#unquiet

This place is never at rest.

Mamma’s rules for good parenting:

Hello and how do you do. Let me look at you. You’ve grown. You’ve become pretty. And then, perhaps, he puts his thumbs and forefingers together to form a square so that he can look at her through the square. He’ll shut one eye and peer at her with the other. Take a picture. Frame her with his fingers. She stands perfectly still and gazes solemnly at the square. It is not a real camera—if it had been a real camera she would have wriggled and squirmed and wondered how she would look in the picture.

Give it time, said a friend who had also lost her father. It was like being pregnant, you see other pregnant women everywhere you go, you look for them, you quietly greet them, a kind of sisterhood, and then you become fatherless and you start looking for other people who are also fatherless, you read books and articles written by authors who have lost their fathers, or their mothers, although offhand I can name more authors who have written about their dead fathers than about their dead mothers.

The dog sleeps on a sheepskin rug on the floor by my side of the bed, he is in the middle of life and might live for another six or seven years. He has never figured out what it means to be a dog, he is always guessing. My husband and I are the same, we have no idea how to be us, it’s a perpetual guessing game.