It’ll be fine. I know it’ll be fine. It’s just that I hate transitions. But then, who doesn’t?

I called Eva’s school this morning. Actually, I’ve called 3 times in the last week, but thank goodness they’d never know that since I never give my name. Because I am That Mother. My questions are innocent enough: When is the 1st day of school? (Next Monday.) Must I really register my daughter for the 3rd time in person? (For me they made an exception. So, okay, I did have to reveal my name there.) Finally: That meet-the-teacher picnic, what time exactly?

Underlying them all: Are we going to be the parents who can never make anything because Jordan teaches & I have clinic? How is one supposed to pull this off, exactly? 

We’ll figure it out. Meantime: for my American readers & in the spirit of Back to School, the Word of the Day is: Dou Tang.

Okay, so it’s two words. Here’s a hint: they’re on Eva’s school supply list, and though I’ve held one a hundred times I never knew a word for it in American English. Guesses?

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Glory be, and thank goodness for the end of summer.

Because my kids are covered in scabbed-over mosquito bites.

Because when I unpacked our luggage, sand spilled onto the floor.

Because my neck aches from other people’s too-puffy pillows.

Because it took forever to bury Ted Kennedy, and summer ended there but still we had to go through the motions for a few days. And because my dad and I waited hours for Obama’s speech and still missed it, laying flat on my parents’ bed watching the eulogies, my father too exhausted from his own brain-cancer radiation to speak much; me not knowing what to say, or how to say what to say.

And wasn’t it shocking, after all: not the death, not the disease, but the pomp & circumstance, the beauty & order both of the Roman Catholic ceremony & of the Americal political burial: all ritual, all symbolism, all reported with the most catch-your-breath innocence.

Just listen:

Soon, seven riflemen were firing three volleys. Soon, the shadow of a bugler was playing “Taps,” as heat lightning stunned the night sky. Arlington was dark; a long day had ended. But come Sunday morning, cemetery officials say, the green of the grass will be smooth again, the hole filled, the sod laid. Only then it will feature a white wooden cross made by the cemetery’s carpenter, and a white marble marker that bears the name of another Kennedy, this one as distinct and as human and as accomplished as the others, a man in his own right.

EDWARD MOORE KENNEDY, it will say. 1932-2009

At Barnard I majored in European History. In particular, I was a WWI buff. I wrote my senior thesis on masculinity in Britain during the Great War. (Yes, I called it The Great War, for reasons I felt passionate about at the time but can no longer explain.)

Alongside my thesis I wrote a narrative account of the burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey on November 11th, 1920. It was the ultimate orchestrated funeral, and it provided an incredible catharsis from the nightmare of the war.

Every aspect of the soldier’s journey from France to London was carefully planned–from the coffin made by Queen Victoria’s coffin-makers to the war widows who sat in each pew during the burial. The ritual resonated: on the first day alone, 40,000 Britons queued in the rain for the chance to pay their respects to the fallen soldier, perhaps their own son, husband, brother, lover.

I’d thought we’d forgotten how to do that: not just the pomp & circumstance, but also the shared public mouring ritual –remembering one man while delineating the shared values & symbols of a country.

We haven’t.

It’s kind of nice to think, in a sad, end-of-summer kind of way.

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I’m melting.

My parents look at Jordan and me languishing on the livingroom couch, and at Tillie & Eva, sweaty and heat-rashed, and declare that we are all hopelessly Canadian.

It’s true. Not so much the Canadian part — Toronto can give NYC a run for its money when it comes to miserable, muggy summers — but after 4 years of Pacific Northwest living, I find the heat pretty miserable.

The cold, too.

When I was 18 I went on a year-long trip to Israel, to milk cows on a kibbutz and plan my future utopian commune and — well, and to disco every Friday night. On my program were a whole slew of Vancouverites, many of whom are still close friends — and two of whom now live, like everyone else in the free world, in Brooklyn.

The Vancouverites were famous for two things. First, they always thought everything looked like Vancouver. The hills of the Judean desert at sunrise? Looked like Vancouver. The ancient Arab port city of Akko? Vancouver.  

Second, they had absolutely no tolerance for heat or cold of any kind. I remember watching with curiosity as they staggered from the bus on a 40+ Celsius day. It was hot, sure. Okay, it was very, very, hot. But to me it was a smoke-in-the-shade kind of day (of course, every 18 year old North American planning a utopian community in the Negev desert must smoke), whereas they looked….ill.

And now it’s my turn.

New York is confusing for me. I can’t handle the weather, but I surprise myself by knowing my way around…navigating through a subterranean subway tunnel last night I thought, isn’t it odd how this is still mine? And then again, isn’t it odd, also, how it isn’t?

I once identified strongly with the city and thought I’d live here forever, and now NY is just the place I grew up. But of course nowhere is just the place you grew up  — the place you grew up is the place. And maybe everyone has that strange feeling of returning home, always a little surprised to find how well home has existed without them. New York is New York.  I’m overwhelmed by it each time. There are so many people, so much activity, and — a personal favorite (favourite?) of mine — so many, many, refreshing drinks to choose from at one of the millions of independent grocery-marts that make each neighborhood.

Jordan says that he could have married someone from anywhere, and been stuck visiting in-laws in, say, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Instead he married a girl from NYC, and gets to vacation regularly, albeit with some physical discomfort, in one of the greatest towns in the world.

But while he’s gotten to know the city through me, his small-city Ontario view of NY has also altered my own.  ”New York always looks like a movie set to me,” he told me years ago. It seemed so bizarre at the time, but now I’ll often catch myself looking at something — last night, for example, a restored waterfountain set against a  pre-war Village backdrop — thinking, wow, looks like a movie. 

I have truly a ridiculous amount to say on this topic — has there perhaps been a different NY for each stage of my life? — but…I’m too darn hot.

And now I’ve written an entire post about the weather. Can’t get more Canadian than that.

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1. Blogs

All around the pond is green, with just a few homes and barns perched on the grassy hills. It’s a beautiful –breathtaking –spot.  I floated on my back a bit and stared up at the perfect blue sky.

I haven’t written in awhile, and partly it’s because I’ve been on vacation, but partly it’s because my father has brain cancer.

I’m going to admit something really dumb: for years and years I’ve heard of people who seem healthy and then get told they have cancer, and suddenly they’re truly, incredibly, sick.

And I never understood it.

I always kind of wondered: What if they hadn’t been diagnosed? Would they still be a healthy-seeming person if they just never knew?

I told you upfront: stupid.

What I understand now is how the cancer grows before the symptoms present. And then once they present, with some kinds of cancer, things change quickly.

So, to go from my mom’s timeline: on July 9th my parents were dancing together at a wedding. Then came a strange numbness down my father’s right side, & then he hit a parked car & then the MRI & then the biopsy & now the treatment, and he’s been in bed all weekend, weak, and he knows though I don’t say that you can hear the cancer in his voice.

I’ll be home in a few days. Though there’ll be nothing for me to do, really. And then we’ll be off again way out west. And then Eva starts kindergarten and I start my final year of midwifery training and both feel like varying degrees of overwhelming, though I know we’ll muddle through. (Have I mentioned before that Eva’s [public] education will be conducted in French? French. I picture her singing “Frere Jacques” over and over, which tells you just about all you need to know about my French).

So you can see about floating in the pond with blue sky above. I’m going with the idea that if I can pack in enough of those moments I’ll be able to take them out later, try them on again at some future date, feel & touch that watery, floating feeling.

I’ll let you know if it works.

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It’s good. Really good. It means a whole new “package,” apparently: another cover, another launch, another chance. 

Very, very exciting. Even though I love the old cover & even though I have become a huge fan of Overlook Press, still, this is clearly a very good thing. June 2010: a summer read. I have to say, when I was writing Sima  I never really envisioned it on a beach blanket. But apparently it’ll be marketed that way.

It must be all those boobs.

Meantime: things continue on here, the daily routines similar each day while, at the same time, the girls change constantly. It’s an interesting contradiction. In the last few weeks Eva’s favorite colour went from pink to purple to pink again, plus white. Horses are out; dogs and cats are in.  She dresses herself easily, and has even started dressing Tillie–or rather, suggesting ensemble combinations which Tillie, unbelievably opinionated & strong-willed, mostly rejects, inevitably selecting something from Eva’s closet instead.

So Tillie trips along in size 4 dresses and Eva looks out for her. This weekend I watched in amazement as Eva carefully helped Tillie climb rocks, one arm protectively around Tillie’s back. They are both big into rocks, and right now Victoria’s best rock-spots are dotted with amazing blue wildflowers, an incredible setting which gives Tillie’s drowning-dress-look a very pleasing Little House on the Prairie aesthetic.

Another first this weekend: we had the kind of dinner party we all remember our parents having. You know, where the children amuse themselves in one room and the adults in another. As opposed to the kids being the entire focus. Don’t get me wrong: I like focusing on my kids. But my generation takes it too far sometimes. We’re so serious, so concerned, so protective…the other day I listened to Tillie crying out for freedom from the constrains of her car seat: “Up Mommy now! Up Mommy now!” and thought that when I was her age, if I were bored in the car I’d, well, go for a walk. I’d climb over the back seat, hang out in the “backity-back” –station wagons basically had playrooms–or crouch down in that soft spot behind the seats. 

My father thinks the car seat is basically my invention –he’s chided me more than once for my “obsession” with car seats. “Admit it,” he’s told me, watching me strap in the girls for what he’d consider a short enough ride to not warrant seat belts, “everyone has their shtick, and this is yours.”

I’ve tried explaining that the car seat isn’t my shtick–it’s a law. And sure we’re all in favour of making the roads safer for our children. But our kids have lost some freedom, too. So Saturday night we toasted to the Penguin deal out on the deck while a roving band of kids made a mess of the basement. Aahh. New starts, and a revival, too.

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“It made Jonathan Safran Foer ,” I was told.

Which is maybe a bit of an exaggeration, since as I recall Safran Foer debuted on the cover of the NY Times Book Review. Still: an amazing program and an amazing opportunity: the chance to get my novel into the hands of readers across the country.

So here I am, trying to balance personal appeal, story interest, and Jewness into a 2-minute package.

The trouble of course: if they do choose me, how the hell will I get the time off clinical placement?  And why does it feel so much like being pulled in different directions? And why does it feel so much like guilt? (Am I abandoning my book? Shirking my clinical training? And don’t get me started on my family…)

One step at a time. I had to audition–I just couldn’t not try for it– even though it means flying to NYC on Saturday and returning on Monday in time to start my next placement.  The good news is that if I lose I win– if no one wants me, no conflict arises. And if I win I win, too, because then my book gets more than life-support — a new jolt, defib!

(No: that’s not my midwifery-training talking, just the late nights watching Gray’s Anatomy.)

2 minutes. 2 minutes. Breasts, breasts, Jews, Jews, Mother, daughter. Anything else you think I should include?

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1. Camel vs caramel, and where are the reviews?!

Feast or famine: at Yale we had 6 attendees, at R.J. Julia’s, 22. But at both the conversation was hilarious and wide-ranging…get a group of women together (men are far and few between at my readings, it seems) and read a passage about bras and breasts, and the conversation flows. Throw in midwifery, and it really takes off.  Readers confess to me like a latter-day Sima: their first bra-excursion (horrid; thrilling) their first birth (unknown ectopic; transcendent home birth).

What I never expected and what is entirely wonderful and thrilling: writing a novel has opened the door for all these women’s stories. What a priviledge, for me, to listen.

Meantime, my own girls are strung-out. By which I mean: dreadlocks and red-rimmed eyes from days of travel and too many new toys vying for their loyalty. It took an hour to get them to bed tonight — we’re staying at my sister’s, and therefore at my nearly-eight (can she really be almosy 8?!) year-old niece’s Sophia’s house. The plan was for Sophia to sleep on the top-bunk, and Eva on the bottom, and Tillie in the toddler-bed, which had been airlifted (well, on the shoulders of  Jordan and my brother-in-law, that is) from the basement for that purpose.

Within two minutes of getting them all into the bedroom, already an hour and a half past bedtime, this somehow shifted to Sophia in the toddler-bed and Eva and Tillie on the bottom bunk. Which might have been fine. Except: Tillie was feeling chatty.

“Hi Sister!” she kept saying, her grin wide to be sleeping beside her beloved big sis.

Getting a kid to sleep is often a war of attrition. Eventually, sleep wins. But it ain’t always pretty.

Tomorrow we’ll head back into the big city. A few book club events, including my mother’s Hadassah chapter, and then a quick return to Victoria. And to work. In May I’ll be with a family physician who specializes in well-woman care and abortions, in early June with a Victoria obstetrician, and then until August at a birth centre outside Edmonton.

In my weeks off I have become increasingly confident about my skills. So, obviously, I’d rather not have them tested again. Ever.

 How about I never write and never work but instead tour around and listen to women tell me their stories?

It could be tempting. But for the dreadlocks…

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1. On the road

In other news, I’m enjoying a short break from midwifery school. Hanging around the girls all the time has been fantastic. Albeit tiring today, as both came into bed at 3am. Which left me wide awake, snuggled in between them but unable to sleep as I sought to remember, and eventually did, Yul Brynner’s name.

(Come on–like you have so many better things to think about at 3am?)

Why Yul Brynner? Well, the girls and I have been watching a lot of Annie. And I kind of assumed that the bald-singing-Daddy Warbuck’s was himself Yul Brunner. I mean, how many bald musical-stars are there? Well, in 1982 apparently there were at least two.

I have mixed feelings about Annie. As I told a friend, it does serve the purpose of helping our children distinguish  between abusive-but-ultimately-well-meaning-if-totally-ineffective-alcoholics and  true sociopaths. Always an important distinction. And: Annie is smart and brave and kind, defender of stray dogs and crying children, and ultimately, too, Annie is a celebration of the love between fathers & daughters.

And the music is simply fabulous. Really. Just try this, & you’ll remember.

(Oh lord, I seem to be blogging about Annie.)

But here’s the thing: yesterday for the first time Eva understood that Annie’s “real” parents died. “Died?! They died?!”

What surprised me, actually, was realizing that she hadn’t picked up on that before. And her clear distress hit on something that I’ve been wondering about for years, as we’ve watched any number of children’s movies and certainly as we’ve read classic fairytales  – is it right to introduce evil to our children? Is it our needs we’re meeting, or theirs?

I caught the tail end of a CBC interview with Neil Gaiman, the author of Coraline the other day. Responding to a question about the function fairytales serve, Gaiman quotes G.K. Chesterton, who apparently said,  ”Fairytales do not tell children that there is a boogeyman. Children know there is a boogeyman, they know there are monsters, they know there are dangerous things. What is important is to tell them that the bad thing can be beaten.”

I think I agree. Mostly. Still, I squirm when I see those orphans, or Dorothy watching the sand run through the hourglass in the Wicked Witch’s dungeon, or the dog-catcher in Lady & the Tramp.

 And don’t even get me started on Bambi.

Perhaps I’ll bring my inner-debate to tonight’s book club. Which would fit for me my typical book-club participant experience, where you chat about the book for 5 minutes and then let the converstion wander marvelously. Meantime: Tomorrow.

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Okay? Okay.

But who’s kidding who: I haven’t written in a bit because I simply don’t have much book news. I gave an embarrasingly long interview to an Australian ex-pat who has made it his business to interview every Jewish author around. I’m not sure what possessed me to go on, and on, and on, though I suspect his accent was to blame. At any rate, he’s posted not just the transcript but also the audio. I will never ever listen to it myself, but it’s nice that it’s out there for Jewish author posterity –in excellent company.

This coming Friday I have an interview with Jewish Week.  A bit of a coup for me–it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that my mother has been salivating over the idea of a Jewish Week review ever since the publishing contract got signed. When none came, she simply called them herself. She got the name & email of the book reviewer and passed it on to me; I sent an email explaining the situation re: my mother and my novel. Right away I got a response, and now an interview. Score one for the home team.

In other news: my midwifery placement ends this week, I’ve got a final on Tuesday, I have no idea where my summer placements will be (the idea is to work with obstetricians, nurses, and family physicians, but UBC has been mum on the details), and I have now committed to go to NYC the last weekend of May for Jewish Book Network auditions, which means I will parade around showing how Jewish and appealing I am while representatives from Jewish Book Fairs all across North America watch, deciding whether I am worth bringing to their venue. Which begs the question: if I am chosen, how will I get the time off? (And if I’m not?!)

All the usual craziness. But the real big good news: Tillie is toilet-trained! One month shy of 2, and totally brilliant. And with two kids in underwear, nothing can stop me. 

(Not even being out of Cheerios mid-week–even this trial I can face. So off to the supermarket I go–)

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Gulp.

It also means, realistically, that I am staying with family and having a lovely time. The highlight so far: Eva and her six-year-old cousin, Maia, broke into some secret chocolate stash while supposably asleep in bed. They were caught. Maia was whistle-clean and innocent as could be; Eva had a chocolate ring around her mouth, a bed littered with wrappers, and, inexplicably (she was as surprised as I was by the discovery), chocolate smeared all over her back. (Yes, I’m sure it was chocolate.) The hijinx of close cousins—I had to fake the stern reprimand, pleased as I was to see those two reunited again.

But back to books.

Kicked off the tour last Thursday night with a wonderful launch in Victoria. We packed the gallery and sold-out of books. Jordan and I only moved to Victoria 3 1/2 years ago, so it was particularly gratifying to see so many great people there–it’s become home, and as far away as Victoria is from Boro Park, it felt like the right place to launch Sima.

Over the next two weeks I’ll be doing several readings, mostly in lingerie stores. I’m curious to see what that feels like — certainly they’ll be the first lingerie-literary readings I’ve attended.  Meantime, my publicist is picking me up early tomorrow morning to taxi around Toronto signing books. I love the word “publicist” almost as much as the verb “taxi,” so I am looking forward to the adventure. Plus, I hear it’s an author trick: once you’ve signed them the bookstore can’t return them. Shhh–don’t tell.

Do come out for lingerie and literature if you live anywhere near Toronto, Waterloo, NYC, Philly, or DC. (But if you are planning on coming to a reading, don’t look at the online pictures: I’m going to be wearing that dress over and over again….).

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