Instead of saying hello when I walk in the door, Rachel likes to greet me with statements like, “I’m pretty sure there’s asbestos in our attic,” or “It smells like gas in here.” (Okay, she’s never actually said that she’s sure there’s asbestos in the attic, but rest assured, now that I’ve written that, she’ll be thinking, “Asbestos … in the attic … Alert. ALERT!”) It’s a charming quirk, her refusal to embrace conventional forms of salutation, but I’ve learned to love it.

So I should not have been surprised when, one day last week, as I walked in the door, she announced to me, “Rowan wants to buy a Happy Meal.”

She said this to me with the gravity with which other parents might have said, “Rowan wants a tattoo.”

Rachel and I have read Fast Food Nation. We’re committed to not eating at the Golden Arches or any of its cousins. We make pizza from scratch, sneak beet greens from the garden into meatballs made from local, organically raised cows. We’re turning the front yard into an earnest little organic vegetable garden.

And yet, our kids are no stranger to McDonald’s. They’ve been to the Golden Arches for birthday parties. Their grandfather has taken them on occasion. (On Passover, no less. Twice.) Their babysitter takes them there frequently to play in the PlayPlace. And, frankly, I’ve been known to end up there myself — on a dark, frigid Sunday afternoon in the middle of winter in a sleepy northern Ontario town, sometimes it is necessary to take children to a free, indoor park to blow off steam for couple of hours. They bounce around on the slides while I write or read a magazine. And we all leave happy, if somewhat sullied.

What our kids are mostly strangers to is the actual food at McDonald’s. When they go with their babysitter, they bring their own lunches, and when I take them, we don’t eat or I assuage my guilt by bringing our own bottles of water and snacks. Occasionally, I will acquiesce to letting them get a muffin or some milk, but even that makes me itchy. The not eating thing was made easier by the fact that, until very recently, Rowan didn’t like chicken fingers or french fries.

But then he saw the movie How to Train Your Dragon, and then he put two and two together and obliged the marketing powers that be by realizing that the toy from the movie was in that meal from McDonald’s! And suddenly, his desire for a Happy Meal burned with the intensity of a thousand splendid suns.

Which left me and Rachel in a moral quandary. We finally decided that he could have his Happy Meal — provided he used his own money to buy it. I’m not sure that Rowan’s ancestors, upon fleeing ancient Egypt all those millennia ago, imagined that one day a five-year-old would use his afikoman money to purchase a very traif fast-food meal.

And yet, there are many things about my life but I’m sure my ancestors did not imagine, either.

“Do you even like the food in a Happy Meal?” I asked him. “Will you even eat it?”

“Oh, yes!” he said, and then launched into a soliloquy of such praise for the food that I briefly considered getting him an agent: “I love it! I love the chicken fingers and I love the french fries and I love the ketchup that you dip the chicken fingers and the french fries in and I love the drink and I love the apple slices and I will get the apple slices so that you’re not worried that I’m not eating healthy food and I will eat it all. Mom.”

“And you know that it’s only a very sometimes food?”

“Yes, Mom,” he said. “I know.”

And so he (and his brother) went to McDonald’s with their babysitter and their own money and bought — and ate — two Happy Meals and got two plastic dragons with removable wings and eyes that light up when you press a button.

And they were happy.

And I will deal.

But I’m never going to learn to love it.

The car is aging.

I mean that, of course, in the sense that the car is — like the rest of us — getting older. But I also mean that the car ages me. As in, I gain a couple of decades whenever I slide behind the wheel of our late-model, Big-Three sedan. It is — and I use this term fondly — a dad car, a car your father might drive, a car my father did drive for several years before upgrading and generously bequeathing it to us.

All my cars, actually, with the exception of the Chevy Cavalier my brother and I shared for two weeks one summer in our teens before it was stolen out of our driveway one night and later found on the outskirts of town with vomit and heroin works in the backseat, have been dad cars: the Pontiac something or other, the Cadillac Sedan Deville, the Dodge Intrepid, and now our current beast. The running theme, of course, has been the price. For me, “free” tends to trump “pride” when it comes to vehicles: if the price I have to pay for not going into hock over a car is that people assume that the carseats in the back are for my grandchildren, well, then, that’s fine with me. Our current car is popular with the seniors here in Thunder Bay. People tend to do a double take when they see me behind the wheel. “But she’s too young,” they must be thinking. “Hi Gramps!” my friend Daphne calls whenever I drive by. My friend Jody giggles whenever she sees it. “It just doesn’t … fit … with the rest of you,” she said once, and I wanted to hug her. (Or maybe hit her.) She, of course, drives a Harley. (Or is that “rides”?)

Still, I have a soft spot for our eleven-year-old car, partly because my mother also drove it. I can still picture her behind the wheel, faintly remember conversations we had while driving, and imagine she’d get a kick out of seeing me drive by, two kids in the back, barking, “Do I need to stop driving or can the two of you stop hitting each other?”

But the car is aging. We are entering, I fear, that period of increasingly rapid automotive decline, where repairs edge out maintenance and visits to the mechanic inch closer and closer together. It’s all the little things: the door to the glove compartment doesn’t close properly; Rowan’s seatbelt gave out last week, forcing us to move his booster seat into the middle (fortunately, he says he likes being next to Isaac, but you know that’s just a chicken fight waiting to happen); the brights don’t stay on unless you hold down the lever; every so often, the driver’s-side windshield wiper takes on a life of its own and whaps around the side of the car to smack the driver’s-side window. The paint is chipping, the shocks are iffy, the electronic locks work only intermittently, you have to hold up the hood with one hand while you check the oil, and the cup holder spring mechanism is busted. That said, it still looks fairly respectable and gets us from A to B without fuss.

There is aging, of course, and there is aging. Time passes by at the same rate for us all, I realize, but my children are growing, developing, becoming stronger, more realized, versions of their own selves. I, on the other hand, like the car, seem to be aging in the sense of getting older, where regular maintenance is designed to slow down the decline rather than actually improve things, where pain moves on a regular sightseeing tour throughout my body: neck, shoulders, wrists, knees, ankles. My forearms are shit. I have vertigo, just like my mother did, and it gets worse every year. I chew cold things only on the left side of my mouth. My lower back hurts. The index fingernail on my right hand is thickening and developing a permanent split. I’m going grey. My vision is still rock solid, but that’s only because I had laser eye surgery four years ago. I may be getting wiser, but I am losing nouns, names, just like they (I forget who) said I would. I can still touch my toes, but I worry that, if I skip a week, I won’t be able to any more.

I am told this is just the beginning.

That said, I  like to think I still look fairly respectable and I can get from A to B without much fuss.

In my head and my heart, I am a Prius girl, or maybe a Subaru Outback or even a Mazda 5 kind of driver. (In my slightly wilder dreams, I’m driving on the coast, any coast, in a red, two-seater, convertible MG.) In my head and my heart, I can stay out all night dancing, type like the wind, squat to pick up my toddler without grimacing as I straighten my knees. In real life, I’m hoping the current car lasts us until Isaac is in school full time and we can shift our child care budget over to car payments.

On Wednesday, I committed the act of flagrant hope and suspension of all parenting values otherwise known as Taking Small Children on International Flights.

Admittedly, the “international” bit meant flying, via Minneapolis, from Fort Lauderdale to Thunder Bay, but still. Ten hours spent in transit with a five-year-old and his toddler sidekick requires concessions to M&M cookies, portable DVD players, rolling around on the floors of public spaces, and an all-you-can-drink apple-juice bar. (Sidenote: is Isaac, at two and a half, still technically a toddler? Is there a name for this age?)

Every time we get on a plane, the nice people in first class smile at the children as they march on board and make jokey comments to us about how we’ve got “some good little travellers there!” And I smile back and say, “Well, we’re planning on leaving them up here with you, if you don’t mind.” And they smile and laugh some more and then we leave them to their quiet, amenities-laden, seats while we go find ours in coach, children in tow.

In absolute truth, the kids are getting easier and easier to travel with. Or maybe it’s that Rachel and I are getting better and better at travelling with them. Or some combination thereof. Whatever it is, Rowan and Isaac are fairly easy to placate with cartoons and a regular supply of treats, and the adults can be fairly certain of at least skimming a magazine article or two (me) or completing a Sudoku (Rachel) in between fielding requests for blankets and escorting small people to washrooms and reading stories and filling sippy cups and explaining why it’s not good to kick the seat in front of you and retrieving dropped Bakugans and making pillows of laps and turning the overhead lights on and off and on and on and on and off. And on.

And off.

So, we get on our first flight of the day, which coincides precisely with Isaac’s naptime, and we have three seats on one side of the plane, and a fourth across the aisle. And it is my turn to sit with the kids. Which I do. Because it is my turn. And I am one of their mothers. And they’re all excited to turn on the DVD player even though they know they have to wait for it and so I spend a half-hour preflight repeating brightly, over and over, “No, not yet! Not until the lady tells us!”

And then I am paged. Passenger Goldberg is paged. And I press my call button, and not one but two flight attendants come to let me know that I have been selected for an upgrade to first class.

FIRST CLASS! With all the people I threatened to leave my kids with. Except, without my kids. But with free booze. Even though it goes against all my principles, I adore first class. The two times in my life I’ve flown it.

And I can’t do it. I mean, even if it wasn’t my turn to sit with the kids, even if I was snugly ensconced across the aisle, I still couldn’t have done it. In my heart of hearts, I know that I would have never in a hundred years forgiven Rachel if she went off to sit in first class and left me with the kids. I know all that, but that doesn’t stop me from harbouring a brief and utterly unrequited longing that she will look up from her Sudoku and smile and wave me off, saying, “Oh, go for it! Have a great time! We’ll be just fine here — no really, go!”

And so I turn down my upgrade to first class for four hours of Flying with Children. Four hours during which Isaac does not nap, not even for a moment, but instead becomes increasingly cranky and winds up screaming, “I want milk! I WANT MILK! You go away!” for the flight’s final half-hour. (When he finally sleeps, it is as the landing gear is released on the runway as we touch down in Thunder Bay; the bump as we hit the tarmac lulls him into an ever deeper slumber that lasts all the way through customs, where we have to explain to the official how, exactly, we are family, but I digress.)

Four hours. Four full hours of my life that I could’ve been in first class. For hours that I will never get back. Not that I’m not trying.

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 

Every so often, one is the witness/recipient of such a run of Behaviour that one is tempted to pull out one’s fingernails, just for the welcome distraction the pain might bring

You know, those days when every utterance out of a child’s mouth is a version of, “I didn’t want you to do that, and you did it wrong, too.” When every action is the equivalent of them stealing your last bite of pie, only to spit it out because it’s yucky. When they insist that the best way to show their love for you is to crash into you full speed while braying like a donkey and laughing hysterically at your bruises. When it’s all you can do to excuse yourself quietly from the room, hide behind a locked door, rub your temples and breathe and count the minutes until bedtime and the reprieve from the banshees who have taken over the household.

And then — and then — one happens upon a tableau such as this:

And, just in case you thought it was a fluke, this:

Yes, that is the big one reading stories to the little one. By reading, I mean a mixture of memorization (he’s sort of the human equivalent of a Kindle, what with all those books he’s got stored in his head) and actual, sounding-out-the-letters-to-make-a-word reading. And the little one, formerly hostile, is now rapt, in awe of books, taking my hand and pulling me to the shelf to find Sandra Boynton’s Doggie Book or one of DK Media’s thousand-plus books about trucks. His new favourite sentence (after, “Mommy go get it”): “I want to read.”

And now, in addition to saying yes, we can also say, “Go ask your brother.”

Makes up for a lot, that.

Happy Earth Day! To celebrate, Rowan rode his bike all the way to the babysitter’s this morning. That’s the equivalent of approximately two city blocks, but it’s the furthest he’s ever gone at a stretch. What a difference a year makes. Last summer, Rowan on his bike was the equivalent of the kid picking flowers in the soccer field, all on, off, on, off, don’t let go of the handlebars Mom hey what’s that shiny thing on the ground I’m tired can you push me let’s take the car. Today, he pedaled along steadily. “My bike has magic powers to go over cracks,” he told us, repeatedly. “That’s why I’m so good.”

Rachel and I just grinned like idiots. Way back when, before there were children and we had only visions of what children might be like and what astonishing kinds of parents we would be, we both imagined our kids riding bikes. We imagined walking or cycling to school or daycare beside our bike-riding kids. (We actually imagined cycling beside our bike-riding kids as we made our way across, say, the Netherlands, or down the West Coast from Victoria to San Francisco, but I may be getting ahead of myself.)

And today, I got to check that vision off my mental list — always nice when those come to fruition instead of falling by the wayside (“And they will not eat cheese strings”).

My celebrations of Earth Day will continue for the next hour and a half, while Rachel takes both children to Kindermusik and I get my biweekly extra 90 minutes to myself. I have this vision where I will do yoga and some journal/creative writing and screw around on Facebook.

Once upon a time, there were two small boys. And their mothers took them from their small town, where the water was not fluoridated, on a small airplane, to (as the larger of the small boys put it) The Land of Toronto, where for two nights in a row they attended enormous family dinners, during which they ran around like madmen with their cousins and ate untold amounts of sugar and watched cable television shows like American Idol and had vast quantities of fun and fell into bed at 10 p.m. without even brushing their teeth they (and their mothers) were so tired and full of glee.

They also drove all around the Land of Toronto, having adventures that involved dinosaurs and subway trains and mud puddles and several of their mothers’ Old Stomping Grounds. And it was good.

Then they went to The Small Town of Guelph, where they ate untold quantities of chocolate Easter eggs and had large family dinners and ran around like madmen with their cousins and stayed up very late watching (appropriately) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The children, though generally delightful, coped with the travel and the influx of sugar and the lack of sleep and the media by occasionally throwing tantrums in the presence of older relatives and eating lots of cheese strings. Their mothers coped by drinking lots of wine. Mostly, they tried to be good parents, which involved, in part, requiring the small boys to brush their teeth after two nights of not.

They took out the small boys’ toothpaste and toothbrushes, whereupon the small boys’ auntie wondered aloud why the mothers were letting the small boys use fluoridated toothpaste.

The mothers explained that the water in their small town was not fluoridated, and that their family doctor had suggested that they use said toothpaste to compensate.

The auntie again wondered out loud why the mothers were letting the small boys use fluoridated toothpaste.

The mothers again explained that the water in their small town was not fluoridated, and that their family doctor had suggested that they use said toothpaste to compensate.

The auntie again began to wonder out loud why the mothers were letting the small boys use fluoridated toothpaste, but stopped herself midsentence when she realized that she was critiquing other people’s parenting and apologized for doing so.

Just then, the larger of the two small boys walked into the room and, for no apparent reason, bonked the smaller of the two small boys on the head. The smaller boy began to cry. The larger boy left the room.

There followed an uncomfortable silence.

Then the auntie said, “Well, maybe if you didn’t let them use fluoridated toothpaste, they wouldn’t be so violent.”

Look what my girlfriend made!

I would say she just whipped it up in the midst of a particularly chaotic Saturday afternoon, but “whipped it up” would imply effortlessness, and this baby was a bit of a palaver. The making, chilling, and rolling out of the dough. The — literal and figurative — lemon squeezing involved in making the filling. The separating of eggs, the beating of egg whites into meringue. The assembly. The baking.

All told, it was a marathon of a pie. Rachel kept apologizing for attempting such a complex feat of baking on a weekend day, with children underfoot. Rangy, rangy, rangy children. “If I’d known it was going to be so much work,” she kept saying, “I never would’ve started this.”

Which kind of sums up how I was feeling about having kids right at that particular moment. Our morning had consisted of a series of tantrums, from adults and children alike, culminating in a tear-stained Rowan running down the driveway just as I was about to put the car in gear, screaming, “I am too going to the maaaaaaaaaaaarket!”

Minutes earlier, of course, he had refused to get into the vehicle, declaring loudly and repeatedly that under no circumstances was he going to the market. Rachel had finally thrown up her hands in disgust and gone back in the house with him, while I and a blinking Isaac, already in his car seat, were left outside. For a brief, shining moment I thought that Isaac and I might have a sweet little date together, sans four-year-old attitude. In the end, I strapped Rowan in, fed him a banana, did some deep breathing, and braved the public with both children, leaving Rachel at home for a blessed hour or two to stare at the wall or do Sudokus or drink herself silly — whatever she needed. She reciprocated that afternoon when I strapped Isaac into the stroller and wandered around the neighbourhood for an hour or two, listening to This American Life on my iPod. As I left, Rachel and Rowan were arguing about whether he could or could not stick his fingers in the mixing bowl while the electric beaters were running.

When I returned, Rachel and Rowan had reached some sort of truce. They had managed, together, to get the pie into and out of the oven. Then they played chase in the basement and read books. The kitchen was spotless. And this beauty was cooling on the counter — cloudy layers just obscuring the sunny sweetness underneath.

I can’t knit any more. Too many decades of constant computer use have left me with repetitive strain disorders and carpal tunnel syndrome. From my fingertips to my shoulders, I’m essentially a train wreck, a bundle of tingling nerves and sulky muscles that rebel any time I type more than a few sentences or click my way through too many Etsy pages.

I’ve compensated by turning to voice dictation software, ergonomic mice and keyboards, a yoga ball instead of a chair, and by practicing certain forms of restraint. Like making the decision to stay away from online Boggle’s siren call. And giving up knitting.

It’s been a sacrifice, especially for someone who has a tiny bit of a problem with compulsion. Basically, I’m a productivity junkie. I like to keep busy, and I find it difficult to watch television without also doing something “useful” — a character trait of mine that Rachel barely puts up with (“When I watch television, I want to … watch … television,” she will say, when I suggest that we could fold a couple of loads of laundry while catching up on season three of Weeds.). Knitting was a perfect way for me to quell the voices while getting in good-quality bad-television time.

Mostly, I have come to accept the fact that my knitting career is over, although every so often I think that maybe I can find some small way to jump back on the craft bandwagon. So when my friend Judy, who has of late been indulging — beautifully, heartbreakingly beautifully — her own knitting and felting obsession, mentioned that she was going to repurpose a couple of hand-knit sweaters into felted mittens, I offered to unravel them for her. If I couldn’t knit something, I figured, I could un-knit something and make myself useful.

I made that suggestion on a Sunday morning, at Judy’s house, where my family had descended upon hers for our standing brunch date. I was thrilled to be there, mostly because being there meant that I wasn’t at home on a frigid morning corralling increasingly edgy children.

Or maybe I’m the one who’s edgy. Lately, I’ve been finding Rowan more challenging than I usually do: chalk it up to some combination of bronchitis (his and mine), PMS (mine), defiance (his), and a general ranginess, but I’m not exhibiting all the qualities that I would like to exhibit as a parent in terms of patience, modelling appropriate behaviour, and the like. Midway through the weekend, I had nearly had it, and the prospect of French toast at Judy and her partner, Jill’s, house was exactly what I needed.

We came home from brunch with a sweater. Isaac napped, Rowan watched a video, Rachel read, and I sat at the dining room table blissfully picking out the sweater seams. The day passed, more or less a study in average parenting skills and equally average four-year-old behaviour. Before bedtime, I sat on the couch with Rachel and Rowan as she read stories to him and I unravelled a sleeve.

“What are you doing?” he asked me.

I explained my project to him.

“Can I do it?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, passing him the sleeve.

And we sat together in silence for a good 15 minutes, working together, him pulling the yarn intently, me winding it around itself into a ball — our own little prayer service (I asked for more patience and more parental grace) at the Church of Craft.