Kalina’s Reviews > A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself > Status Update

All the years of ritual—undressing and dressing, diaper changes, potty time, bath time, tooth brushing, reading, hugs and kisses—are so exhausting. If they don’t fall asleep beside him, whoever is on bedtime duty stumbles downstairs, announces wearily, 'And that concludes today’s parenting.' Until the next day, and the next and the next. As if it were a curse and not a blessing. As if it really were forever.

He’ll still need a 'bop' sometimes, as he calls it, an arm-flinging, wrist-
flapping, kicking up of heels. A caper, a gambol, a rumpus. Leap of faith, and jump for joy. Sometimes they’ll even join in, breathless with love.

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.