My Childrens’ Worldview Helps Me Write Better Characters
Author Rachel Barenbaum reflects on the role reversal with her son and how he enriched her latest novel
There are three teenagers living in my house. They need razors and deodorant and spend hours staring at their screens. Keeping them alive used to be my main responsibility but now, without warning, it seems my only role is keeping food in the house while I sit back and enjoy the show.
I used to help them learn to walk and talk and ride a bike. Now, I can only be a spectator and ask where they’re walking, who they’re talking to and who they’re riding with and why. The truth is, they’re driving their own lives forward and I’m along for the ride. The biggest shock has been something all those books on parenting failed to mention: My children would have opinions and ideas, and not just about what they want to wear or eat, and I’ll have to scramble to keep up.
I realize this might sound ridiculous. The point of parenting is raising a child to become an adult, and adults have opinions and ideas that should surpass their parents, but somehow I could always imagine my kids as babies and then as full-grown adults but never the in-between space they occupy now. They are in between childhood and adulthood and I’m trying to figure out how to make sense of this new space.
I write about this in-between push and pull in my latest novel, Atomic Anna. The novel tells the story of three generations of women — grandmother, mother, and granddaughter —working together to build a time machine that will save their family and stop the Chernobyl disaster. In the book, I show Anna, the Soviet grandmother, giving up her role as a mother because she knows from the beginning she won’t be able to handle it. Her daughter, Molly, grows up as an adopted refusenik in America and rebels against everything Soviet.
She chooses art over her parents' objections and falls for the man they hate. Her parents warn and scold but, in the end, they can only watch as Molly makes her own decisions. Similarly, Molly’s daughter, Raisa, makes her own decisions. She embraces the math her mother hates because Raisa truly loves it. And she falls in love, is prepared to do anything for the man she’s chosen even when her mother warns against it.
All three generations quarrel and love deeply, and I show that no matter how hard the parents try, they can only watch from the sidelines and be there to catch their children when they fall. It’s exactly where I am as a parent, too.
I’m more than a little obsessed with this change in my parenting role (and that of my characters) because I was caught in this bumper-to-bumper chasm completely unaware. The change started around the time of my eldest son’s bar mitzvah. He didn’t want me or my husband to look at his speech because he said we didn’t understand this world he lived in. “Your generation is killing our earth.” But I recycle and… “You don’t get it. It’s not enough.”
One week later he declared, “I’m a vegan.”
Soon after his declaration, he started explaining his reason: that he was going to play his role in saving the earth and stopping cruelty towards animals. He dropped one animal product after another from his diet. He stopped wearing leather shoes and his down coat. At the time it seemed sudden but looking back, it was only a surprise because I’d missed all the signs along the way. I was looking down while he was looking up and ahead. He was already volunteering at an animal sanctuary and refusing to eat fish. He was already reading and talking about the impact of meat production on the environment and on climate change.
In my novel, I show that no matter how hard the parents try, they can only watch from the sidelines and be there to catch their children when they fall. It’s exactly where I am as a parent, too.
The characters in Atomic Anna build a time machine. Once they’ve finished, they are faced with a central moral question: Just because we can, does it mean we should? They realize the time machine is the deadliest weapon ever imagined. Their intentions are good — to stop the Chernobyl disaster and save their family — but what if the machine is stolen? And who are they to decide that they should alter history in the first place?
In the blink of an eye, they could kill off an entire future family without anyone ever knowing what they did. I was dumbstruck when my son read my book and then turned around and used my own question on me: “Just because you can eat meat, does it mean you should? Think about all the damage that steak causes in the world,” he explained. “Is it worth it?”
Yes, the statement is laden with teenage angst, but there’s truth in it, too, and that’s what got me. For the first time, my son was teaching me about how to be in the world. Our roles were reversed. Little did I know it was only the beginning.
All three of my children have taught me about asking what pronouns people prefer and how to work within those guidelines. They’ve made me stop and think about how I call myself a liberal, but in fact, if I haven’t updated my understanding of the world much since the ’90s. I’m an old-fashioned liberal, they say, and that doesn’t really make me liberal at all. But I want to be a liberal. I want to change, and that means listening to and learning from them.
TikTok, Snapchat, and Signal are all apps my kids try to show me how to use, but I’m terrible with them. They laugh and keep trying to teach me — and that’s the point. They are teaching me while I sit back and watch them grow. Yes, I still have to go food shopping and buy them clothing, but I have crossed this giant chasm — I’ve jumped from crib bumpers to car bumpers. My kids are behind the wheel, metaphorically and physically, which means that they will be going too fast for me to keep up. None of my parenting groups or books warned me about any of this. They all said the days are slow and the years are fast. That’s true, but there’s more to it.
Just as my children teach me about this changing world that they’re inheriting, I also make sure the characters in my books continue to learn from their children. I don’t want to be the old-fashioned liberal, but it’s hard. Every time I struggle to understand or make sense of the way they see things, I remind myself to be grateful because I’d rather keep moving with them than be left behind.
Rachel Barenbaum is a prolific writer and reviewer whose work has appeared in the LA Review of Books, the Tel Aviv Review of Books, LitHub, and DeadDarlings. She is an Honorary Research Associate at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University and is a graduate of GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator. She is also the founder of Debut Spotlight and the Debut Editor at A Mighty Blaze. In a former life, she was a hedge fund manager and a spin instructor. She has degrees from Harvard in Business and Literature and Philosophy. She lives in Brookline, MA.
