“Mom?”

Part of me sighs inwardly — maybe even, I will admit, outwardly — as Rowan props himself up on one elbow and opens his eyes to ask yet one more pre-sleep question. I’m tired. He’s tired. There have been lots of questions already.

“Yes, sweetie?” But I’ll humour him. Because this is the time of day — cuddled up in bed — where he is sometimes most conversational, most able to engage in the back-and-forth of real dialogue as opposed to his usual running-roughshod monologue and random series of segues.

“What did you do after you were borned?”

My mind struggles to process the question. Does he mean the first-breath minutes after delivery? The shift from womb to air and from umbilicus to bottles? (Confession: I was not breast-fed, and still managed to grow to functional adulthood.) From infancy to toddlerhood and so forth?

And then I think I might understand what he means.

“Well, I lived in my house with my parents — your Bubbie Ruthi and Zaidie — and with Uncle Jeff, and I got bigger and bigger and I learned to talk and walk, and I went to school and I grew up.”

Rowan is silent, so I continue.

“And then,” I say brightly, “I got my own house” — actually, a tiny, attic apartment with sloping ceilings, just north of College Street near Dufferin in Toronto’s west end — “and then Rachel and I got our house together. And we moved to Thunder Bay, and had you! And Isaac!”

That’s the gist of it, more or less: my life after I was borned, give or take a few apartments and a couple of degrees and so forth. But it will do at 8:15 on a school night, I think.

“Did you miss them?”

Did I miss who? Again, it takes me a moment to figure out what he’s asking. Oh!  

“Do you mean did I miss Bubbie Ruthi and Zaidie and Uncle Jeff when I got my own house?”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” I say, hedging a bit — not quite sure how to explain to him that my brother and I (Hi, Jeff!) developed a healthy regard for each other mostly after we both left home, or that leaving the suburbs of suburban Toronto for McGill University and Montréal’s plateau neighborhood was the best possible thing I could have done, not because home was a bad place, but because the plateau was just so good, so necessary for me as a sheltered, bored, somewhat morose 18-year-old — “well, sometimes. But whenever I missed them I could always phone them or go visit them. Or they came to visit me. I left when I was ready to.”

Rowan’s eyes are large, liquid. I’m talking and watching his jawline soften, melt, still racing to keep up with his thought process and wondering what he’s getting at when I finally figure it out.

“Are you worried about missing us when you leave home?”

He nods and gulps and the tears spill over. “I don’t want to miss you and Rachel and Isaac! I want to live with you forever!”

Let me be clear: there are no plans afoot for Rowan to move out, no plans for everyone to live anywhere but here. Rowan lets us know at regular intervals that he intends to live with us, in this house, for his entire life — even after he has the seven children he is planning to have. He would like to marry me, or Rachel, or, in a pinch, Isaac, and we explain that this is not possible, that marriage, should he choose to embrace that particular institution, is about making families bigger, adding to them, bringing in new people to the mix. We tell him that he may change his mind and choose to live with his spouse and their seven children in a different house, and he says, “But you’ll come live in that house with me.” And we say, maybe. And then he says, again, “I’m going to live here forever.” And we say, again, “Of course you are, for as long as you want.” And then he says, “But do I still have to follow the rules?” And I say, “Yes,” and he says, “Even when I’m 12?” And I say, “Yes,” and he says, “Even when I’m 50?” and I say, “Mister, if you’re living in my house with me when you’re 50, you especially have to follow the rules.”

“Sweetheart,” I say, pulling him to me, “nobody’s leaving. Nobody’s leaving for a long, long time.”

“I don’t want them ever to,” he wails, shuddering.

And we go on like this for a little while, him calming down slowly, until he is near sleep, until I can leave his bedroom, lights dimmed, and go downstairs to shrug my shoulders and shake my head, bewildered, at Rachel, as we try to process Rowan’s advance grieving.

Which is why I’m slightly ambivalent about reading Nicola I. Campbell’s Shin-chi’s Canoe with him. Because here’s a book about the unthinkable, a true story about boys and girls taken away — before they’re ready, before they’re old enough — from their homes, their siblings, their parents. The book tells the story of Shin-chi and his older sister, Shi-shi-etko, as they are taken from their families and communities; from their bedtime stories and language and food; from their names and their games and the arms of their parents to Indian residential school: a cold, foreign, hungry world designed to annihilate them under the guise of saving them.

Rachel has ordered the book and it has arrived and we have put it with all the other books. Waiting until the right moment, which means waiting until Rowan takes it out one day and asks to hear the story. I don’t want to tell it, not sure he’s ready for it or will be able to handle it, especially given his fears of leaving home. But I don’t want the story left untold. And I don’t imagine there’s ever going to be a convenient time to tell it.

I let Rachel do the reading, because she has read it already and imagines that she will be able to stay (fairly) calm, whereas I know I will begin to weep immediately, unstoppably, the moment the story begins. Which I do, as the siblings sit with their parents and grandmother and baby sister, waiting for the cattle truck to appear. Which I do through the cutting off of their braids (Shi-shi-etko asks her grandmother to cut their hair to avoid the indignity of having it hacked off by the nuns and priests at the school), through the end-of-summer journey through familiar landscape to, a hard, new, unfamiliar place of hunger and prayer to foreign gods. I weep through the spring and the return — temporary — home to their families and a dugout canoe of their own. The story is beautifully told and spares us the worst details, the outright violence and assault of the system. But it’s brutal enough, even geared towards children.

Rowan is confused. “Why did they do that?” he keeps asking. “The people who took the children away — why did they do that?” And, “what happened to them because they did that?” When he asks where, we tell him, here, right here. On this land. Not any more, but not so very long ago — as the book tells us, the last government-operated residential school in Canada did not close until 1996. And he says, “I don’t want them to do that here! I want them to do that somewhere else” — and he thinks of the place he imagines is furthest away from him — “in … in China! Not here!” And (as my mind flashes to the thousands — millions? — of baby girls given up in that country, other countries) we try to explain that we don’t want children to be taken from their parents, anywhere.

This is a child who has never known hunger, whose parents have spent all of three nights away from him his entire life, never more than a cell phone call or short flight away. And yet who is so spooked at the thought of leaving us that he can’t fathom that this happened all the time. And why should he? That kind of thing — it won’t happen to us, right? We’ll all get to live together in our house, until we’re good and ready not to?

Probably we will. But my son, my sons, need to understand that their own human rights — and sometimes, their lack thereof — have a long history in this country, and that the horrors perpetrated in Indian residential schools have an important, ongoing, chapter in that history. They need to know that their story is tangled up in those of the First Nations in this country; that important, horrific injustices were perpetrated; and that one way to prevent further injustice and possibly further some form of healing is to learn the history, tell the stories. Everyone’s stories. No matter how much they hurt. They need to know that no one is safe unless everyone is safe.

So, we can all — my two kids and their two moms —  live here together, forever? That’s what I tell my kid as I tuck him into bed after the story. Mostly, I believe it’s true.

Mostly. 

… 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.

In a word: yes. Wednesday evening treated us to a series of conversations in which Rowan ping-ponged back and forth on that very question. “I’m not going to that school ever again,” he would say, and then, immediately afterwards, “And I’m going to play with the marble run!” followed by, “But I’m not going to school,” followed by, “And there are going to be balloons for Avery’s birthday!” And so on.

Thursday morning, I still wasn’t sure what would happen. My guess was that he wanted to go, but couldn’t quite bring himself to fully admit that — and that any hint of sentimentality or moment of doubt would set him off. So when he said he wanted to ride his bike to school, I jumped on it — until Rachel reminded me that his bike was in the shop. “I want to go in the car, then, “ said Rowan, and, a hot minute later, I had him buckled in the backseat and we were off. Like a prom dress.

I was so on the ball, in fact, that we were the first kids to arrive. We wandered into the senior kindergarten courtyard and hung out for a while until the teacher’s assistant, Mrs. T., showed up. I met Mrs. T. approximately, oh, infinity times last year during Rowan’s tenure in JK, and yet, every single time we meet her, he feels the need to introduce her to me.

“That’s Mrs. T.,” he’ll say, and then be genuinely shocked and puzzled when I explain that I know who she is. “But how do you know her?” he says, and I explain, patiently, that I have met her before, right here at school. And he looks both impressed and doubtful.

In any case, this being a new year and all, Rowan obviously felt some justification in introducing me and Mrs. T. again.

“Mom, this is Mrs. T.,” he said. “And this is my mom. One of my moms. I have two moms. And I also have a dad, Rob. But he doesn’t live here.”

He said this all, characteristically, while walking in a circle waving his hands, as he is wont is a to do when he explains things to adults. Mrs. T. and I nod and smile — she’s heard all this before. Rowan talks about his family, like all kids talk about their families — at least, when they’ve never been given a reason not to. The four-year-old daughter of my friends Fiona and Jen has been telling supermarket cashiers that she has two moms since she could put words together. Another toddler-daughter-o-dykes I know recently shouted at the corner of a busy downtown Toronto intersection, “No Dadda! More mamas!”

Which is fantastic. And not necessarily because we’re not ashamed of our queer families (which we aren’t), or because were proud of them (which we are), but because we exist for the most part in a world where we can exist, where we can talk openly about our two moms or our two dads, or our donors, and the like. We’ve never explicitly explained to Rowan that there is anything unusual or different about his family. He simply has two moms, and a Rob, who doesn’t live here — and an entire network of biological and chosen family to support him. No secrets, no shame, no worries.

Right?

So, tell me this: how am I going to explain to my sons how this:

becomes this

outside a gay bar in downtown Thunder Bay last Friday night?

I don’t know Jake Raynard, the gay man who was savagely beaten gay with bricks by a crowd of young men. The man to whom police took more than an hour to respond when the employees at the fast food restaurant called them to report his distress. The man with 15 fractures to his cheekbone, a broken palate, a broken eye socket, and a broken jaw. I don’t know Jake, but I know the daughter he helped my two friends here conceive. I know he has a supportive community in this city, who have organized a rally this evening in order to support him to welcome him back into the community, and to send the message, in their words, that our response to this action — and not this action — will define our community.

We are going as a family to the rally tonight. I suspect it will be an emotional event, a conflicted event, an event that has the potential to be healing but that could also pit community against community if we aren’t very careful. And I’m not yet sure how to answer the questions that Rowan might ask about why we’re there and what’s going on.

These are lessons way beyond the scope of senior kindergarten. And yet, our kids have to learn them, now.

Every so often, I veer into slightly dangerous territory with my neighbour. It happened again on Saturday. We both drove up to our respective driveways at the same time, got out and waved at each other, and then I dropped the bomb.

“Greg,” I said, “I have a question for you about drill bits.”

In fact, I had two, related, questions about drill bits. Our house was lovingly built by master plasterers sometime in the 1950s, which is wonderful in terms of structure but a bitch when you want to hang a picture and can’t sink a nail into the wall. In desperation, I tried to drill a hole into one the other day. Barely made a dent. And then, I tried to put a latch on our new back door, in order to prevent the children from opening it during blizzards: again, not a dent.

So I figured that maybe I was using the wrong kind of drill bit. And I knew that Greg would know what kind of drill bit I needed. I knew this because Greg is the kind of guy who, on his summers off from teaching high school, does little household projects like, oh, single-handedly PUTTING AN ENTIRE SECOND FLOOR ON HIS HOUSE. I know: I watched him do it. The following summer, he insulated and sided the whole thing, and then landscaped his front yard.

Greg spends afternoons and weekends putting siding and a shingled roof on his garden shed, or rotating the tires on his truck. Or re-sodding his backyard. Or renovating the kitchen. If there something handy to be done, and a particular tool with which to do that handy thing, Greg knows how to do it, and by God, you can be sure he has the tool.

I am in awe of Greg’s abilities. I kind of covet them. (And the tools, too.) I mean, I’m handy, but in a kind of “I can install a dimmer switch or clean out the dishwasher trap” kind of handy. I can put together an IKEA bookcase with the best of them (admittedly, somewhat like this), install childproof latches and baby gates. I paint walls. One fateful weekend, I even sanded and refinished the floors in the ground-floor apartment Rachel and I rented just off Queen West in Toronto — I inhaled a lot of varathane fumes that day and ended up hallucinating about communing with my peasant Russian ancestors on the steppes. Mere hours before I wrote this, even, I finally got round to replacing the missing shelf in the built-in bookcase in my office, a task that involved visits to two different hardware stores, and the use of a drill, a level, a screwdriver, and a mallet. Lots of my projects end with mallets.

Because the thing is, I’m also a Sagittarius, which means that three-quarters of the way through any largish (or smallish) project, I get impatient, clumsy, frustrated with my lack of expertise and the inherent chaos that inevitably comes when tools are involved. Which is why only six of the eight holes for the screws that hold the bookshelf to the brackets actually have screws in them. Which is why so many of our ceilings look like this:

And our walls like this:

Still, things need to get done. And while I have finally succumbed to Rachel’s begging and of late agreed to hire someone to do many of the things I normally would have — disastrously — insisted upon trying myself (she once said, as we contemplated getting a new roof, “I really, really, want to hire a professional to do this,” as though I would actually attempt to replace the shingles myself), some of them are just too small or too mundane to outsource. Hence my question to Greg about the drill bits.

On the one hand, it was innocent enough: I needed to know what kind of bit to buy, and he could tell me. On the other hand, asking Greg a question related to home improvement is a bit of a calculated gesture, because the man just cannot stand the thought that something might not be done right. In a jiffy, he was over, cordless drill and bits (for wood and concrete) in hand. He inspected my latch and the guide holes I had marked for the drill. “I think you’re a little close to the edge of the doorframe here,” he murmured. “You think?” I said — and, ten minutes later, our latch was installed. Perfectly. As though by angels. “Who was that masked man?” I thought as he glided off back to his house.

This kind of thing happens fairly frequently. When we first moved in, Rachel and I attempted to hack away at the neglected, Gothic moss garden of overhanging Manitoba maple branches that made up our backyard. Within minutes, Greg showed up with a ladder and a chainsaw. He and his oldest son, Greg Junior, not only trimmed back all the trees — which had kept the sun from reaching their backyard — but then tied up two truckloads worth of branches and hauled them to the dump. Rachel and I stared out the window, flabbergasted. This was not the kind of thing that happened to us in Toronto.

The next summer, when I decided to do something about the overgrown hedge separating our two properties, Greg was on it like white on rice. I was timidly trimming the tops off the branches; he drove stakes into the ground ran a string between them, and used his hanging level to make sure the string was plumb. And then we spent a couple of hours hacking six feet off the top and shaping it into something respectable. Once we got everything tied up, he drove the branches to the dump. For days, I just stared out the window at the hedge, happy.

If there’s a blizzard, Greg’s snowblowing our driveway, as well as that of the neighbours on the other side. When our roof leaked because of an ice dam, Greg climbed onto it with a hatchet and a shovel. Toddler turn on your headlights so you need a boost? Greg has a charger and will plug your car in for you. Good fences make good neighbours — and good neighbours make good fences. I know this, because Greg rebuilt our fence when we decided to take down the most offensive of the Manitoba maples.

And then Rachel and I bake cookies and Bundt cakes and take them over, with our undying gratitude.

Every so often, I’m tempted to say, all casual like, “Hey, Greg, do you know anything about taking down garages? Cause the insurance people think ours is a big liability”, and then count down the seconds until he’s on the driveway with crowbar and a Bobcat. But I bite my tongue. One doesn’t want to take advantage. Of a very, very good thing.

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.

“Mom?” Rowan asks at the dinner table. “Mom? You know who Santa Claus is?”

The hand lifting the fork to my mouth doesn’t even tremble.

“Well, yes,” I say, slowly, evenly. My eyes meet Rachel’s across the table. “I do.”

Inside, however, I am moving into crisis mode, trying to quell the five-alarm siren that my son’s question has set off in my head. It’s okay, I remind myself — you’re prepared for this.

“He brings you presents,” says my four-year-old.

“Well,” I say, choosing my words carefully, trying to remember the script. “Some families tell a nice story about Santa Claus, and how he brings presents. But not all families tell that story. Our family tells a different story.”

“He comes down the chimney,” says Rowan.

“Yes,” I say, “that’s part of the story. Some families — okay, lots of families — have a holiday called Christmas. And they tell a story about how a man named Santa Claus comes down the chimney and brings presents. But we have different holidays. We have Hanukkah and Pesach and Rosh Hashanah. So we don’t tell the Santa Claus story.”

Rowan looks at me, eyes wide, absorbing my carefully thought out, painstakingly rehearsed presentation on “How Families Are Different (Or What It Means to Be the Only Jew in Your Junior Kindergarten Class).”

“And he brings you presents!” he chirps after a moment.

Oy.

There are benefits and drawbacks to living in a small city. One of the hardest things — more than even the Safeway cashiers who talk too much, way more than being queer — is trying to raise Jewish children in place where they are a rare species. There are fewer than 30 Jewish families here, total, most of them older couples, many of them (like us) interfaith. There is one synagogue, with a tiny but active core, and a handful of children (one of whom, by the way, was born in the wee hours of this morning — we got a call at 4 a.m. and Rachel went over to take care of her older sister while her parents went ever so briefly to the hospital. Mazel tov!) Everywhere we go, well-meaning people ask Rowan if he’s excited for Santa to come. And this year, he’s old enough to know what they’re talking about.

I’m torn. It’s not that we don’t celebrate Christmas in some of its forms — I draw the line at a tree or wreaths, but we have hosted and attended lovely Christmas dinners. The kids get Christmas gifts from Rachel’s family and from their dad’s. And this year — right after doing Hanukkah with my side of the family — we will spend the holiday with Rachel’s sister in full-on Christmas mode. But I just can’t get it up to get all ho-ho-ho for the guy in the big red suit. Especially not in the absence of other stories.

So, what’s a Jew to do? In a couple of weeks, I’m going into Rowan’s class with a Hanukkah book and a menorah and some dreidels, and tell the kids a story. It won’t even things out, but at least I’m making an effort. What would you do?

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?