The Yoga Class Incident: Part I

Picture it: Two women, a man, and baby in the summer of 2005, in a beautiful, but stinking-hot second-storey apartment in the High Park neighbourhood of Toronto.

Rachel and I — the two women — have fled to this baking summer sublet after our freezing first winter in Thunder Bay, Ontario, the coldest winter the city had seen in a decade, a winter in which I use a credit card to scrape the ice off the inside of the car windows on the rare occasion I manage to get it together enough to leave the house, what with the new baby and never, ever sleeping and not really having any friends anyway to hang out with. I didn’t have any friends because I was brand-new in town, although I would hazard a guess that the vibe I gave off — sort of, how would I describe it, grieving, desperate, sleepless and obsessed, talking endlessly, about it — didn’t help me in the friend-making department. I’m sure I exuded some kind of manic, scratchy sadness that made people smile and back away slowly instead of inviting me out for coffee or offering to come over and hold the baby while I napped.

Anyway.

By the time May rolled around, by the time I was able to cobble together the occasional five-hour stretch of sleep, by the time I finally crept outdoors with a blanket and lay it across the scrappy grass in the front yard and sat my baby down on it for the first time, I was so ready to be gone from The Lakehead, ready to be somewhere warm and familiar and decidedly urban. So we hightailed it to Toronto, where Rowan’s sleep schedule morphed into an almost-bearable two wakings a night and where good Indian food was a half-block away.

Rob came from Vancouver to Toronto to visit us that summer, our first as co-conspirators in this parent/donor/family thing we had created. We were all pretty new to the game, only five or six months in, so perhaps we could all be forgiven for what has come to be known as The Yoga Class Incident. But maybe not.

Picture: two women whose collective sleep deprivation has rendered them just a tad grumpy, whose lives have been utterly savaged by parenthood, trundle back and forth in their baking-hot High Park summer sublet, attending to their baby, eking out bits of work here and there, figuring out what’s for dinner, changing diapers.

In the centre of the room, the man sits at his computer, trying to find a yoga class to attend somewhere in the Greater Toronto Area.

As the women trundle and caregive, eke and change, the man narrates his yoga-class quest: There’s a class across town but he’s not sure he likes the look of the studio’s website. … click click click … There’s one around the corner, but he may go see a movie after, and the timing won’t quite work. … click click click … There’s one a few neighbourhoods over … click click click … “Oh, but they do Iyengar, and I’m really looking for more of an Ashtanga feel.” He mentions a class at Yonge and Eglinton, to which one of the woman replies, “But it will take you at least an hour each way to get there and back.”

To which the man replies, “Oh, that’s okay. I’ve got plenty of time.”

At this point, the collective storm clouds that have been gathering in the humidity of the Toronto summer reach maximum saturation.

“Listen to me carefully,” says the woman. “I need you,” says the woman, “to pick a fucking yoga class and go to it and never say another word about it again as long as you live or so help me God I will smash your computer into a million little pieces right now, Mr. I’ve-got-all-the-time-in-the-world.”

And he does.

* * *

To be continued.

Six-year-old (II)

Dear Isaac,

I’m writing this from Montréal, where your other mother and I have gone to get away from it all, to live our alternative, child-free, urban life for a week while you and your brother stay home under the care of your Rob, whipped into shape from a week of doing this last year.

Still, I woke up this morning the way I usually do, at 6:30 AM, even though you weren’t there to quietly open my bedroom door and carefully close it behind you to keep out the cats and the light before climbing into my bed. (And why is it that you can so carefully remember to close the door but you still “can’t remember” to lift up the goddamn toilet seat?) This morning, no skinny little boy stole my covers and vibrated relentlessly and whispered question after question (“Where am I going today?” “Is this a family day?” “Is next day a family day?” “Can we go to Egypt? Next day can we go? And if we find treasure there do we have to give it back?”) Into the quiet room while I — depending on my mood and just how much sleep I had— either gritted my teeth and secured my sleep mask and turned over to try to eke out a little more rest or managed to revel in the sweetness that is you.

That’s a big difference from last year to this: you sleep hurrah hurrah in your own room, but only because we kicked you out unceremoniously year ago and then left Rob to deal with the consequences while we left the country. I swear, the fact that he took on this final phase of sleep training ranked just as high for me as the fact that he took care of you and your brother for the week. Now, you’re still a regular night visitor, but more often than not my bedroom is adults-only space, which is great given that your other mother and I have so much energy left at the end of every day.

But aside from the bedroom development I’m having difficulty deciding what about you, at six, is different from you at five, four, three and so on. Because change a few details here and there, but you are so quintessentially, consistently, you that it’s hard to see you as doing anything but continuing to grow into yourself. You’re still all about the bling: the more sparkles and stick-on jewels and shiny things and buried treasure, the better. You’re still all about the breakfast, spooning up massive bowls of oatmeal most mornings while I watch your blood sugar levels rise from “Everything you do is wrong” to “[insert positive parallel construction here].” You’re still all about the cuddles, although the blanky and thumb-sucking are falling by the wayside, shedding slowly like an old skin that was too small. (Speaking of which, I finally bit the bullet and hid away your two, too-small, favourite shirts just as you inherited a windfall of hand-me-downs to replace them — I love how you look in new-to-you clothes that are on the larger rather than smaller end of your size, how you instantly mature by a few months, the same way you do when I cut your hair. I’m getting better at that, by the way: the last time I set you up in front of some cartoons and trimmed away, I didn’t even nick the top of your ear ONCE.)

Speaking of clothing, you seem to be officially done with the pink (though not pink pajamas) and the party dresses, and I am ambivalent about that, can’t tell if it was something that would have happened no matter what or if the giggles and long looks and questions cast the deciding vote. I’ll never know. (You’re also full on into weapons, just to confound any gender essentialist. Anything vaguely long or pointy is immediately transformed into a gun, a sword, a light saber. You beg us relentlessly for a Nerf gun and we keep saying no because we have drawn the line at buying toy guns. Sorry.)  At least you’re still full on into jewelry. Your current career plans consist of becoming a jewelry designer and selling your creations from a stand in our front yard. You will live with us forever, you explain, and thus contribute to the family economy. You will help clean, but you will not cook, because you don’t know how — and you don’t seem to be convinced that you can learn. You’re equally unconvinced of the fact that you will one day read on your own or ride a bike that is not attached to the back of mine — you would rather, I somehow get the sense, get your books via a warm maternal body cuddled up next to yours, travel through the world still tethered to one of us. And that’s okay — you’ll read on your own just fine and I swear the first time you take off on your own set of two wheels, no training wheels, I will weep tears of both joy and sorrow.

And yet, you don’t miss us right now. I talked briefly on the phone to your brother this morning, and he ended the conversation with, “I love you. Have a good day,” before passing the phone over to you. You screeched, “HAVE A BAD DAY!” and then cackled wildly before passing the phone back to Rob and running off like the booty-shaking, ninja-kicking, sugar-seeking, crayfish-catching, soccer-dropout, diamond encrusted little maniac you are.

Which I guess makes you entirely well-adjusted.

Happy sixth birthday, Isaac! I’m sorry I didn’t get you a Nerf gun.

Love,

Mama

"What are you going to do about Charlie?"

So, my friend Judy – godparent to my children, one of approximately three people who have seen my entire nuclear family at its individual and collective highest highs and lowest lows over Sunday brunches and other occasions the past eight or so years – sent me a wee message a few nights ago on Facebook:

my stress dream last night: you had a 3rd baby (charlie) but you were bummed that he was interfering with the lovely dynamic that you had as a 4-some, so you mostly left him at home. (like, you would come for brunch and not bring him.) i spent the dream fussing about what to do about charlie and the million possibilities of what i could be/should be doing. you were so nonplussed about the whole thing. Oi. woke up exhausted and so wanted to write and say thanks for not having a third baby. xox. i told some people at work about the dream, and so now the code for any decisions i need to make about students is “what are you going to do about charlie?” ha ha

Now, we’ve been through this: it’s not like anyone around here was considering having a third baby. We are a house of big kids now, the rhythms and needs of babies and toddlers vague, distant memories. Pregnant women, women with babies, look so young to me now, so unbroken, so sweet with their strollers and their round-faced children with those tummies who don’t know how to open doors. We are a house wherein, most of the time, most people sleep through the night in their own beds and wipe their own bums. Etc. Simply put, we are a household that is — more to the point, we are two 40-plus parents that are —no longer equipped to handle the crazy that would be another baby, a third child.

And yet, there’s something slightly disconcerting when other people are having stress dreams about me having another baby. I mean, I realize that dreams are dreams and open to interpretation, but still. It makes you wonder about the kind of angst I must have projected into the world as the mother of infants.

Because, as I recall, there was some angst. Or, as Judy put it in our ongoing chat, “Can you imagine if you had another baby????? Oi. the sleepless nights the feeding the helplessness. i get panicky just thinking about it for you. or maybe anyone.”

So, the short version is: we are going to do nothing about Charlie. And yet still, there it was, there it is: a tiny part of my brain that immediately thought, “Oooh, sweet baby Charlie! Mama would never forget to take woodums you to brunch!”