I’m liking that word more and more: not quite overwhelmed, but certainly it feels as though things gush out of the tap at a pressure that leaves me scrambling to contain them. Something slips: the laundry, this blog, the dinner we intended to make but forsook for frozen tortellini , my novel manuscript, my vitamins in their little daily cases, the cases themselves (which Isaac likes to fill for me when I actually find the time to set him up with little containers of zinc and vitamin D and vitamin C and immunity boosters and the like, and he goes to work, because if that kid likes something, he likes things that live in their own special little containers). On Monday, I realized that I had somehow checked the wrong box on the sign-up form and signed myself up to coach kids’ soccer (oh, the irony), and had to explain like a jerk to the utterly gracious organizers of the league that actually I had just screwed up and they would have to find someone else.

And then there’s the book: I became utterly absorbed in the Mysterious Benedict Society trilogy that I randomly picked up for Rowan’s birthday back in November. I’m on the last book, with seven pages more to read, and now I can’t find the damn thing anywhere and it is making me insane. Insane. I keep rummaging through the house, running my hands over shelves, checking under the beds and above the washing machine, trying to imagine myself as this book, but it is stubbornly gone and I just want to know what happened. On many levels.

While rummaging under Isaac’s bed (or, as he refers to it, Isaac’s “old bed”), however, I did find this:

This is a very special wooden pen in its own very special wooden case, a gift from a local organization where I’d done some volunteer work. Ever since I brought it home a week or two ago, Isaac — passionate aficionado of all things that come in their very own special containers — has been fascinated by it. Apparently, he just needed it to be his for at least a little while. I burst out laughing when I saw it, at his magpie tendencies, at the passion and how much I identified with it. Almost made up for the last seven pages.

And yet, there’s so much that we do squeeze in, the writing that does get done and the dinners we do make, the brunch we throw together for beautiful friends on a Sunday morning. And there was “Overflow,” the title of both the reading I did on Sunday and one of the pieces that I read, the brand-new piece that I somehow managed to write and edit and rehearse in between all the other things. The crowd itself at the Northern Woman’s Bookstore spilled over, seated on the floor, in the aisles, perched on the edge of cash desk. Rachel Mishenene and Meghan Eddy read beautiful, brilliant, brave pieces. And the generosity and response and warmth of the crowd spilled over, too. I read another essay, “Friend me?”, that talked about the social pecking order of my eighth grade class and its aftermath, and that, too, sparked its own series of — not unwelcome — ripples.

The Northern Woman's Bookstore's indomitable owner, Margaret Phillips, introducing the reading. That's Meghan to my right; Rachel is hidden behind Margaret, but she's there.

I keep pushing back the writing in favour of all the things that keep piling up on my desk: the receipts to be filed and the library books renewed (just ordered a library version of MBS III, with the idea that the moment I bring it home the original version will magically reappear), the endlessly morphing to-do lists. Need to shift my brain: it’s not that the writing isn’t getting done — to the extent that it isn’t — because I have too many other things to do, but rather that I’m letting the things keep me from the writing. My papers will pile and overflow, but I don’t actually need a clean desk in order to put everything else on hold for half an hour and get something down. Let it flow, let it flow, let it flow.

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Me: Isaac, come to the table. It’s dinner time.
Isaac: I can’t. I’m reading.
Rowan: You don’t know how to read.
Me: He’s looking at pictures.
Rowan: That’s not reading.
Me: Well, it’s an important pre-reading activity.
Rowan: Yeah. It helps you make inferences about the text.

I’m reading. Isaac is, at least, pre-reading. Rowan, apparently, has been attending teachers’ college in his spare time. We are making inferences about texts around here and it and all seems kind of appropriate and slightly surreal as I gear up for this coming Sunday, April 22. On that date, at 7 PM, I will be headlining at Overflow: An Evening of Readings about the Vulnerable, at the Northern Woman’s Bookstore.

So: vulnerable. Which may or may not mean, for me, literally and/or figuratively stripping things down to some tender/raw places. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I bought a whole bunch of new bras recently and I have written an essay about them. Which I will read, along with an essay about what happens when the people who bullied you in junior high school decide to friend you on Facebook.

You know, nice light stuff. But hey: there will be cake! And if cake’s not enough, also on board are fantastic local writers Rachel Mishenene and Meghan Eddy.

Oh! And the event is also serving as THE Thunder Bay launch of the anthology Here Come the Brides: Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage, edited by Audrey Bilger and Michele Kort. I’m thrilled they’ve chosen to include my essay, “Four (same-sex) weddings and a funeral.”

So, come! Listen. Make inferences, or not. But I hope you enjoy yourselves, and I look forward to seeing you.

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My cousin Jill likes to tell me and anyone else who will listen about how I used to torture her when we were little and spent summers together at our cottage in Winnipeg Beach.

Apparently — and I remember none of this — I used to devise quizzes for her, and then tie her up or tickle her or imprison her or fart on her head or something if she got the answers wrong. She acts out these stories in great detail for my benefit, for my kids’, her kids’, I’m not sure: me at seven demanding, “Name the four seasons!”

Her, age four, forgetting spring.

“What are we sitting on?” I kept asking, bouncing on the bed, making the springs squeak. “What’s inside the bed? What are we sitting on?”

She didn’t know, didn’t know, desperately didn’t know and I was thrillingly relentless, tickle-attacking her for her faults.

If don’t remember the particular incident, I do remember what it was like to be simultaneously annoyed and flattered by her constant attention, the way she followed me around like a puppy and how I could get her to do anything. I remember a summer home thick with children, the easy and immediate (and sometimes grating) intimacy between all of us and our collective parents.

(But torture? If you want torture, how about the time my brother dipped Jill’s thumb in hot sauce in a sadistic attempt to get her to stop sucking it? Or the time I dropped my cousin Jason’s goldfish into a sink of hot water — totally by accident, I swear?)

Jill’s constant retelling of the story used to confuse me: was she mad? Had the incident traumatized her unduly? Had I somehow betrayed her? Did I need to make amends?

“It’s weird,” I once said to Rob, after introducing him to her and sitting through another iteration.

“I think she does it to show she has a history with you,” says Rob.

And I was momentarily stunned. I never thought of that.

But I think of it now, think of it after returning from a weekend away and watching my boys with their own cousins, who live now on three different continents and whom we see sporadically. But there’s still that easy intimacy, the way they gather and play and curl up together and are parented collectively and spontaneously by whomever happens to be around. I love how quick and strong the bond is, how it holds between months and miles. One day, if we’re all lucky, I’ll hear them tell their own stories about each other, demonstrating their shared and thrilling and relentless history.

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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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Apparently, I hit a wall when it came to organizing the pantry cupboards.

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