I’m parenting solo this week, so it makes perfect sense that Thunder Bay is currently in an official state of emergency. (Update: make that disaster area. I live in an official disaster zone.) Heavy rains have washed away roads and bridges and flooded basements – in some cases with the sewage that the sewage treatment plant, currently partially submerged, can’t process. Our household, our neighbourhood in general, has emerged relatively unscathed, and for this I am truly grateful. We’ve been asked to restrict water, which means that first-world conveniences like flushing the toilet even semi-regularly or running the dishwasher or clean laundry or, say, bathing, are suddenly luxuries. (This morning, I surmised that Isaac, sweet little Isaac, was smelling just a wee bit fetid, and stuck him in a bucket in the bathtub with a bit of water and soap. And for this everyone will be grateful.)

It’s not that I’m taking responsibility for the flooding. I’m just saying that the last time Rachel went away a freak windstorm ripped the power and phone lines out of the side of the house, leaving me and the kids (and a houseguest, no less) ex communicado and relying on the extension cord my lovely neighbour Greg ran from his home.

These kinds of incidents are extreme – normally, when Rachel leaves town all that happens is that one or other of the kids gets a sudden, painful ear infection. Or bronchitis.

And yet, it’s all good. It’s true what they say: these children, crazy and complicated and activity-laden as they are, have also gotten easier. They are easiest, I will admit, in the morning: happy and curious and golden and bright-eyed and generally fairly amenable or easy to coax from one activity to the next until they have been deposited at the various institutions in charge of them during the weekdays. “Easy,” of course, is relative: there is a certain, Herculean, amount of planning and prepping and tidying and cooking that goes on in the name of getting and keeping us on board the little train that chugs us inexorably from the before-seven wake-up call to the shutting of the cats in the basement and the switching off the final nightlight. Just before dinner, things tend to get a bit hairy: whiny choruses of “Mama? Mama? Can you read me this book? And how fast is water? Can I paint this rock? “ compete in poorly timed syncopation with “Mom? Can you play soccer? Can you? When? Can you?” as all the while my brain is chanting at me to get dinner into them get dinner into them before they impl— oh well.

And while I take a certain amount of pleasure in the planning and organization (ahem, okay: while I aspire to be the fucking VALEDICTORIAN of planning and organization), I will be really, really happy when Rachel arrives home on Friday evening.

Because this solo gig gets a bit all-consuming, and occasionally a little bit isolating. These kinds of weeks always increase my awe of and admiration for single parents, and make me appreciate my co-parent that much more.

Or, I should say, my primary coparent, because I am lucky enough to have two.

Rachel is the daily, the core, the one who knows the steps to the dance of our household routine so well that we don’t have to articulate them. (Much.) And while we occasionally step on each other’s toes as we waltz around the morning kitchen, mostly we’ve got the steps down pat.

Rob is the safety valve, the one who shows up again and again and again and forces us to step out of routine: go out for dinner, take a walk, an evening, a weekend, a week away. Get that four-year-old out of our room and into his own. Get some perspective on this whole messy and all-consuming and often golden disaster called family life.  Remember that routine can too easily turn into a rut.

If I had to, I could and would do this job alone. Even through windstorms and floods and ear infections, if I had to, I would find a way to shepherd the three of us through it all. But I don’t have to. I have not one but two other partners in this there-but-for-the-grace adventure.  And for that I am also, truly, grateful.

PS: If you haven’t already, click here and leave a comment in order to click here and leave a comment in order to enter to win a copy of The Letter Q: Queer Writers’ Notes to Their Younger Selves.

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Hey, folks –

Just a friendly reminder that I have three copies of The Letter Q: Queer Writers’ Notes to Their Younger Selves up for grabs this week. As Ontario’s Catholic schools fight against legislation that would require them not only to allow Gay-Straight Alliance clubs but actually — horrors! — actually call them Gay-Straight Alliance clubs, it seems like this book, and the giveaway, are more timely than ever. (Kudos, by the way, to the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association (OECTA), which put out a press release yesterday in support of Bill 13, also known as the Accepting Schools Act.

“As Catholic educators, we believe that EVERY student is worthy of respect, dignity and love, and we affirm the sanctity of all human life,” said OECTA president Kevin O’Dwyer. “We cannot expect to address a problem if we cannot openly discuss that problem, regardless of how difficult that conversation may be.”

Leaving aside another difficult conversation about some of the likely vast differences between my definitions of the sanctity of life and those of the Catholic Church’s definitions of the same for a moment, it’s nice to see a voice of reason from the 43,000 teachers who work in Ontario’s publicly funded (to the tune of $7 billion annually, including my tax dollars) Catholic school board.

To win a copy of The Letter Q, leave a comment here, and/or become a Facebook friend of this here blog.  Contest closes at midnight on Sunday June 3; I’ll announce the winners on Monday June 4. (And here’s a copy of the book trailer!)

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Here’s a pledge: if I have ever loved you – passionately, carnally, platonically, requitedly or not — and if you have ever written me a letter, I have that letter.

The boy down the hall in first-year residence. My boyfriend in Grade 13. That Danish girl. The girl I married. But also letters from my best friends, every letter my parents wrote to me at summer camp, a letter from my adored second-grade teacher, Mrs. Ospolak. They’re all there, tucked away in a bag in the closet, tied in bundles with acrylic yarn.

I also have a thick pile of letters from the guy who stalked me in first-year university (roommate of Grade 13 boyfriend), increasingly maudlin and miserable, flirting with suicide. I’m not exactly sure why I kept them: partly for evidence, partly as a reminder of the intensity of that time in my life, partly today as some kind of creative inspiration, although the idea of actually reopening those envelopes and rereading the contents makes my stomach shift. (I don’t, however, have the very last letter he wrote to me, which was sent in an unmarked envelope; I steamed it open and read the last line – “I pity you and I pity the mediocrity for which people like you stand” (catchy, no?) — and then slid it back into the envelope, otherwise unread, and printed his address and RETURN TO SENDER on it, stuffed it back into the mail. To this day, not reading it is very likely one of my most fruitful acts of self-control.)

Another letter I no longer have — because I burned it — is a letter sent to me near the end of Grade 8 by a group of mean girls. I won’t get into the whole, sordid, story here, because I’ve already rehashed it in an essay in Truth Perceived, an anthology of Canadian nonfiction just put out by McGraw-Hill Ryerson as part of their iLit textbook series. But suffice it to say that it’s a story about bullying and its aftermath. (And what happens when the girls who were mean to you in junior high later on become your friends on Facebook. And you have to face the fact that you have all grown up in the wake of the complicated mess of adolescence in which you are as culpable as the next person.) And maybe some despairing 14-year-old will read it and feel slightly better? I can hope. Here’s a taste:

I wanted a daughter at first, couldn’t imagine what I’d do with a boy — let alone two. And when the ultrasound showed, unmistakably, that I was having a son, I was momentarily deflated. All my daughter-images rushed out of the picture frame in my head like the ocean at low tide, leaving me temporarily blank. Who was this baby if not the daughter I had imagined, the daughter I would protect from my own experiences, the daughter who would not come home crying every day after school, who would not starve herself or stick her fingers down her throat in an effort to disappear, cut bloody lines into the soles of her feet? Where was the daughter who would be both popular and compassionate, who would know what to do with her hair, whose mother would buy her the right clothes, who would have both the mass appeal and the strength of character I did not in junior high?

Where was the daughter who wouldn’t think she needed you?

While my essay is a letter to that collective group of girls, now women, it’s also very much a letter from me now to me then, the kind of assurance that I desperately needed (and probably wouldn’t have believed) that things would work out just fine and not to worry.

Which brings me to a different series of letters. The Letter Q: Queer Writers’ Notes to Their Younger Selves, is exactly that: anthology of letters from 64 award-winning authors and illustrators — including the likes of Michael Cunningham, Amy Bloom, Jacqueline Woodson, Terrence McNally, Gregory Maguire, David Levithan, and Armistead Maupin — to their younger selves, telling those kids what they would’ve liked to know then about their lives as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender people and also as artists. Editor Sarah Moon has done a great job of putting together the collection, which falls into the “just one more” school of reading: I’d pick it up, and not quite be able to put it down. The stories echo each other, over and over, into a kind of collective voice: life sucks now, but it won’t always. You have — or will find — the resources you need to not only survive but thrive. The pain and the misery that you think is so unique and personal to you is actually pretty much a requirement of adolescence (and not just queer adolescence): other people have gone through the same thing as you, and you can learn and take comfort from them. It’s a message many teens — myself included — can use, or could have .

Scholastic Books has very kindly offered YOU — the readers of this blog — two copies of the anthology in a giveaway. I’m adding a third, my own well-thumbed copy (not because I don’t want to keep it for myself but because I really like the idea of even one more teenager having free access to a copy of this book). For a chance to win one, leave a comment on this post. For a second chance — and yes, I am well aware of the irony of this — click on the “like” button over there to the right and become a Facebook friend of this blog. Bonus karma points if your comment gives some of tip to your teenage self, but it doesn’t have to. While you’re at it, you can “like” The Letter Q on Facebook as well.) Contest closes at midnight on Sunday June 3; I’ll announce the winners on Monday June 4.

(If you’re already a fairly well-adjusted grown up, or at least a merely functional grown-up, by all means enter, but I’d love it if once you’re done reading the book you pass it on to some kid who could really use it. Or the public library. Or a local queer youth group. Or a high-school guidance counselor. Or some right-wing church. Etc.)

Good luck!

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A quotation mark eraser! How handy — in case you say something that you regret. Found in my $16 yellow rubber boots from Zellers, which cost only three times what some other boots cost. Not that I’m counting.

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When the kids were babies and I was three-quarters (okay, seven-eighths. Maybe nine-tenths) psychotic with sleep deprivation, I used to fantasize about hiring a sleep nanny, someone to come into the house in the early evening and do whatever it took to get them to sleep through the night in their own beds.

And where would I be during this sleep training, you ask? Somewhere else: maybe in the basement, maybe ensconced in the spare room of some understanding friend, maybe, in a pinch, at a hotel. Anywhere except near the screaming and the dreadmiserypanic that engulfed me after being awakened constantly, relentlessly, night after night.

I don’t think there were any actual sleep nannies in Thunder Bay at the time (there was that nurse at the health unit who called me back, twice, to chastise me about even considering letting my baby “cry it out,” but I don’t think she counted), and I’m not sure that I would have been able to stomach coughing up several hundred dollars a night for the privilege of having one (although, really? In hindsight, it would have been worth every penny in terms of preserving my mental health and my shortening telomeres). But I fantasized about them, these Mary Poppinses of the night, fantasized about bunking down somewhere orderly and quiet while someone else instilled decent sleep patterns in my children.

Reader? Seven and a half years after becoming a parent, the fantasy has been fulfilled.

You may recall that Rachel and I took off for Copenhagen at the beginning of May, and that Rob stayed with the children. But I have neglected to mention until now that Rob — who shall henceforth be known as “He who trained the untrainable” — also spearheaded and saw out Isaac’s long-overdue move out of my room and back into his own.

Had I not mentioned recently that Isaac moved into our room in October of *cough* 2010? As in, for the past 18 months, a small child has slept, with varying degrees of soundness, in a little bed next to his mommies’ big bed. Mostly, his tenure of bunking with us has been marked by certain amount of relief, but mostly by grudging acceptance on my part, and often by sheer frustration. For several months, it seemed that he was there by the very skin of his teeth, especially during the weeks upon weeks of nights during which he still woke up multiple times to kvetch about the state of his pillows and the fact that we still would not let him cross the line from his mattress to ours.

(I did empathize with his frustration. I mean, he’d got so far, only to be thwarted at the last great divide: out of his room and into ours, from a stingy air mattress on the floor to a foam bed, to the foam bed topped with the stingy air mattress. Onto which he piled pillows so that he would be at the same level as — if not just slightly higher than — us. Like a cat asserting its dominance. And then, he’d slowly, slowly sneak his head onto our mattress. From his vantage point, the logical next step was obvious: just roll over into the maternal bed and cuddle on up.

From our vantage point, he had to stay on his own bloody mattress so as to avoid scuffing our shins with the slip-proof bottoms of his footed pajamas.

At least, until after 6 AM, when nobody felt like arguing anymore.)

“He is so out of here,” I muttered pretty much daily. And Rachel would nod and look concerned and say, “I hear what you’re saying. You sound pretty frustrated.” Which is basically a line out of the Parenting 101 script that means, essentially, “I’m going to acknowledge your unhappiness in an attempt to satisfy your needs without actually changing anything.”

Her point was that at least she didn’t have to actually get out of bed in order to deal with the wake-ups. I countered — neglecting to acknowledge that it was my idea to bring him into our room in the first place — that we should force Isaac to sleep in his own damn bed, in his own damn room, all through the night, so that we wouldn’t have to get up in the middle of the night at all. Ever. Of course, I had no suggestions for how to actually make that happen, given that Isaac had successfully resisted all known forms of sleep training for the school of I’ll Do What I Damn Well Please, to the point where we started calling him “Isaac the Untrainable” (a moniker later adopted by our friends for their two-year-old daughter, who was Totally Not Down with spending the entire night in her toddler bed).

But by the time May rolled around, we were both fairly fed up with sharing our space with Isaac. By this point, it had become a habit rather than a necessity, but neither of us could actually stomach the thought of losing the several nights’ sleep that would inevitably accompany the switch.

Enter Rob. Whose basic condition for staying with the kids for nine days while we went to Europe was that he not have to sleep in the same room as Isaac. I’m not sure if this had anything to do with Rob’s own sleep preferences or if it was simply a way to get us to get the kid out, but it seemed like as good an opportunity as any to cut the cord. The clincher, though, was that Rob offered to be our sleep nanny (or should I say “manny”?): You girls go off to Europe, he said, and when you come back, the transition will be complete. Or something to that effect.

(This is usually the point in the conversation where all my female friends with husbands and children — you know who you are — start seriously re-contemplating their life choices and wondering if it’s too late to enlist a sperm donor retroactively.)

Not that I didn’t help. The day before we left, I dug out and hung up (using fun, fun power tools) the crazy bed canopy with glow-in-the-dark stars I had purchased online in a moment of hopefulness. And because the canopy looked a little too stark, I jazzed it up with some red and yellow ribbon accessories. I stuck glow-in-the-dark stars all over the ceiling. And I made up the bed with kid-friendly sheets. And then, Rob went out and bought not one but two crazy-ass nightlights, the four-year-old equivalent of a Zeppelin-inspired sound and light experience. I mean, what kid wouldn’t want to sleep in this?

That kid would be Isaac.

Oh, he liked his new bedroom. But he liked it as, he told us, as a place to visit, not a place to actually spend the night, alone. But we persisted, persisted right through the hours and hours of screaming and protesting through the wee hours of the night until we snuck out of the house, shattered, at 6 AM, to go to the airport. Never have I been so happy to get to an airport, to a plane that would take me far, far away from the children. Rob texted me from the airport at 6:30 AM: “Isaac awake. Says to tell you he slept in his bed the whole night so he gets a star.”

I texted back: “Tell him to go fuck himself.”

From there, however, things got better. I mean, Copenhagen. A basic tenet of life is that going to Copenhagen with your girlfriend is always better than listening to your nearly-five-year-old scream from 2 AM to 4 AM in Thunder Bay, Ontario. But each day, we received text updates from Rob on the progressively better quality of Isaac’s nights in The Room. And if Copenhagen was the cake, then the inch-thick frosting was the idea of coming home to a kid to not only (a) slept through the night in his own room, but (b) did so happily and (c) fell asleep on his own without needing or even agitating for someone to lie down next to him.

We’ve been working on the early mornings. Now, the deal is that he can’t come in until his alarm goes off (or, as he puts it, “My clock starts talking to me”). At 6:35 AM, mind you, but this is still an improvement. A few mornings ago, I woke up early to pee and found him lying on the floor outside our bedroom, sucking his thumb and cuddling his blanket. “How long have you been here?” I asked him. “Oh,” he said, “only about half the night.”

“Great,” I whispered. “Come get us when your alarm goes off.” And I went back to bed. In my own room. With my door closed and nobody but Rachel beside me.

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Okay, technically I didn’t find this wee present in my boot this morning. Officially, I found it on the morning of Friday, May 4, in Copenhagen, of all places. Which is where I have been. Which is why I have not been here, writing in this blog.

(Copenhagen! O, Copenhagen, land of beautiful buildings and bicycles and windmills and herring! And smorresbrod! To which I would relocate in a heartbeat if it weren’t for all those things like money and jobs and family and citizenship and language barriers, etc. But I digress: right now, we’re talking about things in boots.)

I found this little bracelet, lovingly made by Isaac, in my left ART Company boot

(… … and then she drifted off onto eBay in search of size 40 ART boots… …)

Hello!

…, the boots, you may recall, that I purchased in Chicago for approximately the cost of what my heart would fetch on the black market. And that was half price. But that’s okay, because they are the most beautiful boots I have ever owned and I adore them.

I was putting on said boots in order to go out for dinner with my girl to Aamaans restaurant, for what turned out to be one of the loveliest meals of the trip (and, o, there were many lovely meals on that trip, lo, yes there were), and finding Isaac’s bracelet seemed like a sweet omen, a reminder of my children, who had conveniently remained in North America while their mothers sojourned abroad in honour of my 40th birthday. (Look soon for a guest post from their caretaker, the indefatigable — or, more accurately, utterly fagged out, no pun intended — Rob, on what was like to take care of them for a week, solo. Heh.)

We were joined at the end of the meal by by this girl I had a fling with during the summer of 1995 my friend Lene and her girlfriend, Maria, who scooped us up and took us out to some bars where there were many younger women dressed up like Simon Le Bon (this seems to be a fashion trend, no? Babydykes in black fedoras with rolled rims and lots of eyeliner?), and who the next day scooped us up in their little Volkswagen and drove us three hours inland to the city of Århus, which I also promptly fell in love with.

We ate the original Danish comfort food at Teater Bodega (I had a dish called Biksemed, which translates roughly into “mixed food,” which is, of course, what it is;

Rachel ate some rock-hard yet delicious bacon with potatoes and parsley sauce and swooned), drank Carlsberg classic, and visited the rainbow panorama on top of the Århus Art Museum.

And we also went to a flea market, where out of the corner of her eye Rachel spied these ART boots.

In her size.

For 30 kroner.

Which translates to approximately five dollars.

And then she bought them. And then I tried very hard not to sulk. Mostly successfully, but with little episodes of sulking breaking through now and then like the opposite of the sun through clouds.

And then Lene, bless her Danish heart, said to Rachel, “You know, I have a pair of cowboy boots in your size that I love but I never wear. Why don’t you take them?”

And then I thought about killing both of them until they were dead, but instead I smiled serenely and encouraged Rachel to just say yes, until I couldn’t help it any more and hissed at her out of the corner of my mouth, “I didn’t sleep with some girl 17 years ago so that YOU could get BOOTS.”

And she smiled back at me, equally serenely, and said, “Apparently, yes you did.”

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Susan: So, Isaac, Rowan is really liking his piano lessons. Do you think you’d like to learn an instrument?

Isaac: Um … maybe. How about the slide whistle?

Susan: Well, you are pretty good at the whistle. But what about…

Isaac: I could play the French horn?

Susan: Well you can’t really play the French horn until your mouth and jaw have grown a bit—

Isaac: I know! I know! The jingle bells!

Susan: Um …

Rowan: How about he plays the accordio—

Susan & Rachel: No.

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