Cycle path

Maybe it was the German couple (him from the East, her from the West) Rowan and I met in the park a couple of weeks ago, cycling across Canada with their two-year-old daughter. They had two fully loaded bikes — front and back panniers, more gear neatly bungeed on top of racks, handlebar bags — and they were towing their toddler in a single Chariot carrier. With a child’s bike strapped to the top of it. They had started in from Vancouver, and, over the course of four months, made it through the Prairies and into Thunder Bay. Now, they were trying to decide whether to take the (very) non-scenic logging road up to Armstrong and catch the Via Rail train to Toronto, or risk the heavy traffic and narrow shoulders of the TransCanada on their bikes to catch the gorgeous views of Lake Superior.

I wish I had known to tell them to cycle Superior, cross the border at Sault Ste. Marie, and take the Amtrak to the Big Smoke. Whatever they decided, I hope they made it to Toronto in time to catch their flight home. They plan to return to Canada next summer and pick up where they left off, cycling to the easternmost point of Newfoundland.

I can barely tow Isaac and a diaper bag up a hill in our double Chariot without getting lightheaded.

But I digress.

Maybe it was the German couple (did I mention they spoke perfect English?) that sparked Rowan’s interest in his bike, the one my father bought for him in June and that has remained in the garage, mostly untouched, since then. But two weeks ago, he asked to get it out and cycle to our weekly brunch at Judy and Jill’s.

(Another digression: Did you know that, for the past year, Rowan and Isaac’s godmothers, Judy and Jill, have had us and our children over for brunch every Sunday morning? As in, just when we realize that the weekend is — depending on your perspective — already half over or only half over and Sunday stretches before us like this great yawning chasm of time in which to keep children happy and occupied, we are treated to coffee and muffins and eggs and back bacon and blueberries and two adults who dote on — and entertain — our children. It’s heavenly. Just in case you didn’t know that.)

So, the bike. If Rowan were cycling across Canada, he would take a lot longer than four months, because:

a) he can’t steer and would probably end up in either Montana or the Yukon
b) he tends to get off his bike every 10 feet or so to examine more closely a pothole or a rock or a tree
c) midway through each trip, he decides he’d rather walk, leaving me to push his bike along, the equivalent of leaving it somewhere in Saskatoon.

Still, we persist, because my theory is that, for Rowan (for anyone, really), any and all bike time is good. The more he pedals, the further he goes, the better he’ll get and the more he’ll enjoy cycling. So I walk along beside him, holding the handlebars gently and lifting my hands when he’ll let me (“Hold on, Mama! You need to hold on!”), urging him to LOOK WHERE YOU’RE GOING, adding to his forward momentum, and waiting as he pops off to explore again and again. “Ready to hop back on?” I’ll ask after a few moments. And sometimes he does, and we set off again.

For Rowan, cycling is so completely about the journey and not the destination that there’s no point in being anything but patient and accommodating. And besides, I’m loving it. I love watching my kid ride a bike, love walking or jogging beside him holding the handlebars, love letting go, love the idea that one day, we might ride our bikes together. I love how riding his bike seems to make Rowan more attentive to the outside world.

And I love being around to hear him say things like, “Mama, if you get me a basket for my bike, I can put flowers in it.”

One day ...

I will check my email one last time before shutting down, and something magical will have arrived.

Jonesing for a nannycam

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

Welcome to Rowan’s first day of junior kindergarten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Countdown

Rowan starts junior kindergarten tomorrow. We’re mostly ready. We’ve got the backpack, the lunch box, the indoor shoes, the haircut, the vaccinations. We’ve read library books with Rowan about the first day of school. We even made an appointment with the teacher to discuss the fact that Rowan Has Two Mommies (she was cool, had a kid with two dads last year). Weirder probably to her in Thunder Bay is the fact that he’s Jewish, but, no problem, more or less. “Oh,” she said, “I don’t do much for Christmas. Just the tree, and stories about Santa.” (I am now committed to showing up on major — and likely some minor — Jewish holidays with some activity for the kids.)

Rowan’s teacher also told us that the first thing she does is teach the kids how to line up. Which kind of seems terrible, as though the entire purpose of elementary school and beyond is about corralling unruly children and making them conform to society’s rules and expectations.

But — and perhaps I am exposing myself for the tyrannical parent that I am here — really, although we hate to admit it, doesn’t that make up a good chunk of the parenting we do at home? It’s just that we would never admit that it’s one of our primary activities — and, with only two instead of a dozen or two children to deal with, we don’t have to state our intentions as baldly.

Still, it’s those kinds of statements that get me fantasizing momentarily about just skipping the whole school thing — until I realize that I’m just not cut out for homeschooling. Which means I don’t want to. In any case, I know lots of homeschooled kids — and their parents seem to want them to know how to line up, take turns, speak politely to other people, and share, too.

So, we’re mostly ready. Except for how we’re not. In the last two days, two different parents on two different occasions have told us, “It’s a terrible day. A terrible, terrible day.” One of them paused for a moment. “Terrible.”

I have a sneaking suspicion they may be correct. Not because I’m paranoid (no, really), but because when we took Rowan to Winnipeg Beach Day Camp in July, he melted down in a fit of tears and screaming and kicking every single day when we left. And then, when we picked him up, he said over and over, “I don’t want to go to camp. I don’t like it when you leave me.”

With that in mind, we’ve been talking a lot about school. And, slowly, we’ve been hearing less about how Rowan doesn’t want to go, how he wants us to stay, and more about circle time and painting and toys and snack. So I’m hopeful, or slightly less unhopeful.

But I’m also prepared for all hell to break loose tomorrow.

And, not prepared at all.

The Closer

Rowan is finally up to date on all his vaccinations. He won’t need another needle for a good ten years. And this is a good thing, given his latest doctor’s appointment.

We’ve been reluctant but resigned passengers on the vaccination train — the result of a certain amount of neurotic over-education that kept us researching the ideal way to balance the risks and benefits of shooting up your kids with altered versions of serious illnesses.

On the one hand, we were suspicious of Big Pharma’s agenda to sell as many drugs as possible to doctors, parents, and governments, as well as unhappy about the idea of assaulting a six-week old baby’s immune system with four or five different strains of disease.

On the other hand, we weren’t happy about relying on other children’s immunity to protect our own kids. And in the absence of any convincing literature that suggested that vaccinations were inherently dangerous, we finally decided on a compromise: wait until at least a year, and/or until the kids were weaned or weaning, and do one vaccine at a time until done. It also helped that our vegan, home-schooling family doctor had vaccinated her kids. Although, apparently, our midwife hadn’t. To each her own, and we made our decision.

Since embarking on project immunity, we have spent a small fortune on Emla patches, in order to minimize the pain for our little hothouse flowers. Two Saturdays ago, we took the boys in for the latest round of sticks. Isaac had been napping during the Emla applications, so he was patch-free. I took him in, while Rachel and Rowan watched Thomas videos in the waiting room. He didn’t even flinch.

Then Rachel took Rowan, while Isaac and I waited outside. And waited. And waited. And waited. Just as I was beginning to wonder, Rachel emerged. “Your turn,” she said, taking Isaac from me.

I went in. Rowan sat on the examining table, a lipstick case in his right hand and his left palm planted firmly over his left thigh where the Emla patch had been. “I want lipstick but I don’t want a needle,” he told me. I looked at the doctor, eyebrows raised. “Well,” I began, “they’re not mutually exclusive...”

Apparently, Rowan had stated quite firmly but calmly that he was having no needle that day. They had discussed why he was getting a shot, that it wouldn’t hurt, but it would keep him from getting sick. “But I not sick,” he had said. Rachel had rooted through her handbag to find something to distract him, and had come up with lipstick (usually a winner). I tried to lift Rowan’s hand from his thigh but it wouldn’t budge. “He’s been pretty focused on not moving that hand,” said our doctor.

Finally, I climbed up on the table, and pulled him, facing me, onto my lap so that he was straddling me. “Close your eyes. Hide your face in my shoulder,” I told him. Then I pried his hand off his thigh, tucked the hand under my right armpit, held his head into my shoulder with my left hand and his left leg down with my right hand and our doctor gave him his needle. He didn’t feel a thing.

After

So I picked up Rowan from his babysitter on Tuesday, quietly buckled him in to the car, and casually started driving in the opposite direction than we usually go.

“Hey!” said Rowan. “Where are we going? Are we going to the barber?”

“Why, yes,” I said. And then, before he could say anything else, I added, “And then we’re going to the ice cream store!”

Still, he protested. But he got out of the car, helped me put money in the meter, and walked into Sam the Barber’s shop — the real deal, a one-room, one-chair establishment complete with stripey pole outside and a wood stove to keep warm in the winter. The chair is so old that it has an ashtray built into it. Things are held together with duct tape. Sam is a nice old Italian man with infinite patience. Rowan saw him and flipped. Tears, kicking, wailing, flailing, snot, running out of the building, the whole bit. “I don’t want to go to the barber,” he repeated. “I don’t want ice cream!”

Still, I managed to wedge him into the chair as Sam turned the TV to Treehouse — and, miracle of miracles, Go Diego, Go! was on. Rowan almost immediately sank into a television-induced coma (complete with drooling), and Sam went to work with the scissors. When he was done, we had to stay and finish watching Diego and his cousin Alicia rescue the pygmy marmosets.

And then we went to the ice cream store, where Rowan got a twisty cone and I got to look at his new hair.

“Hey Rowan,” I said, “that wasn’t too bad, was it?”

“No,” he said, carefully licking his cone, “that was good.”

Hairstyle of the gods

So, Rachel and I kind of made this pact not to cut Isaac’s hair. No particular reason, just an effort to preserve his strawberry blond babyhood a few moments more, let him get all ringletty and wild.

Fortunately, our pact contained a clause that stipulated that, in the event that the baby began to develop a mullet, I was free to take out the scissors and even things up a bit. At least, that’s what I thought we agreed.

And so one day last week, when I decided that Isaac was starting to look just a tiny bit like Carol Brady, I sat him up on the bathroom counter and got out the scissors. I thought I did a pretty good job, all things considered. (The things considered would include the fact that Isaac tried to look at the scissors every time he caught a glimpse of them in his peripheral vision. I’m thankful that he still has peripheral vision.) In any case, my technique has certainly improved since Rowan’s first haircut, when one of our friends witnessed the clear-cut that was the nape of his neck and stage-whispered to him, “Don’t ever let your mommy do that to you again.”

Rachel wasn’t so sure. “He doesn’t look like a pretty little girl any more,” she wailed, when I brought our smiling little newly shorn lamb downstairs. For about a day afterwards, she moaned every time she saw Isaac and his big-boy ’do.

What the haircut made abundantly clear, though, is that Isaac, like me, is probably doomed to a life of difficulty finding hats that fit. He has what is known in the millinery industry as an “elongated oval,” which, loosely translated, means he has a big, weird, alien-shaped head. It’s a family curse: my dad recalls having to buy a fedora (to go with all those three-piece suits) when he was hired at IBM in the 1960s. The hat maker charged him $60 — probably something like his weekly take-home pay — for a custom-made number, because nothing in the store fit. I maintain the elongated oval is storing all that extra brainpower that makes us so smart.

As for Rowan, any day now I'm going to take him into the barber and erase the mop-topped evidence of the last summer of his life before entering the school system. Part of me hates to do it, sees it as the symbolic curtailing of all his freedom and creativity.

Part of me can’t wait.

Nothing but flowers

Sometimes, it feels less as though we had children than were infested by them, this riot of small bodies (are there really only two?) inexorably altering our environment, working their way deeper, deeper, into every crevice, step by tiny step.

Rowan is a small but powerful magnetic force, instinctively able to set the default language on my iPod to German, alter the task bar on my computer, or switch Rachel’s homepage to Google. The clock radio in our bedroom seems always, randomly, set to the wrong time — each morning, a small boy comes into the room and propels us continually into the future, trying to get the numbers to 7:00, which he knows is “wake-up” time. Each evening, we set the clock back again.

But it’s a losing battle — all of it. We put away the blocks, the trains, the cars; sweep up the crumbs; fold the laundry and put it in drawers; try to find homes for the craft projects and paintings and pieces of plastic that arrive, amass, multiply, gather dust. I make 48 zucchini-carrot muffins, Rowan cracking the eggs and helping measure out the flour, and, five days later, we make 48 more muffins. Every night, without fail, it’s dinner time again, and after that we have to clean up. And pack up lunch for the next day.

We go to bed to find Rowan asleep in our bed, clutching my pajama bottoms like a security blanket. We carry him back to his bed. Morning comes, and he is back, either crawling into bed with us or knocking on his own door until one of us stumbles into his room and his bed with him. “Cuddle me,” he says, to which a couple of days ago I replied grumpily, “I will cuddle you if you lie still and don’t stick your feet and elbows into my back.” “I won’t,” he said, but he did. Because he does, he expands to fill the space that you might take up. This morning, he climbed in with Rachel and me, and then swivelled his way around like the horizontal bar joining the two vertical strokes of a letter H, pushing my head off my pillow. He wanted to see the clock, he explained. Or he sits at the dinner table and plays footsie, his foot nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudging my thigh until I move it. “Why?” he says, and I say, “I don’t like how it feels.” “Yes you do like how it feels,” he responds. Okay.

The CDs no longer play — they are covered in scratches and fingerprints. We lose things — water bottles, keys, fridge magnets. We find them later, behind couch cushions, underneath the fridge, inside the wardrobe. I open a drawer and Rowan appears, pulling out underwear, T-shirts: “Wear this one — this is the one I love.” Food disappears from my plate, my hand, as a child walks or toddles by and spirits it away. Isaac at my feet, reaching up, twining his hand into the hair at the back of my neck, exploring my mouth and nostrils with his fingers. He buries his face into my shoulder when strangers speak to him, drools down my arm, laughs and tries to eat my nose. He agitates for a bite of whatever’s on my plate, and then tosses it on the floor. I sit, and suddenly, two children are playing in my lap.

It’s summer, and I am continually struck in Thunder Bay by how easily we could slide into wilderness. The house is filled with spiders and bugs. There was a skunk in the garage the other night. We drive minutes to get out of the city and discover frogs and leeches (shudder), go berry picking with friends and take their dogs to ward off bears. We are covered in bites. Alone for a moment, hunched over a blueberry bush, I think of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, and briefly consider going deeper into the bush, disappearing.

But I would never survive, not without those small bodies to keep me warm.

My subconscious has a fairly enlightened parental leave program

I have this recurring dream in which I realize that, for some ungodly reason, I have committed to being a counselor at my childhood sleepover camp. Me and the seventeen-year-olds. Apparently, I still have unresolved issues about my stint as a camper (1982–86) and, subsequently, as a counselor (1989–90).

Back then, the highlights of my summer were nights off spent drinking to get drunk on margaritas at Earl’s in Kelowna and winning the mini Maccabiah games — a Zionist camp’s answer to the colour wars; I wrote the team song each year, Jewish-themed lyrics to classic tunes such as the theme songs to Fame or Cheers or “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” (“Our team is tzedakah — charity — that’s what we stand for; We make the world a better place by helping out the poor...”). Not to mention the drama that breeds in a closed society where teenagers are mostly left to govern themselves.

But, twenty years later, I have other commitments. In my dream, I try to explain this to the camp directors, but they are curiously unresponsive to my plight. I explain to them that I have clients; that I really cannot afford to earn just $800 for nine weeks of work; that I don’t remember applying; that the idea of spending a summer taking care of other people’s children with a bunch of horny, self-absorbed teenagers as my closest colleagues was just not what I had in mind. And besides, as always happens in these dreams, I have no luggage.

Somehow, it never seems possible (maybe because I have no wallet? no access to a phone?) to simply, politely, explain that there must be some sort of mistake and quit. Instead, I plead with the powers that be in the dream to release me from my apparent obligations to them. Which they never do. But last night, last night in my dream, I suddenly slapped myself on the forehead and said, “My God! I have two little children! I have a baby! I can't leave them for nine weeks! I have to go right now!”

And the powers that be said, “Oh, okay.”

And you asked because...?

Rowan is dropping his toothbrush down the back of his radiator, collecting it from his scungy bedroom floor, and dropping it behind the radiator again.

Me: “It's time to get pajamas on.”

Him: “I can't. I'm playing a game.”

Me: “Oh, really? What game are you playing?”

Him: “I’m playing the toothbrush behind the radiator game.”