Your Monthly Momecdote, Issue 27: July, 2026

This blog post was originally published in my July newsletter. Subscribe to receive next month's essay along with book and music recommendations.

My husband has issued a retraction: he would like me to re-rank CHILDREN OF TIME below THE THREE BODY PROBLEM by Cixin Liu and perhaps also ANXIOUS PEOPLE by Frederik Backman, the latter of which I gave him. He also told me I am reading utopia wrong. I allow this; it’s nice being married to someone whose opinions I respect, even when I choose to disregard them. To err is human. Moving on.

The thing I'm wrestling with lately: my child is not an extension of me. He and I are, in fact, two different people.

This is obvious, of course. Duh. I didn't have a baby so I'd always have a baby. I knew I was having a future adult, and in that sense it's easy to say of course, of course, we are two different people, we always have been, we were always destined to be. But babyhood, it blurs the line a bit. Well, in practical terms, for childhood overall, that line is often blurred. Whether he plays well with others on the playground often feels like an extension of my parenting. Whether he is polite or eats enough or stays mostly healthy is directly related to how well I'm doing my job. He turned five recently, and it has been much harder than I anticipated for two reasons: one, he's not a baby anymore. He doesn't look like one or act like one, for the most part, which you'd think would be less of a shock, but isn't. Two, he is starting to display characteristics that either do or don't resemble my own, and those are hitting me hard, for different reasons.

It's hard not to see traits in childhood as an onramp to potential problems of adulthood. Right? Isn't that how we're supposed to look at it? With wisdom? Maturity? The clarity of hindsight? If he's allowed to be a sore loser now, that will suck for him later. If he gives up too easily now, what will that mean when he's confronted with real obstacles down the line? I'm being generic and facetious, but on the whole, this is the work of parenting, isn't it? To try, with the tools that I have, to prevent him from experiencing unnecessary future pain.

Sometimes I look at him and see myself. Which is hard. Because I would characterize myself as having been a lonely child. I was bookish and found it difficult to relate to my peers and I often felt alienated and alone. Of course, now I can look back and say that was probably a good thing. Then and now, I spent a lot of time being imaginative in my own quiet spaces. I am, in fact, unafraid of my inner space. And look! Now I'm a writer, I have no desire to be anything else, I love my work, I am valued for what I do. But I remember, acutely, the loneliness—in fact, I am built on it. At my core lives what is probably the very thing that makes me a writer in the first place: the feeling that I am lonely, and all I want is to put the words in the perfect order, so that someone else will finally understand.

Sometimes I look at my son and I see something so wildly unlike myself that I short-circuit, like there's a bug in my code. A specific example: when I was a kid, I was pretty aggressively into doing tasks correctly. I would dress up my Barbies individually, arrange them, and then gaze upon them with the satisfaction of a job well done. My son enjoys building LEGOs. Except—Oh god. Here is how he does it. He puts the LEGO set together, per the instructions. There, done. Beautiful. Perfect. But then—and here, watch me break out in a cold sweat—in the literal next breath, he disassembles what he's just built. He takes the thing apart and turns it into something else. Some new thing, totally different. Out loud, I say: You are so creative. You are so imaginative. I'm so proud. Inside my head, I freak out over the loss of the dismantled Perfect Thing.

My child is not an extension of me. His accomplishments are not my accomplishments. I can tell I will wrestle with this for a long time. I held—hold—myself to a very high standard. My inner voice, the way I talk to myself, is so, so mean. So, on some level I think it will be very difficult not to pass onto him—or rather, impress upon him—my own urgency to Achieve. But what is achievement, if it just means you're an absolute dick to yourself at all times? If you can't even enjoy what you have? I mentioned earlier a book I had read, ASSEMBLY by Natasha Brown, where the main character is trying to climb a ladder toward something that is, realistically, horrifically, closed off to her. And while I was reading, it seemed very simple: Obviously, the thing to do, short of collectively rewiring the way everyone on this planet thinks and ensuring our political and social infrastructure follows suit (working on that), is to simply change your definition of achievement. But—ha! Easier said than done.

Sometimes I look at my son when he's Being Me—something I would characterize as being more fearful of failure than necessary; or honestly, just more fearful than necessary; sometimes it's a preference for being alone or an inability to vibe with other kids—and I think oh god, oh no. Doom. And then I think, but wait, what's so wrong with me that I'm afraid will happen to him?, and then I think, oh yeah, right, the loneliness. But I also know that part is fear and projection. I can't predict the future. He is not me, or an extension of me. It's kind of like I have to re-secure my perspective, shake out the trap where I can only see him from inside the lens of my own regrets. Then, on second (or third) try, I can observe more clearly that he may be alone, but not unhappily. There's a whole world in there, and I only get these lovely little windows, these opportunities to enjoy the view whenever I am invited inside.

So anyway. My child is not an extension of me. We are, in fact, two different people. So there's today's cosmic grapple. I'd love a smoother landing, but sometimes the cookie just crumbles, and you have to lick it off your hand.