“Mom?”

Part of me sighs inwardly — maybe even, I will admit, outwardly — as Rowan props himself up on one elbow and opens his eyes to ask yet one more pre-sleep question. I’m tired. He’s tired. There have been lots of questions already.

“Yes, sweetie?” But I’ll humour him. Because this is the time of day — cuddled up in bed — where he is sometimes most conversational, most able to engage in the back-and-forth of real dialogue as opposed to his usual running-roughshod monologue and random series of segues.

“What did you do after you were borned?”

My mind struggles to process the question. Does he mean the first-breath minutes after delivery? The shift from womb to air and from umbilicus to bottles? (Confession: I was not breast-fed, and still managed to grow to functional adulthood.) From infancy to toddlerhood and so forth?

And then I think I might understand what he means.

“Well, I lived in my house with my parents — your Bubbie Ruthi and Zaidie — and with Uncle Jeff, and I got bigger and bigger and I learned to talk and walk, and I went to school and I grew up.”

Rowan is silent, so I continue.

“And then,” I say brightly, “I got my own house” — actually, a tiny, attic apartment with sloping ceilings, just north of College Street near Dufferin in Toronto’s west end — “and then Rachel and I got our house together. And we moved to Thunder Bay, and had you! And Isaac!”

That’s the gist of it, more or less: my life after I was borned, give or take a few apartments and a couple of degrees and so forth. But it will do at 8:15 on a school night, I think.

“Did you miss them?”

Did I miss who? Again, it takes me a moment to figure out what he’s asking. Oh!  

“Do you mean did I miss Bubbie Ruthi and Zaidie and Uncle Jeff when I got my own house?”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” I say, hedging a bit — not quite sure how to explain to him that my brother and I (Hi, Jeff!) developed a healthy regard for each other mostly after we both left home, or that leaving the suburbs of suburban Toronto for McGill University and Montréal’s plateau neighborhood was the best possible thing I could have done, not because home was a bad place, but because the plateau was just so good, so necessary for me as a sheltered, bored, somewhat morose 18-year-old — “well, sometimes. But whenever I missed them I could always phone them or go visit them. Or they came to visit me. I left when I was ready to.”

Rowan’s eyes are large, liquid. I’m talking and watching his jawline soften, melt, still racing to keep up with his thought process and wondering what he’s getting at when I finally figure it out.

“Are you worried about missing us when you leave home?”

He nods and gulps and the tears spill over. “I don’t want to miss you and Rachel and Isaac! I want to live with you forever!”

Let me be clear: there are no plans afoot for Rowan to move out, no plans for everyone to live anywhere but here. Rowan lets us know at regular intervals that he intends to live with us, in this house, for his entire life — even after he has the seven children he is planning to have. He would like to marry me, or Rachel, or, in a pinch, Isaac, and we explain that this is not possible, that marriage, should he choose to embrace that particular institution, is about making families bigger, adding to them, bringing in new people to the mix. We tell him that he may change his mind and choose to live with his spouse and their seven children in a different house, and he says, “But you’ll come live in that house with me.” And we say, maybe. And then he says, again, “I’m going to live here forever.” And we say, again, “Of course you are, for as long as you want.” And then he says, “But do I still have to follow the rules?” And I say, “Yes,” and he says, “Even when I’m 12?” And I say, “Yes,” and he says, “Even when I’m 50?” and I say, “Mister, if you’re living in my house with me when you’re 50, you especially have to follow the rules.”

“Sweetheart,” I say, pulling him to me, “nobody’s leaving. Nobody’s leaving for a long, long time.”

“I don’t want them ever to,” he wails, shuddering.

And we go on like this for a little while, him calming down slowly, until he is near sleep, until I can leave his bedroom, lights dimmed, and go downstairs to shrug my shoulders and shake my head, bewildered, at Rachel, as we try to process Rowan’s advance grieving.

Which is why I’m slightly ambivalent about reading Nicola I. Campbell’s Shin-chi’s Canoe with him. Because here’s a book about the unthinkable, a true story about boys and girls taken away — before they’re ready, before they’re old enough — from their homes, their siblings, their parents. The book tells the story of Shin-chi and his older sister, Shi-shi-etko, as they are taken from their families and communities; from their bedtime stories and language and food; from their names and their games and the arms of their parents to Indian residential school: a cold, foreign, hungry world designed to annihilate them under the guise of saving them.

Rachel has ordered the book and it has arrived and we have put it with all the other books. Waiting until the right moment, which means waiting until Rowan takes it out one day and asks to hear the story. I don’t want to tell it, not sure he’s ready for it or will be able to handle it, especially given his fears of leaving home. But I don’t want the story left untold. And I don’t imagine there’s ever going to be a convenient time to tell it.

I let Rachel do the reading, because she has read it already and imagines that she will be able to stay (fairly) calm, whereas I know I will begin to weep immediately, unstoppably, the moment the story begins. Which I do, as the siblings sit with their parents and grandmother and baby sister, waiting for the cattle truck to appear. Which I do through the cutting off of their braids (Shi-shi-etko asks her grandmother to cut their hair to avoid the indignity of having it hacked off by the nuns and priests at the school), through the end-of-summer journey through familiar landscape to, a hard, new, unfamiliar place of hunger and prayer to foreign gods. I weep through the spring and the return — temporary — home to their families and a dugout canoe of their own. The story is beautifully told and spares us the worst details, the outright violence and assault of the system. But it’s brutal enough, even geared towards children.

Rowan is confused. “Why did they do that?” he keeps asking. “The people who took the children away — why did they do that?” And, “what happened to them because they did that?” When he asks where, we tell him, here, right here. On this land. Not any more, but not so very long ago — as the book tells us, the last government-operated residential school in Canada did not close until 1996. And he says, “I don’t want them to do that here! I want them to do that somewhere else” — and he thinks of the place he imagines is furthest away from him — “in … in China! Not here!” And (as my mind flashes to the thousands — millions? — of baby girls given up in that country, other countries) we try to explain that we don’t want children to be taken from their parents, anywhere.

This is a child who has never known hunger, whose parents have spent all of three nights away from him his entire life, never more than a cell phone call or short flight away. And yet who is so spooked at the thought of leaving us that he can’t fathom that this happened all the time. And why should he? That kind of thing — it won’t happen to us, right? We’ll all get to live together in our house, until we’re good and ready not to?

Probably we will. But my son, my sons, need to understand that their own human rights — and sometimes, their lack thereof — have a long history in this country, and that the horrors perpetrated in Indian residential schools have an important, ongoing, chapter in that history. They need to know that their story is tangled up in those of the First Nations in this country; that important, horrific injustices were perpetrated; and that one way to prevent further injustice and possibly further some form of healing is to learn the history, tell the stories. Everyone’s stories. No matter how much they hurt. They need to know that no one is safe unless everyone is safe.

So, we can all — my two kids and their two moms —  live here together, forever? That’s what I tell my kid as I tuck him into bed after the story. Mostly, I believe it’s true.

Mostly. 

So I’m going to write about somebody else’s book, for a change. This book, in fact:

Isn’t it pretty? It’s Crisp, Rob’s collection of short stories (Who is Rob? Read this.), and they are beautifully creepy, glittering-up-at-you-from-the-bulk-candy-bins mouthfuls of magic realism. They are, as Rob puts it, about “grief, disappointment, and the occasional dinner party gone wrong.” And I don’t think he means like “the dessert burned” wrong. (Although the best part of this book may be that Rob is entertaining my under-exercised five-year-old in the basement as I write these very words. Go, team!)

We’ve all been waiting impatiently for this particular baby to be born, and now it’s here. And those of you lucky enough to live in Thunder Bay are invited to its debut launch, tomorrow evening (that’s March 4), 8 PM, at Calico Coffeehouse. They do a mean book launch, let me tell you. I’ll be the girl behind the book table. See you there!

Hey — JD Drummond over at The Dominion has written a great review of And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents and Our Unexpected Families. Quoth JD: “The stories in this collection are loud and inspiring examples of courage, creativity and love in queer parenting. I knew these people existed somewhere — the queers who make their dreams of babies and families come true, in the queerest of ways.  … this book succeeds in the most urgent of its aims: creating a space for these stories to be heard.”

Matt Hayes, who’s written compellingly about known donors and queer families for The Walrus, has written a great story about And Baby Makes More for xtra.ca. Check it out.

On Thursday morning, I wrote about discovering — quite accidentally — one of my mother’s former students. She taught him — and his best friend — in seventh grade. He told me about how, at age 13, he fell in love with my mother. As did his best friend. And that, as I wrote, “he and his best friend — who is still his best friend, 40 years later — have had, during their friendship, only one, unresolved, ongoing feud: which one of them my mother liked best. How they still argue about it, about her.”

Thursday afternoon, I got an e-mail from the best friend.

(If I were partial to emoticons there would be a smiley face here. Maybe a sort of sentimental, slightly teary, smiley face. But I’m not partial to emoticons so you’ll just have to take my word for this.)

The best friend said, in part, “I wanted to drop you a line to express my sympathies about your mom’s untimely death. She was a great teacher and a fine person. She made learning fun and had a profound effect on the people she taught. Not a bad legacy for someone who wasn’t on this earth nearly long enough.”

I sent him a black-and-white photo of my mom, and he wrote back: “That photo brings back a lot of good memories. Yes, your mom was stunning.  But she had other things going for her. She was only the second Jewish teacher I ever had outside of Hebrew school. And she was probably the youngest teacher I ever had. I once found her grad photo in [the] yearbook, possibly 1961. This means when she taught us in 1966–7, she was 23 or so, barely out of teacher’s college. She was a lot easier to relate to as a teacher than some fossilized version of 30 or 40 (I’m being ironic here).”

He remembers, he says, my mom drilling them on writing, “something that didn’t thrill me at the time but which I’m now grateful for every day.”

And he sent me photographs of my mother, yearbook snapshots that he asked her for — that he asked her for — how adorable is that? — each year. And here they are:

1966–67

1967–68

1968–69

If there was an emoticon for being sucker-punched in the gut, but in a good way, with a wave of nostalgia (or maybe that’s longing) for something you didn’t even experience, I would insert that here. But… well, you know.

“She was so nervous,” my father recalls about my mother and all those seventh-graders. “She was just out of teacher’s college, and they were an advanced class, and she had no special training. And they just adored her.”

My mom left that school to move to Toronto with my father after the 1968-69 school year. My brother was born in 1970 and I was born 21 months later, at the end of 1971. “Her departure was a real loss,” the best friend told me. “You don’t easily replace a teacher of her calibre.”

And you don’t easily forget her, either.

So I’m writing a newsletter for this client, and they’re revitalizing their board, and they have some new members, and so part of my job this morning is to contact the new members and get their thoughts and visions for the organization’s future direction, and then write it all up in a nice dynamic story of 300 words or less.

So, I phone the first two new board members, and get voicemail, and leave chipper voicemail messages. And then I get a live person at the end of my third call. And he is helpful and concise and enthusiastic and gives me exactly what I need in terms of quote. And I notice from his e-mail address that he works at the same firm as my first cousin, and so I mention that, and then his voice takes on a whole new tenor.

“Wait a second,” he says. “Let’s take this in a whole new direction. Are you related to Ruth Goldberg?”

Which is not quite what I’m expecting. “She’s my mother,” I tell him.

“Listen,” he says, “I have to tell you this: I was in love with your mother. She was my first love.”

Mine too, I’m thinking. “Really?” is what I say.

He tells me the story, but he also tells me that he’s probably going to cry. My mom was his seventh grade teacher. And she was so bubbly, and enthusiastic, and beautiful. And that he and his best friend — who is still his best friend, 40 years later — have had, during their friendship, only one, unresolved, ongoing feud: which one of them my mother liked best. How they still argue about it, about her.

He tells me about his mother dragging his father to “meet the teacher” night. About how when his father saw my mother for the first time his jaw dropped to the floor and stayed there. How when his parents returned home all his mother would say was, “Your father’s an idiot.” About how his father, six months later, asked just when the next parent-teacher night would be and his mother said, flatly, “You’re not going.”

But really, can you blame any of them? I mean, if a Liz Taylor–look-alike was your seventh grade teacher? “She was beautiful,” the man on the other end of the phone said. “And she dressed up for school in these beautiful outfits. We had teachers who wore the same thing every day for 20 years.”

I remember my mother talking about that class, about her saying, matter-of-factly, “They were all in love with me.”

The other thing she told me was that she made them learn how to write a proper sentence. “We wrote sentence after sentence — subject, verb, object — paragraph after paragraph, until they got it. My students knew how to write a sentence.”

“One of the worst days of my life,” this man tells me over the phone, “was the day I learned that your mother was getting married. And not to me.”

Thirteen years old. And then, four or so decades later, a different kind of pain. “When your mother died,” this man tells me, “I was heartbroken.”

“Me too,” I say. And I tell him I remember the letters his best friend wrote: to my mom, when she was alive, to tell her what a great teacher she was and the impact she had on his life; and to my family, after my mom died, to tell us, again, that he thought of her often and fondly. And what he — and the world — had lost.

And what I found just a tiny bit of this morning.

Overheard Sunday morning in the front hall:

Isaac (to Rachel): “Your pants broken?”

Rachel: “Well, there’s a hole in the knee.”

Isaac: “Why you have a hole in your knee?”

Rachel: “Well, because my knee has a pointy bone in it, and it rubbed and rubbed on my pants until it made a hole.”

Isaac: “A lion eat it?”

Rachel: “No, no lions. See? My knee has a pointy bone, and it rubbed and rubbed on my pants until it made a hole. See?”

Isaac: “A lion eat it?”

Rachel: “No, just my knee.”

Isaac: “A lion eat it?”

Rachel: “Sure, a lion ate it.”

Isaac: “Why?”

Rachel: (silence)

Isaac: “At the zoo.”

Ye gods people, it’s Friday, and all I’ve posted this week is a picture of some toilet paper. I can totally do better. Here, for example, is Rowan, engaged in the time-honoured public-school tradition of writing Valentine’s Day cards. Or, as he calls them, Valentime’s Day cards.

I feel the need to point out that this photograph was taken two and a half weeks ago, when Rachel had enough foresight to pick up a couple of boxes of 99-cent V-day cards at Zellers and Rowan got on the project like white on rice. ORGANIZED MUCH? That’s us: totally on the ball. Lunches made and clothes laid out the night before. No rushing around in the morning trying to find that other mitten or realizing that you’ve dropped your kid off at senior kindergarten but have neglected to brush your teeth. We are with it, people. WITH IT. If I actually had ever done Christmas shopping in my life, I would venture to guess that the feeling I got when dropping a package of 14, pre-written, sealed Valentine’s Day cards into my son’s communication folder of a Thursday morning would be akin to having all my Yuletide gifts purchased by mid-October.

Rowan is at the lovely stage where everybody gives and everybody gets (except for the two Jehovah’s Witness kids in the class, who don’t participate in the holiday), where popularity doesn’t yet dictate how many cards will populate your little paper-plate Valentine’s Day mailbox. I went to a private Jewish day school as a kid, so valentines weren’t part of the curriculum (read: goyish, feh), and by the time I entered the public system in eighth grade, they were just one more instrument in the torture rack of the junior-high pecking order. In Grade 9, though, I remember that three kids at the top of that pecking order — Noel, Josh, and Joanna — made valentines for every kid in the grade. Every single one of us, from the computer nerds in the gifted class to the library club president, got a personalized Valentine, signed, with love, from the three of them. It stood out, you know? Interestingly, Joanna now runs a lifestyle website called The Sweet Spot, while Noel is president and CEO of AshleyMadison.com — yes, the site with the tagline, “Life is short, have an affair.” Who knew?