was where my wife, the indefatigable Grace Daly, wrote her monthly column, called The Motherlode, for a glossy women’s magazine. A popular missive about the trials and ecstasies of full-time mommyhood in the twenty-first century, the column created a certain mythos around Grace as a walk-on-water parent and did much to extend what she straight-facedly referred to as her “personal brand.” I liked her pieces well enough, but was often (and silently) struck by what she elided rather than included in them. I felt she didn’t always, for example, pay proper due to her wealthy North Toronto parents who provided her multiple levels of encouragement and support and helped to get her where she was. As for me? My own contributions to child-rearing, not to mention my tenured U of T gig that financed this whole operation, made virtually no appearances in the column at all. Anyway. We had experimented with having Grace upstairs in her own office when we first moved into 4 Metcalfe Street, but she soon preferred to have her workplace here, close to the epicentre of the domestic action. On one wall of the alcove, she had hung a framed copy of the epithalamium I had written her — my sole foray into poesy, which I was embarrassed by, but which she nonetheless cherished. Atop her desk sat piles of notes, stacks of magazines, a bright mauve teapot, and a small wireless printer. On the desk’s corner rested the manuscript for her as-yet-unsold new children’s book, which despite taking nearly two years to write was only about 15,000 words long. And, in the middle of it all, was Grace’s own laptop, her chief conduit into a world populated by friends and supporters, but also enemies, frenemies, and near strangers. Yes, unlike me, Grace was fully immersed into the world of social media, a tool to connect with her cadre of fellow authors, stay-at-home moms, and other allies. But it could also, I found, bring out the worst in her. She might lose large portions of a day engrossed in a flame war over some esoteric sliver of the women’s movement, and she spent a lot of time lurking on the Facebook walls and blogs of women she vehemently disagreed with. This had led her to tape up a second note over her desk, a flash card of Sartrean parody that read HELL IS OTHER FEMINISTS. She says she keeps it there ironically, but I know it’s something she sometimes believes.
She opened the laptop and went to Facebook. At the sight of her navigation bar’s beckoning red bubbles, I could tell she, too, had several notifications waiting for her. She scrolled through her newsfeed and sure enough, there was picture after picture of me, with Facebook’s Greek chorus chiming in under each.
“Look, I told you I’ve already seen a lot of this,” I said.
“Yeah, and what about this?” She opened a new tab and went to Twitter, a site I can’t even begin to comprehend. There we found a relentless stream of censure, with the two words of my name smooshed together and placed behind the tic-tac-toe sign.
“Grace, I don’t want to look at that.”
“Or this?” She went to YouTube and found the Power Today clip: 748 comments underneath it. “Or this?” She went to cbc.ca/news and there was my picture above the scroll.
“Oh, for Christsake, boys,” I grumbled at the screen, my PEI accent returning in a burst. “Slow news day or wot?”
She wheeled back around to face me. “You have to do something about this.”
“Like what?”
“Well, we all know Cheryl Sneed is a troll, but you could start by apologizing to her publicly.”
“Apologize to her?” I said. “She’s the one who drew those comments out of me. Anyone who watches that clip can see it.”
“Philip, are you serious? Do you honestly think —” But just then her eyes flashed to something behind me and she was up and out of her chair. “Simone Beauvoir Daly, it is November — you are not wearing that.”
I turned to see that my stepdaughter — in the process of going upstairs to brush her teeth — had also changed into a fuchsia tank top, its skimpy straps revealing the tiny nubs of her shoulders. She and Grace began squabbling about this wardrobe choice, which carried them back upstairs.
I returned to the kitchen, tousled Naomi’s hair on the way to my cupboard, then got out the tin shaker and Jameson to start my own breakfast. I noticed Naomi had now abandoned her Frosted Flakes and had taken up a crayon. “What are you colouring, sweetie?” I asked as I went to my bar fridge to dig out the necessary accoutrements.
“Dine-soars,” she replied without looking up.
Ice cubes: check. I cracked about half out of the tray, and they clanged noisily into the tin. Tomato juice: check. Horseradish: check. Tabasco sauce: check. I looked back at her. “Can I see?” She held up the book to reveal a not-to-proportion T. Rex and triceratops now bludgeoned with crayon. “Another Vermeer in the making,” I declared, then pulled open my vegetable crisper. Took out the celery, then scrounged. Scrounged. Scrounged some more, moving aside torn and empty produce bags. Oh crap.
Grace and Simone appeared back in the kitchen then, the latter now wearing a grey wool cardigan over the offending tank top. “Philip,” she asked as she opened the family fridge and pulled down her lunch, “are you still taking me to that dance recital tomorrow?”
“Of course I am,” I replied, beginning to assemble my concoction despite the fact I was missing one of its chief ingredients. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Well, something bad has happened, right?”
Grace and I looked at each other.
“What’s going on?” Simone pressed.
Grace and I looked at the floor.
Simone then pulled her rhinestone-covered iPhone out of her cardigan’s pocket. “I got a text from Sarah last night,” she said, scrolling. “It reads, ‘My mom says your stepdad’s a real dickhead.’” She pushed the screen toward my face. “Do you want to read the rest of what it says?”
“No, I do not.”
“Okay, you’re now late,” Grace said. “You have to go. Right now.”
“Fine,” Simone sighed, giving a roll of her eyes. She grabbed her bookbag off the counter and threw on a coat from the front closet. “Okay, bye!” she yelled, and then was out the door.
“You know,” Grace said, “she’s convinced you’re going to renege on taking her tomorrow.”
“Well, I’m not,” I replied, dropping a celery stalk into the now completed Bloody Joseph and raising it to my lips. “And another thing: I finally remembered what we’re doing on Sunday.”
“Oh, really?” She gave me a smirk that I could only interpret as an olive branch.
“Yes. We’re having people in for brunch — Jane Elton included. And you want me to steer her in the direction of ‘Sally and the Kitchen Sink.’”
Grace took a brief but longing glance over at the chaos of her writing desk. “Do you think she’d look at it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. She’s not taking a lot of kids’ lit these days. But we’ll see.”
“Anyway,” she said, turning back to me, “I’m sorry I gave you a hard time about it right before you went on the show. I felt bad about that.”
“Yeah, well. It was quite a thing to have on my mind when I was supposed to be routing Cheryl Sneed.”
Grace made a face. “So it
