I took Rowan out for dinner at Swiss Chalet a few weeks ago. No special occasion, just “us.” I got this idea that we could start a family tradition: every couple of months, one mom would take one boy out for dinner. It would be a chance to bond, to catch up, to create special memories over chicken and ribs and dipping sauce. I imagined my boys as surly teenagers, being drawn out into meaningful conversations over such meals. I imagined Rowan and Isaac as grown-ups, looking back on a childhood full of these special evenings out, basking in the undivided attention of one parent. That was special, I imagined them thinking. What great parents.

Aw.

So, we’re at our booth, and I’m all like: Conversation! And Rowan is all like: Why did the waiter tell us his name and where is he and why is our food taking so long to come and maybe I’ll just slide under the table here for a while and are they going to bring around that treasure chest with toys in it and why is food taking so long to come? And I’m all like: Bonding! And Rowan is all like: completing the word search on the children’s menu and standing on his bench seat to see what other people are eating and pretending to fall asleep and bellowing our waiter’s name across the restaurant to find out where our food is. And I’m all like: Undivided attention! And isn’t the dipping sauce good? And Rowan is all like: Do I get dessert and the treasure chest? And that sauce is too hot and it burned my mouth.

And I’m thinking that I didn’t communicate my vision so clearly. So finally I say, “Isn’t it nice to go out for dinner, just the two of us? It’s fun to be able to hang out and talk.”

And he’s all like: I just wanted to come to a restaurant. I didn’t know there would have to be talking.

And I’m all like: Can I have a bite of your sundae?

And he’s all like: Sure.

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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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O cosleepers! We have once again joined your ranks!

All right, who am I kidding? We’ve been cosleeping in various forms for months, now. It’s just that we’ve finally given in and consolidated the process, wrestling the spare bed up from the basement and — when a certain three-year-old deemed it “too low” — topping it with a single air mattress so that he could nestle in beside us and feel secure enough to sleep through the night. He shoves a pillow into the gap between the beds, spreads his blanket over it, and then sleeps, or tries to, at least, on the blanket-on-the-pillow, so as to be even closer to us. I am reminded of how he slept as a tiny infant, only on his back on a pillow between us. And how I thought, then, what happens when he grows?

Now I know.

Are we suckers or intensely practical? Tomato, to-mah-toe: Does it matter, as long as we are sleeping?

Ah. But. About that, that sleeping thing. You think we’d be doing more of it. Maybe we are. Maybe we aren’t. It’s hard to say. The pro of the arrangement — interior design aesthetics, obviously, aside — are that we can “parent throughout the night” (kthnxbai, Dr. Sears) without actually having to get out of bed. The con is that we are, still, parenting a fair bit throughout the night. But at least that means we can rub Isaac’s tummy or his back and shush him, and hope that he will, as we put it, “thunk back to sleep.” Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes the thunking involves much rearranging of the blanket on the pillow and much gentle suggesting that perhaps this is not a viable arrangement. Which is met with much resistance.

It is, I admit, quite lovely to look over at his little sleeping body in the middle of the night. It’s like a little gift, a prize. But — and you can colour me grouchy on this one — it’s still a consolation prize. Like, as the lovely and amazing Rachel Turiel puts it, “walking away with the veggie chopamatic … when you really wanted the new car, or simply to still be asleep.”

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Agghr! An eyeball!

Okay, don’t worry, it’s just a rubber ball, likely a Halloween relic. See: if you look closely you can just make out the “China” next to the cornea. The kids were whacking it around the front hall yesterday despite my pleas to “Think of the mirror! That lamp! That glass-framed picture!” So when the ball suddenly and mysteriously disappeared into the nest of shoes in the front hall, I did not help them search for it.

And then, this morning, there it was in my boot, like a little friend.

Third in an ongoing series of bizarre things I find in my shoes.

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Early morning. A three-year-old boy cuddles in bed between his two mommies.

Isaac:               I want Rachel to take me downstairs.

Susan:             Okay.

Isaac:               Because I want Rachel to take me downstairs. Just Rachel.

Susan:             Okay. I hear you. You want Rachel to take you downstairs.

Isaac:               Yes. To eat my breakfast.

Susan:             Sounds good. But Isaac, I have a question for you. Why do you want Rachel to take you downstairs?

Isaac:               Because I like Rachel. I like Rachel better than you.

Susan:              I can see that. Why do you like her better than me?

Isaac:               Because I do.

Susan:              But do you know why?

Isaac:               Why?

Susan:              No, I’m asking you.

Isaac:               (removing his thumb from his mouth) Because when I grow up I’m going to get married to Rachel.

Susan:              Really?

Isaac:               Yes.

Susan:              Isaac, do you know that I’m married to Rachel?

Isaac:               And I’m going to put you in the garbage truck.

Susan:              Really?

Isaac:               Yes. Because it has very. Powerful. Crushers.

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