Maybe the past four years haven't taken the toll I thought ...

A woman knocked at the door the other day, and when I answered she looked at me and said, “Is your mom or dad home?”

There be hormones

Rachel and I watched a movie, Children of Men, a couple of nights ago. It’s a post-apocalyptic, dystopian (is that redundant?) flick set about 20 years into the future. In that world, for reasons no one can fathom, no child has been born for the past 18 years. Until, that is, we happen across Ki, a young woman who is miraculously pregnant. Clive Owen’s character, Theo, is charged with her safety — and, eventually, that of her newborn daughter (whom, of course, he delivers) — against the hordes of evil plotters out to claim Mary and Jesus Ki and baby for their nefarious purposes.

So, the baby is born. The baby is sheltered from gunfire and car crashes and collapsing buildings and the entire British army. Mom and baby finally escape to the forces of good when Theo secures a dinky lifeboat and rows them out to sea to meet some mythical organization called The Human Project. This all takes up about the last 30 minutes of the movie.

During pretty much that entire 30 minutes, the newborn baby cries. Cries in that mewly, urgent, newborn way that newborns do when they are, oh, hungry. She cries and cries and cries, and Ki, the mom, never, ever feeds her. When they're in the rowboat, finally safe, when I'm thinking I can finally relax, Theo suggests to Ki that she might want to pat the baby’s back.

I don't know about the experience of non-breastfeeding folks watching the movie, but for me this was torture. There’s no way to put this delicately: my nipples were going crazy. “Feed her," I hissed at the screen several times: “Feed her.” Finally I told Rachel, “I can't stand it any more. If she doesn't feed that baby soon, I'm going to rip it out of the screen and do it for her.”

Were there no mothers on the film crew that day? Did it occur to anybody in the continuity department that the entire human race depended on this baby’s survival? Have I inadvertently stumbled across a new school of film criticism?

Eggs

Rowan, as he often does, climbed into bed with me this morning to cuddle. We lay there quietly for a while, me dozing, him singing songs and chatting to himself under his breath (“Clair is my BABYsitter. Clair is my babySITTER. Clair is MY babysitter…”) as he tossed and turned and generally wound his body over and around me and the bed. We did that for about twenty minutes, until he finally turned to face me. He gazed deep into my eyes, took my face gently between his two little hands, regarded me solemnly for a minute or two, and whispered, “What I have in my lunch today?”

In which sleep “training” takes on a different meaning

Continuing along with my current theme of “bribery,” we seem to have hit upon a solution to Rowan’s night fears. Remember those monsters? The ones that were waking him up at night? So that he woke us up at night — four, five, six times? So that we were so strange with fatigue it felt like we had a newborn in the house again?

What do you do about monsters? I asked. What you do about a three-and-a-half-year-old boy who wakes up frightened in the night and wants his Mommies?

The answer: give him a really good incentive to stay in bed. This occurred to me suddenly on Saturday evening as I lay, dazed, on Rowan’s bed as he jumped onto it from his dresser and back. We had to make staying in bed more attractive than getting out of it, even in the face of monsters.

I racked my brains for that kind of incentive and came up with the jackpot: James. As in James the red train. James of the pack of Really Useful Engines of the Island of Sodor. As in James the toy character who was recalled last year because he was covered in lead paint. Which is why he has been sorely missing from Rowan’s ever-expanding portfolio of Thomas trains.

But now, James is back in production. And, I figured, he just might be Really Useful in this situation.

I ran the idea past Rowan: if you can stay in your bed for five nights — and not wake up Mommies — then James will come to your house. He stopped jumping. A slow smile spread across his face. “Okay,” he said.

We went downstairs to get paper and crayons, and I put my considerable artistic skill to work, copying a picture of James from one of Rowan’s books, and, underneath, drawing pictures of Rowan, Isaac, and Mommies all asleep in our beds. Smiling. We taped the drawing to the wall above Rowan’s bed. And then I drew the numbers one to five above James.

And crossed my fingers. I had no idea whether this would work, whether he had actually grasped the whole concept. We talked about it a lot — how everyone needs to sleep, how Mommies get tired when he wakes us multiple times, things he could do (cuddling his stuffed animals, telling the monsters to go away) to make himself feel better if he woke up at night. But I was skeptical: did he really get it? Even if he did, would he be able to stop himself from coming to get us when he woke up?

That night, we heard him whimpering in his sleep at about 10 p.m., but he quieted on his own. He got out of bed just once, at 4 a.m. — not perfect, but a marked improvement.

Next night, same thing.

Night number 3? He slept through. At 7:30, he called from the top of the stairs “Mom! It was three nights I slept in my bed!”

Same with nights 4 and 5. And this morning, James was waiting for Rowan at the breakfast table. And Rowan was thrilled. And so were we. (In a tiny bit of cosmic coincidence, Isaac — uncharacteristically — slept through as well last night. Yee-ha!)

I know I’ve been talking a bit about bribery in these posts, but in all seriousness, this one strikes me as a bit different. It’s the first time I’ve seen Rowan figure out and work toward a long-term goal. It’s the first time I’ve seen him really empathize with us and change his behaviour accordingly: “I won’t wake you up. I’ll let you sleep.” If a twenty-dollar (unleaded) toy train buys us a good night’s sleep, it’s worth it to me.

People can debate forever the merits and drawbacks of rewarding kids with material things. Used judiciously, I think it’s a fine parenting strategy. In any case, if you want to see some poor parenting strategies, why don’t you just come on over to our house after we haven’t slept for five nights straight? Cuz we’re marvels of parenting then. All aboard!

There be dragons

So, apparently, Rowan got his hands on a stray copy of The Little Kids’ Guide to Archetypal Behaviours and flipped to the section on night terrors. “Ah, monsters,” he must have said, running his finger down the list of chapter headings. “Time to be scared of monsters.”

And so it began. Four nights in a row now, Rowan has woken up multiple times. On Tuesday, I lost count after six times (not including the time when his crying woke Isaac as well). Sometimes, he whimpers and cries out in his sleep; when we go in to check on him, he tosses and turns, sits up and lies down repeatedly, mutters things like, “It’s not my turn,” or “Why are you chasing me?” Other times, he wakes fully, gets out of bed, and pounds on his bedroom door for one of us. “Mommy! A monster blew down my bed!”

We rub his back, tuck him in, go back to bed, and then repeat the entire scenario anywhere from ten minutes to two hours later. Finally, last night at 2 a.m., Rachel said, “I’m sleeping with him. I can’t take it any more.” And that seemed to do the trick.

“You’re having such a hard time sleeping,” I said to him this morning. “What’s wrong?”

“Someping … yes, someping is wrong,” he said, tiny and matter-of-fact in his stripey pyjamas. “I am scared of someping.”

“What are you scared of?”

“I am scared of monsters,” he said.

Monsters. Specifically a monster that shoots fire at him.

“Sounds a lot like a dragon,” I commented.

He nodded. “Yes, a dragon.”

So, what do you do with monsters? There’s no point, I think, in telling him they don’t exist, that the nearest thing in this house to monsters are the zombies that Rachel and I have become after four nights of pretty much no sleep. The monsters aren’t real, but the fear is. And how do you engage with the fear without simultaneously reinforcing the monsters? We’re working on it.

“Are you scared of the monsters?” he asks.

“No,” I’ve been telling him. “I’m not scared of monsters. I have you and This Mom and Isaac to keep me feeling safe.”

In the meantime, I’m so tired that when I tried to write something today, the words on the page sparkled and shimmered like fireworks. Add to this Isaac teething and Rachel coming down with some kind of stomach bug. Our proposed solution, makeshift though it is, is that Rachel will sleep with Rowan until we have enough energy to think about it more clearly or until he grows out of it. Which do you think will happen first?

Baby blues

Rowan is wandering around the house, quietly singing to himself, “Nobody knows the troubles I've seen ...”

After the rain

After the rain come the worms, languishing on the sidewalks and driveways, longing for the grass, for the soil, before they are baked by the sun into coiled fossils of themselves. All that aerating potential, all those casings, squandered.

But for Rowan.

Rowan, for whom the three-block walk to the babysitter’s this morning was a worm-rescue mission, the stretches of concrete filled with new potential for good works.

“Oh! A worm!” he’d say every 15 feet or so, dropping the Thomas and Percy trains he held, one in each hand, in order to stoop down to pick up the latest candidate for salvation. “There you go,” he’d say to each one, dropping it onto a lawn. “You’ll be okay.” Then he’d look up at me: “I think that worm needs to go to bed,” he’d say. “I think so,” I’d reply.

Sometimes, often, even, I find the inevitable distractions of the walk — the sewer grates, the snow banks, the endless sticks to pick up and discuss — mildly irritating. I should tattoo, “The journey, not the destination,” on the back of my hand, but not today. Today, I am all for the worms, all for Rowan's nurturing of them, the way they coil in surprise at his touch as he gently picks them up, even for the way he also manages to tread, oblivious, over others in his new white sneakers with the Velcro fasteners.

We talk about the worms, and I try to explain why they are good, why they are important to the plants and the soil. “And what else?” Rowan asks, after each of my sentences. And I tell him something else. The word “compost” is used. Bliss.

He scans the sidewalk ahead of him for more worms, the wind whipping about our heads, the sky grey and unsure. Looks up at me again:

“It’s a nice wormy day, isn’t it?”

It is.

This morning, I bribed Rowan with chocolate to get him to wear corduroy pants

Was that wrong?

It’s just that I am so very, very tired of the fleece sweatpants. The never-ending rotation of red, green-with-orange-piping, and black. The floods. The boy has a drawer full of jeans and cords, but he is passionately attached to the fleece sweatpants. Each morning, I offer up a different pair, and each morning I am cheerfully rebuffed. “No,” says Rowan, “I just think I’ll wear my red pants today.”

What is one supposed to do in the face of that kind of resolution? Bribe with chocolate, of course.

Actually, I prefer think of it as a reward rather than a bribe. As my friend Michael, the child psychologist, says, a bribe is giving chocolate before the pants are on; a reward is given after. In fact, I went one step further: I gave Rowan half the chocolate right after he put on the corduroys, and promised him the other half at the end of the day — assuming he kept the pants on all day. “Okay,” he said. “But if they get wet, I take them off.” Fair enough.

In our house, we have fingernail gelt, a little-known Jewish tradition that has its roots in the traditional giving of chocolate gelt — those gold-foil-wrapped chocolate coins, for the uninitiated — at Chanukah. Fingernail gelt is given not after the menorah is lit, but rather after all ten of the grimy, scratchy, blackened fingernails on my three-year-old’s hands are clipped off.

We also have leaving-the-library gelt.

And now we have pants gelt, too. I’m sure parenting experts the world over are sighing disgustedly at my tactics, muttering things like “slippery slope” under their breaths, but I don’t care. My boy is wearing cords. My boy is wearing cords.

A drop in the bucket

Milestones are popping up around here like gophers these days: Isaac claps his hands! Rowan got his first barbershop haircut! (I wasn’t sure that would fly but apparently he got to watch Go, Diego Go while sitting in the special kids’ chair, and now he has oddly perfect little bangs. Much better than my last attempt in the bathtub, which nearly took out an eye, prompting said visit to the barber.) Isaac says “Mama”! Rowan went to the dentist — no cavities! Isaac uses a sippy cup! We’re even getting some sleep: after fits and starts and the latest round of illnesses, both boys are — more or less, all being well, ptuh, ptuh! — sleeping through the night.

(Pause for a moment while we consider the gravity of that last statement. It’s been two nights now. First, Isaac finally started sleeping through, just in time for a Rowan to get a cough and begin waking up multiple times. Rachel and I ended up trading off nights on the couch so that one of us could sleep while the other settled Rowan without — and this was the kicker — climbing into bed with him. Just as Rowan was starting to improve, Isaac got the cough, plus another tooth, and began waking up again. And so it went. Of course, just as they both began to sleep again, I got the stomach flu. But I digress.)

And Rowan has stopped drooling.

For upwards of three years, Rowan has drooled. For a long time, it was age appropriate. Then it was mostly kind of gross, in that benignly gross way that little kids just are, with all their various leaky bits needing constant wiping up and mopping off. There he’d be, talking away exuberantly, a steady stream of saliva dripping off his bottom lip. Or engrossed in a story, the drip drip drip of the leaky faucet of his mouth soaking the front of his shirt. Did other three-year-olds still drool constantly? Somehow, I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask around.

How do you teach your child to stop drooling? I took a page from the “Tell them what they can do, and not what they can’t” book of parenting, and got on him, trying to catch him just as the drop began to form on his lower lip: “Rowan, swallow your spit. Swallow your spit.” He got the hang of it fairly quickly, managing about half the time to catch the saliva before it dropped. This went on for a few weeks.

And then, all of a sudden, I noticed the absence of drool. Like the absence of the background noise of a dripping tap. In the way he seems to do so many new things — slow lead-up, seemingly sudden mastery — he got it. One more thing — check. Done. A million more to go.

Don’t get me wrong — the sleep thing is big. I wouldn’t trade a good night’s sleep for Rowan's dry shirt front any day. But then again, I don’t have to, do I?

Mama Non Grata

This is an oldie but a goodie — I had to take it down temporarily, so am now re-posting.

In December, I took a business trip. And when I came back, Rowan liked Rachel better than he liked me.

At first, I enjoyed the shift. As the birth- and breast-feeding mom, I’d had 25 months of milky baby love, toddler devotion. When Rowan was hurt, he wanted me. When he was sleepy, he wanted me. He brought me his toys and books. He climbed into on my lap while we sat at the table, and held onto my leg when he wasn’t sure about a new situation. As for Rachel, well, she was great, too, but, she just wasn’t me.

But now, I could sit quietly and read the newspaper on a Saturday morning while Rowan insisted that Rachel read stacks of books to him, that Rachel play trains, that Rachel change his diaper, carry him upstairs, bathe him, put him to bed. “Night night!” he’d say cheerily, literally pushing me away and turning to Rachel. I could eat my dinner in peace without a two-year-old climbing into my lap or trying to pull me out of my chair — “Mommy get up!” I could wander around by myself at the weekly farmer’s market, sampling Gouda and local elk sausage, without hefting around 35 pounds of clingy toddler. I was freer than I had been in two years, and I welcomed the space.

Becoming second-best also meant that I had the profound pleasure of watching Rachel and Rowan together, the two of them cuddling on the couch, rolling out Play-Doh at the dining room table, snuggled up reading stories in bed. I was used to only fleeting glimpses of these tableaux, spoiled by my entering the room, drawing Rowan to me like baby moth to Mama flame, leaving Rachel in the shadows. Their beauty was, and is, astonishing, and I savoured it.

Ironically — or not — it was around this time that Rowan's names for us finally solidified. Unlike many of the other lesbian parents we knew, we had never sorted out whether one of us would be “Mama” and the other “Mommy.” We never made up cute nicknames for ourselves, like “Mama S” and “Mommy R.” Some women we knew had opted for cultural or linguistic variations on the word “mother,” like the Hebrew “Imah” or the Spanish “Mami,” but none of those felt right. We didn’t worry about it. Instead, we figured that Rowan would come up with his own names for his moms. “Kids are smart,” we said. “He’ll figure it out.”

And he did. After hearing his whole life us saying versions of, “This mommy is cooking — ask other mommy to put your shoes on,” or, “This mommy will read you one more book, and then your other mommy will take you upstairs for bed,” he now calls us — quite sensibly — “This Mommy” and “Other Mommy.”

Guess who’s Other Mommy?

At least, mercifully, he eventually shortened it to “Uh-Mommy,” or “Uh-mum,” which actually sounds quite sweet — if you don’t know what it means.

But I know what it means. And while being Mama non Grata has its perks, especially now that I am 37 weeks pregnant with baby number two and can use all the breaks I can get, little stings quite as much as my crying toddler pushing me away because he wants his This Mommy. Suddenly, I’m on the outside, the fifth wheel at the playdate.

I know: it’s what Rachel put up with for two years with barely a complaint. I know it’s what she’ll put up with again, in all likelihood, with the second one. I know I’ll have my hands full what with nursing and sleep deprivation and the like, and that when this new baby arrives it will be even more important for Rowan to have a healthy attachment to his other parent. And I know that it’s all just a phase — Rowan has already shifted to a more neutral ground, and he will shift again and again.

But I guess, somehow, I never really imagined that this “phase” would last more than a few days, or that Rowan would ever really reject me, for Rachel or anyone else. Even when it’s tiring, and overwhelming, there’s something immensely gratifying about being the centre of a child’s life. I was ready for a break, but I wasn’t ready to give up that privilege in its entirety.

It was bound to happen eventually, I keep telling myself. And it will only, properly, continue. But for now I am revelling in every walk where Rowan holds my hand, every morning-time cuddle, my nights to sing him to sleep. Maybe the fact that it’s not a sure thing is what makes his pure affection that much sweeter.