“Now, where’s my toboggan?”
I poked my head out, groundhog style. Our apartment was small. If he had a large wooden sled, I would have noticed it.
“Your what?”
“My toboggan. You know, for my head.”
“You mean a hat?”
“I mean my toboggan! The wool one. With the puffy thing on top.” He batted at an imaginary pom-pom above his head, and I realized he was referring to the kind of knitted hat that Canadians call a “toque.” He had his winter vocabulary confused.
“That is not a toboggan,” I said, with the loud, deliberate pronouncement of a foreign-language tutor. “A toboggan is a waxed plank with a curled end and a rope handle.” Someone had to help these people.
“You don’t wear a toboggan on your head,” I explained to him. “You jump on it with your siblings, point it at a stand of trees, and hurl yourselves downhill at thirty miles an hour screaming, ‘LEAN!’ ”
“Here’s my toboggan!” he exclaimed happily, pulling on a toque and racing outside to throw snowballs at the window.
When I did get out the next day, I was astounded by what I saw. It had been a six-inch snowfall, more than sufficient to bring a city without road-clearing equipment to a dead halt for several days. A half-foot of snow hardly qualifies as a dusting where I come from. What amazed me was the sheer economy of use. It seemed like every lawn had a snowman, as if an army of them had invaded and now stood sentinel awaiting further orders.
Since there were no actual toboggans, kids were sliding on anything they could find, cardboard, trash can lids, their own bottoms. A very few had wooden sleds with runners, hauled out of attics for the first time in years. Adults were walking around their front yards with the pomp and deliberation of the first moonwalk. Nobody was wasting one flake of this snow.
The next time we had that kind of snowfall, I had children. I still would have preferred to spend the day in bed with the curtains drawn, but I felt an instinctual obligation to teach my offspring something about winter, lest they perish trying to keep their heads warm with a sled. We bundled up and ventured out into the yard.
“Right,” I said, picking up a garden shovel. “First, we pile all the snow into a mound.”
As we piled it higher and higher, I sensed that we were being watched. Neighbors were standing at their windows. Passersby were pausing in the street. This was no snowman under construction, obviously. The strange northern woman was up to something. They stared as I packed the pile of snow into a compact dome, and then carved out a cave. It’s the dugout method of snow fort building. Simple, classic, and architecturally sound.
I dug until my whole body would fit inside. The neighbors probably thought I was getting ready to hibernate. They must have been alarmed when I brought the baby inside with me, but we reemerged before they came running. The children didn’t much care for being enveloped in an icy chamber. I thought it was rather homey myself, having spent half my childhood in one. My own mother believed that indoor air was poisonous. “Get some fresh air,” she’d say, tossing us kids outside, even on the coldest winter days. Nearly immobilized by our snowsuits, we would trudge around the yard in circles, with my younger sister having to be dug out of a crevice periodically. Eventually, we would dig a shelter out of a snowbank with our mittened hands and huddle there until called for supper.
I feel a twinge of guilt that my own children are deprived of the adventure. Winters—real winters—are fun for children. It’s like having a theme park show up in your own backyard every year. And a fresh, deep snowfall really is beautiful. My mother sends us photos of her house at Christmas, with the shrubbery all sugared and drifts of white powder clinging to the recesses of the door. I confess the image stirs up nostalgia; the baptismal quality of new snow, its ability to confer innocence on all the blemished world outside.
But I know too much. Whenever my southern-born-and-bred husband muses about moving north, I tell him that he really has no idea what he’d be in for.
“Think how much you hate to mow the lawn,” I tell him, by way of analogy. “Imagine if you had to mow every single morning, just to get out the driveway. Then, just as you reach the end, someone comes along with a tractor and rolls sod back over it. Oh yeah, and the car doors are frozen shut.”
I try to explain to him how long northern winter is, how it drags on and on like a bad marriage, till no one can remember the wonderland that once was. The pristine drifts turn into banks of ice that become decrepit over time, soiled by dog droppings and dirt. They don’t melt so much as decay, rotting slowly under the early-spring sunshine.
What I do miss about deep snow, especially at holiday time, is the enforced dormancy, the way it necessarily slows things down. The main drawback I’ve found in a green Christmas is that there’s no excuse to hibernate, no reason why you can’t spend every day from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Eve shopping, decorating, and baking, which is exactly what the glossy sales flyers encourage us to do. The festivity is relentless. I carve out a little space in it by observing Advent. It’s not time yet, I tell the boys, when the manger in the crèche is empty, and they wonder if I have forgotten the baby who belongs in it. I want them to know about waiting, the fullness of time. What it means to lean into not knowing. That’s what Advent is about, and it creates an interesting tension, because that’s not what the holidays are at all about. I like the quiet introspection that the lengthening darkness affords, but I also hate to miss out on any fun. So I release our merrymaking in increments. Outdoor decorations go up soon after Thanksgiving, and indoor ones a few weeks later. The crèche is populated gradually. The Advent wreath is lit, one candle a week until December 25, after which I cling with orthodox devotion to all twelve days of Christmas, mostly because it gives me a respectable excuse for not getting around to putting the tree away. Just as the kids do with their Saint Nicholas tree, I arrange the season in a way that makes sense to me—never mind what it’s supposed to look like. It’s become a bit of this and a bit of that, like my Thanksgiving table setting. Like me.
13.
The Facts of Life
On Valentine’s Day, my boys came home from school with their doily-trimmed shoe boxes, dumped all the contents out, and immediately began separating candy from the valentines, without so much as a glance at the cards or the messages printed thereon, as if they were candy wrappers, nothing more.
I retrieved the cards, shuffling through them with interest. “Did you get any special valentines from anyone?” I asked. They thought I meant one with extra candy.
I tried a different angle. “Did you give a valentine to anyone special?”
All three looked at me blankly, cheeks stuffed.
“Like a girl?” I asked.
“Like a wombat?” I may as well have suggested. They regarded the question as a total non sequitur, glanced at each other with a shrug, and resumed shucking valentines.
I can’t tell if their complete indifference to girls is normal or not. I’m not sure how it works with boys, at what age they become interested in romance. I can’t remember ever not being interested in it. I was four years old the first time I got married, to a neighbor boy I chased—literally—around the yard and dragged before a friend’s father who had agreed to officiate. I don’t remember what I wore, but I know that I held a potted geranium.
Like many young marriages, ours didn’t last. I fell for another man on the first day of kindergarten. Tony was standing alone at the back of the room, crying for his mother. I never could resist a lost boy. I walked over and took his hand in mine, and from that moment, until he moved to Minnesota later that year, we were together. Our families became friends, and we had sleepovers, talking long into the night about sex. Or what we thought sex might be. It had something to do with men and women getting naked, but beyond that, we had no clue. Our conversations were curious but chaste. It didn’t occur to either of us to do more than talk about it.
I kept a special place in my heart for Tony, but fr
om first to fifth grade, I was in love with a boy we’ll call David O’Neill (since that was his name). David O’Neill was a dreamboat, with dusky olive skin and dark, long-lashed eyes. He was quiet. He was smart. He was nice. I loved him in secret until I was nine years old and in grade four, when my parents separated, and I moved away to live in another part of the country with my mother and six-year-old sister, forever. Or so I thought. In an act of valor or sheer, self-immolating recklessness (I still have trouble telling which is which), I sat down and penned a letter. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but I’m guessing the gist of it was “You are quiet, smart, and nice. I love you.” Forever turned out to be about nine months. My parents reconciled, and I returned to my hometown to begin fifth grade at my old elementary school in September, with all my former classmates.
A gentleman in possession of such a letter might write back, thanking the tender lady for the compliment. He might rail against cursed destiny that he could not return her affections. He might gallantly deflect her indiscretion with an excuse: “I’m gay/ engaged/sworn to the priesthood” are all serviceable white lies in such an instance.
David O’Neill did not do with my letter as a gentleman might. He did not do as my own nine-year-old son would most likely do, which is shrug, toss it in the trash, and go back to playing Star Wars. David O’Neill did the very thing a girl dreads most. He took the letter to school and showed everyone. My reputation never recovered.
I can’t imagine any of my sons engaged in those dramas. Even my fifth-grader still seems oblivious to romantic love. And though in his case I expect that to change any day, as far as I can tell, they are completely incurious about sex. This is a merciful reprieve, since I am completely inept at explaining it to them. I resort to metaphors and similes that undoubtedly leave them more confused. One time we were baking a cake, and I used the cracking of eggs as a segue to a discussion of human reproduction. Consequently, my youngest still refers to his birthday as the day he “hatched.” In trying to simplify sex, I make it needlessly complicated. Explaining homosexuality, I employed a metaphor of right- and left-handedness. Just as people are born preferring the use of one hand over the other, I told them, people are attracted to one gender over another.
“Understand?”
“If you’re left-handed, you’re gay?”
“Let me sort it out,” a bisexual friend offered afterward. “I’m ambidextrous.”
Maybe I’d do better with girls, but I doubt it. One of the reasons I’m so bad at giving “The Talk” is that I never received it myself. I learned about sex from reading my dad’s Penthouse magazines, my mom’s Nancy Friday books, and several hippie-era sexual health classics, including the hirsute original Joy of Sex. I learned about puberty from Judy Blume, and birth control from an exnun at my Catholic junior high school, who gave us dire warnings about the potential toxicity of latex. I have Bradley Wilburn to thank for introducing me to my clitoris, in sixth grade, when he accidentally found it during a tickle fight. We dated a few times in high school, but he had—disappointingly—forgotten where it was by then.
It wasn’t that my parents were prudes. Far from it. Nudity figured prominently in our house, both in art and in life, to my complete mortification when friends came over to play early on a Saturday morning, and were treated to the sight of my father wandering bleary-eyed and stark naked from his bedroom to the toilet. Erotic literature could be found on the living room bookshelves beside the Tom Robbins and Erica Jong paperbacks, and I knew where to open to the X-rated parts of those books, too. My mother worked at the local feminist resource center, and I had free range of the library there, which rounded out my formal education. I wasn’t sheltered from sex, but I don’t remember my parents addressing it openly with me, beyond slipping me a pamphlet or two and asking if I had any questions. I used to think it was strange that they, of all people, would be uncomfortable discussing sex, until I had my own kids. There’s got to be a biological explanation for why this is so hard; an evolutionary advantage gained from it being uncomfortable to think about sex while looking at our offspring. It requires us to engage opposite parts of the brain simultaneously, like trying to write with both hands at the same time. I guess it does help to be ambidextrous.
Because my sons are all still in elementary school and aren’t overtly curious about sex, it’s easy to lull myself into believing that there’s still plenty of time to make sure all the bases are covered before they start thinking about making it to any of them. But that’s bound to be naive of me. When I consider how thoroughly acquainted I was with the contents of my parents’ dresser drawers, I wonder what they’ve seen already, and if they understand it, or if they think it’s strange that Mom keeps a light saber rolled up in her lingerie. Even if they really aren’t that curious yet themselves, they go to school with girls, and some of them are bound to be girls like I was: very curious.
My firstborn is not that many years removed from the age I was when I first had sex, or the boy I first had sex with. I was very young, and my parents must have also assumed there would be plenty of time. Of course, I had to write the experience down, and of course, they found it and read it, and were beside themselves. But I was more precocious than promiscuous. Until my senior year, when I began what would be my first long-term relationship, I had sex only a few times, none of it very memorable outside of whatever romantic drama I scripted in my imagination. I was somewhat careful, and mostly lucky, not to get pregnant before I meant to, at twenty-eight.
I’ve been ready, for years, with my argument for why any daughter of mine should wait several years longer than I did to have sex, which is simply that sex wasn’t very good until I got older. It’s like opening a wine too soon, I would tell her. Uninteresting, at best. Give yourself a few more years. It will be much better then. I could deliver that speech with the full authority of better then. I could deliver that speech with the full authority of one who knew. But I don’t know if it applies to young men. A man is better at sex when he’s twenty-five than when he’s seventeen, but I can’t say that he’s enjoying it more. The argument might not carry the same weight with a boy.
It’s all I’ve got, though, so I’m going to give it to them anyway, and hope that my sons turn out to have a bit more sense and patience than their mother. And just in case reason doesn’t persuade them to act responsibly, I’ve got a backup speech prepared. It’s the one where I explain that I spared them from infant circumcision so that they would come into maturity with all their manly nerves intact. And that I’ve got until their eighteenth birthdays to change my mind.
I’ve gotten so comfortable not having other females in the family, it’s easy to forget that I’ll almost certainly have to make room for some before very much longer. Though I know it’s desirable, healthy, and expected, I can’t quite wrap my head around the idea of someone displacing me as the woman in my sons’ lives. One of my friends claims that her mother-in-law’s decision to surrender her son swiftly and graciously was key to a long and happy marriage between the couple and an enduring bond between the two women. I don’t know if I have it in me to be that generous. What if I don’t like the girl? What if she’s all wrong for him? Wrong for me? She could be a he, but no matter who is cast as the romantic lead, I’ll be moving off center stage. Which is as it should be. Though it melts my heart when my five-year-old says he wants to live with me forever, that’s not how I want either of us to end up. It’s just hard for him or me to picture it otherwise.
Of all my three sons, he is my most ardent loverboy. Obsessive, really. When he wants my attention, which is always, he puts his little hands on my cheeks and pulls my face in front of his to make sure I’m listening. If I happen to be sleeping, he will slap me a little first. It’s less cute than it sounds at five in the morning. He was weaned at about fourteen months, but he is a dedicated boob man, and still cops a feel whenever he can. Fortunately, he can lay on the charm. “You look gorgeous!” he exclaims when he sees me with my head in curlers
, getting ready to go out somewhere. “See how wet my eyes are,” he say, accusingly, when I come back. “I missed you.” He’s intense. If he were my boyfriend, we’d have broken up long ago. And the restraining order would specifically state that he is not to come within five feet of my side of the bed between the hours of midnight and sunrise. As it is, he pretty much owns me.
But even he understands there are natural boundaries, proverbial spaces in our togetherness.
“Close your eyes,” he has recently taken to ordering me when he’s changing underwear. “I don’t want you to see my wee-ness.”
At five going on six, his wee-ness is under autonomous rule, no longer part of his mother’s domain. And all the rest of him is lined up behind it, on the road to independence, or to another kind of allegiance.
Suppose the girl is great. Suppose we all love her, take her in as one of our own. Then suppose she breaks our hearts, or he breaks hers, what then?
My own parents suffered with me when my heart was broken, and suffered because of me, when I broke the heart of someone they’d come to love and regard as a member of the family. Once, after a fight with my boyfriend had ended badly, my misery so distressed my father that he personally intervened and negotiated a reconciliation on my behalf, without my knowledge. I never knew exactly how he brought it about, but my boyfriend came back early the next morning with a changed heart. The incredible part is, Daddy didn’t even like that boyfriend much. But he could not stand to see his daughter in that particular kind of pain.
My mother and my first husband were close during the short time he and I were together, and when I confessed through tears that I had fallen in love with someone else, she hugged me hard, told me she loved me no matter what, and made it clear that her sympathy was with my home-wrecked husband. She knew that their relationship would atrophy on its own after a while, but she wasn’t about to pull the plug before the love stopped flowing. It wasn’t just about him and me, which is something I didn’t appreciate until I had children of my own. Ever since they’ve been able to smile and make friends, I love whom they love. Even if I don’t necessarily like them, or have anything in common with their mothers. The soccer field and playground make unlikely allies of us all. The mom of one of the kids’ preschool friends once heard me mention something about going to church, and for two years, I let her go on thinking that I was a good fundamentalist Christian like she was, and not, as Patrick fondly describes us Episcopalians, a member of the church of freaks and queers. I was willing to let her believe I was saved as long as our sons were buddies. I would probably try to win back a girlfriend for him, too, even if she were a fundamentalist Christian. I’m invested in their relationships. And it’s not that easy to withdraw the investment just because the principal players have moved on.
Planting Dandelions Page 15
