…it’s just that there’s all this WEATHER, fall slamming down on top of summer like a set change, the backdrop with its cold nights and hurricane-force winds thudding down on the seasonal stage — BAM! — to obscure summer with its clear blue skies and heat-thirst and exposed skin. BAM! Fall! We’re done, and stop snivelling in the corner over there about how you want if not just simply MORE summer then at least a GRADUAL shift from one season to the next. Buck up, Buttercup. AUTUMN! IS! HERE!

It’s jarring, like the alarm that woke me this morning, the alarm we will now set regularly, for the first time in six years. We just haven’t had to set alarms — notwithstanding the fact that my commute is a hallway or that our schedules are flexible, we’ve always have children to wake us well before seven, and if they didn’t we took it as a welcome surprise. But this year, with the start of first grade and twice weekly preschool and children who, miraculously, can be relied to sleep at least occasionally through the night and past sunrise, the alarm feels necessary. I’m grateful for it, if grateful is the right word. More specifically I am grateful for the perceived order it confers over the household, over enough time to shower and dress and eat and put together lunches and backpacks and get children to two different locations every single day. I have been fighting, in fact, for the alarm for a while now, fighting against Rachel’s laissez-faire attitude about getting up any earlier than we possibly have to. But last night, the night before the first day of first grade, when I suggested setting the alarm for 7:30, she actually countered with 7:00.

“Really?” I asked.

“Really,” she said.

“Every day?” I asked.

“Every day,” she said.

“Pinky swear?” I asked.

“Pinky swear,” she said, and we shook on it. And then I turned to face her and said very slowly and very carefully, “Okay, because I want you to know that I am fully and completely committed to setting the alarm and two weeks from now you can’t conveniently forget that we had this conversation and decide that you don’t want to set it. Because this is very important to me. I need you to understand that.” And she patted my head.

To be perfectly honest, the alarm didn’t actually wake me — my own internal, autumnal clock did just that. With some help from Isaac, who insisted, circa 6:30 or so, that Rachel go cuddle with him. I lay awake, in the dark, eyes closed, until the news came on and I learned that Australia does indeed have a Labour government and that a 90-year-old man was found alive in the bush in northern Manitoba and I thought how odd it will be to be somewhat informed about world events from here on in. And then we awoke and there was indeed enough time to shower and eat and dress and take two children to two different places. Just barely enough time.

And of course it had to rain, pouring down in grey sheets over me and Rowan as we picked through the puddles and made our way to the gymnasium for the handoff. He’s been fairly low-key about starting school this year, alternating between nonchalance and calm proclamations that he’s simply not intending to go, the way he might decline an invitation to a birthday party. But he hopped gamely out of the car and held my hand as we walked through the doors and through the hallways to the gym. “Oh look,” I kept saying, “here’s Jacob’s dad, and there’s Julie, and Erin and—”

“Mom,” he kept saying, “stop telling me every time you SEE someone.”

And then we were in the gym, and he was in line, and his teacher shook my hand and I caught glimpses of some of the other kids in his class and some of their parents and Rowan kept hitching his backpack up over his shoulders and looking very small and grown-up all at the same time and I caught a glimpse of one of his classmate’s mothers who looked like she was about to cry and you know, a therapist once told me that my tendency to cry so easily — my hyperemotionality — is a sign of a body in crisis, under stress, and to that I simply say, Pah! I am a Goldberg. We cry. Have you met my father? A cryer. Me? Cryer. My five-year-old son, who today started first grade? Two nights ago, after watching an airplane move its way through the sky, I sang to him the first few verses of “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and he asked me, holding the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, to please stop singing, because it was just a little too sad.

Rowan did not cry. And, to my credit, I held it together until I exited the gym and another mother asked me how I was and I gulped. And then another mother came by and took one look at my face and hugged me. And then another. And then we all made our way, slowly, via the first-grade lockers, outside, where we stood making small talk, until I shuffled home, tears mingling with raindrops on my cheeks.

PS: One year ago today

PPS: Two years ago today

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 

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.

Until Tuesday, Rowan’s best friend at school was Robyn. Robyn with a Y not an I, as Rowan tells me, repeatedly. Robyn, who sits on the Q on the alphabet rug, right next to Rowan on the Y. Robyn, who we saw one time at the swimming pool with her mom and her baby brother. Robyn, who once showed up miraculously at the public library while Rowan was there and was all he talked about the rest of the day. “If we go to the library, will Robyn be there?” he now asks.

When I dropped him off at school a few mornings ago, Robyn was waiting for Rowan in the junior kindergarten courtyard. They stood, silent, facing each other in their snowsuits, smiling shyly, rapturously, for about a minute. Then they ran off to play together. And a little piece of me melted inside.

But yesterday, yesterday Robyn got mad at Rowan for pushing her. “But I didn’t push her,” he tells me. I am the recipient of enough flying hugs and inadvertent head butts to know that Rowan isn’t always necessarily aware of the degree to which his body, his actions, can affect others. I’m fairly sure he didn’t mean to push, and I have no doubt that she could have easily misinterpreted his clumsy puppy love.

In any case, Rowan is a bit forlorn. He told the story to me and to Rachel. He and his babysitter drew a picture for Robyn after school. And during last night’s bedtime story, when Rachel got to the line in It’s Okay to Be Different (which you should buy, by the way, and not only because it’s been banned by several uptight school boards) that reads, “It’s okay to make a wish,” he said, “I wish Robyn were my friend again.” I nearly cried when she told me that.

Internet (as Dooce would say), it’s taking a lot for me not to swoop in and fix this. All I wanted to do for a few minutes last night was to get hold of Robyn’s phone number and call her parents, explain the situation, and get the two of them back together. I wanted to write a note to their teacher, asking her to intervene, to make that little girl be friends with my little boy again. I imagined walking Rowan to school tomorrow, waiting for Robyn, and brokering the peace.

But I will do none of that. I will stand back and offer support judiciously, quietly, when asked or when it truly seems that Rowan is in over his head. I will let Rowan give his picture to Robyn himself. I will talk to him about his feelings. And I will see what happens. And I am sure that I will do the same thing over and over and over, when Rowan is 12, 14, 17, when his heart is broken and he broods silently in his room for hours, playing ballads on his guitar, writing bad existential poetry. Here’s my pledge: I will watch, and I will ache, and I will listen, and I will nod and cluck and — if permitted — hug. And I will not interfere.

But, man, it’s gonna be hard.

Get out your Shop-Vacs, your Hazmat suits, your chisels — the toddler has discovered cutlery and wants to feed himself. Will accept no help. Will in fact strenuously reject help. We are reduced to sitting quietly by, keeping one hand as subtly as possible on his breakable pottery bowl — this being the month we wisely chose to rid the house of plastic dishware, bless our earnest green souls — washcloths at the ready, while he shovels food into his pie-hole.

His expertise is — literally — hit or miss, mostly a function of the food’s solidity. Yesterday, he daintily polished off an entire piece of French toast, handling his fork with dexterity that would rival the Queen’s. This morning’s oatmeal? Not so much.

Get out your Shop-Vacs, your Hazmat suits, your chisels — the toddler has discovered cutlery and wants to feed himself. Will accept no help. Will in fact strenuously reject help. We are reduced to sitting quietly by, keeping one hand as subtly as possible on his breakable pottery bowl — this being the month we wisely chose to rid the house of plastic dishware, bless our earnest green souls — washcloths at the ready, while he shovels food into his pie-hole.

His expertise is — literally — hit or miss, mostly a function of the food’s solidity. Yesterday, he daintily polished off an entire piece of French toast, handling his fork with dexterity that would rival the Queen’s. This morning’s oatmeal? Not so much.

Get out your Shop-Vacs, your Hazmat suits, your chisels — the toddler has discovered cutlery and wants to feed himself. Will accept no help. Will in fact strenuously reject help. We are reduced to sitting quietly by, keeping one hand as subtly as possible on his breakable pottery bowl — this being the month we wisely chose to rid the house of plastic dishware, bless our earnest green souls — washcloths at the ready, while he shovels food into his pie-hole.

His expertise is — literally — hit or miss, mostly a function of the food’s solidity. Yesterday, he daintily polished off an entire piece of French toast, handling his fork with dexterity that would rival the Queen’s. This morning’s oatmeal? Not so much.