I remember clearly the day that my religious studies teacher, Rabbi Meyerovitch, explained to us — a group of seventh-grade girls at the private Jewish elementary school I attended in Vancouver, British Columbia — the rabbinic law that determined who got to be “born Jewish.”

He was about as direct as one might expect a grizzled, sixtysomething Orthodox man to be about such matters, but he tried his best. A child follows the religion of the mother, he explained, because — and here he coughed — “well … you can always be sure of who the mother is.”

We looked at him blankly.

He continued: “But …you can’t always be sure of the father.”

It took me a few minutes, but I caught on eventually. At the time, the rabbinic logic made perfect sense to my 12-year-old mind: if any poor shmuck pointed out by the mother could conceivably be the father, then of course the baby should follow the religion of the “knowable” parent, the parent to whose body it was irrefutably, undeniably tethered. Fatherhood as a concept was murky, shifting. But motherhood? You could count on that. You could see it with the naked eye.

That’s the beginning of my essay, “Que(e)rying the Matrilineal Principle,” published in the current issue of Lilith magazine. It’s part of a themed section on “Naming the Matriarchy,” in which, as the magazine puts it, “three ‘deciders’ seize the power of choosing, in ways big and small, bullish and inventive, multicultural and intellectual, norm-shattering and unapologetically subversive.” Aw. More specifically, it’s the story of my ongoing understanding of what it means to reconcile Jewish and queer identities when they collide with parenthood.  You can download and read it here.

And for those of you who’ve been hankering for even more Jewish feminism (and even if you weren’t, bet you now are — kind of like if I mention sushi or brownies you immediately want some, don’t you?), the  good folks at Lilith have kindly provided me with some extra copies of the magazine. If you’d like one, please leave a comment below (yes, you can just say, “I want one,” but I’d also love your feedback on the article itself, if you’re so inclined). On Tuesday, February 7, I’ll randomly choose five of the commenters to receive a copy . I’m reserving a sixth and seventh copy for new Facebook “Friends” of this blog — if you’ve been hesitating to click that “like” button over to the right, hesitate no more! Some independent, Jewish and frankly feminist reading awaits you!

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I just need to tell you this: We’ve been on a wee bit of a soup bender here at Casa Non Grata. And yes, I am aware that that phrase, “soup bender,” may well be considered an oxymoron by some of you. And by “some of you,” I mean those of you with jobs that require them to leave the house and houses that are situated in warm places. And actual lives, perhaps with children who do not wake up before 6 AM. For example.

But for me, hunkered down on the Canadian Shield in January, things are getting pretty wild around the stockpot. So far this month, I’ve whipped up a kitchen-sink version of sweet potato/red pepper purée (sure, throw in that carrot! Got some celery? Why not?), pasta fagioli (so far my favourite), orzo soup with caramelized onions and cheese (Rowan and his friend kept wandering into the kitchen and saying, as I caramelized the onions, “Ew! What smells so bad?” Heathens.), a white kidney bean purée with prosciutto (yay, traif!), and, just last night, a leek and cauliflower soup with (local) elk sausage (and some potato). Tomorrow: yellow split pea.

Souperiffic.

There is not some overarching metaphor for this: it’s simply about warmth and nourishment, the desire to create something tangible, use up what’s left, transform the raw and the leftover into the sublime. I’ve got a little routine going: each week, I boil up the bones of our Friday-night chicken (because we roast a chicken pretty much every Friday night, because we do, because that is the tradition, and certain people – and by “certain people” I mean, well, me. And my children — like things that way) and make stock, and from stock I make soup in double batches. And we eat some and we freeze some in lovingly labeled containers that I take out and eat for lunch later on in the week. And every so often I encounter someone who looks a little down or tired or in need of some nourishment and I yank out just such a container from the freezer and hand it over. And think, “Eat, eat.” Love in a Tupperware.

And then I go to bed at nine o’clock, full , and plumb tuckered out from all the excitement.

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… have his socks ever done to him?

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Our friend is dying; a matter of days, her doctors say. Come soon – now – stay for just a few minutes. I tell this to the children, that our friend is dying, soon; tell Rachel as she walks in the door from some errand or other: don’t take off your coat, just go.

Isaac is already gathering up treasure, presents, pressing a silver filigree ring from one of his troves into her hands, asking to come with. Later, when it’s my turn to duck into our friend’s quiet room, I will see the ring on her bedside table. Not sure if she knows it’s there, but now Isaac does and that is important to him.

He’s on a mission the next morning, gathering, gathering, gathering shiny things in the house, layering them in boxes, insisting that we take them, take him, to see her. He doesn’t take no easily for an answer, this boy, asking again and again why he can’t go. He’ll be very quiet, he says. He won’t disturb her. He’s going to give her all his money, he says, all the money in his little jar marked “Isaac’s bank.” Then she can buy some food. He’ll take it to her. And we try to explain that what our friend needs right now is not money, or food. Just love. And care. Then I’ll give the money to the doctors, he says, dogged. To use to help her, the morning a chorus of refrains of why and why and why not.

I guess we won’t go on any more walks in the country with our friend, he says.

No, I guess we won’t.

Explaining all of these things to him is so layered, so exhausting: the etiquette of death and dying on top of hospitals on top of rite and ritual and finance and generosity. How do you encourage a four-year-old’s selflessness while also encouraging restraint? Which is it, then? We can’t just burst into her hospital room with boxes full of treasures and feather boas, and even as I’m trying to explain this, I’m thinking of our friend’s house, full of shiny rocks and sparkly things and pop-up books and photographs, her shy cat peeping out through the layers of wonder, her, smiling out from photographs on the fridge. And Isaac is right, it doesn’t make any sense that what she might now need is quiet, order. And I don’t want him to see her now, asleep, and slack-jawed, and to remember that image of her instead of the buoyant woman with a head full of hair, playing checkers on the floor with him and his brother.

How do you explain to him that his impulse to give, to want to do something, is precisely right — and yet, that doesn’t mean that he can take the two silver boxes off Rachel’s dresser and give them away? I mean, it sounds so petty, so selfish of me to say no (what kind of a douchebag are you? She’s dying.): of course I would hand them and more over in a heartbeat if it would make any difference, but it won’t and you can’t really give other people’s things away… the explanation, the logic of it, fizzle away in the face of the situation, my explanations as ridiculous as his questions: Can we put the money on her gravestone? (She’s not dead yet, Isaac, I want to say, but) No, we don’t put money on gravestones. Why? Well, because we… Well, then we can scatter it in the grass. Oh sweetie, that won’t help our friend. But let’s find sparkly rocks when the time comes. When the time is right, we’ll take some of the money from our house and give it in our friend’s honour to a place that will help to make sure that no one else…

And then I can’t finish the sentence. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because he’s already dumping out the change and the five-dollar bill from his bank and asking me to count it and I turn from the window, where I have been staring out at the snowy driveway, fighting tears, to tally up twelve dollars and nineteen cents.

Mama, you’re looking like you have a sad look on your face, Mama.

I do. I’m sad.

About our friend?

Yeah. Do you want to be sad together for a little while? Cuddle up on the couch and be sad together?

Okay.

[Beat.]

But can’t I go see her?

No.

Why not?

I don’t know.

* * *

In memory of HS. For GS & JB.

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I’ve been clearing off my desk (yes, again) and keep coming up with notes for blog posts jotted down on scraps of paper. They say things like:

• Family walk to school, singing “Found a Peanut” over and over because it never ends, which delights and fascinates Isaac. “Sing louder, Mama!” And I do, as he trudges along, holding onto the empty stroller.
• Rowan asks, “Want to read together, Mom?” And so we do, tucked up in his bed, him with Junie B. Jones and me with Gender Outlaws. I could spend weeks like this.
• Isaac calls tsunamis “salamis.”
• Walking with Rowan to school in the middle of a freak April snowfall: one more winter wonderland walk with my boy, snowflakes caught on his eyelashes.
• Isaac attacking Rowan, trying to get him to suck his thumbs. Rowan laughing and laughing.
• Painting Isaac’s toenails in stripes, listening to him giggle as I wind strips of toilet paper between his toes in order to keep them separate. He’s inherited the “Goldberg hammertoe,” wherein the fourth toe bends sideways behind the middle toe. Bad for pedicures.

• Training wheels training wheels
• A month-long reprieve from illness. Now I’m coughing, rattling around the house jonesing for Fishermen’s Friends like Nurse Jackie, hiding drugs in old Easter eggs and mittens: please be there!
• Isaac brings me my rings, helps set the table and then remarks, when I thank him, “You grew a very helpful baby, didn’t you, Mama?” Yes I did, sweetie. Yes I did.

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I have spent breakfast for the past two days reading the illustrated Star Wars Character Encyclopedia with Isaac. And by “reading,” I mean watching as he flips through each page and asks, rapidfire, of each character, “Is that good guy or a bad guy, Mama?” I answer, he moves on. Life is simple.

For someone who’s seen only one of the six movies in its entirety and then promptly forgot all about it, I know a surprising amount about Star Wars, as it turns out. I mean, of course even I would get that Princess Leia is one of the good guys and the Darth Vader, not so much. But somewhere along the way I picked up (maybe from a McDonald’s commercial?) on the fact that Padmé Amidila is also one of the good, although I hadn’t quite cottoned on to the fact that she in fact spawned the wee twins Luke and Leia. With Anakin. And then it’s fairly clear that the guys in the Nazi-esque uniforms are probably bad (yes, I’m talking about you, Moff Jerjerrod, supervisor of the second Death Star). Certain bits of information have been force-fed to me ever since Rowan saw the movies a couple of summers ago. Nute Gunray, Neimoidian Viceroy? Bad guy. Palpatine? Ditto. Boba Fett? I knew without looking that he was a bounty hunter. (Although I learned only now that he is an exact genetic clone of Jango Fett, “who brings Boba up as a son.”)

LOOK AT ME KNOWING ALL ABOUT STAR WARS.

It’s crazy, the amount of detail that goes into all these characters’ back stories. I mean, who made this stuff up? Did George Lucas have an army of droids typing like 1000 monkeys at 1000 typewriters to come up with the fact that Balosars’ antennapalps are highly sensitive organs that operate at a subsonic level and appear to give them special powers of intuition? Or that Figrin D’an is a demanding bandleader who expects the best from his musicians, thus earning him the nickname “Fiery”— and that he’s a compulsive card shark? Was this important to the movies? Is this what they talk about at the conventions?

Isaac, meanwhile, has a more pressing question, to which I have not found answers to in this book:

“Mama? Where do storm troopers go to the toilet?”

“Hm,” I say. “I don’t know. Maybe just in regular toilets?”

“I think they have a toilet in their suit. A little toilet. And they go there, and they don’t feel the pee and the poo.”

Can anyone help us out, here? Because I bet there is an answer to this question somewhere in the bowels (ha ha) of Star Wars lore, and someone (not me) wants to get to the bottom (hee!) of it.

(Okay, off to get a life now.)

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Well, hello there, 2012. I missed your debut, of course: I have not voluntarily stayed up until midnight for approximately seven years now, but on this particular New Year’s eve I flopped into bed at about 9 PM in the hopes of catching at least a few solid hours of sleep before our 3:30 AM wake-up call.

Of course, there was no solid sleep to be had. My brain is tricky like that: faced with a wee-hours deadline, it tends to go into panic mode, calculating and then recalculating at regular intervals throughout the night just how many potential hours of sleep the body that houses it may or may not get and at what point it might just be a good idea to cut everyone’s losses and wake up anyway and stumble through the rest of the day like a grouchy zombie.

Fortunately, at this point in my life, I am wise to my brain’s proclivities and have learned how to mostly ignore it. I imagine it as a gerbil running frantically to nowhere in its wheel. “Cute little gerbil,” I think to it, “you just go and run away over there until you’ve tired yourself out and meanwhile I will focus on my breathing.” This mindset, while far from perfect, is still a vast improvement over the sheer panic that constituted my mental life when Rowan was a newborn and the scarce chance I had to sleep uninterrupted (more formally known as hours between 3 and 8 AM when Rachel was on duty; I had the 9 PM to 3 AM shift) was entirely spent joining my brain on its gerbil wheel to nowhere, fuming and angsting about how tired I was and would be and would always be and whose idea was this baby anyway. (I remember writing thank-you notes for the piles and piles of gifts we got when he was born and suppressing the urge to write, just once, “Thank you for the so-called ‘sleeper.’ Unfortunately, it does not work and we are returning it. Please send a functioning one.”)

And now, I just think, Well, this sucks, but the worst thing about it is that I’m going to be tired tomorrow.

PERSPECTIVE. TOTALLY. RULES.

Okay, fine, but where were you going at 3:30 in the morning, Susan? Well, Toronto, of course. And Cleveland, obviously. Followed ultimately by Florida, where we finally stopped. And stayed for a glorious week of lounging and swimming and ping-pong and Solitaire playing. (“If we just moved to Cleveland,” Rowan mused as we climbed onto our third airplane of the day, “then it would take a lot less time to get to Florida.” This is true. It is also true that perhaps we should have booked our flights a little earlier on in the season. And it is also true that it was a lot nicer when there were direct flights to Minneapolis from Thunder Bay, but I’m not in charge of that.)

Our first night in Florida, the kids’ grandparents ever so graciously babysat (a favour they granted twice more during the week we were there, bless them) while Rachel and I bucked up and went out for our now-traditional dinner at the totally awesome Rhythm Café in West Palm Beach with Fiona and Jen, Toronto friends whom we see, naturally, only in Florida. (Increasingly, this seems to be the way things roll in my circles: why would you see someone in Winnipeg or Toronto when South Beach or Deerfield or Delray beckon?) “Fake it till you make it,” Rachel and I vowed to each other as we got in the car and navigated the I-95, bowing to the premise that if we acted well rested, we would be. It totally worked: the four of us ate and bitched about travel and — lovingly — our children and caught up in general and then rounded out the meal with three desserts and four forks ( the peanut butter pie was the surprise favourite). Our waitress looked like Leslie Feist (I told her that and she had never heard it before). And you know what? After 18 consecutive hours of wakefulness, we closed the place. Because, apparently, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Happy 2012!

The very rare spoonbill we saw at the Wakodahatchee Wetlands.

And the alligator lurking not 10 feet away. And I thought, "This could end badly."

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I’m doing a wee bit of end-of-year organizing and culling around here, partly as a way of soothing my holiday-ravaged sensibilities, partly to make room for Ye New Ping-Pong Table in the basement, partly to prepare for The Year Ahead. Which will be filled, no doubt, with wonder, but not with the carload-and-a-half of crap I hauled to Goodwill yesterday. Amazingly, the kids haven’t noticed a thing, although it was all their stuff. Don’t tell them that.

Have you purchased your own label-maker yet? Why not? Really, go brave the Boxing Day sales and pick one up. It’s like peanuts: once you start, you won’t be able to stop at just one.

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Isaac doesn’t play so much play as he curates, designing and accessorizing our household spaces — and himself — into ever more perfect, blinged-out versions.

Our views on interior design differ slightly. Whereas I am aiming for a low-clutter, midcentury modern kind of vibe, he’s got a sort of Betsey Johnson meets Memphis Group/shabby chic/Cartier boutique aesthetic, wherein the more colours and the more sparkle and the more layers, the better. We’ve stopped buying him toys in favour of restocking supplies of play-dough, beads, and Scotch tape.

And fashion magazines (preferably those heavy on the jewelry advertising).

(So that he can spend a blissful hour or two cutting out pictures of precious gems and secreting them in his pirate treasure box.)

Of course, our own jewelry is highly coveted, always up for grabs. “Mama, are you wearing this necklace today?” he will ask me, hopefully, draping things over my head, against my shirt. “Mama, I brought you your rings!” And he will hold out his hands, hoping that his helpfulness will erase the fact that he has been forbidden from removing such shiny metal objects (including my mother’s diamond engagement ring and my own wedding band) from my dresser. “Thank you,” I say, taking them gingerly from his hands. Rachel took the boys to the mall to buy me a birthday present recently (because someone turned foooooor-teeee!) and Isaac came home clutching something behind his back, a huge, secretive smile on his face. But of course, he couldn’t keep a secret for long, not when it was so shiny, and came “in a blue box that goes like this — in [insert appropriate swooping hand gesture here] and [swoop] out,” and had so many colours.

Those are freckles, not age spots.

And really, who needs toys when one can simply repurpose packaging? Any sparkly thing, the fluffy bits of tissue paper from a gift basket, the cylindrical cardboard gift box holding a bottle of birthday wine, the shiny black cardboard box that holds my chi-chi hair product: all are material, fodder, treasure to be squirreled away in a not-so-secret hiding place in the closet in his room. Can you give that to me? Is it mine? Can I have it forever?

(Current contents: some marbles, a rock, and a piece of fluff.)

Pretty rocks.

Stickers on the ceiling.

Rhinestones: also on ceiling.

He made me bang a nail into the window frame to hang this up.

Beads set in playdough for his friend Henry.

I have learned to dread when he asks for tape. Inevitably, a request for tape signals a desire to tape two unjoinable things together (example: a broken plastic trophy cup taped perpendicularly to an empty cardboard chocolate box), followed by an artistic meltdown when his creative vision (seamless, organic) doesn’t match with the final product (two hunks of plastic held precariously together with packing tape) and the tears begin, the tantrum rises. He is such an artiste, a tortured soul whose reality doesn’t – yet – match the ideal in his head.

But — mark my words — one day, I bet you, it will.

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A different hike, but still red and blue.

We took the kids on a hike a few weeks ago, a five-kilometre loop through the woods on what turned out to be the last mild weekend of the fall. Well, mild-ish: the leaves were mostly down, the marsh and puddles covered with thin skins of ice, and I was glad for my hat.

We’re not quite as outdoorsy as my idealized version of my family is. When I was pregnant with Rowan, I devoted a ridiculous amount of energy to finding just the right baby backpack hiker on eBay, imagining me and Rachel meandering outdoorsily through the boreal forest with a snoozing baby on my back. But the carrier hurt my shoulders and the baby never really slept and we used it maybe a half-dozen times before selling it to some other idealistic mother-to-be on kijiji.

Still, now that we have two mobile children, we’re getting better at packing them into the car and insisting, over their protests, that we are going on a walk. In nature. Goddammit. Because this is what we do; we will get out there and march around the forest. And we will like it. And even though they are often disgruntled in the car, every time we release them onto the trails, they are happy and engaged and it’s always worth it. Even if we have to feed them mini M&Ms at regular intervals as part of the deal.

This particular hike, though, Rachel and I were — how shall I put this? — a wee bit grouchy. We’d arrived in the woods a bit later than planned, because the kids started playing with the neighbour kids in the driveway and one thing led to another and we were a bit concerned about getting stuck in the woods in the dark and dying slow, cold deaths. You know. Also, perhaps the effort of finally rounding them up and shoving them into booster seats had left us a bit grim, a mood that seemed difficult to shake in the fading light.

What we lacked in good cheer, though, we more than made up for in determination.

And so we rushed them along, worried, the worry translating into frustration with these two boys in their red and blue winter jackets who wanted to bash open skins of ice with great long sticks and wander and dawdle and carry fallen saplings and yell into the echoing trees and point out every mushroom and talk about fairy houses. In other words, they were on a nature walk, while we were fleeing the Nazis over the Swiss Alps in some kind of forced Gulag march for our lives (yes, I am mixing metaphors and desecrating the image of The Sound of Music). I swear I may have told Rowan to use “an inside voice.”

Fortunately, somehow, we managed to pull it together and come to our senses. Rather than grousing at Rowan to be careful about tripping me up with the 20-foot stick he insisted on dragging through the woods, I finally let him go ahead, trying to breathe as I watched him pretend to kayak, totally at home in his surroundings. And as Isaac begged and begged to smash the ice on each puddle I did a small double take and called out to Rachel, “Bashing the ice is the most exciting thing in the world to him.”

“Oh my God,” she breathed. “It is.”

And so,for the final third of the walk, we actually managed to stop chivvying them along. I held on to Isaac’s coat so he wouldn’t fall through the thin ice into the marsh as he whacked and whacked and whacked at it, blissful, making his difference in this vast world. We piggybacked, handed out M&Ms, watched the blue child and the red child do what we’d actually meant for them to do all along: be happy outdoors.

And then, at the very end of the hike, just before getting back to the car, we saw a beaver. A real beaver, sitting placidly in the midst of a little bog, chewing away on some wood, calm as could be. Like a little reward, or maybe a reminder: chillax, ladies. Enjoy the show.

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