A very touching Akhil Sharma in The New Yorker:
Not long after we began dating, my now wife, Christine, and I started making up stories about the child we might have.
We named the child—or, in the stories we told about him, he named himself—Suzuki Noguchi. Among the things we liked about him was that he was cheerfully indifferent to us. He did not wish to be either Irish (like Christine) or Indian (like me). Suzuki was eight, and he chose this name because he was into Japanese high fashion. When we told him that he couldn’t just go around claiming to be Japanese, Suzuki said that he was a child of God and who were we to say that God was not Japanese. In addition to being a dandy, Suzuki was a criminal. He dealt in yellowcake uranium and trafficked in endangered animals. Sometimes we asked him how his day at school had gone and he would warn, “Do you really want to be an accessory after the fact?” We imagined him banging on our bedroom door when we were having sex and shouting, “Stop! You can’t get any child better than me.”
My wife was forty-eight and I was forty-seven, and we started inventing these stories as a form of play. It also soothed some hurt part of us.
More here.