December 19, 2012

The Fairy Door

For me, the blogosphere has always been about inspiration, new discoveries, things to learn, and people to learn from. And while very often I’m unable to measure my own life up to those seemingly perfect ones I find online (I can’t decorate a cake for shit, my knitting is always wonky, and if I had a lifestyle blog, it would be called “Cluttered and Dusty”), I usually come away better f0r these encounters. My life is so much richer for what other bloggers have shown me to strive for over the last decade.

Sometimes these bloggers make it all seem so hard though, out of reach, or perhaps they are just underlining the very things my own world is lacking (like an expensive camera, patience and artistic ability). I’m here to show you, however, that none of these things are really necessary to create a little magic in your lives, and the Fairy Door is case in point. Now, Fairy Doors are amazing. I think I heard about them while I was pregnant with Harriet, and I loved the idea of a tiny portal, a door to nowhere and anywhere, of a secret world beyond our own. I wanted that kind of everyday magic in our household, an otherworldly realm to believe in. So at some point in Harriet’s first year, I “built” one.

According to Pinterest and other fine sources, a Fairy Door is a beautiful thing. Apparently you can buy accessories for it. It’s one of those projects I would never ever have accomplished, or even tried, except that I made mine without a template. In fact, I made my Fairy Door without anything except a Sharpie marker, and it’s not beautiful, and my stairs are really dusty, but I promise you that neither of things mean that my daughter believes in the fairies any less.

Somewhere along the line, our Fairy Door became the home of the Hoopty’s, Mr. and Mrs. Hoopty and their daughter Harriet Hoopty who have been identified our own family’s reflections in the kitchen windows while we eat our dinner. (They must shrink down when they go home.) They have a younger child, a son called Hando, and they’ve also taken in Cousin Dupa since his parents disappeared and his babysitter died. Apparently, they’ve also just had a new baby, christened Butterfly, and it must have been a high-risk pregnancy because Mrs. Hoopty was in the hospital for 7 weeks. She’s been reported to be fine though.

Anyway, it doesn’t have to be as difficult as it appears, parenthood. Which is not to say that it’s easy, but there really are so many wonderful things for which almost nothing is all that’s required.

October 16, 2012

(Some) Mothers are Writers

On Harriet’s long-form birth certificate, it is written that her mother is a writer. And while I don’t remember much of those blurry days after she was born, when our world was exploded pieces held together with love and hanging on just barely, I remember filling out that form, hunched over my laptop on our coffee table. When we’d got to Mother’s Occupation, we’d paused for a moment. I was three weeks into maternity leave from a job I wouldn’t go back to, from the least meaningful job title in the universe, which was “research administrator.” We couldn’t write that, and besides, I was no longer one. “Why not say, ‘writer’?” my husband suggested, and so we did.

It is often noted as monumental, that moment when a writer learns to call herself as such, when she gathers the confidence, courage and faith necessary to embark upon a creative path. Which I don’t have a whole lot of truck with. I think we sentimentalize these things too much, that we spend too much time with our heads up our asses, and that a woman staring into the mirror practicing calling herself a writer is like Annie Dillard’s writer who “himself only likes the role, the thought of himself in a hat.” I would argue that more important that learning to call oneself a writer is to write and (even better) to write well and to get the work out there so that everyone will know you’re a writer, and what you think doesn’t really matter.*

So this isn’t about how I lied on official documentation and was professionally transformed, never to administrate research ever again. This isn’t about how I learned to call myself a writer, but instead about how everybody’s wrong about motherhood (and by “everybody”, I mean mainly The Atlantic and Newsweek).

Something funny started happening as soon as I got pregnant in 2008. Professionally speaking, research administration aside, it hadn’t been a great time for me. I was a year out of a graduate creative writing program that had failed to take me places, my classmates were publishing books and I was getting rejection after rejection from lit mags. That post-school thing is always brutal, and from creative writing programs in particular. I remember Anne Patchett writing in her memoir of her friendship with Lucy Grealy how they finished the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and had to “write to save their lives” (I paraphrase). It wasn’t working for me. And so when I got pregnant, it seemed like the writing thing was going to be put aside for awhile. At least I would have another focus.

Life, it seemed, would have other plans. Coinciding with my first trimester were some interesting writing opportunities, an invitation to speak on a panel about literary blogging with the Governor General, increased attention to my blog, and some wonderful new writerly connections. By the time Harriet was born, I’d started writing book reviews, had a couple of stories published, and cheques were arriving pretty regularly, even if they were pitifully small. So when I wrote, “Writer” on her birth certificate, I wasn’t entirely delusional. But it wasn’t entirely true yet either.

I suppose it’s still not wholly true, if we’re speaking in terms of finances, because if I didn’t have a husband who worked full time, we’d be in trouble around here. But I’ll tell you this much, because I’m proud of it, and not because it’s the most important thing, because it isn’t: every month, I make our rent. It’s something. Since I became a mother 3.5 years ago, I’ve managed to put together a hard-scrabbled, deeply fulfilling professional life involving writing, editing, teaching and reviewing. And while motherhood has not been integral to this, as though it unleashed some deep creative fount within me, neither has it been an impediment. In fact, it’s helped hugely with the process in practical terms. It gave me a reason to leave my boring 9-5 job. It’s been the inspiration for some of the best stuff I’ve ever written. I’ve made mother-friends who are inspiring writer-friends in their own right. And motherhood has given me the ability to focus, to sit down and get the words out. Harriet has been in playschool since September and I’ve had mornings for working, and I promise you that I’ve not wasted away a single one.

Now obviously, motherhood is not necessary for career success, for many it really does stand in the way, and plenty of writers have really done quite well without kids. Plenty of mothers are also happy enough to be focusing on motherhood alone. Many jobs don’t mix with motherhood quite so tidily. Quite obviously too, our rent is fairly cheap and I could stand to be way more successful. And furthermore, fortune has been good to me. I am enormously privileged. But–

I am thinking about all this now in connection with Jessa Crispin’s column “The Pram in the Hall“, about how fraught is the question of whether or not to have children for creative professionals in particular. She writes, “The reason why it’s so difficult to think through your decision is because people keep pretending like there is one way this motherhood thing could go, when in reality there are millions.” Which she sees as terrifying as it is rife with potential, but from where I stand now it’s mostly the latter. Like everything with parenthood, when people complain about kids being expensive, demands on parents’ time, how you have to give your kids your all, how you just have to have an exer-saucer just you wait, I throw up my arms and shriek, “It doesn’t have to be this way!” There is not only one way this motherhood thing can go. Because life happens. Also, free will doesn’t get taken out along with the placenta.

For mothers, as with women, and as with people (and I’ve made the connection between mothers and people before), there are reassuringly myriad ways to be. We have to broaden and complicate our understanding of what motherhood is and who mothers are if we ever want the conversation about motherhood to be one from which we actually learn something.

*Obviously, I was a child in the 1980s when our education system was robust, my teachers told me I could anything, and my parents underlined this point over and over. So I can afford to be so flippant.

July 22, 2012

Why You Can Never Have Too Many Mother Gooses

When Harriet was very small, I read a prescription by Mem Fox, the mother of children’s literacy, that we were to give our children ” at least three stories and five nursery rhymes a day, if not more, and not only at bedtime, either.” And while we were doing just fine in the story department, I realized I really had to pick up the pace in terms of nursery rhymes. As much as nursery rhymes were nonsense, they were also so important to developing literacy skills, in their rhythm and rhyme, and I loved how they connected us back to stories that have been told to children for centuries.

It was around this same time that Mother Goose collections began entering our lives, right when we needed them most. When Harriet was born, my friend Kate had sent us Scott Gustafson’s gorgeously illustrated Favourite Nursery Rhymes from Mother Goose. Not long after, our next door neighbours gave us their old copy of Iona Opie and Rosemary Wells’ My Very First Mother Goose (with characters, we’d realize later, who were Max and Ruby’s forebunnies).

And so we were chugging along with a Mother Goose in the bedroom and a Mother Goose in the living room, which we thought was probably enough Mother Gooses for one small apartment (with Barbara Reid’s board book Sing a Song of Mother Goose tucked in my purse for days out), until our friends Curtis and Laura gave us Richard Scarry’s Best Mother Goose Ever. Excessive, I know, but we kept this copy in the bedroom too, and we loved Scarry’s cats and rabbits, and his collection’s deliciously violent edge.

We picked up a copy of Nursery Rhyme Comics last year, because it was the coolest book we’d ever laid eyes on, and here were all of our favourite rhymes made anew by some of the best comic artists working today. The old woman who lives in the shoe heads a rock band, for example, and it’s the Grand Old Duke of York as imagined by Kate Beaton. We love this book, which isn’t as well thumbed through as all the others because it lives up on the shelf for special (which is often).

And so you might suppose that receiving a second-hand copy of The Arnold Lobel Book of Mother Goose last month would have tipped us into too much Mother Goose, finally, but I don’t think so. We’ve chosen to keep this one in the living room, in case you’re wondering, right next to Iona Opie, and I’ve realized that in our excessive Mother Gooses, my entire parenting philosophy is inherent, the things I want to impart to my daughter most.

First, in that one can never have too many books. Second, that there are many, many versions of the same old story, different words entirely to tell it. Sometimes it’s hickory dickory, and sometimes it’s dickory dickory, is what I mean, and you are even free to make it your own. Third, that we are indeed connected to people who lived hundreds of years ago and told these same stories that we do, and some of them might have even made sense then. That we belong to something larger then ourselves. And then finally, as each of these collections is marvellously illustrated, that the same picture never looks the same to anyone. How different, valid and vivid is each of our separate points of view. That all of our favourite stories and characters are imagined over and over again, and we have to be open minded enough both to respect that, and also to recognize them when they appear.

May 15, 2012

On the baby blues, that space in between

The unhappiness I felt during my early days as a mother has been diagnosed as post-partum depression by such authorities as complete strangers and the back of book in which my essay “Love is a Let-Down” was published. And I’ve fought this label from the get-go, resenting the neatness with which it packages my experience. I think calling every difficult time in one’s life “depression” undermines the experiences of those who actually do endure this disease, and I maintain that my unhappiness was born from one salient point– life with a newborn was hard and crappy, and I am not very good at adjusting to change.

So I was thrilled to hear an interview on post-partum depression this morning on the radio, for a variety of reasons, actually, because the conversation was very interesting, but in particular because the doctor spoke about “the baby blues”. Of course, we’re all familiar with the term, but I was pleased to hear it delineated. She describes the baby blues as feeling “down and teary”, and the difference between it and PPD is that the former goes away in a matter of weeks (and it did!), and that it is so common that it’s not even classified as a disorder. It’s a period of adjustment, she says, which is what I’ve been saying all along. It was the whole point of my essay, which some readers missed and others resented. My friend Heidi says something similar to this in her blog post “Sometimes It’s Just that Becoming a Mother is Hard”.

I am a huge fan of in-between spaces in general, but I like this one in particular– this space between the blissed out new mom (who does exist! I’ve ever met a few of her) and the mom with PPD. The thing is that all of us are normal, that all of us need support from friends, family and our communities to make it through the early days. And it’s by acknowledging the various degrees of experience that every new mom will be able to find the support that she needs.

May 14, 2012

"I’m not sure if it’s sad or amazing that this is my life now."

“I’m not sure if it’s sad or amazing that this is my life now,” is something I wrote here nearly three years ago, not long after my life had changed forever and I still wasn’t sure if I liked it. “Now, must wake baby, feed baby, change baby. For we’re off to a program at the library that promises songs, and stories and “tickle rhymes” for all.”

And we all know how that worked out, of course: that first day, Harriet fell asleep in my arms, and we kept going back and back to learn new songs, hear new stories, so I could learn new ways to engage with my baby, to memorize the tickle rhymes that made her smile so I could pass them onto her Daddy when he came home at the end of day. The library became our community centre, its staff became some of our favourite people (and there was a time when Harriet referred to four people by name: Mommy, Daddy, Elmo, and Cindy [from Spadina Road] so that means something).

We had good company, made some excellent friends– though truth be told, not so many. I used to spend a lot of time sitting in circles of Mommies I could never love, wondering what had happened to my life, and also why everybody was thinner than me. I also dealt with a reputation as “the mom who knows all the songs”, which was a little embarrassing. But then as Harriet got bigger, we grew more secure in our new world (and found enough friends gathered from here and there that we always felt bolstered), the crowd seemed to matter less and less and the library program became about us, something fun for us to do together. We also weathered the stage where she wouldn’t sit still and I spent Baby Time chasing her around the library.

We graduated to the toddler program at the Lillian H. Smith Library, which came with a door that closed so Harriet couldn’t escape. And like that touchstone first day of Baby Time, when Harriet fell asleep in my arms, we had our toddler touchstone too when at the end of The Beanbag Song, 18 mos. old Harriet could not stand relinquishing her beanbag and howled inconsolably. The next week, however, she’d got with the routine, and returned her beanbag with all the other kids, and I had this sense that here was my girl learning the ropes, figuring it out, watching the world around her and deciding how she’d fit into it.

And so I got a bit teary this morning as I watched Harriet put her beanbag away for the final time, so at home in this environment and without a doubt that she’s entitled to the richness our community offers us. I remembered that 2 mos old baby in my arms that very first day as we sat in a circle singing Sea-Shell, Sea-Shell, Sing a Song to Me, and that screaming toddler clinging to her beanbag for dear life, and now this fabulous child who will be three in two weeks, who knows the ropes in some ways but is still figuring out in others– she likes to watch up to strangers and say, “I’m Harriet.” Sometimes she will hug them. Sometimes they are more or less comfortable with that, and my heart seizes. I already feel like the mother in Kristen den Hartog’s And Me Among Them who’s silently imploring her daughter’s schoolmates as she follows them all on their way to school, “Walk with her, please walk with her. Walk the rest of the way with my girl.” My girl. Yes.

But then my girl is also fierce, hilarious, loving, enthusiastic, fun, and kind, and her hugs are still age-appropriate enough that they’re met with the same. And now she knows all the songs too, singing along out of tune and half-screaming. Today when Joanne read us Jamberry, Harriet amazed us all by reciting the book along with her. Last week, she didn’t even sit with me, but up at the front with the other kids where she took her cues from the rowdiest ones and had a brilliant time. And once again, I wasn’t sure if it was sad or amazing that this was my life now. Sitting back, watching Harriet begin making her way in the world– it’s incredible to see her independent of me, but I miss the squishy goodness of her body in my lap, in my arms. Watching her put the beanbag away one last time, like a veteran toddler. When the program begins again in September, Harriet will be too old and enrolled in nursery school.

And so it’s away with one stage and onto another, sad and exciting, tragic and wonderful, and I’m getting the idea that being a mother means that we do this over and over again.

April 18, 2012

Don't pick the flowers

“Don’t pick the flowers” is a cardinal rule at our house (along with “Don’t chase the pigeons”). It is so important to me that Harriet learn to engage with and appreciate nature without torturing or destroying it. Not every experience needs to be hands-on. And so what she’s come to understand about the flowers we encounter in our neighbourhood (and gloriously, there are so so many) is that they’re still growing. When she touches them, she has to be gentle. “They’re still growing?” she asks me, looking back over her shoulder, and when I nod, she seems to get it. But we’ve made an exception for the dandelions. Not because they’re lesser flowers, but because they’re a flower of abundance. She seems to get this too. And so we gathered a bouquet on Monday morning on our way home from the library, and it’s been decades since I did this. It’s been decades since I sat at a  table with a dandelion centrepiece. I’d forgotten there had even been such centrepieces, but there were so many, and as we picked our flowers, it all came back to me. The “this was why I had a child” moment I didn’t even know that I was waiting for. And the lesson too about exceptions– as important as the lesson about still growing. How important it is for our children to grasp that we live in a bendy and beautiful world.

February 27, 2012

Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman

As I was almost unequivocally the craziest, most anxious pregnant woman who ever lived, I had been particularly nervous what would happen to me when my child was out in the world, the whole “heart on the outside of one’s body” cliche. I’d expected to become neurotic, hovering, unable to sleep at night lest my child succumbed to SIDS, but then I met Harriet, was bowled over by the sheer force of her vitality, her fierceness, and I never really worried again. It was clear to me from the start that she was an actual person separate from me, so absolutely possessed of a distinctive self I’d have very little control over shaping, and it’s been with such fascination that I’ve watched that self developing into the someone she was destined to be from the first ear-piercing scream she ever uttered.

Which is to say that I’m laid-back as parents of 3 year-olds go, which is surprising because I’m laid-back about absolutely nothing else. Though I’m laid-back within certain parameters (which I’ve been lucky enough to have success with): I’ve been maniacal from the get-go about cultivating good eating habits in my child and nurturing an appreciation for healthy food and good flavours. Harriet is usually a pro at eating in nice-ish restaurants. It’s also important to me that Harriet learns to entertain herself and enjoy her own company, which is essential for my sanity as a mother who works from home (and makes it a priority to carve out a good deal of “me time”). And in many ways, these are the priorities that have shaped whatever “parenting philosophy” I’ve established for myself, so when I heard of Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, I thought, “Hey, that’s up my street.”

Because it’s important, of course, to only ever read parenting books that affirm your worldview and what you’re doing already. (And I’m not being facetious. The alternative is to be driven insane.)

Druckerman’s book, about her experiences of pregnancy and motherhood as an American expatriate in Paris, is being marketed as this year’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Druckerman herself as a “parenting expert”. Which is misleading, because Bringing Up Bebe is certainly no manifesto, and it has much more in common with the best book about babies that I’ve ever read, which is Dream Babies by Christina Hardyment, a history of baby advice “From John Locke to Gina Ford”.  Hardyment’s book instilled in me the empowering knowledge that there is no such thing as a baby expert, and that ideas of baby advice and parenting philosophies (scientifically based or otherwise) have been faddish since the 16th century. So that in those brutal early days of new motherhood when I had no idea what I was doing, at least I could be confident that nobody else really did either.

In her book, Druckerman similarly shows how notions of parenting and parenthood (and also children and childhood) are cultural constructs, and her approach is far more anthropological than “how-to”. She shows how French notions of pregnancy are so different from what she experienced as an American engrossed in week-by-week manuals with advice about how every morsel of food that goes in her mouth should be good for her baby. French women around her worried far less about their pregnancies, eat whatever they want (though Druckerman points out that French women don’t eat a lot in the first place), are encouraged to “nurture their inner woman”, and are not only told that they can have sex in pregnancy but are provided with a list of comfortable positions to do it in.

The book goes on to show how babies in France begin sleeping through the night very early, how they are taught patience and independence by their parents not always responding immediately to their needs (but rather, their parents observe those needs from afar to discern how they can best be met). French babies are considered rational people, albeit small ones, who can come to understand the world around them with reasoned explanation (and can understand the needs of their parents and family as well). French children develop independence by entering day care from an early age, and parents can have confidence in the state-funded institution with rigorous standards, instructors with university degrees who’ve chosen their work as a profession (and are well-compensated for it), and healthy meals brought in by chefs.

Parents maintain authority over their children, have high expectations for good behaviour, and yet also don’t run their children’s lives (or allow their children to run theirs). Children are allowed significant freedom and develop higher abilities and a greater sense of responsibility in accordance. Many of the differences in parenting are subtle, and can be understood through differences in language– instead of “Be good,” French children are told, “Be wise” (or “Show good judgement”). Instead of “discipline”, French parents talk about”education”. There is a set of parameters which parents are unbending about, but their children are offered a great deal of freedom within these.

Though Druckerman shows a clear bias towards the French approach to parenting, her book is not a polemic. She wishes her own children to retain a sense of themselves as Americans as they grow up in France, she devotes an entire chapter to breastfeeding not being a priority for French mothers, she admits that though French women have greater support in furthering their careers, they split household roles with spouses more unevenly than American parents do, and are paid lower wages for their work. She shows that until the 1960s, the French approach to parenting was rigid and cold, that effects of this remain, and that some French people (and American expats) are absolutely starving for American ideas of self-affirmation. And she also shows that being a French parent is not easy, that you can’t figure out how to be one by following a guide, and that like any parent, they’re ever responding to new challenges thrown their way. It’s just that, philosophical approaches to parenthood being what they are, French parents respond to those challenges very differently.

What Druckerman doesn’t give enough credit to, however, is the role of institutionalized daycare in France in creating her institutionalized Frenchness. (She concedes, by the way, that life in France outside of Paris and even outside her social circle in Paris is different from and more varied than what her book portrays.) A few times, she mentions that the mothers of the children with such sophisticated palettes don’t even cook themselves, for example, which leads me to conclude that school lunches have a greater role in shaping children’s food tastes than family meals do. It’s not surprising that French children fall into line in institutional settings along with their peers with such rigorous standards and expectations upon them. Perhaps if we all have the benefit of such a system, all of us could have children so obliging.

So Druckerman’s book is not that useful if you’re reading it in the hope of cultivating a little French-person of your own. (It’s also not useful if you wish to be not fat. French mothers, apparently, spend a lot of time baking with their children, but exercise restraint enough not to eat the result, which is a skill that is beyond me.) But what Bringing Up Bebe is useful for is challenging our ideas about childhood and child-rearing, broadening our perspectives to see the different ways these ideas are approached, and allowing us to see our own approaches as the cultural constructions they are. Druckerman’s writing is also light, funny and engaging, and her book is as informative as it is a pleasure to read.

February 25, 2012

Dimwits and numbskulls

“The universal, yet unique experience of motherhood creates an immediate bond with other women, Cusk explains, and, paradoxically, an unchallenged platform from which to pass judgment, a contradiction she experienced at both a local and a professional level. ‘I didn’t know that that kind of cruelty and criticism you encounter among mothers at the toddler group could find its way into written media until my book came out,’ she says, with force. ‘Then suddenly, I have women like Gill Hornby and India Knight writing articles about me, in effect saying, “Well, I love my children and they’re the best thing that happened to me, I don’t know what’s wrong with you”. I’m not remotely afraid of what that kind of person thinks of me. I have no respect for them and I wouldn’t have given them a second thought had not motherhood grouped us all together in the Venn diagram, which is very big and full of all kind of dimwits and numbskulls.'”–from “Mum’s The Word”, Rachel Cusk Interviewed in 2003

January 12, 2012

How to Get a Girl Pregnant by Karleen Pendleton Jimenez

Sperm procurement is Karleen Pendleton-Jimenez’ basic challenge as a lesbian who wants to have a baby, a challenge further complicated by fertility struggles. Though the original challenge was pretty complicated from the outset– sperm is hard to come by for these purposes, and if you decide to go through anonymous donors, it’s next to impossible to find matches with your ethnic background, unless that background is white European. With precise, vivid and immediate prose, in her memoir How to Get a Girl Pregnant, Pendleton-Jimenez documents her journey towards pregnancy, which begins very early in her life when she knows she wants to be a mother as strongly as she knows that she’s a lesbian.

As a butch lesbian who wants to be a mother, Pendleton-Jimenez complicates ideas of butchness, and of motherness. But the arrangement has always felt natural to her, and her experiences co-parenting her partner’s children underline this instinct.  As she approaches her mid-thirties, she decides to finally take the definitive step towards motherhood–and lesbians don’t do turkey basters anymore, she informs us. Turkey basters are too big, and sperm is far too precious a commodity to unintentionally get stuck up in the bulb at the top. There is also an amusing scene where she poses on her front porch for a photo with the tank the sperm is delivered in: “This may be all the baby gets to see of its biological parents together,” she writes, though upon reflection, she notes that she looks tired and unhappy in the photo. The stress of trying to get pregnant was already taking its toll.

Which would only get worse as she begins to undergo treatments at a fertility clinic, going in for regular visits for monitoring, to check for ovulation, and for fertilization. And in talking about infertility, she breaks a taboo, though this candidness does not come easily. She writes about the pain and isolation of what she’s going through, how women don’t talk about these experiences. She doesn’t want anyone to know, she doesn’t want to be pitied, to be “that woman who’s trying to get pregnant but can’t”, and so she is very much alone in the process. She also addresses the complicated dynamics of being a butch prone on a table being poked on prodded by nurses and technicians, learning to become accustomed to this, and of her strange pleasure in the compliment that her ovaries were “beautiful”. And in the hope each month that this time the pregnancy would take, and the predictable disappointment when it didn’t over and over again.

I know that longing, that desperation to be pregnant. Pregnancy came easily for me, but I remember how badly I wanted it, and identified strongly with Pendleton-Jimenez’ need for a baby. So that when she starts cruising for men at night clubs, I totally get it, and also admire the openness with which she writes, how she makes herself as vulnerable in her narrative as she did in the experiences she writes of. The openness works, because the writing is so good, beautifully unadorned and to the point. Pendleton-Jimenez also manages to write with both poignance and humour, and indeed, I laughed and I cried as I read this book. Like all great memoirs, this is an intimate story that manages to connect with the universal, and the narratives of pregnancy and motherhood are so much richer for it.

January 8, 2012

This kid blows my mind

This kid blows my mind. I’ve been writing snarky comments on my Facebook wall about parents of “gifted” children, but naturally, I do suppose that Harriet is the funniest, most brilliant child the world has ever seen before. Basically, she is Jesus (who we know all about from the Dick Bruna Christmas Book).

Though we’ve had to stop borrowing Thomas DVDs from the library because Harriet is too obsessed, and has been talking about the episode where James fell in the mud for three weeks now. And she informed us that she’s changed her name to Harriet Tank Engine, her baths are “wash-downs” and she calls her bed her “round-house”. But it’s not just all cartoons, she’s also political: yesterday when The House came on CBC radio, Harriet listened for a moment and said, “They’re talking about Canada. I live in Canada.”

She can recite Hey Diddle Diddle, Little Miss Muffet, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat and Night Before Christmas. She’s totally potty trained, except that she’s afraid of toilets so still has to wear diapers outside of the house. She likes to coax us into playing her games by telling us, “It’s very good game, very fun” but then she yells at us when we do it wrong and the game is always pretty boring. Every day around 1:00, she decides it’s naptime and goes to bed on her own accord (which has only started since we ditched the crib), sleeps for two hours, then gets up and sings or reads in bed for about a half an hour more. She sleeps until 9:00 on the weekend. She eats sushi, pesto, felafels, blue cheese and hummus, and is quite particular about where she gets her croissants. (This is the kind of thing we parents brag about who have too much disposable income for our own good, and live in the city.)

She loves Chicken Pig and Cow, Katie-Morag, Curious George, The Berenstain Bears, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, Jon Scieszka’s Trucktown books, the letter H, chocolate, watching DVDs, getting mail, and when it’s garbage day. She displays that marvelous imagination that seems to be innate in all her peers (and where does that go? Why do so many of us lose it?) . She likes to help me bake and sometimes is even helpful. Lately, she’s been asking for definitions of words she doesn’t know: “What means ‘on purpose’?” This afternoon she wondered why there was only one cloud in the sky, and if it was lonely.

So yes, now she is two (and a half!), clever as clever. And I really hope she is two forever and ever. Really. Because there’s never been anything quite as marvelously good. We love her.