Trigger Warning: Love You Forever


Tonight, as usual, La Serpiente Aquatica Negra selected three books for me to read to her while she sat on my lap before she went to bed. The first was about Peppa Pig playing football and the third I can’t remember, because the second was the titanic misery fest that is Robert Munsch’s Love You Forever.

Love You Forever is a short, repetitive story about a mother singing a bedtime song to her child. The child grows up and becomes more and more awkward – first as a terrible toddler, then as a grumpy 9-year old, then as a hormonal teenager, but the mother continues to sing to him. Then we flash forwards to the middle age of the child, when his mother phones up and tries to sing the song, but by now is too sick and old, and so the son goes to see his mother and sings the song to her while she dies in his arms and … oh god, it’s the most miserable thing I can think of and yet La Serpiente loves it because of the repetition, or because of the pictures, or because she gets a kick out of whoever reads it starting to choke up and weep before they even get to the end, because you can see the gloomy conclusion from a mile away.

I mean, tonight I was sat there, two year old on my lap, lookig at a picture of a teenager singing into a standard lamp pretending it was a microphone, and my nose was running and tears were pouring down my cheeks, and even now as I write this I’m struggling to hold it together and not get water and snot into my keyboard.

And this is from Robert Munsch, a man whose books are usually about kids making cookies out of play dough, or incompetent parents mistaking a crocodile for their newborn baby, or people getting stuck in snowbanks for half a day, or surreal adventures with hair or teeth. You read a Munsch expecting something cheerful and throwaway – it’s like going to a children’s party and finding that they cancelled the magician and they’ve got a slide show brought by the local anti-vivisection group for all the kids to see.

Thankfully, just like Haruki Marukami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun* at least it’s short. Imagine a version of Love You Forever stretched out to novel length. There’d be uncontrollable tears up and down the country, existential crises wherever you looked. Thank goodness that after Love You Forever and whatever palate-cleanser I read afterwards, I could read Hog In The Fog to La Serpiente as her lying-in-bed-book, and at least cheer myself up with a tale of a mouse and a pig that were best friends, and that ate disgusting food. But I’ll talk about that book another day.

*Final lines of which are “Inside that darkness, I saw rain falling on the sea. Rain softly falling on a vast sea, with no one there to see it.” Yup, we are nothing but misery, and misery that is ephemeral at that.


6 responses to “Trigger Warning: Love You Forever”

    • That remains to be seen. Last night she made me read a In The Midnight Garden flap book, and there was nothing miserable about that. I think I may start graphing [my] tears before bedtime to give a more data driven answer to this question.

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