Labour Day

It's Labour Day. With a U, because we are in Canada. And I'm writing this at 5:24 in the morning, because — yet again — I can't sleep. Which reminds me of what it was like to be pregnant and constantly awake. Which is making me think about how the summer itself parallels pregnancy: nine weeks, instead of nine months, ending with a Labour Day.

At the beginning of it all, you're sort of surprised and giddy and excited and just slightly nauseated at the thought of summer: on the one hand, I mean, you made it through that craptastic winter. But now the reward is, you know, nine unstructured or only semi-structured weeks to carefully fill with day camps or travel or camping trips or — what we're doing right now — JUST HANGING OUT.

By the middle of the summer, like the middle trimester, you're more or less used to how summer works — the slower, more casual pace, the later bedtimes, the raspberries and swimming, the not deciding what will be for dinner until half an hour or so before dinner when you throw something on the barbecue. You're even enjoying yourself. It's like it's always been summer/like you’ve always had a tiny human growing inside you and it always will be/and you always will. And it's manageable, sometimes even pleasant, if occasionally slightly unsettling.

But now, at the 11th hour of summer vacation, at Labour Day, I'm done. I am done with the free-flowing schedule and the lack of structure. I am done JUST HANGING OUT and its accompanying nonstop requests for screens or to bake cakes or to arrange playdates, of juggling work obligations with childcare, of trying to write between 7 and 9 AM and conducting magazine interviews with two boys and two friends thundering screaming to the house. I am ready for these children to vacate the premises, much as one is ready, at 40 weeks, for said infant to vacate the uterus and give you back your body.

Except. Except that our school district, in its infinite wisdom, has seen fit to add a [insert loooong string of exclusives here, beginning — ironically — with "mother”] PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT DAY IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING LABOUR DAY to the school schedule. What kind of asshats schedule a PD day for the day after Labour Day? (I know what kind: the number-crunching, budgetarily minded kind, but that's a different blog post.) For the record, I really haven't experienced full-out labour: Rowan was breech and therefore a planned C-section; Isaac emerged naturally after approximately eleven minutes of intensity. But I kind of imagine that this is the equivalent of being told, after 24 hours’ worth of mind-numbingly painful contractions, that one is only two centimetres dilated and, well, nothing to do but push through the next 24 hours.

Which is what we’re going to have to do.

When these two children leave the house for school on Wednesday (Wednesday!), I will take their picture, and I will hug them both tight, and I will — very likely — get teary. And those tears will be equal parts joy — at my two enormous, beautiful, growing boys making their way out into the world — and part relief: that the labours of summer are over and those two enormous, beautiful, growing boys are back, thank God, in school.

Freewheeling

“It’s like having a baby,” I found myself saying to Rowan on Saturday, thinking to myself even as the words came out of my mouth that this was a ridiculous metaphor for a six-year-old boy struggling with gravity. But I continued, anyway. “It’s like having a baby and you don’t know exactly when it’s going to happen, or how, but you know it’s going to happen really, really soon. You know?” Of course he doesn’t know, except that his eyes widened, and he nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s going to happen really soon.”

And then, not eleven minutes later, he took both feet off the ground and placed them squarely on the pedals of his two-wheeled bike, stripped a week earlier of training wheels, and cycled the length of our driveway and back, and again, and again, and again. (Which is, come to think of it, pretty much exactly the way his brother came into the world: quickly and easily with almost no build-up, unless you count the preceding nine months or so.)

You’d think I’d be used to these milestones by now, raining down like hailstones — exactly, in fact, like the hailstones that appeared out of nowhere yesterday and covered the lawn with balls of ice the size of giant olives — over the last five months: Rowan swims! Rowan skates! First wiggly tooth! First lost tooth! Ties own shoelaces! Rowan blows his own nose! But no, I don’t get used to them. Watching him pedal furiously by on his bike, balancing on only two tires and sheer will, I thought of the scene in ET when the kids all of a sudden rise into the air on their bikes and fly. In other words, thrilling.

“Does it feel like flying?” I called out to him, and he called back “Yeah!”

And of course, there’s no going back, no (barring tragedy) un-getting your balance. Your whole life is has led up precisely to this point, and then it happens in an instant. In an instant, a paradigm shifts and you are a person who rides upright on two wheels, and how or why on earth would you have ever done anything differently? It is like being born, it is, that first breath drawn and cord clamped and cut and why which you ever breathe anything but air, ever, ever again?

He’s just not that into them

It seems that Isaac has weaned. Every so often, I give it one last shot, just to make ABSOLUTELY sure that he has completely and irrevocably sworn off the boob. “Oh, come on,” I’ll say, offering him the breast just one more time. He has humoured me by halfheartedly latching on for a few seconds before squirming away. And then, last week, he took my nipple between thumb and forefinger, inspected my breast carefully, and said, “Ball.” And asked to read Goodnight Moon.

So, we’re done.

Which is fine. I’ve always categorized myself as somewhere in the middle of the spectrum when it comes to breastfeeding mothers. As in, I’m generally of the opinion that breast is best, unless, for a variety of reasons determined by individual mothers — and not, say, formula companies, governments, employers, relatives or doctors — it isn’t. And those reasons? None of my business.

For my part, I’m quite happy to have been able to nurse both kids. It was an immensely satisfying experience on many levels, even if I never felt the need to go to meetings to talk about it or write poetry on the subject. (Kind of like I never felt the need to make a cast of my pregnant belly. Because, really, it’s just not the kind of thing you can throw away in 15 years.)

I’m guessing that Isaac has similar outlook (about the breastfeeding, not the belly cast, about which his opinions remain inscrutable). Unlike his brother, who was quite passionate about them, Isaac has never regarded my breasts as anything much more than an efficient food source. Rowan, on the other hand, nursed for comfort and sleep as much as he did for food. And boy, did he nurse for food. We had a rough start, which I attributed both to our collective inexperience and the fact that my C-sectioned, Demerol-soaked body seemed — deservedly — in no hurry to produce milk right away. Still, we resisted the nurses’ efforts to give him formula, and persevered. Once he got the hang of it, though, Rowan was a champion nurser. In the first six months of his life, we fought for every calorie: I was ravenous constantly, couldn’t eat enough, and was thinner than I’d ever been in my adult life. And thirsty! The second he latched on, my mouth went dry, as though he was sucking the fluid out of my very pores. When he switched to mostly solid foods, I abruptly gained 20 pounds.

I weaned Rowan at 20 months, mostly because I wanted to get pregnant again, and breast-feeding was still messing with my cycle. Rachel took him on a trip to Vancouver Island without me in order to distract him, and when he came back, the milk bar had closed. I got pregnant the next month.

When Isaac came along, I looked forward to another period of Ferocious Eating Without Consequence. Sadly, it never materialized. Oh, my milk came in immediately and he latched on easily — which I attribute at least in part to his eleven-minute-long, drug-free home birth. But, from the get-go, Isaac seemed to eat just enough to take the edge off, and when he wasn’t hungry, he wasn’t particularly interested.

It took me a while to get used to his particular brand of moderation, and to the fact that nursing this time around wasn’t going to be the gastronomic free-for-all I’d been looking forward to for nine months (or, at least once I stopped barfing). For a while, I was convinced he wasn’t eating enough, despite his regular weight gain and constant output. And, for a while, I was convinced I wasn’t eating enough, stuffing my face while waiting for the baby weight to simultaneously, magically, melt away. It did not. After a while, I sulkily succumbed to my own brand of moderation. It’s true: each kid is different. Rats.

And now, again at 20 months, we’re done. No hoopla, no fanfare, no slow winding down, no trips across the country. Just, for the first time in five years, no small being, in utero or ex, relies on my body for nourishment. At least, not literally.

And while I wish I could say that part of me finds this bittersweet, I don’t, really. I don’t lack for physical contact with the kids, who crawl and cuddle and climb over and nudge our bodies constantly. I don’t mind dropping this particular aspect of indispensability — in a thousand other ways, I am still crucial. But the nursing, she is done.

And now, I am going to go get me some kick-ass bras.