HINI enough for you?

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

We’ve all had our plague over at this end: Rowan came home from a class trip to the play farm exhausted and lethargic and put himself to bed for two days. Rachel coughed approximately twice. Isaac was feverish and snotty and sleepy for a week. As for me, I developed a sudden-onset hacking cough and low-grade fever right on the tail end of the Great, Never-Ending Sinus Infection of 2009. In a fit of denial, I ushered myself into my GP’s office so that she could “rule out bronchitis.” Because, me? I don’t get the flu. The flu is for mere mortals who ACTUALLY LEAVE THEIR HOUSES. Which I, as a self-employed, home-office–based freelancer, prefer not to do. I was genuinely surprised when my doctor showed up in the examining room decked out in a hazmat suit and took my temperature and blood oxygen levels and then handed me a prescription for Tamiflu and a requisition for a chest x-ray. And a mask. I looked at the little blue piece of paper in my hand.

“You mean, like, a chest x-ray in the next few days? Like if things get bad?”

“No,” she said, looking at me as though the flu had affected my brain. Which maybe it had. “I mean a chest x-ray now. Your lungs don’t sound too good.”

I keep forgetting I have children, I guess. Children who are snotty germ magnets. Children who insist upon drinking from your water bottle and licking your cheek and coughing into your face. Children who are only just becoming adept at handwashing and coughing into their elbows. Children who go to school with other children and pick up all their germs. Before I had children, I rarely got sick. But Rowan’s birth seemed to usher in the Age of the Antibiotic, and Isaac’s arrival did nothing to stop it. Life with children seems to be a series of steppingstones from one prescription to the next: bronchitis, ear infections, pinkeye, strep. It’s a wonder we get anything done around here.

And yet, we do. I’d complain more (okay, maybe that would be difficult, but shut up) about the constant sickness, not to mention the other zillion parental things that take up vast swaths of my time and energy, except for the fact that I can’t argue that the children have somehow made me less productive. In the era BC (Before Children), when I — in theory — had all the time in the world to write, I didn’t seem to. But the Age of the Antibiotic seems to have had the side effect of writerly productivity: the novel pages are adding up, a slow series of essays have been accepted (and more than a few rejected), not to mention this blog, which wouldn’t exist without the kids. (Or, if it did, it would be kind of creepy.)

And neither would this book.

Yes, it’s in (Canadian) stores now, and will be in the US come the spring. And, last weekend, Rachel, Rowan, Isaac and I had sufficiently recovered from our viral invasion to get on a plane and fly to Toronto for the official launch of  And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents and Our Unexpected Families.

I’m so glad we did. You know, I spent a lot of my 20s regularly visiting the Toronto Women’s Bookstore — a must for a downtown-dwelling women’s studies major, really. So it was a singular thrill to see my own anthology launched there. As it was to meet for the first time so many of the contributors to the anthology: Mary Bowers (who drove in all the way from Chicago), Annemarie Shrouder, Carrie Elizabeth Wildman, Shira Spector, Dawn Whitwell, Torsten Bernhardt, Marcie Gibson, Erin Sandilands, Jake Szamosi. And some of their kids. Mary and Annemarie brought the house down with fantastic readings. My doting father took lots of pictures.

Mary Bowers, reading from "The D Word"

Annemarie Shrouder, reading from "After Yes"

My coeditor, Chloë Brushwood Rose

And Rachel (who also has an essay in the book, by the way; all you non-bio moms in particular might want to take a look) brought the kids. We were a little concerned that a book launch wasn’t necessarily the best venue for them, but they held their own just fine. Rowan took good advantage of the cookies and juice, capitalizing on the fact that there was little we could do to stop him from availing himself of a sixth Oreo in the middle of someone’s reading. At one point during my reading I looked up, and he had walked down the middle of the aisle to watch me. He stood, smiling, ten feet away, as I told the story of the events and the people leading up to his conception and birth, the complicated and exquisite love that brought him and his brother into the world and that surrounds their lives. He looked at me, smiling, and I looked at him and smiled back as I read, and then, when I looked up again, he had gone, in all likelihood back to the cookie table. 

Me, reading from “Mamas’ baby, Papa’s maybe”

“Susan’s talking now!” he told Rachel. Later, he asked her, “When Susan was talking, was that from the book she made?” he asked Rachel, later. “Yes, she she was,” she told him. And that night, as I put him to bed, he told me, “Congratulations on your book, mom. It’s nice that you made a book about us. I liked the party.”

And then he coughed. Still, it’s also thrilling to know that he’s beginning to get a glimpse into what exactly it is that I do, and how he and his brother are part of it — germs and all.   

On the last day of our visit to Toronto in December, I had some time to kill and an energetic child to entertain, so I took Rowan to the billiards room in my father’s new condominium building, and we shot some stick.

I haven’t played pool regularly since my undergrad days in Montréal, when my roommate, Lori, and I lived across the street from a bar unfortunately named the Copacabana. We and the rest of the theatre crowd became regulars, ordering happy-hour specials of two half-pints of St. Ambroise and other Québec microbrews before such things were fashionable, and playing dollar-a-game pool for hours at a time.

Eventually, I got good enough that I could occasionally run the table for a few games at a time, sometimes even winning against long-time regulars like the musclebound guy with the mullet we nicknamed Fabio. It got so that I would drop in for a couple of games most days after class. We got quite chummy with the owners, Alberto and Albino, who would occasionally unlock the table and let us play for free. Alberto even deigned to lend me his custom cue, stored in the supply cupboard. One spring day, shortly after graduation, Lori and I dropped in for a beer during lunchtime, and two middle-aged Portuguese gentleman, friends of Alberto’s, challenged us to a game. Much to everyone’s surprise, we won handily — I’d like to think by banking the eight ball at some difficult angle — and they bought us a couple of rounds.

Oh yeah, I was a hustler. (Now stop laughing.)

Much has changed since my Copa days.

Not just the setting — trade seedy bar on the Main for genteel condominium residence at Lawrence and Bathurst, for one. Or the company. Or the fact that I’m no longer that constantly heartsick young thing, personal soundtrack set to one of ani difranco’s angry albums — the one who lost too many games because she was too worried about people watching her to keep her eye entirely on the ball.

Or the rules. I used a cue to try to sink balls; Rowan used just his hands to whiz them across the felt and into the pockets. He did not take turns. He did not wait for me to line up shots. He took balls out of pockets and put them in others, knocking them into each other and out of my sightlines. I took shots more or less randomly, lining things up as best I could and hitting the cue ball before I was sure, before everything inevitably shifted in front of my eyes. Every time Rowan sunk a ball, he crowed, “I won!” And every time I managed to get one in despite the chaos of the table, he was equally supportive: “You won! Good job, Susan!”

In short, a microcosm of life with children. We had a blast. I can’t wait to do it again, and I can’t wait to visit him and his brother when they are cocky, twenty-something pool hustlers, and play a few games over a couple of pints of local microbrew, wherever that may be.

You take your chances at the Safeway checkout in Thunder Bay. Today, I got Donna Mae and a whole lotta conversation.

“So,” she said, swiping through my six litres of yogurt, “I was reading this book last night? On the menopause? And how you have to eat for it?”

“Uh huh.” I smile and nod.

“It’s like you can’t eat anything!” she continues. “I’m reading this and thinking, ‘What can you eat? Nothing!’ You want your milk in a bag?”

“Oh, no thanks,” I say.

“And calcium. Calcium is very important. I mean, I drink a big glass of milk every day, but some of the food you eat has cheese in it and that, too.”

Nod and smile.

“You’re supposed to take a multivitamin every day,” she tells me. “ But I don’t do that. I just figure you should get your vitamins from what you eat, right? If you eat good?”

“Uh huh.” Nod and smile. Four years after moving to this town, I am no longer surprised by the friendliness of the cashiers, their propensity to comment on the food you buy. “Leeks?” the woman behind the checkout counter will say to me. “What do you use them in, anyway? I’ve never tried them.” Or, “That’s a lot of apples! You making pie?” One time, a cashier told the woman in front of me, who was reading People in line, “Excuse me, Miss, this isn’t a library.” I looked up, horrified and slightly thrilled, at this unprecedented display of unfriendliness, and both women burst into laughter. Turns out they were friends.

“And nuts!” says Donna Mae, shoving a case of soda water back underneath my cart. “You’re supposed to eat a lot of nuts. But” — and here she pauses to take my credit card — “how much is a lot of nuts? A handful? And nuts have a lot of fat in them. So, I don’t know. You know?”

I love a lot of things about living here. And there are a lot of things I don’t miss (amidst the lot of things I really miss) about Toronto. But I’m still not quite resigned to the Thunder Bay supermarket checkout confessional. I just want to buy my yogurt and my milk and my leeks and my apples and get the hell out of there with a little Toronto surliness to let me know I’m still alive. Is that so wrong?