Becoming a parent.
We shall get to the cake soon — first, werewolves.
The only thing worse than becoming a werewolf, I think, is being seen halfway through the terrible transformation, your underwear ripping at the seams, the tussocks of hair blooming on your back, normal eyes but a beard, bald knobby knees and giant feet, etc. That’s partly what’s so mortifying about the early days of parenthood — you’re becoming someone else, there in the stretched but otherwise recognizable clothing, boobs out, in front of everyone. We all like a smooth reveal, the bounce-back, the magic trick. Not whatever happened here:
It’s a lot to suddenly be presented with a new life. It takes time to turn the cranks around it. I like the way Janet Frame explained this kind of dislocation. She sends the main character in The Carpathians halfway around the world on an airplane, landing in New Zealand “without having her mind bathed in the enduring image of the seas that extend, like the seas of eternity, between country and country.” The speed of her travel frays her mind. She goes too far in too short a time, and order collapses (we get “the sudden annihilation of the usual perception of time and space, the bursting of the iron bands that once made rigid the container of knowledge” and a literal downpour of shit at the climax of the book).
Eventually the transition nears completion, your Nanopuff jacket arrives from Patagonia, and you feel more surely a parent. Then, the question becomes, who are you, other than a parent?
Becoming more than just a parent.
This concern is best illustrated by a cake from 1983. The cake appears in the Manley Family photo album near the photos of my second birthday. The masterpiece was created for “Roman night” at one of my parents’ friends’ houses, a dinner party featuring perhaps two dozen very tanned couples wearing ivy crowns on their heads, gods lolling about a carpeted split-level home in Canberra. The cake is cut from multiple bakes in the shape of a lady reclined on a silver gurney, one knee raised, rectangular feet jutting beyond the alfoil like derailed trains, abbreviated arms nestled against the body. Her face is flat and almost featureless, eyes two pools of blue food coloring, but the breasts rise like twin observatories pointed at the stars, higher even than the bent knee. In place of nipples, we have two red lit candles.
The lady has two small clusters of grapes at her sides as though she is snacking while lying down (you can almost feel the grape slipping back onto your epiglottis at the thought), and some kind of licorice has been slung over her mons pubis (1983). She is lying down but does not look relaxed.
Before you scroll any further, take a moment to imagine the author of this cake at work: a woman with two young children applying a neat crumb coat with a butter knife to a haphazard array of body parts while still finding time to spear the cocktail onions and knot her toga before the guests arrived.
What life was this?! What kind of party was it my parents attended while me and my brother were tended by a babysitter? What conversation? What kind of couple did the hosts make? (Not one that would stay married, it turns out.) One conclusion you might draw from the existence of the naked cake is that my parents and their friends were not, as a group, as strictly defined by parenthood as we are now — I know people who have never spent a night away from their children, let alone eaten a slice of nude torso while talking to someone else’s husband dressed in a bed sheet.
Then again, maybe the squeezing of babies from beneath the licorice gave the parents of 1983 a jolt of elan. Back then, remember, people began having kids at 25, and middle age started at 40), saving them from that “awful stage of life from the age of twenty-six to thirty-seven known as stupidity …[when] you don’t even have a philosophy about all the things you don’t know,” as Lorrie Moore wrote. We all graduate from this period whether or not we have kids — though babies certainly hurry this along — from seeing ourselves as kids (yes, even at 37) to seeing ourselves as the adults, and our parents as the phase after that. My own release from this limbo was jumpstarted by holding my baby niece, before I had children.
Last year, I read Moore for the first time — Anagrams. In it, the wonderfully ambivalent, witty Benna invents a life with a 6-year-old daughter, George. Here she is taking in the lessons of a child who doesn’t even exist:
You cannot be grateful without possessing a past. That is why children are incapable of gratitude and why night prayers and dinner graces are lost on them. ‘Gobbles Mommy, Gobbles Grandpa…’ George races through it. She has no reference points. As I get older the past widens and accumulates, all sloppy landlessness like a river, and as a result I have more clearly demarcated areas of gratitude. Things like ice cream or scenery or one good kiss become objects of a huge soulful thanks. Nothing is gobbled. This is a sign of getting old.
Below is another cake, made by my mother the same year and modeled on my teddy. Ted is likewise reclined, twin candles alight on his chest, and lovingly spackled with buttercream. My parents still have that chopping board, and if history is just everyone taking one step to the left, I have replaced my mum in the photo, Scout replacing me.
It feels as though I have taken the long way around to meet my parents where they are as people independent of me. Luckily, I have done so in time to get some spare details about Roman night. It was a “Greek goddess” cake, my dad clarified by text, adding that, “We knew how to party back then!”
They sure did.
I have entered my stint in life as the cake maker. We are fondant people now, but the basics are still the same. The macrame and bushes have made a comeback, and surely the goddess cake is not far off.
How it happened
Making sure everyone goes to the bathroom before we leave the apartment:
Husband: Japhy, I need you to go back up the stairs and try and pee.
Japhy, outraged: There is no pee ANYWHERE FROM MY BRAIN DOWN TO MY POTTY SYSTEM.
Things I sent to at least one other person this week:
A withering account by Caitlin Flanagan of the idiot rioters in the Capitol:
once there they didn’t know what to do, exactly. One patriot made it all the way to Nancy Pelosi’s office, where (per his own gleefully repeated description) he sat at her desk, scratched his balls, left a note—“Nancy, Bigo was here, you bitch”—and grabbed a trophy: an envelope stamped with her name. Soon enough he’d trotted back outside to show it off, the victor in a one-man panty raid. He was an envelope guy in an email world, but suddenly he was taking control of his destiny.
H/t to my friend Patty for sending the Kara Swisher ep. with the CEO of Parler — this led me down the rabbithole and to the Brené Brown episode, which gets really interesting around minute 34:50, when they turn to parenthood, and Swisher (who claims to be impervious to vulnerability) talks about having a stroke and freaking out about how her death would affect her kids, but not about herself.
This IG post by Celeste Barber, which is as simple as any other of her #celestechallengeaccepted approximations of weird model behavior but, more than other posts, seems to use the heft of a life being lived and a face that knows what you’re up to to absolutely obliterate the culture she is impersonating. “Salad, yummy yummy.” (Click it to see the video, which is really just delightful)
Tell me how the story ends! (Ann Patchett + Tom Hanks + psychodelic mushrooms — set aside 20 mins)
Lastly, I was looking for a Chandler Bing meme account I had seen, and instead found the most unexpected assortment of accounts that use “Chandler memes” as their name, including one of Italian memes about the kid from The Walking Dead, Chandler Riggs, and an Indian account that has nothing to do with Chandler Bing beyond the avatar, but includes posts like the viral “Haan ye karlo pehle” meme which, I have learned, translates to “Yes, but do this first,” relevant to seemingly any situation, but totally contextless for me as a non-Indian (it’s weirdly comforting to think that different internets exist beyond your imagination, no matter how online you might be).
… And then this person, who sums up all of my feelings on the topics covered here today.
As always, thank you for reading, and do say hello! I’m at janetamanley@gmail.com, it’s no secret. <3
omg j-money, DIED at this: "Japhy, outraged: There is no pee ANYWHERE FROM MY BRAIN DOWN TO MY POTTY SYSTEM." also, I'd never heard of celeste barber before and MY LIFE IS SO MUCH BETTER AND FUNNIER NOW :D