Deirdre McMurdy
From Thursday's Globe and Mail Published on Thursday, Oct. 15, 2009 12:00AM EDT Last updated on Friday, Oct. 16, 2009 2:15AM EDT
When your children are small, it's common to suffer frequent flashbacks to your previous life. You know - the life you lived before they came crashing into it with their relentless demands and all that gear.
On evenings when you're planted in front of a high chair trying to spoon mashed peas into a clenched little mouth, you might suddenly recall some marvellous dinner party you'd attended just a year or so earlier. (Time gets a little fuzzy at this point in the cycle.)
You remember the fact that no one served mashed peas and no one tried to toss their plate - at least not until they'd had a third glass of wine.
Or, as you rise with a teething toddler long before the local coffee shop is open, you might dimly remember what it was like to sleep in on a Sunday morning, to linger over a newspaper and some eggs benedict. A time when you were still prepared to dilute your morning vodka with tomato juice and a decorative wedge of lemon.
On the positive side, as your children mature and you age, those flashbacks become much less frequent.
Whether that's because the life you led before you started a family becomes utterly irrelevant, or because fatigue and ceaseless repetition have worn down your internal memory chip, doesn't really matter.
That's not to say, however, that your past doesn't continue to ambush you now and again.
It might happen when you suddenly overhear your daughter singing Heart of Glass - and then she asks if you've ever heard of a band called Blondie.
Maybe you'll be filling a large Jacuzzi tub with warm water and scented bubbles and you suddenly, poignantly, recollect a time when you'd do that for yourself rather than for your children.
Such a flash could also strike when you're doing something as mundane as vacuuming out your car. Though frankly, anyone with a couple of kids knows that vacuuming out your car is anything but mundane. As it is when you approach any biohazard, it requires an iron will, a strong stomach and industrial-strength cleaning products.
As a creature of routine and habit, I always clean my car in autumn. Summer road-trip season is over, and ferrying my 8- and 11-year-old kids to school and various other obligations requires that they not adhere to the seats because of the toxic residue that results when gummy worm meets Gatorade.
It's also an especially meaningful exercise for me because it evokes the distant memory of a time when my car was always immaculate. In that glorious past, it gleamed in the sun and it never smelled as though someone might have forgotten a piece of ripe cheese in the glove compartment. The seats weren't sticky and there were no fast-food wrappers, warped books or stray pieces of Lego cluttering the back seat.
This fall, the ritual cleansing of the car began in the usual way - collecting the waste, prying loose change out of crevices, scrubbing finger and nose prints from the windows. But aside from the brief pang about the distant days when my car was small, fast and pristine, the chore somehow morphed into something surprisingly sentimental.
There were drifts of sand on the floor and smears of ice cream from the glorious days we'd spent together at the beach over the summer, climbing into the car in that slightly stunned state that results from too much sun and prolonged exposure to the hypnotic surf.
In the rear was a thick mat of blond dog fur that could only be removed through a laborious combination of whisking, vacuuming and plucking. It was a reminder that this was the year our beloved shelter dog really started to blossom into herself. Brimming with trust and confidence, she'd demand to go along to soccer practice or even to the store for a milk run, silently imploring us to detour and swing by the Dairy Queen. Who wouldn't save the stub of their cone for a creature with such compelling, expressive eyes?
There was a soccer ball with the name of someone other than my son clearly printed on it, a reminder of the happy, carefree crew that raced up and down the field while their parents frantically swatted mosquitoes, furtively checked BlackBerrys and watches and chatted idly on the sidelines.
Also scattered in the mix were handfuls of colourful sugar sprinkles, mementoes of scores of early-morning jaunts to Tim Hortons after hockey or soccer practice with my son and his best friend, who earnestly traded preposterous stories about wrestlers and skateboard stunts in the back seat between bites of doughnut.
In a moment, the clean-car flashback was eclipsed by something far more vivid: a flash forward to a time when my children are grown and the car is mine alone again. The car is pristine then too. And I miss the mess - and everything that goes with it - dreadfully.
Deirdre McMurdy lives in Ottawa.
Illustration by Peter Mitchell.
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