I walked the boys to school yesterday, which makes me feel virtuous, what with readying their minds for a day’s worth of learning without consuming even a smidge of fossil fuels. Et cetera. It was only -19°C out, otherwise known as downright balmy — the school herds the kids inside only once the temperature hits -25°. We are hardy souls.

So there I was, feeling downright virtuous as we walked along, the kids all adorable in their matching snowsuits. And I tried hard to feel virtuous. Really, I did. Except that the entire walk to school I was instead consumed with feeling anxious and irritated as my sons played what is fondly known as “The Shoving Game,” which — loosely — involves running full force into each other and knocking each other into the piles of dirty, rotting snow along the sides of the street. The Shoving Game also involves a certain amount of sitting on top of your opponent/collaborator, perhaps occasionally sprinkling his face with snow, hacking away at large ice boulders and hurling them into the street to see them explode, using my body as a human shield, maniacal laughter, and walking along the top ridges of said rotting snow banks, any moment liable to crash skull-first onto the unyielding pavement below.

Also, there is screaming.

It takes maybe five minutes to walk to school when you just walk. Longer, obviously, when you play the shoving game. It felt like an hour. An hour, in, say, stirrups, during which time I tried to remember that this is normal — even healthy — behaviour, that these kids need rough-and-tumble, outdoor play, that they are, by and large, quite good at negotiating the boundaries of their bodies. And even when Rowan momentarily (and not entirely innocently) shoves him too hard and Isaac bursts into sudden, over-reactionary tears, those tears are gone in moments — especially if I don’t intervene.

And I tried not intervene. Really, I did, but it’s almost physically impossible not to find yourself spouting aphorisms like “Careful!” or “Watch the road!” or “If I have to tell you again…” when all you can see is — when you can practically hear — your child’s head splitting open like a ripe cantaloupe on asphalt. I was trying to be cool, trying to be Zen, but mostly I found myself wishing that this city’s blighted urban planning program had seen fit to install more goddamn sidewalks in residential areas here in the 1960s, and occasionally trying to subtly frogmarch Isaac a few steps forward to gain a little bit of distance before the next onslaught.

This is my current, ongoing parenting challenge: maintaining serenity in the face of justified chaos. I tried again last night, when I desperately needed the kids to play in the basement and they just as desperately insisted that they would play in the basement only if one or the other of their parents stayed down there with them, because the Basement Is Scary. So I sucked it up and went down there with them and decided to quilt while they played the “Use the Couch As Leverage to Hurl Yourself over the Spare Bed, Coming Precariously Close to the Edge of the Cupboard Game.”

I had a bit more fun than I had that morning, which just goes to show what an awesome parent I must be.

P.S. I have a new gig! I’ll be blogging weekly at Today’s Parent Canada, as “The (Other) Mother.” Please check it out!

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So I just had to go and broadcast to the entire Interwebs about how Isaac was trotting off so happily to junior kindergarten and preschool. Just had to, didn’t I? And now God has smited me. Smote me? Watever. God is punishing me in the form of a four-year-old who has reverted to weeping and leg-clinging each school-day morning.

(My friend Vikki —whom, not coincidentally, I met on the Internet — says that God ignores the Internet, but we all know that that’s simply not true. God watches the Internet, all zillion pages of it, intensely, looking for reasons to smite people.  Because, of course, the Internet is pure evil. If you’re on the Internet right now, GET OFF. Your eternal salvation depends on it.)

(Still here? Don’t come crying to me when you get smoted.)

We don’t know why – my punitive God theory aside, of course – Isaac has so suddenly reverted, but it may also have to do with the fact that Rachel, hideously, had the nerve to go to a conference in Toronto the week before last, in the process utterly derailing Isaac’s life. Of course, we made the tactical error of telling him about her departure in the morning IMMEDIATELY BEFORE PRESCHOOL, thereby creating (or, perhaps, reactivating) a negative preschool association. Next time, assuming Rachel is ever allowed to leave town again, we’ll time that one a bit better.

The only upside to the situation is that Isaac has become slightly more enamoured of me. It’ll fade fast (GOD: See? I know.), but for the moment I’m soaking it up: the little boy who bounces, meowing, into the bedroom in the morning to climb in next to me: “Mama, can we still play the game where you’re the princess and I’m the kitten who hurt his foot? Because an evil wizard did a  magic spell on your knife and it cut me? And then it cut off all my fur so I’m cold?” The little boy who nestles into my lap while I write early in the morning, my arm snaking around him to reach the page, not minding the inconvenience, the loss of a few minutes’ sleep.

The teachers smile and gently take his hands as we peel him off us in the mornings. They’ve seen it before. He’s not the only one. (“Ah, JK mornings,” one of the teachers remarked to Rachel as she stood, surrounded by wailing kindergartners in the courtyard, “all those tears.”) We’ve seen it  before. But still, it smarts.

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It’s October. Shut UP. No, really. Not even October: mid-October. I know — crazy.

It’s been like that, lately, where I think something that happened last weekend happened the weekend before. Or the one before that. Or, say, last month. Which was September. And in September, we just got kind of busy. It hadn’t occurred to me that we weren’t busy in the summer but, clearly, I had no idea, what with second grade and junior kindergarten and preschool and babysitters and music and sports and Hebrew school and the like and why do I feel all of a sudden like I live on planet Suburban Mother? Because I do. I live on planet Suburban Mother in September October and thank GOD for our calendar with its very large squares and stickers, the calendar that is designwise a blight on my delicate aesthetic senses but without which I would not survive.

Excuse me while I go fill the station wagon and get that meatloaf in the oven.

Yeah, so we’ve been Septemberized. I just made up that word. And, actually, it was a lovely month, gone all tickety-boo (cf CALENDAR; also setting the alarm). A lovely month made lovelier by a certain four-year-old’s 180° shift in attitude about extracurricular (not to mention curricular) activities. Last September was dominated by Isaac’s utter misery over preschool, his sheer dread of which permeated every waking moment. But this year? This year, he has scampered off gladly to every new activity and classroom September has thrown at him: five new things in one week, and the kid who held onto my leg and sobbed last year walked in, cracking jokes, only looking up to say, “You can go now, Mommy.”

And so we went.

I should point out, however, that this newfound independence has not extended into sleeping arrangements. In other words, Isaac is still sleeping in our room, curled up happy as can be on a single mattress next to ours. It’s been at least a year, now, minus a brief but valiant effort on Rachel’s part this past summer to get him back into his own room. (“But then we wouldn’t have a guest room,” I protested, completely inured by then to the idea of a child depriving me of a bedside table for the foreseeable future. I needn’t have worried, given that Isaac has historically, and successfully, resisted all known forms of sleep training for the school of I’ll Do What I Damn Well Please, to the point where we started calling him “Isaac the Untrainable” (a moniker since adopted by our friends for their two-year-old daughter, who is Totally Not Down with spending the entire night in her toddler bed).)

At this point, though, I will admit that it might indeed be nice to sleep through the night in my own room while Isaac sleeps through the night in his. Instead, he wakes at some point in the middle of the night several times a week and, depending on what side of the bed he wakes on (get it? Ha ha), requires varying degrees of coddling to go back to sleep. A few nights ago, he wanted Rachel to cuddle him, but reluctantly settled for her holding his hand. Except that (and don’t tell him this) he wasn’t really holding her hand. Realy, he was holding my hand in the dark while Rachel stayed securely on her side of the bed, murmuring aphorisms to him like Cyrano de Bergerac about how nice it was to hold his hand, too. He finally let go, saying, “Rachel, you don’t have to hold my hand as long as you stay right next to me.” “Okay,” she said, and we all went back to sleep again. We’re totally winning this one, obviously.

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I got a call from the school the other day.

(That’s a whole genre right there, isn’t it? Documents that begin, “I got a call from the school the other day”? That’s about as writing prompt-y as you can get, full of rich imaginings involving truancy and vomit and broken limbs and suspensions and lice. I mean, no one’s heart grows just a little bit lighter when they see the name of their child’s school on call display before picking up.)

Anyway, so I picked up (like I’m going to ignore a call from the school), and there was Rowan sounding very small and far away. “Mom?” He sounded as though he was at the bottom of a well. “Mom? My neck is bleeding.”

Awesome.

Turns out that a stick was thrown by an unknown child and caught him in the neck, giving him a nasty gash. His teacher came on the phone to say that while it looked ugly, it didn’t seem to be too serious. But that he didn’t want a Band-Aid on it. “Mm-hmm,” I said.

“So,” she said, “do you want to come get him, or do you want him to stay in school until the end of the day?”

Um, guess?

“Well,” I said, hedging my bets and weighing my deadline. “If he can manage to stay in school until the end of the day, that’s fine with me.” But I knew it wouldn’t fly even as I said the words: once the option of going home was introduced, the option of staying there fell to the bottom of that same well. I overheard the discussion in the background and then the teacher came on the phone again. “Okay,” I said, “I’m on my way.”

And I went, meeting him in the office where he sat, big-eyed and forlorn, on a bench, holding a piece of paper towel to his neck. When he saw me, his lower lip began to tremble. I got a look at the cut: jagged, slightly deep, about an inch long. Nothing pretty, but nothing too serious. Apparently, his teacher told me, he’d gone right back to class and hadn’t even noticed it until she pointed out.

He agreed after much convincing to put a Band-Aid over it for the walk home.

“You’re going to want to put some Polysporin on that,” a bigger kid, probably in fifth grade, said to me as I went to sign out Rowan.

“Great idea,” I said. Because I would never think to put Polysporin on my kid’s cut.

But he was just warming up. “It’s a really good thing that didn’t get him even 1 INCH over,” the fifth-grader continued.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “It wouldn’t have been good if it had hit his face.”

“His face?” the kid said. “I’m talking about his CAROTID ARTERY. If he had cut open his CAROTID ARTERY, he would have been dead in like six seconds flat. Blood everywhere!”

Rowan stood next to me, his eyes growing bigger and bigger. I pulled him closer to me.

“Yup, that CAROTID ARTERY is a killer,” the kid continued. What, are you 70? I wanted to ask. Instead I smiled and thanked him and gathered up my lucky-to-be-alive son. Who skipped the whole way home, and then, when Rachel came home with a movie for him, ran to the door to meet her him practically shrieked with glee, “Guess what! If a stick had hit my CAROTID ARTERY, I would’ve DIED!”

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“I not going to cry any more when I go to preschool,” Isaac announced from the backseat a couple of months ago. “I just going to be happy.”

And that, my friends, was it: the abrupt, anticlimactic — although entirely welcome — end to the months of outsize emotions, the awfulizing, the vales of tears and the puffy eyes and the Kübler-Ross–esque stages of grief around day care. Turns out I was right all along: he does like preschool! I would say I told you so, but what’s the point? Being a parent essentially means giving up your right to say I told you so. I’m going to put that on a T-shirt.

It’s like that, isn’t it, with children? So little is linear. They don’t progress slowly, gradually, consistently, from one stage to another. Instead, it’s all passionate declarations and unexpected leaps, so abrupt that you don’t realize that they’re the results of months of, until now, invisible progress, practice. Rowan had training wheels, and — blink — now he doesn’t. Isaac cried about preschool, and now — hey presto! — he doesn’t. Now, when I arrive to pick him up at the end of the day, he sends me away, because he’s not ready to leave. Sometimes I watch him through the windows, see how he hangs up his coat on his hook and pours his own water from those little pitchers and shakes maracas at music time and tidies up his modelling clay as a matter of course, all the while chatting up a happy little storm to his teachers.

Still, he’s still very into the ritual of going through the days of the week: there are preschool days and babysitter days and family days, and almost every morning we do a little recital of the order of the week until we get to the weekend, when he gets to revel in his family: his two moms and his brother and his cats and the various aunties and friends and other central folks — like donor/dad/Rob — who make up our constellation. They’re still his favourite, the family days, but now at least he gets to enjoy them without obsessing over the fact that the week ahead will contain some preschool.

So I was very happy to read an early copy of Arthur A. Levine’s new kids’ book, Monday Is One Day. “The hardest part of going to work is being apart from you,” it begins: “Let’s count the days till we’re both at home with a special thing to do.” What follows is a rhyme for each day of the week: Monday is one day; Tuesday is blue shoes day; and so on, filled with dinosaurs, and cuddles and raspberries on the nose and tractors and guitars and the like. Levine, whose imprint at Scholastic is possibly best known as the publisher of the American editions of the Harry Potter series, wrote the book, he says, as he contemplated what it would be like to be apart from his then-infant son. What’s particularly lovely is the range of family types depicted in the illustrations: single parents (male and female), two dads, an older couple that looks as though they could be grandparents, and — so radical, and kudos to Levine, himself a gay dad, for including them — what looks to be a heterosexual couple. I can’t tell for sure, though, because there’s no footnote to explain each family structure: you just have to take each household at face value and assume that the intimacy between children and adults — “a kiss and cuddle, a dance in a puddle, a dinosaur huddle, a sweet family a muddle!” — is the result of years of not-so-invisible love.

"It's a nice book," says Rowan.

Scholastic has offered three copies of Monday Is One Day to me to giveaway to YOU: readers of this blog. To win, leave a comment on this post with the name of a book you love to read with your kids, or detailing your own family’s story of weekly rituals. Or something else somewhat on-topic; I’m not too fussy. On Monday, April 25, I’ll randomly select two of those comments to win books; I’m reserving the third copy for new Facebook friends of this blog: click on the link to the right in order to become a fan (and yes, that is a brazen grab for more friendship, and that’s all I have to say about that). Good luck!

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Wednesday, 8:52 AM. Or thereabouts. At this point, the number’s not really important, is it? What’s important is that he’s here. He is finally, finally here, at school, despite a morning that inched along so painfully that my eyeballs hurt with the strain of keeping my brains from exploding through my face.

And yet, the school insists on prolonging the agony by forcing me to go through the ritual of “signing him in.” Now, I am all for the wisdom of a quick check-in at the office, a little wave and checkmark to let them know that the transfer of care is complete and kthxbai. But they make you fill out this form, this form that on a good day would be asinine but on a morning in which my every move and strategy has been thwarted, on the morning when “parenting” is met with “counterattack,” seems just cruel.

First, as noted above, there’s the time. To reiterate: at this point, does it matter? The time is late. He’s just late. So stop asking.

Then, I have to write his name. Which wouldn’t normally be a big deal except that the space for his name is about an inch and a half long and they want me to write it with a dull, red magic marker tied to the clipboard, and this is the child of lesbians, people: he is hyphenated. By virtue of his egalitarian parents, he has a gargantuan surname, one that I am no more successful at containing in the tiny space allotted for it than I was at convincing a certain six-year-old to get dressed and eat something this morning, goddammit. And so I go over the line, encroaching into the section: “Why is your child late?”

Okay, so, you know what? There is no “why.” There is late, and there is not late, and that is it. There is no answer to this question, just as there is no answer to the question of whether, if you knew what you know now, you would do it all over again. Whatever it is — I’m not getting specific here — would you do it again? Now that you know what it’s like? Ponder that, but don’t answer it. Because there is no answer.

And yet, you have to answer. It seems, from the answers that precede yours, that there are two possible choices: “city bus” and “slept in.” I have no idea what the hell they mean by option A, and option B is laughable: we could have been awake at 4 AM and still not have arrived here on time today. One parent, several lines above me, has written “bla bla blurg.” Atta girl.

Do they really want to know? Can they handle the truth? Do they really want us to write things like (as various friends have suggested to me), “She was naked and screaming in her room when the carpool came?” Or maybe, “Couldn’t be bothered to make the morning any more miserable”? What about this: “Missed the bus after having a meltdown because I put the bananas on his oatmeal AFTER the milk when I was supposed to put them on BEFORE the milk.” Or “Spent 10 minutes frantically searching the house for the purple mittens WITH the holes because she was crying in the entryway and refusing to leave the house wearing the purple mittens WITHOUT the holes. Then spent another 10 minutes convincing her that she would have to go to school wearing the perfectly good purple mittens because I couldn’t find the holey ones. Then realized at the end of the day that they were in her backpack all along.”

Ditching honesty, I suppose I could write “Some hangovers are like that.” Or maybe get all creative and melodramatic: “Suzie couldn’t be at school on time because, well, this isn’t where I was supposed to be at this point in my life, you know what I mean? And once i started crying I couldn’t stop but now that Suzie is six she is such a good listener and she managed to pick out a blouse for me, too. sorry I’m not wearing pants.” And then sit back and wait for the call from Children’s Aid.

Whatever I write, or decline to write, it’s all there between the lines anyway: the story of my deficiencies as a parent.

I left it blank.

PS: Apparently I was also late for the 2011 Blog Delurking Day, but better late than never, say I. So, I’m inviting you to the prom and I hope you’ll say yes: if you’ve been waiting for a reason to comment here but haven’t yet, today’s the day! I’d love it if you dropped me a note to say hi, either in the comments or, if that’s too public a forum, via the contact form.

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… you come from a long line of people who ENJOYED PRESCHOOL. See?

Right there? That’s my mother, your Bubbie Ruthi (I was going to write “your maternal grandmother,” but in our household that wouldn’t really clarify anything now, would it?) in May of 1951, surrounded by a trio of stripy-shirted little boys, having what can only be described as a blast — A BLAST — at a lovely little preschool somewhere in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

See?

And who wouldn’t have a blast, really, with her minions surrounding her, hard at work? I love the composition of this photo (photographer unknown. Here, for the record, is a photograph of the young Elizabeth Taylor). Maybe what you need is minions — would you like some minions? If you think that would get you over the hump, I’m sure we could find some.

“Is it getting any better?” a fellow mom — who has witnessed your histrionics as she drops her own kids off — asked me yesterday at your music class. “Because he’s breaking my heart.”

Mine too. Mine too. But things are getting better. They really are. You no longer cry the night before you’re scheduled to go to preschool, nor for the entire morning leading up to it. And when the tears begin — usually about the time you’re supposed to get dressed and leave — we can sometimes distract you from them, although both Rachel and I have had the honour of towing a wailing three-year-old through the streets in the bike trailer. It’s a distinct feeling, that, saying good morning to neighbours and other parents while an air raid signal of sadness emanates from the trailer behind you. People can hear us coming, that’s for sure, and they smile sadly and shake their heads.

But it’s getting better. Now, you walk into the classroom on your own, and, often, the tears have stopped before I leave the room. You have started to leave your security blanket in your locker, which frees up both your hands for playing. A friend of yours had his first day last week and when he arrived, teary himself, you told your teacher, “I’m not going to cry today. I’m going to help.” And you did, rubbing his back and showing him the ropes.

It’s getting better, because before I pick you up I watch you through the windows, and you are smiling and skipping and picking carrots from the vegetable garden. Your teachers tell me that each day you talk more, do more, play more — that you have great days. Your eyes aren’t puffy like they used to be when I pick you up, and you talk about going back. You eat the food. Sometimes you even nap.

So, Isaac, here’s what I’m wondering: is it really that you dislike preschool so much, or is that you are committed to disliking the idea of preschool? Because I’m kind of inclined to think the latter, that the tears are at this point a habit rather than, say, a sign of actual, immediate, misery. I realize there’s a fine line — or, depending on your viewpoint, a vast chasm — between perception and reality, but I’m starting to think that you might just be okay.

Either that, or I’m an insensitive oaf of a parent. You say tomato, I say to-mah-to.

Still, as much as you tell me you’d like to, we’re not calling off the whole preschool thing just yet.

I will work on the minions, though.

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Isaac has a new evening ritual: The Asking of The Question.

“Where we going tomorrow?” he’ll inquire, all innocent like, but Rachel and I know where this is heading. Mostly, we are able to answer either that he’s going to spend the day with his longtime babysitter or that we’re having a family day. And he — quite literally — shouts “YAY!” and throws his arms in the air for joy. And then he says, “And after that, where we going? And after that?” He keeps up this line of questioning we reach the answer he’s been angling for. And then, there is no shouting of the YAY. There is no throwing of the arms in the air for the joy. Because, eventually, we do have to concede that Isaac will eventually have to head off to war preschool.

And then comes the mourning, the sobbing, the telling us repeatedly how much he does not want to go to preschool, how he doesn’t like it, how he wants to stay home with us or go to the babysitter. Last night, he sobbed himself to sleep. Then, at 5:30 this morning, he appeared in my bedroom doorway to pick up where he left off. “Mommy,” he said, “I don’t want to go to preschool.” He said it over and over, and then it would dull down for a little while as he almost let himself — and me — fall back asleep before jerking himself awake lest he relax and sleep and hasten the arrival of morning and the dreaded preschool. “I know, honey,” I keep telling him. “I know you don’t want to go. I know.”

Over the course of the morning he seemed to begin to resign himself to the thought that you might actually have to go. It was like moving through the stages of grief: from denial (“I don’t want to go to preschool.” I know.) to anger (“I don’t want to go to preschool!” I know, honey.) and bargaining (“But can I bring my blankie to preschool?” Of course you can, sweetheart.) to depression (“I don’t want to get out of bed today to go to preschool. I’m too tired to go to preschool.” Well, of course you are, because you woke up at five in the morning and have been protesting about preschool ever since.) and, finally, acceptance (“Will you tell me on the clock when I can go home?”).

YAY!

Fortunately, Rowan was available to add some levity to the situation. At first, he was solicitous and sweet, bringing his brother teddy bears and blankets and offering hugs and wise counsel: “I didn’t like junior kindergarten when I first started, but it got better.” When that didn’t work, he resorted to scatological humor, with much more success: “Isaac, are you going to bring POO to preschool? Are you going to bring YOUR BUM to preschool? Are you going to bring PEE to preschool?” Normally I try not to pay attention to the potty talk, but, given that it was the first time I had seen Isaac crack so much as a smile in 12 hours, I played right along. The reprieve didn’t last, though, and Isaac trudged tearfully into the beautifully appointed preschool classroom with its fishies and magic wands and natural lighting and oatmeal with raisins and coloured water. COLOURED WATER! What’s not to like, right? The best I can say about the morning was that at least he managed to walk into the room of his own accord, and that I didn’t hear screaming as I exited the building. I remembered my friend Scott’s comment about leaving his son at daycare lo these many years ago: “Maybe the saddest thing in the entire world is a child who is waving goodbye and crying at the same time.”

It’s classic (isn’t it? Say yes.). I know he’s fine at preschool. I know it’s a nice place, full of lovely, caring teachers, beautiful play areas, wonderful food. I mean, I’d spend the day there if I could. I know he eats well and naps there. I even have proof — in the form of photographs taken by the teachers of him enjoying various activities in an effort to convince him that he actually might like preschool — that he has fun there, at least some of the time. But it’s still just so, so sad to have my little boy — my usually happy little boy — be so, so sad.

I ache for him. I really do. I get — or, at least, I assume I get — how much his little world revolves around security, around the familiar. He’s all about the comfort zone, is Isaac: his mommies, his babysitter, his brother, his blanket, his thumb. With enough of those props in place, he’s set, outgoing, everybody’s sweetheart. He does funny little shuffling dances and proffers kisses, asks questions, offers his help. But he doesn’t feel safe yet, apparently, at preschool. And thus he mourns. And I ache for him.

Mostly, though, I ache at the amount of time he spends grieving for the future, his sorrow for the thing that is about to happen. I ache at all the non-preschool hours, hours that could be spent perfectly happily, but that instead are spent anticipating with horror the next day’s events. He’s awfulizing, as my friend Monica likes to call it, living in the future, and a bleak future at that. It’s a skill that I have, sadly, perfected, one that I now spend much of my time trying to get less good at. But I am pushing 40 and Isaac is three, much too young to be envisioning a hopeless tomorrow. “Honey,” I keep saying to him, “right now we’re not at preschool. Right now, we’re going to bed. Right now, we’re fine.” I want him to Be Here Now, and he spends every minute of Now trying to impress upon me the urgency of the fact that he does not want to go Somewhere Else Tomorrow.

This, too, will pass. It will. It must. I’m envisioning a positive future here. Maybe someday soon my son will, too.

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…it’s just that there’s all this WEATHER, fall slamming down on top of summer like a set change, the backdrop with its cold nights and hurricane-force winds thudding down on the seasonal stage — BAM! — to obscure summer with its clear blue skies and heat-thirst and exposed skin. BAM! Fall! We’re done, and stop snivelling in the corner over there about how you want if not just simply MORE summer then at least a GRADUAL shift from one season to the next. Buck up, Buttercup. AUTUMN! IS! HERE!

It’s jarring, like the alarm that woke me this morning, the alarm we will now set regularly, for the first time in six years. We just haven’t had to set alarms — notwithstanding the fact that my commute is a hallway or that our schedules are flexible, we’ve always have children to wake us well before seven, and if they didn’t we took it as a welcome surprise. But this year, with the start of first grade and twice weekly preschool and children who, miraculously, can be relied to sleep at least occasionally through the night and past sunrise, the alarm feels necessary. I’m grateful for it, if grateful is the right word. More specifically I am grateful for the perceived order it confers over the household, over enough time to shower and dress and eat and put together lunches and backpacks and get children to two different locations every single day. I have been fighting, in fact, for the alarm for a while now, fighting against Rachel’s laissez-faire attitude about getting up any earlier than we possibly have to. But last night, the night before the first day of first grade, when I suggested setting the alarm for 7:30, she actually countered with 7:00.

“Really?” I asked.

“Really,” she said.

“Every day?” I asked.

“Every day,” she said.

“Pinky swear?” I asked.

“Pinky swear,” she said, and we shook on it. And then I turned to face her and said very slowly and very carefully, “Okay, because I want you to know that I am fully and completely committed to setting the alarm and two weeks from now you can’t conveniently forget that we had this conversation and decide that you don’t want to set it. Because this is very important to me. I need you to understand that.” And she patted my head.

To be perfectly honest, the alarm didn’t actually wake me — my own internal, autumnal clock did just that. With some help from Isaac, who insisted, circa 6:30 or so, that Rachel go cuddle with him. I lay awake, in the dark, eyes closed, until the news came on and I learned that Australia does indeed have a Labour government and that a 90-year-old man was found alive in the bush in northern Manitoba and I thought how odd it will be to be somewhat informed about world events from here on in. And then we awoke and there was indeed enough time to shower and eat and dress and take two children to two different places. Just barely enough time.

And of course it had to rain, pouring down in grey sheets over me and Rowan as we picked through the puddles and made our way to the gymnasium for the handoff. He’s been fairly low-key about starting school this year, alternating between nonchalance and calm proclamations that he’s simply not intending to go, the way he might decline an invitation to a birthday party. But he hopped gamely out of the car and held my hand as we walked through the doors and through the hallways to the gym. “Oh look,” I kept saying, “here’s Jacob’s dad, and there’s Julie, and Erin and—”

“Mom,” he kept saying, “stop telling me every time you SEE someone.”

And then we were in the gym, and he was in line, and his teacher shook my hand and I caught glimpses of some of the other kids in his class and some of their parents and Rowan kept hitching his backpack up over his shoulders and looking very small and grown-up all at the same time and I caught a glimpse of one of his classmate’s mothers who looked like she was about to cry and you know, a therapist once told me that my tendency to cry so easily — my hyperemotionality — is a sign of a body in crisis, under stress, and to that I simply say, Pah! I am a Goldberg. We cry. Have you met my father? A cryer. Me? Cryer. My five-year-old son, who today started first grade? Two nights ago, after watching an airplane move its way through the sky, I sang to him the first few verses of “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and he asked me, holding the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, to please stop singing, because it was just a little too sad.

Rowan did not cry. And, to my credit, I held it together until I exited the gym and another mother asked me how I was and I gulped. And then another mother came by and took one look at my face and hugged me. And then another. And then we all made our way, slowly, via the first-grade lockers, outside, where we stood making small talk, until I shuffled home, tears mingling with raindrops on my cheeks.

PS: One year ago today

PPS: Two years ago today

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Has it been a week? It’s been a week. I would have written something by now, except that every post I could think of writing began with the line, “I’m the only person in the house who has not yet come down with the barfing sickness.” And that just seemed like tossing fate a big, shiny red apple and saying, “Take a bite, baby.”

Three… two… one…

Okay, still not barfing. We’ll see how long that lasts.

I invited me and the boys over to a friend’s house last Saturday evening for dinner and trampolining. At about 10 p.m., I got the phone call every parent dreads: “Anyone at your house barfing yet?” No, not yet, but on Monday morning I stumbled out of bed and was greeted by Rowan, who said, by way of good morning, “Isaac was throwing up in his bed all night.” Rowan, however, seemed as healthy as an apricot, so we sent him off to school. By midmorning, however, I had arrived at the school to collect him — a miserable, slick little package of a child — from the school’s office. “He’s been very brave,” the principal called as we left. By the next day, both kids were fine, just in time for Rachel to succumb.

Next in line? The babysitter.

My current goal is not to come down with the summer cold that both boys seem to have picked up. And to catch up on the various deadlines that went whooshing by à la Douglas Adams as I pulled extra shifts on barf-watch duty and childcare last week.

Fortunately, Dana Rudolph over at Mombian is picking up the slack, with the second of three giveaways for And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents and Our Unexpected Families. Visit her and leave a comment (by midnight today) about how you have created (or plan/hope to create) your family, or the language your family uses to describe itself, and you could win a copy. The lovely folks at Insomniac Press will mail you a copy directly, so you don’t have to worry about us infecting you.

Good luck!

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