Things I Was Wrong About

Image by Clarice Tudor

An incomplete list of things I have been wrong about: 

Bluey: I guess I initially mixed up Bluey with Blue's Clues? They both feature blue cartoon dogs and are intended for children. How different could they really be? And why would I be interested in either? Well, it turns out I will cry from much-needed parenting catharsis watching Bluey, which is not something I think it ever occurred to Blue's Clues to offer. I love the Heeler family so dang much, along with the sprawling cast of characters that includes everyone from a street busker (Irish terrier) to a mother of eight (dalmatian). I love Bluey's hippie school, and how hard the parents try, and how they mostly succeed but everyone sometimes fails. Despite the fact that it is about blue cartoon dogs, I am steadfast in my devotion to Bluey: I think this is one of the very few truly all-ages shows, and I recommend it highly. 

Single parenting: Well before we split up, I had considered what it would be like to be a single parent. I had, in fact, already been one: my ex and I lived apart for two years, and while he did join us on weekends, I was largely on my own with my kiddo between the ages of two and four—an era not known, in parenting circles, for its ease. I was reluctant to return to all-child-all-the-time, because it had been heavy. And it remains heavy: my kiddo has anxiety, and good golly, it would be nice to be able to have someone spell me off from time to time—my parents, who are very present, still do not do the school run or the bedtime negotiations—but the simplicity of always being where the buck stops has grown on me. I love watching my kid grow up. "Buy land," advised Mark Twain. "They're not making any more of it." But ol' Mark got it wrong: the most precious commodity is your own kid's childhood. It's time. You never get that back. And if I have to do it on my own, that is a choice I'm happy to make. 

Exercise: I am pained to admit that exercise works. I am less stressed, stronger, and more mobile than I was before I restarted my movement routine, which includes walking, weightlifting, dancing, and thinking about (but not doing) yoga. I am sadly at an age where I tweak things with nearly every workout—right now, my shoulder is complaining, and I did give up jogging because I developed shin splints—but I can see how modifications, not abandonment, will allow me to heal, grow, and age. Dammit. 

Dave Eggers: On paper, Dave Eggers is someone I should have loved the whole way along. He wrote a much-hyped memoir when he was 30, about starting a magazine and raising his younger brother; I read it and was mad that it was so good. I avoided his writing after that—there was something about reading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius that made it clear that Dave Eggers is a best-in-small-doses guy—but I loved his literacy initiatives and admired his work with young people. But still: avoided reading. I am a contrarian! However, recently, in a fit of audiobook browsing, I downloaded his 2024 Newbery Award-winning middle-grade novel The Eyes and the Impossible, narrated perfectly by Ethan Hawke, and am enjoying it a lot. I may dip my toe into Lake Eggers more fully in 2026; stay tuned.  

Facebook: Baby, Facebook has changed. I hate to be like, "Back in the good old days of 2011," but honestly, Facebook used to be relevant and useful. Back then, the content you were shown came from humans you actually knew—your actual friends, or party pals, or university classmates. Pictures were posted. Events were created. Pokes were delivered. It felt like Facebook was a useful tool to support our social lives: online connection bolstered IRL relationships, and vice versa. But a few years ago, an insidious cycle started up: Facebook started serving content that was less relevant, and then entirely irrelevant; actual users, in turn, abandoned the platform because it became a stream of garbage nonsense. (I don't follow Nashville radio stations or the Hamilton police, and yet I regularly see posts from both.) This is the tragedy of the modern internet. You can take a good platform and make it bad, and chumps like me will still log on, hoping to catch some tidbits from friends; instead, we get collectively smacked in the face with the wet eel of late-stage capitalistic tech optimization algorithms. I am wrong to continue using Facebook—it serves me nothing but trash—but it's hard to give up a place that has, in the past, felt like a digital home. 

Dates: I did not grow up in a particularly crunchy household. My parents didn't buy the sugar cereals (or, when they did, my mother would mix them into the health flakes, thus diluting both the benefits and the joy), but we regularly ate ice cream, cakes, and cookies. In modern times, a conscientious parent might trade white sugar for agave, but I was born in the 1980s, so we didn't fuck with that. In any case, I grew up not knowing what a date was; when I first encountered them at a babysitting client's home, I was equal parts terrified and grossed out. Dates look like the dried husk of a large insect. They look like a mid-sized poop. The children I sat for, who were very much in a crunchy household, would clamour for the dates; I was like, "have all you want, you disgusting little weirdos." When I got a job that included carrot-orange-date smoothies, I remained horrified until the head chef bullied me into trying one. Did I know they were sweeter than Lucky Charms? I do now! Chopped dates and bananas on peanut butter toast is an excellent breakfast; three dates and some cashews are a great snack. Dates are great! 

Magazines: I love magazines. The design, the content, the snapshots of time and place, culture and values? Impeccable. I collect them—previously, I would say hoarded, but I've tried to become more curatorial about it—and I love taking out old issues of Martha Stewart Kids or a DWF-era Harper's and leafing through them. It's fun to read an old Bon Appetit and be like, man, we really had to learn about poke bowls, eh? I'm not wrong about magazines as a concept—I will stand by that forever—but magazines as an industry have been gasping on the gurney for a while now. Why do I stick with things that are clearly dying (see also: Facebook)? I was a teen in an age of David LaChapelle covers for Rolling Stone, of Nylon interviewing the Beastie Boys about their uniforms (where sartorial meets janitorial), of Rosie O'Donnell holding up a bandaged hand on the cover of her own magazine (with the cover line "Staph! It's no laugh!", copy that will haunt me to my grave). It was a glorious, excessive, Cambrian-explosion-of-print era...and then then internet happened and magazine had a mass extinction. They still exist now, of course, but they are more serious, more expensive, less fun. I was wrong to believe that magazines would continue, unchanged. Everything good fades away. Thank god for my personal archives.

Small cities: There is nothing worse than being where you're from when you're a teen. As a child, I lived in a lot of different types of places—rural, residential neighbourhoods in mid-sized cities, actual metropolis—but at the beginning of ninth grade, my family moved to the small city of Stratford and stayed for the next 19 years. By the time I moved to Toronto in 2002, I was ready. Stratford was peanuts, old hat, backwater, boring; Toronto was shiny and exciting. Despite a false start or two, I eventually did settle down in Toronto, and lived there for 15 years. Slowly, my world there expanded past the University of Toronto campus, into the far reaches of the Junction and Riverdale, up to the Stockyards on St Clair and the playgrounds of Liberty Village. But by the time I left, I was wrung out. I needed things in walking distance, which our immediate neighbourhood offered little of. I needed friends the next street over, which was challenging in our far-flung constellation. I needed to root down, which was impossible in our perpetual tenants' churn. When I came back to Stratford in 2018, it was culture shock: the streets are too quiet at night; there is only one library; there were fewer fashionistas and a lot more hockey moms. But a small city was a revelation as an adult: I spent less time in transit, worried less about money, and made more friends. Instead of being somewhere I wanted to flee, it was somewhere to finally settle down.