I could only understand how I must have been unloved. And then my daughter was born, and I couldn’t understand ever letting her go. What I mean is that I had told myself that my adopted life was what I wanted, that both my birth parents and my adoptive parents had done the best thing for me. At the time, I was afraid that my sense of reality, as an adoptee, would make it difficult to love my flesh and blood. When we had our first child, I started writing a novel about a Korean American adoptee who tries to hold it together as his sense of reality disappears. After college, I returned to Korea and met my wife. Sometime in elementary school, I realized that I was not white like them. At two, I was adopted from Korea by white parents. I have been thinking about other times in my life when I have had to hold it together. Or at least this is how reading and writing feel to me like love. Our sense of togetherness also helps us hold each other’s sadness-there are days when I see my wife in every corner of the house, when my nine-year-old cries that she is forgetting her mom, when my three-year-old won’t stop saying the word dead, trying to understand its permanent lack. When we lose our lives in Mario or sing a song together about wearing masks, we remind each other that we can feel joy without satisfaction. In the time of coronavirus, I am most able to hold it together with my kids. Too little satisfaction betrays the child’s desire and too much satisfaction spoils it. Winnicott famously wrote that a “good-enough” parent satisfies some, but certainly not all, of her child’s wants. To be a parent, maybe especially a single parent, is to be responsible for the sense of reality your children develop-it is to be responsible for their sense of satisfaction. I have considered why this is, and I suspect that to get and to have are desires that are easily satisfied, compared to my unsatisfiable desire for my wife. My tears send me straight for two-day shipping. Since I have become a widower, I have attempted many times to literally buy my way back into a shared sense of reality. Normal desire, however, is how we understand ourselves as a member of society. Replace cat with president, though, and it is clear that satisfaction, like a sense of reality, is always conditional. A child who dreams of becoming a cat is cute, while an adult who dreams of becoming a cat is either affected or a fool. Only children are exempted from this rule. Generally, we consider an adult realistic, even reasonable, when her desires can realistically be satisfied-it is not reasonable to pursue immortality, to search for utopia, to think white supremacy will disappear overnight. When your sense of reality comes apart, so does your sense of self. In other words, unlike actual reality (if such a thing exists), one’s sense of reality consists of what makes one real to oneself. The it is one’s sense of reality-touching one’s face, standing closer than six feet apart, shaking hands, face-to-face learning-which is directly related to a sense of what is unreal, what is not normal. In other words, one’s life is not the it coming apart. But what? Commonly, people use the phrase without any specific object, to emphasize not whatever is being held together, but their own efforts to cope. Holding it together (as apt a phrase as any for this moment of self-isolation, anxiety, and political failure) implies that there is something coming apart. When my wife died, two years earlier, I heard many times that I should “hold it together for the children.” Grievers are often expected to hold it together, even if only for the sake of those around them. For the past few months, most of my adult exchanges have begun with the question: “How are you doing?” and the answer: “Holding it together.” This is an exchange I am used to.
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