Chapter 37 — Where Are You?
Rufus describes his concept of negligent parenting.
Followed by Chapter 37 —— Where Are You?, in which Mica waits for Saskia to return.
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Hello Friends,
In today’s chapter we will briefly meet one of our protagonist’s mothers. It’s a bit of a guilty omission on my behalf that family doesn’t feature more prominently, but novels only have so much room in them and there are so many ideas I’m already trying to cram in.
In any event, Miranda’s appearance feels like an invitation to talk about my own experience as a parent.
For those of you who don’t know me well, I have two amazing kids, both around that age where they start spreading their own wings. Maybe this is why I’m feeling a little nostalgic and inclined to looking back at my role in their development.
Long before I had kids, I had a very good friend, Terry Burnham, and, apropos what, I cannot recall, Terry gave me some of the best parenting advice I’ve ever received. To contextualize a little: Terry is a father, an economist, and a lifelong student of our battle with our own biology. Many years back, he co-authored the book Mean Genes a smart and fun examination of the consequences of our genes being adapted to a world we no longer live in. In any case, Terry’s adage about parenting came in three parts:
First, you should accept that everything you do will make a difference to your little darlings.
Second, you can’t possibly predict what that difference will be, including the very real prospect that many of your intended lessons will completely backfire (an allowance might just as easily teach dependency as it does the ability to budget, for instance).
Third, parts one and two are not license to abandon responsibility. In spite of everything, you should still play with a plan.
Of course, sometimes in life you have day-to-day plans that you live in the moment, but it’s only later that you find the ability to synthesize them into a cohesive whole. Happily, I now have a moniker that encapsulates what has been my parenting style. I call it: negligent parenting.
Obviously, I’m being a little tongue in cheek with my appellation, but I stand by the basic tenets. It’s kind of the antithesis to helicopter parenting, and it harkens back to that romantic era when kids were permitted to take off on their bikes for the day, and get up to all manner of mischief. To me, that meant letting my kids use knives very early. I mean, we all give ourselves a few cuts and nicks when learning to use sharp objects, and at least being so young when they got their right-of-passage wounds, my kids healed faster than most. It also set them up very well for work in the kitchen, which both I and they have been great beneficiaries of. (As an aside, I did once meet a young man while I was in grad school who could barely chop a banana onto his breakfast cereal; sure, he was at an esteemed institute of higher learning studying number theory, but I couldn’t help feeling that his education had let him down somewhere along the way.)
Like everyone, I did have some boundaries, though. Indeed, by my kids’ peers’ standards, I was unusually cautious when it came to them driving. I was happy for them to get their licenses early, but, much to their chagrin, I was a stickler for them driving a full year before allowing them to give any of their friends a ride. Unlike knives, cars are not something our genes have given us any reasonable intuition for. Put simply, they are freakishly and unexpectedly dangerous.
In the final analysis, I’m absolutely delighted by how my kids have turned out thus far, and so, at risk of committing the basest of statistical errors I’m going extrapolate from sample size one and advocate that any of you prospective parents out there give consideration to the benefits of negligent parenting before dismissing it based on prejudicial lexical grounds.
Lastly, while on the topic of parenting, I should also give a shout out to my buddy Chris Pegula, aka the Diaper Dude, whose parenting advice is geared more towards parents’ own well-being. Chris’ key tenets include remembering that humor is a powerful tool, that it’s imperative to look after yourself, and, perhaps most importantly, that it’s OK not to have to have all the answers.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
And now, without further ado, here’s chapter thirty-seven, in which Mica waits for Saskia to return.
— 37 —
Where Are You?
After Saskia left, Mica checked her news streams. How long would it take for the change to percolate through? A part of her felt that were it to work she ought to have known before Saskia left.
She stirred frothed milk into her chai, and mused on the little ripples we send out into the world whenever we spend time with another person. A month ago, she’d never given the idea of a chai in the morning a second thought. She picked up her computer and took it out onto her balcony. As the minutes turned into hours, trepidation crept in. Hope subsided and gave way to doubt. When would the oil spill not have happened?
Worse still: where was Saskia? It wasn’t like she couldn’t just return to the now. For a moment Mica distracted herself nutting over the quandary of which would happen first, the oil spill not happening or Saskia returning. But really, where was Saskia? Ordinarily, she’d have picked up the phone and tried calling. She looked up at the heavens, almost believing that the gods above might give her a sign.
An airplane silently crossed from one cloud to the next. It disappeared for a few seconds, and then reappeared exactly where she’d expected it to. Looking back over its path, she watched as the vapor trail dissolved back into blue. Were the actions we took in life permanent?
The world had causal rules. You could want what you wanted, but the world didn’t care.
The refresh button on the news site didn’t change the oil spill stories.
To hell with it, Mica thought. She opened her phone app, what was once the entire raison d’être for the device in her hands. She scrawled over her recent calls. A full half of the first screen were to Saskia. Stalling, she added Saskia to her favorites tab. The exercise gave Saskia an extra twenty seconds to appear. But she didn’t.
Mica’s thumb hovered over Saskia’s name until she could bear it no longer. Finally, she let it fall onto the screen and the phone dialed. To her surprise, it connected almost immediately.
An even bigger surprise was a voice she didn’t recognize: “Hello, who is this?”
“Saskia? It’s Mica.” Then, realizing it obviously wasn’t Saskia: “Who is this?”
“This is Miranda.”
“Miranda?” Could Saskia’s trip back in time have switched up reality? That had been what Mica had hoped for. But not that it altered Saskia’s name. Altered Saskia. Altered the timbre of her voice. Miranda’s voice was an echo of Saskia’s, but——
“I’m Saskia’s mother.”
Mica stood there, her own voice subsumed by confusion. “Hello? Are you still there?” Miranda asked.
“Can I speak to Saskia?”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible right now.”
“Why?”
“She ...”
“I haven’t heard from her in——can you have her call me?”
Suddenly, Miranda burst into tears.
∞
Apparently Miranda had gotten a call from the police eight days ago and she’d flown to Dallas to be at Saskia’s bedside. Saskia had been in a hospital. She’d been in an induced coma for over a week.
Mica explained that, yes, they had only met recently. “I’m a reporter. I——” but she stopped mid-sentence. She was about to admit how she knew Saskia.
“Yes?”
If Saskia had been in hospital for the last eight days, how could she have won the lottery? Certainly she couldn’t admit that history to Miranda. Mica was a lover Saskia had never mentioned to her mother. Not because she was closeted. If Mica related the timeline of their courtship ... Miranda had been seated at her daughter’s beside when they met.
Mica had had apprehensive girlfriends before. Girlfriends who hadn’t come out to their parents. But that wasn’t Saskia. And yet, Mica was once again talking to the parent of a lover and not able to say what she wanted to because she wasn’t sure they knew——no, she knew Miranda knew who Saskia was, but she couldn’t possibly know about her. There was no way for Mica to answer Miranda’s question.
Knowing that Miranda knew who Saskia was didn’t help. It just didn’t make sense that she could be a part of Saskia’s world, not with the timeline that existed. She had always been glad that she hadn’t had to butt heads with homophobia in her family, but introducing the concept of time travel felt every bit as fraught. No, the only way forward was to be vague.
“Mica?” Miranda asked into the silent chasm that Mica had let open.
“Yes. Sorry,” she apologized. Wait, how did Miranda know her name? “Did Saskia tell you about me?” It was an idiotic question and she regretted it the moment she’d instinctively asked it.
“No ...”
“Sorry, of course Saskia didn’t say anything. I heard you. I’m just——how’d you know my name? ”
“She——it’s on her screen. On her phone. I’m sorry, how do you know my daughter?”
Mica couldn’t go on. Saskia was in a coma. She had to go out and see her. “Where exactly is Saskia?”
While Miranda described the hospital in Dallas, Mica wondered which timeline was real. Could they both have happened? Had Miranda really been sitting by Saskia’s hospital bed even as they courted? Mica announced that she was coming to Dallas. Again, she immediately regretted her un- thinking impulse. But she manufactured a short courtship from before the lottery win. She leaned into the impression that they were early in their courting to explain the oddity of Saskia not having mentioned her. The lies were proliferating, but they were necessary to make sense of the flight she was about to catch.
For a moment Mica stopped, perplexed. Had Saskia really not called her mother after winning the lottery? Surely she had called her mother. But——maybe she hadn’t.
The lottery hadn’t actually been the big deal of the last week, and though it would normally have been the sort of thing Mica imagined Saskia would have told her mother——perhaps, given the circumstances, she hadn’t made that call yet.
“Do you know why she was in Dallas?” Miranda, it seemed, had no idea what had happened to Saskia.
