It’s been a good season for parenting. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed motherhood quite as much as I am right now — even the hard parts feel, all of a sudden, joyous. It can still be heart-shatteringly challenging, to be sure. When is it not? But the challenges feel rewarding and surmountable, like solving a puzzle or crossing the finish line of a race, rather than gruelling and Sisyphean. The kid is blossoming before our eyes, and I find myself being playful and unflappable and spontaneous in all the ways I always dreamed of being but could not achieve because I was too exhausted or sad or overwhelmed. Perhaps the kid’s having a developmental leap. Perhaps my efforts to fix my mental health are working. Perhaps all that parenting therapy we’ve been doing is finally taking hold. Whatever it is, I’m grateful.
Recently, we’ve upped our “daily learning time” from ten minutes a day, to sometimes a full hour, or longer. The kid complains, but it’s more performative than it used to be. Secretly, he thinks mom school is fun. We’re learning about nouns, verbs and adjectives, practicing writing, reading about King Arthur, and mastering the times tables (thanks to Sums of Anarchy, he’s learning how to really, truly multiply, no memorization involved). We’re making stuff out of air-dry clay, and planning the zines and comics we’ll be producing this summer. Sometimes, we laugh so hard while we’re working our way through a lesson, that we can hardly breathe. “School time” has become something I look forward to every day.
He’s thriving in his nature school, where an extremely cool substitute instructor named Wolfgang recently taught him how to carve a sword out of a stick. Tonight, he spent the evening outside on our street, teaching a half-dozen neighbourhood kids how to do it. They were out there, carving knives, sandpaper and rasps in tiny hands, just … whittling like a bunch of old timey mountain men. It was face-meltingly cute. When he cut himself, his very first carving injury, instead of bursting into tears at the sight of (actually a fair amount of) blood, the kid said “‘tis but a scratch,” and went right on playing.
Did I mention that we recently watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail? You might have picked up on it, above. The recent interest in King Arthur. The “‘tis but a scratch”?
It was delightful and mostly pretty wholesome, and we followed it up by watching Return of the Living Dead the next night, which the kid chose because it seemed “more funny than drama,” compared to Romero’s Living Dead trilogy. The interest in zombies was sparked by a Walking Dead crossover in Fortnite.
We take turns choosing films, so the next one, Colin’s pick, was Time Bandits. The pressure’s on me to choose something really good for tomorrow night, Frightful Friday. I might suggest The House With the Clock in its Walls, now that he’s a Jack Black fan thanks to A Minecraft Movie. Then we can read the book the film is based on, one of Colin’s childhood faves that I read when we started dating, and adored.
Sometimes, I worry that we have too many family movie nights, too many family games nights, that we’re being irresponsible by making our evenings wacky and fun, that evenings should involve sensible bedtime routines and a limit on the amount of hilarity and snacks. I worry that this will somehow ruin him, turn him into a person who expects life to be fun all the time, and is entirely unprepared for the drudgery of adulthood.
But, I’m also an adult who gets as excited about a family movie night as I did at the age of nine. I would drop absolutely everything and anything to go on a road trip or have an adventure or drive an extra seventeen blocks for a really good scoop of ice cream, or change an entire weekend’s plans to do something silly and reckless with a friend. This is a fine life to model for a child. More than fine. Great!
Tonight, while I was out working, Colin texted me “I let him play outside super late” and I replied with “you’re a great dad and we’re giving him a great childhood.” I mean that.
The other day, while the kid was playing outside, a neighbourhood buddy asked to check out one of his toys, and a third little neighbour piped up.
“I’ll get it,” said Kid Three. “I know where you keep it.” And then he barged into our house, grabbed the toy, and came back out. I couldn’t have been more thrilled.
When my family moved to Canada, I fell in love with American family sitcoms, which gave me a whole new, totally foreign version of domesticity to yearn for. In Serbia, we had a relatively close-knit family, lots of cousins and aunties and people we were constantly visiting, or being visited by. But my mom would never have welcomed a drop-in visit from a neighbour, and not only because some of the neighbours were informants for the secret police. My parents were a bit fanatical about privacy and independence. They felt stifled by the close-knit-ness of family life. It’s one of the reasons they moved here, and never looked back.
Naturally, I craved precisely the opposite thing: a home with an open door policy. And now, somehow, I have it. And my kid has friends whose doors he can knock on, whose families I trust to look out for him on the street. He’s got friends who don’t live on our street, who he calls up on Messenger Kids or records funny videos for. After years of worrying about his social skills (thanks, school system), I’m watching him becoming more confident in his friendships, more engaged and connected to a whole network of beautiful, likeminded little weirdos. Oh, my heart.
While driving home from a wonderful weekend at a friend’s cottage a couple of weeks ago, the kid was lobbying for screen time in the back seat. He wanted to use the art app Procreate to make some digital collages, so he was chanting “Pee-Are-Oh … Create! Pee-Are-Oh … Create!”
I was fine with him using Procreate, but I wanted him to eat his dinner first, because he’d demanded a bacon deluxe McCrispy, which we went out of our way to procure even though the rest of the family wasn’t eating McDonald’s for dinner.
In an effort to mimic his chant with my own counter-chant, I started saying “M-A-C-Crispy,” but I’m nothing if not a nit-picker when it comes to spelling and grammar, and there’s no A in the “Mc” of “McDonald’s” so I amended my chant to “Em-Cee-Cee … Rispy!” which fit the rhythm of what he was saying, but sounded so stupid that I sent myself into a laughing fit so hysterical that both Colin and the kid feared I might crash the car.
I kept saying it, and then laughing, and then saying it again. When I saw the looks they were giving me, I realized neither of them understood the joke at all, and I had to painstakingly explain the nonsense between hiccuping peals of laughter. This is what I want parenting to feel like all the time. Absurd, stupid, zany moments, mixed with little triumphs of learning and development, mixed with deep connections and profound emotional breakthroughs, mixed with the odd crying jag because life is too full and beautiful, and it all goes by much too quickly.
M-C-C … Rispy!
I'm so happy to hear how well things are going, and M-C-C-Rispy! made me laugh and laugh.