May 26, 2023
Just You Wait…
14 years ago this morning, my daughter was born, but I want to back up about 120 minutes before that when I was being prepped for a cesarean and a nurse was putting an IV into my arm. It was only us two in the room, and she asked me why I was having a scheduled c-section. I explained that our baby was transverse, lying on her side across the womb, instead of in the head-down position that would facilitate actually being born, and was absolutely unbudgeable.
And I still can’t believe that the next part really happened, with me so completely vulnerable and on the cusp of a life-changing experience, and in my mind that nurse was chain smoking as she said this, though that part really isn’t true. And what she told me was, “Kids—if they don’t screw you one way, they’ll find another.”
I said to her, “It’s all worth it though, right?”
And I absolutely swear that she answered, “No.”
*
I thought about that nurse a lot in the days and nights (especially the nights) to follow, as my life was swept up in a hurricane that would last for weeks and weeks. Only in the last couple of years, I’ve realized that I was suffering from postpartum depression through all that (and I was actually the last person on the planet to figure this out; when I confessed my realization to my husband, he rolled his eyes and said, “Um, yeah, we know.”).
The nurse with her IV, a malevolent force, somebody who haunted me, like the bad fairy who turns up at Sleeping Beauty’s christening with her own curse via a very sharp needle. (It was Emily Urquhart’s Ordinary Wonder Tales that made me think of her in this way—such a wonderful book!).
*
“Just you wait” was a line I heard a lot in those terrible early unsteady, ever-shifting early days of motherhood.
In another story that I really can’t believe actually happened (memory is mutable, especially when one is a storyteller; who knows?) I was pushing my stroller down the street when a car slowed down and somebody screamed out the window, “Just wait ’til they’re a teenager!”
*
Just wait…
Those words were always ominous, and I’d also be told to savour my child’s babyhood, a time during which I was often miserable, and usually unfulfilled. It was not the best of times. Caring for babies is demanding, unceasing, exhausting, debilitating, isolating, and generally unsupported by society at large, and worst of all, babies don’t talk.
But, thankfully, babies grow up.
Just wait…
*
“Just wait,” I tell parents now, those who are overwhelmed by the labour of it all, deep in the thick of it. “Because those days are going to go by so fast (hooray!) and one day you’re going to find yourself the parent of a 14-year-old, truly one of the most interesting, hilarious people you’ve ever met in your life. And she’s going to teach you things, and make you think, and she’s going to be taller than you when she has her shoes on and you don’t, so that when she puts her arms around you and you’re enveloped in her hug, you’re going to think, ‘Who is this amazing person and how did we get here?’
She’s going to love reading, and learning, and have very specific ideas about what channel the car radio should be tuned to, and she’ll have strong feelings about politics and JK Rowling (thumbs down, which is fine, because you never managed to get past Harry Potter Book Three), and have her bookshelves organized by genre (romance and murder mystery, obviously, as if there are other genres), and be obsessed with make up, and want to do your eyeliner, and have the best hair you’ve ever seen, and be heading to high school in the fall, and who has consented to have you play the “host” role at her Bridgerton-themed mystery birthday party tonight, which means you must not be too mortifying (yet) and you haven’t even promised not to speak out of turn (but you won’t, because this is a super important gig, the job of a lifetime, and you really want to get it right.)
Just you wait…
April 4, 2023
On Choosing Harriet
As I’ve talked about many times—it was a formative experience that would inspire both my first novel and the name of my firstborn child—I didn’t read HARRIET THE SPY until I was 27, which I’ve always known was a blessing. Although I’d been a fan of Louise Fitzhugh’s slightly less bizarre (but only slightly) sequel THE LONG SECRET, which I read regularly throughout my childhood, tracing my fingers along the lines on the map that opened its pages. It’s a weird book, but not as weird as the Fitzhugh O.G., whose charms would have washed right over me as a young reader too firmly wedded to conventionality.
It wasn’t until that I was almost 30 that I was ready to receive its message about telling the truth, and being unlikable, and being brave, and true to oneself. When I was 27 and finally coming of age in a way that was real to my bones, HARRIET THE SPY read like a revelation.
At almost 30, I wanted to be like Harriet—that courage, that gumption, no fucks to give. And I wanted the same for my child, my daughter, who was born two years later, whom I named Harriet, imagining—the same mistake I’ve made in parenthood over and over—that she could be fully hatched as such, that I might have learned all my lessons so that she wouldn’t have to.
Last night I finished reading Harriet the Spy again, aloud to my family, the second or third time I’ve read the novel with my children, but the first time since they were old enough to critique it—they’re weeks away from turning 10 and 14. And this is the closest I’ll ever come to reading it as a child myself, because I was reading it through their impressions of the novel, and—just as I would have done if I were 10 and 14—they found the whole thing unfathomably weird.
And I did too, which I don’t remember so much from when I was 27. The unevenness of its structure. The writing is kind of sloppy in places. Why does Pinky Whitehead have the same last name as the head teacher? Someone “gasps audibly,” which, as any editor will tell you, is the only way to gasp, right? Harriet M. Welsch, I can see now in a way I didn’t have the vocabulary for 15 years ago, clearly (and wonderfully!) exists on the autism spectrum. And oh my goodness, she struggles so much, which I see now as I read like as a mother. She’s not badass, she’s tortured. She’s hurt and confused and railing against a mold into which she doesn’t fit. At age 27, I admired her obstinacy, but now I read her and think, “Oh, man! That must be so hard!”
And what a complicated legacy that is to hand to your child—how I see that now. When our children are hypothetical, of course, we dream that they will be strong, and defiant, demand tomato sandwiches. Who’d want a child who was like everybody else, prissy and obnoxious like Marion Hawthorne or Rachel Hennessy? Fitting in to the point where one’s character gets lost, and they’re just part of the crowd. Who’d want a kid who never gets in trouble, or ruffles feathers, or who gets along with everyone? Who wouldn’t want a daughter like Harriet?
But now, nearly fourteen years into parenthood, I see that these questions—in practice—have answers far more complicated than I thought they were when I first asked them. I see how we imagine our children will be brave and bold—and they have to be!—but how difficult it is to be so. How we imagine our children will be strong individuals, and raise them not to follow the crowd, to be like everybody else, but how painful it feels when they don’t fit in. How we (okay, maybe I’m talking about ME) bring all our own painful childhood struggles and experiences to the table, projecting them onto whatever our kids are going through, so that we’re all just mired in emotions and projections (and sometimes it’s difficult to tell where they end and we begin). How we might name our child Harriet and then reread the book and realize that this is an awful lot to carry in a way we really didn’t get at the time.
My particular Harriet, at the moment, is in a pretty good place—though I’ve knocked wood just now, because I’m afraid that I’ll jinx it. (In parenthood, nothing ever stays the same for a moment, which is a blessing when things are hard, but can be a curse when things are otherwise.) But oh, there have been tough times as she’s been finding her way and growing into herself, and there were times I wished for the ease of a Rachel or Marion, for her to be a kid who knew the script and could recite it flawlessly.
I had no idea what I was signing up for all those years ago when I chose her name out of a book.
But I suppose that’s the case no matter what your child’s name is.
November 25, 2020
The Seasons of My Life
I have outgrown picture books…again.
Which I feel nervous even writing. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all, and all that jazz, and I have learned through my interest in kids’ books over the last eleven years that those who create these books can be a bit sensitive about their work, about its relegation to the world of childish things. Wonderful children’s literature appeals to readers of all ages, and readers who restrict themselves to a certain age group (or genre, etc.) are missing out. All of this is true.
But it’s nothing not-nice that I’m trying to say here. Instead, it’s a matter of practicality. That for a long time, picture books were my primary way of engaging with my children and this opened up whole worlds to me, and some of those worlds seemed as real as the one I walk around in every day—but time makes you bolder and children get older, and I’m getting older too?
We still read them sometimes. Iris is only seven and we have so many great books on our shelves that all of us enjoy, books we can recite by heart. There are picture books in our library I’ll never be able to part with, and yet—we’re reading them less and less. I used to blog about picture books weekly, but now I hardly do. Everybody in our family is firmly into chapter books now, books we read on our own and the ones we read together. Picture books don’t have the same integral place in our daily life that they once did.
And none of this is remarkable. Children outgrow a lot of things, and families do too. We used to go on road trips listening to the same CD on repeat, this song with a barking dog in the chorus, because Iris cried in the car otherwise, and we don’t do that anymore. I used to get a big kick out of reading Go Dog Go in ridiculous accents, but these days the dog party is over.
But I feel a little bit disloyal, admitting to giving up on my allegiance to picture books. Or rather, moving on from it—although the new frontier, for me, is middle grade and also graphic novels, and I’m getting the same pleasure from relating to Harriet through some of the novels she’s reading as I once did when we used to examine the illustrations in Allan and Janet Ahlberg’s Peepo together, her gummy baby fingers pointing out the dog in the corner that shouldn’t be there. But I’m also trying to give her space to develop her own relationship with books and reading, one that has nothing to do with me.
And this is what happens, of course, the way things come and go. And how when they go, new things grow up in their place, which I keep reminding myself of in these moments of unprecedented change and upheaval. As businesses shut down in my neighbourhood and city and it’s enough to drive one to despair sometimes, the extent of the loss, all of it so overwhelming and hard. But even harder is trying to hold on to it all.
(And remember: a blog needs space to grow and room to wander!)
It’s okay to grow. It’s okay to change. It’s okay to change again, is what I’m thinking, and for the thing that used to define you so much and mean everything to become a spot of the horizon. And those things we loved will always be a part of who we are, because of the way that we wouldn’t have become ourselves without them.
May 22, 2019
Ten Years is What
“Parent time is like fairy time but real. It is magic without pixie dust and spells. It defies physics without bending the laws of time and space. It is the truism everyone offers but no one believes until after they have children: that time will actually speed, fleet enough to leave you jet-lagged and whiplashed and racing all at once. Your tiny perfect baby nestles in your arms his first afternoon home, and then ten months later he’s off to his senior year of high school… It is so impossible yet so universally experiences that magic is the only explanation.” —Laurie Frankel, This is How It Always Is
I remember ten years ago, the weeks leading up to this weekend, a mysterious “here-be-dragons” date on the calendar. I remember sitting in the chair in my living room and the books I was reading—The Girls Who Saw Everything, by Sean Dixon, and The Children’s Book, by AS Byatt, which I binge-read all day on Monday May 25, because the book was a hardcover, big and heavy, and I was having a baby in the morning, and if I didn’t finish it before then, I knew I probably never would.
Our garden was huge and overgrown that year, and I am sure I could see the top of the forsythia from my second floor window, where I sat sitting reading these books and waiting for the day to arrive, anticipating an unknown I couldn’t properly comprehend, which was even incomprehensible in itself. One afternoon while I was sitting there, uncomfortable and enormous, a ladder appeared at the window, the housepainter I’d not been expecting, and that was day our blue house turned yellow, and now I don’t properly understand that it had ever been any other way.
The arrival of double digits is a momentous occasion in the life of a child, a kind of pseudo-legitimacy, and as a parent it is also cause for reflection. The containment of a decade is a remarkable thing, finished and solid, and all the lifetimes it has managed to hold, which was what I didn’t properly understand when Harriet was born ten years ago and my world was thoroughly rocked in a way that felt terrifying and dangerous. Because I hadn’t understood how everything would always be changing, how nothing would ever stand still again. I thought it would always be like this, those broken nights that stretched out long as my baby cried and cried, long and lonely days, and the weight of my ineptitude. The first book I read after her birth was Tom’s Midnight Garden, which seemed congruent with my own disorientation. On June 9, 2009, I wrote about the book, “The secret world wherein the clock strikes thirteen, and I feel like I’ve been there lately, up with the squalling baby who refuses to eat properly or be satiated. ‘Only the clock was left, but the clock was always there, time in, time out.'”
But those days were only ever a moment, though it didn’t feel like it at the time, and there would be moments after that were different, and I began to understand how much of being a parent is standing in the middle of a whirlwind. The person who my child would become as much of an enigma as parenthood had been in the first place, and now it’s hard to understand that that baby and the nearly ten-year-old girl who lives in my house are the actually same person. How is that even possible? Her very existence as miraculous as it has ever been, but also that she has existed in thousands of incarnations, which is weird because hasn’t it only been about ten minutes since I was sitting in that chair?
When Harriet was born, words failed me. I wrote about the greeting card verses that read so hollow, and all the cliches that didn’t work for me—the people who couldn’t imagine their lives without their children, who were “over the moon.” Although I didn’t properly understand it until after the fact, I was very unhappy and felt like I’d lost the ground beneath my feet, and was struggling to make sense of this new world that I’d arrived in—and imagining it all was permanent, that things would ever after be broken. I imagined my life without my child all the time, and missed that life—how carefree and easy it had been. I hadn’t anticipated the labour of motherhood. I’ve never had to work like that before, and it didn’t satisfy. It should have been enough, I told myself, that I had this healthy child, which I’d thought was all I wanted, but reality would prove more complicated. And complicated realities has been my salient lesson of the last ten years. There is so much I never knew before, my limits more close at hand than I’d ever imagined.
But ten years on, some things are simpler. So much isn’t, BUT the certainty with which I can say now: I can’t imagine my life without her, or her sister. I’m still mystified that they’re here at all, that we can go and make new people, and that they’re here, but also that they weren’t always. Is that even more impossible? That I had a life without them? Because I can’t fathom it, my life without the richness my children bring me. Two of the most interesting people I’ve ever met, and perhaps I’m biased because they’re mine, or else that’s just the result of knowing somebody ever since they took their first breath, and having spent year-after-year watching them grow into such remarkable human beings.
The thing about becoming a parent that is so fascinating but also excruciatingly boring for everybody else is how the most ordinary things become miraculous—pregnancy, childbirth, crawling, walking, growing, talking, reading, writing, arguing, questioning, learning, and then when they start telling you things—the moments when I feel like this is what I came for. My daughter knew all about the Winnipeg General Strike, and when I’ve got a question about insects or small mammals, she’s the one I turn to, and she’s the only person I know who read more books than I do, and her jokes are super terrible, and she’s much less proficient at magic tricks than she’d like to be, but she did a presentation in front of her whole school about climate change, and read almost all the Silver Birch Fiction picks, and she goes to Guide Camp, and she plays piano, and (most of the time) delights in the company of her sister, and she asks the best questions, and challenges me in good ways (and bad—full disclosure), and I’m just so glad she’s here, and I don’t think I will ever stop being dazzled by the fact that she’s here. Who she has been and who she is ever becoming.
June 7, 2018
but it’s your existence I love you for…
“… but it’s your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.” —Marilyn Robinson, Gilead
My children turned nine and five in the least week and a half, which is exciting, because this is the only year in which their ages accord with the title of a 1980 feminist film starring Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Fonda. And as they get older, it becomes harder (and less necessary, it seems) to encapsulate their respective beings in a blog post—but also it gets easier to to find joy and wonder in everything they do (except the annoying things, which is no small percentage of the total, but still). They are two of the most interesting people I’ve ever met, and they fill our home with light, song, and messiness, they each tend to blow my mind at least three times daily, and it is the greatest privilege of my life to get to live with them and watch them grow. And yes, I will miss them—and their crumbs—very much when they’re gone. But we’ve got a while until then…
May 29, 2017
Age 8
I remember being eight. I mean, I remember being younger too, but eight is the earliest age I feel a connection to: that was me then. I did a public speech on sexist stereotypes and started being praised for my story-making prowess when I was eight. I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was eight, and now I am a writer. It was a very big year. Ramona Quimby knew as much. (A joke on the back of one of Harriet’s magazines: What did the zero say to the eight? Nice belt!)
And now Harriet is eight. How extraordinary is that? That the tiny little bundle I held in my arms so long ago, that nut brown baby with that perfect little button face, a simply beautiful infant (and everyone said so) has burst forth into this girl, this small woman, all arms and legs and laugh and gappy teeth. Irrepressible. Where did she come from? Where is she going? Whoever would dare to stand in her way?
She reads, all the time now. I think it was as recently as Christmas that I’d have to promise her there were pictures in a novel before she’d consent to read it, but now she reads everything—although she’d pick up the graphic novels or Archie comics first. They’re her go-to. Her books are piled all over her house, beside my book piles, and the other book piles. She is at home here, although her domain is up on the top bunk, which is hers and hers alone.
She can’t decide whether to grow up to be a rock star or a scientist. She devours books on animal facts. I never dreamed that being a mother would mean suffering car journeys in which I am dispensed fact after fact about toad sex. She still really loves hedgehogs. She makes up weird song lyrics. Last week she made up a song about city life with the lyrics, “Luxury condos and deluxe mini-vans” and I became concerned that I was not imparting our values. She wrote an alternate verse about apartment buildings and public transit to placate me. She is very understanding.
She has secrets. She has stories. I used to write posts like this on her birthday in order to capture her exactly as she is before she becomes a whole new person tomorrow, but she is old enough now that she cannot be captured. She belongs to herself and I am simply observing, albeit with wonder. I made her, but she has nothing to do with me. She is her own incredible self going out into the world, and when she gets anxious I remind her: “You are smart and you are brave.” She will figure it all out. The process being the very point, of life itself.
She is funny, she is silly, she is grumpy, she is moody, she is sullen, she is kind. And she feels things, picking up on subtle points, throwaway details on the radio from five days ago. Sometimes I think we ought to turn the radio down, but no. This is the world and we’re giving it to her, and she deserves to know what she’s getting. This is the world, all of it, and it’s our job to figure out how to love it anyway.
She is tall, she is gangly, she has freckles across her nose. She wants to get her ears pierced, which seems reasonable, except I am afraid the first punch will scare her and she’ll be too terrified for the second, and then she’ll be an earring cyclops. She’s a bit of a melodramatic. She still loves us, so much, and we adore her too, and admire her, and enjoy her company. Most days. It’s mutual. She’s an incredible sister, and while Iris is a perfectly admirable person in her own right, we have Harriet to thank for a lot of her goodness. Iris has learned good things from her sister, kindness, patience, and how to love. Although Harriet is growing up enough that now Iris is the person walking around the house complaining because no one wants to play dragon witch hunter with her, which is the role in our household Harriet alone used to occupy. But Harriet is off somewhere reading.
She was always herself. She is becoming herself. I am so grateful that she’s in the world, and grateful to the world for bringing her to us, and I love her. I remember how it took me a little bit of time to learn to love her, which was ridiculous now, but man oh man was it ever worth the wait.
September 23, 2016
Buddy and Earl and the Great Big Baby
Today for #PictureBookFriday, I’m relinquishing book review duties to Harriet, who has started a blog to explore her fascination with hedgehogs and whose latest post is a review of Buddy and Earl and the Great Big Baby, by Maureen Fergus and Carey Sookocheff, which is the funniest Buddy and Earl book yet (and that is saying something). We love this series, and not just because it features an adorable hedgehogs (although that helps).
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.
May 16, 2016
How to Terrorize Your Child with Margaret Wise Brown
We were at the bookstore a few weeks ago, and I couldn’t narrow down my selection of picture books.
“Should we get,” I proposed to Harriet, “The Fox and the Star, by Coralie Bickford-Smith, or The Dead Bird, by Margaret Wise Brown.” I was emphatically waving the latter in the air.
Harriet pointed to the other one. “Why would I want to read a book about a dead bird?”
“Only because it’s a reissued book by a literary icon that dares to confront uncomfortable issues of mortality.”
“No,” she said.
I said, “Why?”
She said, “I don’t want to read books about dead things.”
She was still annoyed about a recent book I’d read her in which the Grim Reaper comes to tea and takes away the children’s grandmother, and everybody understands and feels good about the whole thing. Even though the children appear to left without a guardian. And even though the book doesn’t address the question of death coming for children, or young parents—would we put the kettle on for the reaper then? Though if someone wrote that book, I’d probably make Harriet read it too.
“So we’re getting The Dead Bird,” I told her. The illustrations are beautiful—by the award-winning illustrator of Last Stop On Market Street— and normalizing death is healthy and wasn’t there a dead bird in Sidewalk Flowers by Jon-Arno Lawson and Sydney Smith? And everybody liked that book.
And Harriet said, “No.”
“The Dead Bird,” I said.
She said, “No dead bird.” And she seemed kind of immoveable, so I didn’t want to push it.
Two weeks later, we were at the library and I saw The Dead Bird on the new releases shelf.
“Now isn’t that lucky,” I said. “A brand new copy of The Dead Bird, and nobody else has picked it up yet. It must be fate. The book was meant for us.”
“Do you think nobody has picked it up,” said Harriet, “because nobody would ever, ever want to read it?”
But I pooh-poohed her. Dropped the book into our library bag. A red-letter day—we’d brought The Dead Bird Home. What a find!
I told her, “I can’t wait to read this.”
She said, “I can.”
I told her, “Just wait. It’s about death. And dying! Come on, you’re going to like it.”
“I won’t,” she said.
I said, “You’ll see.”
Today I told her, “I’m writing a blog post about you reading The Dead Bird.”
She said, “I’m still not going to read it.”
“But how am I going to write the blog post if you don’t?
She told me, “I read it already, actually. By myself.”
“And did you like it?”
She said, “No. It’s about a dead bird. What’s to like?”
I admitted to her, “You know, the New York Times Book Review shares your assessment of it. And of the Grim Reaper book also.”
She said, “I told you.”
I said to her, “Who are you? Are you even my child? Ursula Nordstrom would be rolling in her grave if she could hear you right now.”
And she said, “Yeah. And then Margaret Wise Brown would go ahead and write a picture book about it. And then wouldn’t you like to go and try to make me read that too.”
“You’re not going to let me read you The Dead Bird then.”
And Harriet said, “No.”
March 13, 2016
We did it.
“WE DID IT. WE FUCKING MADE IT. AND LOOK AT HOW AMAZING THESE GIRLS ARE? LOOK AT HOW MIRACULOUS AND INTERESTING AND SMART AND FUNNY AND WILD AND BRILLIANT THESE BABES BE!? AND SOME DAYS ARE REALLY FUCKING HARD. AND SOME DAYS ARE REALLY FUCKING BEAUTIFUL. AND ALL OF THE DAYS… EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM ARE WORTH IT. THEY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN WORTH IT.” —Rebecca Woolf, Girl’s Gone Child
I never had twins (thank goodness; one baby at a time absolutely pushed me to my limits) but the post from which I quote above really resonated with me. Iris turns two-and-three-quarters next month, which means her third birthday’s on the horizon, and we’ve recently given up diapers, some days we don’t need a nap, she (usually) behaves perfectly well in a restaurant, and today we all went out for afternoon tea. For no occasion, and yet it seems like all the occasions—my novel is finished and gone into copyedits; Stuart (hopefully!) becomes Canadian next week; it’s March Break; how doesn’t like celebrating return from a tropical locale with a lavish lunch. And because Iris is finally old enough to partake. We’re about to leave the baby years behind us, and I can’t think of a better reason to celebrate than that, the future unfolding as it should.
We never could have dreamed up Iris—she’s a full fledged mould breaker, hilarious, mischievous, irascible, loving, kind, silly and always paying attention. If you ask her anything, she’ll answer you: “Pooks.” We don’t know what pooks is, the definition ever-shifting, whatever is convenient to hang it on. She loves her sister, reading Go Dog Go and talking about nipples. She likes exclaiming, “Goodness gracious,” when she’s not saying, “Pooks.” She knows more about immigration than most two-year-olds: “Daddy’s going to be a Canadian,” she says. “I’m a Canadian already.” She is a favourite pet of Harriet’s classmates and happily ensconced in a class of her own at playschool, where she plays in drama, paints pictures, learns songs and stories. Her favourite thing is singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. She still likes to climb up onto the table and jump up and down. If she’s hungry, she can be trusted to go fetch a snack, no matter how (seemingly) unattainable that snack might be. She likes reading picture books and gets annoyed when we read books without pictures, goes and throws toys on the floor to get our attention. When she does something wrong, most of the time she is willing to say sorry, but always follows up her apology by asking, “And you say, ‘It okay, Iris,’ okay?”
Harriet will very soon be six-and-three-quarters, which was the age I was at when I discovered there was such a thing as fractions. She will forever to us seem old and wise, just as Iris is forever little, and part of the pleasure I take in the prospect of Iris’s third year was all the fun we had the summer that Harriet was that age, when all at once the days were longer and the world was bigger and we could do almost anything. But she was so little then, I realize now, particularly compared to where she is today. She is bright and articulate and forthright and ambitious, and imagines that she can make anything at all. When she grows up, she wants to be a scientist or a rock star, although she’s leaning toward the former. She loves Taylor Swift, and dancing, and identifies as a feminist. Yesterday we were at Value Village sorting through t-shirts, and I held up one that said, “Girls Rock.” “Okay,” she said. “I mean, it’s what I believe.” She is strong and brave and loves heroic tales of awesome girls. Though she also loves Archie Comics and Betty and Veronica, so she contains multitudes. She’s nuts about the Amulet series, the Narnia books (when girls are in the story), is still more partial to graphic novels than novels proper, and is determined to invent a series of feminist superheroes who do not necessarily fight for justice in their underpants.
We went shopping yesterday, because what better way to mark the explosion of crocuses across the street than buying shoes for our children’s ever growing feet. It was our biannual expedition to the world of commerce, with purchases of nightgowns too and suburban dinner at chain restaurant (with Jello for dessert!), always a big occasion—we get to drive in a car and everything. Plus a stop at Value Village for amazing clothes for growing girls, which was really an excuse to go on a mug-hunt, but the pickings were slim in the kitchenware dept. Alas. We got what we went for though, and I will never cease to be grateful that we can afford shoes for our children—rain-boots, sneakers and sandals too, which is a small bundle. I can’t imagine how hard it would be to have to struggle for that, but nor can I imagine how we got here after all—to be grown people who buy small children tiny new shoes year after year, though they become less tiny with every season.
