, and they think it’s everything.

Every summer now: a clear-out of old clothes and toys and books the boy
has outgrown. [...] They wade into closets, sort through storage bins, linger over tiny T-shirts, past treasures. The boy who loved them so fiercely for an hour or a week, who slept with them, bathed with them, begged for them, named them, has no sentiment about these things. It’s the mother and father who find it hard to let them go.

Later still, he will understand that all these feelings—his, his wife’s—just won’t fit between the lines, between the sides. In the political box. He doesn’t want to argue about those feelings, to defend them or justify them, he just wants to be left alone to feel them.

Sometimes his wife would sing along under her breath to the music. He never heard her sing otherwise, not even in the shower. He wasn’t sure she was aware of it. He’d be very quiet, still in his seat, not wanting to make her self-conscious by drawing attention to it, not wanting her to mind him beside her, loving her silently, as if he were glimpsing her alone.

After a recent session his wife noted: I was always brought up to think of therapy as a little, you know, shameful.
And now?
Now I think everything’s relative.

Dimly he senses this is somehow the point of the internet: to spread shame, but so broadly, so thinly, like a light coat of varnish, that we hardly notice it anymore, until we all just glow faintly with it.

They watch the boy line up and file into kindergarten. It’s his first day. They
stand on tiptoes to watch him bobbing down the corridor as long as possible. The father imagines he’s staring down it into the far future—junior high, high school, college! And then the door closes and they look at each other and wonder what they’re supposed to do now.

He thinks of his own father, teaching him stuff—math, riding a bike—the
shadow of disappointment that would cross his father’s face, when he got
something wrong, when he fell or cried. Those hot moments of shame. And
now he’s inflicting them. Passing them on like genes. And yet, they’re so
bound up in the love he feels; how to feel one, without inflicting the other?

He learns to recognizes faces. They learn to make them.
He learns to laugh. They learn to make him.
In years to come they’ll learn to sew costumes, build robots, bend balloon
animals.
'Did we make a baby?' she asks. 'Or is he making us?'
His eyes darken from blue to brown.

And what has he learned? Why, that he loves his son. The thought of losing him, that alarm bell of adrenaline and then the shudder of relief, that’s love, he thinks. His heart feels clotted with it, knotted with love, clenched and choking. The abiding fear they’ve lived with for months, that he’d thought was stalling love, was the thing itself all along. And now it stretches out before him, forever, like a sentence.

Here was a thing about numbers [...] The chance of a flipped coin coming up heads a hundred times is a half times a half times a half one hundred times. Astronomical. But on one flip, the first or the hundredth, the chances of heads are still just fifty-fifty. The coin doesn’t care how it’s fallen ninety-nine times before. The coin doesn’t give a fuck. That’s what it is to be random. That’s what chance is.