May 26, 2016

7 Years Today

I continue to strongly feel that mothers should be free to write (respectfully) about their children and the lives they share together, though I suppose if my children were unusually vulnerable in some way my feelings about this would be more complicated (and they’re inevitably going to be more complicated anyway at some point in the future). I was talking about this with my friend Diana after we’d seen Vivek Shraya at the Festival of Literary Diversity discussing using her mother in her art and writing, and how she didn’t ask her mother’s permission for this. “Why can’t this license work both ways?” I wondered, though I can anticipate so many possible answers to that question. And Diana made a very good point about the dangers of mothers (it’s always mothers. I don’t suppose fathers get so tied up in knots about writing about their children, or maybe they just don’t, for various reason) writing about their children, which is that the writing might define the child before the child has a chance to define herself.

Although I don’t think I’ve ever done such a thing with Harriet. In writing or in person, I’m strongly resistant to the idea of defining my children (“she’s shy, she’s clever, she’s like this or like that”) because I don’t want such definitions to be the box they feel confined by. A person who is seven years old (or any age for that matter) should it feel absolutely possible to blossom into any kind of person, or not to be a “kind of” person at all. It certainly seems possible to me that this could happen anyway, because of how children are changing all the time. I’ve made a point of writing about both my girls on their birthdays, and from one year to the next, I don’t recognize the curious creature that went before. And that’s why writing it down is so important I think—the value of writing, “This is who she is right now.” Because tomorrow she’ll be someone else entirely, and the only thing that’s consistent is what a pleasure it is to watch her grow.

Harriet is seven today, and has been obsessed with hedgehogs ever since Anakana Schofield came to visit and brought her a small stuffed toy of one. She fills pieces of paper with all the hedgehog facts she knows, and likes to quiz us. She likes to open conversations with, “What is your favourite animal?” just so you’ll ask her the same in return. Sometimes it is a bit much. Sometimes she doesn’t care if it is or it isn’t. She loves reading comics and graphic novels, and every trip to the grocery store involves a look at the magazine stands for new Archies. She is a forthright, strong-willed character, who manages to couple such qualities with being pretty easy-going—you can take her anywhere. Her imagination is enormous. She is besotted with her sister and so kind and patient with her in a way I appreciate more than I can ever express. She eats whatever I cook for her, which is new and wonderful, even if it’s beans and spinach fritters. She loves meals out and doing Mad Libs while we wait for our food to arrive. She reads in bed until she falls asleep every night. She is a perfectly average, well-performing student in every way, except that her reading level is over the top. No surprise as she forever has her face in a book. In the past year, she has learned to swim, to skate and ride her two-wheeled scooter, so I no longer fear (mock hysterically, or not so mock) that she has a spatial awareness and balance disorder. She is determined and works very hard to learn new things, which is the most important skill a person can have. She loves her friends at school. She is brave and goes forth when I drop her off at places where she knows nobody, and expect her to get along in a way that I don’t even expect of myself. She pays a lot of attention to the news on the radio, and I don’t always perceive how much she understands. There is a whole side of Harriet I don’t even know at all, depths and fears and fascination, and sometimes a bit comes up to the surface and it floors me because of how familiar and known she is to me otherwise. But as a parent, permitting a child that space to work things out for themselves is really important. She is kind most of the time, and tries to be good, which is as good as it gets. She loves Taylor Swift and wants to be either a rock star or a scientist when she grows up. She loves to sing and dance and put on performances. She likes school and loves her teacher, and is a staunch feminist, which is cool for somebody in grade one. She is old enough to read the Rainbow Fairy books by herself now, so that I don’t have to. (Phew!) She loves Ms Marvel and superheroes and gets really annoyed by lack of female representation in any context. She still reads picture books with us, which I’m so glad about, that she has not deemed herself above childish things yet. She likes cake and ice cream and is so much fun and up for anything, and someone one told me that the ages from 6-11 were the sweet spot of having children, with most development in check and hormones not yet kicking in—and it is true.

Last night our power went out after midnight and Harriet woke up in the pitch black, her nightlight out, and she started calling me in a panic. She’d flipped out of bed and was walking into the wall trying to regain her perspective, and there I found her. I led her out of her room into our front room (and, apropos of nothing, I thought it was so funny when she was discussing the possibility of being rich recently and said, “We would have a really big front room.” Not understanding that the really rich possibly have houses wide enough to accommodate more than one room at the front) where the windows were letting in light, though houses were dark all around us. In the apartment building north of Bloor that we can see from our couch, lit windows were scattered throughout. I pointed them out to help her find her bearings. “Look,” I said. “There’s light up there.” And how she hugged me as we sat there—so solidly and wholeheartedly. It was one of the nicest things that I have ever ever experienced.

The day I found out I was pregnant with Harriet, Stuart took my picture standing before those same windows, positive pregnancy test in hand, and I look ecstatic. And it’s remarkable now think of what was taking shape just then as the picture was being taken, all the things we had no idea about. That everything we were waiting for would be so far beyond our wildest dreams.