Warm Recollection #4
More from the Bitz files...
As introduced here, these Warm Recollection posts are random cullings from thirty years of notes files…
There are no grown-ups. None. On any given day, in any given situation, the question is merely whether one feels like a child happily at home with contented parents, in that blessed and comfortable nest of remembrance, or instead like a kid on their first day at a big and frightening new school… or whereabouts in between.
Childhood is not the best days of your life — they are the only days of your life.
That feeling you get, between Christmas and New Year, of infinite possibility — a pleasurable anticipation of returning to real life, and work. It all seems so possible. Then, on the day when you get up and actually step into this new year, that feeling is suddenly wobbly, insubstantial, as if it was something from a dream.
In a bar: Wife in her fifties looking at her husband and (in my mind, judging by her facial expression) thinking: “Wow, after all these years, you’re still an asshole. I never did cure you of that. And I didn’t stop loving your either. How does that make sense?”
A different man on another table meanwhile talks to his wife as if she’s some guy who he likes, but either works with or met in this same bar two hours ago.
They are all Schrödinger’s Novels: as soon as you start thinking about an idea — never mind working on it — you begin to change it. To lessen it. To fuck it up.
It doesn’t matter how much your parents loved you, there will have been times when they would have cheerfully dropped you in a blender. This doesn’t undermine their love: in fact, it is what makes it so extraordinary. Parental love is forged in a tough, hot furnace. That’s why it lasts. Add to thatm the fact that — as with our love for pets and other animals — this love is formed non-verbally. Love is not a conversation.
As always, if you can think of anyone who might enjoy this Substack, please spread the word.
I hit the parent lottery, pretty much. My parents love (d) me. But they don't respect me, and I sincerely think that my mom holds me in serious contempt, and it's all her fault that I am shit daughter. So many people don't have it that good. So many.
Out of the blue one day, dad says to me, "You know, you've given us a lot of trouble, but at least you've never been in jail.". Mom is appalled, but I know a Dad Compliment when I hear one. Though I am also thinking What fucking trouble??
I find adulting much less stressful when I keep at the forefront of my mind that all grown-ups are just kids cosplaying as adults. It's the equivalent of imagining the audience naked when you're anxious about performing: we're all more alike than not at our core (teenagers, on the other hand, are a different breed entirely).