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It's hardly surprising that we identify so closely with our kids as they negotiate their twenties. The sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s was not about growing up faster; it was about enshrining the “inner child” and perpetuating a childlike innocence. It was about face-painting, daisies, and blowing bubbles under cloudless skies. In its more serious expressions, it was also about protesting the loss of young lives in imperialist wars. We wanted respect for the young, and for the uncorrupted child in all of us.
Not
growing up became a virtue.

“Much of what we do these days in the name of perfect motherhood,” Warner writes, “is really about ‘reparenting ourselves.'”

What is missing in the mother-literature is more political perspective. The real problem with motherhood is not about getting your partner to empty the dishwasher; it's about recognition and support in a concrete way, from governments and the economy, for the job of raising children. Nothing much has changed about the experience of motherhood, it seems, except the outfits and the equipment.

Motherhood remains the Great Unraveller, the thing that sooner or later brings a woman face to face with herself. The power and joy of motherhood continue to outstrip our little ideologies. No matter how our theories about motherhood evolve, the raw daily experience of it continues to ambush each new generation of women, in good and bad ways.

And just when you think you've got a handle on it, it slips through your fingers again. For mothers, graduation day never comes.

The Degree

C
ONVOCATION at McGill takes place under white tents, on the green lawns of the downtown campus, at the end of May. The weather can still be raw, which it was the weekend we attended. But after six years of ambivalence about university and a great deal of hard work Casey had earned his degree in history, and I thought it was something worth celebrating. Even if no one else in the family did.

Brian had spent the last few weeks in France, reporting from the Cannes Film Festival; he had just arrived back, jet-lagged and exhausted. In any case, ritual gatherings and convocations hold little appeal for him. He had skipped his own graduation, in fact. As for Casey,when I phoned him earlier to talk about plans, he wasn't sure he wanted to go to the ceremony, or indeed what the point of it was.

Was I going to have to use a forklift to get everyone mobilized— and for what? Once again, I felt like I was singlehandedly trying to create a “family moment” in a vacuum. The train ride to Montreal with my semi-comatose husband was not very festive. There was no “Remember when he was in Miss Archer's class and made that clever bridge out of toothpicks?”

But our ragged clan did assemble, on an overcast day with a cold wind that shivered the blossoms on the trees. As soon as we arrived in Montreal, Brian came down with a fever and a sore throat. He closed the curtains in our lovely hotel room and crawled under the covers. Casey and I had dinner in a restaurant down the street. The next day Brian announced that he was too sick to attend the ceremonies. “Being sick never kept you from showing up for band gigs,” I reminded him meanly. This father-and-son dismissal of social ritual (as I primly thought of it) was wearing thin. It also made me feel like the boring CEO of the family, trying to wrangle everyone into the stockholders'meeting.

But fine, I said, you stay in bed. No, I insist. I'll go sit through the entire alphabet by myself. From under the covers, Brian replied that he'd try to show up later.

Casey Burke Marley Johnson. (Yes, that Bob Marley. No wonder he didn't want to go to dental college.) I calculated that the Js would arrive roughly in the middle of several hours spent sitting on hard folding chairs in an unheated tent, watching polished young people, many going on to post-grad work in lucrative fields of study, cross the stage in their book-shaped caps and Oxonian robes.

I reached the campus in good time, I thought, only to discover that more diligent families had staked out their seats near the stage hours earlier. I found an empty chair toward the back and reserved it with my coat. Then I went behind the tent and followed the long serpentine line of grads until I spotted Casey, in his bachelor robe with the white fur around the hood (the “arts” fur) and a tasselled cap perched on his springy hair. Always a sucker for costumes, he was getting in the spirit of things. He was wearing his Ray-Bans, too, even though the day was overcast.

Casey had only thought to invite his girlfriend, Rebecca, and his roommates the night before so he wasn't sure they would turn up. Wow, good sense of occasion, I thought glumly. At least our party of two wouldn't need to make special reservations for lunch.

I went back to my chair under the Big Top. Families were milling about the lawns, getting yearbooks signed and taking photographs, as the girls' high heels sank into the grass. Nobody in our family cares about this occasion except me, I thought morosely and . . . why
did
I care again? I had forgotten. And come to think of it, why hadn't I pursued a career as a cabaret singer like Marianne Faithful?

Then I saw Brian striding across the lawn with a scarf around his neck, carrying a large tea.

“I took some Advils,” he said, sitting down beside me.

I studied the program and counted the list of arts graduates. Three hundred and sixty-five. But I had to admit that whoever announced the names of the students as each one came to the stage was giving it his all.

Thomas . . . William . . . Cullen . . . Please come forward!

There is something about an unadorned list of names that is mysteriously moving. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, that long black granite wall, got it right. Every time a new name was announced and another grad crossed the stage, a pocket of cheers would rise up from their family in the crowd. Tears came to my eyes, and I didn't know why; it was the wedding moment, of witnessing hope and promise, while knowing that life will test that hope in ways that couldn't be imagined now.

Finally Casey was inside the tent, a few yards from the edge of the platform. He craned around in the line, spotted us in the crowd, and waved. He was still wearing his Ray-Bans and grinning. James Dean, B.A. I assumed he would pocket the sunglasses before he crossed the stage but, no, he left them on, loping across the platform and warmly shaking the chancellor's hand with both hands, like T. Bone Burnett getting an award at the Grammies.

I thought this tiny act of subversion was harmless enough, but months later we learned that it had set a historical precedent; henceforth, the wearing of sunglasses was officially banned from McGill Convocation exercises.

Well, it wasn't a fellowship but it did represent a contribution to the academic world.

Rebecca and several other friends had showed up just in time to watch Casey cross the stage. They whistled and whooped; heading off stage, Casey waved the paper baton of his diploma in the air—he had graduated “With Distinction,” which was news to me—and flashed his smile. I insisted on witnessing the rest of the students right down to Zwicker, and then we gathered on the lawn. Brian's hue was slowly changing from grey to pink, now that the captive-audience part was over. Even the spring sun had made an appearance.

We took pictures of our son and his friends, then of him riding his bike around the lawn in robe, cap, and sunglasses.

“I get it now,” Casey said to us, who also likes a good wedding. “Thanks for coming.”

After the ceremony,we took the group out for lunch at a sunny, high-ceilinged bistro on Bernard Ave. There were other families there as well, celebrating, and solo diners reading newspapers on the patio. It was the sort of Montreal place where Sunday brunch goes on for hours, as if Monday will never arrive.

Love Trouble

A
FTER GRADUATION, Casey stayed in Montreal, where Rebecca was still finishing her degree. The pickings were slim on the work front but eventually he found a minimum wage job with a francophone sound and light production company, in the rigging department. Being
le chef des moteurs
was about as far as he could get from the lecture halls of McGill, but he did hang on to one shred of school—his weekly late-night show on the college radio station and his host persona as the Rock and Roll Doctor.

My chronic motherhood didn't extend to staying up 'til 1 a.m. to listen to the live broadcasts, but I tuned into the podcasts online, which had acquired a small but loyal following. I liked the music (unsurprising, since some of it came directly from our basement) and his retro beatnik slogans. (“The show that puts the wildness in your mildness.”) For maternal surveillance purposes, the mood of the program was also an excellent barometer of how things were going for him in his new post-grad world.

(I had been warned not to eavesdrop on his Facebook page, a familiar parental form of spying. But since he is also one of my “friends,” I do get his status updates. “Casey is a dork,” he posted one afternoon when I was logged in. “Is this genetic?” I commented. “Possibly,” he posted back.)

That long, cold winter, I noticed the playlists on his show were changing their tone. The ratio of Roy Orbison to zydeco was going up, and he wasn't playing as much Ramones. Instead, there were more early, crackly sounding blues by Lucille Bogan and lots of Sam Cooke, especially
A Change Is Gonna Come
. I didn't think he liked Amy Winehouse but he made an exception for a killer demo of her singing
Love Is a Losing Game
.

It soon became evident to me from the musical offerings on Rock and Roll Radio that all was not well in the romance department.

Rebecca was younger than Casey, just 21. A beautiful girl from a big, warm family. We had met her a few times and liked her. Wow, good for him, I thought. The two of them fell for each other, and then six months later things began to unravel. I'm not sure what the problem was, apart from the basic, insoluble problem of being in love in the first place, and Casey was too discreet to go into details. But his efforts to sound okay on the phone were not always successful. He was having doubts, and she didn't want him to have any doubts. All I knew was that they seemed to be working awfully hard to be happy.

I tried to remember that all I had to do was answer the phone, put things in perspective for him, and not be pulled off balance myself.

At which I failed.

Well, I'm not getting very far with this part. I don't know how to write about my son's love troubles, and shouldn't even go there. But
not
to write about them in some way would eliminate the thing that probably affected me the most about this particular stage of growing up. There's nothing sadder than the sound of ruined love in your child's voice. For a parent, this is new terrain. We can proofread their essays and buy them duvets but we can't put love back together for them.

Love trouble is the signal that the most gratifying stage of motherhood, when you could actually
protect
your child from being hurt, is over. He's out in bad weather on his own now. It's your job to listen, to sound optimistic, and to feel helpless. Also, when you hear yourself saying,“Are you getting to the gym?”make a note: better hit the gym yourself.

It was February or March. Another call from Montreal. They had broken up, again, and he was determined to make it stick this time. I was attempting to be brisk and normal. He said he hadn't been outside yet but that he planned to. He was going to fix his bike.

“Just keep moving,” I said. “Today won't be good. But it will get better, I promise you.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

We hung up. A wave of sadness descended. I have not quite lied, although I could have elaborated: it does get better, but it is never the same again, not really, and even a mother with several decades between her and the first or last departing love can feel the sting again.

Drugs, Music,
and Sex in
1968

1968. It was only a year since I had finally shed the last of my tattered virginity, the same spring and summer I smoked marijuana for the first time, listened to
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
, and rose up the staircase of that last, long crescendo that ends “A Day in the Life.” The Beatles had gone from singing bouncy little ditties like “Love Me Do” to performing neuroscience on my brain.

In my last year of university, drugs and the new music had just made their way to Toronto from San Francisco and London. From the Canadian prairies too:Neil Young and Joni Mitchell played at The Riverboat. The Jefferson Airplane came to town; Bob Dylan was at his most beautiful, long before the pencil moustache. He had just put out
John Wesley Harding
. My boyfriend's apartment balcony overlooked Yorkville Avenue, where there was a bad-trip trailer parked down the street.

He and his pals liked to drop acid on the weekends, sometimes in the course of sleepover parties in one parental home or another (minus the parents). When they got stoned they would often conduct a shock-and-awe tour of the furniture. One item that sent them onto the floor in paroxysms of glee was a transparent hassock with a bed of artificial flowers inside. It did cry out for ridicule.

But on the whole, dope wasn't my cup of tea. It took me another 10 years before I got up the nerve to try acid (and found it less gestalt-shifting than mescaline). My Burlington brain preferred alcohol. So I drank scotch and water and puffed on the occasional joint while everyone else, including the more intrepid girlfriends, took tabs of Windowpane or Purple Microdot. They marvelled at the hassock, too, or sat with glistening eyes while the boys fell about laughing. I could enter into the spirit of things but I wasn't actually seeing the molecules of the shower curtains writhe and dance.
Seventeen
magazine hadn't prepared me for this sort of dating situation.

While my boyfriend took acid and toured the universe, I rode along in the sidecar, adept at contact highs but still intact, suburban, afraid. It was going to be love that cracked me open, not a chemical.