November 10, 2011
"I wrote two books watching her clothes blow on those lines."
Before I had a baby, somebody told me how she wished she’d played with her children more. That she’d spent their childhoods rushing from one thing to another, and never took the time get down on the floor and engage with what they do on their own level. So I decided that her experience would be a lesson for me, just like I’d decided that any sleepless nights with my new baby be an opportunity for me to revel in her nearness. And then my baby was born, an occasion I came to define as “the day I discovered all my limits within arms’ length”. The sleepless nights were an opportunity for me to imagine murdering my husband, more than anything else. And it would turn out that when it came to play, I wouldn’t do much better.
Now just being with my daughter, I can do. Ours is not a particularly harried pace. We spent a lot of timing talking over pancakes, and lying sprawled on the floor staring at the ceiling. I like our conversations, I love brushing her hair, I think that holding her hand as we walk down the street is perhaps the great privilege of my existence. I really do like to be with my daughter, but I find playing insufferably dull most of the time. It’s boring, and after about five rounds of “playing farm”, “making a cake” (which involves piles of crayons), or “playing doctor” (whose stethoscope is actually a USB cable), I tend to drop out. I find her play absolutely fascinating to watch, but not to engage with it. Which is a huge reason why I appreciate picture books and stories, actually, and why we read so many of them– it’s the one activity of which neither of us ever tires.
In a recent interview promoting her new book Blue Nights, Joan Didion notes that as a mother of a young child, she had been “totally wrapped up in keeping some time free for myself.” And I read that and thought, yes, that is precisely what motherhood is. Because once the baby’s arrived, she’s there, and there’s no fighting it– there’s no need to be wrapped up in that. How much I am enjoying the experience of motherhood has always been directly proportionate to the time I have to spend away from it. And to be totally wrapped in keeping this time free is not the same as being a bad or neglectful mother. To be so wrapped up is to be going against the flow, of course, swimming upstream, yes, but you’re still in the water. You’re always and forever in the water, which is precisely the point.
(I always think of the son in JM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, whining at the bare silence of his mother’s office door. And I’ve always thought that the son was a bit of an asshole, since I read the book, which was long before I had a child of my own. I’ve always thought that learning from an early age that one is not the centre of any universe, let alone his mother’s, is probably a healthy thing for anybody.) 
Love pours out from the pages of Blue Nights, for the difficult Quintana Roo from her even more difficult mother. Life is like this. Motherhood is also like this, as Didion examines old photographs of her daughter growing up in Malibu: “The clothes of course are familiar./ I had for a while seen them every day, washed them, hung them to blow in the wind on the clotheslines outside my office window./ I wrote two books watching her clothes blow on those lines./ Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working.”
We had a wonderful morning at our house today, a backyard buried in leaves presenting the greatest opportunity. To be outside together working on a project we would both equally enjoy, the best mix of practical and whimsical, and neither of us would be bored. We filled two big bags with leaves, and there will be much more of this in the days to come, as the tree appears as fully dressed as ever. And then we walked to the grocery store to pick up some milk, which is rare because we usually stroller-it everywhere. I am usually in too much of a hurry, but not this morning, this lovely, leafy, golden morning. And just when the walk home appeared to be taking forever and the end of my patience was in sight, Harriet demanded to be scooped up and carried, which was fine with me, however awkward in coordination with 4 litres of milk, but these are the things we manage. We got home, and made a batch of Carrie Snyder’s granola bars, which are delicious. The whole arrangement sort of glorious, because it felt like we were two people rather than parent and child, relating on a somewhat-even keel, in spite of the disparity in our heights.
But see, she’s sleeping now, and I’ve got a cup of tea, and the time and space to write it all down, and therein lies the key to my happiness.
October 31, 2011
Tricks and Treats
Harriet was Tilly Witch for Halloween this year, which was a grand success, except for the blip around 4:30 when she decided that she going to wear her Easter Bunny ears instead of the witch hat, and I had to go upstairs and have a moment to myself in order to avoid murdering her. By the time I’d calmed down, the bunny ears were abandoned, and the rest of the evening was splendid, resulting in a bucketful of treats.
Over at Canadian Bookshelf, I’ve written “I am Not At Peace: Ghosts and Haunting in Canadian Fiction”, exploring the spookier side of CanLit. And if you’re not subscribing to the blog, you should. There’s great new stuff up three days a week.
October 3, 2011
Caspian really loves his books
First, I have noticed the way that all parents says things like, “Caspian really loves his books. He just can’t get enough off them. He turns the pages, and loves the pictures, and chews on the spine, and laughs at the funny bits.” I’ve heard this kind of bragging so often that I think book-loving must be a thing that most little kids just do, like crawling and growing teeth. My daughter really loves her books too, and it’s one of the most delightful things about her, but maybe this is just one of the things we can take for granted when we’re fortunate enough to be literate, and have a love of books to share.
Second, I can’t believe I once wrote here in awe of such things as, Harriet can actually wave (without prompting, even!), and I’m sure that if we go back far enough, I wrote about how thrilling it was when she could finally hold her head up. Blah blah blah. And so I hope that myself a few years down the line will forgive me for posting the following (and that all of you with older children who know how boring and ubiquitous such things actually are will humour me for a moment): yesterday, Harriet read me a book. Yesterday, Harriet flipped through the pages of Olivia and the Missing Toy and more or less told me the story, beginning with, “One day, Olivia was riding a camel through Egypt…” In her funny little goblin voice, and Olivia is called Owivia. Some of the text is hard to decipher, but I like that she never forgets the pages on which Olivia’s mother calls her, “Sweetie Pie”. Being read a story by Harriet was really one of the greatest experiences of my life.
Harriet reading in bed. Yes, she still has a soother and sleeps in a crib. Do you want to make something of it?*
We do live a bookish life, reading our favourites over and over. We get about 15 books from the library every week, which mixes things up a bit. For some reason, we keep getting books about wolves though, over and over. Harriet keeps telling us things like, “The big bad wolf is in my room,” and then informs us that, “he’s teeny tiny.” Today she cried because we didn’t get a Katie Morag book from the library, and so we had to go back. (Actually, today was kind of annoying, but that’s another story…) Lately, she loves Little Bear, Charlie and Lola, Elephant and Piggie, Alfie and Annie Rose, Stella and Sam, Arthur and Franklin. Also Curious George, whose books are so long that reading them over and over gets to be a little tiresome. Don’t tell anyone I said so.
It’s Children’s Book Week this week at Canadian Bookshelf. First post went up today about the TD Grade One Giveaway, which is quite a cool program. Check the blog for new posts all week, including great ones by Sheree Fitch and Kristen den Hartog.
*”Do you want to make something of it?” is actually a quote from Judy Blume’s Superfudge, as delivered by Fudge’s best friend Daniel Menheim. As in, “I’m Daniel Manheim. I’m six. I live at 432 Vine Street. You want to make something of it?” Superfudge may be the only cultural reference point I allude to as often as Wayne’s World.
September 29, 2011
Time for some Harriet
The day Harriet learned about Katrina and the Waves, and also Miss Mabel Murple visits Dutch Dreams.
August 30, 2011
Here be (no) dragons
One day, after ages of it being beloved, Harriet suddenly refused to let me read Sheree Fitch’s Sleeping Dragons All Around. At that point, she was unable to articulate why, but it was still significant as the first time a book had been outright rejected (as opposed to, say, abandoned out of boredom, which is different).
She also wouldn’t let us read her The Lady With the Alligator Purse— we’re still not sure why. But by the time she’d gone off two books as various as Neil Gaiman’s Instructions and Robert Munsch’s The Paper Bag Princess, I’d started detecting a theme. And by this time, Harriet had the words to explain: “Too scary,” she told us. Apparently it’s a fire-breathing dragon thing.
But how did she discover that dragons were scary? I’d certainly gone out of my way never to mention such a thing. In fact, I’d never mentioned that there was such a thing as “scary” at all, because little people are so open to suggestion, and I’ve been working hard on cultivating fearlessness. I don’t really do “scary” anyway, except when it comes to sensible things like diving off cliffs and tightrope walking. The closest thing I’ve got to an irrational fear is an extreme unease around dogs (which is not so irrational, I’d argue, because they’re equipped with teeth that could chew your face off), but I promise you that around a dog, Harriet has never, ever seen me flinch.
So this dragons thing has brought me to the limits of my powers, my powers of “cultivation”, and I get it that this is only the beginning of a very long education. And I get it too that it doesn’t take a genius to deduce that oversized fire-breathing lizards are probably best left undistubed between covers. (Interestingly, Harriet’s dragon aversion doesn’t extend to dinosaurs. She loves dinosaurs–plush, fossilized, wooden, Edwina, you name it.)
The thing is actually, that I fucking hate books with dragons (some excellent picture books aside). It’s true. I always have– when I was growing up, I never read a single book with a dragon on the cover. Which wasn’t really difficult to accomplish, because there weren’t many books with dragons on the cover. (My YA self would have been horrified by the popularity of science-fiction/fantasy today. And my adult self remains mystified.) A dragon on the cover was a kind of book design shorthand for “boring book for nerds”, and though I was certainly a nerd, I was the type of nerd who preferred books about pretty girls dying of anorexia or getting cancer.
Fantasy books: here’s another place where I’ve come to the limits of my own powers. I just can’t get into them, though I’ve tried. And I think back and wonder if I’d been less dragon-phobic in my youth, maybe fantasy-appreciation would come easier to me. There are a lot of things I wish I’d spent most of my life being a lot more open minded about, hence the reason why I want to make Harriet’s literary horizons broad from the very start. I want her to read better than I did, but then she persists in having her own feelings about things. She persists in refusing to be malleable, in having fears and preferences and in being a person apart from me.
But also a person who is very much like me, which I’m not sure is more or less disconcerting.
August 17, 2011
I love books too
This evening was very upsetting for Harriet, because her balloon monkey with which she was besotted suddenly popped. We explained that this was part of the balloon’s natural life cycle, then consoled her with a gingerbread man whose arm fell off, and then I ate the arm, and then Harriet went insane, screaming, “I need new arm right now!” We explained that the gingerbread man was a cookie, and that she could eat the rest of him. She was having none of it, and finally her father constructed a prosthetic limb out of a chocolate chip cookie piece. The man’s a genius. Then Harriet forgot about the gingerbread man altogether, went to bed, and now the gingerbread is no more. He was delicious, but his kind will never darken our door again.
This evening Harriet also sat at the table like a superstar, however, and ate her pesto pasta with gusto. “I don’t like beets,” she told us though, and then I banished all talk of “I don’t like—” from our dinner table henceforth, because there is no conversation more boring. The beets were delicious. For afters, we had Barbara Pym with fresh strawberries from the market.
Harriet has become very good at issuing orders. “Stop talking, Mommy!” is a frequent shout, and she clearly doesn’t know me very well, because I’ve never responded well to that kind of guidance. “Stop dancing, Mommy!” was a bit devastating to hear one day last week when I was rocking out to The Kooks, and I fast forwarded to her teenage years and when she finds me totally mortifying. “Clean my diaper!” is another, and my thinking is that if you’re old enough to make a demand like that, you’re probably old enough to use the potty. But alas…
Harriet is currently in love with Curious George, and his curious pipe-smoking ways. If you ask her what her favourite book is, she’ll tell you Knuffle Bunny. We love Mo Willems’ new book Hooray for Amanda and her Alligator. She loves Corduroy too, and Alfie and Annie Rose, and anything else by Shirley Hughes (whose other characters we refer to as “Alfie’s Friends”). She has lately refused to read Sleeping Dragons All Around: “too scary,” she says. She can’t get enough of Murmel Murmel Murmel. And Mabel Murple rains supreme.
If I say, “I love books,” Harriet says, “I love books too.” Which was really exciting for a little while, until I learned (with “spinach”, “tomatoes” and “yak poo”) that Harriet will use that sentence construction to claim a love of anything. But she really does seem to love books, and outside (pronounced “asshat”), and painting, and popsicles, and sandals, and sandcastles, all her friends, dogs and cats, going on the subway, and eating ice cream. She has a hilarious English accent. Her favourite ice cream flavour is cherry, which is weird and we don’t know how she ever discovered that there was such a thing. She has an imaginary friend called Mimi who loves at the museum, and apparently her hair is blue. When we were there last week, Harriet seemed genuinely distraught not to find her there, but we’ll look again. There are dinosaurs in the meantime, and garbage trucks, and fire trucks, and the whole world is amazing.
July 15, 2011
On books, sharing, communal toys, and the playground
I am really not very good at sharing. Giving, I’m all over that, but sharing makes me wary– too often, the things I’ve shared have come back to me quite battered, and usually these things are books. Which is why now if you ask if I will lend you a book, I will tell you no. I will feel terrible about this, embarrassed at being socially awkward and ungenerous, but not so embarrassed that I could be persuaded to change my mind. I like to have my things where they belong.
Which is why I sort of understand when my daughter doesn’t do so well at sharing either. There were two watering cans in the pool yesterday, and she insisted on playing with the red tin one that Margaret was using. And I could understand why because the green plastic can is obviously inferior. The green plastic can is the one she will “share”, and the red tin can will stay with its rightful owner. (Thankfully, dear Margaret [who has been Harriet’s best friend since she was two days old] was civilized enough to go along with this plan). I’d like it if Harriet were a more easy-going person, but I can usually understand the reasons why she isn’t. She’s fierce and feral, but she makes a lot of sense to me. Sometimes “sharing” seems a lot like having Goldilocks come to visit, and while I want Harriet to learn to be a good host and a good friend, where’s the fun in that?
Stuart and I got called out by one of the terrifying mothers at the playground on Sunday. We’d brought a bucket for Harriet to play with in the pool because Harriet insists on having a bucket at all times, and one of the communal buckets might not have been available. (Moreover, the communal toys at the playground are crap because nobody bothers to take care of them, but that’s another story…) Some kid came up and took the bucket from beside where we were sitting. “It’s Harriet’s bucket,” we told the kid, who gave it back, no problem.
But his mother behind us said to our friend, “The boys never understand when they go someplace and everybody has their own toys. They just go up and take them, and the other kids get upset, but parks are supposed to be communal. I mean, that’s the whole point.” (Man, would I ever make a really bad socialist. For someone who doesn’t own any property, I’ve sure got a lot of views about private ones.) So we considered ourselves chastised, and I was feeling badly about this, wondering if we were approaching the whole thing wrong. And then the annoying women’s two children (who were named Cashton and Thorston) started assaulting their friend with shovels, and the annoying woman yelled at the boy, “Walk away, Siegfried! Walk away!” while poor Siegfried got battered. So think that she might not have all the secrets to raising children after all.
It’s a tough call, and I’m still not sure how I feel. I know that I don’t like sharing my books though, which is something. We share snacks, we even share ice cream cones, we’d share a skipping rope if Harriet were capable of jumping. We take turns on the swings, we don’t rip toys out of kids’ hands, if there is a communal toy we want to play with in the playground, Harriet waits her turn. If we were at Margaret’s house and Harriet wanted Margaret’s prized watering can (as you do), I’d have to tell Harriet, “Tough luck.” To me, this is sharing.
We brought our bucket to the playground again on Monday, and a little girl picked it up, hurled it to the ground, and the handle broke off. Is this sharing? Because if it is, sharing sucks. But I don’t want to be a person who thinks that sharing sucks. And I actually appreciate all the communal toys at the park, but everything doesn’t belong to everyone, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing…
So no conclusions. But this is the kind of philosophical issue that I’m grappling with these days. I’m still not lending you my book though.
July 14, 2011
Barbara Pym for afters
We’ve invented a new dessert! Or rather, we’ve re-christened a very familiar one. This all came about because Harriet had taken to walking around the house screaming, “Barbara Pym!” Which is a bit weird, because Harriet and I don’t talk about Barbara Pym a lot, but I must talk about her to other people enough that the name is known (and I shouldn’t be surprised– Harriet has had her photo in the Barbara Pym Society newsletter after all).
One night a few weeks back, when Barbara Pym mania was at its height, Harriet was coerced into her chair at the table with the promise that we were going to be eating Barbara Pym for dessert. Dessert turned out to be berries with ice cream, which has since become the Barbara Pym that we eat almost daily. Splendid local raspberries tonight with maple ice cream made this particular dish of Barbara Pym delightful.
Here is a photo of the world’s dirtiest child devouring hers, having just completed her first course, which was mostly ketchup.
July 3, 2011
Best morning ever
Our friends Jennie and Deep have a new house within the vicinity of Trinity Bellwoods Park, so that was where we met them this morning for a splendid picnic brunch. It was a brilliant walk in the sunshine, from our house all the way down to Clafouti for the best croissants in Toronto. We had teas and coffees, and sat on a blanket under a tree, and marvelled at the goodness of life in general, in particular on a day like today. And then Harriet went to the playground and the wading pool, while Jennie and I dashed across the street for a browse in Type Books. I bought Should I Share My Ice Cream? by Mo Willems and It Must Be Tall As A Lighthouse by Tabatha Southey. Jennie bought the Jack Dylan Trinity Bellwoods poster (at right). Then back to the park where we splashed around with Harriet in the pool. She was eventually bribed out of the pool with the promise of ice cream, which dripped until she was covered in it, and by then we were home. And then Harriet slept for three hours, which made this probably the very best day on record. Not a bad way to cap off a weekend of patio sitting, bbqs, and reading a big fat summer book. More about that book later…
