On the thirteenth hour of the thirteenth day of the thirteenth month of the plague, my son refused to ride his balance bike any further. We were on the way home from school, my daughter on her pedal bike, and her brother in his low-rider that requires him to scoot with his feet, a very modest improvement on using an office wheelie chair as transportation. So he had had enough. After ten minutes of trying out the trick of offering two bad options as a choice (“you can walk, or you can ride”), I decided to just pick him up, pick up the bike, and muscle it home. I staggered 15 steps. “I have to put you down,” I declared, then stood staring at the pieces of the problem: six years earlier, my ovaries had released an egg, and it had snowballed into two children, two backpacks, and sundry helmets and gloves and chrome sections and ego complexes here on the pavement. A storage locker had erupted from an ovary, was the sum of it. What to do.
Struck by a fresh wind of confidence, I set about looping the bike handlebars through the strap of my son’s backpack, hoisting it onto my shoulders, and then picking him up. I made it all of one and a half blocks like this — the bike doinking my calves with every step, a giant koala on my front — then put him down again at a traffic light on a street corner that, coincidentally, often smells like doughnuts. He stamped his feet and screeched “I’m tired!” with his arms outstretched, his sister by now crying because his screaming hurt her ears, and the ground turning to lava around us. “I will pick you up when the light changes,” I said for his benefit and that of the gallery of onlookers, playing the role of Sisyphus Who Set The Ball Down For A Moment, intent on dragging the thing behind him like a bag of laundry when the whistle sounded. That’s when she piped up. The crossing guard in her neon vest and NYPD beanie.
“You’re babying him!” she told me, and turned her full authority on Japhy: “Your legs work, young man.” To me again: “He’s playing you. You’ve got to make him walk.” The lights changed. She made hurried gestures at me. “Keep walking, he’ll follow.”
I gave her a polite nod, and attempted to tug my crying son and daughter across four lanes of traffic as the bicycle dragged behind us like an anchor. I knew that to anyone other than me, my son’s character sketch at this point was just a chaotic scribble. Nuance had been lost. “Make him walk!” the crossing guard said again, and I smiled harder inside my mask out of politesse and shame, the curb on the other side retreating further into the distance with every step we took.
How many insects were born and died while we were crossing that road? How many distant stars were smote? Three-quarters of the way across, I began to feel relief that at least we would be out of sight soon and could resume the trek home in our natural form as a three-headed beast. But the crossing guard followed us up the curb. “You can’t give in to him,” she said again. “You walk, he’ll follow, just wait and see.” She waved me on, intent on delivering this lesson. “Don’t worry, I’ve got him, go.”
I took a few steps forward and the screams intensified but sure enough my 4-year-old followed me as if attached by bungee. A few more steps, more screaming and he tottered to catch up to me. The crossing guard, too, moved in bursts to catch up, the distances between us all opening and closing, a monstrous caterpillar inching along the perimeter of Western Beef. Having reached an invisible boundary, the guard retreated to her territory. Mercifully, my son begged to get back on his bike at the corner. We pushed on, everyone’s face pinched and red.
Was she right? Was I babying him? And if so, was this a lesson I needed to learn right then? These are questions I pondered when the crossing guard sang out at me on Friday morning from underneath the Checkers awning, directing traffic from 20 feet back, safe from the rain, her mask strung across her chin. What does this person — a full snowdrift away from her jurisdiction, tilting at cars — know about how to parent my kids? Doesn’t she know we are living out our own inscrutable adventure? This is all part of the plan, lady! I went down a wee rabbit hole looking into the lore of crossing guards. Once appointed, they “must complete six days of training at the Police Academy.” I would like to see this movie. And to be fair I like this person, who has the power to stop cars with just a flick of the wrist, parting the waves so people who barely clear the bumper can safely scoot across the road.
Hullo, I waved back, strolling with her blessing through a Do Not Walk signal and into a microclimate of doughnuts. I don’t really believe in blanket parenting advice, though I do like to hear it dispensed in the form of stories[2]. This is mine. (“Advice is a form of nostalgia” — Mary Schmidt.)
*
I just read a smart book that isn’t out for a while so I’m probably not supposed to tease it just yet (more soon), but in it the author talks about how families are, in sum, X number of different realities; a set of competing narratives, each member imagining themselves at the center of the action. Some of us are more at the center than others, but! — that there are four Odysseys taking place in my household feels truer than anything else I’ve read. What alt-narratives are at work in my kids’ heads? I’d much rather hear about those than think about what kind of parent I am (Japhy, after working on a problem for a few days: “I’ve figured out who is Batman — it’s Bruce Springsteen.”).
Also there is really just too much “parenting” taking place altogether at this moment in time to worry about strategy — am I really in charge of keeping the markers away from the furniture again for five hours today? Nooooo.
If you fancy a nice escape to a world where parents are on the distant periphery, get yourself a copy of Swallows and Amazons, a 1930s story about some kids holidaying in the north of England on a lake. The kids sail out to an island to set up camp, and imagine they are explorers fighting pirates (n.b., it’s very colonial). “Mother” visits them once or twice — here, she is trying to get her daughter Titty to come back to the mainland, and skirting the electrical fence between offering safe harbor and ruining the game:
Mother got into the boat, and pushed off with an oar.
“Good-bye, Robinson Crusoe,” she said.
“Good-bye, Man Friday,” said Titty. “It was very jolly having you here. I hope you like my island.”
“Very much indeed,” said mother.
She rowed slowly away. Titty ran up to the look-out point to wave. Mother rowed past it. The island was suddenly very lonely indeed. Titty changed her mind.
“Mother,” she called.
Mother stopped rowing.
“Want to come?” she called.
But in that moment Titty remembered again that she was not merely Robinson Crusoe, who had a right to be rescued by a passing ship, but was also Able-seaman Titty, who had to hoist the lantern on the big tree behind her, so that the others could find the island in the dark, and then to light the leading lights so that they could bring their prize into the harbour.
“No,” she called. “Only good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” called mother.
“Good-bye,” called Titty. She lay down on the look-out point, and watched mother through the telescope. Suddenly she found that she could not see her. She blinked, pulled out her hankerchief, and wiped first the telescope glass and then her eye.
“Duffer,” she said. “That’s with looking too hard. Try the other eye.”
Return to the thirteenth hour and view our hero Japhy, run aground on Franklin Avenue, from another vantage point: “Ulysses was not within; he was on the sea-shore as usual, looking out upon the barren ocean with tears in his eyes, groaning and breaking his heart for sorrow.” Would that someone with golden sandals would patch his little boat instead of, I don’t know, lecturing him!
We are all between two shores, trying to rebuild our boats as we go. What I need isn’t someone standing in the bow telling me how to do it better, but a person seated in the boat with me, playing a song on his lute. Whatever happened to the lute guys?
EPILOGUE:
(Much later)
OUTSIDE. ON THE RIVER STYX.
Ferryman, wearing a mask on her chin: Your arms work! Row!
Me, giving a polite nod of the head as I grip the oars: Mornin’.
Notes:
[Photo at top] I was attempting to photograph a pair of cardinals but, when I looked back through my camera roll I noticed this wren(?) hung in the sky like an ornament. My phone did a “live” capture of the seconds before and after the snapshot, and the bird flew through so fast I don’t think I even saw it at the time. I love how casual it looks floating mid-air, wings by its side, as though it’s late to get to the post office.
SPEAKING OF WHICH, one of my personal gods and favorite writers, Jenny True, has a book coming out in May called You Look Tired : An Excruciatingly Honest Guide to New Parenthood. There was a bit in it about a nurse tending to a perineum that sent me into a fit of giggles I couldn’t escape. It’s so so good, and you can pre-order here, if you fancy The Truth with a bonus of side-cramps.
How it happened
Keeping the dream alive in a pandemic:
The breach!
The photographer Xavi Bou came up with a way of photographing bird flight that wasn’t “bird bird bird” — you can see it here. I thought it was p. fab.
“Like a Slice of Ham” — Erin Maqlaque.
“To The Mother Whose Toddler Wrecked Her Castle” — Heather Lanier, of “Superbabies Don’t Cry” fame, in Off Assignment’s strangers series.
And a death academia update, from a convo on cosmism in e-flux: “For [Tsiolkovsky], death was an ecstatic, euphoric event: he thought that death/entropy is the moment when the atoms that make up our bodies are liberated from a finite form, and that they are happy in this moment of emancipation. Following Aristotle, Tsiolkovsky believes that atoms can experience happiness and sadness. This is related to panpsychism, a very ancient, animistic worldview which holds that all matter is capable of feeling and thinking.” I bet my children’s flattened monogrammed Pottery Barn armchairs cannot wait for emancipation.
Thank you for reading KAFKA’S BABY <3 I would love to hear from you about anything at all!