Grace at the walk-in

As you may recall, I went to the walk-in clinic a couple of days ago, where I was gently chastised for my over-clean ears. You will be pleased to know that I have been Q-tip-free for three and half entire days now. It totally sucks. But I’m going to push through. But this post isn’t about my ears. My waxy, crinkly, itchy, unsatisfied ears. This post is about the walk-in clinic — surely one of the least happy places on earth. Especially in Thunder Bay, during what has turned out to be a record-setting cold spell, two days before New Year’s. If you are at a walk-in in Thunder Bay in December, you already feel like crap, enough so that you will brave the cold and the waiting and the other sick people just to get some relief.

I have been amping up my meditation/mindfulness practice of late (a whole other blog post, or series of posts in itself; on the other hand, maybe no blog posts at all — you know, the first rule of meditation practice is that one doesn’t blog at length about meditation practice), and I decided to do my daily practice at the walk-in. Put away the phone, my borrowed copy of Blue Is the Warmest Color, and just sit up straight with my eyes open and be in the room, observe the people and the goings-on without judgment, with compassion. The attractive man sitting next to me, accompanying his elderly father; the young couple in their 20s, she with stomach pains each morning; the teenaged boy and his mom; the coughers and the hackers and the snifflers and the grey-haired man directly across from me burying his head in his hands and sighing. I did my best just to observe them all.

And then an elderly woman approached the young couple.

“Excuse me,” she asked them, “but do you by any chance drive a Honda Civic?”

They nodded.

“I just backed into your bumper,” she said, miserably.

The couple looked at each other, and then at her.

“Don’t worry about it,” said the young man.

The woman shook her head, uncomprehending.

“We just bought a new car,” said the young man. “It’s okay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well,” he said, “… is it bad?”

“There’s a hole in it.”

He shrugged. “Enh. Don’t worry. We’re good.”

The woman looked like she was about to cry. “I’m shaking,” she said.

“Happy new year,” they told her.

And then she went back to her seat and the doctor called in the young woman, and I thought about how lucky I was to have seen that happen, how lucky I was to have been right there, right then.

Nine-year-old

Dear Rowan,

Nine.

I will spare you the "How did that happen?" line of questioning because, frankly, it was the constant revolution of the earth around its axis, its continued orbit around the sun, that got us from there — 8 pounds and 12 ounces of you curled against my chest, me not able to feel my feet — to here, this morning, you easily 10 times that size and pressing snooze on your alarm before making your way downstairs to type in your forgotten homework on my computer.

And also, frankly, the past nine years haven’t just flown by in the blink of an eye. I don’t care what anyone says: they took nine years, those years. Those first 10 or so mostly sleepless months may have, in fact, taken a little longer. Maybe you should be turning 9½. But that’s okay — you are, like every other human on this planet, rightfully entitled to your full share of time on this earth, and you, my son, have lived your time fully and passionately and memorably every day of every year of your life until now and I see no reason why you won’t continue to do so, or why I should pretend that I can’t remember any of them. Why wouldn’t I, and why wouldn’t I want to?

That said, I will continue to be frank: in those nine years, there have been sleepless nights and tantrum moments and smart-Alec comebacks that I would not choose to repeat, that I might choose to expunge from the record were such things possible. But they are not, just as the joyful moments are not, and for the most part, we’re good, kid. Welcome to nine, also known as your 10^th year, and well played!

The weird thing about this birthday is that I remember me at nine, in fourth grade. And not just hazy, vague memories. Nine was the year our family moved across the country, from Toronto to Vancouver, marking a sort of "before" and after" point in my childhood. I started fourth grade at one school in one city and ended it at another in another, and I have not only clear memories of that shift, but clear memories of my opinions about that shift (I wasn’t happy about it). At nine, I was fully a being in my own right, my agenda and my preferences markedly delineated — if not quite fully separated — from those of my parents.

And I know that’s what’s happening to you. I can see it everywhere: the music you listen to, the conversations with your friends I overhear in the car during soccer carpools, how you come home with information I could never have taught you. You speak French now better and more fluently than I ever have and ever will; soon, I imagine, you and your brother will begin having entire, secret, conversations in front of me and your other mother and we won’t be able to do much about it. You actually have political views, and on occasion, they diverge from mine. Some of your interests — to wit, Pokémon, soccer — also diverge markedly from mine, but then again I can still spend the last half hour of your day with you reading side-by-side in bed, and one of the biggest kicks of this year was discovering that you, too, enjoy doing the New York Times magazine crosswords and spending several happy evenings hunched over the latest one with you, hungry to fill in the blanks.

But still, I’m having a hard time fully understanding, deep in my gut, the level to which you are, these days, the star of your own show. I’m barely one of the supporting cast, more like caterer and gofer and driver and occasional assistant director or script doctor. I mean, I'm not being humble: I contribute a great deal to the running of the show, but it feels like it's mostly behind-the-scenes work these days.

This is hard for me. Not so much emotionally as psychically, even physically. You go to get yourself a snack or a glass of milk and it surprises me — that you might be hungry and I can’t sense it. I love apples, and yet they make you break out in hives, and still I have the urge to feed you more apples. We organize your Pokémon cards so carefully, because as little as I care for the actual game I do love sorting things. And then you dump out the boxes to find the card you're looking for and leave them splayed across your floor, because as little as you care about organization, you do love the game.

I'm working on this, kid: cutting the cord and all that. I know it's not the way to go through the world with you, nor will it be with your brother, but I console myself with the fact that it must at least be a somewhat normal process, this differentiation. I'm trying to see you for the independent person that you are; paradoxically, it's helping me to understand that personhood by hearkening back to my own self at nine, hopefully using that knowledge, those memories, to grant you more agency. Perhaps it's no coincidence that I am rereading Bridge to Terabithia  (I finished it yesterday,  gasping and sobbing), learning how to solve the Rubik's cube. What's the world like through your eyes? And what if it's a totally different world than mine, at nine, as your mother?

What if? Well, I suppose we will muddle through as the world continues to rotate on its axis, orbit its way around the sun. You will continue to grow into the person that you already are, and I will continue to watch you do that, and I will try — oh, how I will try — to learn how to see you as your own, lovely, person.

Happy birthday, Rowan.

Love,

Mom

Rubik's cube, 1982

 

We got the kids Rubik’s cubes for the fifth night of Hanukkah. And when I say “we got the kids,” you can feel free to substitute “Susan got,” because that’s kind of the truth.

I haven’t had a Rubik’s cube since fifth grade, where I cycled through several of them, although I never had a real one, only shoddy imitation cubes in pastel colours and teeny tiny keychain versions. Still, I did a good job with what I had. At some point, I acquired this book,

which I read carefully and followed faithfully and eventually memorized. And then I got to the point where I could solve the cube in under a couple of minutes. Like many other kids in my fifth grade class, I was obsessed. We used to sneak our cubes into class and fiddle with them underneath our desks — just as how, today, I imagine kids must try to sneak iPods or DSes or whatever it is those crazy youngsters play with these days. Our fifth-grade teacher banned them during classroom hours, and once I remember doing just a little bit of shit-disturbing and miming the cube-solving motions underneath my desk, so that I could hold up my empty hands when she called me on it. I’m sorry for that, Mrs. Disend.

Today, all I can remember is how to solve the top two rows of the cube. I can’t think about it. I just have to surrender to muscle memory and the formulae I committed to heart, that carved a new groove into my brain — L-minus R-plus F-plus-plus L-plus R-minus-B2; L-minus R-plus F-plus-plus L-plus R-minus with its own particular singsongy chant — and feel my decades-older fingers manipulating the surfaces. But they are still the same fingers.

The bottom third of the cube still eludes me. But not for long! [Cue evil laughter] Because this is now and not 1982, I went on the Internet last night and Googled The Simple Solution to the Rubik’s Cube. It’s long out of print, but copies still float around, and one of them will be mine soon. It may come from Minnesota, or from the UK: we’ll see. (If you have one you’re willing to part with, by the way, let me know.) I thought briefly about ordering a different book, something easily available on Amazon, but then I realized that I don’t want to learn a new language. I want to reanimate something that already exists inside me, reactivate the neural pathways created so long ago. I wonder what else will come up once I manage to access my muscle memories from 1982: fifth grade, just a bit older than Rowan is now. I don’t mean to get all woo-woo here, but it seems highly likely that memories and emotions were forged into the same tissues as movement. Ask any body therapist — they’ll tell you I’m onto something.

Also, I want Rowan — so keen on acquiring languages, mastery — to learn how to solve the cube, too, so then we can have battles and I can slay him (cf., Ms. Pac-Man), until he, inevitably, slays me.