It's the most wonderful time of the year

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.

He likes horses, does he?

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.

In honour of International Hug a Jew Day

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.

One crucial step away from that visit from the CAS

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.

Brown-bagging it

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.

Book club

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.

Stuffy

“Mama?” Rowan asks as we cuddle in his bed on Friday night. It is a time for Big Questions. “Mama, do we ever go over to Mrs. S’s” — and here he names his junior kindergarten teacher — “house, and ... break all her stuff?”

The look on his face is a mixture of curiosity and horror, as, I’m sure, is the look on mine. What?

“No,” I say. “We would never go over to Mrs. S’s house and break all her stuff.”

As I’m saying the words — and, also, trying not to laugh at the sudden image of me and Rowan arriving unbidden at Mrs. S’s house and ringing the doorbell: “Hi! We’re here to break all your stuff!” — it hits me, what must have happened: kids in the class destroying a toy or some such object, and the teacher saying, “Would you like it if I came over to your house and broke your things?”

I asked Rowan if that’s what happened, and he nods. “Some kids were breaking boxes. But not me.”

Mystery solved. A lesson in empathy, although it’s doubtful that it had the intended effect on Rowan, who has been mulling over a world in which people appear at your door to trash your place. Which is, I suppose, is what does happen to people as a regular occurrence in Iraq certain parts of the world, but Rowan doesn’t need to know this just yet. It’s bad enough that Isaac — nicknamed King Kong — lives to knock down towers of blocks and destroy intricate train tracks. To introduce the spectre of a roving band of JK teachers imposing vigilante justice on the stuff-breakers of the classroom is more than he can process just now.

Not that I am unconvinced that Rowan wouldn’t be capable, given the right conditions, of gleefully breaking plenty of other people’s stuff. Lately, we’ve been having lots of conversations about his body, the spaces it takes up and the ways in which it moves and how these can hurt other people and make them uncomfortable. He can clear toys off a surface with a swing of his arm, run into you full-blown to hug you and be surprised when you totter, insist that there is space for him to sit behind you on the couch or in your dining-room chair. He reaches for a dish on the table and knocks over his milk. He misjudges how much Isaac weighs as he tried to lift him, and lets go. He raises his voice to be heard over our requests, and then our reprimands. On Saturday, we played the Goldberg family classic game of “Grabber Machine” (which, if I described it here — and maybe I will, one day — would sound utterly creepy but is in fact entirely innocent and hysterically funny) and he accidentally butted me with his big, rock-hard head and left me with a fat lip. And then in an effort to make me feel better, he kissed it too hard and made it hurt more. “Slow down,” we keep saying. “Watch your body. Be gentle.”

I’m so intent on raising boys who grow into men who don’t take up too much space — who don’t impose their wide-legged bodies and their opinions and their activities and their conversations on the rest of the world without regard for other people’s “stuff” — that I’m hyper-aware sometimes of how much space Rowan can take up, how much is appropriate. I forget that empathy, the consideration of others, are learned skills, that he’s really still just a baby and utterly vulnerable. I reminded myself of that as I watched him sleep with his head on Rachel’s lap on the couch yesterday — a much-needed nap for an overtired junior kindergartener with a cold that seems to be settling into his chest. I would have taken a picture if I hadn’t been afraid of waking him up.

So, stuff. The breaking of other peoples’. We go through it, and I try to explain his teacher’s comment to him. And while we’re on the topic of mind-blowing revelations, I decide to tackle another one.

“Rowan,” I say, “you know that Mrs. S lives in a house, right? She doesn’t live at the school.”

“Her house is the school,” says Rowan.

“No,” I say, “she lives in a house away from the school. A house like our house. She lives with her family. She’s married. She has a partner. And she has kids.”

“She has lots of kids,” says Rowan.

“No,” I say. “Not the kids at school. Mrs. S has her own kids. Two boys. Like you and Isaac. ” And then I add, for emphasis: “She’s a mom.”

“She’s a mom?” Rowan is incredulous.

“Yes,” I say, “a mom. Like me.”

Jonesing for a nannycam

Last night Rachel dreamt that she and Rowan were boarding a plane together, only when she took her seat he was nowhere to be found. “I tried all kinds of things to stop the plane, but to no avail,” she says. “Last thing I remember we were heading for the runway and I was convinced Rowan was in the luggage compartment, or worse.”

Welcome to Rowan’s first day of junior kindergarten.

Things started auspiciously enough, when he wandered into our room at 7 a.m. and said, “Buenos dias! Good morning, Mamas!”

But then, once he realized that today was the first day of school, it kind of went downhill. He spent much of the morning in tears, trying to convince us not to send him. In the end, I carried all 40 pounds of him the four blocks to his school, him mostly wailing along the way. Neighbours drove by in their minivans and honked and waved and smiled mournfully at us. The playground monitor shook her head kindly but knowingly.

When we got to the classroom, he calmed down a bit, and began to explore. He even played for a while with another kid, every so often letting out a post-meltdown shudder. By the time the teacher got the boys and girls (my son has entered the realm of being addressed as “Boys and girls”) to sit down, cross-legged, on the circular carpet, he was red-eyed but mildly interested. I felt kind of bad for his lovely teacher, surrounded by a gaggle of innocent three- and four-year-olds — and then a wider circle of anxious, hovering, camera-toting parents. “Could you all sit down?” she asked us. “I’m feeling a bit intimidated.”

The kids went on a tour of the school, checking out their own private playground, the gym, the library, the computer room. Poor Rowan tried to grab the hand of a little girl as they walked, but she stuck her hand behind her back. I saw him smile as the teacher got all the JKs to run “as fast as you can!” to the end of the gym and back. He wandered all over the library by himself, and skipped back to the group. As we circled back to the classroom, he started looking for the locker with his name on it. And then they all sat down and read a story about a little raccoon’s first day of school. They practiced jumping up and down five times. And Rachel and I slipped out of the room quietly. And I tried to calm the tide of rising nausea in my stomach.

We came home to Isaac, jolly as could be, hanging out with über-babysitter Clair, who was just about to take him on a walk. Shortly after they left, the phone rang. I grabbed it. It was Clair, on her cell. She had walked to the school to see what intelligence she could gather, and had talked to a set of parents just leaving. “They said that Rowan was fine. His eyes were a little red, but he was playing with another kid.”

So Rowan is gonna be okay. He isn’t going to be his classmate Owen, who skipped into the room by himself, raised his hand, and proudly told the room that that was what you did when you wanted to talk while the teacher was talking. Owen, whose mom showed up halfway through the tour, carrying a coffee. “Yeah,” she said, “he came by himself on the bus this morning so I followed later on.”

But Rowan doesn’t have to be Owen. Rowan is Rowan, and he will be fine — good, great, wonderful, even — at school. And we get to go pick him up in two hours. Keep me company until then.