Reading Luly’s The Long, Long Night to my children, and thinking about the kind of love that helps us find our own sea.
Now that my babies are becoming more aware of voices and sounds, I have been trying, whenever I can, to read good books aloud to them. Not every day. Not according to some carefully planned reading schedule. Just whenever there is a quiet moment and they are willing to listen.
The first book I chose was Luly’s The Long, Long Night (긴긴밤). I picked it for my children. But as often happens with children’s books, I think I ended up reading it for myself.
The Long Nights We Have to Cross
There are long nights in every life.
Times we simply have to make our way through.
If we are lucky, there will be someone beside us who makes those nights easier to bear.
But there will probably also be nights we have to cross mostly on our own.
The Long, Long Night is full of those nights.
At the center of the story is Norden, a rhinoceros who was raised by elephants. He grows up among creatures completely different from himself, yet they care for him as one of their own. Later, life takes him through loss after loss. Eventually, he meets Chiku, a penguin protecting an abandoned egg. And when Chiku is gone, Norden is left to care for the egg himself. A rhinoceros who was once raised by elephants ends up raising a penguin. Then Norden and the young penguin begin making their way toward the sea.
That simple chain of love stayed with me.
Elephants raised a rhinoceros.
A rhinoceros raised a penguin.
None of them belonged to one another in the obvious sense.
And yet they became the reason another life could keep going.
The People Who Raise Us Along the Way
The world can be cold. Sometimes terribly so.
There will be moments in my children’s lives when people are cruel,
circumstances are unfair,
and things happen that I cannot protect them from.
That may be one of the hardest things for a parent to accept.
I cannot arrange a life in which nothing hurts them.
I cannot make every road safe.
I cannot promise they will never be lonely.
But I do believe they will meet people who care for them with a kindness they could never have predicted.
People who have no obligation to love them, and somehow do.
A teacher.
A friend.
A neighbor.
A mentor.
Someone older.
Maybe even someone who stays only briefly.
People who, like the elephants who raised a rhinoceros and the rhinoceros who raised a penguin, step across the ordinary boundaries between us and give another person exactly what they need to keep going.
I have met people like that in my own life.
People who gave me something they did not owe me.
A word at the right time.
A meal.
A chance.
A place to rest.
A little patience when I had run out of my own.
Sometimes we do not realize until much later that someone was helping raise us too.
The Kind of Hope I Want to Tell Them About
That is the kind of hope I want to tell my children about again and again.
Not:
Nothing bad will ever happen to you.
I know that would not be true.
Instead, I want to tell them:
Hard things will happen.
But cruelty is not the only thing waiting for you in the world.
There will also be kindness.
There will be people who help.
There will be someone who lends you a little of their strength when yours runs out.
And someday, perhaps, you will become that person for someone else.
I do not want to fill my children’s lives with my own carefully drawn definition of what a good life should look like. I do not want to hammer my expectations into the ground so tightly that they are left with only a tiny patch of earth to live on. But I do not want to leave them completely without boundaries either, free to run anywhere before they know where danger is.
So I keep thinking that perhaps one of the things I can do as a parent is build them a fence.
A safe fence, but as wide as I can make it.
Wide enough to run.
Wide enough to wander.
Wide enough to discover things I never thought to show them.
Wide enough to make mistakes.
Wide enough to become people I could never have designed in advance.
And still safe enough that, while they are small, they always know where home is.
I Cannot Walk All the Way With Them
What feels especially different about The Long, Long Night now that I am a mother is that Norden cannot go all the way for the young penguin.
He can protect him.
Care for him.
Tell him stories.
Walk beside him.
Help him survive the long nights.
But the sea belongs to the penguin.
Eventually, the young penguin has to find it for himself.
And maybe parenting is something like that.
I will not be able to follow my children everywhere.
There will be roads I cannot walk for them.
Choices I cannot make for them.
Pain I cannot absorb for them.
And eventually, there will be places where going any farther with them would no longer be love.
It would be keeping them from becoming themselves.
That thought is frightening.
But there is something beautiful about it too.
Maybe the goal is not to make them need me forever.
Maybe the goal is to love them well enough that one day they can keep going without me.
Not to push them away before they are ready.
Not to hold them back because I am not ready.
Just to stay beside them for as long as they need me,
and teach them how to keep moving forward.
Then, when the time comes,
trust them with the rest of the road.
Find Your Own Sea
Maybe that is what I want to give my children more than anything.
Not a detailed map.
Not a life already planned down to the last turn.
Not my own picture of happiness handed to them as an assignment.
I want to give them enough love to believe that there is something worth moving toward.
Enough safety to explore.
Enough stories to remember who they are.
Enough experiences of kindness that,
when the world is cruel, cruelty does not become their entire understanding of the world.
And enough courage to keep moving through their own long nights.
I hope they meet many people who help raise them along the way.
People whose kindness they could never have expected.
I hope they learn to receive that kindness without shame.
And I hope they learn to offer it freely when it is their turn.
Even if I cannot stay beside them until the end,
I hope that, like the little penguin in this story,
they will eventually know how to keep walking.
Toward something I cannot choose for them.
Toward a horizon that belongs to them.
Toward their own sea.
A NOTE FROM THE SHELF
For readers who
Want a children’s story about loss, kindness, resilience, and the people who help us become who we are.
What stayed with me
Love does not always mean walking beside someone forever. Sometimes it means loving them well enough that they can keep going when they have to walk alone.
On My Shelf
KEEP — Worth a place on my shelf.
Book Referenced
Luly (루리), 긴긴밤 [The Long, Long Night]. Munhakdongne, 2021.
The English title used in this essay is a translation of the original Korean title.
