The Small Tragedies of Children

Roxane Gay

A mother is at the kitchen table with the son she loves less. The exact nature of this lesser love is peculiar, hard to hold on to, difficult to accept. She tries not to let it bother her. He is hunched over his notebook, gripping his pencil tightly, awkwardly between the fingers of his left hand. The boy is in second grade. He is trying to learn multiplication tables. They have been at the kitchen table for hours. She has started dinner and still the child is trying work out how two numbers understood in certain ways become bigger numbers. He uses the five fingers of his right hand. She looks up at the clock, bites her lower lip. She digs her fingernails into the palms of her hands. The pain is soothing. She digs harder. She considers digging so deeply nail reaches bone. Maybe, if that happened, she would pass out.

Her husband will come home from work and for twelve hours, she will not be solely responsible for the care and keep of their two sons. Her husband will be a buffer between her and her indifference to the older boy and the increasing likelihood he is a dullard. She takes a deep breath, smiles, steps away from the table to check on the chicken roasting in the oven. The boy would fit in the oven if she folded him carefully but he would have to sit very still for her to wedge him in there. He is not good at sitting still.

The oldest boy was conceived in a queen-sized bed covered by a sedate print duvet in a split-level home on a street whose name complemented the names of the surrounding streets in a neighborhood where everyone adhered to a covenant. She was on her back and her husband was feeling athletic after a racquetball game with his boss. When he came and she did not, he said, I think we just made a baby. She couldn’t help but hold that against the child as she lay sweaty, vaguely sore, dissatisfied beneath her man. The second boy was conceived in London in a hotel overlooking the Thames. She was naked and pressed against the window as her husband took her from behind. He had learned a few things. They both came extravagantly.  That circumstance improved her disposition toward her second son.

When she was pregnant with her oldest, she was always uncomfortable, not physically but psychically. It unsettled her, knowing there was a person gestating inside her body. She felt the cells multiplying into something unfathomable. Toward the end of her pregnancy, the baby would kick and she would see the faint imprint of his foot against her stomach. Her husband would point and crow and urge the baby to kick again. He was charmed. She cringed. She thought, “There is a foot and it is inside of me.” She tried to swallow her nausea. The doctors called it love.
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