Mahiai shoved the tip of his spear through the heart of a poacher and hauled the corpse to his wife’s nest. “Another one?” Kala asked, eyes wide as he bathed their egg in lowlander blood. Mahiai rubbed his crownfeathers, exhausted. “They will keep trying to use our children to fuel their magic until we kill them all.” --- ## AFTERWORD I wrote _Egg_ because I wanted the Verraine universe to have stories about good parenting. There are all sorts of resources on the internet about how reading science fiction and fantasy makes people have more empathy, literacy, leads to a lot of positive outcomes and children, for a variety of reasons. A lot of people learn things from the stories they read. I wrote an entire article once about science fiction and fantasy novels that help me understand history and archaeology and anthropology better. Disappointingly few have helped me understand how to be a better mom. I don't talk a lot about parenting on the internet. Social media in particular is uncomfortably permanent, and I've read too many horror stories about the children of mommy bloggers, being upset because of what their parents wrote about them on the internet. I want my kid to be able to control his own space online once he's old enough. Also there are a multitude of people who do a lot more with parenting blogs than I ever could and the world does not need one more person going on and on about how their individual parenting journey has put them in a position to give tips and trips and tricks. Every family is different. But what I do want to talk about is the handful of ways reading fiction has made me better able to handle parenting, because the truth is, in modern middle-class America in the suburbs, we have remarkably few opportunities to get role models from parenting, at least for me and my husband. Neither one of us are particularly close with our cousins, and we were both born into a relatively small families where we didn't spend a lot of time around children growing up. Some of our friends come from families that only recently immigrated to America, and their experiences are different. Their cultures, at least from the outside looking in, seem to trend more toward larger families with stronger ties. So for us, one of the reasons we read so many parenting blogs, research papers, books written was because we didn't know what else to do. But, self-help books are inherently trying to sell you on a philosophy or concept or a to-do list. And a lot of the parenting blogs are just so sanctimonious or hopeful, or focused on self aggrandizement, that it's not the same thing as seeing your friends go through the problems. The pandemic has been particularly isolating because opportunities to join mommy groups have been till the ground and frankly a lot of them don't have a great reputation. So even though I have a lot of wonderful friends who are also parents, it's been hard to learn from them because we haven't been able to see them very often. Compounding this is that there are remarkably few parents in fiction. And when you do see parents in fiction, it's usually at the end of the series we're having the baby as the happily ever after, and you don't see much of the struggle of parenthood. There were two exceptions to this idea that have really gotten me through the worst parts of trying to figure out how to manage with an infant or toddler. When my husband was at work, and there wasn't anyone to call for help, I needed _something_ to lean on for encouragement. I got it from two books. One of them was [Flowers in the Attic](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43448.Flowers_in_the_Attic) by V. C. Andrews, which is definitely no place to be at in parenting advice, by the way, and the other was [The Soprano Sorceress](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/185230.The_Soprano_Sorceress), by L. E. Modesitt. Both had a remarkably similar image of a mother struggling to carry small children and suitcases across long distances. Even though I've read 1001 accounts of historical migrations and single mothers in America, nothing is quite as visceral and relatable to me as the character sketches in those books. And when I found myself sitting in the car, trying to figure out how to pick up a whole bunch of things that I needed for my son, or trying to figure out how to get him home, those stories helped. When my car broke down right at my infant's lunchtime, I thought about those fictional women picking up their children, carrying them 20 feet, putting the kid back down, going back, picking up the suitcases, carrying the suitcases 20 feet, and doing that for four miles. It helped me not only keep my problem in perspective, but offered the subtle encouragement of knowing my problem was solvable. A solvable problem is a lot easier to deal with than an overwhelming problem. The way to deal with problems is to break them down into their component parts. And for me the way to deal with my anxiety is to imagine the absolute worst case scenario, and how I will deal with that. As long as I can deal with the worst case scenario, I can deal with a slightly crappy one. Mahiai and Kala, under constant attack by poachers trying to sell their babies to unscrupulous mages, are in a worst-case scenario. But hopefully Mahiai's heroic defense of his nest is in some small way inspiring, too.