Honey I [mebbe] lost [one of] the kids

Victorian house problems

To new Kafkaites, welcome! The point of all this is to put regular existential parenting freakouts on a pedestal and ask: is this art? I sometimes talk about smart books and often just share stories about the cuckoo-banana-farm that is This Life. Take it from fans like my mum, who have raved: “Was that in Jafka’s Baby?”

As you may know, we moved mid-pandemic from Brooklyn to Troy, N.Y., and into a Victorian house large enough to house someone else’s grandma for the first two months of our tenure. It has a basement, a ground floor, a second floor — the grandma’s ghostly abode during the occupation — and a converted attic where the kids sleep. Whether or not you just moved from an apartment with a single toilet that your children used to pee into at the same time, the house seems, let’s say, quite large.

I was loading the car and packing bags a few Fridays ago for a pilgrimage to Brooklyn, when I came downstairs and couldn’t find Japhy, 5. I simply did not know where he was.

I checked all the hiding spots — under the beds, behind the doors, in random cupboards and behind our plastic claw-footed tub. Not having found him in any flower pots or laundry hampers, I repeated the circuit, tearing out the floating drawers from under the beds and yelling his name louder than before. The day had been quite average — just me stuffing sawn-off Gap pajama bottoms into Japhy’s Lightning McQueen suitcase, lest his legs get too hot at the sleepover — but shifted here into something else. I’ve lost my wedding ring, some diamond earrings, dozens of ATM cards, and, briefly, my car, but none of those really mattered; not knowing where your child is warps the actual walls.

Suddenly, you are in a strange house where the possibilities take different shapes. Before, a child can't have disapparated from the second floor, but now, you wonder if he has slid out a window jam or found his way into the sheetrock.

After three loops of the house, turns around the yard and the neighbor's yard, and a quick dash to the school down the road, I resigned myself to texting Noodles the thing you don't ever want to have to text your partner-slash-lost Sting lyrics:

I can’t find Japhy

I just don't know where he is

I'm going to call the police

I called the local police number, not 9-1-1, unsure if there was really a difference but trying not to overreact in case Japhy had somehow just crawled inside the Cornflakes box. I used to operate dispatch for ski patrol some days, and next to the emergency line, there was always the other phone for just people wanting to know if the beer fridge had been refilled in the locker room.

"Troy police, is this an emergency?" said the woman who picked up.

Was it?

"Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I don't know," I said in a high-pitched full-body shrug. "I'm in my house, but I can't find my child."

"Hold please," she said, adding the code for that into her system. 

The two police who showed up clinked like medieval knights under their badges and guns and aviators. "Kid's always in the house," said the first, opening his notepad. "What is the child wearing?"

"Ummmm, Yankees clothes? Pinstripes?" I guessed. "I"m not sure. Shorts and a t-shirt?"

"What does he look like," asked the policeman, trying a more fruitful tack.

"He has red hair and he's 5," I told him. My last picture of him shimmered from view.

They asked if I gave permission for them to look in the house, and I agreed with relief. Please, yes, do the work of parenting for me. 

When they couldn't find him, and another four units pulled up in front of our house, I started to really worry. Where was he? As a direwolf leapt out of the K9 truck and onto the front lawn, I saw the entire house cast in a different color, each dormer now menacing and shadowy. The police asked me to put Scout inside our car so that her scent wouldn't be on the ground, that bizarro crime scene. Still holding onto a semblance of calm, I tried to think of a fun way to get her to climb into the car so the sniffer dog could search for her brother. "Why can't they find Japhy?" she asked, peering out from his carseat.

Japhy's face mask was still on the front porch where he had done the Judd Nelson toss-off on return from school, so the German shepherd had something to work with. The second the trainer had him smell it, he lurched. "The kid is in the house," said the trainer.

The dog yanked his master straight through the front door — if we had a paid account for our Nest doorbell camera, we'd have that photo forever — and upstairs to the second floor. The call came over the radio shortly afterward: "He's here."

"WHERE?!" I said, feeling like a useless suburban mum with Too Much House to keep track of her children.

In our bedroom, it turned out.

He was lying straight as a pencil under a small undulation of blanket at the edge of the unmade bed, a topographic remnant of me sliding out that morning in the usual fog.

To have been missed by me, his sister, and an army of kettlebell devotees, he had to remain exceptionally flat and still. That Japhy lay that way for 45 minutes, straining against his constant urge to sing "Old Town Road," is almost beyond belief. No one has since seen him manage it.

I ran up to find him flat-bodied, peeking out of the blanket like a Hasbro Gloworm with the cheeky doll face at the end. I had to give my details to the cop left to scribble down the notes, then turned to Japhy. “Why were you hiding! Didn’t you hear me calling you?”

The reason — one I had posed to the police as a possible lead — was that he was due to get his Covid-19 booster that afternoon at the mall. Somewhere, I assume we appeared as line item on a local Fox News station that night.

Children do these things, of course. I recently read Nothing To See Here, by Kevin Wilson, about a girl suckered into looking after the twins of a politician who really needs them to be kept under wraps. Why? They tend to burst into flames when angry. It’s a strange and lovely story about how you learn to be a parent, knowing your kids will absolutely fuck things up at some point, and that no amount of fire retardant or flame-proof clothing (no parenting manual or boilerplate philosophy) will save you:

“They burned and burned, like they were eternal. But I knew that it would die down, that it could fade away, back inside them, wherever it hid. I knew that soon they would turn back into the kids I knew so well, their weird bodies and tics. I didn’t try to catch them or put them out. I let them burn. I sat on the porch, a perfect day, and watched them burn. Because I knew that when it was over, when the fire disappeared, they would come right back to me.”

After our adventure with the police, Noodles got a ride home from work, and we then had to head to the vaccination site since, you know, we couldn’t let Japhy get out of it now.

Japhy made his third visit to the dinosaur panic room at the state-run vaccination site, had a full-body meltdown during The Shot (also for the third time), and we then walked him to the pediatric monitoring area, where a movie was playing. I sat in my plastic chair, six feet from each of my kids, glad it was finally over, eyes softening on the free boxes of rapid tests on a table by the exit.

“They’re chopping up body parts!” wailed Japhy, and we turned our heads to the screen — a grisly death march from, I believe, Pirates of the Caribbean. I double-checked and yes, we were in the children’s recovery area.

On the way out, I let him pick up a new box of LEGO.

Why I expected my son, who was not wearing Yankees gear while missing in my house, to be most likely wearing Yankees gear

School: “colour these shapes”

Japhy:

Goodies

I’m still waiting on the great male postpartum novel, as I write in an essay about Teddy Wayne’s The Great Man Theory, Keith Gessen’s Raising Raffi, and other dad-lit for Literary Hub.

Loved Bathtub Mermaid from Edith Zimmerman.

For the Washington Post, I also reviewed Normal Family, a memoir deriving from a viral story about a sperm donor who “fathered” 36 kids — actually an interesting look at how parents “make” families through generating stories, and in some cases literally paying people to show up and act as parental figures.

Elif Batuman on why we must understand women’s stories as political: “As a child, I had felt oppressed by the news: by the way the mood in the room shifted when men came on TV, to speak of the great deeds of other men, and by the aura of gravitas that surrounded these deeds, which seemed to annihilate every other aspect of life, the whole domestic sphere, all the things that children and women took seriously.”

Nice profile by Esther Kim of Krysten Lynch, a Korean adoptee farmer who is developing seeds for native Korean crops in California.

Did you ever read the story of the last hermit?

Japhy just Facetimed his buddy in Troy from Australia, where we are ~summering~ with my family and some cardboard cutouts of ourselves, and a good portion of the call consisted of them each trying aggressively to hum their favorite song louder than the other. The songs were: “The Imperial March” by John Williams, and the Jurassic Park theme song, also by John Williams. The majesty:

Thank you for reading KAFKA’S BABY <3 <3 <3