The beach is very pervious.
“The summer has been long, and it still isn’t over.” So begins A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard and also this newsletter. Both describe “vacationing” with small children, although Karl Ove adds: “I finished the first part of the novel on June 26,” and I cannot say the same. But it’s true summers last longer with small children, at least for me and Karl Ove (and, I suspect, his wife).
I started writing a July newsletter on the 4th then realized my thoughts were more succinctly summed up by this tweet from a dog and stopped. Fortunately there were no sky booms in Northampton, so I was able to wrestle both kids to bed before dark. Then 100 more nights passed the same way, which brings us to August.
I learned from a recent Ann Friedman newsletter that there is a term for summer hibernation: estivation. It’s how some reptiles and invertebrates survive the hot, dry season, and what I often feel like doing in the hot, humid season. I want to hibernate in many seasons, really whenever the temperature trends anywhere outside 45-75°F. Joe once compared me to one of those tropical fish that dies on the way home from the pet store, but I’m actually more temperate. People say I shouldn’t have left San Francisco, and I likely wouldn’t have were I the only fish in question. But we came to one of those points in adulthood where a sacrifice had to be made, and in this case it was San Francisco. What sealed the deal was the heatwave/wildfire combination of 2020, which made me realize we could no longer depend on the temperateness of San Francisco or anywhere, so might as well live more cheaply closer to family. As if to compound this realization, we were greeted by smoke from Canadian forest fires when we arrived in Massachusetts last summer, which I had not expected. (No smoke this year, thankfully.)
Estivation involves burrowing in the mud, which isn’t a socially acceptable activity for adults where I live, so I try to find other bodies of water to submerge myself in. My in-laws are very generous with their house in South Dartmouth, which has access to a beach and pool, so we’ve been going there as much as possible. It’s a 2.5-hour drive, making weekend trips worth it but also enough of a hassle to quell my desire to travel anywhere else until our children have a higher threshold for puking and screaming.
On our last trip, Eva became briefly obsessed with the backstory of a cracked plastic shovel I found while plogging. (I don’t jog but have appropriated this term for walks where I pick up trash on the beach.) She wanted to know how the shovel got cracked, and I surmised that a child left it behind on some distant shore where the tide picked it up and carried it across Buzzards Bay, eventually dashing it against the rocks where I found it. This shovel had seen things. She made me repeat this story several times then repeated it several times herself.
Eventually, she relinquished the shovel to her sister, who broke it more completely, and I added it to the recycling. But I thought of it again when I came across the word “pervious” in this essay by Jean Garnett about her open marriage. You may have already seen the essay online, where it got a flurry of attention, but my initial reaction to the headline was fatigue. The author must not have small children, I thought, scrolling on. But then my friend Claire, who is also tired and very trustworthy, sent it along with some backstory: the author was a parent and the open marriage was her husband’s idea. Figures, I thought, clicking and judging him further when Garnett reveals in the first line that he proposed an open marriage six months after she gave birth. No shade on open relationships—I’ve been in open relationships—but the timing of this request would have troubled me. Fortunately, Garnett is made of sturdier stuff because her open marriage inspired an amazing essay.
Here’s the passage about perviousness:
Equality in marriage being now assumed if rarely achieved, the qualifier open has resumed its primary sense of “enterable by outsiders,” or the more degenerate-sounding “pervious.” (It strikes me that sex, marriage, and procreation intrinsically imply an escalating perviousness—will you let another in? Having let them in, will the two of you accommodate a third, or more?)
Family life as "escalating perviousness” strikes me as accurate. We recently had a lot of family visiting, and I realized our family relationships have multiplied exponentially by the addition of just two children. I had a similar feeling when our families came together at our wedding. So many relationships! My kids are young enough that their relationships are still quite simple, but they already form fierce attachments, especially with family and babysitters. Last summer we moved away from a beloved babysitter, and this summer had two beloved babysitters move away, and each has been its own kind of heartbreak. Here’s Garnett on her babysitter:
[When] we need an interruption from outside—M. is that benevolent figure passing through, caring for us without making any promises. After all, M. will not be our nanny forever, just as E. has not remained my husband’s lover.
This comparison made me realize: people who dwell on the “degenerate,” like those “Don’t Say Gay” people, or me when I prematurely judged this essay, are missing the point. Pervious does not equal perverted. We start learning about perviousness from the moment we’re born, when we pass from water into air. We learn how it feels for the loved one to exist apart from us, how it feels when they return, the length of those tides. No one skips this lesson; stories just give us language to talk about it.
The beach is very pervious. I think that’s why it scares Eva a little. She’s more of a pool gal these days, although she loved the beach in San Francisco. But that was a less pervious beach experience, in that we stayed on the shore with our clothes on (often many layers of them). Slathering oneself in sunscreen, plunging into the great unknown, then reemerging to get covered with sand does not currently appeal to her, and I get it, since I felt the same at her age. This world is a lot; it really is. Sometimes a cracked shovel is all the perviousness we can handle.
