In the meantime, while there's plenty I'd like to be able to say about this, it's not the kind of thing I can put here without a lot of thought and censorship. Everything honest or truthful that I could say about it would be unkind, and possibly unfair.

Thanks to everyone who expressed concern over the last few days, I appreciate it. I hate to segue from "crisis! crisis!" to "let's just forget all that, shall we?" since it feels so abrupt and incomplete, but--let's just forget all that, shall we? For now, anyway. That might be a story I can tell some other day.

And one of my Mom's dogs died.

In a rational universe, those two sentences would never go in the same blog post. But, there they are.

Keep in mind that it happened on Sunday and I found out about it on Tuesday....

In a normal family, I guess, people might go to the hospital, get flowers and cards, hug. In a normal family, I probably would have found out on Sunday. So let's work with the assumption that I don't have a normal family.

What, on god's green earth, do you do for two people in that situation who seem to abhor nothing so much as having to talk to people? Where is the boundary between uncaring and intrusiveness?

I'm not feeling anywhere near as flippant as the above makes it sound, though exasperation is there in large measure. The truth is, I usually have no idea what to think or feel where they are concerned, having lived with them for so long in Solitude. I have no idea what they think or feel. Or want. Or need.

(I asked. She said "nothing." With my Mom nothing might mean nothing, or it might mean "I want you to know already," or it might mean "I don't want to trouble you," or all of the above, or maybe even she doesn't know. In any case, she said "nothing.")

I'm going to have to tell Frances about Lexi before my nephew's birthday party on Saturday. She'll be looking for her.

And I'm going to have to tell her about her grandfather, in terms a four (and-a-half) year old can understand.

I'm not used to thinking of either of them as mortal, at least not in the ordinary way. I'm diabetic, there's a fair statistical chance that they both will outlive me. They've both been in disgustingly good health all the way along (unlike their daughter) and I always just assumed they'd be there when I was gone.

Now I remember that my Dad's father died of a heart attack, when he wasn't much older than my Dad is now.

It's all a whole lot more complicated than it should be. I wish I could just be worried and scared and sad, and not confused and exasperated too.

Not that this needs to be said out loud (or written publicly); the briefest of glances at my romantic resume would make it very plain. I suck at relationships.

There was a period of a few months after the separation when I believed this so intensely that I thought I did not want to be in a relationship--a traditional, monogamous, public relationship--ever again, and made decisions on that basis. (Lesson Learned #1: Don't make decisions in the first few months after a separation. It's a bad idea. Trust me. Whatever seems like a good idea right away, if it really is a good idea, will still seem like a good idea in six months to a year when your head starts to straighten out.) I even flirted with the idea of open relationships and polyamory, though the opportunity to put it into practice never appeared. Good thing, too.

You're all familiar with Attachment Parenting, so I'll assume you are at least minimally aware of the (misused) theoretical basis of it, Attachment Theory, which argues that an infant's relationships with its primary caretakers in the first two years of life will influence the kinds of relationships that infant will seek for the rest of its life. (Cue sense of foreboding and doom.) This may be overstated; later events and relationships can both ammeliorate and exacerbate those early lessons. But the evidence still shows a clear relation between the style of attachment between a caregiver and an infant and the quality and duration of relationships (including friendships and romantic relationships) that infant will form as an adolescent and adult. Most people (app. 60%) have a secure attachment style as adults, meaning they are low in jealousy, high in trust, can self-disclose, and have relatively happy, stress- and conflict-free, and long-lasting relationships. Bracketed on either side of the majority are two quite different kinds of minority: those with insecure attachment styles, and those with avoidant attachment styles. Insecure attachment styles in adults result from relationships with caregivers that were too close, too clingy, and did not allow the infant to differentiate or form an independent identity; the adult then forms relationships that are jealous, possessive, even obsessive, high in stress and conflict, with difficulty in ending bad relationships and tolerating absences and separations. Adults who had unresponsive caregivers as infants or caregivers who were inconsistent in their ability to meet the infant's needs develop avoidant attachment styles. These adults end up in relationships where conflict is low because self-disclosure is nearly absent; they feel they don't particularly need or want closeness, don't depend on other people, tend to have short relationships, and are very low in possessiveness and jealousy.

It occured to me, sometime in the months following the separation when my head began to clear, that declaring myself 'over' relationships and going for casual or multiple relationships would, in my case at least, be nothing more than giving free reign to an avoidant attachment style that had never done me any favours before and wasn't going to start making my life any better now. It was just a way of hiding from all of the things about myself I didn't want to change or confront.

Some people do that, and it works for them. But if I'd gone on in that direction, absolutely the thing to do would have been to keep Frances separate from all aspects of my romantic life forever. It would have been traumatic for her to constantly be getting attached to new "important" people who inevitably leave.

Which leaves me in a much trickier position: someone who would like to be in a 'regular' relationship but whose track record does not inspire much confidence in the success of that endeavour; certainly not enough for me to just throw Greg and Frances together.

I could just not have relationships, but that too strikes me as a way of giving in to the avoidant attachment style and the conditioning that produced it. Not good.

I could just keep it all compartmentalized indefinitely and hope that "permanence" would announce itself to me one day, with gongs and cymbals and banners and an interpretive dance, so I couldn't miss it. As if permanence and the lack thereof were an external condition, and not a partial result of my own behaviours (including the choice of who to be involved with). But this strikes me as wishful thinking, mostly, as well as a shirking of responsibility.

I've decided to do the much harder thing: unlearning all that conditioning that left me with the avoidant style in the first place so I can eventually have some confidence in the permanence of a relationship, to the extent that fate doesn't intervene (Mac Trucks are not particularly responsive to reasoned argument). Then the worries about introductions and the eventual traumas following from them will be much, much less important. (Which is not the same thing as unimportant.) I think, this way, there is the potential for everyone to be happy and to get what they need.

I wonder why this doesn't come up as an option or a suggestion more often in the discussions on this topic that I've read--that if a divorced or single parent is going through a lot of short-term relationships to which the kids are intimate participants or observers, the best course of action may be for the parent to honestly explore the reasons for this pattern and work on fixing it (and in the meantime, keep the kids minimally involved). Doesn't it seem like a good idea? Yet all of the discussion revolves around whether or not you should introduce the kids, and how evil and selfish you are for wanting to introduce the kids, and how much damage it will do to introduce the kids to someone who ends up disappearing. Instead of what kind of relationship the parent is looking for, and how the parent should best go about achieving that, and how much involvement kids should ideally have in that kind of relationship.

It all comes back to the same place these days: I need to learn how to be different. This is yet another way it will make me a happier person and a better mother, not to mention a better partner.

2. Why am I in bed, and the sun is still up? (Sometimes, with an imperious finger pointing towards the window.)

3. But it's not even dark yet!

4. I don't want it to be bedtime.

5. But I have to finish my project. See?

6. But I didn't get to play outside today!

7. (after lying in bed for two minutes) Mummy? Mummy, I have something to tell you. I tried to sleep, Mummy, but I just can't.

8. Mummy, you forgot to say goodnight to the duck/Bella/Ella/Sishi/other stuffed sleep-time friend.

9. Mummy, my finger still hurts!

10. Mummy, I love you. Can I have a hug?

(I figure so many of you are BlogHering, even if you're not there, that I'll wait the heavy posts until sometime next week. Happy weekend!)

Frances: I love my Mummy. I love my whole family!

C: That's nice.

Frances: I love you too. You are my sister.

C: Aww...I love you too. (hug)

Frances: You are my honourary sister.

C: Yeah.

Frances: Honourary means nice.

Plus only the current generation. And no one born afterwards....

Umm.... So the first question is, how do I distract all of you from my shitty, haphazard math?

And the second question is, if 0.000000007 is my share of the answer, then what is my question?

For those of who you are not steeped in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, let me fill in the backstory (giant spoilers ahead. Continue at your own risk): according to that series, see, aliens built a supercomputer to figure out the meaning of life, the universe and everything. The answer the computer comes back with after x eons have passed is "42." "What? That's it?" The alien scientists complain. "Well, you didn't ask me for the question," says the computer; so the aliens, who happen to be little white lab mice pretending to be dumb animals in lab experiments to get their own way, build a really gigantic supercomputer called Earth in order to figure out what the question is. The planet is then blown up by a Vogon construction crew putting in a new intergalactic bypass just moments before the question was to be revealed.

So technically, you know, 0.000000007 of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, is mine; and so are the questions leading to it. And yours too, of course. You have your own 0.000000007.

Victor Frankl argued that people are meaning-seeking animals, who can be happy in just about any circumstance so long as they believe that it means something. He believed this after watching who lived and who died in concentration camps during WWII. Psychologists today are making similar conclusions with more scientific rigour and fewer anecdotes: People with a strong religious faith are happier than those without, and this can be explained in part by the belief of the religious folks' that there is a God who has a purpose or plan for their lives, for instance. I am not at a stage where I am able to convince myself that there is a benevolent, omnipotent God out there who has a plan for my life, and I'm not particularly interested in contorting myself into that shape, either. Still. I know I'm happier when I think I'm here for something, for some reason larger than accident and random chance. Even though I know that accident and random chance is the actual, literal, logical, rock-bottom truth, it makes me miserable and I hate it.

I've decided I'm going to make up my own meaning. It's just going to be my own 0.000000007, so not very much and not very important, but all mine nonetheless. And I've decided that the supercomputer had it right: 0.000000007 is just my answer, it's not my questions.

(I hope to god you all know this doesn't actually have anything to do with Douglas Adams. Right? Right. Good.)

What are the questions that my 0.000000007 is an answer to? Figuring that out feels kind of like writing a novel. You have this hazy idea of where you're starting and where you might end up, maybe, and a few flashes of scenes along the way, and the more you write it the clearer it looks although sometimes you have to go back and start the whole thing over or rewrite three chapters you thought were finished, and most of it looks murky and dark and you keep barking your shins on furniture you can't see, so you sort of flail along with an arm held out in front of you, probing for what comes next, whether it's hard or yielding, smooth or rough, high or low, warm or cold. Sometimes you see exactly what's going on but most of the time you're thinking, "I don't get it," or "What just happened here?" or "Aren't you dead?" or "I really thought that was a sofa." Or, "Goddammit, this is the neighbour's house!"

I have no idea what my questions are. It'll probably take me the rest of my life to figure it out, hopefully before the equivalent of a Vogon construction fleet demolishes me for a bypass. Right now I figure it's something like "How can I make a good family for myself and Frances?" and "What makes people and societies change for the better?" and "How do you get people to fall in love with a place?" But my subroutine has only run about halfway through, knock on wood, so gods only know what that'll look like by the end.

It's such a nice, small number, too. 0.000000007. Who could be threatened by that? We each get our own tiny, tiny little bit; and mine doesn't have to bother yours, and yours doesn't have to bother mine, and it's ok if we contradict. It's not The Meaning. It's not The Meaning of Everything. It's not The Plan. It's just a few questions that add up to a very small answer, but they're my questions and my answer. I find it strangely comforting to think that the meaning of my life may just be to come up with a whole bunch of questions, the answer to which all combined is me.

What are the questions that you are an answer to?

1. This is why I always say Frances doesn't look like me--because this is not what she looked like as a baby.

2. In the middle, with my big cousin S who I adored, and we were wearing matching dresses that my grandmother made us.

3. With my brother, in the brief span of years he was actually shorter than me.

4. Early highschool, with a Certain Reader of the blog, soaking wet after going on timberwolf falls at Canada's Wonderland. I spent a lot of my highschool summers there. I was probably about fifteen in this photo.

5. At the Casino night at the french school in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec. In this one, I'm 18.

6. Frances is in there, you just can't see her yet. (4 months) Plus, I know it looks like the perspective is wonky, or Erik and I are tiny, but I am 5'7" and wearing heels. My brother and his wife are just that tall. They now have a baby who is turning one in July and is, no lie, already heavier than Frances is at 4 1/2. We're meeting L for the first time in two weeks at his birthday party, and I can't wait to take a picture of the two of them together.

7. Me, 6 months pregnant on the top of Vesuvius in Italy. That was fun. I would have been 28.

(Invisible Photos)

8. Me in the hospital with Frances before they discharged her. Isn't she cute? Look at the pumpkin-orange skin and the pumpkin-round head and that ridiculously tiny yellow preemie outfit with the bonnet! Look at all that hair! Just ignore the tubes and wires, please.

9. Me at the Motherlode conference in October 2006. (Was it 2006?)

10. Divorce certificate, which I am still waiting to get in the mail but which was, according to the lawyer, granted in early June. (Have I mentioned that it takes forever in Ontario? Did you know that you must be legally separated for a year before you are allowed to be divorced? I know couples who were separated for longer than they were married. What is the point of this?) I'm hoping to get this piece of paper sometime this year, at which point I'll scan some portion of it and put it up.

(By the way, I haven't had any spam comments on the blog since sometime yesterday morning, and although I've had real comments posted since then it's making me nervous enough to say that if you're trying to use the comments form and it's not working, you can email me at andrea@andreamcdowell.com.)

Instead, I took Frances to Canada's Wonderland, where she is unfortunately still a few inches shy of the minimum height for most of the fun kiddie rides, including the toddler coaster, but where we had a great time regardless. She rode the rocket ships and the airplanes and we went on the helicopters and train together, and waited an hour to ride Scooby Doo's Haunted Mansion, and she got to ride on Scooby Doo again on the merry-go-round, and I took pictures and carried her around when she got tired of walking and wondered when I would remember that Frances can't finish an ice cream cone on her own and I'm better off getting one for us to share. Then we went to see the Dora and Boots show, and Frances joined the preschool mosh pit at the foot of the stage.

I took her to a Canada Day party and her first-ever fireworks and then listen to her ask me for the rest of the vacation if we were going to see fireworks again that day.

I brought her to the library and watched her play with other kids in the toy area while I browsed the non-fiction and got out a few titles. (I'm on a book fast until September--had I mentioned that? No new book purchases over the summer.) I got Frances her very own library card, which she brandished at other patrons. "I have a library card!" she told them excitedly in her non-library voice. "Aren't you lucky!" they told her. Later, she found a Dora book she has at home already: "I have this book at home!" she told another patron. "Wow!" they replied.

I watched her spend hours and hours playing outside with her beloved sister C.

And when she was with her Dad I spent most of a week with Greg. Back when I'd planned this vacation I was supposed to have spent the week doing a writing workshop, but it was cancelled at the last minute and I decided to take advantage of it. We went to Wonderland, where Greg (a coaster-phobe) was a good sport and let me drag him on a bunch of rides. I wrote 8,000 words of my novel and hammered out a few major plot issues, got a few other things ready to submit and followed up on a couple of others. We watched movies and went to see one of his friends play in an acoustic 80s cover band, and I spent an evening dancing for the first time in ... umm ... ten years? I used to love dancing in my early twenties. Then I married someone who categorically refused to do anything that even approached dancing. I ran, a lot. I spent some time down at the Don communing with nature. I also got air conditioning.

The air conditioning is a thirty-year-old window unit that my parents used in their first house when I was a baby. It has an "energy saver" switch. What do you suppose that meant in the 1970s? Am I going to crash the grid? Can I salve my conscience even slightly by telling myself that I am reusing? Probably not? At least I can sleep.

Now here I am, back at work, with probably seven weeks to go before school starts. Ack.

My life is great when I'm not at work.

Anyway. One of my Happiness Expert books said that the benefits of vacation generally disappear about a week after a return to work (and at least the level of restfulness completely vanishes for me by the morning after, since I can't get to sleep on time and then have to wake up early--I'm beat), but the psychology of savouring can help you get the most from good experiences.

The psychology of savouring! What next.

The Happiness Experts have even come up with some practices that increase savouring so you can hold on to the good stuff, including vacation, for as long as humanly possible. Which sounds good to me, especially the morning after the end of a really great vacation.

1. Share the good stuff with others. Talk about what you love and why.
2. Strengthen the memories. Take pictures, get souveniers, write it down.
3. Be proud and congratulate yourself/brag. My guess is this applies more to "I just won the Nobel prize!" than "I love the Behemoth!"
4. Focus your attention on the parts of the experience you want to remember and block out the rest of it.
5. Absorption: immerse yourself completely in the moment, don't think about what's coming next.

You'll have to take my word that I was repeating four and five to myself like a mantra, especially for the last few days. "Stay in the moment! Don't think about Monday! Pay attention!" And the photos I took will soon be printed and festooned liberally around the apartment and the cubicle (for the few remaining weeks I will have the cubicle), not to mention having already been plastered all over facebook. As for numbers one and two ... guess.

It's been a long time since I've posted one of these--those of you who are more recent readers may never have seen one. This is a CDC growth chart for girls from the ages of 2 to 20. The thick black line is the 50th centile, or the average height for girls; the lines farthest outside represent the 97th and third centile lines, respectively. The orange blob is Frances's current height. (You can click on the picture to expand it; the thumbnail is a little blurry.)

The history of Frances's growth (or lack thereof) has been obsessively documented over the past few years, and for those of you who are interested and haven't been reading since the beginning, there's a link, and here's one to an entry showing an old growth chart. But as you can see, Frances is not "normal," which has been defined by the wisdom of the statisticians for every human field as "between the third and the ninety-seventh percentile." She's not even close. She is, at four-and-a-half, approximately the same size as the average two-year-old, as I can see with my own eyes whenever we go to the park and some chubby stumbling toddlerish person of about the same height begins to follow her around.

There's nothing wrong with "normal," and there's nothing wrong with "not normal," when used in the statistical sense; all they really indicate is how common something is. Clearly a child of Frances's age and size is not common; is, in fact, exceedingly rare, on the order of about one in ten thousand. Most of those children will have common forms of dwarfism (which is defined, again, as any condition resulting in an adult height of less than 4'10"), such as achondroplasia or hypochondroplasia. The ultimate cause of Frances's short stature is not likely to ever be known. Whatever it is is that rare. Even within the rarefied world of dwarfism, she is not normal.

The problem begins when "normal" is conflated with "good" and "not normal" with "wrong," which is what often happens. "Normal" is a statistical term, when used properly; it should be not be a value judgment. No, Frances is not normal, but there is nothing wrong with her. I see strangers wrestle with this when they ask for her age. Some people (such as mike) believe that those who are not normal do not deserve to live. This becomes a statistical impossibility once you realize that however you constrict the gene pool, there will always by definition be a third and ninety-seventh percentile line, and by definition six per cent of the human race will always be outside those lines. If you eliminate the three shortest per cent of humans, or "fix" them to make them taller, all that will happen is that the third centile line on that chart will shift upwards, and three per cent of human beings will still be below that line--just a different three per cent, for different reasons. That's how statistics works.

Here is where I am generally expected to make something like the following argument:

"I don't care." (It's true, I don't, not anymore.) "Frances is bright, loving, affectionate, kind, funny, playful, well-behaved, polite, considerate and sweet. She has social gifts that will make up for whatever problems her height brings her."

It's not that this isn't all true. It is. But it's often read, taken, or even intended, as if Frances's other gifts (or the other gifts of other not-normal children) somehow make up for whatever is seen as their primary defect. It's not that Frances's height then becomes unimportant so much as she is then seen to have earned the right to exist as a short person by having other things to offer in compensation for it. This bothers me. What if she were vicious, violent, or stupid? Would she then not have the right to live as a short person, because she can't make up for it by being more-than in some other sphere?

What about autistic children? It often seems as if they 'earn' the right to be autistic if they have superior math skills. Children with Down syndrome seem to be able to 'earn' their lives by bringing happiness to other people. It isn't that the not-normal have a right to live because they are human, and alive, like the rest of us. Oh no.

Think of the last time someone objected to an argument on eugenics on the grounds of "what if one of them is the one to cure cancer?" What if they are? What if they're not? Do people born different in whatever way need to earn their right to live by making an extraordinary contribution? Can't they just be alive like the rest of us are alive, to enjoy a beautiful sunny day, the taste of ice cream, holding a loved one's hand? How do you measure the worth of your own life? By whether or not you're going to cure cancer?

Frances is nobody's object lesson. She is not here to teach you or me or anyone else anything at all. She doesn't have to make up for her small size by being sweet or sociable or smart. She is herself, as I am myself, and you are yourself, and no one has to do anything to validate their being. She is here to live a good life and be happy. Just like anyone else.

"Normal" is not the same as "good" and "not normal" is not the same as "wrong." We need to be careful that whatever it is we're fixing isn't for the sake of our own comfort. We already have a good model of "fixing" in place, the disease model, in which things that cause human suffering for whatever reason are corrected. A cleft palate is repaired not because it isn't "normal" but because it causes difficulty in feeding. Is there suffering? If yes, fix it if you can. If not, don't. Suffering is subjective. It's possible that one person with, for example, autism, will feel that they suffer with it and want to take a cure if one becomes available, and that someone else with autism will not. Why does it need to be definitive? Why do we feel like we need to have The Answer on What To Do With Autism? Or deafness, Down syndrome, whatever.

Fixing something implies it was broken; when it comes to people, it behooves us to be certain that there is something demonstrably broken before it is repaired. Or we risk trying to 'fix' what is already whole, and leaving all the brokenness in place--in ourselves, the beholders whose discomfort tells us that whatever is broken is at least in part in our own heads.

~~~~~

*It's an in-joke. Tell me if you get it in the comments section.

This post is part of Julie's Hump Day Hmm for this week, on the subject of fixing people.

Four years.

Four years to learn it. Four years to unlearn it. Fifty-four damaged years in the middle.

That depresses me.

Why does change have to take so long? Why can't there be a pill, an antibiotic for the mind, something to selectively wipe out unhealthy patterns over the course of a week or so, with a handful of side effects? Why does it have to take us so long to decide to change in the first place? Why can't human beings come with service lights, like cars?

Give me one good reason. Except that we're not cars.

Did you know that, according to studies quoted in the same book, oxytocin may be less of a bonding hormone than an unbonding hormone? When you look at its role in other species where a mother and her offspring imprint on each other, such as sheep, oxytocin is not released for the first litter, only subsequent ones. The theory is that oxytocin allows the brain to reorganize itself, unlearn all the other patterns of affection and association, thereby making room for the new litter. In human beings, oxytocin is released during labour, breastfeeding, and orgasm for both sexes (men experience the release of a different hormone on the birth of their children, to similar effect). Think of the implications: oxytocin might allow you to unbecome the person you used to be, in order to allow you to become the person you are going to be next. If you are a mother and you recall those first few months after your first child was born, and remember that sense of not being the same person, of being reorganized and essentially turned upside down and shaken out by the feet, that feeling is very close to the actual neurological truth. Oxytocin rewrote you.

It does the same thing when you fall in love, by first enabling you to unfall in love with the last partner, allowing you to change to accommodate the new connection.

What I want to know is, why can't there be an oxytocin for other times when you need your brain rewired? Why can't there be a pill or a shot of some other hormone that will make your brain plastic and flexible enough to unwrite old damaging scripts so that new scripts can be written over top of them, in less time and with less struggle? It would make everything so much easier. Just think: I'm sick of losing my temper this way. Or, I'm tired of falling in love with jerks. Or, I don't like how needy I am. And then you get a jolt of a little something that doesn't just paper over it or mask it with chemicals, but gets rid of that part of you a little faster and a little easier so you can replace it with who you want to be a little sooner than you otherwise would.

I don't care if it's cheating.

Change is always a tough, long slog; but there are times when it doesn't feel like it, and other times when it really, really does. You end up being a little kid in the backseat of your own head, going, "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" And at the same time, the driver shouting "No!" for the ten millionth time and acutely aware of the five hundred miles left before you can next get out and pee.

Sometimes it doesn't help that you've already driven a thousand miles, all you can see are the five hundred left to go. And there you are, putting along in your fuel-efficient car at a responsible speed, thinking, "Where is my jet car? Weren't we all going to get jet cars in the 21st century? Where is my transporter? Why can't I travel faster than the speed of light?"

At those times, even seeing all the people stranded outside of smoking cars in ditches on the side of the road, having a picnic with apparent unconcern, will not appease you.

We watched the sky get darker and darker, and the lights on the midway rides shone brighter and brighter, and eventually we snuggled down beneath our blanket, and the practice fireworks started going off. "Wow," said Frances. "Fireworks are cool."

Then the first real one went off. Her eyes widened and her jaw dropped. "Wow."

For the whole show she alternately watched with her mouth open, murmured words of amazement, covered her mouth with a hand. "They look like flowers," she said. "Ooooh. Sparkles in the sky! They're so pretty." Sometimes, she would break into spontaneous applause. Watching her face was as entertaining as watching the fireworks--and they were very pretty. I put the camera away. I wanted to just watch her and remember her face as it was, and not be distracted by focus and framing.

We walked back to the car afterwards talking about which fireworks were our favourite. "Did you like our girls staying up late party?" I asked.

"Yeah."

She was asleep within five minutes of getting into the car, and it took us an hour to get home--forty-five minutes of that getting out of the parking lot. But it was worth it, to have Frances wrapped up in a blanket on my lap, fireworks lighting up her face with rose and gold and violet, all open with wonder.

It just so happens that the print material in question was the latest issue of Lapham's Quarterly, Book of Nature. My book of nature now has a wee bit of nature smeared on the back cover.

Blog-wise, that's all I have for you today, as Frances and I will be meeting up with friends at farms and buying too many butter tarts, and probably watching a movie--very likely The Sword in the Stone, which is the one we watched yesterday. But in the meantime, I have a guest column up at Literary Mama about the joys of mothering with type 1 diabetes. Enjoy. :)

It was Erik. "Daddy!" said Frances, and latched herself around his neck.

"I was doing some shopping too," he said, "but I didn't get anything."

For a few minutes we chatted by my car while Frances hugged her Daddy. Then he tried to say goodbye so we could head home. Frances's face knotted up and she sobbed.

It's hard for her to see her Daddy for just a few minutes and say goodbye again when she misses him so much. I asked her if she would like to spend some extra time with Daddy before going home, and she nodded, and he suggested going to a playpark (it was sunny by then--though it's raining again now), and she nodded again, so that was the new plan. Except that when I got up to get into my car, she sobbed again.

"What would you like to do?" Erik asked her.

"I don't think we should do that," I said. "Let's just go with our new plan." I didn't want her to feel that she was being forced to choose sides, to pick which parent she wanted to spend time with that afternoon.

Poor little bunny. When she's with her Mummy she misses Daddy; when she's with Daddy she misses Mummy; they're never in the same place at the same time except maybe when she runs into them in the middle of a Best Buy parking lot. It's hard enough for a grown-up to deal with. But she is just a little girl who must desperately wish sometimes that things were still the way they used to be.

It's freedom for me, but it's a huge loss for her.

Soon she will be here again and we will watch a new movie together on the couch, and eat some snacks. I'll snuggle her up and wonder what to say and how, and wish there was some way I could make it all right.

It wasn't supposed to work out that way. I'd signed up for a writing workshop that week, and it got cancelled. That's life.

Then Frances will come back and stay with me for a week. And then she'll go stay with her Dad for a week. And so on, right until school starts up again in September.

On the one hand, I know that time off will be good for me, if I have the sense to use it to recharge, catch up on my sleep and my reading, see Greg and my friends, and in general not be a single mother for half the summer. On the other hand, how am I supposed to recharge, catch up on my sleep and my reading, see Greg and my friends, and in general not be a single mother, when I'm paralyzed by missing Frances?

I won't need to get her ready for daycare in the morning or wash her clothes or buy her food or pack her snacks. I won't need to corral her toys every evening or sweep the day's sand imports off the floor. I can run outside every night those weeks, if I want to; I can up and leave for the store or a movie, like I could before she was born. All kinds of possibilities, assuming I'm not mired eyeball-deep in a dark funk.

The important thing is that it will be good for her. She misses her Daddy very much, and they need this extra time together. But, in advance--oww.

When I picked Frances up from daycare yesterday, she said something about growing up and not having anyone to take care of. I can't remember exactly how she put it, or why it came up.

"You might," I said. "You might decide to have babies and take care of them. Or maybe you will have pets to take care of, or a garden. Or maybe you will decide to be on your own and you won't have anyone to take care of. There are lots of options. You can decide when you're a grown up, if you want to take care of someone or not."

She thought about this. "I am going to have babies, and take care of them. And I will have a garden. And you will be there, to take care of me."

"That sounds lovely. I'd love that."

"Yes. I have three things I want to tell you, Mummy."

"Oh?"

"When I grow up, I will have babies to take care of. And I will plant a garden. And you will be there, to take care of me."

Taking care of that girl is exhausting and difficult, but I love it. The apartment feels wrong when she's not there. When there are no high-pitched impatient requests for apple juice refills or chocolate chip cookies before supper, no little outfits to put together, no socks covered with sweat and sand to pick off the floor, no families of stuffed toys to trip over by the sofa.

Saturday to Thursday, we will have our vacation. We will pack it full of fun, weather be damned.

I won't think again about the week after that until it gets here.

I used to have Frances's little lion chair set up with a stepstool placed beside it to hold snacks and drinks when she is watching a dvd. This ended on a day in the winter when we were both ostensibly home sick, yet Frances had, as always, a seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy. She was suspending herself off the big comfy chair beside her little set up, kicking her merry feet, and knocked her glass of apple juice all over the floor. Then she did it again.

I was tired and sick and did not want to drag myself off the couch to mop apple juice off the floor (again) and decided that we were going to get rid of the stepstool. (It wasn't the first time this had happened, just the first time this had happened twice in one day when I happened to be sick.) Her snacks and drinks could go beside her lion chair on the floor. Then they would be out of range of her feet when she was on the big comfy chair. I was, I'll admit, snappish and waspy when delivering this information to her--that's it! It's going, I'm getting rid of this thing, I'm not mopping any more apple juice off the floor because of this stepstool!--but the worst that was directed at her was that she should be more careful of where she was kicking.

This was several months ago and she still periodically assures me that she will never knock the apple juice over again.

It is, I think, a combination of traits: a high level of sensitivity, a very good memory, an eagerness to please which makes her miserable whenever anyone is unhappy with what she has done, and a blooming perfectionism relating to her own behaviour. She is determined to be flawless; then everyone will love her and be happy with her and she can be happy too.

It is the hardest thing about being her mother.

Now, I know that all my mother-readers are dealing with temper tantrums, a desire not to please, what seems like deliberate obtuseness, and so on; and so dealing every day with a child who is bound and determined to behave perfectly does not seem like such a great trial, and it does make the day-to-day management of the household much easier. But it can't possibly be healthy for her.

I ask myself if I am doing anything to contribute to this, and the answer is no, I don't think so. At least I can't think of anything. I try to be cheerful and stable around her; on the rare occasions that I'm not and she tries to comfort me, I thank her and tell her that it isn't her job to make me feel better. (Including headaches and stomach bugs.) If I snap at her, I apologize and tell her that it wasn't her fault; I've tried to reassure her all along that the divorce had nothing to do with her. I do everything I can to support her relationship with her father. I listen whenever she wants to tell me how much she misses him, and how she loves him most. I don't tell her everything will be all right or she will feel better soon; I let her be sad whenever she needs to be. I reign myself in constantly in those rare instances when she approaches misbehaviour: when she whines or stalls or doesn't listen, which is as bad as it gets, the most I've ever had to do is count to three. Even that is often very upsetting for her. All the while I'm telling her that even when I am upset at something she's done, I still love her more than anything; and yet she still acts as if she believes that love will be withdrawn from her and she will be abandoned if she is not perfect.

When, the other night, she was not listening to me and putting her pyjamas on, and I counted to three and she still didn't listen so lost her bedtime story, and I put her to bed, the first thing she said to me the next morning when I woke her up for school, even before "good morning," was, "I promise I will listen to you today, Mummy. Do you love me, even when I don't listen?"

The burden of perfection is far too great for her thin shoulders, but how do I get her to put it down?

The literature on children and divorce presupposes a normal child--an obstinate and wilful creature who frequently and joyfully experiences anger. I was told to expect regression, difficulties with potty training, tantrums, problems sleeping, regression in language abilities, feeding problems.

"Preschoolers can display a wide range of emotional behaviour in a short time. Anger is the most common way for preschoolers to show pain and distress. Hitting, kicking, throwing things, pinching and spitting at other children are common ways for young children to express anger. ...

"Fearfulness is also a sign of anxiety or tension in preschoolers, particularly when it is in response to events the child used to feel comfortable with. Troubled preschoolers may also show sadness, withdrawal or lack of energy." http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/publicat/mh-sm/divorce/4_e.html

But Frances is not a normal child. She just rolled with the punches and kept on going, a little sadder and more subdued sometimes. She misses her Daddy and her old house. Sometimes she has nightmares that he came to get her, and then left again. They wake her in the middle of the night, inconsolable. I miss her old nightmares about dragons who burn her up.

"Despite their considerable physical and emotional achievements, preschoolers have a limited ability to understand separation and divorce. For example, because they understand relationships in self-centred terms, children may feel that they are the cause of certain events. Children often believe that a parent's worries and anxieties, and perhaps even the divorce itself, are their fault....

"Children may think that they are being abandoned by their mother, unloved by their father or that they are being punished for angry feelings....

"Children experience a significant loss when one parent is less involved in their lives. Not only will they often miss that parent's presence and affection, but some of their physical and emotional needs may not be met. They often have overwhelming fears that both parents will leave them."

I wonder, sometimes, if that is why she so needs to be perfect. Why those tiny words, those little grains, lodge so deeply and stick in her memory for months. Does she think she is being punished, that she was bad? Is she afraid that she will lose one of us for real if she is not good? If so, where did it come from? Does she really think that if she doesn't listen to me for a few minutes I will stop loving her?

"Personality is a major factor in development and plays an important role in a child's reaction to divorce. By the time children are 3 to 5 years of age, most parents can recognize the ways their children cope with stress. Some children sulk, others 'talk back' or get angry, still others become overly submissive or obedient."

I remember when she was a baby with reflux and everyone else seemed to think she was difficult, that her crying was temperamental, but I could tell that she was actually a very happy baby who only cried when she was in pain. Sure enough, when the reflux got better and she learned to sleep on her own, the crying stopped almost overnight. Ever since she has been that unnervingly obedient, well-behaved, happy, sociable, affectionate little girl I write about so often. So I'm not claiming that the divorce or our reactions to it or the way I parent or Erik parents are solely responsible for her continual struggle to be perfect. But I worry that the sensitivity and the good memory and the desire to please have made it very easy for my particular little girl to blame herself for what happened, believe she is being punished and be terrified that if she is not always good from now on, she will lose one of us forever.And how do I know? How do I look inside that beautiful little blond head of hers to see whether she is really just the most resilient and naturally well-behaved child who has ever existed, or if locked in there somewhere is a void saying it's all my fault?