Tercero

Last weekend Jack and I were on the ferry to Vancouver. It was a beautiful, calm day. Great humps of mountains rose out of the silver water, like massive whales frozen in time and space. As the Gulf Islands slid past, in the distance I could see a dark square of something moving. The dark square, coming closer, turned into a barge with a bulky load. I made the mistake of idly commenting "I wonder what that is."

Jack looked at the barge. "Looks like garbage." I immediately lost interest. Jack didn't. "Maybe it's scrap metal," he said, warming to the subject. "No, it looks almost like tires, but why would they haul tires on a barge? No, it's got to be scrap metal. Or maybe it IS garbage. Boy, that's expensive, barging garbage like that. I wonder where it's going?" And on and on. There were long silences, during which I prayed the subject (and the barge) would disappear. The barge eventually did.

"Maybe it's mixed recycling. Or it could be wood waste, although why would they barge wood waste? I wonder where it's going?" Jack mused. By this point, I was bored with the entire conversation and tuned out.

There is a point to all of this, and it has to do with the next installment of our herding boys story.

By the time Tercero was on his way, it was pretty clear that our house was too small. Primero and Segundo shared a tiny room and our "master suite" was the formerly windowless shed--it still sported the ominously buzzing electrical box, but we did have a window for quick escapes.

I'm not sure why we decided to have a third kid--I don't think it was a particularly conscious decision. Like so many things, we kind of drifted into it (NOT a good strategy when planning new human beings). Once we found ourselves expecting number three, we looked around and, like Roy Scheider and his desire for a larger vessel in Jaws, said to ourselves "We're going to need a bigger house!"

By now we'd been paying a monthly mortgage for some time. Granted, the amount was small (not to us!) but we managed to carve out a credit rating with the Herbert Co-op. This fiscal responsibility stood us in good stead when we approached the Co-op for a second mortgage. Because, for all intents and purposes, we were really building a whole other house onto the old one.

Which brings me back to the ferry tale (sorry, couldn't resist!) It was during the building of the house-addition that I discovered one of Jack's less endearing paradoxes. It had to do with information sharing. On the one hand, when you merely required a short explanation or brief exchange about something, Jack would launch into a doctoral dissertation. If you tried to bury the discussion, he'd dig it up and, like a dog worrying a bone, chew on it some more. He would draw diagrams--on cigarette packages when he still smoked, and on any handy piece of paper when he quit. The boys learned to run when Jack pulled out a pencil. (Now that they're grown, however, they've discovered that diagram drawing is in the blood.)

On the other hand, when you wanted specific and comprehensive information, Jack would turn annoyingly vague, as in the following conversation: Me--"How long will this take to build?" Jack--"Oh, a while." Me--"What will this cost?" Jack--"Oh, not too much."

I'm not sure if Jack always suffered from this affliction, or if I'd only noticed it because such a large project demanded many questions on my part. I do know he suffers from it still, despite several decades of hard looks from me when he throws out one of his hazy answers. I suspect it's a combination of the two--it's been my observation in life that most things involve combinations of two or more things--I believe that God likes complexity--it likely keeps Him from getting too bored.

Over the years, I've developed the questioning methods of a Crown Attorney with unlimited room to lead a balky (and often hostile) witness: "Exactly how much time, in days, hours and minutes, please, will this project take to complete, and by completion, I mean the following--(here I would provide a detailed list)".

It was during the building of the addition that I also learned to disappear--physically and mentally--during Jack's longer explanations. Being pregnant and living with two small children in a construction zone will encourage that particular survival skill.

By April, we found out another baby was on the way. By May, we decided to add a house onto the house. By June, the Co-op agreed to lend us the money. By July, the plans were complete. By August, we'd hired our friend Barry, a carpenter, to help Jack with the big stuff. Jack only had two weeks' holidays, and a lot to build.

I remember waking up in the heat of an August morning, our tiny bedroom (really only big enough for the bed, a small nightstand and the buzzing electrical box) already sweltering. I was uncomfortable with the pregnancy--only five months along but I looked almost ready to pop.

Voices and hammering had woken me up. Sighing, I closed my eyes and tried to visualize the finished product. Then I thought about the process of getting to the finished product. I remember telling myself, "Well, really, it shouldn't take TOO long to finish." I still howl with laughter at this.

That summer was hot and thundery, much like my mood. Barry was a godsend--he moved in, sleeping on our couch for the two weeks so he and Jack could work early and late. Once our bedroom was demolished (along with the entire back of the house as Jack, Rollie, Dee and I tore down walls in an exalted state of destructive glee), we moved into the greenhouse to sleep. I do not recommend this--it was like sleeping in a solar-powered convection oven.

My job--along with keeping Primero and Segundo from killing themselves with hammers, saws, knife-blades and all power tools in general--was to feed the work crew. For a little guy, Barry could really eat. I had to do whatever it took to keep the construction workers fed. I remember one day when, down with a twenty-four hour flu, I cooked a chicken on the barbeque. I would check on the bird and run into the bathroom to throw up. Crouching on the floor, bellied up to the toilet with my forehead on its cool porcelain rim, I remember thinking that death might not be so bad.

The summer passed in a blur of collapsing bedroom ceilings (see "The House That Jack Built"), crashing timbers, shrieking saws, hammering, dust, debris and heat. Primero and Segundo developed a fascination with all things construction. Segundo, just turned two, would sit on the addition's plywood floor and, brandishing a ball-peen hammer, pound in nails by the hour. The floor around him was paved with silver nail-heads, so close together that no wood was visible. Primero would hang around Jack and Barry, peppering them with questions until he wore then out, whereupon they would send him to me so he could wear me out.

Once Barry left and Jack's holidays (seems an odd word for those two weeks!) were over, he slaved on the addition after work and on weekends. Thanks to the long prairie evenings, it stayed light until ten or so. However, that summer was one of astonishing thunderstorms--heat would build up immense, bruised-looking thunderheads during the day--we could see them, billowing up and up on the horizon, knowing they were headed our way. By nightfall, the storms would begin.

Jack was in a frenzy to get some sort of roof on the addition--the two weeks hadn't been enough time. (It was during this time that I learned the Rule of Three--that is, all estimations of time and/or money must be tripled before they approach reality.) One night, after a particularly hot and humid day--remarkable for the prairies where we pride ourselves on the dry colds and heats--a real pisser of a storm broke over Herbert. The wind had been rising all evening and was really howling, tearing at the tar-paper Jack had nailed over the unfinished roof sections. Nervous about the storm, Jack had tacked up plastic sheeting on the inside ceiling in case the tar-paper didn't hold.

Actually, this story is Jack's, as by this time I had taken the boys after the ceiling had caved in on them (again, see "The House That Jack Built") and left. Safe at my parents, I would phone each night and ask, in my best Laurence Olivier/Marathon Man voice, "Is it safe?" To come back to a house with a roof, that is. Again, I call attention to the fact that this is Jack's account--all of you who know Jack will be able to decide on the reliability of the narrator (as they say in the Lit/Crit biz), which is not to say the story isn't interesting or enjoyable, as it stands.

A lightening flash lit up the greenhouse. The thunderclap was so loud it shook the house. The rain was bucketing down. Jack leaped up and ran into the kitchen, flicking on the light-switch. No power--the storm had hit something.

He looked at the ceiling just in time to see the plastic he'd stapled up earlier stretch, bulge and drop its water-load all over the floor. He managed to find a stapler in the lightening bursts and tack the plastic back up, only to see it sag in another place and dump its burden of water there.

The night passed in a fever of fastening the plastic, watching it come down, tacking it up again, sopping up the water. By the time morning came, Jack was heading for a breakdown. Fortunately the storm had blown itself out by then, and dawn brought the sun. Exhausted, Jack crawled under the bedcovers and slept, no easy feat in that convection-oven of a greenhouse.

By the time I returned with the boys, there was a roof over our heads that didn't cave in or leak. The next few months were consumed with getting the two ground-floor bedrooms finished enough to move into--by then sleeping in the greenhouse had worn thin, not that it had been very thick to begin with.

I don't remember much about this construction phase--I think I was still recovering from the summer. I do know that I was growing at an alarming rate--Doctor Heather sent me for tests to ensure that the baby was okay and I hadn't developed diabetes or something that would account for the rapidly-swelling baby-bump. But the tests showed that everything was fine--the baby was just big.

"Swell," I thought to myself, remembering Segundo and those pediatric nightgowns.

During my September check-up, Doctor Heather asked me if I was attached to the idea of natural childbirth. "I don't know," I replied. "Why? Is there an option?" At this point, with two natural childbirth experiences under my belt, I didn't feel an urgent need to replicate it for a third time. However, I wasn't sure about the alternatives.

"We could give you an epidural," said Heather, and explained what that was. For me, "epidural" became one of the sweetest words I'd learned in a long time. Essentially it meant that I would no longer have to surf those contraction waves, or rather, when I did, I would do it with a painless surfboard.

"Sign me up!" I announced. She said she'd make the arrangements. I just had to show up. I wondered where she thought I was going that I might not.

So I spend the last few months of the pregnancy getting bigger and bigger. People asked me if I was having twins. Thinking of Natalie and her boys, I shuddered. "God no!" I replied, thanking the universe for not-so-small mercies.

Hallowe'en came and went. I packed my bag's spartan contents--no tennis balls this time. By now, I'd pared the bag down to essentials--books and a house-coat. Peppermint sticks, candles, cologne, handkerchiefs--all had been jettisoned by experience and expediency.

The due date arrived and went. As did several more. And more. I went to see Doctor Heather about getting this kid out. She booked me into the hospital the next day. "If this baby doesn't arrive by the day after," she said, "we'll induce labour."

I didn't like the sound of that. The women I'd know who'd had induced labours shared horror stories about the fierce contractions. Uh-uh, I thought. Not for me.

I went home and packed up Primero and Segundo, who were staying with my parents. We drove back into town. Jack dropped them off and then took me to the hospital. It was all very leisurely--no panic, no contractions, no hurry. I walked into the hospital under my own steam. By the time I was settled into my room, I checked for internal signs. Nothing. Not a twinge.

"Okay kid," I said to my belly lump. "I do NOT want to be induced. I doubt you want that either. I want an epidural and I don't want you to screw this up. So time to come out, okay?" It was to be one of the few times that Tercero would actually listen.

The Two Child Family

Today I threw a load of laundry into the washing machine, microwaved milk for coffee, checked Facebook to see what a bunch of people all over the world are up to, emailed registration material for a workshop I'm attending next week, plugged in my cellphone to recharge, and downloaded some more tunes for my MP3 (indispensable item for running).

I remember washing clothes in a Hoover Spin-Dryer--you actually had to touch the laundry--no fun when it came to poopy diapers (a particularly memorable laundry episode involved an ill-fitting diaper pail lid and some intrepid maggots). Milk was heated in a pot on the stove--it took forever, usually boiled over and made a sticky mess. If you wanted to talk to friends far away, you needed a rich uncle to pay for long distance charges. Phones were rotary monsters that hung on walls with long cords that tangled and strangled or perched, like gigantic insects, on desktops. As for tunes, there was vinyl--you played records on a stereo that had an incredibly expensive (and fragile) thing called a stylus. Styluses and three-year-olds were a bad (and expensive) combination, as we discovered.

My granddaughter is visiting this weekend. She is still in diapers (although she's at the stage where she mews "poopoo, poopoo" to indicate the need to unload). Her diapers are paper-thin, but can hold a bucketful of material. Her stroller is an all-terrain vehicle, able to roll over boulders and large dogs with ease. It has holders and chambers for every conceivable item--all it needs is a satellite dish and we can invade some recalcitrant desert nation with it.

I remember cloth diapers--again, you had to actually handle these after they were used--rinse them off in the toilet and fling them into a malodorous (no matter how hard you scrubbed or shined) receptacle called "the diaper pail" (see second paragraph for laundry horror tale). Once they were washed and dried, you had to fold them so they were ready to use. I can still see the high towers of folded cotton, leaning precariously, on the baby's dresser. After many washings, no matter how much you bleached them, they acquired an attractive shade of pale grey. You had to keep the gigantic diaper pins sharp by sticking them into a cake of soap. For extravagant pee-ers, double-diapering was the norm. It's a wonder more kids didn't have their hip-joints permanently popped from accommodating such gigantic wads of fabric.

My granddaughter's car seat is a marvel of engineering--I doubt the Apollo astronauts were protected as well as she is in her automotive cradle. She will inhabit this car seat until high school, or thereabouts. Our kids' car seats, while much safer than the primitive device my younger brother endured (some of you may remember these--a folding canvas contraption that hooked over the front seat, positioning the kid at the perfect height for launghing through the windshield--it also had a little steering wheel so the tyke could steer while sailing through the air) were still light-years away from the high-tech cocoons of today.

You can probably guess where this is going--another of those "we never had that stuff when WE were young and look how we turned out" harangue. You're half right--we never DID have stuff like that when our kids were growing up, but boy howdy, would I have loved to have it--all of it, because it's way better stuff.

But stuff aside, we did the best with what we had. The real job was learning to have two kids instead of one. Because Segundo's arrival changed us from a single to two child family. I don't think we were quite prepared for the degree of change this entailed. It's hard to imagine what we have no experience of, so we tend to envision the same thing, only bigger and more of it. But having two kids is completely different from having one, and not just in terms of more (more laundry, more groceries, more housework, more bodily fluids to clean up, more sleep to lose, etc.). While it does entail all those mores, it's also Something Completely Different, as Cleese, Idle, Palin (Michael, NOT Sarah) and the Python gang might say.

As Segundo's personality emerged (along with his face from the fat rolls of birth--although he would hang onto those famous cheeks for years yet), we were gobsmacked by how different two kids could be. Same gene pool, same environment, but two quite distinct personalities. Segundo was serious but quirky, cracking us up with jokes and antics, furious with us for laughing at them. Primero was affectionate and easy-going--amenable to most everything. The two quickly became a unit--Segundo the Pancho to Primero's Cisco Kid.

It was during this time that "Not Me" moved into our house. Not Me became our ghostly third child. Whenever anything went missing, got broken, messed up or wrecked, it was always Not Me who was the transgressor. "Who broke the cup?" "Not Me!" "Who threw all these toys everywhere?" "Not Me!" "Who chucked the cat off the roof to see if she would land on all fours?" "Not Me!" (more about this later).

One of Not Me's more memorable deeds was uncovered by Jack when the toilet refused to flush. No amount of plunging or snaking would work. Jack, cursing and swearing, finally yanked the toilet off its wax ring and fished out a nice, round apple--intact except for one small bite--that was blocking the drain.

Two pairs of eyes stared at him from shin height. Two mouths offered up the culprit--"Not Me! Not Me!"

Not Me moved in with Segundo and stayed for years. He didn't take up much room. He was always there--no matter how many kids were over, Not Me was there as well. Angry Mom who just dodged shrapnel while weeding garden: "Who threw the aerosol can into the burning barrel?" Little Moron Club Chorus: "Not Me! Not Me! Not Me!"

Not Me stalked us. In the car, grocery shopping, camping trips, Pizza Hut, Burger King, MacDonalds--he was always there. It was Not Me who instigated the infamous Helium Balloon caper at Pizza Hut's grand opening--it's amazing how many balloons a couple of small children can suck dry and how annoyingly loud their shriveled vocal chords can get. I believe we are banned still--"lifetime" is a term tossed after us as we exited.

Apparently Not Me had clones living with all our friends as well. I'm not really sure when Not Me left home--I do know I suffered no empty nest syndrome at his leaving. He just seemed to disappear one day. But I can pinpoint his coming--he came with Segundo.

Segundo brought other things as well. As parents, we now each had a kid to wrangle--no more superior numbers. We achieved a detente of sorts--it was short-lived, only lasting until Tercero showed up, but we did have it there for a while.

Segundo introduced Primero to the concept of sharing--toys, attention (positive AND negative), cookies, his room, bacon, etc. The shared room lasted for several years and brought with it many opportunities for learning--UN peacekeepers could learn a lot from observing shared rooms.

Along with sharing, Segundo brought "He's bugging me!" in its various guises. "He's bugging me" outlasted Not Me and was even more exasperating. It could be initiated by the most innocuous things--air: "He's sucking up all my oxygen!", a glance: "He's LOOKING at me!", area: "He's taking up my space!" It always escalated into "Am not!" "Are too!" etc. etc. or "Did not!" "Did too!" etc. etc. ad nauseam ad infinitum.

Segundo's arrival necessitated a strategy we came to call "Blanket Shit"--essentially punishment that didn't differentiate between instigator and instigatee. We discovered early on that it was far too time-consuming to wade through the rhetoric of fault-finding when sanctions needed to be applied swiftly. Blanket Shit meant that both parties suffered the same consequences, regardless of malfeasance. Of course, we didn't call it Blanket Shit in front of the kids, but between ourselves, the term stuck like, well, like you-know-what to a blanket.

As you can see, Segundo's arrival precipitated many things. In particular, it introduced us, as parents, to the concept of strategy. Because even though the number of heads might have matched (two parents--two kids), kids will always win hands-down in the cunning ingenuity department. We had to hone our wits to stay a step or two ahead. Later, as the boys grew (in age as well as number), we were happy to just keep up. Even that became more and more elusive, as the years progressed. We eventually settled for not being left TOO far behind.

Of course, Segundo also brought a sense of teamwork with him. Primero and he learned to operate as a unit, for good as well as ill. They taught each other many virtues--patience, generosity, cooperation--and in so doing, they taught us as well. For being parents of a two child family is never static--having two kids introduces (in spades, as they say) the concept of dynamics--forces and motion, forces IN motion. And the two forces most in motion are the kids.

For us, having two kids hammered home the idea that family is more than the sum of its parts. We quickly realized that the energy required to herd two small children far outweighed what we expected to expend. I'm sure there is a mathematical formula of some kind (one of those exponential ones that rapidly add up to dizzying amounts) that would explain the exact ratio of parental-energy-to-number-of-kids sort of thing). Throw in two completely different personalities to mess up the numbers, and you understand that you are dealing with a complex entity that defies neat analysis or formulas.

Having two kids introduced our children very early to the idea that the world did not revolve around each of them--a good thing in this world where we all need to learn to share. Thus our two-child family became a primal place of learning this important principle: we defer to the other out of love, not fear or threat of punishment (although the enforced "time out" can be very effective when breaking up your more boisterous disagreements).

Segundo brought all that and more when he came home with us. Of course, without Primero, he wouldn't have been able to do so. Each child plays a pivotal role, for we are all pivots and THE pivot, the centre, all at the same time. If we understand that being the pivot, the centre, is a shared phenomenon, then there is room at the centre for us all. Its economy becomes one of generosity rather than scarcity. We can all stand there, side by side. Perhaps such a centre can hold, unlike the one W.B. Yeats so famously wrote about in 1917: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." ("The Second Coming"). But then, W.B. had just witnessed the Easter Rising and the Great War's beginning. Perhaps he'd also glimpsed the rest of the twentieth century's brutal disintegrations. I prefer to think of Seamus Heaney's (another Irish poet) idea of centre from his 1974 poem "Kinship": "This centre holds / And spreads, / Sump and seedbed / A bag of waters."

The centre shifts and changes, as does the world. We are in a very different place than Yeats's 1917, or even Heaney's 1974. I like to think of Heaney's "sump and seedbed" centre seeping its way into the heart of the world, its "bag of waters" watering all those seeds into a blossoming of new sensibility.

Segundo and Primero are all grown up now, as are Tercero and Cuarto. But Segundo and Primero were the first partners in learning about "other". They set the pattern. And while that pattern looked ferocious and savage at times, beneath its hectic exterior, the basic lessons of love and fellowship were being learned.

And not just by the kids.