red-handed

Driving through Queen's campus on a Sunday afternoon and everything reeks with SUV's parading vanity plates emblazoned BUNNY1 and KITSCAR and PRFXN2, it's no-holds-barred parking and everyone chauffeuring like slow-motion heart attacks, all expensive heads lolling out the window and the rearview mirror completely obscured, and suddenly we realize that these are PARENTS picking up their KIDS from university––it's the end of the semester and here's mom with fourteen scarves to frame her blazing face, calling dad an idiot and telling him to circle the block while she stuffs Wilder's or Saxon's or Audrey's dirty stinking clothes into a brand new hamper from THE BAY. It's time to regroup. It's time to go back to Sunnybrook and lick our wounds and talk about failure and plans for the future and money not very well spent after all and things we might do  differently . If only we can try. Don't worry, none of this will last. All falls will be cus

This morning an eight year-old told me that I am the worst person in the world who makes her breakfast. Considering that I am the  only  person who makes her breakfast, this is a strange, abbreviated list. Sitting in the dimmed light (“Too bright! I can’t eat when it’s too bright!”), half perched between her chair and the dining room table (despite my repeated requests for sitting flat on her bum, so she won't fall off, which she has done before, several times ), complaining about the blackness of the grapes (“I don’t like black grapes! Stop buying black grapes!”), wearing a sweater that I had told her  not  to wear to bed,  she was merely being consistent with her behaviour over the long weekend—a constant kind of commentary/half-arguing about everything. If I asked her to, say, tidy up the floor of her bedroom and pick up a few things, then she would immediately ask  how many things , and argue that she was  playing with that , and anyway first she has to  go get something fr