Allan Candace - Text Me, Love Mom: Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest

Copyright 2014 Candace Allan
Published by Iguana Books
720 Bathurst Street, Suite 303
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M5V 2R4

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise (except brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of the author or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Publisher: Greg Ioannou
Editor: Kathryn Willms
Front cover image and design: Shea Proulx
Author photo: Rose Athena
Book layout design: Kate Unrau

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Allan, Candace, 1959-, author

Text Me, Love Mom: Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest / Candace Allan.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77180-071-6 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-77180-072-3 (epub).--ISBN 978-1-77180-073-0 (kindle).--ISBN 978-1-77180-074-7 (pdf)

1. Allan, Candace, 1959-. 2. Empty nesters. 3. Mother and child. 4. Mothers--Psychology. 5. Text messaging (Cell phone systems). I. Title.

This is an original electronic edition of Text Me, Love Mom.

I am most grateful to my parents, who raised five of us wisely in the age of free-range children.

I dedicate this story with love to my own four spirited children and to my husband, Mike, the greatest patron of our art. XO

Disclaimer:

Every name has been changed and the events depicted went mostly like this

Ancient writers believed that the mother bear continually licked her little cub until it took shape. This was considered to be the very essence of creation, and as a result the Greeks and Romans referred to the bear only in the feminine gender.

The Bear Facts, Association of Zoos and Aquariums

Your father and I dated, I tell our kids, for seven years before we married. Saying it, I wonder, what does dated mean? In May 1977, Will caught up to me in our high school hallway to ask what I was doing that night. When I admitted that I was reading my poetry at a gallery called Clouds and Water, he asked if he could take me there. That was our first date and then I think we were going out.

We went out for two years before we shacked up. After much cajoling, my parents consented to my moving to Toronto to take a creative writing degree that wasnt available at home in Calgary. Going back to school wasnt on Wills radar yet, but he was happy to pack up his collection of albums Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Billy Joel, and Fleetwood Mac and to ship his new stereo and larger-than-life speakers to Toronto to be my roommate in a tiny North York apartment. For a couple of twenty-year-olds from Calgary, it was a pretty sexy adventure. I wrote essays, he got a lousy job in the Sears toy department, and we bickered about important things like who was going to do the laundry this month so that we could go back to wearing underwear.

I kept a little ledger in those days, and when I bought a loaf of bread, Id tell him he owed me twenty-five cents and, oh yeah, that plastic dish rack was $3.99, but he could take his half off what I owed for last nights Hawaiian pizza. It was okay in my mind to be in debt to my parents or the bank, but, damn it, I wasnt going to owe or lend fifty cents to my boyfriend. And yet, despite my initial resistance to co-dependency and my two years of feminist studies classes (in which I wrote essays about the unequal division of household labour), I still wanted Will to ask me to marry him and assumed that we would have children together. On a summer evening in 1983, the year I finished my degree, he took me to our bench in Glenmore Park above the city reservoir and presented me with a floral teapot. I held my breath and looked up at a tiny slip of moon. Years earlier, I had told him how my dad proposed to my mom by presenting her with a diamond ring in a china teapot. Sure enough, I opened it to find an engagement ring tinkling around in the bottom.

We wed having never discussed the number of babies we wanted, when wed want to be graced by their arrival, or even practical considerations like how we were going to afford them. My insistence on splitting the cost of every loaf of bread had long since been abandoned. When I became pregnant with our first, Will was in the last months of an undergraduate degree before three years of law school. His student loan coffers were being supplemented through assistance from our parents, my paycheques from a waitressing gig, and the promise of proceeds from the great Canadian novel I planned to write, with the expertise of my Creative Writing degree, while our little one napped. Our more practical friends thought our timing was off, yet I recall feeling a biological urge to have that baby that couldnt be undone by a calendar or a budget. My parents and parents-in-law were worried, but in 1983, no one was putting our rash behaviour down to being too young.

In todays climate of extended adolescence and emerging adulthood, mine would seem almost a teenage pregnancy. I know young women today who dont plan to have babies until they are pushing forty, even though the media increasingly warns us of the fertility risks of putting off those childbearing years. Back in 1984, my girlfriends who had the nerve to accuse me of reproducing prematurely only took another year or two before they got serious about their reproductive planning. Should their baby be born in early summer to avoid an overheated pregnancy? Or May to make their child the ideal age when they commenced kindergarten?

Will and I were never that calculating. I always told my four kids, you were all planned. You were just planned really, really quickly. Needless to say, my visions of quiet afternoons writing while the baby slept were quickly shattered by reality. The arrival of Zo knocked our collective socks off. It was a heroic feat to keep my eyes open, shower periodically, tend to every last one of her little baby needs, and get over lingering earth mother intentions like making homemade baby food. One afternoon, I watched a couple walk past holding the hands of their small boy and swinging him happily off the ground between them. I remember thinking, that picture looks just right two adults, one child. A week later, I was pregnant with my second baby. Our family would make a slightly bigger mosaic.

Our second child, Cole, was, and still is, the polar opposite of his introspective sister, Zo. At nine months, he was running figure eights around the three of us. A friends daughters giggled whenever they saw him and called him the bad baby. I never, ever saw him fall asleep. He conked out in private.

In the midst of that chaos, I had a feeling I couldnt shake. During a desperately needed weekend escape, looking out at the starry night from a window of the rundown Waterton Lakes Park Hotel, I told my husband, We can discuss whether or not we should have a third, but I just know theres another one waiting to come to us. We brought our third child, Hudson, home from the hospital on a damp late December evening after stopping to pick up a Christmas tree. A perfect gift.

Hudson, unlike his brother Cole, was always up for a cuddle; in fact, his preferred mode of transportation was balancing on my hip. At the tender age of only three-and-a-half, Zo was in training to be a mothers helper for her two brothers, but I couldnt help but feel that I was falling behind the eight ball on some mothering particulars. On one of my I-can-only-open-one-eye mornings, I found her at the fridge filling Coles bottle with milk and getting another bottle ready for herself. If I had missed introducing Zo to the sippy cup in my overwhelmed state, what else had I neglected?