Creative writing

Isaac has set up a laboratory in his closet. Since he doesn’t really have many clothes that require hanging, we’ve mostly used his closet as a repository for stuff we don’t know what else to do with, but in the last few months he’s been claiming the space, with its half-size door and sloping ceilings, as his own, digging through the debris of old couch pillows and my juvenilia and arranging little vials and boxes and treasures in its further reaches. A couple of weeks ago, he and his friend Ben created a complex, booby-trapped, locking mechanism to keep his treasures safe.

And now, every so often, if you ask him where something is, he will look at you all shifty-eyed and whisper, “IT’S IN MY LAB.”

(I love little kids, or at least this little kid, for precisely this reason — the dedication to detail, to the illusion, the need to decorate. I brought a new backpack for him yesterday to replace his current one with the busted zipper. And he went through the entire bag very carefully, asking what each compartment was for, then filling all the slots for pens and pencils with every pen and pencil he could find. I so love his capacity to delight in pencil slots.)

Anyway, as much as things are disappearing into his lab, occasionally something emerges from it. I found this on his bedroom floor a few days ago:

My creative writing folder from either sixth or seventh grade. Actually, it seems to be more of a literary criticism folder, full of book reviews and character analyses. The book confirms — not that I, or, likely, you, need confirmation of this — that I was a total keener, what with all my pristine penmanship and underlined titles and carefully lettered cover pages.

I had the same teacher — Ms. Davies — for both grades and I credit her for cultivating my budding feminist tendencies. We were a class of nine and ten girls those two years, writing letters to the publishers of our readers to complain about the lack of active female characters and their stories, performing an all-girl version of Free to Be, You and Me. She was the first woman I ever met who didn’t shave her armpits, which I found, then, simultaneously thrilling and embarrassing. The notebook also confirms Ms. Davies’s dedication as a teacher, and her commitment to pushing me as a writer: pointing out strengths, suggesting places to improve, always reading carefully. “Maybe you’ll be a reporter, Susan – this shows promise!”

Maybe I will.

And you, Isaac: what will you be?

Bridge to Terabithia

Rowan’s class is reading this book right now:

And I have shivers.

Did you ever read Katherine Paterson's  Bridge to Terabithia? Published in 1977? I must have read it shortly after it came out, and then it was one of those books I kept on repeat for years afterwards. I’m sure I wrote at least a couple of book reports on it. It was a brutal read even then, tackling class structure, sexism, poverty, death, the cruelty of children and their parents. Rereading it now (because how can I not?) it’s no less brutal. I’m already tearing up and — spoiler alert — Leslie hasn’t even died yet.

(That line is seared into my brain: “Your girl friend’s dead, and Momma thought you was dead, too.” And here I go with the tears.)

Rowan loves this book, and I love him even more for loving it. He loves it despite or because of its brutality, or maybe he doesn’t even notice how rough life is for Jesse and his siblings, his schoolmates, in rural Virginia in the 1970s. Did I notice, then? I must have. I asked him if his teacher has talked about the way that things have changed since the book was written — how boys and girls are, say, generally allowed to play on the same parts of the playground, how people don’t generally snort about “some hippies.”

“No,” he said.

“Do you think life is much different for you that it was for Jess and Leslie?”

He shrugged. His favourite character in the book, he tells me, is the dog. Followed by the cow, Miss Bessie. (My voice recognition software just typed in “Ms. Bessie” and I giggled — because calling anyone “Ms.” in the context of this book would have been a dangerously political act.)

It occurs to me that a kid raised in a Jewish household by two moms would have been dead in the water back then.

And then I wonder if maybe much has really changed. In my privileged, Canadian bubble, absolutely it has. But other days, with other news stories as far away as other countries and on other continents and as close as my backyard, it’s hard to tell.

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Day 26 of #NaBloPoMo, and I have to say I feel like I'm losing steam. Four more days!

The “Write a Blog Post on Four Hours’ Sleep” Game

I walked the boys to school yesterday, which makes me feel virtuous, what with readying their minds for a day’s worth of learning without consuming even a smidge of fossil fuels. Et cetera. It was only -19°C out, otherwise known as downright balmy — the school herds the kids inside only once the temperature hits -25°. We are hardy souls. So there I was, feeling downright virtuous as we walked along, the kids all adorable in their matching snowsuits. And I tried hard to feel virtuous. Really, I did. Except that the entire walk to school I was instead consumed with feeling anxious and irritated as my sons played what is fondly known as “The Shoving Game,” which — loosely — involves running full force into each other and knocking each other into the piles of dirty, rotting snow along the sides of the street. The Shoving Game also involves a certain amount of sitting on top of your opponent/collaborator, perhaps occasionally sprinkling his face with snow, hacking away at large ice boulders and hurling them into the street to see them explode, using my body as a human shield, maniacal laughter, and walking along the top ridges of said rotting snow banks, any moment liable to crash skull-first onto the unyielding pavement below.

Also, there is screaming.

It takes maybe five minutes to walk to school when you just walk. Longer, obviously, when you play the shoving game. It felt like an hour. An hour, in, say, stirrups, during which time I tried to remember that this is normal — even healthy — behaviour, that these kids need rough-and-tumble, outdoor play, that they are, by and large, quite good at negotiating the boundaries of their bodies. And even when Rowan momentarily (and not entirely innocently) shoves him too hard and Isaac bursts into sudden, over-reactionary tears, those tears are gone in moments — especially if I don’t intervene.

And I tried not intervene. Really, I did, but it’s almost physically impossible not to find yourself spouting aphorisms like “Careful!” or “Watch the road!” or “If I have to tell you again…” when all you can see is — when you can practically hear — your child’s head splitting open like a ripe cantaloupe on asphalt. I was trying to be cool, trying to be Zen, but mostly I found myself wishing that this city’s blighted urban planning program had seen fit to install more goddamn sidewalks in residential areas here in the 1960s, and occasionally trying to subtly frogmarch Isaac a few steps forward to gain a little bit of distance before the next onslaught.

This is my current, ongoing parenting challenge: maintaining serenity in the face of justified chaos. I tried again last night, when I desperately needed the kids to play in the basement and they just as desperately insisted that they would play in the basement only if one or the other of their parents stayed down there with them, because the Basement Is Scary. So I sucked it up and went down there with them and decided to quilt while they played the “Use the Couch As Leverage to Hurl Yourself over the Spare Bed, Coming Precariously Close to the Edge of the Cupboard Game.”

I had a bit more fun than I had that morning, which just goes to show what an awesome parent I must be.

P.S. I have a new gig! I'll be blogging weekly at Today's Parent Canada, as "The (Other) Mother." Please check it out!