Ooh child

I ran into an acquaintance at the farmer’s market on Saturday, a woman I hadn’t seen for a few months, a mother of three. I was holding Isaac, and she commented on how big he was getting. I told her that his first birthday was last Monday. And she asked me a question:

“Is it getting any easier?”

It was such an odd — such an oddly astute — question that it took me aback for a moment. I tried to remember the last time we’d spoken. Was I in one of those sleepless, near-hysterical phases? Were Rachel and I chasing Rowan around the market while Isaac screamed? “Were things not easy last time we talked?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “it’s just that....” and she let the sentence trail off as she glanced over at her partner and their three daughters, the youngest of whom is 18 months old. “... you know. It gets easier.”

She’s right. It is getting easier. I mean, I look back to the blog entries of a year or so ago and they are exhausted. Not tired, but exhausted. They are walking around the basement for hours with six-week-old Isaac in a sling. They are up all through the night. They wonder when they will be able to leave the house without feeling anxious. They don’t leave me or Rachel alone for very long with the baby, let alone both children. Their house is a disaster and they don’t know what’s for dinner.

Okay, that last one is still true, but for the most part things have settled down considerably. I mean, we’re still busy. We are often tired, often frazzled, often longing for more time to ourselves, less chaos. But things are getting easier. Today, right now, for example, I am in the house, in my office, alone — alone! — and I will be until today at about 4:15 p.m., when we will collect both Rowan and Isaac from their phenomenal babysitter.

I get to spend days alone.

Writing.

About them. But I digress.

No matter that large chunks of those days are also spent doing laundry and tidying the kitchen (such is the life of someone who works from home and who procrastinates by puttering — and has children, though I suspect that’s true of people who don't have children as well). I get to do the laundry and the tidying all by myself.

Isaac, yes, has joined his big brother at the babysitter’s two days a week. He loves it. We love it. In the fall, we’ll bump it up to three days, and Rowan will start junior kindergarten two days a week. Isaac climbs the stairs by himself. Rhys’s grandfather buys him his first two-wheeler (with training wheels) and he takes off down the street. Rachel and I know what it feels like to leave the house of an evening — together — and not worry or feel the need to rush home after an hour. Individual moments, hours, days — those really long weekends — can be challenging, frustrating, difficult even, but overall it’s getting easier.

Which is why, in part, there will be no third child. I just can’t see myself giving up any of this newfound “easier.” I don’t want to be trapped in the basement or up all night with an infant again, pulled in three different directions, none my own choosing.

I’m not ambivalent about being done. I know what I want. But a part of me wishes I felt differently. A part of me wants to be like the heroine of Alice McDermott’s short story, “Enough,” who wants more, more, more of everything — another bowl of ice cream, another baby on her hip, just one more dance into the wee hours.

But I’m not like her (and, I keep reminding myself, she is a work of fiction).

I remember dancing with Rachel and a months-old Theo to Molly Johnson’s “Ooh child/Redemption Song,” singing along to her promise that, “things are gonna get easier.” And they are. I love my boys. I want them. but I also want time for me. So for me, for us, two is enough.

Square eyes

I once read that, when you don’t have cable, a vacation is going anywhere that does. Certainly, that’s the way Rowan must have seen our trip to British Columbia. Ask him what he did, and instead of talking about — among other things — puddle-jumping through old-growth forests, visiting an animal-rescue centre, digging in the sand at Jericho Beach, seeing his two great-grandmothers (as well as two grandmothers and a grandfather), or navigating the kids’ market and model train museum at Granville Market, he will tell you he ate ice cream and watched TV.

For this, we flew on two airplanes across three time zones and got up at 4:30 a.m. each day with Isaac, who never adjusted to the time.

But then again, this is the same child who told me that his favourite thing about yesterday morning’s brunch at a diner with his beloved godmothers, Judy and Jill, was getting his toenails cut before we left the house.

And it’s not just Rowan. Jill says that she used to bust her ass thinking of fun things to do —mini golf! tubing down the river! hikes! swimming! — when her nephew used to visit them each summer, and then when he spoke to his parents on the phone to tell them how he was doing, all he would say was, “Yeah, we had pizza for dinner.”

But I digress from the boob tube. Each morning, Rowan woke up, bounced out of bed, and asked, “Can I watch TV?” Each morning, we debated the pros and cons of letting him watch the idiot box. The pros: he was quiet and happy, and stayed occupied and out of trouble while we got ready each day.

The cons? Well, first, Rowan began talking like Max from the world’s most annoying kids’ television show, Max and Ruby (or Ruby and Max, I forget which way it goes), in which Max, the younger of two rabbit siblings seemingly abandoned by their parents, monosyllabically torments his well-meaning but condescending and prissy older sister, Ruby. For a week now, Rowan has reverted from full sentences to one-word utterances: “Cookie!” “ Rabbit!” “Poop!” “TV!”

Second is I can’t get the theme song from Wonder Pets of my head. For weeks, I have been tormented by Winnie the guinea pig announcing, rock-opera-style, in my head: “The phone! The phone is ringing! There’s an animal in trouble somewhere!”

But the biggest drawback to letting Rowan watch TV — staying out of all the sanctimonious arguments as to whether television is good or bad for children — was that any time the set wasn’t on, he whined and wheedled for more. He was relentless in the way only a three-and-a-half-year-old television addict can be: “TV now? Now can I watch TV? Can I now? Why not? Now?” He quickly figured out the remote as well as the buttons directly on the machine. We finally resorted to unplugging it, and weathering the storm of tears and wailing that followed.

More than anything else about coming home — besides not getting up at 4:30 — I am grateful that we don’t have cable here. Because if we had to fight with Rowan each day over whether he could watch TV, we’d lose, going crazy in the meantime. (And, Rachel adds, we’d get divorced.)

I realize that our lack of cable makes me just more fodder for Stuff White People Like, but I’m okay with that. Before we had children, we had Rachel’s grandfather’s old TV, but no cable, on which, geek that I am, I faithfully watched Jeopardy! at 7:30 each evening. Then we moved to an apartment with free (read: stolen) cable, and our lives turned into one big Law and Order 24-hour marathon. When that gravy train ended, via a handy landlord-tenant dispute, we discovered that, after the shakes had subsided, we rather enjoyed each other’s company. Which was a good thing, since we couldn’t afford cable anyway. Plus, we were awfully pale and Rachel had to finish her dissertation. When we moved again, it took us the better part of the year to realize that the cable was still hooked up. Mercifully, the company pulled the plug shortly thereafter.

And that’s how it stayed. Now, we watch the occasional movie or television show on DVD on one of our computers. We’ll sit side-by-side on the couch, sharing a set of earphones, a laptop balanced on someone’s lap. It’s sort of pathetic, but it’s sweet. I’m not sure what we would do — aside from fighting with Rowan — if we had cable, anyway, given that life around here seems to be a constant flurry of activity from dawn ‘til dusk. Who has time?

My friend Shannon tells me that her childhood television exploded during a particularly rowdy segment, featuring Animal, of The Muppet Show. Apparently the set went off in a shower of sparks and for a few seconds she and her brother weren’t quite sure whether it was the message or the medium. They probably still aren’t. Her mother came into the room, assessed the damage, and said, “Well, that’s that.” And they never got another television. And they turned out just fine — and so will Rowan.

A thousand words

This post originally appeared in the Globe & Mail's “Facts and Arguments” column on May 30, 2008.

About five years ago, I decided to organize the thousand or so baby pictures that my parents took of me and my older brother in the early 1970s and then tossed into a huge cardboard box in the basement.

Of those thousand baby pictures, approximately 850 were of my brother, and the rest were of me. Or, of me and him.

Of course, the injustice of the situation was not lost on me, especially given the fact that I was newly pregnant with my first child and full of resolutions about how I would raise that baby and its subsequent siblings, assuming they ever arrived.

The injustice of the situation was also heightened by the fact that my parents devoted so much film — remember film? — to their firstborn despite the fact that he was not, shall we say, the most beautiful of babies. He did grow into a beautiful toddler, and is today a very good-looking man. But to this day, at least one close family friend still likes to torment him by telling him what an ugly baby he was. It is abundantly clear, however, from the number of photographs that my parents took — and the glowy way they look at him when they are present with him in those photographs — that they thought otherwise. “We just thought you were beautiful,” my mother used to tell him in the face of such cruelty. “We didn’t know what they were talking about.”

I vowed that I would not perpetuate this injustice with my own children. And by that, I mean I vowed that I would not deprive my second child of his or her fair share of photographs. There would be parity. No one would feel left out.

And now, if you look through the archives of my computer, you will find a couple zillion baby photos of, Rowan, and perhaps a million or so photos of, Isaac.

To make matters worse, when Rowan was a baby, we booked time with a photographer and had a series of slick, black-and-white photos taken and framed. We have yet to do the same now that Isaac has joined us.

I’m not quite sure how this happened. I mean, I try to take photos of Isaac, lots of them. I really do. And not simply because that would be the fair thing to do. I try to take photos of him because, simply put, I am madly, soppily, sloppily, heartbreakingly in love with Isaac. Isaac is, at 11 months, a perfect little ripe plum of a sweet baby, just on the verge of falling into what I am sure will be equally adorable toddlerhood. It’s not that I don’t gaze at him a hundred times a day and ache at his beauty, long to record and preserve each moment of his gorgeous, smiley, bow-legged, thumbsucky, crawly, screechy, hand-clapping, babbling little self.

It’s just that there’s this three-year-old around now. It was easy to take thousands of pictures of Rowan when he was the only, non-mobile child in the house. But now, leaving the room to grab the camera — let alone finding the camera amidst the toys and sippy cups and the like — is just more complicated. Plus, if I do get out the camera around Rowan, I have to fend him off because he inevitably wants to take pictures of the floor or his thumb or our legs.

Hence the disproportionate number of photos of my big brother, and the disproportionate number of photos of (and blogs about) Theo’s big brother. It’s not about more love, even if that is what my brother told me when we were children. It’s about time, and energy. And the fact that Rowan, at the moment, tends to take up more space. And that he’s just been around longer. And, possibly, realizing that no amount of photography will keep Isaac from inching out of babyhood into something else, so maybe I had better just soak him up a bit more instead of searching for the camera.

But what will Isaac make of all this? Hopefully, by the time my sons are old enough to notice such things, there will be slick black-and-white portraits of both of them on the walls. Maybe, we’ll achieve some form of photographic parity — and maybe we won’t. Maybe Isaac won’t even care. If he does, however, maybe I can show him this entry. Or, maybe, he’ll just have to wait until he has children — if he has children — of his own. When he does — if he does — I know this much: they will be gorgeous.

As I sorted through all the baby photos at my parents’ house all those years ago, my mother began to sift through the pictures. She shuffled through the 90 dozen or so photos of her firstborn as an infant and then looked at me, genuinely surprised, and said, “You know, now I can see it. He wasn’t very good-looking, was he?”

She paused for a moment, looked down at the photo in her hand, and shook her head. “But we still thought he was beautiful.”

Just when I thought I had nothing to say...

... Rowan, thankfully, obliged me by throwing a monster tantrum in Robin’s Donuts. We went, as is the custom, before his Kindermusik class at 5:15. He picks out a doughnut, eats the frosting and some of the other slightly healthier fare we bring along, we go for a pee in the only slightly disgusting washroom, and then we walk across the strip-mall parking lot to music class. It’s a beautiful ritual.

Today, things started well enough, except that the woman behind the counter gave Rowan the vanilla rainbow-sprinkled doughnut at the end of the row, and he wanted the one in the middle. I managed to distract him long enough to get us seated at our usual table, and placed the offending pastry in front of him. “I don’t want this one,” he said, sinking his teeth into the frosting. And I thought he was done. He nibbled at the rainbow sprinkles for a while, ate some goldfish crackers and a dried apricot, and then remembered that he was not done.

“Not this one,” he said, poking at the hunk of fried dough in front of him. “I want the other one.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” I said, completely irrationally. “That’s the doughnut we have.”

We repeated this exchange a couple more times with only slight variations, until he swept the doughnut off the table with the back of his hand, and it flew about ten feet in the air and landed on the floor near the display case. Then, to really drive home his point, he ran over to his vanilla rainbow special and kicked it several times before falling onto his knees, sobbing, in front of it, and shredding it with his hands. “What’s he doing?” a little girl at the next table kept asking her mom.

I came over, picked up him and the doughnut, and carried both over to the garbage can, into which I managed to drop the latter.

“I want my doughnut!” shrieked my son. “I need a new doughnut! I need a new one! Huhhhh-huuunh-huunnnh-huuuu-uh-uh-uh!” (“What’s he doing?”)

I held him and nodded and shushed him as he sobbed and snuffled and railed against my chest (“What’s he doing?”), smiled and rolled my eyes at the other patrons, and gathered up our stuff. No visit to the washroom. Never even made it into the Kindermusik lobby, although Rowan did make a spectacular welcoming committee as he sat sobbing in my arms on the stairwell as his various classmates filed past him. (“The exact same thing just happened at our house,” one of the mothers whispered conspiratorially as she guided her daughter down the stairs.)

And then we drove home, Rowan shuddering and eating goldfish crackers in the back seat.

“Mom?” he said, and I steeled myself for another round of doughnut talk. “Mom? Patrick,” — the little boy with whom he shares a babysitter, with whom he’s spent almost every weekday for the past two years and whose dad just got a new job — “Patric is moving to a different city and I don’t want to miss him.”

Poor guy.

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 ...”