Wild Dark Shore

But here is the nature of life. That we must love things with our whole selves, knowing they will die.

Maybe we will drown or burn or starve one day, but until then we get to choose if we’ll add to that destruction or if we will care for each other.

I understand it so simply now, it is a love that lives in the body but unlike the body it never dissolves. It lasts forever.

But the dandelion—this single flower that has given nourishment to countless other living creatures—is considered a weed.

To live for your children seems a normal thing, a respectable one; to live because of your children is something else.

What a mystery it was to me then: how she knew what temperature to keep the room overnight and what to dress the babies in so they’d be warm but not overly so, how she knew when to give paracetamol for a fever, and what times they needed to sleep depending on how old they were, and when to bring them into our beds for cuddles and when to be strict about sleep skills, and what the fuck sleep skills are, and not to use soap in their baths, and to try olive oil for the cradle cap, and which foods were safe for starting solids, and exactly how to serve them. How did she know all of this? It must have been built in, that’s what I thought. When Orly came along and it was just me, I realized how she’d known. She’d fucking learned. She’d had to, because somebody had to keep the babies alive, and so she bloody well got on with it.

Maybe that's what being a parent is. Expanding to be more. Asking of yourself more, for them.

I close my eyes, drinking it all in, knowing it is a place in time that I will never forget. The world is dangerous and we will not survive it. But there is this. Impermanent as it may be.

I think I finally understand your words. It’s just a body. They hold on or they don’t. You’re right, it’s nothing to be frightened of. Mine will become the salt of this water. And every time you swim it will be me upon your skin.

There is such peril in loving things at all, and he feels sort of proud, in fact, that he just keeps on doing it.

Here is the nature of life, we must love things with our whole selves knowing they will die.

Most of what I do with my days is repair things that are gonna break again soon. I just fix them and then when they break I fix them again. It’s like pushing shit up a hill.” “So why do you do it?” “Because someone has to, or everything just stays broken.

It is really fucking sad that it should take loss to know the precise quality of love.

I think of this life, of my life, of the things I built and planted. I have been lucky to know such richness. But I also think of how my husband taught me something else, something so wrong I am stunned that I ever believed it: that in the face of the world's end love should shrink. (p.290)

But what is the use of safety if it deprives you of everything else?

I am astounded at the unlikelihood of bringing my children to a place so remote and still have something so terrible happen to her. Maybe it is not unlikely at all. Where men go there is harm.

she isn't frightened of the dead. It is only the living who have the power to harm.

I think, deep in the darkest hours, that even if she survives this night that ocean will have her back one day.

In the years we have been together it has become very clear to me that he does not see me at all. I am actually not so bothered by this; what an ordeal it would be, to be known.

Loving a place is the same as having a child. They are both too much an act of hope, of defiance. And those are a fool’s weapons.

What I miss is having someone to look at in moments like these, someone who understands not just the talent or cleverness of our children but the wisdom, the immensity of feeling they hold within. Instead I marvel at them alone.

But as night falls and we slide wearily into bed, I hear the patter of small feet and there is a boy climbing in with me, and he tells me the story of the dinosaur trees. And I can understand why he might not, in fact, be alright. Why maybe none of us will be, because we have, all of us humans, decided what to save, and that is ourselves.

think my husband loved me as a vessel. Not consciously, I don’t think so little of him that I believe he could be conscious of this. But somewhere deep within. A buried truth in the darkness. He never took the time to discover my body, he never explored it for what it could offer aside from the obvious, he never found in me, in my essence, a purpose other than to carry children, and when I admitted I couldn’t do this for him he turned away from me. He had no more use for my limbs or my skin, my muscles or tongue or fingertips. He couldn’t even see me anymore, my flesh. I’m not sure that such a turning away could exist in the same body as love. I’m not sure it’s possible to make so small a thing of love. I think love expands when it needs to, it adapts, it embraces.

The world is dangerous and we will not survive it. But there is this. Impermanent as it may be.

And I can understand why he might not, in fact, be alright. Why maybe none of us will be, because we have, all of us humans, decided what to save, and that is ourselves.

What I miss most is not any of the things I expected. It’s having someone to talk to about our children. The hilarious things they say and do, the insights with which they blow my mind and the ways they change frequently and without mercy. I need her to help me process and deliberate and delight in. I want to laugh with her. To be awestruck with her. I want her to look at me in wonder, acknowledging what profound creations we have made together. What I miss is having someone to look at in moments like these, someone who understands not just the talent or cleverness of our children but the wisdom, the immensity of feeling they hold within. Instead I marvel at them alone.

He wonders if this is what he is, all that he is, a leaf battered by one wind or the other.

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning. —THORNTON WILDER, THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY

I remember a morning, one of many that all bleed together in my mind. A morning I rose, shattered by grief and weariness, stumbling into our living room in the city. I remember wondering why I could hear no crying, no morning calls for a bottle, and then seeing my son on his back in a shaft of sunlight, with the small lean bodies of my older children laid around him, I remember their fingers tickling his belly and his smile, his first smile. They looked up at me with such awe, such delight. A smile, Dad! He's smiling! And I thought, this is why we survive.