“Story of Your Life” depicts parenthood as an overwhelming instinct, something humans feel drawn to do despite knowing that it may turn out badly in various ways. In “The Story of Your Life,” the linguist Dr. Louise Banks is assigned to research heptapods, an alien species that has decided to observe and communicate with earthlings. She learns Heptapod B, the heptapods’ written language, and in doing so finds out that the aliens experience their entire lives as a simultaneous instant. In learning Heptapod B, Louise becomes able to “remember” her future as well as her past. Remembering her future, Louise learns that she is going to have a daughter, and that her daughter is going to die in a climbing accident at age 25. Counterintuitively, as a result of remembering the future, Louise feels an overwhelming instinct to do what she already knows she is going to do: have a child whom she knows will die at a young age. In other words, her maternal instinct usurps her free will. At one point, she compares this instinct to the instinct to protect her daughter from a falling object. By describing her parental instinct in this way, Louise suggests that having a child completely consumes parents and makes them act in ways that they never thought they would.
Yet surprisingly, despite knowing her daughter will die young, Louise never seems to regret either her daughter’s birth or the way her maternal instinct usurps her free will. She describes her daughter’s conception as the most important moment in her life and, throughout the story, remembers various moments of her daughter’s life with joy. She observes how her infant daughter kicks her legs in the hospital, marvels at her toddler daughter playing with a puppy, and is astonished at her daughter’s poise and beauty during the daughter’s college graduation ceremony. Thus, “Story of Your Life” suggests that people’s overwhelming instinct to parent brings joys that outweigh the inevitable pains.
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Parenthood Quotes in Story of Your Life
Your father is about to ask me the question. This is the most important moment in our lives, and I want to pay attention, note every detail. Your dad and I have just come back from an evening out, dinner and a show; it’s after midnight. We came out onto the patio to look at the full moon; then I told your dad I wanted to dance, so he humors me and now we’re slow-dancing, a pair of thirtysomethings swaying back and forth in the moonlight like kids. I don’t feel the night chill at all. And then your dad says, “Do you want to make a baby?”
[…]
I’d love to tell you the story of this evening, the night you’re conceived, but the right time to do that would be when you’re ready to have children of your own, and we’ll never get that chance.
“I wanna be in Hawaii now,” you’ll whine.
“Sometimes it’s good to wait,” I’ll say. “The anticipation makes it more fun when you get there.”
You’ll just pout.
It won’t have been that long since you enjoyed going shopping with me; it will forever astonish me how quickly you grow out of one phase and enter another. Living with you will be like aiming for a moving target; you’ll always be further along than I expect.
There’s a joke that I once heard a comedienne tell. It goes like this: “I’m not sure if I’m ready to have children. I asked a friend of mine who has children, ‘Suppose I do have kids. What if when they grow up, they blame me for everything that’s wrong with their lives?’ She laughed and said, ‘What do you mean, if’”
That’s my favorite joke.
When you are three, you’ll pull a dishtowel off the kitchen counter and bring that salad bowl down on top of you. I’ll make a grab for it, but I’ll miss. The edge of the bowl will leave you with a cut, on the upper edge of your forehead, that will require a single stitch. Your father and I will hold you, sobbing and stained with Caesar dressing, as we wait in the emergency room for hours.
I reached out and took the bowl from the shelf. The motion didn’t feel like something I was forced to do. Instead, it seemed just as urgent as my rushing to catch the bowl when it falls on you: an instinct that I felt right in following.
Working with the heptapods changed my life. I met your father and learned Heptapod B, both of which make it possible for me to know you now, here on the patio in the moonlight. Eventually, many years from now, I’ll be without your father, and without you. All I will have left from this moment is the heptapod language. So I pay close attention, and note every detail.
From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum, or a maximum?
