Okay, so. I watched it.

And, oh my God, it was everything everyone had said it would be, and more. From the opening slanting words of the back story through to the Jawas and the lightsaber (grateful thanks, Rob, for alerting me to the correct spelling of this seminal term) battle between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi, I sat, entranced, glued to the screen. As my synapses adjusted and my entire psyche realigned to make room for this new sacred text, I thought I might explode from happiness and wonder. Truly, I felt part of the Force.

Okay, so, not so much.

It was fine. It was fun. It was somewhat gratifying to finally sit down and watch the whole thing from start to finish and make sense of the finer points of the plot (aided by the closed captioning — my solution to the mumbling actors — and Rowan, who said helpful things throughout, like, “And now Obi-Wan Kenobi is going to die” — oh, sorry, spoiler alert). That Luke is pretty cute, in a mullety sort of way.

I’m wondering if I would’ve felt more uplifted had the DVD player not decided to stop playing during the final few minutes of the film, as Luke is stripping off his mask and trusting his instincts and the Force in order to make the precise hit he needs to destroy the Death Star. I’m guessing nothing too important happened right then, though, so I’m probably okay.

But all this talk about Star Wars and such has got me wondering just what I was doing in 1978 rather than twisting my hair into Princess Leia buns. What movie was I obsessing about? This one:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my sacred text of 1978: the Walt Disney production of Child of Glass. Wherein 13-year-old Alexander Armsworth and his family move to a spooky old grand antebellum Southern mansion and he and his nerdy friend Blossom encounter the ghost of the beautiful little girl Inez Dumaine (jealous much, Blossom?), who initially appears to him as a throbbing blue light (not unlike a lightsaber, I suppose, but not really). Inez, who has been murdered by her riverboat pirate uncle, cannot rest in peace until Alexander and Blossom solve the riddle of her death and find and reunite her with the “child of glass.” Being a ghost and therefore somewhat cryptic, Inez gives Alexander only the following poetic clue to help him out:

Sleeping lies the murdered lass

Vainly cries the child of glass

When the two shall be as one

The Spirit’s journey will be done.

Oh my God people this movie freaked me out. FREAKED ME OUT. Every Sunday evening, my cousins Michael and Nancy (Nancy, who taught me how to knit and to crochet, and who worked at the Children’s Bookstore in Toronto and brought us wonderful books, and whose weekly visits are the reason I am so devoted to our weekly brunches with Rowan and Isaac’s godmothers, Judy and Jill) came over for deli and we all watched the Disney Sunday Movie together. Because rituals are good. I remember watching Child of Glass with them, remember how utterly entranced I was by Inez, and how terrified. The best part is when Inez comes alive — every ghost, apparently, has a once-in-a-deathtime chance to turn human again — in order to dance with Alexander during the cotillion his parents throw at the Southern mansion. The scariest is when she changes into a menacing spirit in order to scare off the drunken handyman who tries to murder Alexander by setting the Armsworth barn on fire. Because I was seven years old, much of the plot sailed right over my head, but I remember deciding that the only way that I would get through the rest of my life was to cultivate an imaginary friendship with the ghost of Inez Dumaine, to get her on my side so that she would protect me as opposed to, say, stalking me in her scary spirit form and tormenting me for the rest of my days. I imagined myself as a ghost and how and when I might choose to come back as human: with whom would I dance? For years, I used to lie awake at night, just knowing that the ghost of Inez was floating through my house and coming to rest under my bed. We would chat, and I would quell my nerves by telling myself that I was friends with this ghost, that she had my back. It almost worked.

Several years ago, I spent a small fortune on eBay to acquire a VHS copy of Child of Glass, and I watched the whole thing, shaking. Sure, the plot was hokey as the special effects, the dialogue was stilted and the characters two-dimensional (in addition to the drunken handyman, there is Blossom’s grandmother, the “mystical old hag” — according to the copy on the video case — who gazes into her crystal ball and tells Alexander “Strange forces are at work here… Listen to the call of the spirits… they’ll come to you soon”), but watching that movie was like watching a home video of long-lost relatives I’d met once and loved and wondered about and never seen again. Watching it was like coming home.

So, people, I get why those of you who are obsessed with Star Wars are obsessed with it. I can’t argue that my late-70s flick of choice is better or worse. Just mine.

What was yours?

You know what I have a problem with? Cool people who insist that they are — or that they once were — nerds. Because, you know? Even though it’s cool to call yourself a nerd these days, nerds, by definition, aren’t actually cool. And the people who willingly admit to being nerds actually wouldn’t admit it if they really were nerds, because then, well … there is a difference. If you are actually a nerd, you don’t tend to want to announce it publicly. You tend to quietly go about your nerdy little life, playing along like you’re mostly cool and hoping people won’t notice that you really like trilobites or enjoy reading the Chicago Manual of Style.

All of which is by explaining why, until now, I have not mentioned on this website that I have never seen Star Wars.

Because, I’m sorry, but every North American child of my generation has seen Star Wars. And The Empire Strikes Back. And that other one, the return of the whatevers. And then those other three with that guy Jar-Jar and the princess played by that badass Natalie Portman.

Except me. And it’s not like I was locked inside an iron lung or something between 1979 and 1984 or so. I chose not to see them. Because they did not interest me. I vividly remember my brother and my two male cousins running hyperactively through a movie theatre parking lot as though their lives depended on seeing that movie and thinking, “Why would I bother to see that movie? I don’t care about stars and wars and spaceships.” Because I didn’t. Which put me, apparently, into a tiny minority of my friends, into a class of true nerddom. At the time, I thought it was a gender thing: it was a boy movie and I was decidedly not a boy. Except that all the girls I know saw the movie too, and loved it.

I probably still wouldn’t care, except for the fact that now Rowan, and by extension, Isaac, all of a sudden care. Passionately. Rob, who is a walking Star Wars codex (and not, however, despite his protestations otherwise, a nerd) put it on for them one day, and now, it’s all about the light sabres. Rowan skulks into rooms, wielding the sabre he has managed to procure, breathing heavily. “Hi, Darth,” I say, and he points that thing at me and says, “Guards,” or “Mom! I’m not Darth Vader, I’m Luke!” And I say, “Oh, sorry. Luke.” A few nights ago, he wrapped a towel around his shoulders and said, “I look a bit like Darth Vader in this, don’t I?” This morning, I walked in on him and Isaac on the sun porch, Rowan with the sabre, Isaac making do with a broom. “Come with me to the dark side, and together we will rule the planet,” Rowan was saying. To which Isaac replied, “Okay.”

At the risk of making a massive understatement, there’s obviously something compelling about these movies, something that captivates children and grown-ups alike, over the span of generations. Rachel, getting all lit-critty on me, calls them “sacred texts.” She may be right.

So what is so strange about me that I don’t get them? Over the years, I’ve caught glimpses of each movie, and they don’t draw me in. Other people see magic, and I see rinky-dink special effects and jerky monsters and slightly forced dialogue. The actors mumble and I can’t follow the plot. So I don’t.

On the other hand, it’s not like I’ve ever given the George Lucas oeuvre an enthusiastic chance.

Until now, that is.

People, I’m going to watch Star Wars. With my sons. I am going to watch the first three movies in their entirety, although I make no promises, yet, about the prequels. I’m going to try to watch them through the eyes of my children, to set aside my own biases (and, Rob, sarcastic comments), and see if it’s possible, at this late stage, for a lifelong holdout to convert to the church of Jedi. I’ll keep you posted on this experiment.

May the force be with— oh, fuck off.

Back in the days when IKEA charged a flat fee of $35 to deliver any amount of furniture anywhere in Canada, Rachel ordered an entire one-bedroom’s apartment worth of BILLY bookcases and EKTORP desks and other loveseats-with-names to furnish her apartment in Thunder Bay. Among those items was a double box spring and mattress set — I forget its name, so let’s just call it LARS — that she used for the year until I and the rest of our furniture moved up from the Big Smoke to join her. We put LARS in what would eventually be Rowan’s room and graduated to a queen-size Sealy Posturepedic of our own.

The thing is — as I remembered this morning, all snuggled up in what has become my five-year-old’s bed — LARS is the most comfortable bed in the house. Our Posturepedic is fine and all, but it does not have the Scandinavian je ne sais quoi, the perfect sleepability of LARS. LARS, like the baby bear’s bed, is just right. Plus, when a child arrives at one in the morning for a cuddle and subsequently settles in for the night, I really wish we had sprung for the king-size mattress. Things get a little crowded. Which is why, last night, I left Rachel and Rowan in the Sealy and decamped for LARS, quite happy to be ensconced underneath a sailboat comforter in a comfy bed all to myself.

At least, until 5:30 AM, when Isaac woke up to hurl abuse at me and needed resettling and Rachel stumbled into Rowan’s room to say she had been awake since three.

“Do you want to climb in here?” I asked, on my way out of bed to shush Isaac.

“No,” she said. “Well, yes.” And she snuggled up in LARS while I got to go listen to the two-year-old complaint department gripe that I wasn’t Rachel and where was Rachel and he wanted Rachel not me so I should just go in the garbage. Which I took as my cue to return to Rachel and LARS, for another 45 minutes. “This is the garbage,” I told her, and we both fell back to sleep.

Things could be worse, though. These days, Isaac is more or less sleeping through the night again, after an incredibly tedious few months of waking twice or three times and calling out for us. We finally dealt with that problem, however, with the highly controversial technique of RIDING IT OUT AND WAITING TO SEE IF THINGS WOULD CHANGE ALL BY THEMSELVES. Which they did. I’m going to write a best-selling book about how you can do that with your two-year-old, too.

Funny, though, how much things have changed when it comes to sleep. In my parenting incarnation of a few years, or even months, back, I would have been planning, strategizing, spending the precious little energy I have left coming up with a plan, A PLAN, to get the baby to sleep. I would have been trading off nights with Rachel in the basement in order to ensure that we were both at least half-rested.

At this point, though, we seem to be wise enough — and well-rested enough, and, let’s not forget, healthy enough — that we can take the stretches of interrupted nights more or less in stride. I chalk it up partly to increased levels of Zen, but also fatality: what, really, could we have done to prevent the child from waking up? And what else was there to do but help get him back to sleep? And then go back to sleep ourselves, wherever and however we could? I like it, this new Zen. It’s so much better than hysteria. Really, it’s just — and don’t kill me for this one — common sense.

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.

Continuing along with our theme of bodily functions…

Cold season is upon us, a season that brings great joy to Rachel, because it allows her to indulge in one of her favourite pastimes: picking the crap out of Rowan’s nose. She’s relentless to the point of obsession (and denial), ignoring the wailing and the flailing and shrieking and running away and screaming of “No!” as she pursues her crusty quarry. With the arrival of Isaac, her joy has doubled.

Although I occasionally remind her to give the children a break, mostly I look on bemusedly — partly because no child ever died from having his nose picked, or picked at, and partly because if I called her on it, then she would call me on my own obsessions. If Rachel’s on snot detail (and ear wax, can’t forget the ear wax — and, yes, it’s true, you could probably grow potatoes in Rowan’s ears), then I am all over the fingernails and haircuts.

Like any other self-respecting mother, I carry nail clippers in my pocket at all times. You would too, if a tiny baby scratched your nipples — and his own head — with his little razor-sharp claws. You would, if your three-year-old had jaggedy toenails and half-moons of black at the end of each finger. And nobody likes a mullet. Least of all me, apparently.

And then there was Isaac’s spectacular case of cradle cap, wherein his entire scalp was covered in a stinky layer of dead skin that looked like the Gobi Desert. I spent much of his early months oiling up his tiny head in order to soften the crust. Then, I picked off the flakes as he nursed serenely.

This urge to groom, to pick, it seems hardwired. Is it some parental instinct, as natural as chimps picking fleas off each other? Or maybe it’s the enforced intimacy of having and caring for children, biological or adopted, that hardwires us, makes us into parents instead of just innocent bystanders. Whatever the case, little satisfies me more than tucking short-nailed, clean-nosed, downy-scalped children into bed each night. Until a life is conferred upon me, I guess this is as good as it gets.