This past weekend was a weekend filled with tremendous, heart-busting joy. It was also one of the most personally disappointing weekends of my entire life. My head is spinning a little from the existential contradiction that this represents.

I took the brood to Disney World, and one of the objectives of the trip was, of course, to have a good time, and having a good time at Disney World is not a particularly difficult thing to do, what with the spinning teacups and fireworks and pirates and flying carpets and pixie dust and all, and so to say that we – and more importantly, our coterie of pixie-loving badgers – had fun is to understate things dramatically. But having fun was not the only objective of the trip, nor even the primary objective of the trip. The primary objective of the trip (which saw us drive from Toronto to Florida in a vehicle provided by GM Canada) was me tackling the Disney Princess Half-Marathon, aka the Tiarathon, as the first race in my year-long quest to run 100 miles for Tanner. I’ve been training since last year to do this run and all the other runs – runs that will cover a total distance, I hope, of 100 miles – to follow. I had my tiara and tutu packed and ready.

I never got the chance to wear them. (more…)

I don’t claim to understand what it is, exactly, that makes girls girls and boys boys and women women and men men and whatever identities lay within and between these categories of gender, but I do think that I can say, with some authority, this: it’s not hair. Really, it’s not.

I say this because I know. I know because, I have had short hair. As a child, even: (more…)

Yesterday, Emilia brought home her very first report card. Emilia is four. Just yesterday she was in diapers and nursing and the only thing that anyone ever reported about her was quantity and quality of her bowel movements. How did we get to report cards?

For the longest time, I couldn’t open it. I’m not sure why. The reasons that I gave myself – that reading others’ evaluations of my child would be awkward and challenging; that the report card was a symbol of school and so a symbol of her moving ever further into a life of her own, a life apart from mine; that I just couldn’t bear to see anything other than the highest praise for my child – were not, in themselves, convincing. They just landed in my psyche and fell limp, like drained water balloons, or banana peels, or something else more figuratively appropriate that I can’t think of right now. I was anxious for all of these reasons, and for none of them, and for a thousand other reasons that I probably wouldn’t understand until sometime around her high school graduation, and as I sifted through these known and unknown and entirely inscrutable reasons for my anxiety, I thought, this is the problem. This. This worry. Not the reasons for the worry. The worry itself. (more…)

(Photoshop narrative contrived by Jenny; random badness embodied by – from left to right – Karen, me, Laura, Jenny, Jyl, Rachael, and Alison, who took me down immediately after this photo was taken. Sarcastic spirit fingers, apparently, do not frighten her.)

So I wrote this post over at BlogHer. It’s kind of heavy, but also, I think, kind of extraordinary (that is, the subject of the post is extraordinary, not my writing) and I’d love to know what you think. Not least because it comes up in a week during which some people are saying hateful things on the same subject, and talking about actions and ideas that counter hate is, really, the best defense against such hate, so. I think that it’s worth reading, and well worth discussing, and even if you disagree with the whole enterprise, well, at least we could all join hands and agree that compassion is good, no matter what? I’d like that.

We’re sick. Each and every one of us in this house is sick, and not in the delicate, dab-tissue-to-nose-and-sniffle kind of way, either: this is lung-hacking, cold-sweating, vomiting on bed sheets plague. If I weren’t delirious from fever and drowning in my own bodily fluids, I would be kind of impressed.

And because the gods are perverse in their humor, they have arranged things such that the children are maintaining, despite their illness, extraordinary levels of energy and seem determined to prove, definitively, that plague should never get in the way of rollicking batshittery. That, or they’re trying to kill us. One or the other.

All of which is to say, if you don’t hear from me in a few days, send in the ninjas, and maybe some chicken soup.

Jasper is feeling better. Also, he has discovered the joy of shoving his hand down his pants.

I feel much, much better – and am much more comfortable enjoying the camaraderie and awesome of Blissdom – and the Harry Connick Jr-ness of it all – knowing that Jasper is getting well, and that he finds comfort in the roomy waistband of his pants.

I’d thought that I’d had my fill of beating myself up yesterday, what with blaming myself for Jasper’s pneumonia and all, but really, there’s no such thing as too much self-flagellation when you’re a mother, is there? After a brief flirtation with self-forgiveness that lasted, roughly, the duration of the season premiere of Lost, I’ve regressed fully back into guilt and self-loathing, and it has more than a little to do with the fact that tomorrow, I’m leaving my sick little boy and flying to Nashville.

Which, I wouldn’t do if he weren’t improving and if my husband weren’t going to be around to take over the role of primary caregiver, but still. I’m leaving him. I don’t want to leave him, but I also kinda do. I haven’t had a break since my dad died, and that, well, that wasn’t so much a break as it was a giant, gaping tear in my heart-mind continuum. And the idea of a day or two of not being the Captain (and First Mate, and deckhand, and cook, and scullery maid) of the Good Ship Our House is just so, so, so compelling. That, and this is my work – work that I take much pleasure in, such that it will feel like a holiday, but still. I want to go. I’m going to go.

But I feel guilty as hell.

(Closing comments. I don’t want to crowd-source the question of whether or not I should go. I am going to go. I need to find my own way to feeling okay – as okay as I can feel – about that.) (And yes, I know that I crowd-sourced reassurance over my guilt and anxiety yesterday, and comments are still open over there if you want to weigh in on the question of whether mothers are always hard on themselves, even though I’ve just answered that very question here, in spades, and so it’s really just moot. BEHOLD, I RAMBLE NONSENSICALLY.)

Jasper goes to playschool a couple of days a week. He loves it – loves it – and he knows exactly what days he’s scheduled to go. He toddles down the stairs on those mornings and heads straight for his coat and boots, which he tries to tug on over his pajamas.

SKOO! (School!) he yells. RUSSELL! ELLA! (friends) GO! GO! GO!

Yesterday was a school day. He’d been up throughout the previous night with a cough, and he’d felt a little warm at times the day before, but there are always bugs going around this time of year, and he seemed okay in the morning, and in any case, there he was, clutching his coat and boots and yelling skoo!

I hesitated, for a minute, maybe two. He didn’t feel warm, but he did have a cough, and he had been so, so sick before Christmas… but no, he wanted to go. And I wanted him to go. I had work to do. So I took him to school.

Some hours later, my phone rang, and the voice on the other end was a little panicked. Could I come right away? Jasper wasn’t well, he was hot, really hot, sweating through his clothes, his temperature 105 and climbing, and obviously in pain, and coughing, badly. I dropped what I was doing and ran straight there, not bothering to put on socks or scarf or hat or gloves, not stopping to lock the door, not stopping for anything. I just ran. And as I ran – the very short distance from where I was to where he was – I berated myself a hundred times with every step. I should have kept him home. I shouldn’t have taken him to school. I shouldn’t have let what was convenient and easy trump what was right. (more…)

I don’t know about you, but I think that my child makes a far slicker Horatio Caine than does David Caruso, who, let’s face it, is a hack. But CBS doesn’t care if my baby is an undiscovered Horatio Cane-impersonating genius, because CBS hates babies. Canadian babies, mostly, but also just babies, as a class, because they won’t let babies or Canadians – and certainly not Canadian babies – enter their Horatio Caine impersonation contest, which, seriously, is a crime against babies and also lovers of CSI Miami and anybody who writes baby-centric Horatio Caine fanfic. This is an outrage, you guys. (more…)