The Greatest Romance

On Paris, the romance of children's childhood, and moving cross country

For my fifth birthday, I very seriously and very confidently requested a trip to Paris. I don’t remember my parents’ reactions, but I do remember that the request was denied. I had to content myself with a lovely watercolor of Notre Dame Cathedral (especially treasured in the wake of the fire) and a copy of one of my favorite paintings by Claude Monet.¹ Claude Monet and Notre Dame Cathedral were two of the main reasons I wanted to go to Paris. As I grew older, and The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, and The Lord of the Rings loomed larger in my imagination, Great Britain became the magnet for my wanderlust. I studied abroad in London, honeymooned all over Scotland, and now look at pictures of these places on Instagram when I need a little escape.

That being said, I retain a fondness for Paris, the first place to inspire an obsession with, and desire to see for myself, a particular place on our planet. As a result, reading Adam Gopnik’s essay collection, Paris to the Moon, was an exercise in nostalgia. It was also a delightful chance to live vicariously through Adam Gopnik, who did the thing so many of us (at least in America) dream about doing: leaving everything behind to move to a romantic European city. His essays range from the laugh out loud hilarious (Barney in Paris) to the heart meltingly poignant (The Rookie). And many of them center on the universal experience of parenting, which is an exhausting, heart-breaking, and transformative journey no matter where you live.

In the essay, Barney in Paris, Gopnik begins by reflecting on the various responses he and his wife gave to the question of “why Paris?” He jokes that the “real reason” was his and his wife’s desire to escape “the garish Jeff Koons colors, the frantic prancing” and “cynically appropriated public domain melodies” of Barney (which I, ironically, loved as a child). However, the Gopniks’ distaste for Barney was tied to a deeper desire they possessed. They wanted their son to, “grow up someplace where everything he sees is beautiful.” While the vision of beauty the Gopniks sought to share with their son was Parisian, their desire to give their children a particular sort of home with a particular set of beauties struck a chord with me.

And then Gopnik delivers a couple of lines that were my favorite from the entire book: “We knew that out attempt to insist on a particular set of pleasures for out kid-to impose a childhood on our child-might be silly, or inappropriate, or even doomed. We couldn’t help it entirely. The romance of your child’s childhood might be the last romance you can give up.” I read this quote while living at my parents house. A few months earlier, our daughter was born. In the weeks following her birth, my husband and I decided to shoot a shot in the dark: my husband requested classification as a fully remote worker so that we could move to the east coast. It was a move we planned on making “eventually,” but hadn’t thought would be possible for years to come. Praise be to God we were wrong. In a dizzyingly short amount of time, we listed our house, sold our house, started looking for a new house, and moved in with my parents temporarily (bless them).

All of this occurred because my husband and I had our own romance of our children’s childhoods. We too had a vision of beauty we wanted to share with our children and a set of pleasures we wanted them to experience. Our vision of beauty was tied to a New England colonial home with fireplaces, wide wooden floorboards, and south facing windows separated from a not too busy road. Our particular set of pleasures included gardening, animal husbandry, hiking, and living no more than an hour’s drive from my side of the family (and cutting the time it took to drive to my husband’s side by half). Again, by God’s grace (and the intercession of St. Therese of Lisieux), we found a home as close to our ideal as can be found this side of paradise.

Of course, as Gopnik discovers, the reality of trying to “impose” a certain experience of childhood on our children is to some extent “doomed.” Not one of our gorgeous fireplaces is currently working. Eight out of our ten original chickens were slaughtered by a bobcat. The invasive vines criss-crossing our land have made gardening more difficult than we originally anticipated. Mice and hornets invaded our house. The road in front of our house is still busier and closer than we’d wish (especially with toddlers whose sense of self-preservation is still a work in progress). And these are just the small things. Bigger things, tougher things, can and will occur that make our efforts to share beauty and “a particular set of pleasures” with our children seem “silly, or inappropriate.” Simply turning on the news, especially this past week, can make the ways we cling to the “romance” of our children’s childhood seem ridiculous, grotesque, and absurd when children all over the world are suffering in ways beyond bearing.

And yet. We can’t seem to stop dreaming. We can’t fully “give up” the “last romance” we may possess. And we shouldn’t. This broken world will not be healed by surrendering dreams of truth, beauty, goodness, and joy to the darkness surrounding us. We can’t save every child whose world is ugly rather than beautiful, and whose suffering robs them of a true childhood. But we can share the blessings in our own lives, and the compassion we have learned from our own suffering, with those in need. And we can raise children whose childhood is as close to beautiful, joyful, and hopeful as we can contrive it to be in a fallen world. We can dream for them when they are young, and with them as they grow older and begin to dream for themselves.

Our shared dreams may have to be modified or adjusted to reality. We had to buy new chickens, and our three year old received a very concrete lesson on the circle of life and the meaning of death. But our new chickens are even friendlier than the ones we lost, and my son has gained an increased interest in, and appreciation for, the hope of heaven. My children lost the planned pleasure of an abundant garden, but gained a new pleasure in their consumption of the natural bounty already growing around us, from the violets they picked and ate fresh, to the dandelions I turned into jelly. Day by day, the pattern emerges. Loss is turned into gain. Dreams dead, or lying dormant, are resurrected into new dreams. For “the world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places; but still, there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”²

It is love, mingled with the grief of experience, that inspires us with a desire to give our children a greater beauty, joy, and truth than we ourselves received. It is love, strong as death, that allows us to fight for the romance of our children’s childhood in spite of the deep waters of despair threatening to overwhelm us.³ Darkness, peril, and grief come to us all. But love is greatest when it operates in spite of them, and even through them. And it is those who cling to this ultimate romance of childhood, that love conquers all, who will enter into the joyful childhood of eternity.

What dreams do you have for your children’s childhood? What particular set of pleasures have you tried to share with them? Sound off below!

1. Specifically Claude Monet, "Water-Lily Pond, Symphony in Green," 1899. Bless my Mom she mounted it on a very pretty wooden frame and even artistically burned the edges to give it some texture.

2. Haldir in The Fellowship of the Ring

3. Song of Songs 8:6-7 NABRE