Okay, so. I watched it.

And, oh my God, it was everything everyone had said it would be, and more. From the opening slanting words of the back story through to the Jawas and the lightsaber (grateful thanks, Rob, for alerting me to the correct spelling of this seminal term) battle between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi, I sat, entranced, glued to the screen. As my synapses adjusted and my entire psyche realigned to make room for this new sacred text, I thought I might explode from happiness and wonder. Truly, I felt part of the Force.

Okay, so, not so much.

It was fine. It was fun. It was somewhat gratifying to finally sit down and watch the whole thing from start to finish and make sense of the finer points of the plot (aided by the closed captioning — my solution to the mumbling actors — and Rowan, who said helpful things throughout, like, “And now Obi-Wan Kenobi is going to die” — oh, sorry, spoiler alert). That Luke is pretty cute, in a mullety sort of way.

I’m wondering if I would’ve felt more uplifted had the DVD player not decided to stop playing during the final few minutes of the film, as Luke is stripping off his mask and trusting his instincts and the Force in order to make the precise hit he needs to destroy the Death Star. I’m guessing nothing too important happened right then, though, so I’m probably okay.

But all this talk about Star Wars and such has got me wondering just what I was doing in 1978 rather than twisting my hair into Princess Leia buns. What movie was I obsessing about? This one:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my sacred text of 1978: the Walt Disney production of Child of Glass. Wherein 13-year-old Alexander Armsworth and his family move to a spooky old grand antebellum Southern mansion and he and his nerdy friend Blossom encounter the ghost of the beautiful little girl Inez Dumaine (jealous much, Blossom?), who initially appears to him as a throbbing blue light (not unlike a lightsaber, I suppose, but not really). Inez, who has been murdered by her riverboat pirate uncle, cannot rest in peace until Alexander and Blossom solve the riddle of her death and find and reunite her with the “child of glass.” Being a ghost and therefore somewhat cryptic, Inez gives Alexander only the following poetic clue to help him out:

Sleeping lies the murdered lass

Vainly cries the child of glass

When the two shall be as one

The Spirit’s journey will be done.

Oh my God people this movie freaked me out. FREAKED ME OUT. Every Sunday evening, my cousins Michael and Nancy (Nancy, who taught me how to knit and to crochet, and who worked at the Children’s Bookstore in Toronto and brought us wonderful books, and whose weekly visits are the reason I am so devoted to our weekly brunches with Rowan and Isaac’s godmothers, Judy and Jill) came over for deli and we all watched the Disney Sunday Movie together. Because rituals are good. I remember watching Child of Glass with them, remember how utterly entranced I was by Inez, and how terrified. The best part is when Inez comes alive — every ghost, apparently, has a once-in-a-deathtime chance to turn human again — in order to dance with Alexander during the cotillion his parents throw at the Southern mansion. The scariest is when she changes into a menacing spirit in order to scare off the drunken handyman who tries to murder Alexander by setting the Armsworth barn on fire. Because I was seven years old, much of the plot sailed right over my head, but I remember deciding that the only way that I would get through the rest of my life was to cultivate an imaginary friendship with the ghost of Inez Dumaine, to get her on my side so that she would protect me as opposed to, say, stalking me in her scary spirit form and tormenting me for the rest of my days. I imagined myself as a ghost and how and when I might choose to come back as human: with whom would I dance? For years, I used to lie awake at night, just knowing that the ghost of Inez was floating through my house and coming to rest under my bed. We would chat, and I would quell my nerves by telling myself that I was friends with this ghost, that she had my back. It almost worked.

Several years ago, I spent a small fortune on eBay to acquire a VHS copy of Child of Glass, and I watched the whole thing, shaking. Sure, the plot was hokey as the special effects, the dialogue was stilted and the characters two-dimensional (in addition to the drunken handyman, there is Blossom’s grandmother, the “mystical old hag” — according to the copy on the video case — who gazes into her crystal ball and tells Alexander “Strange forces are at work here… Listen to the call of the spirits… they’ll come to you soon”), but watching that movie was like watching a home video of long-lost relatives I’d met once and loved and wondered about and never seen again. Watching it was like coming home.

So, people, I get why those of you who are obsessed with Star Wars are obsessed with it. I can’t argue that my late-70s flick of choice is better or worse. Just mine.

What was yours?

Dear Isaac,

Pretty much every other morning for the past year, I have woken up well before 7 AM to the sound of your voice. Sometimes, if it’s really early, I can cajole you into cuddling with me for a little while, but we always eventually end up downstairs in the kitchen, because you’re hungry, and you want your breakfast.

And, pretty much every other morning for the past year, I have fixed precisely the same thing for you, in quantities that would make a trucker blanch: oatmeal with cinnamon and yogurt and applesauce and — this is key — brown sugar on top. I don’t know how many conversations we’ve had in the past year about brown sugar, but I will say this: you’re very passionate about the subject. You’re generally a little bit anxious each day that I might somehow forget the brown sugar, and you take great pains to remind me, and increasingly higher pitches, not to forget it. In fact, you’d like to put it on your oatmeal yourself. And then you very carefully carry your brimful bowl to the table, and demolish it in about 30 seconds flat. Sometimes, you have seconds.

And then, generally, it’s hit or miss as to whether you eat anything else for the rest of the day until snack time before bed, when you put back more yogurt and applesauce.

Lately, however, you’ve been eating lots: big breakfasts, followed by genuine lunches and dinners to boot. Which can only mean one thing: you’re going to grow. Maybe by the end of the summer you’ll break 30 pounds. I suppose this is a calculated effort on the part of time and nature to ensure that Rachel and I stop carrying you around so much. Because we do. Because you’re just so little, and so light, and so sweet up there in our arms with your sooky thumb and your blankie. More often than not, I just swing you up onto my hip and tote you downstairs, or down the street, or to the car, when you could easily walk on your own two feet — and we both know it. But I pick you up anyway, because I like how you feel in my arms, because I can.

But not for long. You may not weigh much, but you get longer, lankier, by the minute. Your tastes (thumb and blanket aside) are morphing into those of a little kid, not those of a baby. For your third birthday, for example, your other mommy and I plan to get you a flashlight. And maybe a Swiffer. If we cared nothing for your personal safety — not to mention the windows — we would get you a full-sized hammer, because hammers are your favourite things in the entire world. You sneak into my office and check out my tool box, cadging open the latches like a lovesick fool, and I have to pry hammers and screwdrivers and drills out of your passionate little hands while you screech and flail. Rachel recently — and possibly unwisely — purchased a child-sized croquet set for the backyard, and you have misappropriated the mallets for use as hammers. You like to whack the top of the turtle sandbox, the deck stairs, the fence, the swing set, the windows, and each time you whack something I say your name until, tired of giving warnings, I eventually confiscate the mallets, and you tell me that I am mean. I will be in the middle of telling you a story, or discussing what everyone did today around the kitchen table, and you will interject, “And there was a hammer…” Your favourite song is “I’ve been working on the railroad,” but, occasionally, you will ask me to substitute the word “hammer,” repeated over and over, for the regular lyrics. And then you gaze at me, eyes shining, as I do.

Perhaps as a foil to your hammer obsession, or perhaps merely as a complement to it, you also enjoy a good session of “playing princesses,” revelling in a twirly-skirted velvet dress that we picked up at a thrift store. For your birthday, you have already received from your Rob a princess hat and sparkly shoes, which you insisted on wearing to bed, even thought they cut off circulation to your feet. Aside from the occasional kid on the playground, no one has ever told you that boys “don’t wear dresses,” and, if I have my way, no one will for as long as possible.

You have a new-to-you purple bike with training wheels, and a new helmet, and you tell pretty much everyone you meet about them. You’re still figuring out the art of pedalling; I manipulate your tiny feet and ankles so that you get the hang of forward propulsion, and although you’re quickly improving, you’re still impatient, swatting my hands away from the handlebars when I attempt to correct your steering, keep you on the sidewalk.

After you tell people about your bike, you like to tell them your two favourite jokes. “Hello,” you say: “my nose is on fire.” And then you say, “Banana split!” You also like to tell long, complex stories, generally involving lions biting you and robots throwing things out the window. And hammers. When you are unhappy with me, you tell me that you are going to throw me out the window. Or into the garbage. Lately, after six months or so of these threats, I have taken to responding, “Okay, pick me up and throw me out the window. Pick me up and throw me in the garbage.” To which you respond, “I can’t pick you up.” And I say, “I see,” and you say, “I not talking to you any more.” And I can tell you that very little is as heartbreaking as the snub of an almost three-year-old sprite of a boy, but the good news is that your snubs never last long. Apropos of nothing, you will suddenly announce, “Mommy, if you are stuck in a machine I will pull you out.” “Mommy,” you say, “if you fall out of your bed tonight you can come and sleep in my bed with me and I will keep you safe.” “Mommy,” you say, “when I am big and you are little, you can ride my bike.” And I say, “Thank you.”

You are (mostly) in love with your brother, and the feeling is (mostly) mutual. You seek each other out, literally fall upon each other, and Rachel and I are still learning to back off, to watch you wrestle and tussle and laugh and occasionally go too far with each other — often, if we stay out of things, you figure them out on your own. Rowan, nearly double your size, generally has the upper hand physically, but you make up for your stature in scrappiness and perseverance. He is occasionally indulgent with you, lying spreadeagled on your bed and giggling as you body slam him over and over, with a zeal that forces me to turn my head away. Later in the evening, the two of you will snuggle up again in your bed as he reads stories to you before you hug and kiss goodnight. Those times are some of the most enchanted of my life.

People adore you. Everywhere you go, you talk to people, telling them your jokes, about your bike, the lions. Your babysitter takes you regularly to visit an assisted-living facility, and little old ladies hobble out of their rooms to say hello to you as you trundle by. You have a “lady friend” there, a one legged woman in a wheelchair who, unbidden, buys you presents: books, stuffed dogs, a sparkly reindeer. “Please,” we have said to the lady friend via the babysitter, “you don’t need to buy him things.” And she has responded that you are the highlight of her life and she will spend her own money how she pleases.

People adore you, and you adore people. A few nights ago, before bed, you came to me, then Rachel, then Rowan, for “a hug and a kiss.” And then you wrapped your arms tight around your own self and kissed your right shoulder before tumbling up the stairs to your bedroom. And I wished for you to always have exactly what you had in that moment.

And, as much as I wish that I could keep you exactly as you are, as you were in that moment, the truth is right there in those uber-bowls of oatmeal: you’re growing. You’re changing. “He’s leaving me,” I wail to Rachel, and she nods sagely. You’re leaving me, but, mostly, you’re coming into your own.

Happy third birthday, little guy.

This post is part of the 5th Annual Blogging for LGBT Families Day, hosted by Mombian. Check out the other participating blogs! A very slightly different version of this essay appeared in the Winter 2010 edition of Lilith Magazine. Warning: tearjerker.

My girlfriend proposed — if you could call it a proposal — over the phone, long-distance, on a Sunday afternoon in October 2003. Cordless in hand, I was rooting through my fridge for something to eat when she said, “So, what do you think about getting married?”

I paused, the cold air from the refrigerator blowing in my face.

“Um,” I said, “okay.”

And that was that. We were getting hitched.

The Canadian province of Ontario had — finally — granted same-sex partners the right to marry only the previous summer, and all of a sudden “gay marriage” was on the radar, the topic of every conversation, garnering its own special section of the editorial pages each day and forcing Canadian queers to consider the question: Will you or won’t you, now that you can?

“Not us,” I had thought about me and Rachel. After all, we were good feminists. We both had master’s degrees in Women’s Studies, for god’s sake. Not for us the need for state sanction, that piece of paper from the City Hall keeping us tied and true. Not for us the capitulation to tradition.

And then, she asked. And all of a sudden it was us. When I asked her why, Rachel simply said, “It felt like a good approximation of where our relationship was at the time.”

She had a point. Eight and a half years in and counting, there we were. We’d just spent the previous year rescuing the relationship from near ashes, sitting across from a skilled therapist as we learned to talk to each other all over again, to wipe clear that pane of murky glass that seemed to be there between us, distorting our images of each other. She’d finished her doctorate, had got a tenure-track job teaching at a northern Ontario university. I’d built up my freelance career. We were looking at houses up north; I planned to move from Toronto to be with her in the fall. And we had booked the first flight for our sperm donor to fly in from Vancouver so we could begin the process of trying to have a baby.

We didn’t tell anyone for a few weeks. At first, Rachel didn’t want to tell anyone at all, ever. She wanted to elope, have a secret ceremony at City Hall and never mention it again. I think she was scared: if we said it out loud, if we told anyone, it would be real. But we were also scared of my family’s influence. I come from a family big on big weddings — weddings of the white-dress variety, with dozens of attendants. Weddings that cost tens — if not hundreds — of thousands of dollars. Weddings with DJs and klezmer bands, with first dances, with showers and rehearsals, with open bars and (I swear) mashed-potato bars and (kosher) hotdog carts wheeled in at midnight. Weddings with disposable cameras on the tables and head tables, preceded by a year’s worth of Friday-night dinners in honor of the engaged couple. My mother’s sister owns a bridal store. We had lots of reasons to be afraid.

Slowly, though, we both warmed to the idea of a public ceremony, on our own terms. We began to plan our ideal wedding: outside, maybe on one of the islands on Lake Ontario. Summer. A string quartet. Fantastic outfits. I would bake. A big party with family and close friends. We’d find a way to afford it.

And then we told my parents. More precisely, on a Sunday evening in November, we invited ourselves over for dinner and told them about our baby plans. “And there’s one more thing,” I said.

“There’s more?” my mother said, weakly. My father just grinned as he sat next to her on their family room couch, where she spent most of her time these days.

“There’s more,” I confirmed. “We’re getting married.”

What I thought was an afterthought became the main event. “You’re getting married? When?” asked my mother. “Where? How?”

We began to outline our vision: summer, outside, family and close friends—

“Well,” she interrupted, “you’ll have to do it here. At our house.”

Rachel and I looked at each other. I was about to explain why we couldn’t possibly hold the wedding at my parents’ house when Rachel said, “Okay. That would be lovely.” I looked at her as though she had gone insane. “What were you thinking?” I asked her in the car on the way home. “Well,” she said, “it’s just that it’s your mom.”

My mom. Who had reached out in dozens of small ways to my girlfriend over the years. Who had helped pave the way toward my father’s slow but eventually steadfast acceptance of my relationship. Whose chicken soup Rachel — at the time a vegetarian — ate without hesitation. My mother, battling breast cancer, there, on the couch.

And that was the end of the first wedding, and the beginning of the second. By Monday morning, my mother had notified all our relatives: I came home that evening to a half-dozen messages of mazel tov from scattered cousins, aunts and uncles, who promised to be there for our “big day.” By Tuesday morning, my mother was in full swing, brainstorming caterers and flower arrangements, guest lists and officiants.

“Um,” I said, “I’m not sure we can afford all this.”

She paused. “Oh, Susan,” she said, “we’d like to pay for it.”

It was a vast gesture of acceptance that I should have anticipated and hadn’t — and the fact that I hadn’t suggests that I was more caught up in doubts about the legitimacy of my own marriage than were my parents. For them, this wasn’t a “gay wedding.” It was their daughter’s wedding, and, damn it, they were going to do it up right.

 * * *

Doing it up right, I soon found out, meant a lot of details. We set the date: June 13. We met with the caterer. We negotiated the guest list, capping my parents’ friends to, in my mother’s opinion, an impossibly small number that seemed to grow as the weeks passed. (We had conversations like this: Her: “Gloria’s coming.” Me: “But she’s not invited.” Her: “I know. I told her that. And she’s still coming.”) We found a rabbi — possibly the only one in the city — who would agree to perform both an interfaith and same-sex wedding. A secular humanist Jew, her only conditions were that the ceremony contain no reference to God and no sexism. We could live with that. We booked the string quartet, asked my sister-in-law to do the flowers. I applied for our marriage licence: the forms hadn’t yet been updated to reflect the new legislation, and so my name was entered under the heading “groom.” I wondered which of the two men in line ahead of me at the registrar’s office would be a bride. After much convincing on the part of family and friends, we even registered, and then spent a couple of giddy hours debating china patterns and testing the fine blades of luxurious German knives.

In the meantime, we bought a house up north. We flew our donor in for a second try, then me to Vancouver for the third, which “took” — I was pregnant. My parents were over the moon. So was the rabbi.

And my mother’s chemo failed.

Through it all, we had tried to ignore the question that hovered, unspoken, in the backs of our minds: Would she make it to June 13? Back in October, we had been optimistic. Yes, my mom was weak, but for the past three years each successive round of chemotherapy, each new drug, had brought her back. Over the past 20 years she had survived, against astonishing odds, two previous bouts with cancer, one ovarian, one breast. The disease was the product of mutation 5382insC of a gene now known as BRCA-1 (BR for breast, CA for cancer). Women with this mutation — women like my mother, and her mother, who died of ovarian cancer in her 40s, and her mother, who died of breast cancer — have an up to 46% lifetime risk of developing ovarian cancer, and a 50 to 85% chance of developing breast cancer. One in 45 Ashkenazi Jewish people carry a BRCA mutation, as opposed to one in 800 to 1000 individuals in the general population. Their daughters — women like me — have a 50% chance of inheriting that mutation.

Those were the facts. And yet we couldn’t quite face them. Although my mother had tested positive for the genetic mutation, I had resisted testing. Never mind that I was pregnant — and potentially with a daughter to whom a Jewish family legacy of cancer could be bequeathed. Never mind that my mother’s cells were coded to multiply beyond her body’s capability to sustain them. I couldn’t think about my own mortality, and as for my mother, we thought she was invincible. We were counting on her track record of almost miraculous resilience: Why would this occurrence — breast cancer now metastasized — be any different?

And yet, it was. By April, she was vomiting up most of what she ate, and had started spending nights as well as days on the couch, because the walk up the stairs was too hard. She found it increasingly difficult to breathe.

We all saw the third wedding coming, but we hesitated. Finally, my mother said out loud the words no one else had been able to say. She’d spent the night at the hospital in respiratory distress; the doctors had drained two litres of fluid from around her right lung, the one that didn’t have a catheter in it already. We had an appointment with the palliative care doctor the next morning.

“Susan,” she said, “I don’t think I’m going to make it to June 13.”

“We’ll change the date,” I said. “We’ll do it sooner.” She nodded. My father just looked into his lap as he sat next to her on the couch. I didn’t cry until I phoned the rabbi to reschedule.

We settled on Mother’s Day, May 9, three weeks away. It was the closest we could fathom pulling everything together. It would be a truncated affair, just family and a few close friends at my parents’ house, no dates, no quartet. Our families changed their flights. We flew up north, signed the lawyers’ papers on the house, flew home, found rings and outfits, met with our midwife. We printed off our ketubah (no God, no sexism) — no time to commission anything custom. I had a pre-wedding pedicure, and then burst into tears when the polish smudged. “All I want is for my toenails to look nice,” I wailed in the car on the way home. Rachel looked at me sideways. “Is it really your toes you’re upset about?”

Meanwhile, my mother deteriorated rapidly. She had moved from the couch to a hospital bed we’d set up in the family room, but she could no longer get comfortable. Even small efforts like going to the washroom became overwhelming. My father spent hours trying to convince her to eat something, anything, but she wasn’t hungry, and her body wasted, wisps of chemo-thin hair framing her gaunt face. She had coughing fits that left her exhausted. Some combination of drugs and disease left her unfocused and anxious, confused or annoyed. “I know I’m not making sense,” she told me. “It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to make sense.”

The night before the ceremony, we ordered in Thai for the immediate family members who had congregated. My mom napped in the family room while we ate quietly in the kitchen, unsure how to work her decline into the celebration, how to acknowledge such sorrow in the midst of what was supposed to be joy. The food tasted like sawdust.

“I’m not sure I can go through with this,” I told Rachel at the door as she left to meet her mother at our downtown apartment. I was going to sleep at my parents’ home, on night duty.

The next morning, the tips of my mother’s fingers had turned dusky and I wasn’t able to rouse her. But her chest rose and fell, and so I called up denial, found the now-much-too-big clothes she wanted to wear and laid them out, to help her into later on. She died while I left the room to eat breakfast and while my father was at his computer, printing out his toast to the brides. “Excuse me?” said the home-care worker. “Miss? I think that your mother is not breathing.”

We held the funeral the following day. My cousins, already assembled for the wedding, were pallbearers. The wedding caterer fed the hundreds of people who showed up at the house following the burial. Rachel and I exchanged rings privately, then sat shivah.

The fourth wedding was on June 13, in my parents’ backyard — a much smaller affair then we’d originally planned: just family and a few close friends, hors d’oeuvres and lunch. In the photos of the ceremony, we all look so sad under the chuppah: my father and brother are holding back tears; my sister-in-law wears dark glasses, and Rachel and I clutch each other’s hands and stare straight into each other’s eyes, biting our lips. At three months pregnant (with, as it turned out, a boy, who would be named for his Bubbe), I am barely showing. When the time came to break the glass, though — because according to Jewish tradition, in each simcha we are always reminded of our sorrows — we couldn’t do it. We tried, but maybe there had been too much sorrow already. Our high heels simply pushed the glass deeper into the soft ground, where it stayed resolutely whole, unbroken, unbreakable.

No, not Scrabble tiles, although I wouldn’t blame you for guessing that. Not golf balls, either, or marbles or a rock collection or tent pegs or jigsaw puzzle pieces. When we moved into this house I shoved the bag into a closet, and last week Isaac came downstairs with it around his neck. He was most interested in the bag itself, but that’s only because he didn’t know what was inside:

Now, you’ll either know immediately what this is or you will not. And, I would venture to say that whether you recognize it immediately as a gum wrapper chain says something about you. What, exactly, it says I’m not at all sure. Rachel seems to think that the fact that I have managed to, over a 28-year span, transform untold numbers of chewing-gum wrappers into a multicoloured chain that measures — one sec — approximately 59 feet long is a sign of some kind of weird, tenacious, obsessiveness. I say, if you want obsessive, here’s obsessive. But the truth of the matter is that I have never passed by a stray gum wrapper on the street without stooping to pick it up.

The chain began in fifth grade as a joint project between me and my friend Adrienne; she in particular supplied a range of Carefree gum wrappers and boundless enthusiasm. But, apparently, not as much enthusiasm as me, the Keeper of the Chain, the grown woman who still adds to it.

When it became apparent, back in the early 1980s, that the chain and the wrappers that make it up needed some kind of permanent home, my dad tossed me the purple bag, thus continuing the great Canadian whiskey’s double life as storage provider for random stuff. Wrappers include Carefree Gum; Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit, Double Mint and Spearmint flavours; Fruit Stripe Gum; Beeman’s; Orbit; Dubble Bubble; Beech Nut; Big Red; Freedent; and others whose names I can no longer piece together from the origami mix. My elementary school friends used to bring me exotic brands from their United States vacations. It used to smell sweetly fruity; I would drape it over my shoulders or bury my face in the Crown Royal bag and inhale cherry, grape, cinnamon. Now, when I inhale, nothing: the scent is almost completely gone.

As are gum wrappers, aren’t they? At least, the long, thin flat sticks — first sheathed in tissue paper or foil, over which were folded the colourful paper sleeves. Typing that now, I can see that the wrappers were utterly overpackaged, contributing no doubt to global warming and our landfills, but I — in case you haven’t noticed — still have a soft spot for them. I think that Juicy Fruit is still in production, but the wrapper has changed from its sturdy paper to a slick, plasticky stock that just isn’t as satisfying.

I haven’t actually chewed gum for years, and I can’t remember the last time I found a suitable wrapper on the street. They’ve become hot commodities; currently, there’s an auction on eBay for two chains, found at an estate auction, measuring 15 and 18 feet each — “folk art chewing gum wrapper chains,” no less — plus 3500+ wrappers. Current bid is $120. I can’t say I’m not tempted, but that would push me over the edge from nostalgic to just plain weird, wouldn’t it? Or maybe we just say that I’m committed to my art. Maybe I need a patron. Actually, I definitely need a patron: feel free to send me your wrappers, and know that you are contributing to a storied folk art tradition.

So, I’ve been trying to figure out how to write a post about Mother’s Day without turning it into some huge pity party where I’m that host who ties on a few too many and then starts ranting while you, the politely horrified guest, back away slowly, a frozen smile on your face, before finding both a place to set down your half-full glass of Pinot Noir and an excuse to leave quickly.

But here’s the thing: Mother’s Day is a painful holiday if you don’t have a mother. Now, I realize that many people out there have or had terrible relationships with their mothers, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they too find Mother’s Day at best annoying and at worst horrible. But if you actually loved your mother and liked her a lot, too, then that second Sunday in May can much too easily become a yawning chasm of desperate longing. If you both loved and also liked your mother, and she died too young smack-dab ON MOTHER’S DAY, then there’s very little left to redeem the holiday. Especially if you were pregnant at the time with your first child and felt, irrational as it may sound, that everything might be okay if she could just stick around long enough to meet your baby. Especially if — and this is where you start looking for your coat because the whole thing really gets too maudlin, and you really can’t keep the sitter waiting — you were, oh, going to get married on that particular Mother’s Day but then, of course, had to cancel the wedding and instead plan a funeral.

It’s a challenge. I don’t like being jealous of my friends who can call up their mothers not only on Mother’s Day but any old time they want, who go out for Mother’s Day brunch or barbecues or mom-and-daughter mani-pedis and such. Over the past five years, my jealousy and my grief have diminished, but they’re still there, pinpricks targeting the balloons of other people’s joy.

Of course, the situation is complicated by the fact that — hey! — I now have children of my own, children who don’t and shouldn’t grasp the extent of my ambivalence about this holiday. This weekend, Rachel and I will receive kindergarten- and babysitter-crafted gifts from two wee boys whose worlds still revolve largely around not one but two mommies. And I will find it touching, but slightly empty.

My mother never liked sentimentality. In fact, she wasn’t a fan of Mother’s Day, put up with my five- and six-year-old insistence on making her breakfast in bed even though she drank only instant coffee in the mornings and hated crumbs in the sheets. One year, when I was about 11, I found a card that read, “Happy Mother’s Day — now go away and leave me alone.” “That’s perfect,” she said.

My mother’s own mother died when she was 17, but she never talked about it, brushed off my questions about how she felt with answers like, “It was a different time then. We didn’t have relationships with our parents the way you do today.” I’m not so sure she’d be thrilled to with my harping on about the whole thing — online, no less. Probably she’d say something like, “Just open the card and eat a piece of toast in bed and hug those two boys and get through the day like you would any other.” Because, of course, the cliché is also true: for those of us in the trenches — and who isn’t, in some way? — every day is Mother’s Day. All those days add up to a lifetime — however long — of memories, and the point is to have the good ones far outweigh the bad.

So happy Mother’s Day to all of you. And for those of you who have lost a mother, I’m raising my glass of Pinot Noir to you. Grit your teeth and eat a piece of toast in bed and remember the best things about your mother.

And if you’ve read this far — thanks for sticking around.

Honestly, I stare at these things the way I used to stare at a couple of babies as they slept — sneaking back for just one more peek, scanning them for each new development; each unfolding, each unfurling. It’s addictively satisfying (or is that an oxymoron?), all that potential.

Rowan stares at them, too — his “beautiful seeds.” He pushed for flowers, lots of flowers, over vegetables, and now is the proud papa of an egg carton or two of giant sunflowers, pansies, and delphiniums. Me, I’m all about the beets, bats about the beets, nuts with the beets — you get the idea. Rachel seems to have a soft spot for the peas and beans. The plan is to raise property values by turning our front yard into a series of 16-square-foot, raised vegetable beds — square-foot gardening to replace our sea of anthills and dandelions. (Although, after reading this, I’ve been inspired to gather dandelion greens.)

I stare at the seeds the way someone else very little stares at his new lava lamp. Which is to say, adoringly and obsessively. Yes, of course it makes perfect sense for a nearly three-year-old to have a lava lamp: what could possibly be inappropriate about a toy that heats up to skin-burning temperatures, is made of glass, and filled with liquid? Still, he fell in love with it at a penny auction, and then won it, and now we turn it on at bedtime and at nap time, and he lies there, basking happily in its red glow, until he falls asleep.

And then I sneak into his bedroom and turn it off, but not before staring at him in his dinosaur pajamas for a few minutes, his thumb halfway out of his mouth, various bears scattered around the bed.

Far 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.

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?

Hey folks! It’s time for another episode of Talking about Death.

Actually, probably not so much episodes as commercial breaks, small interruptions in our regular programming to discuss life’s big, unanswerable questions in manageable chunks.

Rowan is back on his “figuring out death” focus, looping round as he does to the subject every few months or seasons or so. Last week, he woke me up with a chipper “Rachel and I talked about dead people last night!” In fact, he and I had talked about dead people as I lay with him before he went to sleep — what it means to be dead: that you can’t see, or hear, or feel, or know about the people still living. He had sobbed at the thought of leaving me, Rachel, his brother; missing us too much already; not yet ready to not be. I rubbed his back, held him close, tried to explain about probabilities, how memories and lessons and the wonderful things that we do live on. But mostly I was quiet, letting him have his grief, work through it.

Which he continues to do, in slightly macabre — if generally quite pragmatic — ways.

“I love this cat,” Isaac said on Saturday morning, nuzzling Lola, our increasingly tolerant alpha feline, as she stretched across the kitchen floor. And from the dining room came sound of the voice of five-year-old wisdom, intoning: “You know that cat’s going to die one day.”

I went to sit with Rowan at the table. “Who will you be sadder,” he asked me between bites of oatmeal with milk and brown sugar: “when the cats die or we?”

“When you die,” I told him. Because it’s true.

This morning, on the way to school: “If a giant pancake runned over you, would you get dead?”

“No,” I answer, “I doubt it. It would have to be a really giant pancake.”

“But if a car runned over you, you’d get dead, right?”

“Yes, probably. Or at least very hurt.”

“But you would only get dead if it runned over your heart and your head, right? Your heart or your head?”

“If it ran over your heart or your head, yes, you would probably die.”

Small pause.

“Hey, head, dead! That rhymes!”