Jun 07, 2011 Parenting: This be the curse
I’ve been slowly working through Five Dials‘s Parenting Issue, mostly on the train and likely to the dismay of commuters who’ve had to endure the gasps and facial contortions elicited by each revelation it contains. Parents not only fuck you up, it seems they like to indulge in near-incoherent pathography detailing how you’re the source of the disease—to wit, you fuck them up too. Yet I keep returning to the magazine as to some past humiliation in need of fresh perspective or just some more worrying. Plus, I am not (yet?) a parent and need something to offset the takeaway (so far) that love of one’s child is the greatest affliction of all. (Maybe that upset comes at the end.)
This post started as an excuse to share an unexpectedly funny excerpt from Darin Strauss‘s essay, or “eleven thoughts,” on raising twin boys—a four-sentence story of the type I imagine writerly fathers to find comfort in:
The novelist Italo Svevo is said to have come back alone from a trip to an amusement park to which he’d taken his son. “Where’s the boy?” his wife asked…. “Oh, no!”—Svevo grabbing his coat and hat. “I’ll be right back.”
But I kept going back to Philip Larkin, whom Strauss invoked in his thought #7:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.
So I took a break, and came across this story by a news reporter who donned diving gear to photograph the debris at the bottom of Yamada Bay, Iwate Prefecture, an area hard hit by the tsunami. I haven’t been able to shake this image since.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf…