No, not Scrabble tiles, although I wouldn’t blame you for guessing that. Not golf balls, either, or marbles or a rock collection or tent pegs or jigsaw puzzle pieces. When we moved into this house I shoved the bag into a closet, and last week Isaac came downstairs with it around his neck. He was most interested in the bag itself, but that’s only because he didn’t know what was inside:

Now, you’ll either know immediately what this is or you will not. And, I would venture to say that whether you recognize it immediately as a gum wrapper chain says something about you. What, exactly, it says I’m not at all sure. Rachel seems to think that the fact that I have managed to, over a 28-year span, transform untold numbers of chewing-gum wrappers into a multicoloured chain that measures — one sec — approximately 59 feet long is a sign of some kind of weird, tenacious, obsessiveness. I say, if you want obsessive, here’s obsessive. But the truth of the matter is that I have never passed by a stray gum wrapper on the street without stooping to pick it up.

The chain began in fifth grade as a joint project between me and my friend Adrienne; she in particular supplied a range of Carefree gum wrappers and boundless enthusiasm. But, apparently, not as much enthusiasm as me, the Keeper of the Chain, the grown woman who still adds to it.

When it became apparent, back in the early 1980s, that the chain and the wrappers that make it up needed some kind of permanent home, my dad tossed me the purple bag, thus continuing the great Canadian whiskey’s double life as storage provider for random stuff. Wrappers include Carefree Gum; Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit, Double Mint and Spearmint flavours; Fruit Stripe Gum; Beeman’s; Orbit; Dubble Bubble; Beech Nut; Big Red; Freedent; and others whose names I can no longer piece together from the origami mix. My elementary school friends used to bring me exotic brands from their United States vacations. It used to smell sweetly fruity; I would drape it over my shoulders or bury my face in the Crown Royal bag and inhale cherry, grape, cinnamon. Now, when I inhale, nothing: the scent is almost completely gone.

As are gum wrappers, aren’t they? At least, the long, thin flat sticks — first sheathed in tissue paper or foil, over which were folded the colourful paper sleeves. Typing that now, I can see that the wrappers were utterly overpackaged, contributing no doubt to global warming and our landfills, but I — in case you haven’t noticed — still have a soft spot for them. I think that Juicy Fruit is still in production, but the wrapper has changed from its sturdy paper to a slick, plasticky stock that just isn’t as satisfying.

I haven’t actually chewed gum for years, and I can’t remember the last time I found a suitable wrapper on the street. They’ve become hot commodities; currently, there’s an auction on eBay for two chains, found at an estate auction, measuring 15 and 18 feet each — “folk art chewing gum wrapper chains,” no less — plus 3500+ wrappers. Current bid is $120. I can’t say I’m not tempted, but that would push me over the edge from nostalgic to just plain weird, wouldn’t it? Or maybe we just say that I’m committed to my art. Maybe I need a patron. Actually, I definitely need a patron: feel free to send me your wrappers, and know that you are contributing to a storied folk art tradition.

Ye gods people, it’s Friday, and all I’ve posted this week is a picture of some toilet paper. I can totally do better. Here, for example, is Rowan, engaged in the time-honoured public-school tradition of writing Valentine’s Day cards. Or, as he calls them, Valentime’s Day cards.

I feel the need to point out that this photograph was taken two and a half weeks ago, when Rachel had enough foresight to pick up a couple of boxes of 99-cent V-day cards at Zellers and Rowan got on the project like white on rice. ORGANIZED MUCH? That’s us: totally on the ball. Lunches made and clothes laid out the night before. No rushing around in the morning trying to find that other mitten or realizing that you’ve dropped your kid off at senior kindergarten but have neglected to brush your teeth. We are with it, people. WITH IT. If I actually had ever done Christmas shopping in my life, I would venture to guess that the feeling I got when dropping a package of 14, pre-written, sealed Valentine’s Day cards into my son’s communication folder of a Thursday morning would be akin to having all my Yuletide gifts purchased by mid-October.

Rowan is at the lovely stage where everybody gives and everybody gets (except for the two Jehovah’s Witness kids in the class, who don’t participate in the holiday), where popularity doesn’t yet dictate how many cards will populate your little paper-plate Valentine’s Day mailbox. I went to a private Jewish day school as a kid, so valentines weren’t part of the curriculum (read: goyish, feh), and by the time I entered the public system in eighth grade, they were just one more instrument in the torture rack of the junior-high pecking order. In Grade 9, though, I remember that three kids at the top of that pecking order — Noel, Josh, and Joanna — made valentines for every kid in the grade. Every single one of us, from the computer nerds in the gifted class to the library club president, got a personalized Valentine, signed, with love, from the three of them. It stood out, you know? Interestingly, Joanna now runs a lifestyle website called The Sweet Spot, while Noel is president and CEO of AshleyMadison.com — yes, the site with the tagline, “Life is short, have an affair.” Who knew?

So that quilt I’m making? I’ve been doing the math. Some numbers for you: A queen-sized quilt top measures 83 by 103 inches. That translates into 437 individual blocks, each measuring 4.5 square inches. Each block, in turn, is made up of nine individual pieces. For a total of 3,933 individual pieces of fabric.

Each of those 3,933 individual pieces varies in length, from 1.25 to 5 inches, but they are all 1.25 inches wide. And so, for the past couple of weeks, I have been wielding my trusty Olfa rotary cutter as I watch episodes of True Blood and United States of Tara and Bob the Builder on DVD, cutting those 1.25-inch-wide strips from approximately 12 yards of red and pink fabric. Twelve yards, at approximately 36 inches per yard, means I need to cut approximately 346 strips.

I’m guessing I’m about halfway done.

(We will pause here for a moment to let it sink in, slowly, that my project is, as previously stated, cutting 12 yards of perfectly good fabric into approximately 4,300 pieces and then sewing them all back together again. Got it? Okay, let’s continue.)

It’s all going to add up to something beautiful. I know it is. But, in the short term what it’s added up to is this: My arms and shoulders are shot. My wrists ache and my palms and thumbs tingle. My forearms are dotted with painful little knots.

It’s not like I wasn’t perfectly aware that this could happen. I’ve written before about carpal tunnel syndrome and repetitive strain disorder and the fact that I can no longer knit. Or type. Or bowl (not that that one is a huge loss, to me or to the world, but still). So why I decided that it would be perfectly acceptable to repetitively strain my upper limbs in 22- and 45-minute bursts is beyond me. Although, actually, it’s not. I was in denial. I wanted the quilt so badly, wanted so much to get going on this artistic pursuit, that I pretended I could do it.

Of course, the idea of the quilt is tied to the idea of writing the novel, of the two taking shape simultaneously, of the story, like the fabric, being broken down into its individual parts and breathtakingly reassembled. Yeah, yeah, so romantic. Of course my wrists would get right on board that.

Thing is, I don’t know why I decided I had to make the quilt in the space of a couple months when I’ve given myself permission to work slowly but steadily on the manuscript. My goal for the novel is 250 words each workday. (To put that into perspective, this post is pushing 400 words as of this sentence.) It’s not very much, but it’s doable even on the days when I feel as though, as Ann Lamott might put it, everything I write is “a stupid, self-indulgent sack of spider puke.” And it adds up, over time. Two hundred and fifty words is a page. A page each workday adds up to a manuscript in about a year, give or take. Especially on the days when, as often happens, I write more than 250 words. But not a lot more.

So, I’m backing off with the quilting. I’ll schedule a few emergency appointments with the acupuncturist. And then I’ll cut a few strips a day. I’ll write my few words a day. And I will complete both projects without compromising my body, or my sanity. At least, no more than they’re already compromised.

I’m quilting again, after a too-long break. I don’t know — something about having two children under the age of five just didn’t seem conducive to futzing around with geometry and sewing machines and rotary blades and tiny scraps of fabric and, oh, pins. Lots of pins, scattered, no matter how careful you try to be, on the floor. On which crawl babies. Who like to put things in their mouths. And so on.

Also there was the fact that I couldn’t find the pedal for the sewing machine. And then, for some reason, I decided that the sewing machine wasn’t working. And the idea of both finding the pedal (it was behind some shelves in the basement) and then actually hooking up the entire machine and running some fabric through it just to check if it worked — and then deciding what to do with it if it didn’t — seemed so overwhelming that I needed to take a nap and eat some chocolate every time I thought of it.

But, in the past few weeks, I’ve got unstuck. I suspect it has something to do with finishing teaching. For the past semester, I taught a course in creative nonfiction at the local university. And while teaching opened my eyes to about a zillion mostly fantastic things, it also seemed to consume vast swaths of my creative energy. It seems I can teach writing or actually write, but not both at the same time, aside from a few blog posts here and there.

But! I am done! And from the moment the last paper was graded, I’ve been on a nonstop organizational extravaganza. Filing, purging, list making and crossing-off. Alphabetizing the CDs. I even bought a label maker. I’m hard-core, man.

And, so, the sewing machine works. I’m not sure why I thought it didn’t, but it did a fine job of hemming the hanging-down curtains in Rowan’s room, which have been bothering me for approximately a year and a half. And then I dug out the beginnings of a quilt idea I had experimented briefly with a couple years ago — log cabin, but monochrome — and tried to figure out exactly where it stood.

I think I first got obsessed with quilting when I took Women’s Writing and Feminist Theory as an undergraduate. Read enough Alice Walker at a formative age, and I suppose that’s bound to happen. I remember creating a presentation on The Color Purple in which I mapped out all the characters’ various relationships to each other as patches on a crazy quilt. There was Walker’s short story, “Everyday Use,” which brought home to me the power of the artist: when one sister objects to her sibling actually using her family’s heirloom quilts as opposed to hanging them on a wall, their mother replies, “‘She can always make some more. Maggie knows how to quilt.’” Something about quilting’s combination of beauty and utility, the idea of disparate scraps of cloth coming together to create works of art, fascinated me.

And now, it appears, Rowan is fascinated, too. He stands by me as I feed scraps of material through the machine. His job is to remove the pins, which he does, carefully replacing them in the Altoids box that serves as their container. Then he helps me cut the newly sewn pieces apart, and then stands by the ironing board, inhaling deeply, while I press them. “I love the way it smells,” he says of the steaming fabric. For the sake of everyone’s self-preservation, I have not yet explained to him the function of the pedal. Just as he thinks the car drives itself, he assumes the sewing machine is powered by my brain. And that’s just fine by me, for now.

I think of Walker, in her essay collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, describing the year it took her to write The Color Purple: lodged in a cabin in northern California, working on a quilt, spending time with her daughter. Scraps of fabric stitched together like words become sentences, paragraphs, chapters. The whole more than the sum of its parts. Her, trusting in her vision of what both would be before anyone else could see them.

All of which is by way of saying that I have dug out the novel manuscript, and I’m writing again. This is not so much a resolution as an affirmation: 2010 holds a novel manuscript and a queen-sized quilt top. Pins be damned. Yesterday, I bought more fabric. Along with the label maker.

Rowan doesn’t yet know what we’re making, has no concept that these painstakingly pinned and sewn and unpinned and ironed pieces of fabric, have any larger purpose. “But what is it?” he asks. And I try to explain: that we’re making a blanket; that each of these tiny pieces of cloth will eventually join together in a (hopefully) gorgeous design, the whole more beautiful than the sum of its parts. I show him the quilt I made for him before I knew him, had any sense of his possibility. We hang it on his wall, right next to his map of the world.

“Basically,” I said to him, “you take a [perfectly good] big piece of material, cut it up into a whole bunch of little pieces, rearrange them, and sew it back together again”: smaller, more intricate, stronger, more detailed. More work. More beautiful, for its scars. Kind of, some days, like my life, before and after him.

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.   

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.