“It’s the journey, not the destination.”

How many times have you heard those words as a parent? A lot, I bet. If you’re anything like me, I bet that you’ve muttered those words to yourself as you tried to get a toddler to go just about anywhere. I bet you’ve “journey-not-destinationed” yourself through homework or toilet training or the grocery store or sleeping through the night or any number of child-related milestones.

But you know? Sometimes, Zen as it is, that little “journey not destination” mantra can get, well, a wee bit onerous. Sometimes, having someone chirp at you that, “Oh, ha ha, you should just enjoy what’s happening right at this very moment because life with kids is all about the journey, not the destination” can make you feel like punching that person in the throat. It’s tantamount to saying that if you were just a better parent, a better person, you would truly embrace, say, your toddler’s insistence upon stopping to drop pebbles down every single sewer grating on the way home from daycare, thus turning a 10-minute walk into a 90-minute odyssey.

Because here’s the thing: sometimes, no matter how wonderful a person or a parent you are, it’s about the destination. Sometimes, sure, it’s important to be here now. But sometimes, you just want to get there, already. Fast. And with as little screaming as possible.

Nowhere is this more true than on road trips with children.

So, let’s debunk this whole myth of “journey not destination,” shall we? Let’s put to rest once and for all that we are somehow lesser as parents if we feel on occasion that the less time spent in moving vehicles with our children the better. Let’s stop judging ourselves and each other by the degree to which we look forward to and enjoy strapping small, high-energy beings into five-point harnesses and hurtling off into traffic for hours. Because while there while there are undoubtedly lots of excellent things about road trips, there are also lots of rather tedious things.

Sure, there will be moments of pure beauty. You will see a pair of deer standing for a split second at the side of the road and your four-year-old will say, “Mommy, that deer looked right at me!” And you will say, “Yes, she did, honey.”

You will stop at a perfect beach for a picnic lunch and spend an hour skipping stones with your children, and one of them will lean back into your lap and look up at the sky and point out how that cloud looks just like a rabbit. Eating a Chihuahua.

You will prepare a cooler filled with fruit and vegetables and healthy snacks and your children will eat all of those fruits and vegetables and healthy snacks without complaining and you will sail right on by the fast-food chains, drinking tea out of your reusable travel mug, feeling smug virtuous.

You will bring E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web on CD and your entire family will listen, entranced, to the entire story, and you will weep together at its ending.

You will bring a big pile of your own pillows and stack them between your children so that they cannot easily hit each other, and they will make little nests with those pillows and both fall asleep at the exact same time. And while they sleep, you will drive as fast and as far as possible, all the while talking to the other adult in the car and listening to — squee! — your own music on low.

But for all those times, and more, there will also be the times where the kids are too busy scratching at each other in the backseat to notice the scenery and when you go out of your way to visit the World’s Biggest Nickel they will refuse to get out of the car. They will eat only ice cream and deep-fried things for days on end and insist on listening to Diary of a Wimpy Kid or One Direction on repeat. They will clamour for electronic devices and grunt and not look up as you point out, say, the Grand Canyon. They will insist that they don’t need to pee during the rest stop and then have to pee the moment you pull onto the open freeway. The baby will scream unremittingly for the last half-hour of the day’s travels and then fall asleep as you pull into your hotel parking lot. And not one bit at night.

These things — and more — will happen. They are part of road trips. And no matter how good a parent or a person you are, there is no earthly reason you should enjoy those moments. During those moments, your job is to grit your teeth, stick on One Direction and toss your emergency stash of chocolate and the backseat, and drive as fast and as far as possible. Because you’ll get there eventually. I promise.

This post is part of BlogHer’s Family Fun on Four Wheels editorial series, made possible by Mazda CX-9.

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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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We’re eating out of the pantry these days — trying to work our way through what we already have in the house before finally, grudgingly, giving and going grocery shopping. Partly, we’re doing it to try to make a dent in our ghastly grocery bills. Partly, we’re doing it because nobody in this house likes going grocery shopping and so the longer we can wait between trips, the better. Partly, we’re doing it for the perverse thrill of seeing the back of the fridge. Who knew?

But mostly, we’re doing it because we are awash in food, because our freezers and our cupboards and our refrigerator floweth over, bursting at the seams with our plenty. We have so much food that we don’t eat, and so we’re trying to eat it rather than ignoring it and going for the obvious, for the fresh pack of chicken and the baby carrots and English cucumbers.

Seriously, we’re pretty good for food. We bought (with apologies to the vegetarians) an eighth of a cow in September. I let my friend Karen talk me into buying not one but two cases of organic Spartan apples in December (okay, it’s my own fault), and now a half-dozen crisps lie in wait downstairs in the freezer while I ponder whether the remaining dozen or so in the fridge will last or if I should make them into yet another batch of sauce.

(Decision: applesauce.)

(I love the Thunder Bay economy: Stephanie orders organic peaches and teaches me how to can; I show up with piecrust and we each end up with stuff for the pantry. Karen organizes the organic apple order and I drop off a communal cheque from her and me and Derek to the organic apple order people, whose house I can tell from the others on the street because of the hand-lettered “no pesticides” sign on the lawn. Karen pays me back from her till at her stand at the farmer’s market on Saturday, and Derek gets me with a bunch of fives in an ATM envelope at Pokémon club on Saturday, where we all take turns keeping track of each other’s kids. And then Karen and I spend an afternoon making apple crisps while our children run around us like maniacs (we get so obsessed that we lose track of time and end up ordering pizza in for dinner for everyone, which is kind of the opposite of what we wanted), while Stephanie texts me to show off her husband, Carlo’s, recent loaves of bread — he’s become obsessed with breadmaking and I sweet-talk him about it at every opportunity because, well, fresh bread made by someone who’s obsessed . I need to take an apple crisp over there.)

We’ve still got beets from the garden in the fridge, despite my first pickling efforts and having made a couple of rounds of my friend Nat’s infamous beet hummus (also in the freezer). I think we’ve very nearly got through all the frozen ends of bread in the freezer — but we still have flour, and yeast, and a bread maker (and two loaves of challah, which I make in batches of three) and so there’s no point in buying more: I’ll just whip up a loaf with what we already have.

Tonight’s dinner will be steak and quinoa salad: why is it that we have a gallon-jar full of quinoa and yet I never remember it? Toss it with a can of corn, one of chick peas, the rest of the marinated artichoke hearts, a jar of roasted red peppers and the last of the first of the two containers of feta. I get a wee thrill, a perverse sense of accomplishment, every time I throw a jar into the recycling, run a spatula around the inside of another container. The kids could use muffins in their lunches, so I’ll unearth a couple of the dozen or so containers of pumpkin from October’s jack-o’-lanterns and experiment with a batch of pumpkin muffins — if they’re hungry enough, they’ll eat them, right? Too bad we just ran out of chocolate chips, but maybe some candied pecans, because we have pecans and sugar … or I could chop up the last of the Chanukah gelt that the kids forgot about and throw that in.

We have three jars of olive oil, because we keep going to the store and buying more, thinking, Don’t we always need olive oil? No, apparently not.

When we ran out of our regular tea, we went through all the fancy (caffeinated — we’re not that committed) teas in the cupboard that we’ve received as gifts over the years and have forgotten about. And they were good. We have chicken stock, and lentils, and pounds of carrots, and frozen pesto, and diced tomatoes, and brown rice vermicelli, pasta fagiole in lunch-size containers, canned peaches, half a cauliflower (oh, and on Friday night I danced such a parental dance around getting Rowan to try just one bite because I think you’ll like it but it’s really up to you because I don’t care that much of roasted cauliflower and he finally did and then ate a small mountain of it and I died happy), some broccoli that will perk up just fine once I stick it in water. We can make popcorn. We have peanut butter and couscous (the kids hate couscous, they tell us, but we’ll keep trying, like with the cauliflower) and 11 different kinds of vinegar and beans, beans, so many beans.

We have garlic.

We are bursting.

It doesn’t feel like restraint. It feels exhilarating, like every mealtime is a game of (no pun intended) chicken with the universe and the gods of plenty always side with us. Like some home ec exercise and we’re getting an A. Like we’re on some cooking show for earnest/foodie homemakers challenged with making a passable dinner out of an aubergine and some capers. And we are so totally on. We are potluck-ready: we’re bringing apple crisp and beet dip and we will feast and shun the store for as long as we can.

What’s in your pantry? How long could you go?

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It’s been a month of words.

The draft is done, off.

And yesterday, I needed to make something with my hands.

My plan was to create a quilt in tandem with the book, but all the little squares sat neglected for months and months.

But yesterday, I cleared off the dining room table, hauled up the ironing board and iron, and got to work.

Pinning, stitching, pressing; repeat.

Listening to Jian Ghomeshi interview Dolly Parton, to podcasts, to nothing at all.

Watching something take shape before my eyes.

Letting myself have a day to make something other than food, other than words pinned together and stitched into sentences, stories, essays.

And this is what I made.

If you want a taste of the other thing I made recently, get thee over to the Northern Woman’s Bookstore this evening at 7 PM, where I’ll be reading an excerpt from Step on a Crack.

Okay, gotta go figure out what to wear.

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I canned peaches with a friend last night. I’ve never canned anything before, aside from that brief foray into pickled beets a couple of weeks ago (and, frankly, I’m not entirely sure I got that one right, although I don’t have the heart yet to go check on my jars sitting there so hopeful in the cupboard). I’ve wanted to learn how to can for years and years, to line up the jars of summer and sweat in the cupboard. But the project has seemed so daunting for so long from the outside: all that sterilizing and boiling and popping out of air bubbles and processing and waiting and hoping for the seal and the threat all round of death.

So many things to get wrong, such huge repercussions.

But then Stephanie texted me like a gift to say she’d ordered peaches and did I want her to order me a box, too, and then I could come over and she could show me how. And I wrote back, YES! of course, and she mentioned that they would arrive in the next couple of weeks, these British Columbia Freestone peaches, and that once they arrived we would have to can them the very moment they were ripe. What followed was a comedy of errors in terms of scheduling: the traditional and the modern colliding as we tried desperately in the midst of Jewish holidays and soccer tryouts and wine club dinners and Symphony tickets and work schedules to find an evening that would work. Last night, we finally opened a bottle of wine and two boxes of peaches as tender as a baby’s bruise, and got to work.

“They won’t be pretty,” she said. “But they’ll taste good.”

So much is going on right now, all those beginnings and endings of chapters and pieces that I am sorting through in my life. It’s the kind of time that makes me crave a big project that can be accomplished over the course of an evening and a bottle of wine when two people stand and score and scald and cut fruit and place it gently, cut side down, in hot, clean jars. Fill with syrup, knock out the air bubbles, screw on lids fingertip-tight and process, process, process in boiling water for 25 minutes. At each step me saying, “Just so long as nobody dies, I’m okay.” And her saying, “Nobody’s gonna die.”
She should know; she’s a doctor. For what that’s worth.

In between those steps, I made peach pies (also for the first time), rolling out dough and mixing cut fruit with lemon juice and flour, cinnamon and salt, stirring it together with my hands. I held them up, dripping with fruit and sugar, and asked Stephanie if she would forgive me if I licked my fingers — too much sweetness to rinse away. She, meanwhile, was boiling down the tiny bits of peach left over to make juice for her kids, and why not?

We chatted, mostly about the process at hand and how we grew up: what we’ve learned on our own, what our mothers taught us (for the record, while my mom loved to feed people, canning would never have interested her. She did, however, make several dozen apple crisps each fall, when the apples were at their peak, and froze them — a tradition I have continued and that my children adore.).  I asked her what it actually meant to be on call all weekend: does that mean you sit at home and wait for your beeper to go off? Are you at the hospital all day? What’s involved? What do you do? The things I don’t know about a doctor’s life. She asked how the writing was going, mused about the difference between being an avid reader and an absolutely reluctant writer. Did I like rereading what I had already written, she wanted to know. When enough time has passed, I said.

And when what I wrote was good in the first place.

And then we were done, the project completed well before midnight, beginning to end, nothing killed but the bottle.

So far.

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It’s Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. Which probably means that I shouldn’t be writing on the computer, but I’m not really that kind of Jew, so that’s okay.

I don’t tend to make New Year’s resolutions, not because I’m not the type of person who doesn’t totally freaking adore the concept of New Year’s resolutions, what with their promise of self-improvement and lists and all. No, I don’t tend to make New Year’s resolutions because therein lies the possibility of, shall we say, going overboard. I mean, once you resolve to do one thing, about 72 others seem to want to follow and then life becomes an endless pursuit of perfection, which leads to strife. So, usually, if anything, I resolve to do something relatively benign like “See more movies” or “Be nicer to the grey cat.”

But this year, this Rosh Hashanah, I have been mulling over one resolution that I think I actually need to resolve. It involves my children, and for this reason alone I will now take a short break in order to pick them up from their various after-school activities because a corollary to this resolution may just be that I will not be late for picking them up because I am blogging about how I am going to change my behaviour around them. It’s okay, though, because you won’t actually notice that I took a short break.

See! I’m back! No noticing, all good.

So, yes. My resolution. I will… I’m not sure exactly how to phrase this in a sentence so I will give you an example:

One evening this past summer, the kids were being, shall we say, high-energy but also very happy, and also — unrelated — we needed lemons. So, for a change of scenery, I decided to take them to the store to buy said lemons. And so we got to the store and we got lemons and I was heading to the checkout counter (and hoping that the cashier wasn’t going to talk to me too much) and the kids they were all like, “Can we go see the lobsters?”, as in the live lobsters in the tank at the back of the grocery store.

And I was all like, “No, no, we’ve just got to buy the lemons and go home.” And they were all like, lobsters, and I was all like, no no no we can’t have any fun and why can’t you just frog-march like some unsmiling little prisoners in some Gulag quietly through the grocery store and not have any fun any time ever instead of WASTING MY TIME with requests full of childlike wonder and awe to see the live lobsters in the back of the store? To paraphrase.

Fortunately, I came to my senses long enough to realize what a jerk I sounded like. A no you can’t go see the lobsters kind of jerk. And I realize that, yes, this is too often a lot of parents: we are tired and fed up and we must process eleventy million requests each hour, the vast majority of which are unreasonable. But still, still, too often I default to the automatic no, the impulse to squelch any and all joy from a situation because it is inconvenient and I am tired.

And so I said to the kids, “Yes. Let’s go see the lobsters.” And then I watched them hop merrily down the aisle of the grocery store, stepping only on the dark checkerboard tiles on the floor, because they are children, and that is what children do.

So my resolution is Remember to Say Yes to the Lobsters. As often as I can, say yes to them.

Lobsters are not kosher, but that’s okay cause I’m not really that kind of Jew anyway.

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Woke up early and exercised while listening to Jian Ghomeshi talk to Kate Bush on a months-old Q podcast.  Wrote a couple of average paragraphs.  Finished a book outline.  Sent some e-mails.  Ate the leftover homemade pizza.  Drove with my two boys out to a friend’s house on the lake with a bag full of free apples from a garage sale and my trusty Starfrit apple-peeling machine.

Watched my two boys play with her two boys for the next four hours, moving in and out of rooms and back and forth between the two porches, catching toads, playing Checkers, making potions, trapping the dog in the tent, always forgetting to close the door. Peeled apples at the kitchen table, while my friend pickled beets from her garden. Let all the boys, one by one, take turns peeling apples, like we were in Tom Sawyer or something, the spirals of peel unspooling from the fruit.

Learned how to pickle beets. Sliced apples. Picked and ate purslane, calendula, nasturtium. Drank tea. Listened to Harry Potter on the drive home, leftover brine in a canning jar for my own beets. Ate leftovers for dinner. Read new library books to Isaac. Wrote names in Sharpie on four pairs of new sneakers and threaded curly laces through holes. Slowly. Packed backpacks. Played soccer with Rowan as the thunderclouds collected. Made apple crumble topping. Wondered out loud with Rowan which class he’d be in  and discussed which came first, thunder or lightning. Listened to the thunder. Made these beauties.

Wrote this.

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I’m back. I haven’t spent more than four consecutive nights in the same bed since July 21, a feat of bed-hopping I don’t think I have matched since, perhaps, fourth-year university  (joking!) the summer I travelled around Europe in 1993 with my friend Julie.

(Coincidently, in this recent spate of bed-hopping, I spent two nights on Julie’s pull-out couch in the lovely borough of Queens, New York, where I slept quite well. Julie, however, did not, poor thing: her 15-month-old daughter, it seems, has some very strong ideas about exactly when and where she will and won’t sleep, and it seems that the hours between 2 and 4 AM are currently designated Not Sleeping Time.)

But. Now. I am home, from journeys that took me from Thunder Bay to Toronto and back again, to Bushwick, Brooklyn, and then Queens and then South Orange, New Jersey, and then the Manhattan Hilton and BlogHer ‘12 and then back to South Orange, and then Toronto (and another not-sleeping toddler), and then Thunder Bay to wash my clothes and pick up my family and then to a tent in the Sleeping Giant Provincial Park and home, and then to Duluth, Minnesota, and then to the Wisconsin Dells (oh Lord, the Wisconsin Dells — where Vegas meets water. And a vengeful God. And Republicans. And bumper stickers that say things like “I don’t believe the liberal media.”) and then Minneapolis and then Duluth again and then home, where I intend to stay put for a good long time if I have any say in the matter.

Because, frankly, I have things to do.

Chief of which is to make a to-do list.

I am a list maker. I like lists. I need lists. I feel unmoored without one, purposeless. I need to know that there’s a place where I can record every single task, books to read, movies to watch, blog posts and pitches to write, client jobs, phone calls to make, things to renovate. I scribble things down on scrap paper, cross them off, add new pieces of paper, consolidate the items onto fresh sheets, clip the lot together on the clipboard I’ve had since I was 13. This last spate of travel ended Saturday night with me furiously scribbling items onto four different sheets of paper, collating things I had typed into my phone, going through old to-do lists, X-ing out outdated or done items, running through the house with a toothbrush in my mouth to add just one more thing. And then one more.

(Do I count as the liberal media? Just wondering.)

The idea is that I will eventually dictate the entire list into a Word document and print it out, and there it will be: a blueprint of my life, the plan, perfect, just like in Getting Things Done. In reality, it rarely if ever works that way, and I end up with my various scraps of paper, written with different pens, half outdated, never completed. And while I continue to hold on to the fantasy of the finished to-do list, the ordered life, I may also be starting to let go of it, the idea that I can capture it all in one place, that for even one brief shining moment I will know what it is I have to do with this one perfect life, line item by line item until I am done.

(How do you to do?)

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Oh, yeah: I have a blog. It’s just that I have been submerged at the bottom of a sea of deadlines. And so I have been Writing Things for Other People (all lovely people, by the way). And when I am not doing that, I am Shuttling Children to Summer Activities. In particular, I am shuttling Rowan to soccer-related activities. Thus far, his summer seems to consist of soccer, with a side of soccer, with a wee soccer chaser and the occasional soccer nightcap. All washed down with some great big thirsty guzzling gulps of swimming pool.

I’m working on a longer post about how weird it is to have a sporty kid when one is avowedly not sporty. But for now, I just wanted to note that all this shuttling of my son to and from soccer has left me seeing an awful lot of this kind of thing on various minivans around town:

And, at the risk of alienating any of you perfectly lovely folks who have such stickers on your minivans, they make me barf a bit in my mouth.

It must be something to do with their reeking of heteronormativity, practically an advertisement for Mom+Dad+boy+girl+dog+cat. Or the fact that they reduce “family” to a set of mix-and-match stickers, all of whom seemed to be Caucasian and happy. Or that anyone should care so much about just exactly who’s riding in your minivan, or that you’re so damn proud of it that you need to put it on your car window for everyone to see.

Or maybe it pisses me off that some kind of families can put those kinds of stickers on their cars and not worry about getting rear-ended.

As someone who drove a series of my parents’ dying cars for the majority of my driving life, maybe I’m just averse to the idea that your car should be a reflection of your personality or, say, your lifestyle choices (ask me about this later when I acquire my red MG, but for now let’s live in the present moment, shall we?). Maybe driving a 2000 Buick Regal for the past six years, and an aging Chrysler before that, and before that a Cadillac Sedan de Ville that cost me $60 a week to fill well before gas prices got crazy (but, now, there was a smooth ride) made me happy to dissociate my car from my personality. Or maybe it just was a raging advertisement for my own frugality (or my parents’ taste for big cars) — who knows? When we finally sucked it up and bought our own new vehicle, it was with some reservation that I finally stuck a Pride decal to our rear window. What if someone keys us? I thought. What if someone smashes the window, or gives me the finger as I drive? What if, what if… For those reasons alone, I decided to bite the bullet and affix the rainbow sticker, if only to prove myself wrong. If only because I have perhaps internalized the corporate messaging from LuluLemon that you should do things that scare you just a little bit.

And, of course, absolutely nothing has happened.

They do, for the record, have decals of little boys playing soccer. Or maybe they’re little girl with short hair? Or maybe the long-haired figures on the site are actually boys with long hair, which is what I hear happens to boys when you don’t cut their hair for a year and a half. I haven’t checked to see whether they have decals of little boys dressed in tutus, which is what Isaac wore to preschool this morning, along with a pair of Rachel’s heels. And, true, there’s nothing stopping me from ordering of decals of two mom figures and slapping them on the rear window of our car because I’m just so damn excited about our family. Apparently, you can get Star Wars decals as well: I could possibly see my way to having two Princess Leias wielding light sabers up there, along with two little R2-D2 droid figures, one in a tutu and one with a soccer ball (any takers?): it would be a way to sum up just about everything that my children have brought into my life, in all its complicated glory. Maybe if I still had the Caddy…

But really, I overshare about my family plenty already, right here on the Internet — do I really need to boil them down to an uncomplicated set of bland conformity on my vehicle? I’ve already got a basic-model car, no heated seats or six-CD changer here: but my household? Anything but.

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If it weren’t soccer, it would be something else.

Right?

This is what I tell myself in my lower moments, during the times I wish the game had not been invented or at least that Rowan had never heard of it, had never put foot to ball and in that moment of connection found something thrilling and addictive. This is what I tell myself during each of the dozen or so daily negotiations about when and for precisely how long I will play soccer with him in the backyard and what must happen before or after in terms of things like eating breakfast and practicing piano and going to school and keeping one’s hands to oneself and the like.

I sound like a monster. I understand this. I realize that I am complaining about my son’s passion for engaging in a wholesome, healthy, outdoor form of exercise, instead of, say, online poker or dealing crystal meth. I understand the value of encouraging physical activity and team sports. I know that the fact that he wants, desperately, to play with me is a gift, something I should treasure now because, “You know, in eight years, he’s not going to want to have anything to do with you…”

I know all this. It’s just that I’m not really an organized-sports kind of girl. Sometimes I would rather not go outside and kick around a ball. Sometimes, I have had enough. Sometimes, I have other things to do, like make dinner or read the Styles section of the New York Times or alphabetize the spices or simply do anything but go outside in the snow (“snoccer”) or the sunshine or the rain or the darkness and play. Sometime over the last seven months, soccer has worn thin for me, even as Rowan’s passion for the sport seems to increase daily.
Sometimes, I just don’t want to play.

But if it weren’t soccer, it would just be something else, like — God forbid — hockey. It’s not so much the sport as it is trying to make my seven-year-old understand, as gently as possible, that I simply don’t care about it as much as he does. He doesn’t get that yet, doesn’t understand how I’m not elated each time I score one of my rare goals, why I don’t roar “YAAHHHH!” and pump my fist. He doesn’t get that I score far fewer goals than him not simply because I am the worse player, which I may well be, but because I don’t try nearly as hard, don’t throw myself after the ball, don’t insert my small, fast-moving body in between it and anything else in my way, as though it’s always and forever the most important thing in the world. For him, “fun” and “winning” are intertwined, while for me, soccer would be a whole lot more fun if winning weren’t quite as important.

And if it involved reading the Styles section of the New York Times while quietly sipping my tea at the pristine kitchen counter.

This is one difference between me and my seven-year-old son. Another difference between us is that I don’t try to convince him that he, too, might really enjoy a decaf latte and a section of the paper as much as I do.

(On the other hand, that’s not entirely fair. I suppose that I do, daily, try to convince him of other things: that he will probably like that cube of marinated tofu if he just tries it (an incorrect assumption); that his foot will fit better in his boot if he takes the time to fish out and uncrumple his sock and put it on his actual foot (I was right); that 900+ Pokémon cards are enough (we continue to disagree on this one); that as difficult as it may be to fall asleep in your bed right now, it is far more difficult to fall asleep while standing on the landing and talking about how you cannot fall asleep (I’m right about this, too); that whining is not an effective negotiating tool. Etc.)

We’ve gone through a few soccer balls over the last several months: the freeze-thaw cycle isn’t particularly kind to the dollar-store variety of balls we’ve purchased until now. Shredded octagons of white plastic litter the backyard now, cast off by the balls as they slowly fall apart. I’ve taken to calling our latest one Wilson, after the volleyball that Tom Hanks’s character befriends in that movie Castaway: Rowan, I daresay, is possibly as emotionally dependent upon our Wilson as Hanks’s Chuck Noland (does anyone else besides me think that the name’s a tiny bit too heavy-handed of a metaphor for a man thrown up on a desert island?) was upon his.

Also, I think that Chuck’s Wilson is in a lot better shape than ours.

Yes, we have signed Rowan up for leagues. We plan to max out the amount of organized soccer we can fit into everyone’s schedules, in order that Rowan can get his fix in while I can sit on the sidelines with a thermos and a novel and look up occasionally to cheer. And, in our rare, unscheduled, moments, I will continue to try to seek some kind of balance between playing his games and playing mine. Even more, I will do my best to actually play when I play with him, to see where and how I can find the fun in this activity that I barely tolerate but he loves. Loves. Loves.

This is the parenting philosophy I try to cultivate, known as Everybody gets most of what they need most of the time. Because, frankly, I’m never going to be the kind of parent who’s able to give it everything she’s got, all of the time.

And maybe, one day, many years hence, the two of us will sit in a café somewhere, quietly sipping caffeinated beverages and reading companionably, together.

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