Yesterday I had the experience of dragging my son Jacob by the hand, while he sobbed loudly, all the way from our house and up the big hill to my daughter Hannah’s school. Because this is what life is like with a four-year-old, sometimes.

It started with the Buzz Lightyear costume. Jacob really wanted to wear his Buzz Lightyear costume. But a Buzz Lightyear costume requires clothes to be worn underneath it, and he especially chose his long-sleeved, thermal cotton, blue and orange striped shirt and jeans. I expressed my concerns. The day was unseasonably warm. Too warm, really, for a long-sleeved thermal cotton shirt. Once you added the cheap polyester costume on top, it was more than too warm. I shrugged, though, because the chill of morning was still in the air, and the day loomed long ahead of me, with the promise of several wardrobe changes to come.

For once, though, my son kept the same outfit on all day. So, at 2:30pm when I could feel his skin under his heavy shirt and costume, sticky and sweaty, I insisted that Jacob switch his long-sleeved thermal cotton shirt out for a lighter, short-sleeved T-shirt. We had to head out into the hot sun and I laid down the law. In my head I reminded myself that I am the grown-up and I make the decisions, because I have better judgment. By the time my son’s shirt was changed, he was so upset. I wanted to calm him, but we had to leave the house to get my daughter on time. I hoped that I could help him get over the affront as we walked.

Jacob would not be calmed. He rebuffed my every effort. I carried his Buzz Lightyear hood and Hannah’s old kid-sized gardening gloves that he’s decided go with the costume, and asked if he wanted to put them on. In response he made an angry, high-pitched noise, letting me know that he was not happy. I picked him up and carried him until my breath was rasping and my legs complaining. He quieted a bit while I held him, but he didn’t stop. His rage was not so easily quelled as that. He wanted only one thing – his long-sleeved shirt – and every moment he was away from it he was unhappy.

As we headed out of our neighbourhood and got closer to the school, we were joined by the throngs of other parents. Some parents turned to stare, because that’s what you do when you hear a very loud noise. Not everyone did, though. Some parents kept their eyes fixed resolutely in front of them, which let me know that they themselves had been in this very spot. While their children pointed and asked questions, they pointedly ignored the scene unfolding in front of them.

While we waited for Hannah outside the school Jacob continued to express his displeasure. When my daughter finally appeared, my son gave a few more half-hearted sniffles, and then turned to me and insisted that we needed to return home right now. I suggested that we stay and play on the playground instead. I pointed out that nobody else could tell what kind of shirt he was wearing under his costume. I offered the hood and gloves again. This time, instead of crying, he was resolute. He set his jaw and repeated his demand. He had to go back home, where his inappropriately warm shirt waited. I relented.

I remember my daughter Hannah, at around the same age, being so caught up in the way she felt things should be. I remember trying to teach her the word flexibility. I delivered lectures about how she could choose to be happy or sad. How one thing not going to plan didn’t have to ruin her whole day. She didn’t understand, then. She was too young. And Jacob doesn’t understand, now.

Eventually, my son will turn five and six and seven and eight. He will outgrow his current rigidity. Wearing the wrong shirt under a costume will no longer be the end of his world. But today he’s still four. So I’m the one dragging the crying kid in the Buzz Lightyear costume up the hill to school, secretly thanking the parents who don’t turn and stare. They may not be looking at me, but I feel they’re walking with me, and I am not the only one.

Children are born with talents of their own, which is one of the most amazing parts of parenting. For example, from the age of four my daughter Hannah has spent hours and hours drawing and painting. While her father and I are drawing stick people, our child has honed her talent until she’s become quite exceptional for her age. My son Jacob is four and his talents are just starting to shine through. What is already clear, however, is that they are very much his own – not his sister’s, not his father’s and not his mother’s.

There is one thing, however, that our whole family shares in common, and it’s a love of performing. While my husband Jon and I are no actors, our budding relationship actually got its start in junior high, when we were both cast in the same play. Today our kids are both very comfortable in the spotlight. Jacob delivered a show-stopping line in the church Christmas pageant this past December. Hannah has sung in her school talent shows and currently takes musical theatre classes. Perhaps this is one area where their parents actually are rubbing off on them.

This past week my daughter had one of the principal roles in her school play, when she played JoJo in Seussical the Musical. She actually had the opening lines in the production, kicking the whole thing off. I admit that (1) I am her mother, and I am biased; and (2) she is only eight years old and her age must be taken into account. All the same, I think she knocked it out of the park. Without a microphone, her voice carried to the back of the room where I sat. She remembered her lines, was in time when she danced, and stayed on tune when she sang.

Sometimes, my children just leave me feeling gobsmacked by their sheer awesomeness. They are growing into their own people, with their own abilities and interests. I am playing some small part in it, but mostly it’s all them. I’m just the one in the audience, taking photos of my baby in the spotlight.

Sometimes being a parent is totally awesome. Other times it’s a whole lot of work, and maybe even a little (or more than a little) icky, but for today I want to focus on the awesome parts.

One of the things that makes being a parent awesome is the way that it forces you to look at the world through new eyes. As my daughter Hannah gets older, I find that her perspective changes and matures. No longer is she a lisping toddler who mispronounces words and believes that I know everything. As an eight-year-old she has insights she didn’t have before, asks questions she didn’t ask before, and considers how I’ll react to her words before she shares them.

Recently, Hannah told me that she’s been thinking about questions with no answers. She’s pondering life’s mysteries, my child. For example, she’s wondering:

• “Why am I me, and not you?”
• “How come you’re my mom, instead of someone else’s mom?”
• “Why do the mountains go up, and not down?”

There really are no answers. It’s humbling to me that my child is now sophisticated enough to understand that.

There was a time in my life when I pondered the same sorts of questions. I wondered if what I think of as blue is the same thing that other people think of as blue. Did some people see blue as orange, and vice versa? I wondered about worlds that were too small, or too big, for us to see. I wondered why some names were girls’ names, and some names were boys’ names, and some names were both. I wondered what a soul looked like.

The truth is that I don’t ponder those questions so much anymore. The petty details of grown-up life take up all of my mental space. Instead of thinking about life’s mysteries, I think about what I have to buy at the grocery store, what appointments are in my calendar this week, about the fact that it’s Hannah’s library day tomorrow so we need to put her books in her backpack. I think about home renovations and cooking dinner and how much money I have in my bank account. I think about work deadlines and summer vacation plans and on and on and on. I am always thinking, but I am very rarely pondering.

Spending time with my daughter right now forces me to slow down and shift my thinking. It reminds me of all those questions that filled so many of my thoughts as a child. The questions that were just as much about who I am and how I exist in the world as they were about the fathomless mysteries of an infinite universe. When we contemplate the vastness of life, time and space, we can’t help but consider our place in it, and remember how very small we really are. These questions are the stuff of wonder and majesty and the divine.

And so, as my daughter shares her questions with me, I agree with her and say Yes, you’re right, that question doesn’t have an answer. And just for a minute, I see beyond myself, and into a much larger world. In doing that, I am once again thankful for the gifts that parenting brings, slipping into my life and enriching it in so many ways.

When you have little kids you use a lot of band-aids. There’s just something about these sticky bits of plastic and gauze that children find enchanting. When my daughter Hannah was two or three, the offer of a band-aid could stop her tears as if by magic. It didn’t matter if she really needed one, or if the wound was mostly emotional. Slapping a band-aid on to whatever spot she decided was hurting soothed it.

My son Jacob loves band-aids. He’ll keep them on forever-and-a-day, until the skin underneath is pale and pruney with the sweat that’s being held in. Once a band-aid gets really dirty and grubby Jon and I will try to urge him to take it off, but he always declines. Once he even came to me, tattling. “Daddy wants to take off my band-aid,” he said, “but it’s precious to me.”

Sometimes we run into a band-aid catch-22. This happens when my son requests a band-aid in a place that’s covered by fine little hairs, like his neck. If we decline the band-aid, he is inconsolable, and sometimes even applies one himself. If we allow the band-aid, then when it has to come off he is inconsolable, as the little hairs all get pulled out by their roots. It doesn’t matter if we rip it all off in one go, or remove it as slowly as possible. Either way, there are tears. And then, once the band-aid is off, he asks for another because he was hurt by removing the first one. Then we enter a never-ending cycle of neck band-aids, until we hide the box from him.

My daughter Hannah has mostly outgrown her fixation with band-aids. These days, she tends to only opt for them if she’s genuinely hurt, and possibly bleeding. Even then, she has a tendency to remove them herself after only a day (or even less), so that she can see how her wound is healing. All of this stands in stark contrast to my first experience with Hannah and band-aids, which provided one of my earliest parenting lessons.

When Hannah was released from the NICU at six days old, she had a band-aid on her heel. It was a remnant of the heel-pricks she was receiving at the hospital to check her bilirubin levels. As I took off her little sleeper to change her diaper, it caught my eye. My first impulse was to just leave it until it fell off or she picked it off. Very shortly, however, I realized that neither of those things would happen. Hannah was still five weeks shy of her due date. She wasn’t about to pick off a band-aid, especially one that was hidden inside a sleeper most of the time. She also wasn’t walking or doing much of everything, so the likelihood that her band-aid would fall off by itself anytime soon was small.

For some reason, looking at that tiny band-aid on my daughter’s heel was a revelation to me. It drove home to me how completely and utterly dependent my baby was on me, for every little thing. She couldn’t apply or remove band-aids, or move around of her own accord, or do pretty much anything. It was all up to me. And so, I picked off that band-aid, and then held my crying baby, apologizing to her and shedding my own tears at the enormity of the responsibility that I had assumed.

Children love band-aids. And, in many ways, their childhood can be measured in all those band-aids they wear. Each and every cut and scrape, real and imagined, wears a band-aid like a badge of honour. It’s one more time that my child has fallen and gotten back up. One more wound kissed and dressed. One more example of how my children depend on me, even still. And so, I buy the biggest box I can, and remember all the band-aids that have come before, even as I dread hearing the piercing cry that tells me yet another one is needed. The cry that is up to me to soothe, because that’s what I signed up for, whether I knew it or not.

PS – I realize that band-aid is a brand name. But, since I’ve never said ‘adhesive bandage’ in my life, I’m going right ahead and using it. I am not being sponsored by Johnson & Johnson or anything like that.