Chapter Four: Finials
Once, and only once, I went to a parenting seminar. I would have gone to others, but after the baby was born I spent every spare, sleep-deprived moment I had trying to complete my own bath, or merely synapse in the comfort of my own home. The speaker, the expert, was clever and funny. He described what it was like for him to be a new parent. His story went something like this: “I was sitting in a chair holding the baby while my wife ran an errand. I was nervous. I spotted a lamp on a table across the room and began to imagine that it suddenly fell off the table, rolled across the living room floor all the way over to where I was sitting, climbed up my leg and then my arm, turned itself on its side and lunged upward so that its finial plunged into the soft spot of the baby’s head and lodged there. Base up. Permanently. Forever.” As a term, “finials” are useful when describing anxiety to your therapist or to your older child while suggesting that he drive in the middle lane while going over a bridge, or ride a bus, not the subway, while in New York alone because the terrorists might bomb the subways and there you’d be-dead and underground, covered with dust and torn pages of Rolling Stone. In short, “finials” describe anticipatory despair, a state of mind with which you should become intimate, and the only real cause of aging in parents.
