Okay, so that resolution didn’t work. Boo. But just as I decided to go to the gym yesterday even though I would only be able to work out for a half hour, I’m pushing forward with this resolution. I’m rebuilding.
Sometimes I feel guilty not writing because this project is one of the only constants in my adult life, and if I stop feeding it, I’ll have failed at something huge. Sometimes I feel guilty not writing because I know how weird and patchy my memory is, and I want to remember my kids when they were tiny and precious or older and precocious.
(Last night I was lying in bed, trying to find the words for the deep sense of satisfaction I get at night when we’re all in the bed. Three of us lying in the dark, slowly warming up under the covers, Maggie’s fingers flexing on my bare stomach as she transitions from feeding to sleeping. Later on when she gets big and kicky I’ll want her out of the bed, but for now? Heaven.)
Those two reasons kind of suck, though. Keeping some institution afloat is no reason to do anything, and reading about my babies is definitely not the same as holding them. Ultimately, the reason I want to write, and the reason I want to put organization and structures in place to make it easier for me to do so, is because I still love it. I still love putting it all into words and filing it away, deciding how it all went down and snatching at ephemera. I still love it.
Now that it’s taken days to write about New Year’s Eve, I hope expectations have not been raised as to the spiciness of the content. You’ll be disappointed.
Ever since the Boy left, I’ve had New Years Eves on my own: even the first one, when Blake had a sleepover at my parents. This has opened the door to a muted kind of partying, one that befits someone who lives in a different town from the one where the party’s at. I’ve been stranded at home, I’ve been dancing with my favourite band, I’ve done late-night runs to parties and returns before midnight, and last year we went to two proper parties. This year we had two babies, Sage and Maggie, and Maggie is a terrible, inconsolable night passenger. What with the prospect of Sage falling asleep and having to be loaded into the car (that kid is heavy), and Maggie crying all the way home, we decided to bow out of our invitations. It was a hard decision, as we’d had so much fun last year, but we’ve had a very long run of childfree NYE’s, so we couldn’t get too upset.
During the day we tooled around Toronto. We picked up Sage in the morning, and then drove around in the strangely warm day, looking at the Boxing Day sales and enjoying ourselves. We had brunch at Caplansky’s, where Mags was able to visit with the waitress who spent decades in Brampton and is also a doula. We bought some great books at She Said Boom, which I promptly gave away. We bought Mason a good overcoat and some nice suit elements at a fabulous store in Kensington, a place where the sales staff know your neck measurements just by looking at you and the prices are not so much fixed as starting points for the owner to use as a high watermark. The weather was so nice by this point that we were in the mood for a short walk to Lettuce Knit, where I dropped off a few birth announcements, then went across the street for screenprinted cards and boxes destined to package up the books.
The day before I had put out a call for a top hat, figuring that among the ranks of my stylish friends there would be one easily-accessible hat and then I could do my New Year’s baby photo shoot. We ended up borrowing two, one each from the households that had invited us out that night. There’s a beautiful symmetry in that.
The first was a fancy black fascinator from Stacy. We dropped by so that I could give her birthday and Christmas gifts, and then leave quickly (who wants to see people on the day they’re getting ready for a party?). Much to our surprise, she and Jim invited us in, and we all hung out in the kitchen while Stacy made appetizers for the lucky people who would be arriving later. I greatly admire the calmness they exuded, even as they worked to get everything together. It’s a calmness I can only aspire to, and it was beautiful. I was so glad they let us in.
We also dropped by Souzan’s for her grey top hat, which provided Mason a key accessory later that night. After we had come home and fed Sage, we tried to figure out if we were up for anything else. The city runs a family New Year’s program every year, and I have fond memories of it from when Blake was a few years old. Besides, there would be fireworks at 9, an entirely civilized hour for fireworks if you have small children. So we loaded up the car and went. Mason wore the baby, the grey tophat, his new coat and the leather gloves my mom got him for Christmas; I kept telling him that he looked like a Sensitive Millionaire Dad and random passerby were thrilled to catch a glimpse of Maggie’s little head poking through his coat. Unfortunately, he’d overestimated how much stretch was in the coat, so he became convinced that he had wrecked his new coat on its first day. This followed a long period in which he was anxious about how much money we had spent on clothes, which I suppose makes the stretching worry a logical follow-up.
But when we weren’t talking about the restorative effects of dry cleaning, we had a good time. Sage liked everything, from watching the skaters in the outdoor rink to dancing with me in the square to some techno teen queen. (I agree. It was hugely enjoyable, one of those no-expectations moments of sheer happiness.) He also liked getting to climb inside a fire truck, and we spent a fair amount of time watching the boots in the boot drive get pulled up to the roof of City Hall. We were killing time with a hotdog in a local coffee shop when the fireworks started, so we rushed out the door to watch. For some reason, I tend to bow out of any activity before the fireworks, so it’d been a long time since I stood in a crowd, oohing and wowing at the sky.
And then we went home, put Sage to bed, and experimented with some of Mason’s very special beers. It was a very good New Year’s Eve; exactly the kind of family night I picture when I imagine what it would be like if the Boy didn’t have Blake every year since the split. It’s good to know that we can find a middle ground between cocooning and mad rush back to the days before kids. That said, I think we’ll want to go to a party next year. Who will sneakily monopolize the karaoke at Zing Haus if not me?
