Every night, S turns to a fresh page in her diary—pink with purple lines—and puts in her secrets. She asks me if I would ever read her diary, and the answer is no. “That’s your space, like your bedroom is yours,” I say. But I couldn’t read it anyway because she writes in invisible ink in the shaft of a UV pen light given to her by a Cool Aunt. She is never ready for tuck-in; instead, she is hunched over her white desk in her Winnie the Pooh dressing gown, angling her secrets in clear ink under the beam of neon purple. Getting it all down.
J has no secrets. He sings in the bath with the door open. Sometimes he works at his desk, because he has seen his sister doing so, but when he turns to a blank page his instinct is to replicate the golden arches of a McDonalds, the Target sign, a Lego stormtrooper minifig. That is his work. So concluded, he climbs the rungs of his bunkbed, casting around for reasons to delay tuck-in, and demands to be fed a dream. It’s all open-source.
S doesn’t want a dream, she wants a story from my childhood. Something the adults wouldn’t approve of. I tell her about my secret pet mouse, the time I broke the clothesline trying to use it like a trapeze, the night I snuck out to trick or treat and got only homemade peppermints (my mum, who got me my first Judy Blume books, maintains her disapproval of the tradition: “Halloween is American.”). I had a series of diaries with little metal locks on them as a kid, but usually lost the key before I wrote anything in them. In the ‘80s, you didn’t need a place to put secrets, the afterschool hours and overlit stretch of weekend were full of cubby holes. My parents had their projects, drove the trailer here and there, went out to the tip and back, and we kids would disappear into the neighborhood or up into the bush. In the mornings on the way to school on our bikes, we’d careen through ditches and lift our feet off the pedals while thundering down the bridge, sometimes slamming onto the bar of the BMX partway through an almighty stack, a mallet to the mouth of your pelvis that took your breath away.
*
I got two books recently: Raising a Highly Sensitive Child and Raising Your Spirited Child. If you could drill all the way down into the particular temperamental niche of your child (raising your Sagittarius, second-born, spirited, Gen Alpha, post-Obama, COVID-kindergartened child), you might get a truly useful parenting book. The books do offer some good takeaways into the terroir of each child’s basic brain, their triggers and patterns, and I want to be a Good Parent and do a Good Job so I read them. But I can see how plumbing every psychological gap edges on Truman Show-ish. Too much a play.
When I walk the kids to school, I can see how I’m a bad cutout, dragging pieces of the sky and background along with me, leaving the kids only a tiny shoal to cross by themselves before moving into the custody of the teachers.
*
We had a grownup secret for 24 hours back in fall, when a girl was taken from a campground not too far away while riding her bicycle under the giant trunks of the pine trees. The amber alert bleeped on everyone’s phones, and soon the governor was at the podium, and every adult in the area had their antennas up. We could all picture the flat rectangle of dirt for the tents, the sideways light coming across the pond at the end of the day while they all frantically ran around the camping loop yelling her name. We adults texted about it with our phones tilted away from the children, waited for updates and theories. I’ll be honest, I searched Reddit. We weren’t going to tell the kids, but they found out about it the next day at school anyway, since it was major Kid News. One of their own. Some real gossip for once.
That night, I saw the news break that the FBI had found the girl alive. “Guess what,” I told J as I was getting ready to tuck him in, “they found that girl and she’s OK!”
“Oh!” he said, excited, “was she tied to a chair?”
GEEBUS. (She kind of was though: they found her in a closet in a trailer-home behind the kidnapper’s mum’s trailer-home.)
*
J refuses to lose a tooth that is swiveled 90-degrees around in his gums. It hangs over the page as he focuses on a drawing of Captain America at bedtime. He won’t let us help, insists on climbing on my back with it flapping around in his mouth.
*
“I don’t tell you everything,” S says to me as she tap-dances along in her rollerblades, wearing knee pads, elbow pads, wrist guards, and a shark helmet. Which is a way of making sure like she feels like she has told me everything. When she lied, she used to immediately dissolve into a bent-over laugh that left her totally boneless, tonsils clacking as air wheezed in and out. She’s getting better at lying now. Good.
Notes:
from the prologue to Liar’s Club: “We may remember how, in childhood, adults were able at first to look right through us, and into us, and what an accomplishment it was when we, in fear and trembling, could tell our first lie, and make for ourselves, the discovery that we are irredeemably alone in certain respects, and know that within the territory of ourselves, there can only be our own footprints.” —R.D. Laing, The Divided Self
Goodies
🐛 Did anyone else get Heinrich Boll The Clown vibes from the Apple Vision Pro videos?
“Each excited or bewildered observation posted from within the helmet implies, instead, a series of gently absurd vignettes, observed by nobody: a user sitting on the edge of his bed for hours, pinching his fingers in the air; a man at a desk missing the rim of his cup with his lips before clonking it into his headset; a guy “holding” a video in front of his face, like an invisible tablet, so he can keep watching while he walks around his kitchen" - John Hermann
🐛
quoting Constance Debré’s novel Love Me Tender in an essay on self-determination:“If people want to believe that women have a connection to the Moon, to nature, a special instinct that forces them to cling to motherhood and give up everything else, that’s their business. But I’m not interested. There’s no such thing as a mother.”
🐛I know that you know that I love Jenny True, but man, I love Jenny True. Here’s the latest, in which her husband’s van is finally towed away for being unregistered:
“We gathered the car seat, a jeans jacket of one of Silver’s friends, the toy boats on the dashboard. We forgot the USB-plug-slash-seatbelt-cutter for when you drive into a lake. The meter maid, startled by how friendly we were (SJ said later that when he’d come out of the house, the guy wouldn't make eye contact with him – ‘They get so much abuse,’ SJ said), stammered that I had been so friendly that if the tow truck driver hadn't been there right away, he would have let us off with a warning. We watched the van bump down the street.”
🐛This episode of Cool Story had me crack up out loud at Bridie’s 6-year-old telling her he was not coming home from his grandparents’ house, ever. (Nice poddie for book recs and a bit of aussie piss-taking.)
I’m a man but it has been my observation that womens parenthood instinct is different from men’s parenthood instinct and mothers react differently from fathers to various things. In general on average etc etc. but it feels to me like there’s some nature there, aligning with certain well known natural differences in parental biology. So maybe I disagree with Ms Debre
Whatcha gonna do with that tooth?