Okay, technically I didn’t find this wee present in my boot this morning. Officially, I found it on the morning of Friday, May 4, in Copenhagen, of all places. Which is where I have been. Which is why I have not been here, writing in this blog.

(Copenhagen! O, Copenhagen, land of beautiful buildings and bicycles and windmills and herring! And smorresbrod! To which I would relocate in a heartbeat if it weren’t for all those things like money and jobs and family and citizenship and language barriers, etc. But I digress: right now, we’re talking about things in boots.)

I found this little bracelet, lovingly made by Isaac, in my left ART Company boot

(… … and then she drifted off onto eBay in search of size 40 ART boots… …)

Hello!

…, the boots, you may recall, that I purchased in Chicago for approximately the cost of what my heart would fetch on the black market. And that was half price. But that’s okay, because they are the most beautiful boots I have ever owned and I adore them.

I was putting on said boots in order to go out for dinner with my girl to Aamaans restaurant, for what turned out to be one of the loveliest meals of the trip (and, o, there were many lovely meals on that trip, lo, yes there were), and finding Isaac’s bracelet seemed like a sweet omen, a reminder of my children, who had conveniently remained in North America while their mothers sojourned abroad in honour of my 40th birthday. (Look soon for a guest post from their caretaker, the indefatigable — or, more accurately, utterly fagged out, no pun intended — Rob, on what was like to take care of them for a week, solo. Heh.)

We were joined at the end of the meal by by this girl I had a fling with during the summer of 1995 my friend Lene and her girlfriend, Maria, who scooped us up and took us out to some bars where there were many younger women dressed up like Simon Le Bon (this seems to be a fashion trend, no? Babydykes in black fedoras with rolled rims and lots of eyeliner?), and who the next day scooped us up in their little Volkswagen and drove us three hours inland to the city of Århus, which I also promptly fell in love with.

We ate the original Danish comfort food at Teater Bodega (I had a dish called Biksemed, which translates roughly into “mixed food,” which is, of course, what it is;

Rachel ate some rock-hard yet delicious bacon with potatoes and parsley sauce and swooned), drank Carlsberg classic, and visited the rainbow panorama on top of the Århus Art Museum.

And we also went to a flea market, where out of the corner of her eye Rachel spied these ART boots.

In her size.

For 30 kroner.

Which translates to approximately five dollars.

And then she bought them. And then I tried very hard not to sulk. Mostly successfully, but with little episodes of sulking breaking through now and then like the opposite of the sun through clouds.

And then Lene, bless her Danish heart, said to Rachel, “You know, I have a pair of cowboy boots in your size that I love but I never wear. Why don’t you take them?”

And then I thought about killing both of them until they were dead, but instead I smiled serenely and encouraged Rachel to just say yes, until I couldn’t help it any more and hissed at her out of the corner of my mouth, “I didn’t sleep with some girl 17 years ago so that YOU could get BOOTS.”

And she smiled back at me, equally serenely, and said, “Apparently, yes you did.”

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Susan: So, Isaac, Rowan is really liking his piano lessons. Do you think you’d like to learn an instrument?

Isaac: Um … maybe. How about the slide whistle?

Susan: Well, you are pretty good at the whistle. But what about…

Isaac: I could play the French horn?

Susan: Well you can’t really play the French horn until your mouth and jaw have grown a bit—

Isaac: I know! I know! The jingle bells!

Susan: Um …

Rowan: How about he plays the accordio—

Susan & Rachel: No.

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I’m liking that word more and more: not quite overwhelmed, but certainly it feels as though things gush out of the tap at a pressure that leaves me scrambling to contain them. Something slips: the laundry, this blog, the dinner we intended to make but forsook for frozen tortellini , my novel manuscript, my vitamins in their little daily cases, the cases themselves (which Isaac likes to fill for me when I actually find the time to set him up with little containers of zinc and vitamin D and vitamin C and immunity boosters and the like, and he goes to work, because if that kid likes something, he likes things that live in their own special little containers). On Monday, I realized that I had somehow checked the wrong box on the sign-up form and signed myself up to coach kids’ soccer (oh, the irony), and had to explain like a jerk to the utterly gracious organizers of the league that actually I had just screwed up and they would have to find someone else.

And then there’s the book: I became utterly absorbed in the Mysterious Benedict Society trilogy that I randomly picked up for Rowan’s birthday back in November. I’m on the last book, with seven pages more to read, and now I can’t find the damn thing anywhere and it is making me insane. Insane. I keep rummaging through the house, running my hands over shelves, checking under the beds and above the washing machine, trying to imagine myself as this book, but it is stubbornly gone and I just want to know what happened. On many levels.

While rummaging under Isaac’s bed (or, as he refers to it, Isaac’s “old bed”), however, I did find this:

This is a very special wooden pen in its own very special wooden case, a gift from a local organization where I’d done some volunteer work. Ever since I brought it home a week or two ago, Isaac — passionate aficionado of all things that come in their very own special containers — has been fascinated by it. Apparently, he just needed it to be his for at least a little while. I burst out laughing when I saw it, at his magpie tendencies, at the passion and how much I identified with it. Almost made up for the last seven pages.

And yet, there’s so much that we do squeeze in, the writing that does get done and the dinners we do make, the brunch we throw together for beautiful friends on a Sunday morning. And there was “Overflow,” the title of both the reading I did on Sunday and one of the pieces that I read, the brand-new piece that I somehow managed to write and edit and rehearse in between all the other things. The crowd itself at the Northern Woman’s Bookstore spilled over, seated on the floor, in the aisles, perched on the edge of cash desk. Rachel Mishenene and Meghan Eddy read beautiful, brilliant, brave pieces. And the generosity and response and warmth of the crowd spilled over, too. I read another essay, “Friend me?”, that talked about the social pecking order of my eighth grade class and its aftermath, and that, too, sparked its own series of — not unwelcome — ripples.

The Northern Woman's Bookstore's indomitable owner, Margaret Phillips, introducing the reading. That's Meghan to my right; Rachel is hidden behind Margaret, but she's there.

I keep pushing back the writing in favour of all the things that keep piling up on my desk: the receipts to be filed and the library books renewed (just ordered a library version of MBS III, with the idea that the moment I bring it home the original version will magically reappear), the endlessly morphing to-do lists. Need to shift my brain: it’s not that the writing isn’t getting done — to the extent that it isn’t — because I have too many other things to do, but rather that I’m letting the things keep me from the writing. My papers will pile and overflow, but I don’t actually need a clean desk in order to put everything else on hold for half an hour and get something down. Let it flow, let it flow, let it flow.

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Me: Isaac, come to the table. It’s dinner time.
Isaac: I can’t. I’m reading.
Rowan: You don’t know how to read.
Me: He’s looking at pictures.
Rowan: That’s not reading.
Me: Well, it’s an important pre-reading activity.
Rowan: Yeah. It helps you make inferences about the text.

I’m reading. Isaac is, at least, pre-reading. Rowan, apparently, has been attending teachers’ college in his spare time. We are making inferences about texts around here and it and all seems kind of appropriate and slightly surreal as I gear up for this coming Sunday, April 22. On that date, at 7 PM, I will be headlining at Overflow: An Evening of Readings about the Vulnerable, at the Northern Woman’s Bookstore.

So: vulnerable. Which may or may not mean, for me, literally and/or figuratively stripping things down to some tender/raw places. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I bought a whole bunch of new bras recently and I have written an essay about them. Which I will read, along with an essay about what happens when the people who bullied you in junior high school decide to friend you on Facebook.

You know, nice light stuff. But hey: there will be cake! And if cake’s not enough, also on board are fantastic local writers Rachel Mishenene and Meghan Eddy.

Oh! And the event is also serving as THE Thunder Bay launch of the anthology Here Come the Brides: Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage, edited by Audrey Bilger and Michele Kort. I’m thrilled they’ve chosen to include my essay, “Four (same-sex) weddings and a funeral.”

So, come! Listen. Make inferences, or not. But I hope you enjoy yourselves, and I look forward to seeing you.

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My cousin Jill likes to tell me and anyone else who will listen about how I used to torture her when we were little and spent summers together at our cottage in Winnipeg Beach.

Apparently — and I remember none of this — I used to devise quizzes for her, and then tie her up or tickle her or imprison her or fart on her head or something if she got the answers wrong. She acts out these stories in great detail for my benefit, for my kids’, her kids’, I’m not sure: me at seven demanding, “Name the four seasons!”

Her, age four, forgetting spring.

“What are we sitting on?” I kept asking, bouncing on the bed, making the springs squeak. “What’s inside the bed? What are we sitting on?”

She didn’t know, didn’t know, desperately didn’t know and I was thrillingly relentless, tickle-attacking her for her faults.

If don’t remember the particular incident, I do remember what it was like to be simultaneously annoyed and flattered by her constant attention, the way she followed me around like a puppy and how I could get her to do anything. I remember a summer home thick with children, the easy and immediate (and sometimes grating) intimacy between all of us and our collective parents.

(But torture? If you want torture, how about the time my brother dipped Jill’s thumb in hot sauce in a sadistic attempt to get her to stop sucking it? Or the time I dropped my cousin Jason’s goldfish into a sink of hot water — totally by accident, I swear?)

Jill’s constant retelling of the story used to confuse me: was she mad? Had the incident traumatized her unduly? Had I somehow betrayed her? Did I need to make amends?

“It’s weird,” I once said to Rob, after introducing him to her and sitting through another iteration.

“I think she does it to show she has a history with you,” says Rob.

And I was momentarily stunned. I never thought of that.

But I think of it now, think of it after returning from a weekend away and watching my boys with their own cousins, who live now on three different continents and whom we see sporadically. But there’s still that easy intimacy, the way they gather and play and curl up together and are parented collectively and spontaneously by whomever happens to be around. I love how quick and strong the bond is, how it holds between months and miles. One day, if we’re all lucky, I’ll hear them tell their own stories about each other, demonstrating their shared and thrilling and relentless history.

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If it weren’t soccer, it would be something else.

Right?

This is what I tell myself in my lower moments, during the times I wish the game had not been invented or at least that Rowan had never heard of it, had never put foot to ball and in that moment of connection found something thrilling and addictive. This is what I tell myself during each of the dozen or so daily negotiations about when and for precisely how long I will play soccer with him in the backyard and what must happen before or after in terms of things like eating breakfast and practicing piano and going to school and keeping one’s hands to oneself and the like.

I sound like a monster. I understand this. I realize that I am complaining about my son’s passion for engaging in a wholesome, healthy, outdoor form of exercise, instead of, say, online poker or dealing crystal meth. I understand the value of encouraging physical activity and team sports. I know that the fact that he wants, desperately, to play with me is a gift, something I should treasure now because, “You know, in eight years, he’s not going to want to have anything to do with you…”

I know all this. It’s just that I’m not really an organized-sports kind of girl. Sometimes I would rather not go outside and kick around a ball. Sometimes, I have had enough. Sometimes, I have other things to do, like make dinner or read the Styles section of the New York Times or alphabetize the spices or simply do anything but go outside in the snow (“snoccer”) or the sunshine or the rain or the darkness and play. Sometime over the last seven months, soccer has worn thin for me, even as Rowan’s passion for the sport seems to increase daily.
Sometimes, I just don’t want to play.

But if it weren’t soccer, it would just be something else, like — God forbid — hockey. It’s not so much the sport as it is trying to make my seven-year-old understand, as gently as possible, that I simply don’t care about it as much as he does. He doesn’t get that yet, doesn’t understand how I’m not elated each time I score one of my rare goals, why I don’t roar “YAAHHHH!” and pump my fist. He doesn’t get that I score far fewer goals than him not simply because I am the worse player, which I may well be, but because I don’t try nearly as hard, don’t throw myself after the ball, don’t insert my small, fast-moving body in between it and anything else in my way, as though it’s always and forever the most important thing in the world. For him, “fun” and “winning” are intertwined, while for me, soccer would be a whole lot more fun if winning weren’t quite as important.

And if it involved reading the Styles section of the New York Times while quietly sipping my tea at the pristine kitchen counter.

This is one difference between me and my seven-year-old son. Another difference between us is that I don’t try to convince him that he, too, might really enjoy a decaf latte and a section of the paper as much as I do.

(On the other hand, that’s not entirely fair. I suppose that I do, daily, try to convince him of other things: that he will probably like that cube of marinated tofu if he just tries it (an incorrect assumption); that his foot will fit better in his boot if he takes the time to fish out and uncrumple his sock and put it on his actual foot (I was right); that 900+ Pokémon cards are enough (we continue to disagree on this one); that as difficult as it may be to fall asleep in your bed right now, it is far more difficult to fall asleep while standing on the landing and talking about how you cannot fall asleep (I’m right about this, too); that whining is not an effective negotiating tool. Etc.)

We’ve gone through a few soccer balls over the last several months: the freeze-thaw cycle isn’t particularly kind to the dollar-store variety of balls we’ve purchased until now. Shredded octagons of white plastic litter the backyard now, cast off by the balls as they slowly fall apart. I’ve taken to calling our latest one Wilson, after the volleyball that Tom Hanks’s character befriends in that movie Castaway: Rowan, I daresay, is possibly as emotionally dependent upon our Wilson as Hanks’s Chuck Noland (does anyone else besides me think that the name’s a tiny bit too heavy-handed of a metaphor for a man thrown up on a desert island?) was upon his.

Also, I think that Chuck’s Wilson is in a lot better shape than ours.

Yes, we have signed Rowan up for leagues. We plan to max out the amount of organized soccer we can fit into everyone’s schedules, in order that Rowan can get his fix in while I can sit on the sidelines with a thermos and a novel and look up occasionally to cheer. And, in our rare, unscheduled, moments, I will continue to try to seek some kind of balance between playing his games and playing mine. Even more, I will do my best to actually play when I play with him, to see where and how I can find the fun in this activity that I barely tolerate but he loves. Loves. Loves.

This is the parenting philosophy I try to cultivate, known as Everybody gets most of what they need most of the time. Because, frankly, I’m never going to be the kind of parent who’s able to give it everything she’s got, all of the time.

And maybe, one day, many years hence, the two of us will sit in a café somewhere, quietly sipping caffeinated beverages and reading companionably, together.

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Apparently, I hit a wall when it came to organizing the pantry cupboards.

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We had Blankiegate here last night and I’m blaming the kids. I mean, it’s not my blanket: I don’t carry it around the house and leave it in random places like behind the living room chairs or (once, memorably) stuffed inside the cardboard dollhouse I made with my babysitter.

I’m not the one who spreads out my blankie on the kitchen floor at 6:45 AM and then lies down on it, sucking my thumb, while I wait for my oatmeal to be ready. Is what I’m saying. By which I mean it’s not my fault if Isaac’s blanket goes missing, especially when I didn’t run gleefully and naked around the bedrooms yesterday evening with my brother (now there’s a picture), leaping from bed to bed and jostling pillows and comforters out of their normal spots before coming downstairs to eat my ritual bowl full of oatmeal for bedtime snack (I swear, if oatmeal wasn’t invented Isaac would starve to death). Only to go upstairs and insist on wearing stripy fleece pajamas in this freakish mid-March heat and to discover that my security blanket is gone (“discovered missing” – that always seemed like an oxymoron to me, but I digress).

And yet, that is not how being a parent works, of course. I mean, it’s not as though they asked to be born, I suppose, or that they ever consented to live in this house with these parents with these rules. Which I am sure seem as arbitrary to them as does to me the fact that Isaac in fact has three blankets, rectangles of fuzzy white cloth each half the size of a yoga mat and indistinguishable from each other except for the width of their satin borders. There is “the blankie I like,” with its half-inch of satin, and then there are the meh blankies that will do in a pinch, their vastly inferior inch-and-a-half satin borders rendering them much less, well, secure. Which is why neither of the “blankies-I-don’t-like” was available to pinch-hit last night, given that both currently reside with various caregivers in the event that Isaac naps while in their care.

So. Bedtime. I’d had a decent enough evening with the two of them, but at this point I was really just so happy that this time of the night had arrived and there would be cuddles and stories and quiet. And then Isaac fell into the bottomless void of anguish created by the blankie-I-like’s absence, and I pretty much fell into it right along with him. And then I grabbed Rowan’s arm and pulled him in as well. Just so everyone could share in the fun, except for Rachel, of course, who had the good sense to be out.

My first mistake was trying to rationalize with the irrational, even though I KNOW THAT NEVER ENDS WELL. I know it. And perhaps I was not entirely rational myself. Because no rational person would actually believe that a distraught four-and-a-half-year-old would stop sobbing and say, “You know, Mom, you’re right: I am responsible for my own stuff and should pay better attention to where I randomly fling the rags to which I am so passionately attached. I’ll just chill out and hunker down with this substitute afghan from the couch and everything will be just fine.”

To be honest, at first I — desperately and sneakily — offered him his brother’s yellow blanket, virtually indistinguishable — or so I tried to suggest — from his own, aside from colour and, well, the width of its satin borders. It was a cheap trick, and it was a stupid move on my part, too, because then of course Rowan had to get involved, which meant that I now had two kids with blankie issues on my hands, coupled with fast-disappearing patience. Which, combined with the tick-tick-tick-tick-tick of each passing second did not for a good combination make.

So I did what any self-respecting parent would do in the situation: I proposed cutting the yellow blankie in half so that they could each have part of it, with the idea that the child who deserved it more would protest and let the other one have it, at which point I would bestow it upon its true owner.

Okay, I didn’t do that. I yelled at them.

OOOOHHH a mommy blogger who admits online that she yelled. So edgy. Maybe now I will cop to every cliché ever derided on Salon.com and admit to occasionally being ambivalent about this entire project (parenting, not blogging, that is; oh wait…) and confess to doubts about my abilities to do this job adequately (ditto) and that I occasionally lose it and then feel bad about it. I yelled, and there were tears, and even as I yelled I knew I was yelling and shouldn’t be and so I stopped, but not before I let myself yell a little longer. OMG.

(I’m going to tell you something here that my sons are going to read in five or 10 or 20 years and be floored by, a closely guarded secret that we have kept from them: Isaac’s blankie — in fact, all three of Isaac’s blankies — actually originally belonged to Rowan. When Rowan was born, someone sent us one of the meh blankies as a baby gift, and he became attached enough to it that I panicked at the thought of ever losing it and ordered two near-replicas on eBay. And then Isaac was born, and someone sent him the yellow blankie. And then somewhere along the way, the switch occurred, and neither of them was the wiser. Until now. LUKE I AM YOUR FATHER.)

(Wait till I tell Isaac that, in fact, the store HASN’T IN ACTUALITY RUN OUT OF BROWN SUGAR.)

Hi! Blankies!

Okay, so, the rest of the evening kind of lurched and stumbled along after that, and I said sorry for yelling and everyone got some cuddles and their fingernails trimmed and eventually went to sleep, one child in particular looking very glum as he cuddled up with an extra-meh purple chenille blanket. And when he woke up, in tears, at midnight, I remained calm and I took him back into his bed and then I had a sudden flash of inspiration and reached down, down, down, into the dark space between the head of his bed and the wall and it was like I had pulled unicorns and rainbows out of my ass when I handed Isaac the blankie he likes. “Thanks, Mommy,” he said, and patted my hand before popping his thumb in his mouth and cuddling up.

As though I’d known it was there all along.

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-Um…

-What?

-I forgot what I was going to say.

-That you love me and want to give me a big smooch?

-Well, yes.

[Cue music and cut to a flock of birds flying high into the air. Several moments later….]

-See, I told you I knew what you were thinking.

-That, and we need mozzarella.

-Gotcha.

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It’s a rainy Monday, and I’ve just dropped donor-dad (dad-donor? Dad? The “pretty much perfect”?) Rob off at the airport after a fantastic visit. Pathetic fallacy? I think so. Given that Air Canada decided not to go on strike and keep him here, Rachel and I are just going to have to take on all the soccer-playing, Pokémon-hustling, latte-making and chase-playing duties ourselves once again. This is hard, but we will prevail.

So here’s a little shout out to Rob and all the other queer parents who helped inspire my latest musings over at interfaithfamily.com today. Here’s a taste :

My partner, Rachel, met, Rob, the man who would eventually become our sperm donor, during her first year in grad school. Within weeks, she’d accomplished a major feat of advanced family planning: she managed to get him to commit his genetic material to us, well in advance of any concrete plans we actually had to have kids.

Finding Rob was a major coup. He’s pretty much perfect: kind, smart, good-looking, no unmanageable issues, interested in being involved with the kids but absolutely uninterested in parenting full time or having any say in parenting decisions. We’d struck gold with him — but it’s also true that he was the only man out of several we asked who was even willing to consider the possibility. The whole idea of “choosing” a donor is, actually, kind of misleading, implying that would-be same-sex moms can simply pick one of the dozens of tempting options dangling in front of them like ripe fruit.

So the fact that Rob wasn’t Jewish seemed like a minor blip to me.

Please read the rest and let me know what you think here or over at IFF.

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