Mama Non Grata

Mama has a brand-new blog

2009-11-13T09:05:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone,

Mama Non Grata is all grown up and now has her own domain name! Just like a big girl! Posting will now shift over to http://www.mamanongrata.com — please visit me over there, update your RSS feeds, browse the various pages, let me know what you think of the design (not to mention the content), and leave lots of comments. Oh, and if you like it, please tell your friends.

See you there!
Susan

Book launch today! And Baby Makes More ...

2009-11-07T05:06:00.000-08:00

Hey,

If you're in Toronto today (Sat. Nov. 7), join us from noon to two p.m. at the Toronto Women's Bookstore (73 Harbord St.) for the launch of my anthology: And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents, and Our Unexpected Families. Should be a blast.

New tricks

2009-11-03T17:52:00.000-08:00

On November 1, Rowan came downstairs and by way of “good morning” said to me, “Candy.”

And I said, “No problem, buddy!

And then, under the tender and loving eyes of his mothers, he and Isaac proceeded to eat every single piece of Halloween candy in their bags until it was all gone.

Aren’t I a great parent?

The end.

Okay, so it didn’t go quite like that. What I actually said was, “No problem, buddy! Right after you eat breakfast.” And he did: an entire, wholesome, bowl of organic oatmeal with applesauce and plain yogurt.

And then, we brought out the candy bags. And The Wild Rumpus began.

Okay, so I should mention that the candy bags were heavily edited: the previous evening, Rachel and I had already gone through the kids’ stash and got rid of some of the particularly egregious stuff — the lollipops and Tootsie Rolls and anything else that we’d need to scrape off their teeth with a chisel. We even managed to recycle some of it immediately back out to the last few rounds of trick-or-treaters before closing up shop for the night.

But that did not seem to hamper Rowan’s spirits in the slightest. He commenced a highly ritualized Sunday service at the Church of Candy, sorting, eating, distributing and rhapsodizing about sugar, aided by Isaac, who seemed primarily interested in transferring Smarties from one tiny box into another. Rachel and I gladly accepted any and all offers of shared treats — and they were surprisingly forthcoming — shoving Nibs and mini Coffee Crisps and Twizzlers into our pockets, to be disposed of later. When Rowan went upstairs to the washroom, Rachel stood guard while I thinned out his stash yet again. But even with our subterfuge, I’m guessing he still ate upwards of two dozen individually packaged treats. At minimum.

And you know what? He was fine. He didn’t get a stomachache. He didn’t throw up. He didn’t wind himself up into a sugar-fuelled, maniacal tyrant. He just ate and ate and ate, and then he put away some of the candy, and then he went back to it, and then he went swimming, and then he came home and ate the rest, and then it was done, and then we never, ever had to negotiate with him about the candy ever again. It’s gone.

Which leaves me wondering: just what else can I let go?

Princ(ess)ipals

2009-10-28T06:31:00.000-07:00

While we have studiously avoided as much as possible the Disnefycation of womanhood in our household, it still sneaks its way in through the cracks in our armor. If we are at a friend’s house, Rowan gravitates towards the costume trunks, the fairytale pumpkins, the tiaras. He has dubbed me Princess Snow White, himself Princess Cinderella, and Isaac Princess Rosebud. Rachel, crafty crafty Rachel, has managed to get away with the nickname Alice in Wonderland, even though Alice is technically not a Princess. “Oh, Princess Rosebud,” Rowan will say to Isaac, “do you want to build a fort? Do you need your blanket?” And it’s all very sweet. In a saccharine sort of way.

I mean, on the one hand, I am all for gender atypical play. And so, part of me feels that when Rowan and Isaac gleefully don tutus and run around waving magic wands, I should encourage them.

On the other hand, I mean, princesses. Come on. Disney princesses. If my sons are going to run around waving anything that represents my take on ideal womanhood, it would likely be a sign saying, “Pro-child, pro-choice!” or “When can I vote on your marriage?”

So this little cartoon — combining as it does princesses and critique — made me happy.

Happy, but not hopeful. At least, not in the immediate term. Rowan, thus far, is impervious to societal critique, has an absolutely deaf ear for our earnest political explanations. Take Santa Claus, for example: no matter how many times we explain that jolly old St. Nick is simply a nice story that other people tell their children about the holiday, that nobody — repeat, nobody — is going to come down our chimney and leave presents for him, he’s like that dog in that Gary Larson cartoon who hears only her name, only in this case, substitute “presents” for “Ginger.”

“Some people leave milk and cookies for Santa Claus,” he’ll murmur at the close of one of our diatribes.

Similarly, we keep having talks with him about the fact that we won’t shop at a certain retailer (whose name rhymes with smashmortion, I mean Gallmart) because it treats its workers badly, particularly its female workers. It makes lots and lots of money and yet won’t pay them very much or give them benefits. Rowan listens to all this, and then says, “But can’t we buy Bakugans there? Even if they’re not nice to womens? They have the big case of Bakugans. Please?”

When Rowan asks me if I want to play princesses, then, it’s always a bit of a quandary. Sure, I’ll play princesses, but can we be princesses building a house? Princesses reading books or, I don’t know, going on a peace march?

“It’s just that princesses are only important to some people because they’re pretty,” I’ll try to explain to him. “And women are important for lots of reasons: because they’re smart, and creative, and have ideas and make things and change the world.”

“But Princess Snow White,” he says to me, twining his fingers through my hair, “you’re pretty.”

Leaving me about as speechless as Ariel, the little mermaid.

This post was originally called “Greetings from the basement”

2009-10-22T13:04:00.000-07:00

You know, the basement where I slept every other night for a couple weeks earlier this month (or was it September? I can’t remember.) because some toddler who likely won’t remain nameless started waking up twice a night and hollering for stuff. Like water, or apple juice (as in, "Apple juice! Apple juice! APPLE JUICE!"), or cuddles (as in, "CUDDLE ME!"). Or Rachel (as in, "Go away, Susan!").

Trying to pacify him often involved pulling him into our bed, where, inevitably, he would end up lying perpendicular between us, feet on my side. On my head. Leaving me sleepless but unwilling to risk moving him for fear of waking him. Because, when push comes to toddler feet in my sternum at 4:30 in the morning, I’d rather lie there in discomfort than actually have to get up and function.

At least, Christoph Niemann had the good grace to fly in all the way from Berlin and sneak into the bedroom one early morning to do a little sketch, which made me feel so much less alone.

But really, too tired to write about it all again. Besides, now that I’ve actually got around to it, Isaac (see?) is more or less sleeping through the night again. I’m sure I just jinxed that by writing it, but, you know what? I’m so past believing that any particular voodoo on my part — not least what I write about him on the Internet — has any particular effect on his sleep patterns. It’s not me, it’s him, a fact verified by what I heard him chanting in bed the other night as I walked past his door at about nine o’clock: "I’m in charge. I’M IN CHARGE."

Seriously.

The early-morning wake-up calls are still, sadly, the norm. But at least he makes up for them by being adorable a lot of the times. He talks a little bit like a Sprocket, full of slightly odd, almost inappropriate questions: "You want to touch my hair? It nice? It soft? You got soft hair? You got a car? You got money? In your pocket? You being friendly?" And, my favorite, his description of me nuzzling him: "You put your nose in my eye? It nice?" Yes, you crazy baby, it nice. Now go to sleep.

Thanks to M.A. for the Niemann reference.

Transitions are hard, or, Our trip to Duluth

2009-10-14T10:45:00.000-07:00

“Hey!” Isaac exclaims every 25 minutes or so, as if struck with some version of toddler amnesia, “Where we goin’?”

We’re in the car, navigating Highway 61.

“We’re going to Duluth!” Rachel or I answer brightly. “For a holiday!”

And then Rowan chimes in: “We’re not going to Duluth! I don’t want to go there!” And drums his feet on the back of my seat in protest.

“I really wonder how my parents managed to get us all to Virginia Beach in a Ford Cortina,” Rachel murmurs, while I breathe deeply and wonder how, precisely, my mantra “It’s the journey, not the destination,” applies to this journey along the scenic north shores of Lake Superior. Because I just want to get there already, to be out of the car, to silence the protests emanating from the backseat. I find myself wishing we had brought the movie player, biting my tongue to keep myself from saying things like, “Well, I guess we’ll just turn around and go back, then,” or, “If you don’t stop that, I’m going to stop this car and you can get out and walk.”

Rowan, it’s fair to say, doesn’t rush in gladly to the unknown. And Duluth, to him, is not yet a place, not even a city, but simply a vast, unquantifiable mass of unknowableness, a break from beloved routine. He hasn’t been on board with this weekend getaway since the beginning, not even with promises of playgrounds and aquariums and swimming pools and restaurants and cable TV and the like — although he warms slightly at the mention of ice cream. He wants to bring the cats with us, our own toilet and bathtub, actually, the entire house in the trunk of the car. We explain and explain, we acknowledge his feelings, repeat them back to him, and, finally, just shut up and stop talking about the trip, knowing that until he’s actually there, at the destination, it won’t make sense.

“Hey! Where we goin’?”

I get it — I do, really, that fear of the unknown. I like to know where I’ll be sleeping at night, hate arriving in darkness to unknown cities. I get how it must feel to be plunked into the car and told, “We’re going. You’re going. And you’ll like it.” Like what?

It’s just that maybe he could chill a little bit.

And he does, in minor spurts, falling hard in love with each new experience and yet seemingly unable to generalize and apply the idea that “new” might not necessarily equal “horrific.” He settles in immediately to the hotel room, jumping with Isaac on their king-sized bed before turning on SpongeBob. But it’s a battle to get him out of the room and onto the street, a battle to get him off the street and into the restaurant where he devours Kraft dinner and red pepper and a tiny ice cream sundae from the kids’ menu. Sunday morning’s itinerary proceeds something like this:

Doesn’t want to go to the Aerial Lift Bridge. Loves the Aerial Lift Bridge. Doesn’t want to leave the Aerial Lift Bridge to see the lighthouse. Loves the lighthouse. Doesn’t want to leave the lighthouse to go to the aquarium. Loves the aquarium. Doesn’t want to leave the aquarium to have lunch. And so on. And by “doesn’t want to leave,” I mean, “pitches a fit when asked to leave.”

Still, by the afternoon, following a swim while Isaac naps, he has mellowed a bit. Is excited from the get-go to go to the Train Museum and the Children’s Museum, and, predictably, doesn’t want to leave either of them, but does not pitch a fit. Tries pakoras and papadums and chicken korma — followed by mango kulfi — at the Indian restaurant we happen upon. By Monday morning, he’s actually thrilled to take another dip in the hotel pool, followed by a visit to the utterly charming Duluth Zoo, where we get to pet turtles and a ferret and watch the bats being fed and get within a foot of a real live kangaroo. At every stop, during every activity, there are moments of pure gold, utter delight: the scale model of the Great Lakes with working locks, an absolute fascination with a 14-ton ship’s propeller and the ancient anchors along the sea walk. “Mom, can you read me the story?” he asks, pointing to each plaque we pass.

Predictably, he’s exhausted by the time we pile into the car for the trip home, and, mercifully, both kids fall immediately asleep for the first hour and a half of the journey home, during which time I try to put as much distance as possible between us and Duluth.

Isaac wakes up first. “Hey! Where we goin’? We goin’ to Doo-loot?”

“We’re going home,” we tell him. But first we’re stopping for a break and a bite to eat in Grand Marais, a tiny, picturesque town about an hour and a bit from Thunder Bay.

By now, Rowan is awake. “We’re not going to Grand Marais! I don’t want to go there!” Drum drum drum drum drum drum drum. After a mediocre experience at dinner, he loves throwing rocks in the water along the beach, jumping from one boulder to the next along the shoreline.

And later, putting him to bed, his own bed, in his own house, with his own cats and toilet and bathtub, I ask him, “Did you have a good time in Duluth?”

“Yes,” he says, snuggling down under his blankets. “Can we go there again?”

The blogger's dilemma

2009-10-06T08:08:00.000-07:00

Saturday, early evening. We’ve had a great day: Farmer’s market in the morning, followed by a hike in the rain at Mission Island Marsh, where we spot too many deer to count and throw driftwood into the stormy waters of Lake Superior. The kids don’t mind the weather: they splash through puddles in their rubber boots and twirl their umbrellas, tearing ahead of us on the trails and the boardwalk, sliding down boulders, making up imaginary worlds.

We’ve spent the day with friends, a three- and five-year-old brother and sister and their parents, who are tag-teaming childcare for the weekend. Their dad accompanied us to the marsh, while their mom took over for an afternoon play date and dinner. Pancetta pasta with capers and cherry tomatoes from our garden for dinner — to be followed by apple-pear crumble made with fruit from I’ve picked myself. How locavore is that? Smell you, Nancy Drew.

The kids eat quickly but heartily, making our hearts swell, pushing away from the table to go play in the basement until dessert, while the grown-ups linger over wine and conversation. Rachel and I are congratulating ourselves on the wholesome choices we’ve made: to embrace the rain and the grey rather than hole up inside with rangy children and DVDs. To feed them local food, healthy food, instead of macaroni and cheese. We are all three express our disdain for the school’s weekly hot dogs and pizza days — is it really appropriate? Have they switched over to whole-wheat buns, at least? We talk about how nice it is to be able to send the kids to the basement while we enjoy adult company. We take the crumble from the oven and serve it up on plates, so that it will be cooled for the children to enjoy.

And then.

And then, we hear Rowan on the basement stairs. “We have a surprise for you!”

I walk toward the landing, just as my sons — my now Day-Glo sons — appear at the top of the stairs. “We painted!” says Rowan, holding up his hands to show me. His hands are smeared with purple and black. His feet are bare, but it looks as though he’s wearing green socks. Isaac is right behind him, his hair a yellow and green mohawk with purple highlights, his hands and feet, his clothes, thickly layered with pigment.

Surprise!

I’m not sure what I said, but I think it might have been, “Oh, crap.”

And then I did what any self-respecting mommy blogger would’ve done. I turned around and went to get the camera.

In the meantime, the other two mothers in the house, alerted to the scene by my tone, showed up to investigate. Our guest descended the stairs first, and then turned to Rachel, who had followed close behind, and said, “Don’t laugh. Whatever you do, don’t laugh.”

We surveyed the carnage. Before I realized the extent of it, I took one picture.

And then I put the camera away.

The four of them had discovered my acrylic paints, left over from a series of art projects, carefully packed away in a cupboard. They opened them, and then they proceeded to coat the entire basement — and themselves — with them. The alphabet tiles on the floor. The couch. Handprints on the chairs and the carpet. The toy lawnmower, the yoga ball, the wooden blocks, the baseboards. The spare bed. Covered. In non-water-based, non-soluble, paint.

(That’s Isaac, at the far right — check out his hair.)

What followed was a flurry of containment and clean-up: children stripped down and thrown into laundry sinks and bathtubs, clothing and sheets and furniture covers placed on rinse and then wash, shampoos and scrubbing, mops and rags and— “Don’t walk on the floor! Don’t go near the white couch! This is so inappropriate! SO INAPPROPRIATE! It doesn’t matter whose idea it was!” Clean clothes found and distributed. Apple-pear crumble dumped, unceremoniously, back into the pan, because none of the adults can fathom tucking into our nice little locally grown dessert after such a display of INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIOUR. So, so, INAPPROPRIATE. You guys should know better. REALLY.

And still, in the face of it all, in the midst of the chaos and carnage, and later that evening as Rachel and I mopped and scrubbed and threw in load after load of laundry, we couldn’t quite stop giggling, whenever we were out of earshot of the kids. “We’ll all laugh about this later,” I whispered to our friend as she scrubbed her kids down in our bathtub (“How on earth did you paint there?”). “We already are,” she whispered back.

I wish I had a picture of four paint-soaked children to show you, but you’ll have to make do with the shots I took after the kids were in bed and Cleanup Part 2 began. Because the last thing I wanted to do was reward them for the destruction of the basement, and it just seemed to me that lining them up for a paint-smeared mug shots would send the wrong message: “Here’s one for the album! Aren’t you cute! Ah, kids and the hijinks they get up to!” So, at least this instance, parental prudence wins out over the best shot for the blog. Just barely.

So, bed without dessert. The next day, Rowan helped me reassemble the floor tiles.

“S, R, E, K, C, star, F... Mom? What does that spell? Mom?”

My baby!

2009-09-22T12:42:00.000-07:00

Here's the cover. I promise that the insides will be just as attractive -- details to come.

Dream big, kid

2009-09-17T13:04:00.000-07:00

“I was at the wishing well in the park and I threw a penny in and I wished that I had a marble run.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And then I wished that you were a princess.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. And then I wished that Rachel was a princess.”

“I see.”

“And then I wished that Isaac was a princess too.”

“Didn’t you wish that you were a princess?”

“Mom. I only had four pennies.”

Pass the Twinkies, Elmo

2009-09-17T12:54:00.000-07:00

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, the Globe & Mail wants you to know, again, that family meals are good for the kids. The research shows that “the more often a family eats together the less likely children are to smoke, use alcohol and drugs, suffer from an eating disorder or consider suicide. Family meals have also been linked to higher self-esteem and better performance at school.”

What I love about this research is that — although I forget where I read this so you’re just going to have to take my word on it for now — apparently, even family meals that consist of TV dinners in front of Friends reruns are better than no family meal at all. It so lets parents off the hook. I mean, even on the day where you throw Kraft dinner in front of your kids while they watch Elmo downloads, you’re actually benefiting their brains — just as long as you sit next to them on the couch while they eat it. So sit down! Watch TV with your kids! Just make sure you eat something while you do it. Even a Twinkie will do.

And, just imagine: if you manage to get the Kraft dinner into them around the dining room table, you’re really ahead of the game. And if you get a home-cooked, organic meal with three different colours of local vegetables into them, well, just sit back and wait for those letters from Princeton and MIT to come rolling in. Even when the boat of parenthood seems awfully rocky, it’s something to hold onto, now, isn’t it?

Rowan, for one, takes such things quite seriously. So much so that, for him, it doesn’t count as dinner unless it’s around the table. And not just any table — our table. At our house. He won’t be convinced otherwise, which is why on Sunday evening I found myself conceding to him that the pizza and salad and peach pie we were about to enjoy at a friends’ home was, sure, not dinner but just a really big snack. Sometimes it’s just not worth arguing. Especially when the Caesars are flowing and the children are playing happily.

At least I know I’m not alone in having a child with this particular foible. At a birthday party recently, I said very slowly and carefully to my children, “Just so you know, THIS is dinner. We’re not going home and having dinner again.” And a friend jumped up and slapped her forehead with her hand and said, “Oh! Thanks! I forgot to tell them that!” and ran off to find her boys. Which made me feel much better. I will choose to take Rowan’s attachment to our dinner table not as symptom of a deeply ingrained inflexibility but rather as a sign that we’ve been doing something right for the last four and half years.

Tonight is the school’s annual welcome barbecue. We’ll mosey over to play in the playground, chat with friends, and eat hot dogs served by the principal. And then we’ll come home and eat dinner. Around the table. Because it’s good for the kids.

School of hard knocks

2009-09-11T12:54:00.000-07:00

In last week’s episode, our heroine was left wondering whether her son would ever go to senior kindergarten without dissolving into a little puddle of profound unhappiness.

In a word: yes. Wednesday evening treated us to a series of conversations in which Rowan ping-ponged back and forth on that very question. “I’m not going to that school ever again,” he would say, and then, immediately afterwards, “And I’m going to play with the marble run!” followed by, “But I’m not going to school,” followed by, “And there are going to be balloons for Avery’s birthday!” And so on.

Thursday morning, I still wasn’t sure what would happen. My guess was that he wanted to go, but couldn’t quite bring himself to fully admit that — and that any hint of sentimentality or moment of doubt would set him off. So when he said he wanted to ride his bike to school, I jumped on it — until Rachel reminded me that his bike was in the shop. “I want to go in the car, then, “ said Rowan, and, a hot minute later, I had him buckled in the backseat and we were off. Like a prom dress.

I was so on the ball, in fact, that we were the first kids to arrive. We wandered into the senior kindergarten courtyard and hung out for a while until the teacher’s assistant, Mrs. T., showed up. I met Mrs. T. approximately, oh, infinity times last year during Rowan’s tenure in JK, and yet, every single time we meet her, he feels the need to introduce her to me.

“That’s Mrs. T.,” he’ll say, and then be genuinely shocked and puzzled when I explain that I know who she is. “But how do you know her?” he says, and I explain, patiently, that I have met her before, right here at school. And he looks both impressed and doubtful.

In any case, this being a new year and all, Rowan obviously felt some justification in introducing me and Mrs. T. again.

“Mom, this is Mrs. T.,” he said. “And this is my mom. One of my moms. I have two moms. And I also have a dad, Rob. But he doesn’t live here.”

He said this all, characteristically, while walking in a circle waving his hands, as he is wont is a to do when he explains things to adults. Mrs. T. and I nod and smile — she’s heard all this before. Rowan talks about his family, like all kids talk about their families — at least, when they’ve never been given a reason not to. The four-year-old daughter of my friends Fiona and Jen has been telling supermarket cashiers that she has two moms since she could put words together. Another toddler-daughter-o-dykes I know recently shouted at the corner of a busy downtown Toronto intersection, “No Dadda! More mamas!”

Which is fantastic. And not necessarily because we’re not ashamed of our queer families (which we aren’t), or because were proud of them (which we are), but because we exist for the most part in a world where we can exist, where we can talk openly about our two moms or our two dads, or our donors, and the like. We’ve never explicitly explained to Rowan that there is anything unusual or different about his family. He simply has two moms, and a Rob, who doesn’t live here — and an entire network of biological and chosen family to support him. No secrets, no shame, no worries.

Right?

So, tell me this: how am I going to explain to my sons how this:

becomes this

outside a gay bar in downtown Thunder Bay last Friday night?

I don’t know Jake Raynard, the gay man who was savagely beaten gay with bricks by a crowd of young men. The man to whom police took more than an hour to respond when the employees at the fast food restaurant called them to report his distress. The man with 15 fractures to his cheekbone, a broken palate, a broken eye socket, and a broken jaw. I don’t know Jake, but I know the daughter he helped my two friends here conceive. I know he has a supportive community in this city, who have organized a rally this evening in order to support him to welcome him back into the community, and to send the message, in their words, that our response to this action — and not this action — will define our community.

We are going as a family to the rally tonight. I suspect it will be an emotional event, a conflicted event, an event that has the potential to be healing but that could also pit community against community if we aren’t very careful. And I’m not yet sure how to answer the questions that Rowan might ask about why we’re there and what’s going on.

These are lessons way beyond the scope of senior kindergarten. And yet, our kids have to learn them, now.

This post NOT brought to you by Apple

2009-09-08T13:12:00.000-07:00

So, I got this new computer and it has completely sucked all the life out of me and my poor little repetitively strained forearms. Seriously, sucked the life out of me. Like a Dementor sucking the life out of Dudley Dursley. Sucking. Suck-King.

To be fair, it's not so much the new computer as the voice dictation software that was supposed to make my life easier and my forearms all smiley and my limp little carpally tunnelled wrists spring to life. MacSpeech dictate officially sucks in my books right now. It doesn't work, which means that I can't make the computer work, which means that I am dictating this on a wheezing old PC that's starting to look kind of good right now. At least when it doesn't crash on me, like it did ... just ... now. Reboot. Somewhere in Georgia, two tech people are trying to solve this problem for me. I spent 40 minutes on the phone this morning with some drawling guy named Jason and it felt just a little bit like suicide prevention call. "Jason," I kept saying as the call drew to a close, "Jason, I'm scared to get off the phone with you."

"Yeah," he would answer, "I'm kind of leery about that myself."

Despite his compassion, Jason could not make MacSpeech work for me, though.

And yet, I haven't lost all hope. You get hopeful. You do, when the shiny new technology toy arrives in the box and you imagine just how great things might be. You do, when your four-year-old climbs on the school bus on the first day of school last week and you think, "Huh. That was way easier than last year."

And then, and then, the computer sits on your desk like a big shiny expensive mistake, and the second day of school rolls around and your son pulls his knapsack straps over his shoulders and then turns around for one last hug -- hugging! Damn the hugging! -- and completely melts down. Runs back inside the house. Repeats things like "I'm going to miss you too much! I want you all to come with me! I'm going to miss Isaac! I just want to be here with you!" Is driven, sobbing, by his other mother to class, clutching a blanket, continuing to sob. Setting off other kids in the class who weren't quite sure whether this was a good idea or not.

Rachel and I have been kind of mopey all day.

To take the edge off, I cycled to the bus stop after school where Rowan would meet his babysitter. He climbed down, a bit tired but seemingly no worse for wear. Told me he had homework, that we had not put a granola bar in his lunch (peanut allergies in the classroom) and that it was Katie's birthday on Thursday -- and they would celebrate.

"When it's your birthday, should we bring cupcakes to school?" I asked him.

"Yes," he said.

But I'm not convinced. Not convinced that the promise of cupcakes will get him on the bus easily on Thursday. Not convinced that my Mac will be running by then, either. I give them both three weeks to settle into the new school year. It's a tempered kind of hopeful, and yet, it's still there. Because I'm nothing if not an optimist. Or just terribly, terribly naïve.

It's the most wonderful time of the year

2009-09-03T10:45:00.000-07:00

As some of you may remember, approximately one year ago today, I carried Rowan, all hysterical 40 pounds of him, the four blocks to his new school and delivered him in a shuddering, tear-stained heap to his junior kindergarten classroom.

And although it didn’t take him long to acclimatize, and although he grew to love school, love his teacher, love his friends, love – like Lilly in Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse – the chocolate milk at lunchtime, shades of that first morning still haunt me, have taunted me for the past couple weeks as a new school year approached.

Rowan seemed all gung ho about SK, but of late he had been balking whenever we mention it. “I’m not going to school,” he announced recently. “I’m not going on the bus. I’m just staying home with you.”

We’ve been quietly working to subtly shift his attitude. He has been somewhat mollified by the promise of a granola bar in his lunch on the first day, the fact that there will be a train table in his new classroom, the fact that we have a birthday party to attend right after class today. Still, this morning, as far as I was concerned, was a crapshoot. I was totally prepared for him to get on the bus, happy as a clam – and I was equally prepared (well, as prepared as one can be for such events) for a bloodbath.

And?

We waited outside, the tension mounting as yellow school bus after yellow school bus drove on by, until finally his arrived, the door opened, and … the sun shone its smiling face down upon me and my boy as he climbed aboard, smiling, and waved goodbye. I think I caught a flicker of doubt cross his face just as the doors closed, but he sat down, and the bus pulled away, and I got all weak in the knees and couldn’t stop grinning.

And then he got to school just fine. His “bus buddy,” a tiny fifth-grade girl, delivered him to his locker and then to the senior kindergarten courtyard, where he dropped his bag and went off to play. I know all this because Rachel, Isaac – Isaac, who spent the morning chanting, plaintively, “I want to take the bus!” – and I followed the bus on foot and spied on Rowan as he made his journey.

We’ll do the same this afternoon as he buses to his babysitter’s. If you think we’re being overprotective, just remember that on my first day of Grade 1, my carpool driver – Mrs. Miller, my parents’ trusted friend – forgot me at school.

But! What a difference a year makes.

It got colder — that’s where it ends...

2009-08-18T09:35:00.000-07:00

Ding, dong, the fridge is dead! And long live the fridge!

Okay, it’s not quite dead, but the Eaton Viking model manufactured sometime in the early years of the Reagan Administration that has been chugging away in our kitchen since well before we moved in is slowly dying. And we are more than happy to pull the plug.

We’ve been eagerly anticipating the fridge’s demise for a while. Each time something goes awry, we call Franz, our inscrutable appliance repair guy, and I cross my fingers that he’s going to take a look, shake his head, and say, “You know, I think it might be time to say goodbye.” But he never does. Instead he tightens a hose or replaces the timing mechanism in his understated way, as I hover and ask leading questions. He never takes the bait.

“So,” I’ll say. “When, in your expert opinion, do you think we should call it quits and replace this thing?”

“That depends,” he’ll say. “But, generally, when it stops cooling things.”

It’s not quite that I need Franz’s permission to buy a new refrigerator. It’s just that it somehow feels more responsible to go purchase a major appliance “because our appliance guy told us to,” rather than “because it’s an ugly relic of the early 1980s.” I mean, take a look:

Yes, yes, I know that the newer fridges are much more energy efficient and environmentally friendly, but I just would have savoured that little nudge from Franz in the right direction. (And, why, yes: those are white melamine cupboards! They go so nicely with the flowered linoleum floor, don’t you think? But I digress.)

In any case, Rachel and I noticed a puddle of water emanating from underneath the Viking a couple of days ago and decided enough was enough. We briefly consulted Consumer Reports, measured the space, hightailed it over to Sears and picked out a new — Energy Star–rated — model in basic black, in approximately 20 minutes. Our salesperson was an odd mixture of completely not homophobic and utterly sexist: got it right away that we were a couple, asked how many kids we had at home, compared notes with us on child-rearing, but also made fun of Rachel for being “a sarcastic woman” and me for being “an opinionated woman,” while suggesting that it was a good thing we had two sons instead of two daughters — “because four women in one household – hooo boy.”

It was oddly refreshing.

So, we buy the fridge. It’s going to be delivered the first week of September. And then I mention to Rowan later that evening that the current fridge will soon be gone, to be replaced by a new one.

And he loses it.

“I don’t want the fridge to go away,” he wails. “I don’t want a new fridge. I want this fridge. I love this fridge.” Tears, shuddering sobs, snot, the whole bit. I think he might have even hugged the old Viking. It took about 20 minutes to calm him down and distract him, with promises that the current fridge would still be there when he woke up in the morning, that everything would be okay.

So, what’s with the sudden passion for the fridge? I mean, of course, he loves to stand in front of the thing with the door open while I intone like a robot about wasting energy and all, but beyond that, I’ve never known him to profess any great love for the beast. My sense is that — of course — it’s about something else.

And that something else? Just a hunch, but this: Rob is leaving soon.

If you look closely, you can just make out the face of a man in two photographs tacked up to the side of the fridge. That’s Rob, with each of the boys as babies. Rob is our cherished friend, our sperm donor, a key part of the extended family, and Rowan and Isaac’s, well, their “Rob,” who currently lives and works in a different city but who has spent the past five weeks with us, playing Chase and Cat in the Hat and Princesses and Chutes & Ladders and Pokémon and computer games with the boys, holding slumber parties and sleepovers, babysitting and hanging out and cooking and talking and eating ice cream with us and generally being a mensch.

But, summer days are slipping away. Soon, August will give way to September and school and work commitments, and Rob will have to leave.

None of us — me, Rachel, Rob — can actually talk about the upcoming goodbye. The last time Rob left, I sat with two sobbing little boys on the front steps as the car pulled out of the driveway on its way to the airport, Rachel and Rob white-faced in the front seat. The plan had been for Rowan to accompany them to the airport, but he wouldn’t get in the car, as if that might somehow delay the inevitable. But the inevitable, it has a funny way of happening in the end.

So, it’s getting colder. The fall will come, and we’ll stick old pictures our sexy new fridge — which will, undoubtedly, chill the milk much more efficiently than its predecessor. And try not to pine too much for, uh oh, those summer nights.

Bonus points: Use all three in a sentence

2009-08-14T11:27:00.000-07:00

So, it’s not just me: apparently “moist” is one of the most hated words in (North) America. I can’t decide whether I feel vindicated about my lifelong repulsion towards it, conjuring up, as it does, images of mould, bugs hiding under wet rocks, off food, earwigs in dank basements, laundry gone sour, unwashed bodies in the humidity—hey! Where are you going? I was talking about that creepily disgusting M-word, and whether I can’t decide whether I feel vindicated that it is, apparently, the “patron yuck-word of the [word aversion] movement” or simply resigned to the fact that I will never be original. According to Mark Peters of Good Magazine:

… word aversion has something to do with the sound and structure of the word itself. S]ome reactions are “…bred of the mysterious relationships between language, motion, memory, sound and ‘mouthfeel.’” I’m more used to seeing the word mouthfeel in discussions about beer, but it sure does get at the physical violation some feel when saying certain words.

For years, I had egotistically assumed that the way my stomach turned when confronted with “moist” was a deeply personal, highly idiosyncratic — and slightly adorable — quirk. Nope. Same with my next-least-favourites: “panties” and “slacks.” Everybody hates them. I’m just a demographic. Again. It's All Been Done before. Depressing, no? Might as well go mix up another round of Caesars (with the new Grey Goose vodka — which has just fantastic mouthfeel, by the way) and go join one of the many the “I hate the word ‘moist’” Facebook groups. Who knew?

Thanks to Deborah over at Peaches & Coconuts for the heads up on word aversion!

Literalist

2009-08-12T09:27:00.001-07:00

As in, “Pretty please, with whipped cream and a cherry on top.” Are we prepared or what?

All hail Caesar

2009-08-05T12:52:00.000-07:00

Me, I don’t drink so much. This may come as a surprise when you consider ALL I HAVE TO PUT UP WITH, but really, left to my own devices, I’d probably go a few weeks before cracking open a real beer (the non-alcoholic O’Doul’s I got used to during pregnancy don’t count) or a bottle of wine. It’s not that I don’t like a really excellent cold beer on a hot day or that perfect glass of red wine, more that I rarely seem to think of it as a reasonable (or not so reasonable, depending on your perspective) option at the end of the day or when the children life in general gets stressy. Plus, I don’t like the taste of most hard alcohol — call me crazy, but to me a martini is about the most unappetizing drink on the planet.

My non-predilection for booze puzzles Rachel, for whom a drink at the end of the workday is a rite of passage, the symbolic closing of one door and the opening of another. This is a woman who compares the merits of one brand of gin versus another — and can actually tell the difference — who spent part of yesterday molling (it’s a verb, apparently) mint leaves with lime and icing sugar in a mortar and pestle bought specially for the occasion, in order to make mojitos. Who actually planted mint in our garden for that particular purpose.

But now — now — all that might change. Because I have recently rediscovered the pleasures of that Canadian classic, the Caesar, and all of a sudden I am finding myself thinking, fairly regularly, how nice it might be to have one. It seems counterintuitive: I mean, really, clam juice? Bleah. But, my God, the Clamato, the vodka, the Worcester and Tabasco, the lime, and the ohmygod the celery salt, and it just... works. So very, very well, especially in August. And really, the Clamato would go bad if I didn’t finish it up. (As would, I hear, the Stoli. Just watch Arrested Development.)

“Maria, what is it you can’t face?”

2009-07-29T13:23:00.000-07:00

When Isaac was a baby — a real, bona fide baby and not the skinny toddler he is now — we used to try to comfort him on long car rides by singing what became known as the “Isaac Song.” It didn’t always work, but it had the advantage of being easy to remember, even for Rowan, as it went something like this (in the key of C major):

Isaac Isaac Isaac
E E E F E D

Isaac Isaac Isaac
D D D E D C

Isaac Isaac Isaac
E E E F E D

Isaac Isaac Isaac
D D D E D C

(Second verse, same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse!)

Anyway, as he exits babyhood, Isaac seems to have outgrown Isaac Song, and so we are currently trolling around for replacements.

Which got me to thinking about the summer of 1993, when I backpacked around Europe with my friend Julie, and we met this girl named Joanna Rainbow. She had a last name, too, and I just found it in the back of my diary from that trip so now I can Facebook her — but I will refrain from posting it here.

One of the best things about Joanna was that she was about as obsessed with The Sound of Music as Julie and I were. (Although I do remember Julie gazing wistfully at yet another panoramic view of the Alps and asking, “Would you really want to climb every mountain?”) And, since we met Joanna in Salzburg, Austria — otherwise known as Sound of Music mecca — she was the perfect companion for the SOM bus tour. The gazebo! The gazebo!

Another thing about Joanna was the story of how her parents met. Apparently, her mother and father were each married to other people, and the two couples were best friends. Such best friends, in fact, that the four of them decided to take a trip to Hawaii together. On the plane, each of the women sat with the man she was not married to. And at the end of the flight, without anybody saying a word to anybody, each of the newly configured couples stayed in their new configurations, all the way to their hotel rooms, throughout the stay in Hawaii, and beyond to divorce and remarriage. I don’t remember whether they all had children before or after that fateful trip, or whether Joanna’s parents actually gave her the name Rainbow or she just added that on later in life, but – oh, those crazy Californicators.

And what does all this have to do with the Isaac song? Well, the thing is, I probably wouldn’t remember anything about Joanna today if not for her family car song, which she sang for me and Julie, which we didn’t stop singing for the entire continental tour, which I still find myself randomly humming today. I remember her telling us about how she and her brother would fight “like chickens” in the backseat of the car, but that the bickering could always be brought to a halt by the following ditty:

Mother-fucking, titty-sucking, two-bomb bitch
C C E G CC E G A- A- C

Father-fucking, titty-sucking, two-bomb bitch
C C E G CC E G A- A- C

La la la la la la la
G G A A F F G

Fill your ass with spaghetti.
G G F D D E C

The real genius in the song is that, with every repetition, you had to fill your ass with something else, like paper clips or turtledoves or bright copper kettles and whiskers on kittens. “It was just such a caring, sharing, kind of song,” I remember Joanna saying. She described how her mother and father would beam at their respective lines, about hours of bliss passing by as they sang and sang, about the creativity, the sharing.

And now, as I look for a new car song, I'm thinking, “Heeeyyyyyyy...”

Pineapple weed

2009-07-24T07:50:00.000-07:00

“Look,” Rowan says, dropping to his knees on the sidewalk: “pineapple weed.”

He plucks a sprig of the ubiquitous small plant that grows through cracks in the summer pavements: green stalk and leaves, topped with a golden helmet of a blossom. It’s never occurred to me to look at it.

“If you rub the yellow part with your finger and smell it, it smells like pineapple,” he says, and does, holding his thumbnail to my nose. And he’s right: there it is, the smell of pineapple, lingering on his fingers. (Later, on a walk around the block to clear my head, I perform the same magic trick for Rachel. She is suitably impressed.)

I hold onto this moment — this moment of my son teaching me something interesting, something I don’t know already, something quirky and cool; this example of his ability to pay attention — and return to it a few days later as I sulk in the corner of the kids’ pool at the Sports Complex, fed up with Rowan’s refusal to go to his swimming lesson, at his ability to confound me in public, at the fact that he has deprived me of a much-needed half-hour swim.

It’s only later that I realize that he doesn’t actually get the concepts of “late” and “on time,” that much of him believes that the lesson will be there when he is done in the kiddie pool. “But I just got in,” he keeps saying. “I’m not ready to get out yet.”

He knows so much. Like the pig Olivia, he is good at lots of things, including — especially — wearing people out. Without even really trying, he has started to read. Recently, he showed a friend of ours how to work a program on her Mac. But there’s still so much to learn, like how to dunk your head underwater without the water going up your nose, or that Isaac will hand him almost anything if he only asks nicely.

“You’re having a hard time listening when I ask you to do something these days,” I said to him a few bedtimes ago.

“Yes,” he said, after a pensive silence. “Yes, I am having a hard time with that.” He placed his palm on my cheek.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Because,” he said, after another moment. “Because my body doesn’t know so much things yet. My brain doesn’t know so much things yet.”

Mine neither, I think. But you’re teaching me.

My mothers went to the Winnipeg folk Festival and all I got was this hippie relic of a T-shirt

2009-07-20T18:24:00.000-07:00

Ye gods, people, you have no idea how much shorter an eight-hour drive is with no children in the back seat. The whole way to the Winnipeg Folk Festival, Rachel and I kept marveling at how easy this was: no backseat DJing from the three-year-old dictator, no “Are we there yet?”s, no placating a restless Isaac with chunks of Arrowroot cookie and half-grapes, passed into the backseat at regular intervals. No doling out points for every “motorcycle-go!” passed on the highway. No ending the last leg of every driving interval with a screaming baby whose limits had been pushed past breaking point. No skulking around the sleeping children in a hotel room at 7:30 p.m., only to be wakened by the very same children at 4:34 a.m. So not like last year.

Just me and my girl, on the road with grown-up music and coffee and the cell phone I finally acquiesced to. And oh my God, it was sweet.

Those of you with small children who have not yet gone away for a few days with your partner: do it. If you can swing it at all, do it. Leave them with a trusted somebody and hightail it out of town. It barely matters where. I mean, the Folk Festival was fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but the real highlight of the weekend was not being responsible for anyone else’s needs. From Friday morning — a getaway marred only by Rowan’s sudden tears and pleas for us to stay (he was fine, fine, five minutes later, as we confirmed by said cell phone) — until Monday evening, I did not have to worry about anyone else eating, sleeping, sharing, peeing, hurting, running off, waking up, being bored, throwing sand, or otherwise Behaving or Needing or just plain Existing under my jurisdiction. We travelled with three other sets of parents of relatively small children, none of whom had ever left their kids behind either, and we all walked around with slightly goofy, dazed expressions on our faces. We half-declared a moratorium on conversations that began with, “If the kids were here...,” but eventually gave up. It was just too much fun to gloat.

Even the camping — such as it was, what with nice flat fields of open grass and cooking facilities and bathrooms nearby — was magical. I slept, uninterrupted, under a duvet on our air mattress, until whatever time I chose to wake up in the morning. Our second morning there, Rachel brought a steaming mug of tea to me as a 10:30 wake-up call. And I remembered what it was like to be pampered, how easy it was to be romantic, when not pulled in two directions at once, not mentally mapping out the morning, the hour, how to entice children from Point A to Point B.

And the people! The beautiful people everywhere, eating the beautiful food that we simply bought when we were hungry, washed down by the microbrews in the beer tent when we had a hankering. The baked goods! (Rachel would like me to mention for the record that we ate fried dough in four different forms.) The swimming, the conversations, reading large chunks of my novel, the setting up of camp chairs and hanging out for hours on end in ways that we haven’t hung out in far, far too long.

And, uh, the music. “What did you see?” my sister-in-law asked when we got back. “I don’t actually know,” I admitted. Because, sacrilegious as it sounds to the hard-core festivalgoers, I didn’t really care all that much, at least after k.d. lang cancelled and we missed Elvis Costello and Martha Wainwright on the Wednesday night. Neko Case was pretty rockin’, as was a UK band called Bellowhead. I liked Iron and Wine, and I kind of thought Steven Page was a bit pathetic, what with singing all the old Barenaked Ladies songs he wrote, thank you very much.

But really? As long as it wasn’t Raffi, I wasn’t complaining.

Rejected

2009-07-14T18:17:00.001-07:00

Hey, how would you like an organic blueberry-banana smoothie, garnished with a fresh-picked strawberry, still warm from the fields? Because I have two, right here, that my children Are Not Drinking.

The little one, just woken from a nap and therefore in the state of mind I refer to as Everything You Do Is Wrong, screeched, “No strawberry! No strawberry! No moothie! Don’t want! Take it away! Away!”

“Why did you put the strawberry there?” was what the big one wanted to know. “For decoration,” I explained. He picked it up by the stem and examined it gingerly, as though it might explode, and remarked, “You forgot to cut the top off.” He briefly considered lobbing the offending berry into the smoothie glass, but reconsidered this action when I barked, “Don’t even think about it, mister!” Instead, he plunked it down on the table, took a couple of sips of the smoothie, and then forgot about it until he realized it could be used as a delaying tactic at bedtime. At which point he desired it passionately.

But, you know? It didn’t bother me. Even as I was pouring drinks and slicing strawberries and arranging everything just so, I knew that my kids probably wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about my efforts at plating. I was doing it for me. And now, for you. Because you? You appreciate things.

Orchestral manoeuvres in the dark

2009-07-06T08:53:00.000-07:00

In the latest round of our ongoing game of musical beds, Rowan has spent the past few nights on an air mattress (yes, that air mattress) in our room, while Auntie Kathryn occupies the “blue” room he usually sleeps in.

It’s quite sweet, really, to peer over the side of the bed and see a small person, tucked up in the little nest we’ve created by the window. Twice now, he has climbed into our bed from his during the wee hours of the night, and — because I don’t seem able to sleep with his elbow in my solar plexus — I have decamped for the spare bed in what is currently Isaac’s room or gently but insistently escorted Rowan back into his own bed.

But not before reveling for at least a few moments in the glory of his almost-tiny body snuggled between the two of ours, the quiet intimacy of three bodies in the sleep-heavy night, lying under the blades of the slowly oscillating ceiling fan.

When Rowan was a newborn, a young baby, he loved the light fixture above our bed. He lay on his back between me and Rachel, cooing and kicking at the round white bulb. If we turned it on, his whole body wriggled in paroxysms of joy. He spent a lot of time in those early months lying between us, talking to the ceiling. But, back then, awash in a tsunami of sleep deprivation and consequent anxiety, I did not revel. I worried. I angsted. I fretted that we were doing everything wrong, that we were somehow harming him even as he lay happy next to me, that he would never sleep and that I wouldn’t, either. I wondered why all the other new parents I know didn’t seem to be slowly going insane, desperate with the knowledge that they had made a huge, irrevocable, mistake.

One early January morning, lying next to my nursing baby, Rachel spooning him from the other side, a tiny voice managed to work its way through the fretting. “You all look so beautiful,” it said, and for the first time I imagined what we must look like to the outside world: three tired bodies, two parents surrounding a breast-feeding child, warm under a nest of feather duvets and receiving blankets. And I realized in that moment that we did look beautiful, but that — more importantly — we also looked just fine, like we were handling things, like we were okay. Good, even. And I realized that, in fact, that all the other parents I saw with their babies must have had moments of sheer terror and desperation, too. Which, somehow, helped make things feel a bit less scary.

I hung onto that moment for a long time, reminding myself that we were okay. Which we were, all along, even if it took months more to relax into. Which is why, even as he wakes me from deep sleep, even as he jams his toes between my legs to warm them up and asks me to fetch him some water, I revel in my son’s — and now my sons’ — occasional presence in my bed. I revel that they can be there and it is at worst a mild disruption, not cause for despair. I revel in the heads heavy on my shoulder even as my arm falls asleep. And then I fall asleep, or I move them, or move me, and the night continues.

This morning at about 4 AM, I coughed, as quietly as I could, into my pillow.

“Mom!” came a voice from the side of our bed.

“Yes?”

“You woke me up!”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

And it was.

Bad babies

2009-07-03T09:59:00.000-07:00

Look! It’s Friday afternoon! The sun is shining, I have a head cold to go with my bronchitis, a cherished friend is coming in for the weekend, and — yay! — I don’t have to write a new blog entry, because the following story, about how we found out that Rowan was a boy, just appeared in the wonderful magazine Brain, Child’s “Backtalk” section. Have a great weekend.

“Do you want to know the sex?” the ultrasound technician asked at my 18-week prenatal appointment.

“Yes,” I said, “but instead of telling me, can you just show me the anatomy on the screen so I can see for my—”

“It’s a boy,” she said.

O-kay. Moving right along, the technician did the anatomical scan. She kept trying to get good pictures of the baby’s various parts, but he (now that I knew he was a he) wasn’t in the right position. She tsk-tsked a few times over the uncooperative fetus, and then said, “What a bad baby.”

I was stunned. My partner was stunned. Who calls a baby — an unborn baby, no less — “bad”?

“A very bad baby,” she said again, as she tried to get a picture of his femur or something. And then, just in case we missed it, again: “Very, very bad.” I guess she’d skipped the sensitivity training day.

She sent me off to the washroom to pee and drink some water, to try to get my bad baby moving so that she could get the pictures she needed. I sat on the toilet, reeling, awash in my first moment of parental protectiveness. Who the hell was this woman? And how dare she call my baby “bad”?

I emerged from the washroom. “So,” the technician asked, wand in hand, “did you tell this bad baby to cooperate?”

“No,” I said, sweetly as I could. “I told him not to be scared of the mean lady.”

If I never play this game again...

2009-06-29T17:58:00.000-07:00

... it will be too soon. Fortunately for me, I may never have to. Rowan has decided that I “play too slowly,” and now helpfully takes not only all of his turns, but all of mine as well, all the while narrating the game like a sportscaster on speed: “Okay, my turn: three! One, two, three! I’m on 37! Mom, I’m higher than you! Okay, mom, your turn: six! One, two, three, four, five, six! Mom! Look! You got a ladder! You go up, up, up, up, up — Mom! You’re on 84! Good job! But watch out, because if you get a three next time, you go down that big ladder. Okay, my turn: three again! One, two, three — oh no! I skated on thin ice! I go down a ladder! You’re winning, Mom! Okay, your turn: four! One, two, three, four! You missed the big ladder! Good job!”

And so on, and so on, and so on. This is a parenting strategy I like to refer to as Everybody Gets Most of What They Want, Most of the Time. Rowan gets to play his game, at the warp speed he prefers, and I get to murmur excited noises while reading the New York Times Sunday Styles section (which, in Thunder Bay, is generally delivered on Mondays, sometimes Tuesdays). In which, this week, I learned that, “Relationships between gay and straight men aren’t always easy, but stereotypes are falling.”

Oooh. Apparently, in the big city of New York, the gays and hets have tentatively figured out how to maybe be friends. At least, the guys — no mention of women. Whatever, I’m thinking: just move to a small town and you’ll have no choice.

Case in point: it was just Pride weekend. At least, it is places where they have Pride. Also known as places that are Not Here. All I wanted on Saturday was to take my children to the post–Dyke March beer garden. I wasn’t even envisioning idyllic: I would have settled for whining, demanding, overheated children in a beer garden in the middle of a city without garbage collection. Seriously, I would have. And then I read a whole bunch of blogs about moms who took their whining, demanding, overheated children to Pride, and I still wanted to be there.

My friend Tara, one half of the only other two-mom household I’m aware of in this fine city, suggested we try to create some kind of kid-focused Pride event. We discussed the idea, but the discussion kinda stalled around the question, “And which queer parents would we invite?” We scratched our heads for a while. “Well, there’s you...” she said, and trailed off. I thought of the woman at Rowan’s school with the rainbow sticker on her car: Rachel, excited, struck up a conversation with her one day, but we never got her name. There’s the woman who came up to me in the Scandinavian Home Restaurant in the winter because she recognized me from this blog — Pam! If you’re reading this: send up a flare! Jeez, if you made out with your same-sex roommate in college one drunken night and now live in Thunder Bay, send up a flare! — and then there’s, um … well. All the parents we usually hang out with. Our friends. Fine, fine, fabulous people, all of them. And all straight, as far as I can tell.

That's the thing about small places. You get to be friends with fabulous people, even when they are Heterosexual and you are Homosexual, because That’s How Things Work. In Toronto, I could surround myself with people just like me: I can, off the top of my head, for example, think of at least five other same-sex, interfaith couples with two kids, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of queer motherhood. Not to mention the dozens upon dozens of queer non-parents who are mainstays in the lives of so many of the gaybies (and their parents) in their midst.

And while I longed to be with all of them this weekend, I consoled myself with the fact that the community we have built and are building here is pretty damn lovable. And if we had stayed in Toronto, never moved to Somewhere Without Pride, I wouldn’t have known that. It’s not perfect, but neither is Toronto (even when the city workers are picking up garbage): I still long for more queer culture — not to mention more cafés, more art galleries, more patios, more walkable neighbourhoods — but it’s pretty damn good, from our mini Pride Sunday brunch with godmothers Judy and Jill to the community pizza potluck in the park that evening, where children danced in circles around giant cottonwood trees. Both versions my life — the urban and the small-town — have their ups and downs, but in the end, I suppose, Everybody Gets Most of What They Want, Most of the Time.

Marlo and me

2009-06-24T08:37:00.000-07:00

One of my less marketable skills is the uncanny ability to create new lyrics to pre-existing songs. It came in quite handy at summer camp, where I never tired of making up team songs to the Fame theme song or “I’d like to Teach the World to Sing,” or, on one memorable occasion, George Michael’s “Faith.”

Today, I find I find that the same skill serves me quite well as a parent. Rachel just stares at me and shakes her head as I come up with nifty little rhyming ditties about brushing teeth and putting toys away, all set to Sound of Music and Beatles melodies. But the kids like it, and I swear it keeps my mind younger. Never mind that I can’t remember anything that happened last week.

So when I read Lesbian Dad’s recent “Baba’s Day” post, wherein they take their kids to a Pride-sponsored screening of Free to Be You and Me — in San Francisco’s Castro, no less — I was, in addition to being insanely jealous, also immediately taken back in time to my seventh-grade production of FTB. It was 1983. I was in a class of ten girls, with my first teacher who went by “Ms.” and didn’t shave her armpits. You could say it was my feminist awakening. While I could relate to the relevance of “William’s Doll,” I also felt that it needed a girl-specific corollary. A couple of classmates and I got together, and “Gillian’s Ball” was born.

Without further ado:

Gillian’s ball

When my friend Gillian was five years old
She wanted a ball to bounce and throw.
“A ball,” said Gillian, “is something that
“I could use to learn to bat.
“A ball to catch and throw all day —
“Baseball and football I could play!
“And when it’s time to go to bed,
I’d put my ball away,” my friend Jill said.

[CHORUS] A ball! A ball! Gillian wants a ball!
“Don’t be a tomboy,” her best friend said.

Why should a girl want to play with a ball?
“That stuff’s for boys,” said her cousin Meg.
“Don’t be a jerk,” said her older brother.
“I know what to do,” to her father said her mother.

So her mother bought her a Barbie doll,
A baking set, and that’s not all:
Some knitting needles, a crayon set,
A baby doll that really wet.

And Jill loved all of her new games,
Enjoyed them all but all the same,
When Jilly’s mother praised her skill,
“Can I please have a ball now?” said my friend Jill.

A ball! A ball! Gillian wants a ball!
A ball! A ball! Gillian wants a ball!

Then Gillian’s grandma arrived one day
And wanted to know what she liked to play.
And Jill said, “Barbie’s my favorite game.
“I like to play, but all the same,
“I’d give up all of my new toys
“to go play baseball with the boys.”

“How very wise,” her grandma said.
Said Jill: “but everyone says this instead:

A ball! A ball! Gillian wants a ball!
A ball! A ball! Gillian wants a ball!

So Gillian’s grandma, as I’ve been told
bought Gillian a ball to bounce and throw.
When Gillian’s mother began to frown
Grandma smiled and calmed her down, explaining:

“Gillian wants a ball
“So when she’s on a Little League team,
“She’ll know how to bat and to run and to throw,
“And to field left and right and to pitch high and low.
“And maybe one day, Gillian will score the winning run!”

Gillian has a ball! Gillian has a ball!
'Cause she’s gonna play baseball and have a lot... of... fun!

Okay, I admit that I got just a wee bit choked up writing that down.

Yes, of course I remember all the lyrics, another slightly more marketable skill being a semi-photographic memory, especially for Trivia Relating to My Own Life, particularly the preteen years. Actually, I can quote the entire FTB soundtrack from memory (not to mention The Sound of Music and Fiddler on the Roof) and, yes, I do, whenever we put the CD on, inspiring yet more eye-rolling from Rachel. I’m always up for a resounding chorus of “Housework.” My version, however, is inspired not so much by Carol Channing’s rendition as by the Russian-accented version of my seventh grade classmate, Lina, who had recently immigrated from the USSR: “You KNOW, there are TYMZZZES when you HAPPEN to be, just SEE-TING there, KWI-etly, watching TEE-VEE...”

It only just occurred to me now that maybe William grew up to have three kids with his husband, Steve, and that Gillian was a budding baby-dyke who’d grow up to be a human-rights lawyer and pitch for her Rainbow-league softball team. You never know — but you know they were free to do whatever made them happy. Whether you’re in San Francisco or northern Ontario or anywhere in between or beyond, Happy Pride!

And your mothers wear army boots

2009-06-18T13:11:00.000-07:00

When I went to pick up Rowan at school today, the JKs were playing outside in the big kids’ playground. Rowan looked up from the slide, gave me a huge grin, and yelled, “Susan! What are you doing here!”

His teacher looked at me in mock horror. Instead of commenting on his amazing people skills, though, she said, “‘Susan?’”

“That’s what he calls me,” I said.

“Not ‘Mom’?”

“No,” I said. “Not ‘Mom.’”

“Why?” she asked.

“Well,” I said, “maybe if you had two of them, you would find more sensible things to call them, too.”

“Good point,” she said.

Because I am not Rowan, I did not answer, “I know it’s a good point.” But I thought it.

Two-year-old

2009-06-15T13:03:00.000-07:00

Dear Isaac,

You turned two this month, and I have devoted no small amount of time into figuring out how to bottle you, to preserve the essence of you at what I can only imagine is peak cute. I keep thinking the formula is nearly perfect, and then, every time I test it out, the Oompa Loompa turns into a huge blueberry and rolls away.

But first it wakes me up at 5:17 in the morning and demands a muffin and a glass of milk.

So I guess that you are going to keep on growing in the way that you have for the past two years, and I will just have to trust in the photographs and videos and, yes, this blog, to remember what you were like RIGHT NOW, barely 20 pounds soaking wet, in your goofy little frog hat that shades you so nicely from the sun.

I will have to remember your uncanny ability to wedge yourself so precisely into the space next to my body, and your almost palpable satisfaction at doing so with both white fuzzy security blankets in your arms and your thumb in your mouth. We spend lots of time like that on the couch, where we read, over and over again, books about trucks and about dogs, and you still get mad when the back cover of the board book will not open, and you try to pry apart the layers of cardboard in an effort to squeeze out just one more little bit of story. But you’re learning to flip the book back to the beginning and begin again. And each time we see that dump truck or the “six quiet dogs,” it’s just as thrilling as the last time.

For your birthday, we are buying you some leverage with your older brother in the form of two particularly coveted Sodor Railway trains. That brother of yours, one of his favorite questions is, “How come Isaac always wants to do what I want to do?” He sounds a bit put out by the whole younger sibling thing, and to some extent, he is. After all, one of your favorite phrases in relation to him is, “Coming too.” But I’ll tell you both a secret: pretty much just as much of the time, he wants to do what you’re doing, too. The two of you will disappear upstairs or into the basement for half an hour or more at a time, and your other mother and I are learning to back off just a bit when the two of you play. Because, when we do, when there’s no authority figure to provoke, your older brother becomes protective, solicitous of your toddler needs, nurturing. Many times, we’ll hear a bump, and then your cry, and then his voice, asking if you’re okay, if you want a hug or your blanket or some water. And, more often than not, you’re fine, trusting in him to make things better. He likes to lie down with you while you nap, swearing up and down that of course he will not talk and he will go to sleep. And then the two of you giggle and wrestle and natter and mess around until we finally have to escort him, protesting, from the room.

You doubled your lifespan over the past 365 days, and will double it again and again and again and still be younger than me. During that time, you learned how to walk and to talk, to feed yourself, what the telephone is for and how to climb into your own car seat. You paint, you sing, you dance, you sweep the floor. At playgroup the other day, you planted your first red runner bean. You like to mix up batches of pretend oatmeal in the sandbox and serve them to anyone who’s hungry. You are enamored of tea parties, a particular stuffed doggy, and the cats, even though the big one occasionally lets you know when to cut it out with the poking her with pens and paper clips. You have an uncanny ear for motorcycles and ambulances, and like to imitate a truck backing up, beep-beep-beeping as you shuffle carefully backwards.

You are a second child, who knows of things like ice cream and Pokémon well before your older brother ever did. When you wake up from your nap hysterical and inconsolable, your other mother and I feel bad for you but we do not worry, we do not feel desperate and wonder what we did wrong. You have grown up, thus far, not under the weight of our anxiety but rather our bemusement. Has that made a difference to your personality? Is that why you have the sense of humour you do, screwing up your face into coy little grimaces, pursing those rosebud lips into your series of funny faces? Rowan likes to get you to perform your tricks like a trained seal at a party: “Isaac, do baby laughing!” he’ll say, and you will oblige by breaking out in a series of jolly guffaws. “Isaac, do baby crying!” he’ll say, and you’ll wah-wah-wah for the audience.

And even though you’re two now, we still do think of you as a baby, our tiny, smiley little guy. You made a spectacular entry into the world, and I often find myself in the bathroom, marveling at the spot of linoleum right near the cupboard where the doula laid you carefully onto a towel before rushing off to grab some piece of equipment or other. Your other mother was on the phone, paging the midwife, who was parking her car in our driveway. Your big brother, seven months older than you are now, was asleep in his bed, barely 20 feet away. Time slowed down then for me, so that the entire world consisted of our two bodies, still joined, and the maybe six square feet of bathroom floor we occupied, me on my knees and breathless and thrilled at the turn of events that let me have you at home instead of the euphemistically named Regional Health Sciences Centre. I’d spent the day in labour, breathing through contractions and thinking about what it meant to open, to make that kind of room within myself and without, imagining you as my partner in this process and working with me to get you here, each of us trusting in the other’s instincts and decisions.

Even your 5 a.m. wakeup calls will eventually cease. On my mornings to get up with you, you eat your snack and then we cuddle up in your big brother’s abandoned bed for 45 minutes or so. You start off a foot or so away from me and slowly inch your way closer until we are spooning, me breathing in the scent of your strawberry-blond hair, nuzzling your skin, holding your tiny body close to mine for as long as I can until you turn over and sit up and say, “Go downstairs.” And I sigh and heave my weary body up and say, “Okay.” And you reach out your arms and say, “Coming too.” And we go downstairs together and squeeze out just a little bit more of the story.

Happy birthday, baby.

Magic wand, repaired

2009-06-12T09:45:00.000-07:00

We went to a birthday party last night, an offshoot of the weekly kids’ soccer game that has become our latest mainstay. Each Tuesday evening, several families gather in the lower field of a nearby schoolyard, children and potluck snacks and water bottles and bicycles and picnic blankets in tow. J’s four children drag their nets across the street and down the field. M brings a bag full of purple and yellow cloth strips that the kids tie around their heads or their waists to indicate their teams. L brings an entire watermelon, sliced. T blows his whistle and get the kids to line up by height, somersault across the field, give him 10 push-ups to warm up. S, who lives across the street, is the default bathroom stop for kids who just can’t hold it. At least one toddler eventually ends up naked. The little girls get hot and strip off their T-shirts; boys show up in pretty dresses if that’s what they feel like today.

There is a game of sorts, and then a break, and then a kids-against-grown-ups game, and then eventually we all scrape our children together, pluck them from the trees and the hills and the sidewalks, and make our way home, past bedtime and worth every minute of it.

Last night, J’s younger son turned eight, and the soccer game expanded to include tables and a potluck dinner, candles and cake, three-legged races and stomp-the-balloon and garbage-bag crawls and a cup-decorating station and the birthday boy high on contraband Fun-Dip. Grown-ups picked up broken balloon pieces and swung random children through the air. One child wondered aloud if there was an extra piece of birthday cake for him, and his dad indicated an abandoned half-slice on a plate on the ground: “Go ahead and have that one,” he said. “It doesn’t look like anyone is eating it.” And I thought: My kind of people.

Just as all the tables were set up, all the food spread out, the canopy stretched over top, we saw two police officers slow down and then stop their car across the street, open the doors and climb out and make their way, slowly, towards us. And I thought, Oh come on. Do we need a permit? Are they going to shut us down? Can’t we just gather in the park for a picnic without the cops arriving?

And one of the officers said, “We’re looking for a little girl who’s gone missing.” And I felt a rush of shame. Were all the kids here — all the girls — present and accounted for? No one extra? “Her name’s Angelica,” said the officer. “Apparently she comes here to play sometimes.” And we all scanned the field, picking out our own children and everyone else’s, hoping to spot one more girlish body in the mix. She wasn’t there.

The cops left. We returned to our festivities, the mood picking up fairly quickly in spite of it all. Games were played, cake eaten, new balloons tied around ankles and sweaters donned in the fading light. J brought a bag of tiny gifts for the kids, including a roster of fairy wands with pink ribbons tied around them. I found Rowan, perched in the lower branches of a crabapple tree, surrounded by children, and handed him one. “What is it?” he asked. “Your magic wand,” I told him, and he was into it immediately, shouting “Alakazam! I’m turning you into a turtle!” all the way home.

Of course, magic wands in the hands of four-year-olds are delicate proposition, and so I’ve Scotch-taped this one back together. Given its provenance, I’m fairly certain there’s still magic in it. Fingers crossed for enough magic in the world to make sure Angelica is safe.

Forty years in the desert was enough

2009-06-08T08:47:00.000-07:00

If Rachel and I ever split up, you just know that the next person she gets involved with will like to camp. Why, why, why, she’ll ask her new love, as they lie next to each other on their Thermarests, gazing out of the mesh door of their tent, which will be pitched in the belly of some provincial park or other, Why, why, why did I spend all those years with someone who never appreciated all this?

Here’s a (not-so) secret: I don’t really like camping. I’ll put up with it for a few days, here and there, for the greater good, but I never really got the point of it. I mean, I like nature and all, but I don’t really feel the need to sleep in the middle of it. Or cook, for that matter: I have a perfectly functioning stove right in my house, along with a bed. And oh, this crazy little thing called a toilet.

A lot of my camping aversion has to do with sleep. As in, I can’t — at least, not lying in a tapered, zippered, sleeping bag, with only an inch of foam and between me and the hard, hard ground, my folded fleece acting as a pillow, the whine of a thousand bloodthirsty mosquitoes droning in my ears. Sleep, as anyone who reads this blog regularly will know, is important to me, perhaps because it does not come easily to me at the best of times. And I am loath to squander it for the purported benefits of “getting away from it all” in the wilderness. One of the last times Rachel and I camped, I was five months’ pregnant with Rowan, which gave me the leverage to insist that we purchase an air mattress (along with a nifty little pump that you can plug into your car’s cigarette lighter). And now, when we camp, we camp on a mattress, outfitted with sheets, duvet, and pillows. Two of them, for me. Because I need two pillows to sleep. (Actually, in a perfect world, I also like a third pillow, just hold on to, but I’m willing to sacrifice this perk for the sake of “outdoorsiness” and keeping things simple.)

I also like earplugs, and an eye mask, to filter out the sunrise. And then I like to drink tea, with milk in it, as soon as possible after waking up. I’m becoming one of those people who contemplates traveling with my own pillows. In other words, I’m getting older, and it’s clear I’m not mellowing with age in the sleep department.

Here’s another thing: I feel ugly when I camp. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but it’s the truth. I have hair that really does require a certain amount of product to look halfway decent, hair that, when faced with humidity and lake water and left to dry of its own accord, frizzes out into an unattractive pyramid. And I don’t tan, either. Camping, sans product and styling aids, I begin to resemble a yeti. There’s Rachel, of the fine, straight, blonde hair, getting progressively cuter and browner and silkier with each passing hour, while I grow into a Brillo-headed, mosquito-bitten, grouchy little mess. Oh, and did I mention I am prone to heat rashes? And that Rachel could sleep on a pile of rocks?

Aesthetic issues aside, sometimes I find camping just a wee bit boring. I’m a little bit of a productivity junkie; I like to keep busy. And faced with a day of hanging around the site, I can get a bit antsy. My best trips are the ones that keep me busy and that thoroughly tire me out by the end of the day: canoeing or cycling to the next destination. Or, trips where camping is a means to an end: the tent the equivalent of a hotel room while we hang out at a music festival or stop for the night on a road trip.

And now that we have children to add to the mix, camping takes on a whole new tenor. We’re planning our first session of roughing it in the bush (as opposed to in a field with other festival-goers) with the kids this summer — Rachel wanted to head to Pukasaw, a national park four hours north of here; I talked her down to the Sleeping Giant, a breezy hour’s drive, with a little town nearby for diversions. I figure, in the event that I don’t sleep well and then am woken at five by chipmunks and a toddler, I may not have the energy to keep a watchful eye as the children stray towards open water, open fires, bears, the woods. I may need to take a little walk down the street to a coffee shop, or, at worst, make it home in short notice. At least for the first time we head out.

When Rachel and I first met, the throes of new love did a lot to temper my misgivings about camping, and Rachel’s misgivings about my misgivings about camping. We thought of each other’s quirks as simple — but adorable! — errors in judgment, each imagining that the other would come around if we could only convince her of the rightness, the moral superiority, of our positions. She would make me love camping; I would make her see the charm of a B&B.

We joked that it was a religious difference: Jews don’t camp (notwithstanding my weeklong canoe trip as a CIT at Camp Hatikvah in 1986); Gentiles do. It’s a biblical relic, really: Wasn’t wandering in the desert for 40 years enough for my people?

In the years since we met, we’ve learned the futility of trying to convince each other of our rightness and have settled for putting up with each other’s foibles as gracefully as possible. We’ve done a half-dozen or so camping trips, some involving cars, some canoes, and at least one that involved bicycles and a taped ankle. We’ve slept in one-person tents and, most recently, a behemoth that divides into two rooms with us on one side and a baby in a Pack-and-Play on the other. We’ve camped at music festivals and provincial parks, on the gorgeous beaches of Pancake Bay on the shore of Lake Superior.

And we have also bailed from the tent on a number of occasions for the relative comforts of bed and breakfasts, cheesy motel rooms, and the Best Western hotel chain. On at least one occasion, she did the bailing. Because sometimes, in the pouring rain, or when the horses in the pasture next door give you strange looks, or when you have tonsillitis, nothing quite beckons like a room. With walls. That you can stand up in. And a hot shower. And beer, brought up by room service, while you watch cheesy cable TV. And tea, with milk, first thing, the next morning.

Now, that’s roughing it.

Guess I left them in the basement too long

2009-06-04T09:08:00.001-07:00

I’ve been so thrilled lately about the kids’ ability to go down to the basement and play, unsupervised, for at least short periods. This morning, though, I think we may have crossed the line.

Could’ve been worse. Could’ve been like the kid down the street, who used indelible Sharpies to draw coloured lines down each of the piano keys.

Must be doing something right

2009-06-03T07:45:00.000-07:00

Every so often, one is the witness/recipient of such a run of Behaviour that one is tempted to pull out one’s fingernails, just for the welcome distraction the pain might bring

You know, those days when every utterance out of a child’s mouth is a version of, “I didn’t want you to do that, and you did it wrong, too.” When every action is the equivalent of them stealing your last bite of pie, only to spit it out because it’s yucky. When they insist that the best way to show their love for you is to crash into you full speed while braying like a donkey and laughing hysterically at your bruises. When it’s all you can do to excuse yourself quietly from the room, hide behind a locked door, rub your temples and breathe and count the minutes until bedtime and the reprieve from the banshees who have taken over the household.

And then — and then — one happens upon a tableau such as this:

And, just in case you thought it was a fluke, this:

Yes, that is the big one reading stories to the little one. By reading, I mean a mixture of memorization (he’s sort of the human equivalent of a Kindle, what with all those books he's got stored in his head) and actual, sounding-out-the-letters-to-make-a-word reading. And the little one, formerly hostile, is now rapt, in awe of books, taking my hand and pulling me to the shelf to find Sandra Boynton's Doggie Book or one of DK Media’s thousand-plus books about trucks. His new favourite sentence (after, “Mommy go get it”): “I want to read.”

And now, in addition to saying yes, we can also say, “Go ask your brother.”

Makes up for a lot, that.

I used to do the same thing with pimento-stuffed olives

2009-06-01T16:34:00.001-07:00

And what is that God-awful thing she’s wearing?

2009-05-29T08:35:00.000-07:00

For the greater good of art, I present to you this unflattering photograph of my back to the camera, as an illustration of this morning’s ritual Making of the Challah.

Do you like my apron? It was my grandmother’s: my father’s mother, who, during my childhood, made the journey from the steppes of Russia her apartment in Winnipeg to our house in Toronto twice a year, at Passover and Rosh Hashanah, and cooked her heart out. Traditional stuff: gefilte fish, honey cake, Passover rolls, kugel. She and I had a little bit of a tortured relationship in my late teens, her being all about tradition and me being, well, not so much traditional. But I do like to think that she would be pleased to see me sporting the halushious apron each week as my sons and I make Friday-night challah. Even if we do use a bread maker.

Sometimes, when time and patience are in short supply, I wait until after the kids have left for the babysitter before I get going on the braided bread routine. But this morning (despite the fact that it started, as per the current usual, at 5 AM) everything was going so swimmingly that I decided what the hell. Rowan was so eager to help that he went as far as to get his own self dressed — right down to his Home Depot apron — in order to participate. Then Isaac got in on the action, and demanded his own apron, too: we improvised with a vintage yellow bib with a Mickey Mouse decal painstakingly handstitched onto it. With him perched on the counter and Rowan on the stool, we were ready to go.

Baking with Rowan used to completely unnerve me: all those jerky movements and flying flour and overzealous mixing and the hands in the batter and the way he’d tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap an egg on the counter for a full minute without so much as bruising the shell, only to crush the thing in his fist a moment later. These days, it’s either that I’m more relaxed or he’s more skilled, because he doesn’t faze me the way he used to. Even with Isaac sitting crosslegged on the counter, repeating, “I help!” and poking teaspoons into everything, it was an entirely enjoyable exercise.

And just look at this!

Every week, it’s a struggle not to tear into one of these babies, just warm from the oven, instead of waiting until we’re at the table and the candles are lit. But I don’t, because to do that would mess with tradition, which around here dictates that Friday night dinner consists of challah and roast chicken, yam frites and broccoli. We’ve fallen into the pattern, and now there is no deviating. Not even for, say, the organic wild salmon fillets purchased for last night’s dinner that never got cooked because we were too busy enjoying soccer in the park. At snack time before bed last night, I casually put the question to Rowan as to whether he’d mind if we skipped roast chicken in favour of salmon, and he burst into tears. Don’t fuck with tradition, man. Or the wrath of the bubbies and the four-year-olds will be upon you.

Oops, we did it again!

2009-05-25T17:26:00.001-07:00

(No, nobody’s pregnant.)

It’s happening again. I realized this last night when I found myself setting out a blueberry-banana muffin on the kitchen counter and pouring a small glass of milk, which I then stored inside the refrigerator. For easy access. For Isaac’s 5 a.m. attack of the munchies.

Yeah, we’re doing it again: segueing out of one ridiculous sleep (or lack thereof) situation into a different, also ridiculous, one, which I am sure we will maintain until we can no longer delude ourselves that it’s “okay for now,” followed by a week or so of strategizing and the imposition of said strategy, for better or for worse. Whether it’s walking around the basement with Isaac in a sling, or coming up with reward charts for Rowan, or me and Rachel alternating nights in the basement, or playing musical beds, it’s always something. Something ridiculous.

Right now, it’s this: boys have bedtime together, cuddled up for stories in Rowan’s double bed. Then Rowan decamps for our bed, where he starts the night while Isaac “settles” in his single bed (with its safety rail) in the brother room. This practice started when Rachel and I decided that we could no longer lie next to Isaac for an hour and a half each night while he took his sweet time going to sleep and screamed if we left. Four days later, we had broken him of that habit, but in the process engrained a new one in Rowan, who is still starting the night off in our bed because, as he puts it, “I don’t like toddlers sleeping in my room with me.”

Which is fine. I mean, me neither, mostly. We just move Rowan to the bed in what used to be Isaac’s room before we go to sleep. Why not back to his own bed? Because Isaac, although he now goes to sleep beautifully, has taken to waking up at 4:30 or five in the morning and screaming, “Mufffffffffin! Miiilllllllllllllllllk!” I’ve discovered that if you take him downstairs, feed him said quick snack, and keep all the lights off, he will sometimes consent to being taken back up stairs and cuddled with you in Rowan’s bed for half an hour or so. Come over! Try it! If you’re really lucky, he will actually fall back asleep, and if you are astonishingly lucky, blessed by the stars and fortune, Rowan won’t wake up only moments after that.

This is dumb.

I mean, it’s dumb because it’s just a dumb system, in the sense that in the larger scheme of things Isaac — and everyone else in the family — needs more sleep than a 4:30 wakeup call allows for. But it’s also dumb because we are repeating our own history, caught up in this seemingly endless treadmill of almost-solutions out of which spiral new problems. And new almost-solutions. Welcome to parenting, I suppose.

Do I sound bleak? I think it’s more that I’m weary: a summer cold plus seasonal allergies have added to my general fatigue. At least I’m not so far gone that I don’t take some pleasure in snuggling with the boy, who has now taken to singing “Twinkle twinkle” quietly in bed as the sun comes up. If you have to be awake at 5:30, I suppose there are worse ways to be awake.

Radical acceptance? Denial? You decide.

“How will I dance now?”

2009-05-22T07:00:00.000-07:00

Rowan has been growing his hair. He wants to grow it long, and even though he’s currently suffering from a condition known as, in family parlance, “wide head,” and even though my fingers itch to just touch it up a little bit, to even things out, I haven’t. And I won’t.

In the realm of bodily functions and day-to-day hygiene, I make my kids do lots of things they don’t really want to do. I insist on diaper changes for Isaac, a certain amount of handwashing, toothbrushing, nose wiping, fingernail cutting and the like. I’m pretty clear about daytime clothes versus pajamas, although what Rowan actually wears tends to be what he picks out

But the hair? Now that he’s no longer a recalcitrant toddler, that’s his prerogative, a line I can’t cross.

There’s just something about the idea of forcibly cutting his hair that feels wrong to me. Whether it’s the fact that all I ever wanted as a child were Cindy Brady–pigtails, the Samson overtones, the risks inherent in wielding scissors in front of an unwilling child’s face, or — just maybe — the unnecessary insult to his sense of autonomy and self-identity, it feels viscerally unacceptable.

Which is perhaps why this report of a Thunder Bay elementary school teaching assistant forcibly cutting the hair of a seven-year-old First Nations boy is so upsetting. According to reports, the child wore his hair long because it was important to his traditional dancing practice. The boy told his mother that the teaching assistant lifted him onto a stool, put the scissors to his forehead, and told him not to move. Which he didn’t, because he was too scared. Too scared.

Too fucking scared.

And then she cut his hair in front of his classmates. And then she stood him in front of a mirror and said, “Look at you now.”

What the kid looks like now, according to his mother, are the pictures of his relatives after they were given forcible haircuts at residential school. The boy is upset and ashamed, and heartbroken at the thought of what his shorn hair means for his dancing. “How will I dance now?” he asked his mother. “How will I dance?”

The teacher has been suspended, but the police and the Crown are refusing to press charges of assault. Enough said. This is the city I live in, and its inability to deal with difference — cultural, racial, gendered, religious — has implications for us all. If this boy isn’t safe, then my kids aren’t safe. No one’s are.

I wonder what happened to this kid’s hair. Probably swept into the trash. Because isn’t that how we deal with so many First Nations issues around here? If I could restore it to his head, I would. But if I had a strand of it, I would twine it round my fingers, put it (with his permission) in a locket, wear it next to my heart. Dance, baby: dance your heart out.

He likes horses, does he?

2009-05-19T13:44:00.000-07:00

Today was Rowan’s turn to present at “Bring and Brag,” or what in my day used to be known as “Show and Tell.” In my day, though, we were allowed to bring toys, which are now verboten. The official line is that kids will fight and get jealous over toys, but I think the real reason is to make parents’ lives more difficult. I mean, how many meaningful, non-toy objects can there be in a four-year-old’s life? The first time, we racked our brains and sent Rowan with his rock collection. The second time we came up with a papier-mâché cat he had made, accompanied by photos of our own felines. Today, we completely forgot about B&B until approximately five minutes before it was time to leave for school.

“Here,” I said, pulling a book off the shelf and a solution out of my ass. “You can tell the kids all about earthquakes.”

Recently, we were gifted a shelf full of hand-me-down books that includes a series on natural disasters: Rowan is now fascinated by all manner of plagues, including earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes and the like. We went through the book quickly, marking a couple of pages of great interest, going over a few talking points, doing up a quick PowerPoint presentation, and rushing out the door.

Turns out, it was a banner day. Not only was Rowan on for B&B, but he was also Special Person for the day, which is a big deal: the special person gets to sit in the Special rocking chair, be first in all lineups, in charge of the weather chart, and all kinds of other great stuff. There’s a Special Person poem, where the kid fills in details about his or her favourite food, thing, book, etc., and then all the kids recite it out loud.

I asked the teacher how the earthquakes presentation went. “Fine,” she said. “Except that he couldn’t really answer the question, ‘What is an earthquake?’”

D’oh.

Then I looked at the Special Person poem. Apparently, Rowan’s favourite food is crackers. No real surprise there, although I would've put money on roast chicken. His favorite book is about earthquakes, which makes total sense. And his favorite thing?

Horses.

“Horses?” I said.

“Something there surprise you?” said his teacher.

Um, no, not really, unless you count the fact that I can recall no instance in which Rowan has ever even mentioned horses. He doesn’t play with horses, unless you count a rocking horse in the basement. Last time we were at a hobby farm, he refused — by which I mean screamed in terror — to go on a pony ride. Or a horse-drawn sleigh ride. If you had asked me, I might have said trains or hide-and-seek or the camera or making slides out of Isaac’s toddler-bed railings, but never horses.

Which begs the question(s): Am I clueless about my son? Does Rowan really love horses? Or was he merely pulling the answer out of his ass? I suspect we’ll never know.

The sound of Cheerios dying

2009-05-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

Blurry teeth marks on placemat.

Outlet.

Beach towel over chair.

Baby Alice — clothed.

Mother’s Day present.

Fishie hands.

Things up high I.

Things up high II.

Cheerios at risk.

Trains on coffee table.

Back yard.

Things up high III.

You are here. You are here. You are here.

To sleep, perchance to dream

2009-05-11T18:30:00.000-07:00

So, we finally told Isaac to go suck it. Seriously, I looked it up in the sleep training books and those are the exact words they use. Right there on page 37, Dr. Richard Ferber and Dr. Marc Weissbluth and even Mrs. Elizabeth Pantley of No Cry Sleep Solution fame all told us to tell Isaac to go suck it. At least, that’s what I’m fairly sure they said when I racked my brains for how we handled tumultuous nighttimes in the past. Suck it, baby.

Okay, so we didn’t quite use those exact words. More a lot of “Night night” and “Back to bed, Isaac” and “No, cuddles all gone” and “Time for bed.” Forty-five minutes’ worth of that on the first night, 30 minutes on the second, 15 on the third night, two on the fourth, and then — none. Maybe half a protest squawk and off to sleep. Textbook.

And, you know, not perfect sleep. Not necessarily all through the night, every night. Still some ridiculously early mornings. But, all things considered, much improved sleep. Even better, we have our evenings back. Instead of lying next to a squirming toddler until 9 PM each night, the resentment creeping in through the holes worn through my good attitude, I am free by about 7:30, often earlier. There’s a new regime in the house: dinner at 5:30, bath at six, reading stories in bed by seven, lights out shortly after. And then: grown-up time! (Excuse me while I go French kiss Dr. Marc W. on my way to watching Mad Men with Rachel.)

All this extra sleep, plus a weekend away, plus the reacquisition of my evenings, has made me downright giddy. The kids, too. I mean, there’s nothing like two extra hours of sleep a night for the toddler mood. The four-year-old — who now starts off the night in our bed, and is then moved to the “spare” room — also seems to be benefiting. Good moods abound around here, aided in no small part by sunshine and warmer weather.

This morning, I woke up before Isaac woke up, woke up to sunlight, got up with him at the downright civilized hour of 6:15. By 7:15, both kids were up and fed and happy. By 7:30, the four of us were piled into our bed, Rachel and I bookending some thumb-sucking, blanket-toting, footed-pajama-wearing, squirming little chatty boys who competed to kiss our faces. As Rowan read a copy of Today’s Parent to Isaac (“Dat baby. Dat more baby.” “Isaac! Look! Another baby!”), Rachel looked at me across the tops of their heads and said, “This is what I thought it would be like.”

What I got today

2009-05-06T16:48:00.000-07:00

Can’t wait to see what they’re planning for Mother’s Day.

And, you know? I really was going to end there. Because, for those of us who have lost mothers, sometimes the less said about Mother’s Day, the better. Short and sweet.

And then, like an idiot, I realized that today is May 8. And that my mother died five years ago today. On Mother’s Day, in fact. What are the odds?

My mother had lots of opportunities to die. In 1982, when she was first diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and the cancer was given 95% odds, her 5%. When she totalled her car later on that year, her only injury the cut on her hand sustained as she crawled out the broken driver’s window of the upended vehicle. When she developed breast cancer at age 47. When the cancer returned, and returned again.

When she did die, at the age of 59, my mother still had lots more living to do. But certain things had been accomplished: namely, her children were grown. We were out of the house, developing careers, established in relationships with people she liked. My brother had two children; I was pregnant with my first. We were okay. And, even though there was so much left to live for, I think she knew that a fundamental job was done. We might have wanted a mother, desperately wanted her, but we no longer needed her to mother us.

There’s a fine, or maybe, rather, a fuzzy, line between want and need, though. While I may not need my mother to sign my permission forms or kiss my boo-boos any more, never in my adult life have I wanted her more than when I became a mother. The early days of parenting for me were a haze of grief and sleep deprivation, the coldest winter in years in a new city, where I barely knew a soul. I would have given anything to have her back, have her with me, even if she would have probably told me to calm down and relax and just put the baby in his bed and walk away. Maybe she would’ve made me crazy in ways I wasn’t already, but, you know? I don’t think so. And I don’t really care.

And now that those early days are behind me, now that I have more perspective on the whole thing, now that sleep has (more or less) returned and the grief isn’t all-encompassing, all the time, I still want her back the way I want nothing else. Just so that she could see those two small boys, clutching dandelions and bluebells in their fists. Just so she could drop to her knees and gather them all in her arms.

Separated at birth?

2009-05-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

And by about 35 years. Though I’m guessing the laundry baskets are both circa the early 1970s.

That’s my father’s foot — or, at least, his shoe — in the foreground of the shot of me. Yeah, definitely the shoe, given the angle. He would have been about 30 years old when the photo was taken. He turned 65 just last week, and I snuck down to Toronto and surprised him at his birthday bash. It was one of those Hallmark moments: the look of utter surprise as I walked into the room, then delight, and then the tears. Way better than a girl popping out of a cake.

For me, it was also three full, childless, spring days in Toronto, cycling around the city, visiting friends (ironically, all of whom seem to be pregnant or the parents of newborns. Teeny, tiny newborns.), remembering what that life was like. Slow mornings, meandering afternoons, sitting down for entire meals, late nights unclouded by the worry of early rising or babysitters on the clock.

On my last evening, just before my flight home — and just before his first photography class — I met my father for a glass of wine and some mussels on a patio on Queen Street East. Another rare, stolen hour: our visits these days are always full of children, family, chaos. He handed over early, perfect, Mother’s Day present for me and Rachel: gift certificates to Home Depot. We chatted — about his upcoming travels, my work, his grandchildren, my mother — as the sun hovered in the western sky just before its descent and parents walked their children home from daycare and dogs fetched sticks in the park across the street. And I thought, “I’m so glad I came.”

And then, much later that night, I met Rachel at the front door and touched the sleeping bodies of tiny boys in their beds, and thought, “I’m so glad to be home.”

The end of an era

2009-04-30T06:59:00.000-07:00

These things are so much harder to put together than to take apart, aren't they? Or maybe I've got that the wrong way around.

Sleeping around

2009-04-27T17:45:00.000-07:00

Field study notes: The sleeping habits of the suburban queer family

Location: Detached, two-story family home in northwestern Ontario.

Subjects: Occupants of house: Two adult women (codenames: Buttercup and Sausage), parents of one four-year-old boy (codename: Quiggy Quoggy Quoo), one toddler (codename: Pwink).

NOTES

March 2009: Buttercup and Sausage have alternated sleeping on the futon in the basement in order to slow their child-induced, sleep-deprived descent into hell.

April 2009: In an effort to make bed- and night-times smoother, Buttercup and Sausage set up a single bed in Quiggy Quoggy Quoo’s room (hereinafter referred to, with varying degrees of success, as “The Brother Room”) for the thrilled Pwink, who has been longing to share in the bedtime festivities. After some initial bumps, the new system takes hold and all four family members resume sleeping through the night, on one level.

Buttercup, in a flurry of optimism and determination, hauls the double futon up from the basement to Pwink’s former room and declares it “The Spare Room.”

Nothing lasts.

Some highlights:

Wednesday, April 22, 7:30 p.m.: Pwink yells, “Love you!” over and over as Buttercup descends the stairs at bedtime. QQQ complains that Pwink is too loud and decides to sleep in Buttercup and Sausage’s bed. They will transfer him back to his own bed later on in the evening.

4:10 a.m.: Pwink wakes up and announces, “Mama, cuddle!” As a result, QQQ also wakes up and requests cuddles. Sausage climbs in with QQQ and Buttercup hauls the duvet off the parental bed and bunks down with Pwink. She must have slept, because she knows she dreamed (of weddings), but it doesn’t really feel like it. Sausage, whose bed is now duvet-less, sneaks out of QQQ’s bed and goes to sleep in the spare room.

Thursday, April 23, 12:40 p.m.: Pwink goes down for his afternoon nap. Spurns his single bed in the “brother room” in favour of QQQ’s bed. Two minutes in, decides that the futon in the spare room would be best and traipses across the hall to sleep there, exhorting Buttercup to join him. They settle down, he sticks thumb in mouth, and 10 minutes later he is asleep. Buttercup leaves. Later, she may regret not napping with him. But regrets are for the weak. She is not weak. No.

Thursday evening, 8:22 p.m.: Buttercup finds herself lying next to Pwink for 45 minutes until he is completely and utterly asleep. Each time she tries to leave, he wakes up and says, “Mama, night night!”, patting the bed beside him. If she continues to tiptoe out of the room, he starts to cry, forcing her back in so as not to wake up QQQ. Pwink has Buttercup’s number.

Friday morning, 3:30 a.m.: Buttercup wakes because her right arm is COMPLETELY ASLEEP and numb to the touch. This happens more and more frequently of late, and while it has nothing directly to do with the children, it never happened before they arrived and so must somehow be their fault. She turns over and uses her left arm to haul her right arm into a less compromising position and wonders, as she always does, whether the recurrent pins and needles are doing permanent damage, and what would happen if she didn’t wake up: amputation? She goes back to sleep.

5:22 a.m.: Pwink wakes up. Calls out, and in so doing wakes up QQQ. Sausage attempts damage control by bringing Pwink to sleep with Buttercup, except that QQQ follows them both into the parental bed and cannot be persuaded to cuddle up in his own bed with Sausage. All four lie down. Much squirming ensues.

5:32 a.m.: Just as everyone relaxes enough to make Buttercup think that just maybe, sleep might just occur, someone snores. Pwink sits bolt upright and announces, “Noise!” QQQ grumbles about Pwink being awake. Sausage absconds with Pwink to QQQ’s bed to stave off the possibility of all four having to get up. Pwink cries.

5:35 a.m.: Buttercup tells QQQ she will be “right back — don’t move!” and delivers lost blankie to Pwink and Sausage. Pwink continues to cry

5:42 a.m.: Buttercup tells QQQ she will be “right back — don’t move!” But she is lying. She instead climbs into QQQ’s bed with Pwink and Sausage, who immediately stops crying and snuggles. Sausage leaves that ungrateful Pwink and climbs into bed with QQQ. Buttercup, her arm trapped beneath Pwink’s head, stares at the open door and tries to will it closed with her eyes. It doesn’t work.

5:46 a.m.: Pwink asks for water.

6:10 a.m.: QQQ decides it’s time to get up. Buttercup is fairly certain — based on previous experience — that Sausage has coached him on keeping his mouth closed (“Like this!” and mimes buttoning her lips together) and being extra quiet as they descend the stairs. By virtue of the open door and his hawklike hearing, Pwink hears them anyway. Insists on getting up. Insists that Buttercup come with him down the stairs. Buttercup delivers Pwink to Sausage in the kitchen and returns to sleep in her own bed, because it is officially her morning to “sleep in.”

Friday evening, 7:23 p.m.: Sausage finds herself lying next to Pwink until he is completely and utterly asleep. Each time she tries to leave, he wakes up and says, “Mama, night night!”, patting the bed beside him. If she continues to tiptoe out of the room, he starts to cry, forcing her back in so as not to wake up QQQ. Pwink has Sausage’s number. Sausage fall asleep next to Pwink and stumbles downstairs two hours later.

Saturday morning, 2:11 a.m.: QQQ appears in the parental bedroom because he is cold, and insists there is room for all three of them in Sausage and Buttercup’s bed. He climbs in. Buttercup decamps for the spare room.

6:12 a.m.: Pwink wakes up, ready for the day. Buttercup gets up too.

1:04 p.m.: Pwink goes down for a nap. Buttercup who is tired and oddly besotted, take him upstairs and lays him down in QQQ’s bed. When he says, “Mama, cuddle,” she lies down. One day, they will have to break him out this habit, but right now the thing she wants to do most is snuggle up with her baby boy. She’s a sucker. He has her number.

Tuesday night: For a variety of reasons too tedious to detail here, Buttercup spends the night on the futon with Pwink’s feet tap dancing in the small of her back. She does Not Sleep Well.

Wednesday morning, 2:13 a.m.: Pwink appears in the parental bed.

Wednesday morning, 5:15 a.m.: Pwink wakes up, hysterical. Sausage suggests to Buttercup that she should just suck it up and get up with him. Buttercup counters that Pwink will indeed go back to sleep in a few minutes. Sausage decamps for the futon, but is waylaid by QQQ, who has woken up because of all the screaming. Sausage bunks down with QQQ.

Wednesday morning, 5:23 a.m.: Buttercup sucks it up.

---

And so it goes. I haven’t bed hopped this much since ... aaaaaaaaand, you know? I’m not gonna finish that sentence.

Heads you win, tails I lose

2009-04-27T07:14:00.000-07:00

Isaac in 100 words or less: Asks for water, but does not want the water in his glass. The water in his class must be poured into my empty glass before judged acceptable. Then proceeds, repeatedly, increasingly aggressively, to offer me his water, holding the cup to my lips and refusing to be fooled by my pretend sips. Finally, to placate him, I drink some. Whereupon he screeches, “My water! Mine!” Whereupon I tickle him.

Green intentions

2009-04-22T13:30:00.000-07:00

Happy Earth Day! To celebrate, Rowan rode his bike all the way to the babysitter’s this morning. That’s the equivalent of approximately two city blocks, but it’s the furthest he's ever gone at a stretch. What a difference a year makes. Last summer, Rowan on his bike was the equivalent of the kid picking flowers in the soccer field, all on, off, on, off, don’t let go of the handlebars Mom hey what’s that shiny thing on the ground I’m tired can you push me let’s take the car. Today, he pedaled along steadily. “My bike has magic powers to go over cracks,” he told us, repeatedly. “That's why I'm so good.”

Rachel and I just grinned like idiots. Way back when, before there were children and we had only visions of what children might be like and what astonishing kinds of parents we would be, we both imagined our kids riding bikes. We imagined walking or cycling to school or daycare beside our bike-riding kids. (We actually imagined cycling beside our bike-riding kids as we made our way across, say, the Netherlands, or down the West Coast from Victoria to San Francisco, but I may be getting ahead of myself.)

And today, I got to check that vision off my mental list — always nice when those come to fruition instead of falling by the wayside (“And they will not eat cheese strings”).

My celebrations of Earth Day will continue for the next hour and a half, while Rachel takes both children to Kindermusik and I get my biweekly extra 90 minutes to myself. I have this vision where I will do yoga and some journal/creative writing and screw around on Facebook.

Baby steps

2009-04-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

Recently, in an effort to clear up some misconceptions surrounding human anatomy (you will be relieved to learn that girls do not, in fact, “pee out of their bums”), I got out our copy of It’s Not the Stork and sat down with Rowan to have a little chat.

After we clarified — at least, for the moment — the tricky question of the female urethra, we kept turning pages until we got to the pictures of babies in their mothers’ bellies. And I found myself having what appeared to be my first formal “birds and bees” talk with my child.

I’ll save the actual details for another post, but suffice it to say it was all pretty low-key. I communed with my mother, flashing back to the time she made a special trip to the library and got a book — with diagrams — in order to answer my four-year-old questions about how the baby got out of such a small hole. I congratulated myself on my upfront, no-embarrassment, give-just-as-much-information-as-necessary-but-not-enough-information-to-overwhelm approach.

Until Rowan dreamily asked the one question I hadn’t really prepared for: “When are we getting another baby?”

Reader, I snorted. If I’d been drinking coffee, it would have sprayed out of my nose. I immediately felt bad: I mean, seeing that he is a kid, my kid in fact, it might be just slightly rude to suggest that he and his brother have set a precedent I don’t want to repeat. I mean, it’s one thing to shout, as I have, at my ovulating body, “Do I look like I want any more children?” It’s another to scoff at the very idea in front of your own offspring — I mean, it could send the wrong message, you know?

The right message, the true message, is that the two kids we have are the two kids we want. And with every milestone — the crib for sale, the high chair gone, the way these two kids grow and blossom and become more and more their own people, more and more independent — I have no desire to rewind and start over again, times three. I want to run ahead with my boys, not lag behind to nurse their younger sibling or stay home while that baby naps. I’m not ready for another two years of sleep deprivation. I want to cuddle them in the mornings. I want to watch Rowan put on his own coat and boots and help Isaac into his so that they can play outside in the backyard after dinner while Rachel and I have a conversation at the table and then join them. I want to push Isaac on his tricycle as Rowan figures out the two-wheeler with training wheels ahead of us. Forward, not back.

And then Rowan mentioned a few days later that, for his next baby, he’d like twin sisters.

And part of me — the insane part of me, the part of me that’s not be let outdoors on spring days — thought, Oh sure, why not? How bad could it be?

What's springing up around here ...

2009-04-16T08:18:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite Bizarro cartoons depicts two kids, dressed in shorts and T-shirts on a summer’s day, staring quizzically at a snowman on the front lawn. “Okay,” says one, “I’ll give it one more week but if it hasn’t melted by then I’m tearing it down. It’s starting to give me the creeps.”

Witness the fossilized pile of snow-cum-dirt in the northeast corner of our front yard. I smacked it viciously with a shovel the other day and barely made a dent. Everywhere else, spring has sprung: the crocuses are budding and the snow has gone. Warmth spreads, but this one, intransigent lump remains. I imagine I will look out the window in July and shrug: “Still there. Hey, are the neighbours performing another exorcism?”

Can you see where I’m going with this? All these flowers and light vying against a hard little heart of stubborn iciness? Exorcisms? Of course: the terrible twos.

They have arrived, the toddlerific moments of ridiculousness. Almost overnight, it seems. Yesterday, during what is ambitiously known as “sharing time” at Rowan’s Kindermusik class, Isaac sat in the centre of a circle of bewildered four-year-olds, desperately grabbing at each instrument and shrieking, “Mine! Mine! Mine!” As I played an alphabet game with Rowan, Isaac kept up a steady chorus of, “My T! My Q!” Last night at bedtime, he insisted on pulling up my shirt to play with my (taut, taut, washboard) stomach. When I tried to get him to stop, he screeched, “My tummy! My tummy! More tummy! Mine!”

And, just in case we weren’t sure that he is hell-bent on world domination, this morning, he looked out the window and shouted, “My moon! MY Moon!”

Oh, honey.

I won't deny that this new season of aggressiveness has its tiresome moments. But I feel for him. He's just capturing his first glimpse of the vastness of the world and his relative insignificance compared to it all — not just his big brother or the hidden treasures of the kitchen cabinet, but the entire damn universe, moon and all. It must be a bit overwhelming.

But, like winter, it too will pass. I'm sure there will be moments where I wish I could take the back of a shovel to the two-year-old attitude. But one day I'll look up and think, “Hey — where did that go?” Assuming, of course, that I have not been entirely beaten into the ground with four-year-old attitude. What do they say? Hope springs eternal.

A Passover/Easter fable

2009-04-13T12:11:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, there were two small boys. And their mothers took them from their small town, where the water was not fluoridated, on a small airplane, to (as the larger of the small boys put it) The Land of Toronto, where for two nights in a row they attended enormous family dinners, during which they ran around like madmen with their cousins and ate untold amounts of sugar and watched cable television shows like American Idol and had vast quantities of fun and fell into bed at 10 p.m. without even brushing their teeth they (and their mothers) were so tired and full of glee.

They also drove all around the Land of Toronto, having adventures that involved dinosaurs and subway trains and mud puddles and several of their mothers’ Old Stomping Grounds. And it was good.

Then they went to The Small Town of Guelph, where they ate untold quantities of chocolate Easter eggs and had large family dinners and ran around like madmen with their cousins and stayed up very late watching (appropriately) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The children, though generally delightful, coped with the travel and the influx of sugar and the lack of sleep and the media by occasionally throwing tantrums in the presence of older relatives and eating lots of cheese strings. Their mothers coped by drinking lots of wine. Mostly, they tried to be good parents, which involved, in part, requiring the small boys to brush their teeth after two nights of not.

They took out the small boys’ toothpaste and toothbrushes, whereupon the small boys’ auntie wondered aloud why the mothers were letting the small boys use fluoridated toothpaste.

The mothers explained that the water in their small town was not fluoridated, and that their family doctor had suggested that they use said toothpaste to compensate.

The auntie again wondered out loud why the mothers were letting the small boys use fluoridated toothpaste.

The mothers again explained that the water in their small town was not fluoridated, and that their family doctor had suggested that they use said toothpaste to compensate.

The auntie again began to wonder out loud why the mothers were letting the small boys use fluoridated toothpaste, but stopped herself midsentence when she realized that she was critiquing other people’s parenting and apologized for doing so.

Just then, the larger of the two small boys walked into the room and, for no apparent reason, bonked the smaller of the two small boys on the head. The smaller boy began to cry. The larger boy left the room.

There followed an uncomfortable silence.

Then the auntie said, “Well, maybe if you didn’t let them use fluoridated toothpaste, they wouldn’t be so violent.”

PS: Some good news

2009-04-06T13:08:00.000-07:00

Last week, I found out that I was awarded an Ontario Arts Council “Northern Arts” program grant. Now I actually have to write that novel that’s been mouldering in my desk for the past decade. And I will — and I’m making that promise in public. Hold me to it.

ER, adieu

2009-04-06T09:23:00.000-07:00

ER ended last week. I haven’t actually watched the show for about five years — I stopped during a particularly depressing point in the storyline, where Mark was dying from brain cancer, and Abby’s schizophrenic mom was giving her grief and Carter and Kem’s baby had just died, as had Kerry’s girlfriend. It seemed like the entire show was shot at midnight: just a whole lot of darkness and doldrums — and a whole lot of acronyms: another MVA, MI, MRI, DUI, GSW to the head, all just rushing into the trauma centre — too many of which seemed to parallel my own life at the time. I was newly pregnant with Rowan, and my mother was dying of cancer. Imagine the tension in the room when we watched, together, the episode when Mark actually died. Her in her hospital bed set up in the family room and me on the couch. No one looking at anyone.

And then, well, then, my mother actually did die, and then Rachel and I had a baby and moved and had little access to cable TV (although I’m guessing that last one is a flimsy excuse, given that ER probably plays on all the free channels in 24-hour marathons), and that particular show fell by the wayside, as did many, many things.

But I still kind of missed it. If all the characters were real people, I would friend them on Facebook and ask them for updates: “Great to see you! It’s been so long! How are the twins? Did Seattle work out?”

I missed it not least for the fact that ER was just full of smart, sexy, professional women who were integral to the storyline (for more on that, see Dorothy Surrenders) — nurses, yes, fantastic nurses, but also doctors. (And not blathering idiot doctors like the whiny whinies on Grey’s Anatomy.) Some of them were even queer.

Of course, the plot that involved Kerry and Sandy and their baby boy, Henry, held a certain weight for everyone in my circles. You remember: bio-mom Sandy, a firefighter, dies, and her homophobic-ass family tries to take the baby away from Kerry. At about 11:01 PM on the Thursday night after it aired, my phone rang. It was my mother. From her hospital bed. She was livid.

“You just make sure that Rachel adopts that baby!” she told me.

“She will,” I said. But then I also tried to comfort her with the obvious. “But Mom, um, you and dad aren’t going to try to take the baby away from Rachel if anything happens to me.”

“Of course we aren’t!” she snapped. “But that doesn’t matter. You just make sure you take care of things!”

“Okay, Mom,” I said. “Okay.”

Which was the right answer, all along. As Rowan will one day discover.

When preschoolers hand you lemons...

2009-04-02T06:50:00.000-07:00

Look what my girlfriend made!

I would say she just whipped it up in the midst of a particularly chaotic Saturday afternoon, but “whipped it up” would imply effortlessness, and this baby was a bit of a palaver. The making, chilling, and rolling out of the dough. The — literal and figurative — lemon squeezing involved in making the filling. The separating of eggs, the beating of egg whites into meringue. The assembly. The baking.

All told, it was a marathon of a pie. Rachel kept apologizing for attempting such a complex feat of baking on a weekend day, with children underfoot. Rangy, rangy, rangy children. “If I’d known it was going to be so much work,” she kept saying, “I never would’ve started this.”

Which kind of sums up how I was feeling about having kids right at that particular moment. Our morning had consisted of a series of tantrums, from adults and children alike, culminating in a tear-stained Rowan running down the driveway just as I was about to put the car in gear, screaming, “I am too going to the maaaaaaaaaaaarket!”

Minutes earlier, of course, he had refused to get into the vehicle, declaring loudly and repeatedly that under no circumstances was he going to the market. Rachel had finally thrown up her hands in disgust and gone back in the house with him, while I and a blinking Isaac, already in his car seat, were left outside. For a brief, shining moment I thought that Isaac and I might have a sweet little date together, sans four-year-old attitude. In the end, I strapped Rowan in, fed him a banana, did some deep breathing, and braved the public with both children, leaving Rachel at home for a blessed hour or two to stare at the wall or do Sudokus or drink herself silly — whatever she needed. She reciprocated that afternoon when I strapped Isaac into the stroller and wandered around the neighbourhood for an hour or two, listening to This American Life on my iPod. As I left, Rachel and Rowan were arguing about whether he could or could not stick his fingers in the mixing bowl while the electric beaters were running.

When I returned, Rachel and Rowan had reached some sort of truce. They had managed, together, to get the pie into and out of the oven. Then they played chase in the basement and read books. The kitchen was spotless. And this beauty was cooling on the counter — cloudy layers just obscuring the sunny sweetness underneath.

What’s with the tiny bottles?

2009-03-30T11:44:00.000-07:00

An open letter to the makers of Tempra, Infants’ Motrin, Infants’ Advil & Infants’ Tylenol:

One of the things nobody told me before I had children was that I would spend the equivalent of a small nation’s GDP on painkillers for them.

Mostly, I don't resent the dent that your products have made on my household budget. I love your products. More to the point, I need your products. Your products have saved my sanity and eased my children’s pain on innumerable occasions. And for this I thank you.

Four and a half years (and a couple dozen ear infections and 36 baby teeth and counting) into this parenting gig, however, I have, I feel, gained a certain, hands-on, expertise in the use and effects of your products, not to mention their packaging. And, I have a few issues suggestions for improvement. Herewith:

1. What’s with the tiny bottles?
It just seems clear to me that the people in charge of such things clearly have never lived with a teething 12-month-old with an ear infection. And diaper rash. Look: a container with the volume of a travel-sized bottle of shampoo is simply NOT BIG ENOUGH. We’ll go through that — layering the ibuprofen with the other stuff — in less than three days. And then we get pissed off when we run out of medication at three in the morning.

Why aren’t the bottles bigger? Are you worried that we will, in some fit of parenting hysteria, feed an entire mason jar of analgesic to our children? Or that they will find said analgesic and, because they are so besotted with its fruity taste, down it themselves?

Okay, maybe I just answered that one for myself. Moving right along (and this next point is bulletproof):

2. Why can’t you make syringes that actually suck up all the medicine in the already tiny bottle?
This is truly one of my pet peeves. It’s bad enough that we hardly have any medication to work with here, or that the tiny bottle costs $8.98, but the fact that the last half dose is virtually impossible to suck up with the provided syringe is unconscionable. Get a good mechanical engineer in there and figure out the ratios so that we can angle the syringe directly into the tilted edge of the floor of the bottle, and squeeze every last drop of our investment out of the (ridiculously tiny) bottle and into our children.

(Speaking of syringes, isn’t it kind of unhygienic to keep dipping the same one into the same bottle? Especially after it’s been in the germy little mouth of a toddler with bronchitis? And that of his baby brother? Could there be a better system? I’m obviously too tired and lazy to come up with one, but maybe that’s your responsibility.)

3. What’s with the tiny type?
This is perhaps an offshoot of the tiny bottle problem, but it’s virtually impossible to read the dosage information on a bottle of Advil that is the size of my thumb. Especially when one is bleary-eyed at three in the morning. And, frankly, despite the fact that Canada moved to the metric system when I was in second grade, I still don’t know how much my kids weigh in kilograms. Make the labels bigger, and the directions easier to read. (Hey! If you made the jars bigger, then the labels and type could be bigger too, couldn’t they? I’m just saying. Again. For what it’s worth.)

4. Start a recycling program.
Maybe this is too much to ask, but given that we seem to be rivaling the bottled water industry in terms of waste, would it be too much to ask that the bottles — and the syringes — be recyclable? Then, maybe, I wouldn’t end up with four dozen syringes in a glass in my cupboard because I felt too guilty to throw them away. (Again: bigger bottles = less packaging = less waste. Think about it.)

Anyhoo, just my thoughts, and, I'm guessing, those of a couple zillion North American parents. Anyone out there agree? Let me know.

Cheers,
Susan

It’s always something

2009-03-26T06:30:00.000-07:00

That face just about says it all, doesn’t it? The heavy eyes, the sheen of snot on the upper lip, the petulant mouth. Someone little is sick, and tired, and some bigger people are sick and tired of the sick and tired.

Just to complicate things, we’ve begun the transition from the crib to the “big boy bed” — in Rowan’s room, no less. Ideally, I would have waited until our nights and our health were a little more stable — until, say, Rachel and I were actually sleeping in our bed, together, instead of trading off peaceful subterranean versus potentially chaotic upstairs nighttimes — but these developments have a way of choosing their own times. Isaac screams if we put him in the crib, but settles happily in a bed in Rowan’s room, and so be it.

“Settles happily,” does not mean, however, “settles in for a long, refreshing, full night’s sleep.” Which is why I had a toddlerific companion in my bed (Rachel, of course, was in the basement, nursing a sinus infection) from about 11 p.m. to six this morning, with a bonus visit from Rowan, requesting cuddles at 2:30.

And, you know, I tried to be all “glass half-full” about it. But the best I could do, as I lay quietly on my third of the bed, stifling my coughs and subtly repositioning myself in order not to wake the boy, was wry amusement and acceptance. I mean, he’s cute. And, I asked myself, how many more times in my life will I have the sweet, sleeping body of a tiny, trusting boy next to me in bed? Gotta be precious, don’t they, those times? I willed that great big overwhelming well of love to rise up and wash over the two of us, drenching us in perfect, solid, blissful sleep.

But mostly, I just thought, “Meh.”

The right tool for the right job

2009-03-23T13:34:00.000-07:00

Every so often, I veer into slightly dangerous territory with my neighbour. It happened again on Saturday. We both drove up to our respective driveways at the same time, got out and waved at each other, and then I dropped the bomb.

“Greg,” I said, “I have a question for you about drill bits.”

In fact, I had two, related, questions about drill bits. Our house was lovingly built by master plasterers sometime in the 1950s, which is wonderful in terms of structure but a bitch when you want to hang a picture and can’t sink a nail into the wall. In desperation, I tried to drill a hole into one the other day. Barely made a dent. And then, I tried to put a latch on our new back door, in order to prevent the children from opening it during blizzards: again, not a dent.

So I figured that maybe I was using the wrong kind of drill bit. And I knew that Greg would know what kind of drill bit I needed. I knew this because Greg is the kind of guy who, on his summers off from teaching high school, does little household projects like, oh, single-handedly PUTTING AN ENTIRE SECOND FLOOR ON HIS HOUSE. I know: I watched him do it. The following summer, he insulated and sided the whole thing, and then landscaped his front yard.

Greg spends afternoons and weekends putting siding and a shingled roof on his garden shed, or rotating the tires on his truck. Or re-sodding his backyard. Or renovating the kitchen. If there something handy to be done, and a particular tool with which to do that handy thing, Greg knows how to do it, and by God, you can be sure he has the tool.

I am in awe of Greg’s abilities. I kind of covet them. (And the tools, too.) I mean, I’m handy, but in a kind of “I can install a dimmer switch or clean out the dishwasher trap” kind of handy. I can put together an IKEA bookcase with the best of them (admittedly, somewhat like this), install childproof latches and baby gates. I paint walls. One fateful weekend, I even sanded and refinished the floors in the ground-floor apartment Rachel and I rented just off Queen West in Toronto — I inhaled a lot of varathane fumes that day and ended up hallucinating about communing with my peasant Russian ancestors on the steppes. Mere hours before I wrote this, even, I finally got round to replacing the missing shelf in the built-in bookcase in my office, a task that involved visits to two different hardware stores, and the use of a drill, a level, a screwdriver, and a mallet. Lots of my projects end with mallets.

Because the thing is, I’m also a Sagittarius, which means that three-quarters of the way through any largish (or smallish) project, I get impatient, clumsy, frustrated with my lack of expertise and the inherent chaos that inevitably comes when tools are involved. Which is why only six of the eight holes for the screws that hold the bookshelf to the brackets actually have screws in them. Which is why so many of our ceilings look like this:

And our walls like this:

Still, things need to get done. And while I have finally succumbed to Rachel’s begging and of late agreed to hire someone to do many of the things I normally would have — disastrously — insisted upon trying myself (she once said, as we contemplated getting a new roof, “I really, really, want to hire a professional to do this,” as though I would actually attempt to replace the shingles myself), some of them are just too small or too mundane to outsource. Hence my question to Greg about the drill bits.

On the one hand, it was innocent enough: I needed to know what kind of bit to buy, and he could tell me. On the other hand, asking Greg a question related to home improvement is a bit of a calculated gesture, because the man just cannot stand the thought that something might not be done right. In a jiffy, he was over, cordless drill and bits (for wood and concrete) in hand. He inspected my latch and the guide holes I had marked for the drill. “I think you’re a little close to the edge of the doorframe here,” he murmured. “You think?” I said — and, ten minutes later, our latch was installed. Perfectly. As though by angels. “Who was that masked man?” I thought as he glided off back to his house.

This kind of thing happens fairly frequently. When we first moved in, Rachel and I attempted to hack away at the neglected, Gothic moss garden of overhanging Manitoba maple branches that made up our backyard. Within minutes, Greg showed up with a ladder and a chainsaw. He and his oldest son, Greg Junior, not only trimmed back all the trees — which had kept the sun from reaching their backyard — but then tied up two truckloads worth of branches and hauled them to the dump. Rachel and I stared out the window, flabbergasted. This was not the kind of thing that happened to us in Toronto.

The next summer, when I decided to do something about the overgrown hedge separating our two properties, Greg was on it like white on rice. I was timidly trimming the tops off the branches; he drove stakes into the ground ran a string between them, and used his hanging level to make sure the string was plumb. And then we spent a couple of hours hacking six feet off the top and shaping it into something respectable. Once we got everything tied up, he drove the branches to the dump. For days, I just stared out the window at the hedge, happy.

If there’s a blizzard, Greg’s snowblowing our driveway, as well as that of the neighbours on the other side. When our roof leaked because of an ice dam, Greg climbed onto it with a hatchet and a shovel. Toddler turn on your headlights so you need a boost? Greg has a charger and will plug your car in for you. Good fences make good neighbours — and good neighbours make good fences. I know this, because Greg rebuilt our fence when we decided to take down the most offensive of the Manitoba maples.

And then Rachel and I bake cookies and Bundt cakes and take them over, with our undying gratitude.

Every so often, I’m tempted to say, all casual like, “Hey, Greg, do you know anything about taking down garages? Cause the insurance people think ours is a big liability”, and then count down the seconds until he’s on the driveway with crowbar and a Bobcat. But I bite my tongue. One doesn’t want to take advantage. Of a very, very good thing.

Pearly whites

2009-03-19T08:55:00.000-07:00

I’m not sure whether these are a testament to our children’s superior oral hygiene or to our inability to throw anything away.

Most likely, they reflect Isaac’s obsession with brushing his teeth — or, more precisely, his addiction to the sickly sweet children’s toothpaste that he agitates for constantly. He follows us around upstairs, repeating, “Teeth? Teeth? Teeth?” until one of us caves and sticks some paste on a brush for him. Then he wanders around the house (and yes, I know that’s dangerous and that one day he’ll poke out his own trachea with a Dora the Explorer toothbrush — I’m working on it) sucking on the toothbrush and then casting it off somewhere obscure like my desk or the kitchen floor. And then, come bedtime, we say, “Hey! Have you seen Isaac’s toothbrush?” And then we find another one for him. And then ... you know.

I did suggest to Rachel a couple of weeks ago that we needed a “toothbrush system.” She just rolled her eyes. Apparently, the idea of a “one-toothbrush-per-person, all-in-the-same-drawer” rule is too radical to contemplate. Or maybe I shouldn’t have used the word “system.” I decided not to suggest that we disinfect the current brushes with hydrogen peroxide. Because, apparently, you can do that. Makes sense, no? Especially during flu season? Just don’t do what my friend Karen did and leave the glass of hydrogen peroxide next to the sink for her husband to mistake for water and then ... you know.

“I poisoned Dan last night,” she told me.

“You know,” I said, “if you and Dan are having problems, you should talk to him.”

But seriously. It’s spring cleaning time. I am motivated. Take one good last look at these babies, because some Dora the Explorer toothbrushes are going to fall victim to the system real soon. Right after I get rid of the syringes.

Sleeping leprechauns, Sandy!

2009-03-17T18:30:00.000-07:00

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Actually, I had no clue it was today until I took the kids into the Scandinavian Home Restaurant for lunch and realized that all the waitstaff were wearing green. Still, I can’t feel too bad — I’m not really a Shamrock shake kind of girl, if you know what I’m saying. That’s Rachel’s department: her father was born on this day in the north of England in 1938 and dutifully named Patrick by his terribly Catholic parents, who went on to have three more children, in addition to his older twin sisters. The name, however, didn’t stick, and he went by Bob in the end. (On the other hand, I’m not sure what a restaurant specializing in Finnish pancakes is doing putting green food colouring in the clabbered milk, but I digress.)

But forgetting: that seems, more and more, to be my department these days. Just little things, like the fact that I completely erased any memory of the doctor’s appointment I made for Isaac last week, or that I couldn’t hold it together to remember to call my brother on his birthday, or that I forgot about the end of Daylight Savings Time. That Sunday morning, I was obliviously making muffins when our friend Judy showed up uncharacteristically early for 10 o’clock brunch. “I was going to ask you guys if you remembered that the clocks changed last night ...,” she began, and then trailed off as our blank faces answered the question for her.

We can be forgiven for Daylight Savings, too, given that it came a month early and given that it is a ludicrous invention obviously created by sadistic people without small children. Isaac acclimatized almost immediately and Rowan has not, meaning that their bedtimes are now an hour and a half apart, which makes for some long evenings for the grown-ups and some misery for our toddler, who just can’t stand the fact that his beloved older brother is still bouncing around the house in his crazypants while he is being bundled off — successfully or not — to bed.

(Another digression: you would think here would be a great place to update you all on sleep situation, but I’m not going to be drawn into that ahora again. See? I’m learning.)

Forgetting, though. I’m chalking up mine to the cumulative effects of sleep deprivation of late (because it can’t be aging, can it? Wait, don’t answer that.). And then I read this article in the Washington Post about real forgetting, agonizing forgetting, forgetting of nightmarish proportions, the kind of nightmare you don’t wake up from. And I have nightmares about forgetting already. And the really scary thing? This kind of forgetting starts out simple, like forgetting a doctor’s appointment or your brother’s birthday.

Where am I going with all this? I'm not quite sure. St. Patrick's Day to Finnish pancakes and my father-in-law to doctors’ appointments and Daylight Savings and, as the Post puts it, “fatal distractions.” Dunno. I guess I will leave it at that, and join Rachel for a half-pint of O’Douls, the non-alcoholic beer that has been a staple in the household ever since I first became pregnant, and that is the symbol of all things pathetic and sweet that parenthood has done to us. I love it. It comes in a green can, and it certainly sounds Irish. And then one of us will go to sleep in the basement, the other in the bedroom. With the luck of the Irish, there won't be any nightmares tonight.

PS: I forgot this as well: Termiknitter, the recipe for hamantaschen is here.

Strangers in the night

2009-03-11T09:53:00.000-07:00

So much of (mildly successful) co-parenting — of successful cohabitation, really — is about resisting the urge to itemize and compare just how much work each partner does. Because, trust me, little good comes from statements like, “But I changed the last poopy diaper,” or, “How come I always cook?”

According to my research, such statements are likely to unleash an escalating and entirely unsettling volley of stored-up comparisons regarding laundry, bed-making, snow shoveling, lawnmowing, recycling, garbage, Kindermusik attendance and child fetching.

Yes, of course, every household has its imbalances — and those imbalances do occasionally need to be addressed — but I have found that, more often than not, comparisons invite trouble. Because, at least in my household, a LOT of stuff gets done, and when it all shakes down, Rachel and I freely admit that neither of us can recall doing about half of it. When the tallies come in, it’s quite likely that the balance of meals cooked and diapers changed will come out about even, and that, if they don’t, other things will very likely make up for them.

That said, Rachel is being shafted when it comes to sleep.

We’ve been alternating nights in the basement and upstairs. And on my nights upstairs (barring one too-early wake-up on Isaac’s part, fairly easily dealt with), the kids have slept through. Meaning that I’ve had a full week’s-plus of full-night sleeps.

Rachel, not so much. For some reason, on her nights on call, Rowan wakes up with strange neck pains (landing us in emergency) and Isaac’s eyeteeth poke painfully into his gums. Every morning that Isaac and Rowan bound into the basement to wake me and Rachel trudges in behind them, I ask, hopefully, “How was your night?” And she shakes her head.

After about a week of this, I let her have two nights in the basement. I was mildly, selfishly, worried that I had now got myself onto her schedule, but instead I got two nearly full nights in my own bed. And then, last night, a third night in the basement, while Rachel was up, on and off, with Isaac from midnight to about 3:30.

From my perspective at least, Isaac is much improved from his worst. And, aside from the neck thing, Rowan is sleeping like a champion, inspired at least in part by ye olde-fashioned sticker chart, with the promise of a trip to the ice cream store once he amassed seven stickers. (Do you like my artwork, using dried-out markers? Do you think the title is too subtle? We went to DQ on Monday after picking the kids up from the babysitter’s; Rowan had a chocolate-dipped kid’s cone, and we watched him do a couple of full-body shudders as the sugar began its madcap ride through his bloodstream. “We did this to him,” I kept reminding myself as we dealt with a whole bunch of hyper for much of the evening. “This is our fault.”)

From Rachel’s perspective, things still kind of suck. And while I don’t generally condone the constant repetition of, “But why? Why always my nights?”, in this case I can hardly blame her. All I can offer her is sympathy, another night on the futon, and the promise that, almost certainly, my nights will come.

Purim at our house

2009-03-09T06:18:00.000-07:00

As overheard in our house, on Friday, and transcribed not quite verbatim here.

Me: When are you going to make hamantaschen?

Rachel: I already made hamantaschen.

Me: But do you think you’ll make more?

Rachel: Why would I make more?

Me: Well, because I kind of wrote this article about you making hamantaschen for the blog.

Rachel: So?

Me: But then I sold the article to Interfaith Family.

Rachel: Uh huh ...

Me: And so now I need you to make more hamantaschen so that I can take a photo.

Rachel: This is the most twisted kind of Jewish guilt I have ever experienced.

Me: At least I can write off the apricots and dried prunes.

Rachel: They’re really just Fig Newtons, you know.

This morning’s post brought to you by an ear infection

2009-03-06T06:41:00.000-08:00

The four-year-old woke up, sobbing and clutching his ear, at 4:30 this morning, and is currently at the doctor in his fuzzy pink pajamas. Possibly still sobbing. And all because Rachel said, not two days ago, “And Rowan has grown out of his ear infections!”

Postscript:

Okay, after three hours of my life lost to the emergency ward, three hours that I will never get back, I am suitably chastened: it was not an ear infection. It is, of course, most likely influenza. And it is not Rachel’s fault. It is my fault, for saying only yesterday to a friend, “Nope, we haven’t ever had to rush either of our kids to the hospital.” Maybe it was her fault for asking in the first place.

“Just to be prudent,” after seeing Rowan this morning and ruling out an ear infection, our doctor sent us to the ER to see a full-fledged pediatrician and to rule out meningitis. And, of course, when your doctor says “meningitis,” you jump.

And, of course, as our GP predicted he would, Rowan perked up the moment we walked through the ER doors. Still in pink fuzzy pajamas, trailing his blanket. He ate his way through all the snacks we brought and bought, watched Wallace and Gromit movies, and fell in love with Jennifer, the clinician who finally assessed him. “Is she coming back?” he kept asking. “When is she coming back?”

And, aside from the waiting — and you have to wait, because, to do otherwise would be imprudent, and imprudence can lead to guilt and second-guessing, neither of which is useful — it wasn’t all so bad. We played “Who’s the mom?” with about a dozen people; only the intake nurse seemed slightly miffed by our standard, “We both are.” But she had seemed miffed from the get-go, so I didn’t get too huffy about that. When we did see the pediatrician, he was thorough and cordial, as was his student. And Rowan was a model of cooperation — charmed the pants off them both.

So, the flu. As the doctor said, it will probably get worse before it gets better. Welcome to the weekend.

And yet more fame...

2009-03-03T18:03:00.000-08:00

Flooded Lizard Kingdom was sweet enough to feature the post Heart, Break as part of the lineup on this week's "Monday Morning Good Writing." Thanks.

Oh, and even though writing this might jinx it: we all slept through last night.

Rude awakenings

2009-03-02T00:15:00.000-08:00

For a brief, blissful, period sometime in January, I thought that we had become one of those families. As in, those mythological families where everyone sleeps past 7 a.m. Whose members look at you with a mixture of polite sympathy and horror when you mention that your children like to get up at six. Or earlier.

“Us?” I imagined saying, casually, nonchalantly, at a playgroup full of tired parents. “Oh, we get up around 7:30 or so. Yes, of course the children sleep through the night. Don’t yours?”

In other words, I got smug. And it has come back to bite me in the ass. And, I’m just going to come out and say it: it’s all Isaac’s fault. No, really. It is. Don’t let that adorable face fool you for a second. He’s a stinker. A stinker who, for the past three weeks, has either woken at 5:30, raring to go, or at 3 a.m., soaked and inconsolable. Or both.

We go to him, we change him, and then, at his insistence, we take him on a small guided tour of the darkened house in order to prove to him that, really, it is still night-night time. And then, if we’re lucky, he yawns and agrees that it is in fact night-night time and falls back into bed and immediate sleep for anywhere from three hours to 11 minutes more.

If we’re not lucky, he continues wailing. And, eventually, we put him back into the crib anyway, and wait him out.

And then there’s Rowan. Who is much more rational — no, wait, I take that back: anyone who comes into your room three times in one night because “the monsters came in” is not really rational — who is much less hysterical but no less demanding in his quest for comfort.

The nadir so far (that sounds so ominous) was Saturday night, when Isaac woke at 11, Rowan at midnight, one, and two, Isaac at 4:30, and then at 5:45 for the day. When I went in to get him, he had figured out, for the first time, how to climb out of his crib and was standing on the floor, wailing. Good morning to you, too. I delivered him to Rachel, whose turn it was to sleep in the basement in order to ensure that at least one parent in the household would be semi-functional, and slept a couple of hours on the vacated futon.

This, of course, is irritating.

But what tips it over from irritating into — what’s the word? — heinous is the fact that, once the children have, at least temporarily, gone to sleep, I can’t. I lie awake as 3 a.m. turns into 4 a.m., then 5, as my brain rampages. It hums Kindermusik songs, makes lists, gets into imaginary matrimonial disputes, whips its head around at any tiny sound, and generally tortures me with wakefulness until I can finally convince it that it is night-night time — just about 45 minutes before one or the other of the kids gets up for the day.

I’m so tired. I know that a couple of hours of lost sleep per night is nothing compared to what the parents of newborns are going through. I know I shouldn’t complain, that it could be worse, but I’m sucky like that. In any case, I figure that I’ve racked up a total of about 40 hours of sleep deficit in the past month. That’s an entire workweek. Just think of everything I could’ve accomplished in that hypothetical week. I want that week back. I need that week back. And I don’t think I’m getting it any time soon.

He’s just not that into them

2009-02-25T09:28:00.000-08:00

It seems that Isaac has weaned. Every so often, I give it one last shot, just to make ABSOLUTELY sure that he has completely and irrevocably sworn off the boob. “Oh, come on,” I’ll say, offering him the breast just one more time. He has humoured me by halfheartedly latching on for a few seconds before squirming away. And then, last week, he took my nipple between thumb and forefinger, inspected my breast carefully, and said, “Ball.” And asked to read Goodnight Moon.

So, we’re done.

Which is fine. I’ve always categorized myself as somewhere in the middle of the spectrum when it comes to breastfeeding mothers. As in, I’m generally of the opinion that breast is best, unless, for a variety of reasons determined by individual mothers — and not, say, formula companies, governments, employers, relatives or doctors — it isn’t. And those reasons? None of my business.

For my part, I’m quite happy to have been able to nurse both kids. It was an immensely satisfying experience on many levels, even if I never felt the need to go to meetings to talk about it or write poetry on the subject. (Kind of like I never felt the need to make a cast of my pregnant belly. Because, really, it’s just not the kind of thing you can throw away in 15 years.)

I’m guessing that Isaac has similar outlook (about the breastfeeding, not the belly cast, about which his opinions remain inscrutable). Unlike his brother, who was quite passionate about them, Isaac has never regarded my breasts as anything much more than an efficient food source. Rowan, on the other hand, nursed for comfort and sleep as much as he did for food. And boy, did he nurse for food. We had a rough start, which I attributed both to our collective inexperience and the fact that my C-sectioned, Demerol-soaked body seemed — deservedly — in no hurry to produce milk right away. Still, we resisted the nurses’ efforts to give him formula, and persevered. Once he got the hang of it, though, Rowan was a champion nurser. In the first six months of his life, we fought for every calorie: I was ravenous constantly, couldn’t eat enough, and was thinner than I’d ever been in my adult life. And thirsty! The second he latched on, my mouth went dry, as though he was sucking the fluid out of my very pores. When he switched to mostly solid foods, I abruptly gained 20 pounds.

I weaned Rowan at 20 months, mostly because I wanted to get pregnant again, and breast-feeding was still messing with my cycle. Rachel took him on a trip to Vancouver Island without me in order to distract him, and when he came back, the milk bar had closed. I got pregnant the next month.

When Isaac came along, I looked forward to another period of Ferocious Eating Without Consequence. Sadly, it never materialized. Oh, my milk came in immediately and he latched on easily — which I attribute at least in part to his eleven-minute-long, drug-free home birth. But, from the get-go, Isaac seemed to eat just enough to take the edge off, and when he wasn’t hungry, he wasn’t particularly interested.

It took me a while to get used to his particular brand of moderation, and to the fact that nursing this time around wasn’t going to be the gastronomic free-for-all I’d been looking forward to for nine months (or, at least once I stopped barfing). For a while, I was convinced he wasn’t eating enough, despite his regular weight gain and constant output. And, for a while, I was convinced I wasn’t eating enough, stuffing my face while waiting for the baby weight to simultaneously, magically, melt away. It did not. After a while, I sulkily succumbed to my own brand of moderation. It’s true: each kid is different. Rats.

And now, again at 20 months, we’re done. No hoopla, no fanfare, no slow winding down, no trips across the country. Just, for the first time in five years, no small being, in utero or ex, relies on my body for nourishment. At least, not literally.

And while I wish I could say that part of me finds this bittersweet, I don’t, really. I don’t lack for physical contact with the kids, who crawl and cuddle and climb over and nudge our bodies constantly. I don’t mind dropping this particular aspect of indispensability — in a thousand other ways, I am still crucial. But the nursing, she is done.

And now, I am going to go get me some kick-ass bras.

More fame

2009-02-23T10:59:00.000-08:00

The post Heart, Break was selected for this week’s Five Star Friday, “the best of what's being thought and said on the web.” I’m in some good company. Thanks to whomever nominated me!

25 random things about my trip to Florida

2009-02-22T18:45:00.000-08:00

There’s this meme going around Facebook that asks you to write 25 random things about yourself. I swore I wouldn’t do it because I overshare enough here already. But I thought I’d borrow the format to account for last week’s adventures down south.

1. Toddlers’ eyes and sunscreen do not mix. On two separate occasions, Isaac spent a couple of miserable hours weeping in his stroller and wailing, “Eye! Eye!” We decided to go with longsleeved shirts and pants rather than exposed skin.

2. Northwest Airlines routinely overbooks its Thunder Bay–Minneapolis route. Arrive early, or risk being bumped — as we were — to the next day. At least we got vouchers.

3. Despite their name, sandwiches do not taste better with sand in them.

4. Global Positioning Systems rock, and I will never drive in an unknown city without one again.

5. Our rental car was “upgraded” to a white Chrysler 300 — which ensured that we fit in well with the geriatric populations of Boca Raton. On the plus side, given that I normally drive my parents’ hand-me-down Buick, I felt right at home.

6. Isaac can sit, perfectly content, for hours at a time on the top step of a swimming pool, playing with a cup.

7. Ice cream cures almost anything that ails you.

8. Rowan asked, as we watched planes take off for two hours in the Thunder Bay airport, “Where’s the hill?” “What hill?” we asked. “The one the planes go up up up up...” he explained.

9. A disposable diaper can hold a vast amount of chlorinated water.

10. I have never been on a beach holiday where I cared less about getting a suntan.

11. Boca Raton is a strange, strange place, filled with gated communities and strip malls.

12. Shopping for bathing suits tests many of my feminist principles.

13. My dad and his wife were extraordinarily gracious and generous hosts.

14. Let Rowan press the buttons on the elevator, EVERY TIME.

15. Although I worried that we might get bashed, I also couldn’t resist asking the car rental guy if Rachel really had to pay for the privilege of being a second driver on the car. My exact phrasing: “Even if we live in the same household?” Once he confirmed that we were indeed “on the same insurance policy,” he put her on for free. So, folks, at Avis, the codes for “same-sex couple” are “same household” and “same insurance policy.” Stick that in your Pride parade.

16. I like the idea of shopping at Target better than actually shopping at Target.

17. No theme park beats making sand castles on the beach.

18. When on holiday with small children at your parents’ place, it is vital (or at least recommended) to commiserate and commune with your friends who are also on holiday with their small children at their parents’ place. Go to the zoo. Get the grandparents to babysit. Have dinner out. Drink lots of wine. Go to bed at midnight and get up at 5:30 with your toddler.

19. Although I have a mild phobia around butterflies, I enjoyed walking through the butterfly garden at Gumbo Limbo nature preserve.

20. Isaac climbed all six flights of stairs to the top of the observatory deck at Gumbo Limbo, and then insisted on bumping down the same six flights of stairs on his bum, followed by a horde of impatient 11-year-olds.

21. You never know what will end up on your camera when you hand it to a four-year-old.

22. Isaac is now big enough to go on a carousel horse on the merry-go-round, just like his brother.

23. The best thing about parenting principles is letting so many of them go while on holiday.

24. Isaac literally fell asleep as our return flight to Minneapolis taxied to the gate, after three and a half hours of ridiculous in-flight energy.

25. On our flight home to Thunder Bay, Northwest offered us $400 each in vouchers and hotel accommodations for the night if we would volunteer to fly out the next day. We seriously considered it, but decided we were too exhausted. Both kids slept the entire flight home.

Hey! An entire blog entry, and no need to worry about narrative cohesion. Cool.

Greetings from sunny Florida!

2009-02-19T17:01:00.000-08:00

The best thing about this picture? No snowsuits. No snowsuits anywhere at all. Bliss.

Fame, fame

2009-02-16T15:32:00.000-08:00

Hey! Mira Sucharov's latest column in the Ottawa Citizen quotes yours truly.

Something old, something new...

2009-02-10T17:47:00.000-08:00

This post was written for Robin Reagler's Freedom to Marry Week blog carnival, What About Love. Since I'm slightly late to the game, I'm combining yesterday's and today's themes: Something old, and something new.

On the ring finger of my left hand, just underneath my gold wedding band, I sport an engagement ring with a rock that would make any girl swoon — assuming she's the sort of girl who swoon over diamonds. I'm not, really. Sometimes, I think it would be better placed on someone with a French manicure, not close-cropped fingernails and chunky silver rings.

My wife didn't give the ring to me. Her proposal did not involve small velvet boxes or bended knees. Rather, it came over the phone, long distance, while I was rooting through my fridge for something to eat. Just finished her PhD and half a year into what would eventually become her first permanent faculty job, she wasn't in any position to spring for a multi-carat, round cut, bright white diamond, set in white gold band, with two smaller stones nestled on either side of it. Nor would I have wanted her to.

I suppose you could argue that, more than 40 years ago and fresh from his own engineering degree, my dad wasn't necessarily in a position to spring for the ring, either. But he — and, more importantly, perhaps, his mother, who worked most of her adult life, before and after her husband died, to help support her family — wanted to do right by the bookish, violet-eyed young woman who would become his wife. And since my grandmother worked at, conveniently, a jewelry store, she dropped everything to make sure that, when he popped the question, he had an eye-popping ring to back him up — staff discount, of course.

And when Rachel and I told my parents that we were getting hitched, my mother immediately dropped everything and began to plan. She phoned my entire extended family, as well as caterers and rabbis and loads of friends. I came home the next day to dozens of messages of congratulations on my answering machine.

Did my mother slip off her engagement ring and hand it to me in a selfless expression of her love and support? No. She didn't need to. Her love and support were tangible, but in any case the ring slipped off of its own accord, soon enough, too big to remain on her chemo-wasted finger. We put it away in a drawer for safekeeping. Still, we planned and planned for June wedding, and then a May wedding, when June became unrealistic.

And then we called off the May wedding, and attended a May funeral, instead.

Rachel and I exchanged rings privately that day, new rings, that we bought in a rush at the mall — no time to linger over choosing, or have something made or engraved. We thought that we'd replace them when we had more time, but they've grown on us, become laden with meeting. And then, on our original June date, we exchanged those new rings publicly, in a small, bittersweet, ceremony.

A couple of years later, when I decided I needed a more tangible reminder of her, my father let me take my mother's engagement ring. I rarely take it off. If you look closely at the diamond, you can see a small chip, a tiny flaw in the perfection. I don't mind it — it makes sense to me in a world without my mother.

And so now, on the ring finger of my left hand, I wear two bands, one old and one new. My mother didn't live to see my wedding, but at least — in Ontario, Canada, in 2004 —she could have. One day, the world?

(B)oy, was it early

2009-02-09T16:59:00.000-08:00

So, this guy gets on this train, and he’s settling in with his magazine, when the old man across the aisle starts complaining: “Oy, am I thirsty. Oy, am I thirsty!”

Every 20 or 30 seconds, just as the guy manages to read a couple of sentences, it’s the same thing: “Oy, am I thirsty!”

This goes on for about 20 minutes, with the old man yelling and the guy getting progressively more annoyed, until finally he gets up, walks through three cars to the dining car, gets a huge glass of ice water, carries it back to his car, and hands it to the old man. Who thanks him profusely and drinks the water.

And all is quiet.

And then, just as the guy is really getting into his magazine article, the old man sighs. “Oy, was I thirsty!”

Sometimes, Rowan is kind of like that

I’m thinking in particular of this thing that happened, oh, last May, when we woke him up at 4 a.m. because he and Rachel were catching a 6 a.m. flight to Vancouver, via Winnipeg. We thought she’d just carry him to the waiting taxi and that he would sleep through the first part of the trip.

We were wrong. He threw a huge fit, crying and flailing and going on and on about how he didn’t want to get in a taxi, that he just wanted to go to sleep, in his own bed, and why why why did we wake him up? He didn’t want to go to Vancouver, he didn’t want anything, and no.

Rachel managed to shove him in the cab and eventually get him on the airplane, but he wasn’t really over it until somewhere over the Prairies. And even now, he’s not really over it. Eight months later, we’ll be going about some routine part of the day when will say, “Remember that time you woke me up?”

How could we forget?

I mention this only because next week we are going to Florida — no snowsuits for an entire week! I swear, even if there is a freak blizzard in Florida I will not put snowsuits on those boys — and our return flight leaves at 6:30 a.m.

So, if, sometime next Saturday, very early in the morning, you hear screaming from somewhere in the southern United States, don’t worry. We’ll have it under control.

Take the toddlers bowling, take them bowling

2009-02-09T09:18:00.000-08:00

We took the kids bowling on Saturday morning, part of an ongoing quest to quell cabin fever and fill the yawning chasm formerly known as the weekend with wholesome activity. I’ve taken to mentally dividing up the weekends into quadrants — Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon; Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon — and things seem to go smoothest when at least three of the four have some kind of activity booked.

And this past Saturday morning was bowling.

Every so often, on a whim, you do something you don’t usually do and you realize that there exists an entire world of people who live to do that thing, who have created entire communities and languages and art forms and T-shirts devoted to that thing. For me, bowling is one of those things. Naïvely, I expected Mario’s Bowl to be fairly quiet on a Saturday morning in Thunder Bay. As we pulled into the only vacant space in the parking lot, I realized I would have to rethink my assumptions.

We managed to snag the only available five-pin lane left in the entire, buzzing, place. Children’s bowling leagues were practicing in the first twenty-odd lanes, while adult leagues took up the bulk of the ten-pin alleys. We came with a school friend of Rowan’s, and his little sister, who is the same age as Isaac, and their mom. The two older boys played (and, let me tell you, little is sweeter than a four-year-old boy in bowling shoes) while the toddlers ate Goldfish crackers and stuck their hands up the gumball machine chutes and then, in Isaac’s case, discovered the bowling balls.

While Rachel bowled with Rowan (who was, I must say, a model of turn taking and cooperation), I was in charge of ensuring that Isaac harmed no one — himself included — by, say, lobbing a five-pin bowling ball into the path of an innocent junior bowler, or dropping a ball on someone’s foot. In essence, we formed a miniature assembly line: he picked up a ball, and I immediately relieved him of it. Repeat a million times.

In an effort to distract him for at least a little while, I took him on a forced march throughout the rest of the bowlerama, placating him with said gumball machines and the exploration of the bowling ball lockers. (Again, who knew? Who knew that dozens and dozens and dozens of dedicated bowlers would need lockers to store their balls and shoes and gloves and the like? Of course, now it all seems obvious in retrospect.)

We sat for a while at a table above the lanes with two women and a boy who looked to be around ten years old. I guess that they were grandmother, mother, and son, watching what I guessed were grandfather and father roll a series of strikes and spares oh so casually down their lane in wide, graceful arcs. Isaac climbed into a chair and smiled at the women, who obliged him by cooing. “Are you a busy boy?” asked the mother. “Are you? Yes?”

“Yeah,” said Pres., laughing, as I rolled my eyes and nodded in agreement.

The mother laughed too, and pointed at her son. “Oh! He was all the time, back, forth, back, forth," she said in accented English, her index finger swinging left, then right, then left again to illustrate. “I never sit down. Oh! When he was year, year and a half” — and here she drew an imaginary knife across her neck — “I want to cut off my head.”

I love it when people say things like that.

But I’m glad that I didn’t cut off my head, because then I wouldn’t have seen a tiny, tiny boy in grey sweatpants gets to pick up his own bowling ball — finally! — toddle up to the foul line (under Rachel’s careful tutelage), gently set the ball down, and push it with all his might towards the pins. It rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled toward its destination. For all I know, it’s rolling still.

Heart, break

2009-02-03T17:17:00.000-08:00

Rowan takes me by both hands and leads me to the couch, where we sit, side by side. He looks at me solemnly, earnestly. Still holding my hands, he gazes deep into my eyes and says, “Okay, Umom, now we’re going to talk about when your mom died.”

And so we go through the story, again: how my mom was sick, very sick, with a disease called cancer. Not sick like bronchitis or an ear infection or a cold, where you get better. A different kind of sick that she couldn’t get better from. And that she was very tired of being so sick. So all her family came to visit her and they got to see her and tell her how much they loved her. And then she closed her eyes and she died.

“And then what happened?”

And then lots of people came to say goodbye to her and tell us, her family, how much they loved her and how wonderful she was.

“And you were sad?”

Yes, I say. I was very sad.

And then I tell Rowan how he and my mother never met, but that he was just a tiny baby inside my belly when she died, and that she was so happy to know that he was going to be born. Which he was, three days after what would have been her 60th birthday. And that the reason his name starts with R is because her name did, too.

“You miss your mom?”

Yes, I say. I miss my mom. I wish that she could have met you and Isaac. She would have loved you so much.

I tell the whole story from the neck up, a technique I’ve practiced for getting through these conversations. It helps if I don’t have to look at Rowan — or, God forbid, Rachel — directly in the eyes the entire time but can focus instead on some spot in the distance just above his head or, if necessary, his eyebrows. It helps that the story is of necessity simplified.

Because if I got into the details, if I let the telling sink down to heart level, things might get a bit overwhelming. Not just for a four-year-old who is just beginning to wrestle with the concept of death and its finality, but for his mothers, who still struggle with the fact that Bubbie Ruthi is never coming back, no matter how good we are or how long we wait. I can’t yet tell Rowan that the death of my mother remains my life’s biggest heartbreak, that I have to refrain from making Faustian bargains in my head about what I’d trade to have her back, to be able to call her to report each milestone, to tell her what we’re making for dinner.

I don’t mention that she had cancer three times and that the first time she got sick I was nine years old. I don’t tell him that her funeral was standing-room only. I don’t say that the reason her entire family came to see her was that Rachel and I were supposed to be married that morning — a hastily thrown-together ceremony meant to outrun the course of her disease. And that she must have known, because she was that classy, that the two events — a wedding and a funeral — needed more than a day’s space apart. I don’t say that, in fact, she died and then I closed her eyes. I just say that I miss her. And that I was very sad.

And then Rowan pats my knees, rises from the couch, walks over to Rachel, sitting on a black leather chair, squeezes in beside her, and takes her two hands in his. “Okay, This Mom,” he says. “Now we’re going to talk about when your dad died.”

He’s been doing this often in the last month or two. And we tell him our stories. And it all percolates, until a few nights ago, when, sitting in a black leather chair, he said, seemingly out of the blue, “What if you die?”

And I said the only thing I felt I could say in that moment: “I won’t.”

Of course, we’ve had conversations since then, conversations about how everybody dies one day, but that most people die when they’re very, very old. About how Rachel and I won't die until we're very, very old and Rowan and Isaac are old enough to take care of themselves. About how if anything ever happened to me and to Rachel — which it won’t, but just in case — that we know who will take good care of him and of Isaac, where they would live, what they would eat.

I can’t guarantee that I’ll keep my promise. But I don’t think Rowan is old enough yet to handle the thought of my death, or of Rachel’s, as a conditional maybe.

And I don't think either of us can handle, at least not yet, telling the full story.

In honour of International Hug a Jew Day

2009-02-02T09:06:00.000-08:00

Check out my article, “Small-Town Jew Blues,” at InterfaithFamily.com, on being a queer mom raising kids who are Jewish in Thunder Bay: “For my sons, having two mothers is natural, omnipresent, what they've always known. It's being Jewish that requires more work.”

Note: I did not write — nor can I vouch for the accuracy of — the caption. Sleeping Giant versus strip malls: you decide.

Overtime

2009-01-29T07:36:00.001-08:00

A friend of ours called the other day to see if she could borrow our copy of Siblings Without Rivalry. Her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, it seems, is having some difficulties surrounding the arrival of her baby sister, now two months old.

“How long did it take Rowan to get over Isaac being born?” asked our friend.

I sighed. “I don’t think Rowan has got over Isaac being born,” I said, as gently as I could.

There was a small silence on the other end of the phone. “Ohhhh,” she said, after a moment.

It’s true that, a short while after Isaac was born, Rowan went a bit berserk — a couple of weeks of weepiness and regression that we attributed less to the arrival of his brother than to the chaos that arrival set in motion and the subsequent disruption of his own schedule: a round of visits from family and friends, a trip to Toronto, all of which coincided with his babysitter going on vacation. After the initial brouhaha settled down, so did he. Even finished the potty-training project we had all decided to put on hold.

But getting over Isaac? I’m guessing that’s a potentially decades-long project. Which doesn’t mean that Rowan doesn’t adore Isaac: just this morning, the two spent twenty-odd gleeful minutes together taking turns throwing the vintage Fisher Price push toy down the basement stairs. They wrestle, they dance, they sing, they cuddle, they hug and kiss goodnight. They play together independently upstairs while Rachel and I finish dinner.

But it is just as likely that Rowan will choose to bash Isaac over the head with the vintage Fisher Price push toy. Several times an hour, Rowan will charge at his brother like a belligerent goat, screeching, “Nananananananananaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” while Isaac shrieks in protest. There are serious sharing issues. And there is rarely a toy in Isaac’s hot little hands that Rowan doesn’t immediately, passionately, desperately need right now.

Rowan is not over Isaac.

But, isn’t that kind of the point? Rowan is not over Isaac, any more than Rachel and I are over either of them, any more than we’re over each other. Any more than Isaac is over any of us. We may be over — so over — that high school crush, that toxic friend, the ex with commitment issues, the Atkins diet.

But we are, the four of us, perpetually, just getting started.

Nudge

2009-01-26T07:45:00.000-08:00

In the late 1970s, my mother bought herself a dress made out of — you know it — Ultrasuede. It was fantastic. Not because of the styling, which I vaguely remember as light tan in colour, perforated with a pattern of tiny holes. Because of the way it felt. Sometimes I snuck into her closet just to touch that dress, to run my fingers back and forth across the nap of the fabric, which was softer than anything else I knew. She wore it to synagogue services one year, and spent the better part of three hours in a silent, futile battle with me, trying to get me to stop stroking her sleeve.

She called it “nudging,” (pronounced noodje, like book) a Yiddish term that translates to “pestering” or “badgering” or “annoying” — as in, “Mom, can we have ice cream? Can we? Can we? Can we have ice cream? Can we have some now? Ice cream? Can we? Have some? From the freezer? Now? Ice cream?”

Or, “Have you emptied the dishwasher?”

But nudging to me is always physical, not verbal, a form of silent intimacy that falls somewhere on the continuum between bliss and torture. My six-year-old compulsion to touch my mother's softsoftsoft sleeve. A small foot pushing against my thigh underneath the dining room table. Isaac stroking my hair: “Nice! Nice!” The way Rowan does up and undoes the buttons on my cardigan as he talks to me, or picks the lint off my sweater. A baby asleep on your chest, clutching your T-shirt in his tiny fist. Isaac’s thumb in his mouth, his fingers working the satin and fuzzy fabrics of his blankie. The way a cat pushes her head underneath your hand, the way a child creates a lap by falling into it, the way a bedmate turns her back to you for spooning, ready or not.

There are the large intimacies of parenting, those surrounding conception and pregnancy, birthing and nursing and feeding and cleaning and such. There are the children sticking their fingers into your yogurt and then into your nose. But, I think sometimes, that families are made just as much by the tiny intimacies, the nudges that only they can — just barely — get away with.

Old cat, new tricks

2009-01-22T07:59:00.000-08:00

Every day, the cat jumps up onto my desk and stands in front of my monitor, obscuring my work. She tries to drink from my water bottle; meows repeatedly, piteously; knocks pens to the floor; generally forces me to acknowledge her presence by making a nuisance of herself.

And every day, I find myself thinking, “Why is Lola being such a pain?”

And every day, after about 20 minutes of this, I realize that she’s hungry. And I haul my ass off my yoga ball and put some food in her dish. And peace is restored.

I don’t know why I don’t clue in earlier. We’ve had this cat for, oh, nine years. And still, this one lesson doesn’t seem to permeate. Kind of like how, at the same time each month, I wonder why everything suddenly seems visible only through grouch-coloured glasses, or why I’m weepy for no particular reason

Or how I can catch myself despairing at a four-year-old boy who is forcing me to acknowledge his presence by making a nuisance of himself, who is insisting that Everything I Do Is Wrong. And then I actually think for a minute, and, without saying anything, I hand him a banana or a plate of cheese and crackers or a glass of milk. Which he silently ingests. And peace is restored.

(Cat bowl by Toronto designer Wendy Tancock)

Literary breakthrough

2009-01-19T06:00:00.000-08:00

I’m sorely aware that I don’t blog nearly as much about Isaac as I should. I suspect it has something to do with language, and with the complexities that language brings. Isaac is talking up a storm these days — I recently tried to make a list of his words and stopped counting at 50 — but he is not, say, telling stories. Mostly, he is emptying cupboards of pots and stacking empty yogurt containers on top of each other and harassing you to lift him higher so that he can set a final one on top. He is repeating the phrase, “Good job!” over and over, patting his own self on the back each time he makes a move, leaving us confident in his burgeoning self-esteem. He is obsessed with all things tea-related, particularly teapots, proving that he truly is Rachel’s boy. “Tea!” can also mean, however, that he wants to brush his teeth, and we also occasionally mistake it for cheese. Which can also mean the camera. And so on. For all his words, he is still a bit of a shriekyhead, a habit I am trying to discourage by telling him to — what else? — use his words. To which he responds, sweetly, “Beep beep!”, an approximation of, “Up, please!”

But Isaac is definitely becoming more complex, language and all. And one of the ways that’s becoming apparent is that he will actually permit us to read him a few pages at a time of a book these days.

Which is a kind of exciting. Unlike his brother, who loved being read to from Day One, Isaac has never been interested in books. I would describe his attitude towards reading as, perhaps, hostile. He shut books if you tried to open them in his presence. Pushed them away. Occasionally threw.

But maybe, just maybe, he’s on track to discover the joys of classics like Harold and the Purple Crayon and Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (which is even funnier once you’ve grown up and see just how exhausted and put-upon the parents look). In any case, last Thursday, I think I even managed to get through three quarters of the abridged version of Hands, Hands, Fingers, Thumb. And, this morning, he actually pulled a book off the shelf (My First Shabbat), carried it over to the couch, climbed up, and began leaf through it — if “leafing” is a term one can apply to board books.

(There have been other milestones of late, which I will duly note here for posterity’s sake: the Sleeping Until 7 AM. The Sitting in a Chair at the Dinner Table. The Gradual, Self-Imposed Weaning. The Fourth Molar. The Cuddling of Rachel in My Presence. The Beginning of Imaginative Play — on Sunday, we spent a good half-hour ferrying stuffed animals into his crib; he kissed each one and told it, "Night night!”)

All of which is by way of saying: Internet, I expect you'll be seeing a lot more of Isaac in the next little while.

Unravelling

2009-01-14T09:38:00.000-08:00

I can’t knit any more. Too many decades of constant computer use have left me with repetitive strain disorders and carpal tunnel syndrome. From my fingertips to my shoulders, I’m essentially a train wreck, a bundle of tingling nerves and sulky muscles that rebel any time I type more than a few sentences or click my way through too many Etsy pages.

I’ve compensated by turning to voice dictation software, ergonomic mice and keyboards, a yoga ball instead of a chair, and by practicing certain forms of restraint. Like making the decision to stay away from online Boggle’s siren call. And giving up knitting.

It’s been a sacrifice, especially for someone who has a tiny bit of a problem with compulsion. Basically, I’m a productivity junkie. I like to keep busy, and I find it difficult to watch television without also doing something “useful” — a character trait of mine that Rachel barely puts up with (“When I watch television, I want to ... watch ... television,” she will say, when I suggest that we could fold a couple of loads of laundry while catching up on season three of Weeds.). Knitting was a perfect way for me to quell the voices while getting in good-quality bad-television time.

Mostly, I have come to accept the fact that my knitting career is over, although every so often I think that maybe I can find some small way to jump back on the craft bandwagon. So when my friend Judy, who has of late been indulging — beautifully, heartbreakingly beautifully — her own knitting and felting obsession, mentioned that she was going to repurpose a couple of hand-knit sweaters into felted mittens, I offered to unravel them for her. If I couldn’t knit something, I figured, I could un-knit something and make myself useful.

I made that suggestion on a Sunday morning, at Judy’s house, where my family had descended upon hers for our standing brunch date. I was thrilled to be there, mostly because being there meant that I wasn’t at home on a frigid morning corralling increasingly edgy children.

Or maybe I’m the one who’s edgy. Lately, I’ve been finding Rowan more challenging than I usually do: chalk it up to some combination of bronchitis (his and mine), PMS (mine), defiance (his), and a general ranginess, but I’m not exhibiting all the qualities that I would like to exhibit as a parent in terms of patience, modelling appropriate behaviour, and the like. Midway through the weekend, I had nearly had it, and the prospect of French toast at Judy and her partner, Jill’s, house was exactly what I needed.

We came home from brunch with a sweater. Isaac napped, Rowan watched a video, Rachel read, and I sat at the dining room table blissfully picking out the sweater seams. The day passed, more or less a study in average parenting skills and equally average four-year-old behaviour. Before bedtime, I sat on the couch with Rachel and Rowan as she read stories to him and I unravelled a sleeve.

“What are you doing?” he asked me.

I explained my project to him.

“Can I do it?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, passing him the sleeve.

And we sat together in silence for a good 15 minutes, working together, him pulling the yarn intently, me winding it around itself into a ball — our own little prayer service (I asked for more patience and more parental grace) at the Church of Craft.

Changing constellations …

2009-01-10T17:26:00.000-08:00

On the last day of our visit to Toronto in December, I had some time to kill and an energetic child to entertain, so I took Rowan to the billiards room in my father’s new condominium building, and we shot some stick.

I haven’t played pool regularly since my undergrad days in Montréal, when my roommate, Lori, and I lived across the street from a bar unfortunately named the Copacabana. We and the rest of the theatre crowd became regulars, ordering happy-hour specials of two half-pints of St. Ambroise and other Québec microbrews before such things were fashionable, and playing dollar-a-game pool for hours at a time.

Eventually, I got good enough that I could occasionally run the table for a few games at a time, sometimes even winning against long-time regulars like the musclebound guy with the mullet we nicknamed Fabio. It got so that I would drop in for a couple of games most days after class. We got quite chummy with the owners, Alberto and Albino, who would occasionally unlock the table and let us play for free. Alberto even deigned to lend me his custom cue, stored in the supply cupboard. One spring day, shortly after graduation, Lori and I dropped in for a beer during lunchtime, and two middle-aged Portuguese gentleman, friends of Alberto’s, challenged us to a game. Much to everyone’s surprise, we won handily — I’d like to think by banking the eight ball at some difficult angle — and they bought us a couple of rounds.

Oh yeah, I was a hustler. (Now stop laughing.)

Much has changed since my Copa days.

Not just the setting — trade seedy bar on the Main for genteel condominium residence at Lawrence and Bathurst, for one. Or the company. Or the fact that I’m no longer that constantly heartsick young thing, personal soundtrack set to one of ani difranco’s angry albums — the one who lost too many games because she was too worried about people watching her to keep her eye entirely on the ball.

Or the rules. I used a cue to try to sink balls; Rowan used just his hands to whiz them across the felt and into the pockets. He did not take turns. He did not wait for me to line up shots. He took balls out of pockets and put them in others, knocking them into each other and out of my sightlines. I took shots more or less randomly, lining things up as best I could and hitting the cue ball before I was sure, before everything inevitably shifted in front of my eyes. Every time Rowan sunk a ball, he crowed, “I won!” And every time I managed to get one in despite the chaos of the table, he was equally supportive: “You won! Good job, Susan!”

In short, a microcosm of life with children. We had a blast. I can’t wait to do it again, and I can’t wait to visit him and his brother when they are cocky, twenty-something pool hustlers, and play a few games over a couple of pints of local microbrew, wherever that may be.

Pride and joy

2009-01-03T17:34:00.000-08:00

Lest you think that bronchitis has brought out the best in my children, I thought I would share a little fantasy (and, I stress, it’s a fantasy) I’ve been harbouring of late:

You know those Wild Kingdom, National Geographic–kind of TV shows, the ones with long shots of the animals on the African veldt, the elephants trumpeting and the gazelles leaping and the lions stalking the gazelles?

Eventually, they always cut to a shot of the lions lolling about, full after the kill, with the cubs wrestling in the dirt around their parents. And eventually one cub or another gets a bit too close or a bit too uppity or refuses to put on its snowsuit and the mother lion half snarls and picks up her heavy paw and whacks the cub sideways with it.

And the cub rolls off, ass over teakettle (I fear I’m mixing metaphors here, but what the hey). If there were a sound effect it would be from a cartoon, and it would go something like i-bid-ee-i-bid-ee-ib-ib-ib-i. And the cub eventually comes to a stop and gets to its feet and shrugs and shakes itself off and goes back to playing, but with JUST A LITTLE BIT MORE RESPECT.

Until the next time.

Sometimes, thinking about that is what gets me through the next five minutes.

With bronchitis ...

2009-01-02T13:08:00.000-08:00

... in both children. (And, said our GP, if I’m not careful, in me, too.)

And then I lost $80, just ... oh, somewhere on the street. Although I seem not to have shed the thin layer of morosity coating my outlook just right now. (I will say quick prayers of thanks for antibiotics, universal health care, and the fact that we actually have a GP, and that she will see us on short notice.)

And how is 2009 treating you?

This, that, and the Other Mom

2008-12-29T11:50:00.000-08:00

Rowan has taken to calling me and Rachel by our first names. It happened suddenly — and pretty much wholesale — about a month ago. “Good morning, Susan,” he said to me one morning as I stumbled into the kitchen. “Did you have a nice sleep?”

“Why yes, Rowan,” I said, slowly. “I did. Did you?”

“Yes, Susan,” he said. “I did.”

Some things are not worth processing before caffeine.

The processing post-caffeine hasn’t been particularly intense, either, at least for me. “Why do you call me ‘Susan’?” I asked him, a few days into the new regime.

“Because that’s your name,” he said, predictably.

I left it at that. For some reason, it doesn’t overly bother me, this shift in nomenclature. After the initial, jarring, effect wore off, I don’t really notice any more, unless someone points it out to me. Maybe it doesn’t bug me because, well, “Susan” is my name.

I should also point out that, for the past two years or so, Rowan has called me “Uh-mum,” which is short for “Other Mom.” The “other” being in relation to Rachel, who scored the coveted title of “This Mom” in the great toddler name shakedown of 2006. I have mostly come to terms with being (at least on paper) the second-string mother, have even come to embrace my title and its short form. But perhaps it is fair to say that being “Susan” is no better or worse than being Rowan’s other mom.

This Mom, however, begs to differ. Rachel has had a harder time with the new, first-name basis. “My name is ‘Mommy,’” she tells Rowan. “Or ‘This Mom.’ Or ‘Mom.’”

“Okay, Rachel,” Rowan will say.

“You and Isaac are the only people in the world who get to call me ‘Mommy,’” she continues. “That’s your special name for me. That’s what I like you to call me.”

“Rachel, do you want to play trucks?”

I can see why it’s frustrating. But here’s the thing: whatever they call us, it doesn’t erase the fact that at 6 a.m., when we hear a small body slide out of bed, pad across his bedroom floor and the hallway, and open our door, we know that it can be nobody else but Rowan (and, eventually, Isaac). Nobody else but Rowan and Isaac will ever stand, small and pajama’d, at the foot of the bed and say, “Rachel, will you please come cuddle me in my bed?”

At that moment, really, what’s in a name?

In the battle of the sexes, we may all have lost

2008-12-18T09:34:00.000-08:00

Overheard in the living room yesterday afternoon, 4:50 PM:

Rowan: Where does toe jam come from?

Rachel: It comes from fuzzy socks.

Rowan: Robyn doesn’t have toe jam.

Rachel: Oh. I guess Robyn doesn’t have fuzzy socks.

Rowan: No, girls don’t get toe jam.

Rachel: Girls totally get toe jam!

Rowan: No, they don’t.

Rachel: They do so!

Rowan: And womens don’t get toe jam either.

Rachel: Oh yeah? Look! See? I have lots of toe jam! See?

Me: Excuse me while I go blog about you.

Pajama daze

2008-12-16T06:56:00.000-08:00

So, it’s pajama day at school today, where all the kids are supposed to get a thrill out of wearing their nighttime clothes during the day.

Predictably, Rowan wasn’t interested. He just looked puzzled when we suggested that he could wear his new Thomas the Train pajamas to class. “But I want to wear my daytime clothes,” he said. And really, who can blame him for not seeing the point? Pajamas are pajamas, and wearing them to school just seems odd to him, not some big special treat

And, frankly, I’m not so disappointed. It’s not like we haven’t spent the better part of the last three years trying to convince him to take off his goddamn pajamas in the morning and put on his daytime clothes. I’d hate to have one morning at school unravel all that work.

Still, we packed up the pajamas and stuck them in his backpack, just in case he had a change of heart once he got to school. And we picked the Thomas PJs, an early Christmas/Hanukkah present from Rachel’s mom. That is, we chose the “boy” pajamas. Instead of the pink-and-green striped pajamas that he’d been wearing happily for the past month or so, underneath the fuzzy pink fleece set we got him for cold nights.

Yes, after getting on my high horse about why boys should feel free to wear pink, I am actively steering my son towards leaving the pink at home and entering the public realm in some nice, serviceable navy blue. With trains on it.

Why? Good question. Partly because we don’t want him to come home telling us that “those are girls’ pajamas.” He loves them, and we want him to keep loving them, untainted by any potential preschooler peer group disdain. Partly because we don’t want to open him up to unnecessary bullying or ridicule. Don’t get me wrong: if he insisted upon wearing the pink and green ones, we’d let him. But if he’s indifferent, which he is, we’re going with Thomas for the time being. Because, sometimes, pajamas aren't just pajamas.

I’m a bit torn about this decision. Am I letting fear steer me toward entrenching gender norms I don’t necessarily agree with? Maybe I am. It’s just that I don’t think I’m ready to send him out in the world without me. That is, when my four-year-old son wears pink pajamas in public, I feel that it’s my duty to be there with him — just in case anything comes up. He’s just a bit too young to stand on his own as his parents’ gender spokesmodel.

Just in case you think I’m a complete sellout, however, I’m being interviewed today by the local CBC about my book, which will essentially involve me using the word “dyke” about a hundred times as I talk about how queers like me are choosing to have kids with known donors and parenting partners and the like. The part of me that isn’t a media whore is worried about getting a rock thrown through my window. But I can take it — I’m a big girl.

With apologies to a certain credit card company, and original thinkers everywhere

2008-12-15T05:04:00.000-08:00

Meccano toy? $29.95.

The hour spent with Zaidie putting it together? Priceless.

Bianca’s here for a reason

2008-12-11T07:01:00.000-08:00

Have you seen the movie Lars and the Real Girl? If not, go rent it right now, and not just because you shouldn’t put off for even a moment more the chance to see the smokin’ Patricia Clarkson in all her awesomeness.

In L&TRG, Clarkson manages to eat up the screen in every scene she’s in, even in her understated supporting role as Dr. Dagmar, a widowed family physician/therapist in a wacky little town in northern Minnesota. Her patient, Lars, played by Ryan Gosling, orders Bianca, an anatomically correct, life-size doll over the Internet, and then the entire town helps him to perpetuate his delusion that she’s a real, live (if sickly) girl — the wholesome girl he’s going to marry, once she’s well enough. In the meantime, Bianca gets a job, joins a church group or two, and accompanies Lars to his office Christmas party.

Clarkson’s character is charged with “fixing” Lars, by way of covert weekly psychotherapy sessions while Bianca receives “treatment” for her unspecified illness. But what I love most about the movie is the fact that, while she takes Lars seriously, Dagmar doesn’t seem too worried about the whole imaginary friend thing. In her consult with Lars’s frantic brother and sister-in-law, she’s cool and unruffled. “Well,” she says, “Bianca’s here for a reason.”

And that, my friends, sums up the attitude I aspire to as a parent (and as a person in general). Yes, I know she’s a fictional character and all, but Dr. D. just exudes the kind of competence, compassion, acceptance and unflappableness that I would like to exude around my children. (And if I happened to resemble Clarkson physically at all, well that would be a bonus, now, wouldn’t it? I’m just saying.) Even at 5:30 in the morning. Even as the boys shriek “No!” back and forth at each other. Even as Rowan melts down over who gets to lift Isaac out of his crib or walk down the stairs first. Even as I try to make dinner, one-handed, with a clingy McClingypants toddler who wails if I try to put him down. Even in the face of a four-year-old who has appointed himself household dictator.

They do strange things, these children, but they do them for a reason — even if those reasons seem a little, well, unreasonable. And who am I to assume those reasons, however frustrating, aren’t valid?

Well, of course, I’m their mother — one of them, at least — which means that it’s also my job to gently steer these children towards increasing levels of so-called reasonable behaviour. Here’s hoping that my methods and my standards are adequate to the job. In the midst of chaos, I am trying to channel my internal Patricia Clarkson, muttering to myself, “She’s here for a reason. Bianca’s here for a reason.”

So it’s not quite Lord of the Flies... So sue me.

2008-12-04T05:53:00.000-08:00

Until Tuesday, Rowan’s best friend at school was Robyn. Robyn with a Y not an I, as Rowan tells me, repeatedly. Robyn, who sits on the Q on the alphabet rug, right next to Rowan on the Y. Robyn, who we saw one time at the swimming pool with her mom and her baby brother. Robyn, who once showed up miraculously at the public library while Rowan was there and was all he talked about the rest of the day. “If we go to the library, will Robyn be there?” he now asks.

When I dropped him off at school a few mornings ago, Robyn was waiting for Rowan in the junior kindergarten courtyard. They stood, silent, facing each other in their snowsuits, smiling shyly, rapturously, for about a minute. Then they ran off to play together. And a little piece of me melted inside.

But yesterday, yesterday Robyn got mad at Rowan for pushing her. “But I didn’t push her,” he tells me. I am the recipient of enough flying hugs and inadvertent head butts to know that Rowan isn’t always necessarily aware of the degree to which his body, his actions, can affect others. I’m fairly sure he didn’t mean to push, and I have no doubt that she could have easily misinterpreted his clumsy puppy love.

In any case, Rowan is a bit forlorn. He told the story to me and to Rachel. He and his babysitter drew a picture for Robyn after school. And during last night’s bedtime story, when Rachel got to the line in It’s Okay to Be Different (which you should buy, by the way, and not only because it’s been banned by several uptight school boards) that reads, “It’s okay to make a wish,” he said, “I wish Robyn were my friend again.” I nearly cried when she told me that.

Internet (as Dooce would say), it’s taking a lot for me not to swoop in and fix this. All I wanted to do for a few minutes last night was to get hold of Robyn’s phone number and call her parents, explain the situation, and get the two of them back together. I wanted to write a note to their teacher, asking her to intervene, to make that little girl be friends with my little boy again. I imagined walking Rowan to school tomorrow, waiting for Robyn, and brokering the peace.

But I will do none of that. I will stand back and offer support judiciously, quietly, when asked or when it truly seems that Rowan is in over his head. I will let Rowan give his picture to Robyn himself. I will talk to him about his feelings. And I will see what happens. And I am sure that I will do the same thing over and over and over, when Rowan is 12, 14, 17, when his heart is broken and he broods silently in his room for hours, playing ballads on his guitar, writing bad existential poetry. Here’s my pledge: I will watch, and I will ache, and I will listen, and I will nod and cluck and — if permitted — hug. And I will not interfere.

But, man, it’s gonna be hard.

The best eleven minutes of my life

2008-12-01T10:43:00.000-08:00

Less often than I’d like, I do yoga in our bedroom, where my mat is a permanent fixture on the hardwood floor. Hanging out upside down in downward dog gives me a whole new perspective, sometimes too much perspective: it’s its own exercise in Zen just to accept without judgment the dust bunnies and clouds of cat fur and other assorted detritus collecting under the wardrobe and in the corners rather than stop my practice and grab a Swiffer.

Yesterday, as I was doing a seated forward bend, my meditation on the state of my toenails (verdict: could use a pedicure) was cut short as I notice the state of the bedroom door. At about ankle height, I noticed a few spots of what on closer inspection appeared to be dried blood.

Yes, absolutely — dried blood.

Awesome.

It’s my blood on the door, one last relic from Isaac’s birth, likely splattered there as I squelched, stunned, across a bridge of towels from the bathroom to the bedroom carrying the seconds-old baby, still attached to me via umbilical cord. Isaac was born after approximately 11 minutes of hard labour, which had been preceded by a lazy day’s worth of intermittent, mild-ish contractions, never less than 12 minutes apart. “Call us when they’re lasting about a minute each, five minutes apart,” our midwife told us. Never happened.

The plan — not my plan — had been to labour at home and deliver at the hospital. Rowan, a breech baby, had been delivered by planned C-section, and our community standards did not allow a woman with a previous C-section to deliver naturally at home. Which pissed me off, especially after the OB/GYN with whom I was required to consult to get the green light on the natural birth started rhyming off all the reasons why a second C-section would be infinitely preferable: pain, incontinence, and all kinds of “damage” to my pelvic structures (which he would then have to repair, no doubt heroically), not to mention uterine rupture, the chances of which, according to the research, doubled from less than 1% to about 1.5% for births following a caesarean.

“In my career, I’ve seen that happen twice,” he said, looking at me coolly over the tops of his glasses. “Both times, the baby died.”

If I needed any more reason to want a home birth, this guy sealed the deal: the thought of him being on call when I went into labour was enough to make me contemplate heading to the woods at the first contraction.

So, when our incredulous doula, Tara — who had come over, ostensibly, to help out while Rachel fed Rowan dinner and put him to bed — said, “Hey, are you pushing?”, and I realized that I was, I was thrilled. “You’re not going to any hospital,” said Tara. “You’re having your baby right here.”

I looked up at Rachel, who no doubt was envisioning my uterus rupturing, and said (apparently a little too sternly), “Don’t cry — this is good.” She paged Lillian, the midwife. Seconds later, Isaac’s head appeared. Behind me, Tara was talking: “Okay, one more push and this baby is going to come out. One more push — it’s gonna be a doozy — and I’m going to catch the baby. I’m going catch the baby.” I thought she was talking me through the birth; later, she told me she was talking herself through the delivery. By the time our midwife arrived, nine minutes later, Isaac was lying on the bathroom floor on a towel grabbed from the home birth kit I had put together, hopefully, on the sly.

“Baby’s out,” said Rachel. “So I see,” said Lillian. Still on my knees, I pushed aside the umbilical cord. “Oh, look,” I said, “it’s a boy.”

I cut the cord myself. The baby nursed. Lillian stitched me up by the light of the bedside lamp. One of the cats stretched out on the bed next to Isaac as we went through the newborn checkup. We called our families. Rachel changed diapers. We spent a sweet, mostly sleepless night in our own bed, Isaac nursing and snuffling between us. And when Rowan woke up the next morning, we introduced him to his baby brother. “I take her downstairs,” he said. “I read her a book.”

Someone — Tara, I assume — threw in loads of bloody laundry and wiped down the floors. But she missed a couple of spots on the door, apparently. And I will never, ever wash them off.

Yes, Rhys, there is no Santa Claus

2008-12-01T07:03:00.000-08:00

“Mom?” Rowan asks at the dinner table. “Mom? You know who Santa Claus is?”

The hand lifting the fork to my mouth doesn’t even tremble.

“Well, yes,” I say, slowly, evenly. My eyes meet Rachel’s across the table. “I do.”

Inside, however, I am moving into crisis mode, trying to quell the five-alarm siren that my son’s question has set off in my head. It’s okay, I remind myself — you’re prepared for this.

“He brings you presents,” says my four-year-old.

“Well,” I say, choosing my words carefully, trying to remember the script. “Some families tell a nice story about Santa Claus, and how he brings presents. But not all families tell that story. Our family tells a different story.”

“He comes down the chimney,” says Rowan.

“Yes,” I say, “that’s part of the story. Some families — okay, lots of families — have a holiday called Christmas. And they tell a story about how a man named Santa Claus comes down the chimney and brings presents. But we have different holidays. We have Hanukkah and Pesach and Rosh Hashanah. So we don’t tell the Santa Claus story.”

Rowan looks at me, eyes wide, absorbing my carefully thought out, painstakingly rehearsed presentation on “How Families Are Different (Or What It Means to Be the Only Jew in Your Junior Kindergarten Class).”

“And he brings you presents!” he chirps after a moment.

Oy.

There are benefits and drawbacks to living in a small city. One of the hardest things — more than even the Safeway cashiers who talk too much, way more than being queer — is trying to raise Jewish children in place where they are a rare species. There are fewer than 30 Jewish families here, total, most of them older couples, many of them (like us) interfaith. There is one synagogue, with a tiny but active core, and a handful of children (one of whom, by the way, was born in the wee hours of this morning — we got a call at 4 a.m. and Rachel went over to take care of her older sister while her parents went ever so briefly to the hospital. Mazel tov!) Everywhere we go, well-meaning people ask Rowan if he’s excited for Santa to come. And this year, he’s old enough to know what they’re talking about.

I’m torn. It’s not that we don’t celebrate Christmas in some of its forms — I draw the line at a tree or wreaths, but we have hosted and attended lovely Christmas dinners. The kids get Christmas gifts from Rachel’s family and from their dad’s. And this year — right after doing Hanukkah with my side of the family — we will spend the holiday with Rachel’s sister in full-on Christmas mode. But I just can’t get it up to get all ho-ho-ho for the guy in the big red suit. Especially not in the absence of other stories.

So, what’s a Jew to do? In a couple of weeks, I’m going into Rowan’s class with a Hanukkah book and a menorah and some dreidels, and tell the kids a story. It won’t even things out, but at least I’m making an effort. What would you do?

One crucial step away from that visit from the CAS

2008-11-24T07:59:00.000-08:00

I was in a client meeting last Thursday when I suddenly noticed the time on a colleague’s watch.

“Excuse me, but it is really four o’clock?” I asked him, panic already flooding my veins like ice water

It was.

“Would you be kind enough to excuse me for a moment?” I asked, backing away from the table as the panic escalated into a five-alarm siren. I grabbed my phone, dialed frantically, and, in my haste, misdialed.

It was my day to pick Rowan up from school — at 2:30.

I tried our number again, and again it didn’t go through. Where was he? Had Rachel figured things out and gone to collect him? Dial again, hit the “4” twice by accident. Dammit — slow down. Dial again — hit the “8” instead of the “4” — idiot! Idiot! Idiot! Idiot! Should I just run over to the school now? The client, a round, middle-aged woman with greying hair, looked on, concerned. “I forgot to pick up my son from school,” I announced to the room. I dialed again, with shaking fingers — okay, got the correct sequence — and a recorded voice telling me to please hang up and try my call again. “Isn’t there a goddamn phone that works in this office?” I yelled. He could be wandering the streets by now. “Here,” I said, shoving the phone into the hands of the big-eyed receptionist: “Here. You call for me.” I dictated the numbers, and she punched them in, and still nothing happened.

“I left my son at school,” I wailed, punching at the phone, the numbers shifting out of my reach. “I left him at schooooooooooooooooool.”

And then Rachel woke me up.

As someone who nearly lost her mind, twice, from sleep deprivation — as documented here, here, here, here, and here — I never thought I’d say this, but here you go: sometimes, sleep’s a bitch.

And you can spread it on your toast

2008-11-20T05:53:00.000-08:00

It’s a good thing Rowan has discovered the sock fuzz between his toes, because it has been far too long since we’ve discussed body fluids in this forum. Not that toe jam — and yes, Rowan has learned the proper term for it, courtesy of Rachel — is, strictly, a body fluid. It’s more of a byproduct of new, fuzzy winter socks. But perhaps we’re getting too technical here. In any case, Rowan is fascinated. “Oh! Gotta check my toe jam!” he’ll announce, dropping to the floor and peeling off his socks. “Not much today!” he’ll say, after a quick inspection of both feet. I think he’s planning on carding, spinning, and knitting a sweater with it. Or maybe just taking it to junior kindergarten for show-and-tell. Which should make parent-teacher interviews all the more interesting.

A million little washcloths

2008-11-17T12:06:00.000-08:00

Get out your Shop-Vacs, your Hazmat suits, your chisels — the toddler has discovered cutlery and wants to feed himself. Will accept no help. Will in fact strenuously reject help. We are reduced to sitting quietly by, keeping one hand as subtly as possible on his breakable pottery bowl — this being the month we wisely chose to rid the house of plastic dishware, bless our earnest green souls — washcloths at the ready, while he shovels food into his pie-hole.

His expertise is — literally — hit or miss, mostly a function of the food’s solidity. Yesterday, he daintily polished off an entire piece of French toast, handling his fork with dexterity that would rival the Queen’s. This morning’s oatmeal? Not so much.

Four legs good

2008-11-12T06:35:00.000-08:00

We are living the cliché that says that when you have kids, your pets plummet on your list of priorities. When we brought Rowan home from the hospital, our beta-cat, Creemore, briefly saw him as an opportunity for advancement in the pecking order. Within seconds of us laying our newborn son on the sofa, she attacked. Twice. Imagine a flash of grey fur and extended claws covering your brand-new baby. Rachel threw the cat across the room, twice, and then locked her in the office for hours as she seriously contemplated euthanasia. And this is the cat we used to take with us — on the airplane — when we went away for long weekends.

We expected trouble when Isaac arrived, but by then Creemore had learned her lesson. As the midwife conducted the newborn exam on our bed, the cat stretched out next to him, curious but respectful. Since then, she’s mostly stayed out of the kids’ way.

Today, the cats seem more like innocuous roommates than cherished pets. Except that they are woefully behind on their rent. Every so often I will see one of them sleeping on the bed or descending the stairs and be mildly surprised. It’s an odd thing, really, to have animals living with you, right in your house. Think about that: we have two animals living right inside our house. Crazy. Why cats and not, say, squirrels?

And then there are the times when I watch the boys and think, why children and not cats? I watch as Rowan runs shrieking through the dining room as he unspools the retractable cord from the vacuum cleaner. I watch Isaac empty a cupboard of pots, break into impromptu little dances, bestow kisses on my knees, treat the other parents in the Kindermusik lobby to impassioned gibberish soliloquies. And I think, who are these strange creatures with their strange rituals who live in our house with us? And how did they get here? And why children and not, say, order, sleep, trips to Venice?

I’m convinced, actually, that the cats are thinking the same thing. Maybe not that part about Venice, but they must wonder about these two loud little beings with their sudden, jerky movements and oppressive love. Isaac first word was “cat.” For as long as he has been sentient and at all mobile, he has gravitated toward the wee beasties. “Caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat,” he’ll say, lurching toward one feline or the other. Creemore just runs away, but Lola, our big, black, snarky queen, has proved remarkably tolerant. She’ll lie quietly as the baby mauls her and covers her with kisses. In the last week or so, he’s become much more skilled at the art of petting her. “Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice,” he’ll say, over and over, as he strokes her fur. “Niiiiiiiiiiice.” Rowan scratches her behind her ears, “with four fingers. See, Mom? You do it with four fingers. Like this” — and he holds up his hand to show me. “See?” I swear I’ve even heard Lola purr as they descend upon her.

As Isaac sheds his babyhood, marching on two feet inexorably towards language, molars, cups without lids, I notice his almost daily capacity to surprise me. Just the sheer presence of this grinning little boy standing up in his crib at the end of his nap, answering my questions when I expect only silence, pointing, spooning oatmeal into his mouth all by himself, is a bit of a revelation. Each day, he becomes more and more his own person and less (dare I say this?) pet-like. Each day, he becomes more deliberate, a part of the family with his own opinions, his own preferences, his own rituals. One day in the next year or so, he’ll sleep in a big-boy bed, just like his brother. And one day I will go into his room to check on him and find, as I did the other night when I went to check on Rowan, a grey cat curled up next to him. Purring.

The gratuitous, if late, Halloween 08 shots

2008-11-06T07:49:00.000-08:00

Super Why and his amazing dinosaur friend. I didn’t know who Super Why was, either, but apparently he’s some PBS character who teaches children how to read. And that’s who Rowan wanted to be for Halloween. How cool is that? I would love to pat myself all smug-like on the back and say it’s because we don't have a television, but of course Super Why is a television show ... mini Skittles, anyone?

Actually, the mini Skittles are all gone. Everything is gone. Not because we ate it all but because Rachel took it in to work and unleashed it upon the unsuspecting there. After the initial dressing up and trick or treating, the candy itself became a supporting character in a series of family dramas that involved Rowan negotiating nonstop (Now? Now? Now can I have candy? Now?) and Rachel and I trying to do our best to curb the intake of pure sugar that left him irritable and bouncing off the walls. At one point over the weekend, I was so annoyed that I ate a bunch of his candy purely out of spite. Not so good. So now it’s gone.

Next year, I'm debating just letting him gorge to his heart’s content for 48 hours — will the absence of arguing compensate for the attendant sugar high? That's a question only Super Why can answer.

The writing on the wall

2008-11-03T11:59:00.000-08:00

Here's a parenting dilemma for you:

Should I be proud that he knows how to write my name, or annoyed that he used the wall as his canvas?

Brown-bagging it

2008-10-28T12:59:00.000-07:00

Rowan is home from school today with a hacking, spewing cough that would have rendered him the Typhoid Mary of the Junior Kindergarten set — assuming, of course, that he didn’t pick up the cough from one of his classmates in the first place. He’s asleep on the couch right now. And the silver lining to the cloud of having a sick child (two sick children, actually), to having to rearrange our work schedules and to forfeiting sleep and downtime, is that at least we didn’t have to make him lunch.

I don’t know what it is about the lunch thing, but I’m always relieved when it’s my turn to put the kids to bed rather than clean up the kitchen and make lunches for the morning. Anne Lamott writes about the emotional baggage attached to school lunches, how they can stand in for everything, edible microcosms of the social order:
If code lunches were about that intense desire for one thing in your life to be Okay, or even just to appear to be Okay, when all around you and at home and inside you things were so chaotic and painful, then it mattered that it not look like not look like Jughead had wrapped your sandwich. A code lunch suggested that someone in your family was paying attention, even if in your heart you knew that your parents were screwing up left and right.
Okay, so that’s a little over the top for JK. But she’s on to something. It’s not that I’m worried about what other kids will think of his lunches (Lord knows, if I wanted to worry about things that other kids could potentially tease my queerspawn, half-Jewish, television-less kids about, I don’t have to stoop to lunches.). It’s just that it’s just one more bloody thing to do at the end of every day. You can’t skip it. And you have to get it right, more or less: something nutritious yet appealing, easily opened by fingers that can’t yet reliably hold a pencil or fasten a zipper, and simple to eat. There are twenty-two kids in his class — we can’t assume he’ll get any help with the meal. It’s a tall order for a child who will not eat bread and can’t yet open a Ziploc bag (yes, we use them — but we wash them and then reuse them, so we’re not entirely evil). Oh, and no peanut better and no fish.

I have cut myself a great deal of slack by deciding at the outset of the school year is that it is a perfectly acceptable thing to send Rowan to school with the exact same lunch every single day. I mean, how many winning combinations can a parent reasonably be expected to come up with? We’re still honing the mix, but the current standard lunch plus snack includes a zucchini-carrot muffin (made with whole-wheat flour), a banana, a container of plain yogurt (this one’s hit or miss), some chunks of cheddar cheese, egg salad on a pita, cucumber (generally ignored, but one has to keep up some appearances), and the milk (white) provided by the school. Sometimes almost all of it comes back, sometimes the bag is empty. We don’t know why.

Rowan just walked into my office, pantless, refreshed from his nap and looking healthier than he has all day. Fingers crossed he’ll be over this cough by Thursday. And on Wednesday evening, I will gather together the ingredients and, in some small way, hope that they will add up to everything being Okay.

Linus

2008-10-21T16:57:00.001-07:00

Who’s a blankie boy? Who? WHO? Nar nar nar nar snuffle.

Book club

2008-10-20T11:29:00.000-07:00

Another crazy thing about Rowan starting school: Scholastic Books. I didn’t even know they still existed. I mean, the idea of filling out a form with a pen, writing a cheque, sticking it all in an envelope, waiting your four to six weeks, and then — boom! — your books arrive ... it just all seems a little archaic, like ordering Sea Monkeys from the back page of an Archie comic.

And yet, Scholastic Books are — to the best of my knowledge, at least — alive and kicking, and I am making up for the lost opportunities of my youth. We weren’t a Scholastic Books kind of household growing up, which always rankled a bit. That’s not to say that we didn’t have books, books by the hundreds, just that we weren’t the kind of household that was generally organized enough to remember to fill out the forms and write the cheques and stick things in envelopes. When the Scholastic orders arrived, it didn’t matter that I was never short of reading material. As the teacher distributed those rubber-banded piles of books to the class, she may as well have been handing out engraved invitations to a birthday party to which I wasn’t invited. (Yes, yes, cry me a river, child of the middle class.)

So when Rowan came home with his order forms that first week, I pounced, form-filling and cheque-writing and envelope-sticking my little third-grade heart out. Now, we are (or, at least, I am) eagerly awaiting the arrival of My First Ramadan and Stone Soup. And 30 years from now, Rowan and Isaac will write blogs about how we never got them an Xbox.

Squirts

2008-10-15T12:59:00.001-07:00

These are just a sampling of the dozens upon dozens of medicine-dispensing syringes that we have acquired — and, for some bizarre reason, saved — over the past four years or so. They are the result of teething, the gazillion ear infections that Rowan developed during his second and third years, the Motrin and Advil and Tempra Rachel and I dispensed to help him (and us) cope with said infections, the boys’ several bouts of bronchitis, Isaac’s first ear infection (circa two weeks ago), and a potentially questionable but ultimately satisfying (especially at 3 a.m.) parenting strategy that Rachel and I have developed that says, “When in doubt, medicate.” It’s how we show love.

Fortunately, both children have embraced our stance on drugs. “He loves love pretty much anything dispensed in a syringe,” I once told our family doctor once as she wrote out yet another prescription for Rowan. “That might not be such a good thing down the line,” she commented.

Normal people would, of course, use a syringe once (or, perhaps, for the duration of the lifespan of a particular bottle of medicine) and throw it away, but we’ve found it comforting to have 30 dozen or so of the things stored in a glass in the cupboard (plus several more hidden in bathroom drawers). And they do come in handy, especially when you are giving a toddler three doses of antibiotic plus attendant pain medication throughout the day. Or when he is inconsolable with a fever and won’t drink and the only way to calm him down and keep him hydrated is to use a syringe to squirt water into his mouth. We have devoted an entire section of the dishwasher cutlery rack to used syringes. It’s a wonder the RCMP hasn’t found a way to shut us down.

It occurs to me that the bucket-o-syringes will be, eventually, just another relic of Rowan and Isaac’s early years, as they graduate from squirty, bubblegum-flavoured penicillin and liquid ibuprofen to spoons and chewable, cherry-flavoured pills. All the more reason to immortalize them on the Internet, where all things ridiculous go to never die.

Plan B

2008-10-13T10:09:00.000-07:00

Sunday was one of those days, those middle days of the long weekend when you realize you have no plan and that you desperately need one. When you wake up at 3 p.m. from your 20-minute nap (also desperately needed) because the baby has woken up from his, scoop him out of his crib and carry him to the basement, where your spouse is watching your nearly-four-year-old son bounce off the walls in his underpants, and start racking your brain for something to do in the four hours until bedtime.

What we came up with was the farm. One of the several hobby/working farms in the area that offers up fall pumpkin festivals — hay rides, petting zoos, haunted pumpkin patches, ponies, candy apples, hot dogs, and so forth. We piled into the car (after changing Isaac, sticking sweatpants on Rowan’s resistant little stick legs, throwing snacks and diapers and camera and hats into a bag and a stroller into the trunk) and headed out.

This particular farm is about a 25-minute drive from our house, past the airport, past the pulp and paper mill, into the last of the fall colours and the hopes of seeing wildlife. Isaac kicked his legs happily in his car seat while Rowan kept up a steady chatter about petting bunnies and hay mazes. Then the two of them started their yelling game, where they shrieked back and forth to each other, with increasing hilarity, until Rowan abruptly fell asleep. We kept Isaac content by putting in a CD at low volume and passing the occasional grape back toward him; he also found a stash of stale Goldfish crackers that no one ever bothered to clean out of his car seat, and munched on those for a while. And Rachel and I chatted all the rest of the way to the farm, through the gates, and up to the 15-year-old girls who told us they were closing in 45 minutes — although we were welcome to pay our $21 and go ahead. Perfect. We turned around, Rowan still sleeping, Isaac staring contentedly out his window, and chatted and enjoyed the fall colours all the way home. Rowan opened his eyes as we pulled into the driveway. “Where are we?” he asked. “Where’s the farm?”

It was, as the writer Anne Lamott writes, “like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony.” We needed to get out. And we didn’t need to be any place else but where we were.

Drew Barrymore’s mother, are you reading this?

2008-10-13T10:08:00.000-07:00

If Rowan ever becomes really famous I’m going to kick myself for throwing away most of his childhood artwork. When I’m purging, though, I’m not usually thinking of the future value on eBay of a papier-mâché cat or a toilet-paper-roll spider with woolly legs. Mostly, I am frantically trying to ensure that we don’t drown in a sea of finger paintings and macaroni collages.

It’s Clair’s fault. Since the age of 13 months, Rowan has had the grand privilege of being taken care of by the wonderful Clair, master of all babysitters. From about day one, he was smitten. And so were we. Not only because she took great care of our son, but because she opened up Rowan’s world, and our own. She took him on all kinds of adventures that we — new parents, new to the city — hadn’t thought up, hadn’t known were possible: to the pet store, to the bowling alley, to the old-age home, on a city bus, to a rehabilitation centre to watch the people swim, to pick raspberries, to the aquarium, the library, to visit her sister-in-law’s parrot, to coffee shops, to collect and polish rocks. She packed up his lunch, bundled him up warm, and they set off together, happy as clams.

And Clair and Rowan crafted. Oh, how they crafted. The very first week, Clair presented us with Rowan’s first piece of art, probably a finger painting or a crayoned drawing. We were thrilled — what parent wouldn’t be? We loved watching her nurture his creativity, loved that our son was getting an arts education instead of being parked in front of the television. We loved how much Clair loved creating stuff with our toddler. “He’s definitely very artistic,” she told us, presenting us with yet another collage.

But the truth of the matter is that Clair is the real artist. If something, anything, can be repurposed as an art supply, Clair will use it in her work. She and Rowan press fall leaves between sheets of wax paper, glue pinecones onto old take-out containers, cover empty bottles with layers of papier-mâché and pipe cleaners, create books, paint rocks, collect feathers and buttons, create elaborate paintings and collages and mobiles and dioramas.

And when she’s not with Rowan, Clair is painting, carving intricate scenes out of tree bark, taking photographs, knitting. Recently, she handed me a bag full of children’s stories she’d written and illustrated a decade or so ago. She’s passionate about fossils and rocks and spends long chunks of her weekend hunting for interesting specimens that she can cut and polish — once, on our way out of town, we drove by her poking through the piles of rock at the side of the side of the highway.

In another life, Clair would have been a geologist, a painter, a writer, a full-time artist. In another life — one without seven siblings and not much money in a northern Ontario town. I don’t know how to reconcile my feelings about this, about my need and desire for quality childcare, my enormous happiness and relief that we have found such a creative and caring person to look after our kids, and the fact that we pay her (not enough, never enough, despite the fact that childcare is our single biggest household expense, bigger than food or the mortgage) to look after our kids so that we can pursue academic and artistic careers. Liberal white guilt has never been a particularly useful emotion, in my books, but I am at a loss when it comes to my feelings about our babysitter’s — what’s that word? — oh, yeah: potential.

In a much less profound way, I am occasionally also at a loss about what to do with all the art Clair creates with Rowan. We simply cannot house it all in our current quarters. I’ve hung some of our most treasured pieces with clothespins on long lines of twine in our basement. I use a lot of them as birthday cards. And then, I’ve taken to photographing the rest of the pieces and, well, throwing them in the garbage or the recycling bin. In editorial terms, it’s called, appropriately, “killing the babies.”

And then, a couple of weeks ago, at the end of Isaac’s first week with Clair, I was going through the a batch of paintings fresh out of the kids’ lunch bag when I came across Isaac's tiny fingerprints, floating across a white page, balloons held together by red ribbons:

It’s beginning again. The deluge is going to double. And I’m thrilled — and still a bit confused.

Wake-up call

2008-10-08T11:09:00.000-07:00

So, at 4:30 a.m., there was Isaac, awake, crying, my responsibility. I staggered into his room, where some nursing happened, a blanket was retrieved, and he thunked back down to sleep in that solid way that babies do.

And then his snooze button went off. Cue repeat performance from Rachel (minus the nursing) nine minutes later. And nine minutes after that, I went in again, armed with a sippy cup. Nine minutes after that, after some philosophical frippery from Rachel about “acceptance,” I hauled Isaac out of bed and took him downstairs for some breakfast. “Yup,” he said, as I stuck some cold oatmeal in the microwave and then topped it with yogurt and applesauce. I just stared at him, not unkindly.

At 6 a.m., I took a fed, dry-bottomed baby back upstairs, handed him his blanket, and lay him down in his crib, where he promptly went to sleep. Not a nanosecond after my head hit my own pillow did Rhys wake up.

Next morning: same thing, except Rachel’s turn to get up. “But it’s too early,” she moaned from under the covers. I practically bit my lip to refrain from saying anything at all about acceptance, and after a long moment she hauled herself out of bed and went to get the baby.

We can speculate as to why — the cold that turned into an ear infection? Teething? A growth spurt? Possession by Satan? — but we’ll never know exactly what provoked Isaac into this spate of doggedly early mornings. All I can say is that by Saturday morning, after two weeks of this pattern and three days of solo parenting (and telling my wailing 16-month-old, in the wee hours of Friday morning, to do something that rhymes with “duck off”) I decided that enough was enough. He did not need to be awake that early, and he certainly was not benefiting from my deteriorating version of early-morning parenting. The kid woke up at 4:32 and proceeded to cry for precisely a full hour (seriously, he stopped at 5:32) before conking out until 8 a.m. Rhys crawled into bed with me at 6:21, and we cuddled and then got up and had breakfast and played in the basement until I heard the baby, happy as a clam, laughing in his bed. And then we went to the farmers’ market and then — yay! — to the airport to pick up Rachel.

The following morning, same thing.

The morning after that, he slept until a perfectly reasonable if slightly unpleasant 6:04. That was Monday. Yesterday, 6:21.

Today? 5 a.m. I sucked it up and we spent a perfectly lovely couple of hours playing together, him retrieving balls in the basement and playing patty-cake in my lap while I read the Sunday New York Times. “Are you my cuddly boy?” I whispered to him, not expecting an answer, as he put his arms around my neck and buried his face in my shoulder. “Yup,” he whispered back.

Tonight? I’m sleeping in the basement.

You can take the (apparently perimenopausal) girl out of Toronto ...

2008-10-06T07:33:00.000-07:00

You take your chances at the Safeway checkout in Thunder Bay. Today, I got Donna Mae and a whole lotta conversation.

“So,” she said, swiping through my six litres of yogurt, “I was reading this book last night? On the menopause? And how you have to eat for it?”

“Uh huh.” I smile and nod.

“It’s like you can’t eat anything!” she continues. “I’m reading this and thinking, ‘What can you eat? Nothing!’ You want your milk in a bag?”

“Oh, no thanks,” I say.

“And calcium. Calcium is very important. I mean, I drink a big glass of milk every day, but some of the food you eat has cheese in it and that, too.”

Nod and smile.

“You’re supposed to take a multivitamin every day,” she tells me. “ But I don’t do that. I just figure you should get your vitamins from what you eat, right? If you eat good?”

“Uh huh.” Nod and smile. Four years after moving to this town, I am no longer surprised by the friendliness of the cashiers, their propensity to comment on the food you buy. “Leeks?” the woman behind the checkout counter will say to me. “What do you use them in, anyway? I’ve never tried them.” Or, “That’s a lot of apples! You making pie?” One time, a cashier told the woman in front of me, who was reading People in line, “Excuse me, Miss, this isn’t a library.” I looked up, horrified and slightly thrilled, at this unprecedented display of unfriendliness, and both women burst into laughter. Turns out they were friends.

“And nuts!” says Donna Mae, shoving a case of soda water back underneath my cart. “You’re supposed to eat a lot of nuts. But” — and here she pauses to take my credit card — “how much is a lot of nuts? A handful? And nuts have a lot of fat in them. So, I don’t know. You know?”

I love a lot of things about living here. And there are a lot of things I don’t miss (amidst the lot of things I really miss) about Toronto. But I’m still not quite resigned to the Thunder Bay supermarket checkout confessional. I just want to buy my yogurt and my milk and my leeks and my apples and get the hell out of there with a little Toronto surliness to let me know I’m still alive. Is that so wrong?