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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“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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… 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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… can be heard today — talking about (what else?) And Baby Makes More — on CFUV 101.9 FM. That is, they can be heard on the radio for those of you lucky enough to actually be in Victoria, BC, today, where I’m guessing that the illusion that it’s still fall is being perpetuated. Tune in between 1 and 2 PM Pacific time. For those of you elsewhere, you can listen in online at www.cfuv.uvic.ca.

It’s a good thing “Women on Air” didn’t try to interview me last week, because the interview would have been punctuated by coughing fits and extended nose-blowing sessions. So sexy. Yes, hot on the heels of H1N1, the dreaded, month-long sinus infection with the bonus pack of hacking cough has returned. I’d like to think that the germs have rendered my voice appropriately Kathleen Turner-esque, but really I sound like Harvey Fierstein just inhaled some helium.

Speaking of Harvey, if I hadn’t already given away my right thumb to the past year, I would give it away now to go see him play Tevye in the production of Fiddler on the Roof currently touring North America but — surprisingly — not stopping in Thunder Bay. What, David Mirvish, the 30-odd Jews up here weren’t a big enough draw? I guess I can’t blame you when the local Santa-meter is already pushing 11. Exhibit A.: my son’s PUBLIC SCHOOL senior kindergarten curriculum, which seems to have emerged intact from the 1950s. It’s all decorated with pictures of Santa and Christmas trees and reindeer and the like, and filled with chirpy instructions to “Decorate your tree and bring it to school this week!” “Write a letter to Santa!” “Practice your holiday songs and teach them to your family!” “Count the days until Christmas!” “Put out milk and cookies for Santa and a carrot for his reindeer!” (Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. I did add in those exclamation marks.)

Discussion with the school is ensuing. Wish us luck in convincing the powers that be that it’s time to break with, as Tevye would say, “Tradition! Tradition!” in favour of some December activities that feel just a wee bit more, oh, multicultural. Inclusive. You know — something that makes me feel less like I’m living in a ghetto.

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Dear Rowan,

In Thursday’s mail, there it was: a bright red envelope with a British stamp, addressed to you. Inside was a birthday card from your doting Gaga, wishing you a most wonderful fifth birthday. The two crisp bills in the envelope didn’t hold your attention nearly as much as the fact that the card came with a pin with a big red “5” on it. You turned it over and over in your fingers, and wondered out loud if you should wear it right now.

“I don’t know,” I said. “You’re still Four, aren’t you? If you wear your ‘5’ pin right now, Four might feel bad. Maybe you should wait a few days. Maybe you shouldn’t wear it until your birthday party.”

I expected you to tell me in no uncertain terms that you wanted to wear the pin anyway, that it was yours and that you could do with it what you liked. I expected you to say something to the effect of, “I’m in charge of me. I make my own rules.” But you took me seriously, calmly even, putting the pin aside until the weekend, when you were surrounded by a frenetic gaggle of senior kindergarten classmates at a bowling alley.

Yes, we ushered out four and rang in five by taking 10 four- and five-year-olds bowling on Saturday morning. And, let me tell you, it was a good call. The idea of your birthday party had overwhelmed me for weeks. Every time I thought about what to do, I got tired: the food, the invitations, the guest list, the decisions, the cleaning, the entertainment. The guilt at the possibility of not getting everything exactly right. Not to mention fitting it all into a weekend filled with grandparental visits and out-of-town guests, a children’s event at the synagogue, and, oh, a book launch. Picking up the phone and calling Mario’s Bowl was the most liberating thing I’ve done in months: all we had to do was invite the kids and bring a cake. And loot bags. With the surge of energy I got from the weight of birthday-party planning lifted from my shoulders, I managed to get it together to get out my mother’s — your Bubbie Ruthi’s — vintage Betty Crocker cookbook (“Decorating fancy cakes has become a fascinating hobby for many women. With a little practice… you too can turn out pretty decorations for special occasion cakes. And someday, you will perhaps trim a tiered wedding cake for a daughter or friend.”) and whip up — with the help of you and your brother — a Smartie-dotted rendition of Black Midnight Cake:

Your brother in particular found it fascinating. Yes he did.

Yes, outsourcing the birthday party was the best thing in the world we could have done, even if only because, at the end of an hour of bowling with you and your friends and a few toddlers thrown in for good measure, and then helping corral pizza and cake and loot bags, I was so exhausted that my jaw ached and I had to stare at the ceiling for half an hour in bed and thank God that we had chosen not to hold the event at our house because then I would have been catatonic.

It’s not that anyone behaved badly. In fact, you were all models of picture-perfect SK behaviour. It’s just, Rowan, that you — like all of your friends — are the merest bit, well, exhausting. I’ll tell you a secret: Four (also known as your fifth year on this earth) has tested my resources so often that sometimes I felt like I didn’t have thumbs, like I’ve been holding on with only an imperfect, slightly treacherous grip. Even though I jokingly told you that you might not want to cut off your time as a four-year-old any earlier than you have to, during the past 365 days, part of me has often wished for the end of Four, for the arrival of Five and, perhaps, a slightly more peaceful time. Some days, Five couldn’t arrive soon enough.

Don’t get me wrong: Four has also been fantastic, fabulous. All vestiges of babyhood have fallen away from you over the past year, replaced by big-kid confidence. You still love to be read to, but now you read to us, too, entire books from cover to cover with barely a stumble. You tolerate Thomas the Tank Engine and Elmo, but you have started to cross the line into Pokémon and Bakugans and — when we let you — computer games. Big-kid stuff. You have friends, real friends, with whom you create complex games and worlds during the courtyard recess. You are competent, insisting on carrying in the bags of groceries, programming the stereo, addressing the birthday invitations. You probably know more about my iPod than I do, and you take decent photographs. You have real conversations on the telephone, even if you can’t sit still while talking (or, for that matter, while eating) and instead circle the ground floor, climbing up and over the couch and across the radiators as you talk to your Rob, your grandparents, your godparents, your friends, and every single person who calls our house when you’re home, because you won’t let us answer the phone — that’s YOUR job. “I’ll get it!” you yell, jumping up from whatever task is at hand and running for the phone. “I’ll get it!”

Over the past year, I have talked to the parents of many of your friends. Often, I asked them, “So, how’s Four treating you?” And, so often, they roll their eyes and then they hold up their hands and show me that they too have no thumbs, just scabs to show that they once had a grip. And this has, paradoxically, helped to keep me sane.

At the same time, the four-letter parts of Four seem to be fading just a bit, replaced more and more often by the fabulous parts. I’ll tell you another secret: as much as Four was about you learning some of the rules of appropriate behaviour, just as much of it was about me and your other mother learning, again and again, what it means to be a parent, what it means, paradoxically again, to find your equilibrium by embracing the loss of control.

So when you and your nine friends and some of their siblings and your own brother, plus almost that many adults, all showed up at the bowlerama on Saturday, I watched you roll gutter ball after gutter ball and all do your crazy Four- and Five-year-old things: climb all over the ball-return equipment until the bowling alley employees had to tell you to stop; hoard the pink balls; obsess over turn-taking and the correct spelling of everyone’s names on the computers; lie on the floor, spinning a ball and chanting, “It’s the universe! The universe!” You barely ate your pizza, you picked off the pepperoni, you all wanted pink Smarties, you sang alternate, scatological lyrics to Happy Birthday. You were fantastic.

Happy fifth birthday, Rowan. I can’t wait to see what your sixth year brings us.

Love,

U-Mum 

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And although it didn’t take him long to acclimatize, and although he grew to love school, love his teacher, love his friends, love – like Lilly in Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse – the chocolate milk at lunchtime, shades of that first morning still haunt me, have taunted me for the past couple weeks as a new school year approached.

Rowan seemed all gung ho about SK, but of late he had been balking whenever we mention it. “I’m not going to school,” he announced recently. “I’m not going on the bus. I’m just staying home with you.”

We’ve been quietly working to subtly shift his attitude. He has been somewhat mollified by the promise of a granola bar in his lunch on the first day, the fact that there will be a train table in his new classroom, the fact that we have a birthday party to attend right after class today. Still, this morning, as far as I was concerned, was a crapshoot. I was totally prepared for him to get on the bus, happy as a clam – and I was equally prepared (well, as prepared as one can be for such events) for a bloodbath.

 And?

We waited outside, the tension mounting as yellow school bus after yellow school bus drove on by, until finally his arrived, the door opened, and … the sun shone its smiling face down upon me and my boy as he climbed aboard, smiling, and waved goodbye. I think I caught a flicker of doubt cross his face just as the doors closed, but he sat down, and the bus pulled away, and I got all weak in the knees and couldn’t stop grinning.

And then he got to school just fine. His “bus buddy,” a tiny fifth-grade girl, delivered him to his locker and then to the senior kindergarten courtyard, where he dropped his bag and went off to play. I know all this because Rachel, Isaac – Isaac, who spent the morning chanting, plaintively, “I want to take the bus!” – and I followed the bus on foot and spied on Rowan as he made his journey.

We’ll do the same this afternoon as he buses to his babysitter’s. If you think we’re being overprotective, just remember that on my first day of Grade 1, my carpool driver – Mrs. Miller, my parents’ trusted friend – forgot me at school.

But! What a difference a year makes.

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Today was Rowan’s turn to present at “Bring and Brag,” or what in my day used to be known as “Show and Tell.” In my day, though, we were allowed to bring toys, which are now verboten. The official line is that kids will fight and get jealous over toys, but I think the real reason is to make parents’ lives more difficult. I mean, how many meaningful, non-toy objects can there be in a four-year-old’s life? The first time, we racked our brains and sent Rowan with his rock collection. The second time we came up with a papier-mâché cat he had made, accompanied by photos of our own felines. Today, we completely forgot about B&B until approximately five minutes before it was time to leave for school.

“Here,” I said, pulling a book off the shelf and a solution out of my ass. “You can tell the kids all about earthquakes.”

Recently, we were gifted a shelf full of hand-me-down books that includes a series on natural disasters: Rowan is now fascinated by all manner of plagues, including earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes and the like. We went through the book quickly, marking a couple of pages of great interest, going over a few talking points, doing up a quick PowerPoint presentation, and rushing out the door.

Turns out, it was a banner day. Not only was Rowan on for B&B, but he was also Special Person for the day, which is a big deal: the special person gets to sit in the Special rocking chair, be first in all lineups, in charge of the weather chart, and all kinds of other great stuff. There’s a Special Person poem, where the kid fills in details about his or her favourite food, thing, book, etc., and then all the kids recite it out loud.

I asked the teacher how the earthquakes presentation went. “Fine,” she said. “Except that he couldn’t really answer the question, ‘What is an earthquake?’”

D’oh.

Then I looked at the Special Person poem. Apparently, Rowan’s favourite food is crackers. No real surprise there, although I would’ve put money on roast chicken. His favorite book is about earthquakes, which makes total sense. And his favorite thing?

Horses.

“Horses?” I said.

“Something there surprise you?” said his teacher.

Um, no, not really, unless you count the fact that I can recall no instance in which Rowan has ever even mentioned horses. He doesn’t play with horses, unless you count a rocking horse in the basement. Last time we were at a hobby farm, he refused — by which I mean screamed in terror — to go on a pony ride. Or a horse-drawn sleigh ride. If you had asked me, I might have said trains or hide-and-seek or the camera or making slides out of Isaac’s toddler-bed railings, but never horses.

Which begs the question(s): Am I clueless about my son? Does Rowan really love horses? Or was he merely pulling the answer out of his ass? I suspect we’ll never know.

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Check out my article, “Small-Town Jew Blues,” at InterfaithFamily.com, on being a queer mom raising kids who are Jewish in Thunder Bay: “For my sons, having two mothers is natural, omnipresent, what they’ve always known. It’s being Jewish that requires more work.”

Note: I did not write — nor can I vouch for the accuracy of — the caption. Sleeping Giant versus strip malls: you decide.

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I was in a client meeting last Thursday when I suddenly noticed the time on a colleague’s watch.

“Excuse me, but it is really four o’clock?” I asked him, panic already flooding my veins like ice water

It was.

“Would you be kind enough to excuse me for a moment?” I asked, backing away from the table as the panic escalated into a five-alarm siren. I grabbed my phone, dialed frantically, and, in my haste, misdialed.

It was my day to pick Rowan up from school — at 2:30.

I tried our number again, and again it didn’t go through. Where was he? Had Rachel figured things out and gone to collect him? Dial again, hit the “4” twice by accident. Dammit — slow down. Dial again — hit the “8” instead of the “4” — idiot! Idiot! Idiot! Idiot! Should I just run over to the school now? The client, a round, middle-aged woman with greying hair, looked on, concerned. “I forgot to pick up my son from school,” I announced to the room. I dialed again, with shaking fingers — okay, got the correct sequence — and a recorded voice telling me to please hang up and try my call again. “Isn’t there a goddamn phone that works in this office?” I yelled. He could be wandering the streets by now. “Here,” I said, shoving the phone into the hands of the big-eyed receptionist: “Here. You call for me.” I dictated the numbers, and she punched them in, and still nothing happened.

“I left my son at school,” I wailed, punching at the phone, the numbers shifting out of my reach. “I left him at schooooooooooooooooool.”

And then Rachel woke me up.

As someone who nearly lost her mind, twice, from sleep deprivation — as documented here, here, here, here, and here — I never thought I’d say this, but here you go: sometimes, sleep’s a bitch.

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