In other breaking news, I am growing out the grey (my voice-recognition software initially heard that as “Growing up Brady,” which really is an entirely different subject).

But. I’ve stopped colouring my hair. You may now choose to stop reading and go do something more useful, which is, essentially, the point. I’m just done with the whole process: the chemicals and the time and the money and the period of malaise when you know you should really touch up those roots but you don’t feel like it. Even writing this down, though, makes it sound as though I’m taking more of a stand than I am, because, essentially, the point is that I simply don’t feel like expending any more energy on colouring my hair. I have found at least one tiny area in my life where I can stop trying, and I’m embracing that area, and this makes me just a tiny bit less fatigued. Yay, lazy!

So, bring on the grey, which, unsurprisingly, has multiplied exponentially in recent years, years that not so coincidentally have coincided with — drumroll, please! — parenthood. I couldn’t figure out how to take a decent shot of my head in its current state, but you can see from these shots that I now have what may be euphemistically referred to as “natural highlights.” Except in my case, they’re grey. And that’s fine. Good, even.

But what’s cool is that, woven in between the grey and the not-grey are strands of bright red — pure and translucent as a strawberry lollipop. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. (And I am so resisting the urge to add in some gratuitous last line about “teasing it out.”)

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I used to go to this sort of fancy gym where the insides of the lockers were nice and clean and I could watch my own individual television while I worked out on one of the two dozen cross trainers and they set out stuff like cotton balls and Q-tips and tampons that you could just have for the taking. Like, ZOMG, as many free Q-tips and makeup sponges as I wanted! (As Rowan might say, “It’s like, they sell it to you for free!”)

But I stopped going to that gym, in favour of a different gym that was closer to our house. The new gym has a pool, which makes it great for the kids. Also, the new gym is cheaper. I figured I could sacrifice the individualized televisions and the free feminine hygiene products and all for the sake of the household bottom line, even if the lockers at the new gym are gritty on the bottom and I often have to do this complicated shuffling dance with all the other women getting changed at the same time as me.

I thought that it might take a bit of time to get used to the new gym, what with having to bring my own cotton balls and all, but it’s been a pretty smooth transition. In fact, I like the new place better. I like the bootcamp classes and the instructors. I like watching the toddlers and their parents. I like that I can walk there in ten minutes. I like eavesdropping on the teenage swim-team girls, and watching them grow up over the course of the year. (Once, I witnessed one of them change out of her bathing suit and into her street clothes inside her locker with the door closed, not even aware she was there until she popped out like some kind of modest groundhog, and I remembered that angsty time when I cared so much what people thought about my body. Just wait till you have a baby or two, honey, I thought, to cure you of caring whether people see you naked in the gym changeroom.)

But mostly, I like the old ladies.

That’s what they are, the dozens of women in their late 60s and 70s and for all I know 80s who are constantly at the gym, sometimes twice a day, going from boot camp to aqua fit to the weights room to the cross trainers and beyond, talking the whole time. The gym is their hub, their social circle, their second home. And they chat away — with each other, with me — about the weather and their children and grandchildren, who’s getting married and who’s coming home for the holidays. They talk about shopping and what they eat and their work and their families and their bodies: what aches, their haircuts (“Why do they always cut your hair so short once you’re old?” one of the old ladies bemoaned the other day. She turned to me: “You’ll understand when you’re old,” she said, and I felt instantly as though I were 20.), how their clothes fit. A few days ago, all the showers were lukewarm and it was like there was some Greek chorus on the subject, wave after wave of women asking and answering each other “Is your shower hot?” “No, no, is yours?” “Oh no, are they cold?” The showers are cold, the showers are cold — I don’t know why exactly, but the urgency of it all made me smile.

I love the old ladies. I love how they take up so much space, how unapologetic they are about their bodies, their scars, the weight of age and experience stripped naked. I listen and occasionally laugh and kibitz. I watch as an old lady spreads her towel carefully across the bench, how she needs to sit down to put her sweatpants on one leg at a time, how she skips a bra because it’s just too exhausting to put on. I love how they always smile, or at least nod and say hello. I love how familiar they are: yesterday, one of them walked by me as I was doing up the hooks and eyes on my ratty old sports bra and actually reached over and twisted off a dangling string. FROM MY BRA. It was awesome.

“There!” she said. “You’re going to get a nice long letter now! At least that’s what they say.” She paused. “Maybe an email in this day and age.”

And then she went on her merry way, leaving me with the sense-memory — just for a moment — of what it must be like to still have a mother.

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Way back in the early days of the Internet, circa 1998 or so, Rachel and I, egged on by some friends (hi, M & H!), took an online personality survey, one of those Kinsey-type things, with approximately 100 questions that asked things like whether we picked the phone up on the first ring or let it go always to machine (machine! See how old the survey was — not voicemail, but machine!). Based on your answers, it then classified you into one of four personality types, and from there, into one of four further subtypes.

I would stake Isaac in a bet that Rachel and I answered every single question differently. You just have to trust me on this. We operate differently. And yet, AND YET … this computer program gave us not only the same personality type but also the same subtype. Meaning that, out of 16 possible configurations, we got the same one. (If math is your thing, tell me if I’ve got the odds of that correct.) Further, it wasn’t as though the whole world was equally divided among four personality types, further subdivided: the site explained that some types were much rarer than others. And that our type was very rare.

Our type?

Master controller.

This is essentially a metaphor for our relationship as a whole. We are both in charge, all the time, albeit in radically different ways. Fifteen years in, maybe we’ve mellowed. Maybe now we’re just apprentice controllers. In any case, we have mostly managed to make this work for us. Sometimes the aggression is too passive, sometimes we go for stretches where the passion loses some of its passion and then we aggressively work on finding the passion again. Occasionally the aggression is downright aggressive — or sometimes quite passionate, depending on your viewpoint — but, well … mostly it’s a tightly run ship around here. (Those of you who have witnessed the household firsthand will refrain from the comments section.)

(Oh, and although it’s too soon to say, I would stake Rowan in a bet that we are well on our way to raising another generation of master controllers. Just a hunch.)

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the ways in which Rachel and I are similar, and how we’re different. My sense is that we operate in a very small spectrum of similarity — and that within that spectrum, the differences are vast. In other words, we are a lot alike, but so close that the differences are noticeable. Or something like that. For the record, however, here are some of the ways in which we are fraternal:

1. Her: Gratification. Me: Deferral of. Rachel is really, really good at relaxing, whereas I am really, really good at doing the seven or eight things that need to get done before I can relax. Which usually means that I never end up relaxing, because by the time I get around to it, it’s time to go to bed. Rachel does not fold laundry while watching television. Rachel eats chocolate at the outset of an unpleasant task, and I fold T-shirts to Glee, while bouncing on my exercise ball.

2. Her: Scrabble. Me: Boggle. She claims that Boggle is too loud, and I claim that Scrabble is too long. In truth, they are our childhood games and we are loyal to them. And we can cream each other at our own games.

3. Rachel loses things and I find them. I was going to write, “I am the finder and Rachel is the…” but that seemed mean. But I can’t tell you how many conversations in our house goes something like:  Rachel: “Where are my—?” Susan: “Kitchen counter, next to the teapot.”

4. Her: Could sleep on a pile of rocks. Me: Earplugs, eye mask, 600 thread-count sheets, cats locked in the basement, the right pillows, utter and complete darkness and silence. This difference explains, in part, the next one:

5. Her: Camping. Me: Would rather be shot in the head.

6. Although we’re both omnivores, Rachel has been quicker to embrace the culinary traditions of my people — Eastern European Jews — than I have to embrace those of hers: the Brits. Although she maintains that she does not like a good brisket, she is completely on board for gefilte fish, matzoh ball soup, lox and cream cheese (although we both concede that the Scots do a fine job with smoked salmon, too), rugelach, hamantaschen, etc. I., however, am not so good with custard, boiled suet puddings in bags with lots of raisins, fried Mars bars and the like. I like Yorkshire pudding and a good roast beef, but I’m not orgasmic about them. (Unless the roast beef is really, really rare.) We are both, however, equally passionate about Indian food, which is, really, what the British seem to do best. And we are both horrified by kishke.

7. We have different shoe sizes. This is likely a good thing, because if we wore the same size shoes, I could see us violating our vow not to share clothes (because that is just SUCH a slippery slope) and going all Carrie-Bradshaw-meets-John-Fluevog. And then we probably wouldn’t be able to feed the children.

8. Rachel pretends not to enjoy musical theater but secretly adores it, while I pretend not to like our grey tabby cat, but secretly don’t like our grey tabby cat. It’s just that she (the cat, not Rachel, who has personality in spades — she is, after all, the Queen of Irony) has no personality. Seriously, the cat is a cipher. There is no there there. She’s nearly transparent, except when she stands, oozing of blandness, in front of my computer monitor and obstructs my view of my work. She had serious potential as a kitten, and then completely fizzled out. It’s sad. It really is.

9. Rachel has fine, straight hair and  I. Do. Not. And I am jealous. Rachel has the hair I have spent my entire life coveting. Instead, I make do with lots of products, the master scissors of one Jimi Imij, hairstylist to the gods at Coupe Bizarre on Queen West in Toronto (and yes, I still travel to get my hair cut, because Jimi thins it out like nobody’s business; it looks like somebody had a litter of kittens on the floor by the time he’s done), and a straightening iron. This difference may also contribute to difference #5 above: it’s hard to enjoy camping when your hair immediately turns to crap.

10. When I cook, I follow the recipe. When Rachel cooks, she deviates. It’s a point of pride — she has to substitute one spice for another, double the cream, mess with the ratio of flour to sugar, etc. She can’t not do that. Rachel also likes to hover when I cook, asking questions like, “Did you put in the cumin?” “Yes,” I will say, “I put in the quarter teaspoon of cumin that the recipe called for.” “Oh,” she’ll say, “and what are you doing with those onions?” “I am going to fry them,” I will say, “just like it says to in the recipe.” “Oh,” she’ll say, “and—” and I will say, “The recipe is right there, and I think you should read it.” She maintains that she is simply making conversation, but I know she’s secretly itching to modify my recipe. (That sounds so suggestive, “Baby, can I modify your recipe?”) I’m all for improvisation, but I tend to reserve my improvisational skills for making up silly songs to sing to the kids. I do, however, double the vegetables in any recipe, because my mother told me to. And she was right.

Still, we eat well.

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Yesterday evening, Rowan and I were engaging in the wrestling match fondly known in our house as “helping him put on his pajamas.” He is perfectly capable of putting on his pajamas all by himself, and yet, there I was, “helping.” Whom, I’m not sure, given that a more appropriate parenting strategy might have been to cheerfully but firmly request that he put them on, and then leave rather than stick around to oversee things. It’s just that it’s kind of fun to forcibly slide one pajama leg on a squirming, laughing child even as he manages to shimmy his way out of the other leg approximately infinity times. It’s good exercise, too. And when I get tired of wrestling, I collapse in a heap on top of him and pretend to fall asleep while he shrieks with joy for me to wake up. As we used to say at summer camp, it’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.

So I’m lying there, “asleep” on top of my five-year-old when I notice something odd about his head. Like a huge bald patch. Or two.

“What happened to your head?” I say, bolting upright.

“Oh. I cut my hair.” He is completely nonplussed about the fact that it looks like beavers have knawed away at his skull.

“When?”

“Just now. In the bathroom.”

He had seemed to take an extraordinarily long time in there. My gut response is to get mad, but, fortunately the little voices of reason that occasionally rent out space in my head win out: It’s only hair. It will grow. No one got hurt. Instead of saying something ridiculous, I have a peek in the bathroom. And this is what I find:

Hair is also all over the floor, and all over the toilet seat. “I tried to put it in the toilet, but it fell,” says Rowan.

“I see,” I say, pocketing the scissors. And all I can think of to say after that is, “Could you please put on your pajamas now?”

“Okay,” he says, and does.

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“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. 

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