The Girl

The other day, when I was dropping my son off at school, his buddy grabbed him by the arm, leered at him--leered, I say! It turns out it is possible for a five-year-old to leer--and said, "Hey, so good luck with the
gi-irl tomorrow." "Um, what girl?" I asked my son later, trying to sound casual and failing badly. "Oh, you don't know her," he said nonchalantly. "She's from the sport's class we go to on Tuesday afternoons."

I'll admit it. In a very uncool move, today I decided to stay for the entire class, when normally I'd leave to go shopping or run errands or have a tea with mom friends. J, who normally always asks me if I'm planning to stick around and looks disappointed when I say I'm probably not going to, appeared slightly alarmed when he saw me sit down on the bench. "You're staying?" He asked. "Why?" "Because I love you," I said. "Because I want to show my support of your ...sporting endeavours."  "For the whole class? You're staying?" And he gave me a look. A look that said, "I know what you're doing. Don't pretend it's because you're supportive."

Part of it was kind of funny: an almost six year old boy acting all silly in an attempt to impress a girl, even though he really couldn't quite figure out why he was doing it. But it was also a little sad. Because I knew at that moment that he was going to grow up no matter what I tried to do about it,  and that he was going to become slightly less mine in increments that would sometimes seem small and sometimes seem big--and today felt gigantic. Being a mom is hard. Somehow,  the idea of him having his first crush broke my heart today,  just a little bit, and completely unexpectedly.

I'll give him this, though: the girl is cute. And she had a little red sequined heart clip in her hair. Well played, sister.

Things you should probably not say to a pregnant woman. Or maybe you should. But in a nicer way.

Recently, I attended a clothing swap party with some neighbourhood friends. In attendance was a woman who was pregnant with her first child. (Incidentally, she tried on one of the shirts I had brought and it looked perfect as a maternity top which made me realize why I should never have bought it in the first place.)

At one point in the evening, I entered the kitchen just in time to hear the tail end of a conversation about how awful the postpartum period can be. "It just really sucks sometimes," said one experienced mom to the new-mom-to-be. "And no one tells you it sucks, so you're basically sitting there thinking, "what is wrong with me!? This sucks. Is it supposed to suck so bad?""

I was shocked. "Um," I said nervously. "This is her first baby. Maybe we shouldn't..." Tell the truth. That's what I was thinking: maybe we shouldn't tell the truth. It  might scare her. "Actually, nevermind," I said. "You're right. Sometimes, it sucks." I turned to the new-mom-to-be and sipped my wine, suddenly determined to give her the straight goods. I'm nothing if not honest, right? "Like, you keep waiting for that perfect feeling. That, "I am so happy, I have never been happier in my life," feeling, and while you DO have that,  on the first day or two when you're still a little delirious, well, after that--" 

And this is the point where I made that sound people make. You know, the one that's supposed to imitate the sound of a bomb dropping or a plane crashing. Kind of like: “Neeeeooooooooooooow.Psssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssh! BOOOOOOOOOM.”

I accompanied this with hand gestures meant to demonstrate a spectacular crash and burn. I looked around the room. "Am I right?"

The new-mom-to be stared at me in horror. I realized I had probably taken it a little far.

Well, at least now she knows what she might expect to experience—and if she doesn’t,  she can say to herself, "Hey, I feel so much better than everyone told me I was going to feel, especially that crazy woman at that party. If I see her on the street, I'm going to avoid her."

 

This is why I love the internet

Some days, I don't like the internet. I say things to my kids like, "When I was a kid, we didn't even have computers or computer games and we certainly didn't have the internet" and their eyes start to glaze over and I feel ancient and also, guilty because I'm lying: we totally had a Commodore Vic 20, as well as the prehistoric video game "Pong."

But today, I don't think the internet is the scourge of civilization. Today, I'm in love with the internet. This is because I was thinking about how obsessed I was with Anne of Green Gables as a kid, and about how I used to have an Anne of Green Gables cookbook, but no one knows where it is anymore. I was remembering how I used to make (unassisted!I was a child genius) a recipe called Saucy Chicken, and I was remembering that it was so good and wishing I still had the recipe.

In the olden days, the lost book would have meant never having Saucy Chicken again. But today, I Googled "Anne of Green Gables Cookbook Saucy Chicken Recipe" and all the recipes from the cookbook, all of them, can be found here.

This makes me so happy! I'll try to remember this the next time I'm mad at the internet.

This weekend I read this article in The Globe and Mail by Ian Brown and it inspired me to believe in the future, and in my kids, and in their intelligence, and in their generation. It's going to be okay. My kids are still going to read. Books, even. Who cares if they're e-books? Although I also hope they cherish beautiful books and silly books and just books in general, the way I do. But even if they don't, I'm sure of this: they're going to cherish words. And that's just fine.

The Third Kid Connundrum (or, all that hussy Mother Nature cares about is getting lucky)

I'm toying with the idea of having another baby. My rationale goes something like this. "But honey, how could we ever regret having a whole other person?! Also, I KNOW there are a few hard months, but honestly, it's all SO worth it. Isn't it SO worth it? Also, we make the cutest babies. Don't we make the cutest babies? Look at these pictures of the cutest babies!"

At this point, my husband usually leaves the room and refuses to look at the pictures. Of his own kids. Honestly!

The other night, our kids, now aged 4 and 5, were at a sleepover with friends who have kids the same age. "This is so great," my husband said. "We've reached the age where this can happen, where the kids can just ... go to someone's house. Without us. And we don't have to worry."

"Oh, you mark my words," I said. "One of them is going to pull the chute. There is NO way they're not going to miss me." No call came in, and I spent the rest of the evening, an evening I should have spent enjoying the one-on-one time with my husband at a local bar with live music, attempting to convince him that instead of enjoying our life now that we can, what we should be doing is jumping right back into the Pit of Late Night Despair and Early Morning Confusion.

As if on cue, a couple walked in with an absolutely adorable baby. I know all babies are cute, but some babies are cuter than others, and this baby had an advantage to most other babies, in part because of his perfectly round little head. "See!?" I said triumphantly. Meanwhile, my uterus started doing this strange thumping thing and trying to move me in the direction of hte baby.  "Look at those people. They have a baby!" (Thump. Thump.) And they're out at a bar, just like we are right now. And look how happy they are." In truth, they didn't exactly look happy, but they didn't exactly look not happy, either. They're so happy, my uterus whispered, in a voice that sounded sort of like Gollum. SO, so happy, and so, so fulfilled, because that's what having a baby does. It fulfills you. You see, my uterus has been completely brainwashed by Mother Nature. It's seen all the propaganda films. I think it might even be a recruiter for other undecided uteruses.

"Yes, but they don't have two other kids running around," Joe pointed out.

"Maybe they do. Maybe they have three other kids, and they're all at a sleepover right now."

He didn't say anything. He ordered us another round of drinks. By the time we had finished these drinks, the couple with the perfectly round headed baby were gone. "See?!" He said.

"See what?" I was staring longingly at the door and considering following the baby out into the night, just to get a whiff of that little round head.

"It's 7:30 pm. They're gone. And do you know why? Because they haven't left the house in six weeks. Because they're exhausted, but they needed human interaction or they were going to go insane, except when they got here, they felt too self conscious to stay. Also, the mother ate those spicy butter chicken wings and now she's going to go home and breast feed that baby, and that baby is going to scream. All. night."

Next, I decided to do what any rational person would do. I asked my four and five year old children for advice. Said she: (with an excited look on her face) "It wouldn't be your baby, it would be my baby! I would be the mommy!" Then she rushed off to rearrange her room to fit the new baby. Uh oh. Said he: (after several moments of thought.) "We-ell, I wouldn't really want to smell poo all the time. And my ears might get sensitive from all the crying." (Me or the baby? I wanted to ask, but didn't.)

"But it would be a WHOLE OTHER PERSON!" I said instead.

"Can I go back to playing LEGO now?" He asked.

Clearly, the men in my life are developing some fairly compelling arguments against having a third baby. But me and my girl, most likely because we have uteruses and are thus at the whim of that trollop Mother Nature (wow, that was really weird, saying that my four year old daughter has a uterus. Yuck. Gah. Ack. But still. She does. I can't deny it. And one day, in the distant future, she might use it. GAAACK. Blarrrg.) who only cares about procreation at all costs, are unable to see this from a rational perspective.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to surf YouTube for funny baby videos. Have you seen this one? This is why I NEED A BABY:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4vvIVxYD2U

But seriously, what if I lose my kid?

True story: Even when I’m not worrying about this, I’m worrying about it.  Sometimes, I'm awakened in the night by this nameless fear. It lurks in closets, under beds, behind doors, and especially out in the streets.

 

But actually, it's not nameless. It's like Voldemort. I don't want to say it, because I don't want it to wake up and start hissing at me with its freaky noseless face. But shhh, okay, here it is, the name of the fear is: Fear of Losing a Kid.

There is nothing funny about losing a kid. And there is especially nothing funny about becoming a parent and suddenly, finding yourself worrying about losing your kid. All the time.

Sometimes, I think it’s all the Internet’s fault.  We know stuff now. Bad stuff. All the stuff. We know that there are crazy people in the world, that there are bad things that can happen, that there are crazy bad things that can happen, and very crazy, very bad things that can also happen.

Only once, knock on wood, knock on anything really, anything at all that will keep me from ever having to feel this fear come up so close to me again,  have I experienced a true feeling of, “Oh no, I’ve gone and done it. I really did Lose My Kid.”

It was a sunny afternoon. Both of my children, J three at the time and M just past one, had woken up from their naps at the same moment. (Yes, they napped at the same time. It was glorious and probably my greatest parental achievement, other than having them in the first place. I could probably sell millions of copies of a book explaining how I managed to entice two toddlers into sleeping the afternoons away, both at the same time, so that Mommy could work on her book. But the problem with writing that particular bestseller: I don’t know how I did it. It just happened. Sometimes, I think it’s because they loved me so much and wanted me to have time to write. I know this is probably not true, but it’s what I’m choosing to believe. Closer to the truth is likely that they learned early that when Mommy didn’t get time to write she was grumpy and erratic. Better to lie in bed, eyes wide open, waiting for the tapping of keys to stop.)

On the day I faced the Nameless Fear head on, the angelic tandem-nappers had awoken and J had asked if he could go downstairs on his own to play while I changed the baby’s diaper. “Of course,” I said. “Meet you down there. We’ll bake cookies.” (I’m making up the “We’ll bake cookies" part. When my son was three, he believed cookie dough came from a tube. He was incredulous when he spent the night at his Nana’s and she actually made cookie dough using a range of ingredients.)

Five minutes later, I carried M down the stairs and called something out to J, probably a snack suggestion or game idea. No answer.

I went into the living room, but he wasn't there. I checked the basement. The lights were off. Not there, either. I looked in the cold cellar, and the laundry room, and the little alcove under the basement stairs.

I started calling his name. Still, nothing.

I ran upstairs, back into the living room, and looked behind the couch. My daughter, on my hip, started shouting his name, too, in her endearing, babyish way. "Are you?" She called. “Are yoooouuuuuu?"

I ran upstairs and checked his room, our room, the bathroom, my office, my husband’s office. I called J’s name again and again.

I ran into the backyard. The gate was swinging open and the yard was empty. The sight of the open gate made me feel sick. Had it been open before? Could he even open it himself? Worse: had someone else opened it? (This is when it does not pay to be a writer. Worst case scenarios are not always funny stories, and these not-so-funny stories are not only given credence, they’re given a storyline, a plot that forms all by itself, with villains and subtexts and a conclusion in which you one day see your son on a backstreet in Paris, but he doesn’t remember you because his memory has been wiped out.)

I sprinted around to the front yard and looked up and down the sidewalk, hoping to see a little boy with blond curly hair, wandering down the street, back home towards me. This was not like J. He was cautious, would never have ventured more than a few feet away from the house without thinking better of it and coming back home again. I knew this about him. Which meant he was gone. Gone. Just like that.

I ran inside to get the portable phone, but before I did, I took one last look up and down the street. I felt like I was standing at the edge of a precipice, with my life before this happened behind me, and my life after this happened a horrifying chasm I was going to have to dive into. (I told you, I have a wild imagination.) Is this really happening? I asked myself. Where is he? What do I do?

I remembered something I'd read once about the first 20 minutes a child is missing being the most crucial. Why is this? Who knows? I didn’t want to think about it too deeply.

I called 911. The operator asked my address, then my name, and how to spell it. I couldn't remember, but this could be in part because my husband’s name is long and Polish "Please," the operator said to me. "Please calm down and understand that these things almost always turn out fine. The faster you answer my questions, the faster we can help you find your son." Find your son. I think my son is missing. These things almost always turn out fine. Almost. But not always.

I answered all his questions, continuing to run around the house as we talked, up the stairs, down the stairs, into the yard, out onto the sidewalk again, over and over until I was sweating and my daughter was bumping and giggling on my hip, thinking we were playing a game. “Arrre youuuuu, buddeee?”

Now the hard part: “What was he wearing?” The operator asked. A red shirt? A blue shirt? Just his Pull Up, or was he wearing shorts? What kind of a mother was I that I didn’t know?

Next, I described his body type, his hair, his eyes.  Then I sat down on the stairs and started to cry. I cried because I was describing my son to the police. I was describing my son to the police because I couldn't find him. He was with me one moment, and then he was gone. Hello, Nameless Fear. It’s not very nice to meet you.

I heard a voice. "Mama, why are you crying? Who are you talking to?"

J had chocolate and crumbs all over his face. His beautiful, perfect, not lost face. "The police," I said. "Mama called the police." Now he was smiling. The police. You can call them? Cool.

“Can I talk?” He asked.

I shook my head, feeling stupid and happy at the same time. I should have known. While my son was indeed cautious, and not the type to wander away from the house, he was at the time, and still is, a Food Sneaker. He had a particular proclivity for these double chocolate cookies from Costco that my mom would bring over. Some of them had been in the cookie jar. He had probably been lying in his bed, during his two hour nap, planning a way to get downstairs on his own so he could have a cookie. When I said I was going to change M he saw his opening and went for it.

How had I not thought of this? I glanced into the kitchen and saw the stool pushed close to the counter and the empty cookie jar sitting open at the edge of it. I'd make a terrible detective. I'd missed all the clues, and panicked instead.

"Hello?" Said the operator.

"I found my son," I said, sheepish.

"I gathered that. Is he okay? Do you need medical help?"

I thought about saying something like, “He might after I’m through with him,” but knew it wasn’t the time to make a dumb joke. Plus, they might call Children’s Aid. "No. He was just hiding behind the easy chair in the living room, eating cookies. I'm so sorry to have bothered you."

The operator assured me I was not the first mother who had called him in a panicked state about a child who wasn't really missing. He cancelled the police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances. “Thank you,” I said, over and over. Then I hung up and hugged my son so hard he wriggled away.

"Why are you sad, Mama?"

"Because I thought I lost you," I said, wiping the chocolate from his little mouth. Vowing that I would never let him out of my sight again, take him for granted again, do anything except be a perfect mother again.

Of course I have, many times since that day, let him out of my sight, taken him for granted, been an imperfect mother. And that Nameless Fear, it still stalks me constantly, most particularly on the not-so-perfect mother days. Essentially, nothing really changed during those ten terrifying minutes on that hot summer afternoon. I learned a few things: that I’m awful in crisis. (I'm too embarrassed to fully reveal the extent of my hyperventilating, but suffice it to say the operator could possibly now qualify as my therapist.) I also learned I need to keep the cookies somewhere else. And I learned, in a very small way, that everything really can change within the confines of a minute or two. Catastrophes like earthquakes, oil spills, acts of cruelty, they can strike. And none of us, no matter how careful we are, or how much we have, or how smart we are, or how nice we are, are immune. That kind of sucks.

The bottom line: you have to live your life. You have to go out and do things and hope for the best.

Besides, the kids will probably notice if you wrap them in cotton batting and implant a tracking chip in their forearm. (Don’t think I haven’t considered it.)

Clue # 3: The Enforced Sobriety

Clue # 3: The enforced sobriety

 

(To recap, I'm attempting to give clues about what it feels like to be a parent. If you feel lost, read post one and post two.)

The weekend I discovered I was pregnant with our first child we had plans to travel to Niagara Falls for an Allman Brothers Band concert. If you’ve ever listened to the Allman Brothers Band, than you know that it helps to be under the influence of something while listening to the Allman Brothers Band. (I’m sorry, but 33 minutes and 41 seconds is just too long to have to listen to a song without lyrics while not buzzed on something.)

Of course, now that I’d gone and peed on the stick and had that profound, “A whole other life! Growing inside me! I'm like Celene Dion! This has never happened to anyone else in the history of time!” moment, I wasn’t going to be buzzed on anything other than my own excitement about becoming a mother. 

Mountain Jam while sober, here I came. 

I hate to admit this, but I actually spent part of the concert wondering if the loud music was going to harm the fetus. I know. 

The morning after the concert, while my husband and our friends sprawled about hotel rooms in various states of hungover disarray, I awoke at 7 am (because I’d gone to bed at 10 pm), went to a restaurant alone for breakfast and then walked (or, more accurately, stomped) toward the falls, alone.

Being a good sport just isn’t in my nature. I was pissy. I was hormonal, or at least I was trying to use the fact that I was maybe hormonal, because you're allowed to be when you're pregnant, as an excuse for being in such a shite mood.  I was also grappling with the realization that I was going to have to be a good sport for nine months (which were actually ten and were going to feel like twelve). It had only been 24 hours, and I was already raging against the self sacrifice. And all I'd had to give up was a few drinks. But what, exactly, was I doing this for? My stomach was still flat. The baby felt like a ghost. 

Which is definitely a feeling you’ll have as a parent. A feeling of self-sacrifice, even when you don't know exactly what the reward, if any, is going to be. And also, a feeling of not only enforced sobriety, but enforced maturity, too. 

It was much less complicated in the olden days, when you had kids primarily so they could help you hoe the fields and milk the cows and carry on the family name and if they refused you threw them in a shed. (Hmm, maybe I've just read too much tortured early-Canadian literature and that was never what it was really like? Anyway.)  

The reality of modern day parenting is that you will have to give some things up, for a while, and you can't make your kid hoe a field in exchange for the gift of life. You'll have to give these things up for as long as it takes for your life to change enough that doing the things you used to love probably won't ever feel the same again, even when you have the time to do them. Mostly because you'll be doing them while thinking things like, "I wonder how junior is enjoying his trip to Port-au-Prince/Ciudad Juarez/Kandahar. I'm so happy he's changing the world, but an email/text/Skype would be fab." These sorts of thoughts can put a damper on relaxation, I'm guessing/

The truth is, I miss a lot of things. I miss sleeping in without feeling indebted to my husband when I finally crawl out of bed. I miss reading at leisure, all the time, any time. Even more, I miss being able to write something down the very second I think of it, or spend all day writing something I really want to be writing without feeling guilty and sad about what I'm missing out on while I'm writing it. Or guilty and sad because wanting to write this thing has made me grumpy and less present and that's not fair to anyone.

I miss the days when I could behave badly and not have to turn around and see two pairs of eyes taking it all in, thus causing me to relive and regret said bad behaviour for days, weeks, months, ever. And mostly, I miss not feeling as vulnerable to the whims of the world as I do now that two people I love a crazy lot go out into the world every day and I can't always be there to fix everything and keep them perfectly safe and perfectly happy.  

But there are rewards. It's true what they say. The things I love most about being a parent are possibly trite and maybe predictable, but here they are:

I like to watch them sleep. It's exquisite, truly. It's just like in that book by Robert Munsch that I can't even say the name of or I'll cry.

I like the way they smell, even when they smell sort of bad.

I like that not only are they my people, but that also, I'm their person.

I like how much they love me and I like it when they say it at the most random of moments. I like it when they say "thank you" to a stranger.

I like it when I realize that there's no one in the world they want to be with at a certain given moment than me.

I like it when they laugh their belly laughs. (I also like jumping out at them and scaring the crap out of them. Call me a sicko, but there is nothing. funnier.) 

The list of things I like was different when they were babies (I liked it when they would sleep on my chest, I liked to carry them close, I liked the way when I put my finger on their hand while they were sleeping, their little hand would automatically close on mine and hold it tight) and I know it's going to be different as they grow. I know there are going to be dislikes, too, but I'm not going to borrow trouble by imagining what those might be. 

Most of all, I like being a parent even though I have no clue how I'm going to feel from one day to the next and even though the peeing on a stick, nausea and enforced sobriety/maturity did very little to prepare me for what was in store. And I like my kids. I think that helps a lot.