There’s barf in my hair for the third time tonight. The first two were direct hits. The third was an aftermath rescue... after racing upstairs, summoned by croup's telltale hacking gag, I found him drenched, arms up, stunned and sobbing, desperate for solace.

Try as I might, I can’t be stoic. We’re up for the second night of marathon sleeplessness and rocking and shower-running and bed cleaning. He barfs and I blubber. It’s the helplessness, I think. Something’s wrong with him, and I can’t fix it. All I can do to comfort him is smell as vile as he does in solidarity.

This is every mother’s test of mettle: to calm and soothe, be calming and soothing. Yet here I am, the very essence of Prissy in Gone With the Wind: Miss Scarlett, Miss Scarlett, I don’t know nothin’ bout no barfin’ babies!

…in which I can’t move. It’s me, years from now. Or maybe sooner: I don’t know. I am bedbound, chairbound, housebound. I don’t know which: just bound. No longer able to move the way I want to, my brain the only thing left that cooperates.

What haunts me, then? Time spent watching So You Think You Can Dance. Time spent complaining. Time spent doing anything other than tearing the skin off every moment, sloppy and juice-dripping.

You idiot, snaps the me of then to the me of now. Leave the house.

Somedays, I feel incredibly fortunate. I’m not nearly oppressed or tormented enough to be a celebrated novelist, entrenched with ten cats and a pantry full of canned peas and one constant, nubby cardigan (although at this rate, it may well happen... all except the 'celebrated novelist' part).

But I make a living, writing. In the business sphere, the kind of writing that wears khakis and deck shoes. Dismissed by true creatives that ooze authenticity through unemployment, or turmoil, or cafe-scribbling sacrifice.

I should be a more interesting person than I am, saying it: writer. But I do it, between dribble castles and floor tumbles and teddy puffs, and I like it. It’s what I always wanted to be (after being a Beach Girl and a Teenage Girl and a Professional Roller Skater).

Otherdays, I feel incredibly mediocre. Pasty and wheezing. Entire days slipping by from sheer laziness, bereft of substance, elements, earthly vigor.

I see freewheeling’s grand dame and muse at the Hubbards Farmers Market, a human sprite who shames me with her glow. She teaches yoga and she rides hundreds of miles in the rain on her roadbike and she has the most amazing pistons for legs and she knows how to breathe and she chants in sanskrit like she really, truly believes it and her cheeks are always rosy and her eyes are filled with sparkling, interested goodness. Being in her presence is like being outside after rain, refreshing and unencumbered and brimming with possibilities.

Next to her I am a bowl of forgotten three-hour-old oatmeal, gummy and resistant and full of excuses and good intentions.

Athletes have always been a mystery to me. The way they would wither away without movement, without wind, without sprays of mud and battle bruises. They’re hungry and passionate and driven by something that I’ve only ever glimpsed. They seem to live life more than I do, through sheer discipline. Pushing and gripping and bonking and relishing.

Cue self-loathing funk. Cue too much of my own baking.

I need the Ghost of Christmas Future to visit me, shock me with the date of my confinement. You have X more days to run, to plunge, to sweat. Then you’re done, left to think and rot and lust for just one more day of blissful ignorance. A suddenly unrequited passion for life, too late. Only then will you know the true value of legs and lungs and your own ka-thump.

Does it all add up to a downer, or an upper, for past-life band geeks? I can't decide.

He just has a strong sense of personal space.
He doesn’t like being boxed in.
He has to learn how to stand up for himself.
He’s a vigilante.

(Translation: Evan just shoved / bit / whacked another child.)

Little Johnny’s a Shover.
Little Johnny’s a Biter.
Little Johnny’s a Hitter.

(Can’t they DO something about that?)

(Translation: another child just shoved / bit / whacked Evan.)

The truth of my own double-standard occurred to me last night as I waited for sleep. Training your kid to be unfailingly gentle, sharing and selfless is akin to training your cat to run away. No matter how diligently you try, you’ll fail. The only remedy is time.

In the meantime, all I can do is react appropriately when we’re the aggressor: be liberally Horrified. Because I am, truly. Again. Dammit! Dammit. F**K. I am instantly naked in front of twelve thousand people, my parenting in question. My response is not so much EVAN! DON'T BITE! But EVAN! DON’T EMBARRASS US! DON’T GIVE US A COLLECTIVE REPUTATION! DON’T GET US BANNED AT FAMILY REUNIONS! DON’T MAKE US THE SUBJECT OF OTHERPARENT DREAD! DON’T LET THE REST OF THE WORLD SEE THAT I HAVE NO CLUE HOW TO DEAL WITH THIS!

Hello. My name is Kate. Sometimes, my son sees his cousin’s arm as a juicy corn cob.

Face it. Live it. Own it. No matter how pristine, no matter how perfect, your child will eventually become a toddler. And no matter how loudly you crow about Sweet Juanita’s sunny disposition, she will soon begin showing random mall shoppers her cho-cha. Or eating her own boogers at the dinner table. And even if you wrote the book, her playdate companion will someday be on the receiving end of her fisticuffs.

Please agree. Otherwise, I have to accept that it’s just Evan.

Before drifting off to sleep the other night Justin blearily whispered to me, "You smell like sunscreen and toddler poop."

Should the scents of true romance, if truly potent, keep one's spouse awake at night? Mais, oui!

Day One

7 AM, Halifax airport. Hope springs eternal. That the 29E – back row, middle seat – on my boarding card is a mistake. That a non-reclining Kate-sandwich is not my fate for the next six thousand miles to Vancouver.

Airport breakfast features bacon-flavoured strips + tetra-pak eggs + perfectly uniform, cube-shaped potato missiles (drown in ketchup from communal trough dispenser: check). Redeeming it all, globbing it all together into an unrecognizable, congealed mass: melted ‘cheese’ slices for my inner trailer-park-girl. The kind of petroleum by-product that justifies a ‘zed’ on the end (the equivalent, in the cheez world, of putting your “hands way up in the air, and wavin’ like you just don’t care”).

<fast-forward>

Surreal. Totally surreal. Awake for more than 20 hours. Feel:

• 50% raised by wolves
• 25% like we never left, and Evan was just a dream
• 15% sentimental
• 15% incapable of coherent thought (or simple mathematics), and already fearing defeat by exhaustion

Am trying to nap in this hotel room but the city waits outside, mocking me. I am here! Eyes are two pissholes. Time for blow-torched mackerel, starting at midnight Halifax time.

Later this night, after wandering:

• Immaculate, delicious-smelling gay men and wasted, convulsing junkies everywhere. Why must everyone inspire either awestruck-gaping or nose-holding? Is there no middle ground?
  
• Maybe Nova Scotia is more home to me now than I knew. I was so busy mourning for my mistress, I hadn’t noticed. It is as spectacular as ever, but all feels foreign.
• At Robson and Burrard, a man wearing nothing but running shorts and fuzzy green slippers walked in front of me and ran into traffic, yelling. No one blinked.
• My hotel room: tonight’s scene for full scale let-it-all-hang-outedness. Despite the appreciated saferoom of marriage, nothing quite beats the lack of witness a hotel room provides to oneself.
• Turning the corner on yet another downtown mountain view corridor still stops me. Fashionistas and junkies and asian school girls and yoga instructors pile up at my back like Augustus Gloop stuck in Willy Wonka's chocolate pipe.

Day Two

Greasy breakfast, japanese lunch, liquid supper. Fabulously smart people. Amazing how easily one slips back into office life, funky bricky coffee-breaky life, despite the accustomed dining room table. CEO smirkily asked how’s life in Tatooine? Earned moderate street cred with at least it’s not remote as the spice mines of the Kessel galaxy, which are millions of light years away.

Day Three

Greasier breakfast, thai lunch, liquid supper, liquid dessert. The mistress is mine again. It’s fantastic, this interlude. I am collaborating, and it doesn't involve anyone else's bum. Am zipped back two years like magic (except for the boobs).

Day Four

People keep saying, Your first time away? Poor you! Does it feel like your arm has been cut off? Are you worried? Have you been sleeping? And I want to answer FRIG no! Frig no! Frig YES!

I miss him like a best buddy, a treasured companion. I can’t wait for the moment when I see him again… drench him in kisses, get entangled in him once more. The thought of it makes me giddy (not to mention the thought of my own personal turnout-gear-clad Mr. July).

In the meantime, I know they're fine. All the world is filled with exotic possibility, company, time, food, Granville Island Cypress Honey Lager. And I must say – mothers everywhere, nod in affinity – This. Is. Decadence. Incarnate.

Day Five

Today was Friday, my last day in the office. Not much writing accomplished this week, but rare and priceless face-meeting, stake-planting. The more that happens on this trip, the less I feel the need to reflect. It is an invigorating blur, such a high.

Day Six

One last free day in Vancouver. Took aquabus to Granville Island, wandered, met friends, had lunch in Deep Cove, wandered, went for hike on Mount Seymour, wandered. All I saw and tasted and felt was sweet and lush and deep… and it all became normal faster than expected. Am now dosed up with career and mountain methadone, ready to see my two fellas.

I can go home, the place I now know is home, satiated.

I leave for Vancouver tomorrow morning, a business trip. How will I feel when the plane circles to land? I always felt a rush of exhilaration, landing. I was the luckiest person in the world on the approach towards the north shore mountains, our mountains, coming home to our extraordinary city. Rainforest walks and thousand-year-old trees and downtown beaches and cherry-blossomed streets and hidden islands and white peaks…

It's an illicit getaway with my mistress. Relentlessly bewitching, she is.

First time away from the boy for more than an evening. Six days of alone time, grown-up time. Time during which I won’t be called on to rescue, to squidge, to upright, to tickle, to wipe or to squish. I am officially clocked out: daddy, grammy and grampa are clocked in, bless them. Time for me to be devotedly on the job, revive the me of two years ago, disallowed from fishing sweats out of the dirty laundry pile. It’s clicky-shoe time.

That’s the magic word, isn’t it? Time. For six days it will all belong to me, to do with whatever I please. I will spend too much money on sushi and teeny-tiny beers. I will not sing skinnamarink. I will write and write and write, working with people who are much like me. I might even feel like my old self again.

Maybe that’s what I’m afraid of.

He scraped his finger and I licked it, a first instinct. His blood tasted like blood, that metallic tang. He’s filled with it, same as everyone else. How strange. I expected him to be made of blueberry juice.

+++

As the pee starts in the bath he looks down at the psssssss, shocked, then thrilled, seeing it come from his pizzle. Then he looks up at us with a wide grin as if to say, “Cool! Did you see that?” and plops into the brackish water in a fit of giggles.

+++

Going away is not so much worry and mother-guilt. He doesn’t need me in the literal sense: anyone can make grilled cheese and up-end a box of dinkies. Going away is missing my little buddy, jealous of the stories and cuddles and head-butts he'll give everyone else.

+++

During a nap I sneak in his room and stand over him, watch him tangled up with his teddy and his owl and his Walter the Farting Dog. He breathes and shifts, so sweet a sight that my head may well pop off and float away with joy. I love being there when he wakes, confused and piss-eyed (justin-ism translation: precious, tousled, not yet awake – a.k.a. ‘my eyes feel like two pissholes in the snow’). He wraps his monkey legs around my waist and rubs his face against my shoulder, wiping away the sleep and murmuring to me his dreams of pirates and deep-sea monsters and salty breezes, bracing and hair-whipping, his favourite.

+++

He is a polka-dot boy, a blackfly-feast. I swat and curse as they nuggle into his eyelashes, tuck in behind his ear, gather in swarms at the nape of his neck where the nectar beckons. Since he is unaware of the existence of bugs, he is completely oblivious. He sits in his paddling pool in the sunshine, babbling to himself, filling a bucket with rocks. The object of an insect maelstrom that would send Gandhi himself shrieking like a banshee for the indoors. Children focus unblinkingly on discovering delight, to the exclusion of all else. Teaching us fractious, glum-filled grown-ups that a state of zen in not reached through consciousness – but through a lack of it.