My father was twenty-seven when I was born; my mother was twenty-four. They’d been trying to conceive for three years, so even my rotten math leads me to believe they were hellaciously young when they first started. Looking at pictures of them from that time makes me wonder what the fuck? Why did you bother? They had smiles set in concrete, eyebrows that confided worries. Nothing about this wooden couple spelled parental desire.
“It was your father’s idea,” my mother once told me, mouth working around a lit cigarette. She thought she hid the habit from my father, as if he couldn’t smell the secondhand smoke, see the nicotine stains that dotted the walls. “I don’t want you to take that the wrong way. I don’t mind having kids. You can be useful. You can sometimes be fun. But I wanted to – I don’t know, go to India or something.”
When I pointed out that she still could do it, she shook her head.
“You know, you go from Point A to Point B, and it cuts off options.”
“You’re saying because you had us, you now can’t travel?”
“I lost my touch,” she said, and locked down her lips.
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