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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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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Dear Rowan,

We’ve had some work done on the house recently, including repairing the living-room ceiling, which has been a mess for just about as long as you have been alive. I remember sitting on the couch, nursing you as a tiny infant, when the brown, water-stained mark on the drywall just above us opened in a slow-motion horror show and released a stream of dirty, icy liquid onto the floor.

I was alone with you. You were new. I was a new parent, a new homeowner, in a new city where I knew practically no one. I had lost my own mother eight months earlier. It was the coldest winter on record and I hadn’t slept in weeks AND THEN THE CEILING WAS CAVING IN.

And I knew I was totally fucked.

I was, shall we say, a little unstable for a while after you were born, convinced that we would make one wrong move and break you. You might look okay, but I knew that the cumulative effect of all my individual parental imperfections would out eventually, a series of drops running together into a stream of ruin that would demolish you, taking me out in the process. And it would be all my fault.

Thankfully, that feeling didn’t last.

Our neighbours came over and climbed up onto the roof with hatchets and shovels and cleared away the ice dam (now there’s a Thunder Bay term) that had forced the water underneath the shingles. The next summer, we got a new roof. And now, just as you turn six years old, we have finally managed to insulate the attic and, for good measure, clear away the peeling, stuccoed mess of the ceiling, plastering over it with white. It looks good.

And so do you, kid, even with that blank spot where your first tooth used to be.

How is it that six years have passed between then and now? I’m no longer new to this parenting gig, no longer new to this city with its wonderful, generous people. I’m no longer a new homeowner. And yet I don’t feel like I’ve changed all that much, not counting the exponential increase in grey hairs and the lines around my eyes, clichés though they may be.

But then there’s you, almost too heavy to lift, nothing all like that big-headed baby who knew nothing of his own — or his mother’s, or his mothers’ — newness. And you still don’t, you still — mercifully — have so little idea of how often I feel like I am just making this up as I go along, the way I make up silly songs and bedtime stories about a magic boy and his magic little brother and their magic backpack full of coloured Cheerios (Eat a red one and sprout wings! A green one will make you invisible!). At least now I have enough perspective, and just barely enough sleep, to understand that that’s just what parents do: the best we can, with what we have.

Last year I wrote about how parenting you as a four-year-old felt, much of the time, as though someone had cut off my thumbs and I barely had a grip. Over the past year, they’ve started to grow back, those thumbs — paradoxically, just as I’m learning to let go a little more, to let you make your own way in the world. You started first grade in September, and it was a battle those first few weeks to make sure you were awake in enough time to get there. “I want my own alarm clock,” you finally told me, and once you were in charge of your own wake-up time, the issue faded. At first, we set your clock for 7:30 AM, and then you decided 7:15 would be better, because then we’d have some dedicated time for cuddling. And then, after one too many fight about getting dressed, I came up with a new strategy: I would get my own self dressed, and you would be in charge of you. It’s working. Most of the time.

I put on skates for the first time in 15 years this past weekend and went out with you on the ice, where I, happily, remembered how to propel myself forward, if somewhat shakily. Rachel and Rob and I took turns guiding you and your brother, new to this icy medium, around the rink, and I got to marvel at you learning to walk all over again, at how game you were to keep trying. “It’s so much fun to learn how to do this with you,” I kept saying, and you nodded, grinning. “I don’t know how, and you don’t know how,” you said, “and we’re doing it together.”

Yes, we are.

Six years in, the ice doesn’t feel so treacherous. You move forward, you fall, and you get up, and you don’t break. And neither do I.

Happy birthday, Rowan.

Love,

Mom

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…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

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I guess I should write a post about how this image captures perfectly what it’s like to live with children. Something about how they get the soft white inside, while I’m stuck with the crusts.

But the thing is, I like the crust. It’s the best part.

On a good day, everything works out just fine, really.

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Honestly, I stare at these things the way I used to stare at a couple of babies as they slept — sneaking back for just one more peek, scanning them for each new development; each unfolding, each unfurling. It’s addictively satisfying (or is that an oxymoron?), all that potential.

Rowan stares at them, too — his “beautiful seeds.” He pushed for flowers, lots of flowers, over vegetables, and now is the proud papa of an egg carton or two of giant sunflowers, pansies, and delphiniums. Me, I’m all about the beets, bats about the beets, nuts with the beets — you get the idea. Rachel seems to have a soft spot for the peas and beans. The plan is to raise property values by turning our front yard into a series of 16-square-foot, raised vegetable beds — square-foot gardening to replace our sea of anthills and dandelions. (Although, after reading this, I’ve been inspired to gather dandelion greens.)

I stare at the seeds the way someone else very little stares at his new lava lamp. Which is to say, adoringly and obsessively. Yes, of course it makes perfect sense for a nearly three-year-old to have a lava lamp: what could possibly be inappropriate about a toy that heats up to skin-burning temperatures, is made of glass, and filled with liquid? Still, he fell in love with it at a penny auction, and then won it, and now we turn it on at bedtime and at nap time, and he lies there, basking happily in its red glow, until he falls asleep.

And then I sneak into his bedroom and turn it off, but not before staring at him in his dinosaur pajamas for a few minutes, his thumb halfway out of his mouth, various bears scattered around the bed.

Far out.

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The car is aging.

I mean that, of course, in the sense that the car is — like the rest of us — getting older. But I also mean that the car ages me. As in, I gain a couple of decades whenever I slide behind the wheel of our late-model, Big-Three sedan. It is — and I use this term fondly — a dad car, a car your father might drive, a car my father did drive for several years before upgrading and generously bequeathing it to us.

All my cars, actually, with the exception of the Chevy Cavalier my brother and I shared for two weeks one summer in our teens before it was stolen out of our driveway one night and later found on the outskirts of town with vomit and heroin works in the backseat, have been dad cars: the Pontiac something or other, the Cadillac Sedan Deville, the Dodge Intrepid, and now our current beast. The running theme, of course, has been the price. For me, “free” tends to trump “pride” when it comes to vehicles: if the price I have to pay for not going into hock over a car is that people assume that the carseats in the back are for my grandchildren, well, then, that’s fine with me. Our current car is popular with the seniors here in Thunder Bay. People tend to do a double take when they see me behind the wheel. “But she’s too young,” they must be thinking. “Hi Gramps!” my friend Daphne calls whenever I drive by. My friend Jody giggles whenever she sees it. “It just doesn’t … fit … with the rest of you,” she said once, and I wanted to hug her. (Or maybe hit her.) She, of course, drives a Harley. (Or is that “rides”?)

Still, I have a soft spot for our eleven-year-old car, partly because my mother also drove it. I can still picture her behind the wheel, faintly remember conversations we had while driving, and imagine she’d get a kick out of seeing me drive by, two kids in the back, barking, “Do I need to stop driving or can the two of you stop hitting each other?”

But the car is aging. We are entering, I fear, that period of increasingly rapid automotive decline, where repairs edge out maintenance and visits to the mechanic inch closer and closer together. It’s all the little things: the door to the glove compartment doesn’t close properly; Rowan’s seatbelt gave out last week, forcing us to move his booster seat into the middle (fortunately, he says he likes being next to Isaac, but you know that’s just a chicken fight waiting to happen); the brights don’t stay on unless you hold down the lever; every so often, the driver’s-side windshield wiper takes on a life of its own and whaps around the side of the car to smack the driver’s-side window. The paint is chipping, the shocks are iffy, the electronic locks work only intermittently, you have to hold up the hood with one hand while you check the oil, and the cup holder spring mechanism is busted. That said, it still looks fairly respectable and gets us from A to B without fuss.

There is aging, of course, and there is aging. Time passes by at the same rate for us all, I realize, but my children are growing, developing, becoming stronger, more realized, versions of their own selves. I, on the other hand, like the car, seem to be aging in the sense of getting older, where regular maintenance is designed to slow down the decline rather than actually improve things, where pain moves on a regular sightseeing tour throughout my body: neck, shoulders, wrists, knees, ankles. My forearms are shit. I have vertigo, just like my mother did, and it gets worse every year. I chew cold things only on the left side of my mouth. My lower back hurts. The index fingernail on my right hand is thickening and developing a permanent split. I’m going grey. My vision is still rock solid, but that’s only because I had laser eye surgery four years ago. I may be getting wiser, but I am losing nouns, names, just like they (I forget who) said I would. I can still touch my toes, but I worry that, if I skip a week, I won’t be able to any more.

I am told this is just the beginning.

That said, I  like to think I still look fairly respectable and I can get from A to B without much fuss.

In my head and my heart, I am a Prius girl, or maybe a Subaru Outback or even a Mazda 5 kind of driver. (In my slightly wilder dreams, I’m driving on the coast, any coast, in a red, two-seater, convertible MG.) In my head and my heart, I can stay out all night dancing, type like the wind, squat to pick up my toddler without grimacing as I straighten my knees. In real life, I’m hoping the current car lasts us until Isaac is in school full time and we can shift our child care budget over to car payments.

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A week ago, I was performing the quintessentially Thunder Bay action of shoveling my front lawn — trying to even out the piles of snow so that we wouldn’t be stuck again in April with a fossilized mountain of ice and dirt in the northeast corner of the front yard. But today? It’s mid-March, and all the snow is already gone. I find myself feeling oddly unprepared, as though dinner guests have arrived early and the house is still a disaster, the oven still cool to the touch. The little feedback loop inside my brain is saying things like We don’t have spring jackets for the kids yet, and Rowan’s bike needs repairs, and I have not planted any seeds indoors yet, and these kind of things make me feel as though I am late, not that spring is freakishly early, literally sprung upon us, still sleepy-eyed and coming out of hibernation.

In other words, the weather is my fault. How’s that for self-flagellation?

Not that I’m not enjoying it, the slipping on of sandals and following Rowan down the street on the season’s first ride on his mostly usable bicycle. And the kids, for them it’s like winter never happened. They don’t stop to marvel, like Rachel and I do, about the sudden greening of the grass in the backyard and the ability to kick around a soccer ball and the no snowsuits — NO SNOWSUITS! They just do it, in the moment, stripping off winter layers and letting them fall into the spring dirt.

Yesterday, after lunch, I met up with Rowan and Isaac and their babysitter at the park. It’s March break — spring break (and, to quote Rachel over at 6512 and Counting, “a good thing because gosh, those preschoolers have a rough schedule, what with snacktime and recess every two hours”). I met up with them at the park because we had signed Rowan up for gymnastics camp for four afternoons this week, on the assumption that since he loves his weekly gymnastics class and said “Yes” when we asked him, four weeks ago, if he would like to go to said camp, that this was a good idea.

You know where this is going, right? Should I just stop right here and not write any more? What about this: those of you who don’t really need to keep reading to know that, of course, when I showed up to bring him to gymnastics camp yesterday, when I showed up at the sunshiny park where he was merrily digging in the thawed sand with his brother, he didn’t want to go anywhere near gymnastics camp, you guys just go get a coffee or check your e-mail or something for a minute. And then the rest of you can hear about how he refused to get in the car even after I tried to bribe him with a yogurt tube, and so I left him with his babysitter and his brother and came home, defeated.

What was I going to do, I asked Rachel over the phone, short of physically forcing him into the vehicle and hurling him, screaming, onto a balance beam?

In truth, I wasn’t surprised. Since his initial embracing of the gymnastics camp idea, Rowan has steadily backpedaled. “I want to go to the babysitter’s every day,” he kept telling us. “I only go to gymnastics on Thursdays. I don’t want to go to gymnastics CAMP — just gymnastics. On Thursdays.” Still, we persevered, hoping that he might have a sudden change of heart. Why we persevered, I don’t know. We’ve been here, with swimming lessons, with indoor soccer, and now with gymnastics camp: Rowan knows what he wants, and what he likes. As he said to us at the dinner table last night, more calmly than he had in the park yesterday afternoon, “I’m sorry, but that’s just how I do things.”

On Thursdays.

So, we’ve shelved gymnastics camp. And, for some period of time that I cannot quite specify just yet, I’m shelving the idea of signing him up for any prepaid, organized activity. Because, my kid? My kid does what he does, when he does it, and it’s not worth the heartache to try to force him to do things he doesn’t do, when he doesn’t want to do them.

Maybe I would be more worried if he spent all day watching TV, if he wasn’t thrilled to go to gymnastics (on Thursdays) and music classes (on Mondays), if he didn’t want to play soccer in the backyard with us (as opposed to on the Astroturf of the indoor gym) or ride his bike every possible chance he got, if he didn’t read dozens of books weekly. Maybe I would be more worried if I didn’t recognize so much of myself in him. Despite my mother’s exhortations for me to take up what she hilariously called a “social sport” (does pool count?) I never learned to play golf or tennis and I don’t regret that for a minute. I refused to go when she signed me up for baseball, although I managed to swim competitively for years and, like my sons, loved gymnastics. I did — and I do — things how I do things. Why? Because I’m not a joiner. Hi! Look at me! Working by myself in my home office! For the past dozen years!

Still, as much as I recognize myself in Rowan, part of me — and I’m working hard to get over this part — still gets so frustrated at his refusals, still feels as though if I were just a better parent, he’d play indoor soccer and skip off to swimming lessons and gleefully jump in the car to go to gymnastics. Part of me wishes we could spring new things on him — travel, for example? — and that he would rise, gracefully, to the challenge.

But that’s not my boy. My boy does things the way he does them, and, like the weather, he does them neither early nor late but right on his own schedule. It’s not my fault, or his — it’s just how things are. And I can fret about them, or I can revel in the sun on my bare arms, my feet in sandals, my son pedaling his bike down the street, training wheels hovering over the pavement.

 PS: That said, any stories of commiseration most welcome.

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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.

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