He says “hi” to himself, over and over, convinced that he can get the attention of that baby on the screen. That baby on the screen, meanwhile, is oblivious to his real-life incarnation, oblivious to the idea that time passes, that eight months or so hence he will look out from the screen to seemingly gaze at, talk to, a slightly more sophisticated version of himself.

But not that much more sophisticated.

It’s the same toddler mindset that lets Isaac relay information as though he is its sole conduit, as though Rachel and I are incapable of hearing each other’s words without him parroting them back to each of us. “Would you like a cup of tea?” Rachel will ask me, and Isaac will turn to me to inquire, “Susan, you like a cup of tea?” “No, thank you,” I’ll say, and he will turn to Rachel, sitting across the table from me, and tell her, “Susan say, ‘No, thank you.’” And then settle himself, satisfied, more firmly into her lap.

Last night I hoisted Isaac onto my hip and opened the mirrored bathroom cabinets so that he could, as per his request, “see two Susans, see two Isaacs” — in fact, a neverending field of Susans and Isaacs — all smiling and gazing and talking at the same time. I’m sure he thinks that each reflection lives its own life, safe in its own house. And that the bathroom mirror is simply a portal, the place we all meet to say hi, see how everyone’s doing in our parallel universes.

He’ll wake up, slowly, slowly, from this version of reality. But it’s an incremental, stuttering, awakening, as if from an early morning, dream-filled sleep. Rowan, for example, is savvy enough to realize that his reflection in the mirror is simply that. But he and I still have long conversations about who is real on television and who is not, and whether God exists and where the dead people are if God doesn’t. Who keeps them? He still thinks that the car drives itself, and not the other way around, that we simply buckle ourselves in and — hey presto! — it shudders to life and takes us exactly where we need to be. His various grandparents have visited over the past month, and each time we painstakingly enumerate whose parents are whose, whose brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles are whose. And then, a few nights ago, he asked me, “And does Rachel have any children?” “Yes,” I told him. “And which ones are they?” he asked. This, only moments after telling Rachel, “You’re my best mom ever.”

In the very first house I ever lived in, my parents decided to wallpaper the downstairs powder room with the covers of old Time magazines. I have no idea why; the decor concept is completely incongruous with my mental image of them, but I’m sure it happened, because I couldn’t make this up: me, age six? Seven? Sitting on the toilet and staring at a cartoon image of Joe Namath to the upper left of the bathroom mirror, practicing my whistling skills and realizing, suddenly, I am me. Just a kid, one person among millions, billions. None of them know me. None of them aware that I have managed to, finally, purse my lips in just the right way so as to emit a clear, high tone.

 The computer screen. The television. The bathroom mirror. Me, age six, seven, thirty-eight, gazing at my own reflection, surrounded — literally — by Time, Time, Time. 

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So.

You know, sometimes the blogs just come. And sometimes I look up at the sky and … nothing.

It’s like being on a bad date. I’m looking at the screen, the screen is looking at me, and we’re smiling politely and all but I’m secretly wondering how I got myself into this situation. Still, it’s important to make an effort, so I will begin some story about how Isaac has lately been obsessed with money, hounding us for pennies (“You got money? In your pocket? I have it?”) or how Rowan got this amazing kids’ cookbook for his birthday but then became so blindingly focused on it that we eventually had to hide it before he worked himself into such a fevered pitch of culinary excitement that the house exploded.

But the stories have no real point, no overriding metaphor pulling them all together, and it doesn’t seem worth the effort to manufacture one, and so I sort of trail off and the screen and I go back to smiling politely at each other and poking at our salads.

We’ve had some great weather, haven’t we? All that fluffy snow … and so warm!

Or I could rely on this standard conversation-starter fallback, which everyone asks my kids these days: “Are you getting excited for Christmas?” Our indoctrination program is working well, because now I gently nudge Rowan and pull the string attached to his back and he says, “We don’t celebrate Christmas. We celebrate Hanukkah,” and then the supermarket cashier or bookstore clerk looks slightly flummoxed and then backtracks, a smile freezing across her face.

(But I wasn’t going to write about the holidays, because that’s so overdone time of year. Plus, no one likes a humbug.)

So.

I suppose it doesn’t help that I’m hung over.

Not even in any scandalous way, just in a pushing-40, cheap-date kind of way. On half a bottle of wine. It was worth it, though — not just the wine itself, which was lovely, but the second annual three-hour December dinner at a posh restaurant with our friends (and the kids’ godmothers) Judy and Jill. We see them pretty much weekly, at Sunday brunch with the kids, but I swear we get more actual talking and visiting done in a single grown-up dinner than we do during the previous 51 weeks. Now, that was a good date, made even more so by beef carpaccio and butter lettuce salad with pears and butternut squash gnocchi and chocolate-pear cheesecake. So what if I was too drunk to actually manage to calculate the proper total after tip on my bill and had to telephone the restaurant this morning to make sure that our hyper-capable server actually got the tip I meant to leave as opposed to the number I wrote down?

“That’s okay,” said the manager when I spoke to him. “We knew what you meant.”

Now that, that is what I need. Comfortable silence.

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So, it’s been a week. Or two. I would offer an excuse— but look! Boys in matching dinosaur pajamas!

I’m guessing that distraction doesn’t work so well for those of you over the age of eight or so, but wouldn’t it be nice if it did? Like if, instead of trying to explain to a client why that press release won’t be coming today or to your significant other why you haven’t yet — even though you said you would last week — made an appointment to have the snow tires put on the car, you could just say, “Hey, look! A raisin! Do you want one? No? How about two — one for each hand? Yummy raisins!”

Yummy raisins. Whatever.

In my defense, my doctor told me last Saturday that my gunky sinuses and fluid-filled ears were the worst specimens she’d seen in the past six months, which made me feel sort of proud, in a warped kind of way. I like to overachieve, and the past few weeks have not felt so stellar in that regard. Not being able to hear or breathe or sleep properly will do that to a girl, I suppose.

Honestly, possibly my biggest triumph in the last few weeks has been ridding the fridge of several near-empty Tupperware containers, thus contributing to the overall organization of the house. I’d eat that final half-square of polenta or Isaac’s container of rejected cottage cheese and I would feel a disproportionate sense of accomplishment.

Hey — did you notice that the dinosaur pajamas glow in the dark?

I thought about blogging. Really, I did. I had lots of half-formed ideas, imagined how I might have turned a dozen just darling things the kids did into full-fledged posts, and then I went to bed. In, of course, the basement, every second night, so that Rachel wouldn’t keep me awake with the hacking sounds of her, oh, pneumonia. (Which, unlike my ear/sinus infection, did not respond so well to the first round of antibiotics and inhaled corticosteroids. Now I’m mostly better and she’s, well, not. Thank God for socialized medicine; you guys in the States should try it sometime.)

Thank God, also, that my mother-in-law arrived yesterday. With matching dino PJs in tow. She spent much of today bustling about and tidying things and making cups of tea and comfort foods (including custard and chicken soup; yes, really) for her daughter and then accompanying me to various children’s end-of-year activities. Like Rowan’s class play — an inspired, French-language rendition of Chicken Little. (‹Oh, non! Le çiel tomb!› But you have to clutch your face like you’re in Edvard Munsch’s The Scream while you say it VERY SERIOUSLY.)

And now Rachel’s mom is asleep in the basement, and the boys are asleep in their beds, and Rachel is asleep in our bed, and I’m going to turn in on the couch. So as not to be awakened by the coughing.

I’ll be back — I promise. The sky isn’t quite falling; it’s just that it’s taking a little bit more work than usual to hold it up.

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… can be heard today — talking about (what else?) And Baby Makes More — on CFUV 101.9 FM. That is, they can be heard on the radio for those of you lucky enough to actually be in Victoria, BC, today, where I’m guessing that the illusion that it’s still fall is being perpetuated. Tune in between 1 and 2 PM Pacific time. For those of you elsewhere, you can listen in online at www.cfuv.uvic.ca.

It’s a good thing “Women on Air” didn’t try to interview me last week, because the interview would have been punctuated by coughing fits and extended nose-blowing sessions. So sexy. Yes, hot on the heels of H1N1, the dreaded, month-long sinus infection with the bonus pack of hacking cough has returned. I’d like to think that the germs have rendered my voice appropriately Kathleen Turner-esque, but really I sound like Harvey Fierstein just inhaled some helium.

Speaking of Harvey, if I hadn’t already given away my right thumb to the past year, I would give it away now to go see him play Tevye in the production of Fiddler on the Roof currently touring North America but — surprisingly — not stopping in Thunder Bay. What, David Mirvish, the 30-odd Jews up here weren’t a big enough draw? I guess I can’t blame you when the local Santa-meter is already pushing 11. Exhibit A.: my son’s PUBLIC SCHOOL senior kindergarten curriculum, which seems to have emerged intact from the 1950s. It’s all decorated with pictures of Santa and Christmas trees and reindeer and the like, and filled with chirpy instructions to “Decorate your tree and bring it to school this week!” “Write a letter to Santa!” “Practice your holiday songs and teach them to your family!” “Count the days until Christmas!” “Put out milk and cookies for Santa and a carrot for his reindeer!” (Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. I did add in those exclamation marks.)

Discussion with the school is ensuing. Wish us luck in convincing the powers that be that it’s time to break with, as Tevye would say, “Tradition! Tradition!” in favour of some December activities that feel just a wee bit more, oh, multicultural. Inclusive. You know — something that makes me feel less like I’m living in a ghetto.

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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 

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