…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

For what may seem like obvious reasons, we don’t do a lot of fatherhood over here at Mama Non Grata. We have nothing against fathers, but in a two-mom household, they just don’t get the same airplay. Those of you who are regular readers of this blog know that a certain amount of posts, usually the ones that make people cry, are devoted to my mother, who merits her own tag. My dad — who is en route to Thunder Bay as I type this — has tended to play a supporting role.

But make no mistake about it, people: people win Oscars for supporting roles. And the fathers in my life are some serious contenders.

There’s Rob, who breaks out in hivestimes when the word “father” is used, although that doesn’t stop Rowan from testing out the word “dad” every so often. “This is my dad, Rob,” he’ll announce to anyone in the vicinity whenever Rob visits — every six to eight weeks, each December and March break, any stopovers he can finagle on other travels, month-long stays each summer. It’s not clear to me that Rowan understand entirely what “dad” means — during one of Rob’s last visits, he asked, dreamy-like, “Rob, do you have any kids?” And when Rob said, “Um, yes. Yes I do,” Rowan asked, “Are they big kids or little kids?” But it’s a name for someone special in his life, someone who shows up, as Rob does, dependably, regularly, constantly. Rob is not a 24/7 parent, but he is, increasingly, a parent, if an occasional one — someone who can be counted on to care for, to jump in and play chase, wipe a nose or a butt, make or clean up dinner, or babysit the kids for four days while their mothers go to New York City. They had a blast, apparently — I returned home to a tidy house, dinner in the crockpot, mostly unfazed children, and the ultimate parental backhanded compliment: My first evening home, Rob looked perturbed as Rowan and Isaac engaged in their usual pre-bed squawking and tussling. “They’re rangy tonight,” he said. “They’re always like this,” I replied. “Interesting,” he said: “They weren’t like this with me.”

I forgave him, though, because, well, getting to go to New York was huge — huge because I got to launch my book (more on that soon), huge because Rachel and I got to visit one of my favourite cities in the world, huge because we got to go to that city without our kids and know that they were happy, huge because it’s precedent-setting: we can go away AGAIN. Further away. For longer. Even as we mused on how much fun it would be to take the kids to Manhattan, New York was exhilarating because it marked the beginning of a new sort of freedom for us as parents: the freedom to not parent, for days on end, to be grownups not in charge of anyone but our own selves. Freedom to read a magazine in an airport lounge and then sleep on the airplane. To drink champagne on a rooftop before dinner, then go to bed at 1 AM, and not worry about having to get up the next morning.

New York was also exhilarating because my dad — proud Papa — showed up, unannounced, at my book launch. He flew in from Toronto, camera in tow, to surprise me, sprung for dinner at Prune — with celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain at the next table, no less! — and then flew home again, only to prepare to drive up north to help us celebrate Isaac’s birthday. Because, twice a year, my dad and his wife show up, unfailingly, with suitcases full of presents and bagels, for the boys’ birthdays. They also make it possible for us to fly south to see them — to Toronto and, for the past couple of years, to Florida.

So, the fathers in my life don’t see me or my sons daily, or even weekly, but they are a constant presence in our lives. They support, in every sense of that word: strong, dependable, helping us to hold up and nurture ourselves and each other. And for this, they occupy an unparalleled place in our hearts. And for this, we love them.

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.

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 

Every so often, one is the witness/recipient of such a run of Behaviour that one is tempted to pull out one’s fingernails, just for the welcome distraction the pain might bring

You know, those days when every utterance out of a child’s mouth is a version of, “I didn’t want you to do that, and you did it wrong, too.” When every action is the equivalent of them stealing your last bite of pie, only to spit it out because it’s yucky. When they insist that the best way to show their love for you is to crash into you full speed while braying like a donkey and laughing hysterically at your bruises. When it’s all you can do to excuse yourself quietly from the room, hide behind a locked door, rub your temples and breathe and count the minutes until bedtime and the reprieve from the banshees who have taken over the household.

And then — and then — one happens upon a tableau such as this:

And, just in case you thought it was a fluke, this:

Yes, that is the big one reading stories to the little one. By reading, I mean a mixture of memorization (he’s sort of the human equivalent of a Kindle, what with all those books he’s got stored in his head) and actual, sounding-out-the-letters-to-make-a-word reading. And the little one, formerly hostile, is now rapt, in awe of books, taking my hand and pulling me to the shelf to find Sandra Boynton’s Doggie Book or one of DK Media’s thousand-plus books about trucks. His new favourite sentence (after, “Mommy go get it”): “I want to read.”

And now, in addition to saying yes, we can also say, “Go ask your brother.”

Makes up for a lot, that.

Look what my girlfriend made!

I would say she just whipped it up in the midst of a particularly chaotic Saturday afternoon, but “whipped it up” would imply effortlessness, and this baby was a bit of a palaver. The making, chilling, and rolling out of the dough. The — literal and figurative — lemon squeezing involved in making the filling. The separating of eggs, the beating of egg whites into meringue. The assembly. The baking.

All told, it was a marathon of a pie. Rachel kept apologizing for attempting such a complex feat of baking on a weekend day, with children underfoot. Rangy, rangy, rangy children. “If I’d known it was going to be so much work,” she kept saying, “I never would’ve started this.”

Which kind of sums up how I was feeling about having kids right at that particular moment. Our morning had consisted of a series of tantrums, from adults and children alike, culminating in a tear-stained Rowan running down the driveway just as I was about to put the car in gear, screaming, “I am too going to the maaaaaaaaaaaarket!”

Minutes earlier, of course, he had refused to get into the vehicle, declaring loudly and repeatedly that under no circumstances was he going to the market. Rachel had finally thrown up her hands in disgust and gone back in the house with him, while I and a blinking Isaac, already in his car seat, were left outside. For a brief, shining moment I thought that Isaac and I might have a sweet little date together, sans four-year-old attitude. In the end, I strapped Rowan in, fed him a banana, did some deep breathing, and braved the public with both children, leaving Rachel at home for a blessed hour or two to stare at the wall or do Sudokus or drink herself silly — whatever she needed. She reciprocated that afternoon when I strapped Isaac into the stroller and wandered around the neighbourhood for an hour or two, listening to This American Life on my iPod. As I left, Rachel and Rowan were arguing about whether he could or could not stick his fingers in the mixing bowl while the electric beaters were running.

When I returned, Rachel and Rowan had reached some sort of truce. They had managed, together, to get the pie into and out of the oven. Then they played chase in the basement and read books. The kitchen was spotless. And this beauty was cooling on the counter — cloudy layers just obscuring the sunny sweetness underneath.

So much of (mildly successful) co-parenting — of successful cohabitation, really — is about resisting the urge to itemize and compare just how much work each partner does. Because, trust me, little good comes from statements like, “But I changed the last poopy diaper,” or, “How come I always cook?”

According to my research, such statements are likely to unleash an escalating and entirely unsettling volley of stored-up comparisons regarding laundry, bed-making, snow shoveling, lawnmowing, recycling, garbage, Kindermusik attendance and child fetching.

Yes, of course, every household has its imbalances — and those imbalances do occasionally need to be addressed — but I have found that, more often than not, comparisons invite trouble. Because, at least in my household, a LOT of stuff gets done, and when it all shakes down, Rachel and I freely admit that neither of us can recall doing about half of it. When the tallies come in, it’s quite likely that the balance of meals cooked and diapers changed will come out about even, and that, if they don’t, other things will very likely make up for them.

That said, Rachel is being shafted when it comes to sleep.

We’ve been alternating nights in the basement and upstairs. And on my nights upstairs (barring one too-early wake-up on Isaac’s part, fairly easily dealt with), the kids have slept through. Meaning that I’ve had a full week’s-plus of full-night sleeps.

Rachel, not so much. For some reason, on her nights on call, Rowan wakes up with strange neck pains (landing us in emergency) and Isaac’s eyeteeth poke painfully into his gums. Every morning that Isaac and Rowan bound into the basement to wake me and Rachel trudges in behind them, I ask, hopefully, “How was your night?” And she shakes her head.

After about a week of this, I let her have two nights in the basement. I was mildly, selfishly, worried that I had now got myself onto her schedule, but instead I got two nearly full nights in my own bed. And then, last night, a third night in the basement, while Rachel was up, on and off, with Isaac from midnight to about 3:30.

From my perspective at least, Isaac is much improved from his worst. And, aside from the neck thing, Rowan is sleeping like a champion, inspired at least in part by ye olde-fashioned sticker chart, with the promise of a trip to the ice cream store once he amassed seven stickers. (Do you like my artwork, using dried-out markers? Do you think the title is too subtle? We went to DQ on Monday after picking the kids up from the babysitter’s; Rowan had a chocolate-dipped kid’s cone, and we watched him do a couple of full-body shudders as the sugar began its madcap ride through his bloodstream. “We did this to him,” I kept reminding myself as we dealt with a whole bunch of hyper for much of the evening. “This is our fault.”)

From Rachel’s perspective, things still kind of suck. And while I don’t generally condone the constant repetition of, “But why? Why always my nights?”, in this case I can hardly blame her. All I can offer her is sympathy, another night on the futon, and the promise that, almost certainly, my nights will come.

Lest you think that bronchitis has brought out the best in my children, I thought I would share a little fantasy (and, I stress, it’s a fantasy) I’ve been harbouring of late:

You know those Wild Kingdom, National Geographic–kind of TV shows, the ones with long shots of the animals on the African veldt, the elephants trumpeting and the gazelles leaping and the lions stalking the gazelles?

Eventually, they always cut to a shot of the lions lolling about, full after the kill, with the cubs wrestling in the dirt around their parents. And eventually one cub or another gets a bit too close or a bit too uppity or refuses to put on its snowsuit and the mother lion half snarls and picks up her heavy paw and whacks the cub sideways with it.

And the cub rolls off, ass over teakettle (I fear I’m mixing metaphors here, but what the hey). If there were a sound effect it would be from a cartoon, and it would go something like i-bid-ee-i-bid-ee-ib-ib-ib-i. And the cub eventually comes to a stop and gets to its feet and shrugs and shakes itself off and goes back to playing, but with JUST A LITTLE BIT MORE RESPECT.

Until the next time.

Sometimes, thinking about that is what gets me through the next five minutes.

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.