Mama has a brand-new blog

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 ...

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

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

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”

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

“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

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!

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

Dream big, kid

“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

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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

All hail Caesar

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?”

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

“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

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.