Area Woman Blows Gasket (8 page)

My Sunny Valentine

The other day Clara excitedly sang a song that she'd learned in her grade one classroom:

"Clara and Lucas sitting in a tree, K R M L B M G." I started chuckling.

"Why are you laughing?" she asked, her sweet heart-shaped face lit up with concern. "What does the song mean?"

"You didn't get the letters quite right," I explained, "but they're supposed to spell out 'kissing.'"

"Oh," she said, smiling in surprise. But she still didn't get why the song would be salacious and meant to tease. I can't
explain romantic love to a six-year-old, because it would be inseparable in her experience from familial love. She wants to
grow up to marry her father, and everything else is merely idiom and play.

I was reminded of that yesterday when she overheard talk of Valentine's Day and asked me what it was for.

"Well," I started brightly, opting for a religious explanation, "it's a special day in honor of Saint Valentine, who . . .
uh . . . er . . ." Of course, I couldn't remember who Saint Valentine was. "Anyway, it's a day when you tell people that you
love them."

"Why?"

Why
being the classic follow-up question of all small children on every subject, guaranteering that you gape like a carp while
you try to formulate an elaborate response to an issue that you haven't thought about. Why don't we tell people that we love
them on the other 364 days of the year? Hmmm, well, I guess we do, so . . . really it gets back to celebrating Saint Valentine,
who was . . . er . . . oh, never mind. Finish your Cheerios.

Clara plays with weddings and family units and the idea of boyfriends, and last summer we were surprised to find her group
playing Spin the Bottle in someone's basement, without having the faintest clue that the objective was the kiss, rather than
the spinning of the bottle, which they all thought was very cool. But I watch her and wonder:When do children genuinely grasp
the concept of romantic love? Do their parents see it coming? Are we prepared to take the revelation seriously after years
of watching puppy-like rehearsals?

Shortly after our conversation, the local paper ran a story about this question as posed by Dr. Wendy Austin, a University
of Alberta mental health expert who has written a book about early adolescent love. In
First Love: The Adolescent's Experience of Amour,
Austin argues that adults don't take teenaged infatuations as seriously as they should. Of course, it's difficult to take
the matter seriously when your child's love is the two-dimensional image of a pop star on a poster or the son of your best
friend, who you still remember being transfixed by Bob the Builder.

But Austin feels that adults misperceive how powerful their children's feelings are when they first develop a "crush" on someone,
and because they don't understand, parents risk alienating their children by not being able to guide them through a hugely
tempestuous experience.

I agree with this up to a point. But to judge from some articles and documentaries I've caught lately, it is teens themselves
who are currently avoiding romance. Instead, they're just checking out sex. Fellatio in school bathrooms. "Hooking up" for
quick screws rather than dating. Hanging out— not with their Romeos— but with guys that the girls call "friends with benefits."
This news, I must confess, has a tendency to make me want to gnaw straight through the kitchen table and then contemplate
where to send my daughter for safekeeping from twelve to twenty. Which nunnery? I don't remember caring whether or not my
mother took seriously my love for the singer Cat Stevens, but if I'd been giving him oral sex in the stairwell with no promise
of anything so much as a prom date in return, I think I would have wanted my mother to snap me out of it.

I certainly agree with Austin saying this: "We talk to young people about sexual health, but we don't really talk to them
about love."

We talk to them about the beginnings of love, its early sweetness— if not explicitly, then through the fairy tales we read
to them and the romantic Disney movies we bring home for them to watch, about Snow White, Pocahontas, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty,
the Little Mermaid. But these happy stories scarcely rehearse them for love's danger. Never mind the unexpected miseries that
overwhelm the cavalier heart. We let them play with fire without a warning. And far from maturing them or strengthening their
independence, the sex that now goes hand in hand with anything resembling love renders them all the more vulnerable.

To give all of yourself, both symbolically and actually, to a fellow child who recklessly throws you over is an absolutely
devastating experience, for which our culture shows little respect. I remember feeling deeply confused, in my early twenties,
by the fact that a woman who was widowed or divorced received solemn recognition for the love that she lost, but I did not.
I got dumped; I couldn't wear black. My love had less value. My heartbreak less meaning.

"To dismiss it as superficial, comical or trivial is to underestimate the power it has over the individual," notes Dr. Austin.

Alas, in our world, the length of time between first crush and anything approaching a ritual acknowledgment of love is growing
longer and longer, as twelve-year-olds have sex and thirty-year-olds remain unmarried. Eighteen years of hoped-for valentines
and broken hearts with no help in mending? Surely I must come up with an imaginative and caring way to prepare my little daughter
for that.

The Seven Circles of Heck

I recently had an opportunity to tour the seesaws and beehives of Italy, which I highly recommend as a travel itinerary if
you are (a) insane or (b) in the company of a toddler.

Traveling through Italy with a toddler is not hell, because the country is so divinely beautiful that even the many, many
beetles that get pointed out by one's teensy tourist are gorgeous to look at. Albeit, they are buzzing around some humdrum
playground in a village, forty-five minutes' drive from Florence, capital of the renaissance, to which you dare not venture
because your toddler will be creamed by a scooter in five seconds flat.

But still, if you combine the beauty of the Italian countryside with the unromantic tantrums of your offspring, you come up
with an experience that feels less like hell than heck.

I am now going to face myself in the mirror and concede that I just spent several thousand dollars on a trip to heck.

Why did I do this? Well, before Clara was born, my husband and I had lots of travel lust, and the spending power of gnats.
We drove to Cape Breton once, and went into debt on the gas.

Then Clara came along and we took a journey into the Twilight Zone of infant colic, which was free, and after that a tentative
foray to Florida, which resulted in the worst fight of our entire relationship, fueled by the huge irritability of being trapped
in a beachside motel with a teething baby.

So we were feeling rather unfulfilled in the realm of romantic adventure.

"I refuse to accept this," I told Ambrose. "I'm not going to drag around our neighborhood encountering the same dull vistas
over and over until I'm fifty."

Let's damn well go to Italy I'll stand among the ruins and fantasize about Jude Law. (Of course I didn't say that out loud.)

I bought some guidebooks and began to plan. The first obstacle I encountered, from a mother's point of view, was Rome. I wanted
to be in Rome, city of Fellini and Loren and Michelangelo and excellent sunglasses. But I couldn't figure out how to be in
Rome with a toddler.

What's in Rome? Priceless art, crazed traffic, mad crowds, stray cats riddled with disease, gelato as an all-meal substitute.
Who would be strolling with me through the gorgeous piazzas? A witless, zany loose cannon about eighteen inches high who would
rather fling herself into the Trevi Fountain than be deprived of a fifth ice-cream cone.

Are guidebooks useful on this point? No, they are not.

In one sense Rome is the perfect place for toddlers, because it's the birthplace of opera. Operatic theatrics combined with
indecipherable words: Toddlers should write opera, I've always thought. The plot could go something like this:

Hero strides into the Coliseum and comes across a mangy, half-dead cat: "The kitty, the kitty, I want to pat the kitty!"

Hero's mother: "No, no! It's too daaaaangerous!"

Hero (streaking over to glowering animal): "But I must, I must, the gods have willed it!"

Hero's mother (grabbing him away in fear): "The kitty's not friendly!" Both wail in sorrow/anger: "NOOOO/ BUT I WANT TOOOOO."

Breast beating and hair pulling ensue. Et cetera.

We decided to stay in Capranica, a village forty kilometers north of Rome, where Clara could run around unencumbered on a
hazelnut farm. Good plan. Gaze longingly at Rome from afar while small child mouths unripe nuts and poisonous mushrooms. This,
of course, necessitated renting a car at Rome's Fiumicino airport. Very bad plan.

My husband to Hertz car rental guy, upon arrival at the airport: "Good morning, here's our prepaid voucher for one thousand
dollars for the automatic car rental?"

Hertz guy (and here I paraphrase): "Ah yes, well thank you for the money, and have a nice time in Italy without your car,
which we didn't bother to procure."

"You don't have an automatic?"

"No; but we liked your money very much, thank you, and have a nice holiday."

Three days, many hundred dollars, and one car rental later (from the efficient and courteous Maggiore), Hertz coughed up a
Chevy Opel.

Good. Now it's time to get HOPELESSLY LOST on Italian roads for ten days with a small child in the back seat whose incipient
tantrum can be sensed like a darkening funnel cloud. At least there was a frisson of suspense in our traveling: "Can we make
it to the two-animal zoo in nearby Poppi before the thunder erupts? What's our contingency plan? A variety store in suburban
Viterbo that definitely sells ice cream, for sure."

So it was that we motored around Lazio and Tuscany, making many wonderfully spontaneous stops in supermarkets, with the occasional
bold strike into towns of actual note. Siena, for instance, where Clara found and ate a piece of chewed gum with a footprint
in it.

We also managed Tivoli, the lovely hill town east of Rome where the Emperor Hadrian built his magnificent country palace.
Hadrian's villa is a huge, rambling compound of evocative rubble rather like Rome's Palatine Hill. It can be toured with a
toddler provided that the toddler agrees to stay in her stroller. Clara opted, instead, to conceal herself in a hedge.

One notion that springs to mind, now that I've toured the shrubbery of Hadrian's villa, is that ruins and ancient monuments
require a daydreamy engagement on the part of the tourist. You need to enter into a kind of reverie, imagining the emperor
and his retinue striding past the marble columns. But small children force you to be highly attuned to the present, pondering
the whereabouts of nettles in the undergrowth, for example.

As a result, having no time to imagine the past, evocative rubble evokes very little, really. What you need, given how split
your attention will be, is totally explicit, in-your-face culture.

In other words, you need to hang out in a city like Rome.

When we finally dared to drive into Rome, which involved getting lost on the infamous Grande Autostrada circling the city
and being obliged to consult with two transsexuals in a bowling alley, we began to feel fulfilled at last.

Clara still occupied herself by examining dog poo and crawling under tables, but the magnificence around us was so vivid and
continuous that it hardly mattered. Whatever she did, my daughter, I still had my feast. I could sit with her all morning
in the traffic-free Piazza Navona and bask in the beauty of Bernini's fountains while she pried ancient horse manure from
the cobblestones.

I could eat the most voluptuous ravioli in walnut sauce while she poured salt into her water glass, and I could watch gorgeous
Romans saunter past while she rubbed peach-almond ice cream into her hair.

So this was my lesson, which I'll pack with me next time: Surround your small child with exotic environs, and in between the
spills and breaks and vanishing acts, you need only lift up your gaze to reap your reward.

SOME THOUGHTS ON
GRABBING WISDOM TO GO

Brushes with Royalty

Clara wouldn't speak to me all day last Thursday because I was going to see the queen and she was not. She was purse-mouthed
and cross-armed. She kept fixing me with a stony glare, as if I were deliberately barring my five-year- old dearest from a
rare and wondrous vision.

Of course, children were not invited to Queen Elizabeth II 's jubilee gala at Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall, but I also felt
I was protecting my daughter from the inevitable devastation she would feel upon realizing that the queen bore no resemblance
to a Barbie in a cone hat. After a steady diet of snow queens and wicked queens and princess-andthe- pea queens, my daughter
would be shocked by the real queen, with her steel-gray sausage curls and sensible coats.

Still, there is an appealing thread of narrative continuity between her fairy tales and real life in the mere
fact
that there is, actually, a queen. This keeps open the possibility of there being flower fairies as well, and possibly even
mermaids and elves, although ideally not monsters. So Mummy was dressing up to see
the queen,
and that was sufficiently exciting for Clara to eventually surmount her huff. I, on the other hand, was feeling faintly disturbed
by the fact that I was going to see the queen. My mother, who is a Canadian senator, had invited me to this jubilee gala as
her date. The occasion, my mother advised, was black tie and long dress, which is to say the fanciest party clothes I've ever
been asked to don, ever, ever. Including to my own wedding.

Yet it wasn't a party. It was a concert. It was the modern equivalent of Henry VIII clapping his hands at court and shouting
"bring on the minstrels." We were all meant to gather together in the most sumptuous clothes we could find in order to sit
in a darkened theater watching— as it turned out— the rock band the Tragically Hip. A very fine-clothed lady sitting ahead
of me in row G hunched over and stuck her fingers in her ears as the Hip played, her silken blouse quivering on her shoulders
as she tensed with displeasure. I found that rude. Would the queen do such a thing? Certainly not.

In any event, with the evening still ahead of me, I went to Shoppers Drug Mart and bought some nail polish. I haven't polished
my short uneven mommy nails in years, but it seemed necessary. The queen would expect dainty nails. Not that I was going to
meet her. There was no receiving line. Getting fancy for my wedding was a no-brainer, but this occasion felt more . . .
je ne sais quoi .
. .
qui va voir
my nails anyway? Who would be there to admire my finery? If it was just a question of keeping pace with the queen, then I
wasn't sure that a sleeveless brocade dress with threads of gold and lavender and a shimmering silk overcoat were appropriate.
A sparkly tent-dress was more in line.

Oh dear. Well, I hauled out my Yves Saint Laurent wedding shoes and figured no one would notice that my daughter had drawn
on the heels with green marker. Then I donned my outfit and a gorgeous pair of gold earrings lent to me by my mother and snaked
slowly along the walls of the house trying to avoid Geoffrey as I headed for the door. Unscathed by cracker spittle, we toddled
off in our stilettos, my mother and I, leaving my daughter enormously impressed and jealous, as if she were Cinderella and
we were the stepsisters. "Ta ta! We're off to the ball!"

We arrived at six-forty-five and discovered that we had an hour and a half to kill until we could sit down, with nothing on
offer but soda water and fleeting shreds of chicken satay whisked past us before we could reach out. So we milled about hungrily,
now and then bumping into Mum's friends. Nobody seemed to notice that I'd polished my nails.

The invitation list had been drawn up by the prime minister and consisted primarily of people over fifty with Liberal Party
connections. I saw former Ontario Premier David Peterson, for instance, who has become the political equivalent of celebrities
on the D list who are game to do
Hollywood Squares,
which is to say that you can count on him to pop up at galas. When we finally got to sit down in the auditorium, all the
politicians began jumping up in their seats and waving at one another and cracking excited jokes like school chums on a field
trip.

At quarter after eight, the Toronto Symphony suddenly started up a fanfare, and all necks craned leftward and upward for the
arrival of the queen.
Da da da daaah da da da da da dum dum.
It was kind of thrilling. One felt fleetingly swept up in a current of genuine power. This was not the queen sweeping into
a ballroom, mind you, but a queen creeping sideways into her seat in a theater, excuse me, excuse me, with one hand holding
up the hem of her sparkly tent-dress. She was preceded by a small group of elderly ladies sporting pearl chokers and puffed
blouses.

"Who are they?" I asked my mother.

"Those are her ladies-in-waiting."

"No way!" All of a sudden I had this epiphany, like whoa! She's a real queen! Like those other queens from days of yore! Where
are their cone hats?

"What on earth do they do?" I whispered to Mum. "Do they help her put on her bra?"

"I suppose they accompany her," my mother guessed vaguely, "and probably act as her confidantes about what have you." The
queen is no longer permitted to chop off their heads, so relations are doubtless convivial.

"Maybe they have an investment club," a friend of mine speculated later. "Or play Chinese bridge." Perhaps they go back to
the queen's chambers after each minstrel show and succumb to the giggles. I could imagine them musing about the woman in the
gala who belted out "MacArthur Park" with so much reverb on her mike that you couldn't hear any of the lyrics except for the
preposterous chorus: "Someone left the cake out in the rain! I'll never find the recipe again!" This, with full symphonic
accompaniment. A lament for you, Your Majesty, concerning wet cake, on the occasion of your golden jubilee.

My overall sense of the occasion was crystallized in the videotaped tributes offered between live acts. Canadians commented
on the queen's fifty years of ribbon cutting and waving. Good for you, for . . . uh . . . well, you didn't defeat the Spanish
Armada or found the Church of England, b u t . . . darn it, good for you for being the queen! You
wave,
girl! Susan Aglukark pointed out that the queen had shared the same period of history as her own Inuit community, which is
an observation of such indirect import that you could say it to a pigeon.

But that's all right. We may not know what she's for, but we do love Her Majesty, and she loves us back. She even went onstage
and shook hands with Canada's most beloved rock band. That is grace most becoming of a queen.