As we live our lives together, you add so much enjoyment and dimension to my life, but I’m probably a relatively flat figure to you -- a limit, a wall, a source of rules and unexamined habits -- a thing that shapes your own presence, that provides you with a certain area to grow up in.
Parents are mysterious. My parents are mysterious to me. In a fascinating book about the mystery of parents, the unbridgable gap of unknowing, Family Romance, John Lanchester suggests that the substance of the mystery is the inability of people to tell the truth about things.
Parents are people who can’t convey the truth about things, not only because they often just don’t know the truth, but mainly because the parent-child relationship is just not about conveying the truth of the parent’s experience -- it’s about behaving like a parent, about creating the child’s grow-up space.
Who knows what you’ll want to know about your mom and dad when you grow up, but at least these little bits will be floating around and you’ll get an idea of what it was like to be us when you were two. And what it was like to be you!
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