NOTES FROM THE MIDDLE

The House Next Door

The neighbours from our old house came for dinner last night.

Calling them “the neighbours” is technically accurate in the same way that calling someone you have known since infancy “an acquaintance” is technically accurate. It describes the original arrangement but leaves out almost everything that followed.

We met when my eldest was eighteen months old and theirs was four months old. Three more babies arrived after that, and for years our two houses operated less like neighbouring properties than a small, loosely governed family compound.

The children used both homes interchangeably.

They came through whichever door was closest. They ate whatever was being served. They left socks, cups, mittens and parts of costumes in both houses. No one kept especially careful track of whose things were whose, including, occasionally, the children.

The garden between us became one large garden. There were Harry Potter Quidditch matches, teepees, road hockey and, in the rare Vancouver snow, forts constructed with the urgency of civil engineering projects and the structural integrity of cake.

There was so much road hockey.

Nets were dragged into the street. Sticks were abandoned in hedges. Cars waited while someone solemnly moved a goal six inches to the left. Games continued until dinner, darkness or an adult lost patience calling for bath time.

We worked out childhood together.

Were they old enough to ride their bikes to the park without us? Should they be doing the dishes after dinner by now? Was that cough concerning? Was that teacher concerning? How much supervision did a group of children playing in a yard actually require, and at what point did “independent play” become “we have no idea where they are”?

There was the afternoon two of them played “working man” and drilled a hole through pristine drywall.

They had tools. They had a project. They had, apparently, no permitting process.

We gave the boys their first haircuts at home, as it turns out curls are more forgiving.

Every Halloween, we made costumes together.

There were dining-room tables covered in felt, cardboard, and glue guns. We would eventually get everyone dressed, take the necessary photographs and eat hamburger soup from The Best of Bridge before heading out to trick-or-treat as a small, overexcited herd.

The adults carried travel mugs. The children carried pillowcases. Someone always became too cold. Someone always lost part of a costume. Someone always insisted on one more block.

At the time, none of it felt historic.

It felt busy.

There were dinners to make, permission forms to sign and wet boots lined up near the door. We were trying to get through bath time, bedtime and the next morning. No one stood in the middle of the garden during a Quidditch match and said, “We will miss this terribly one day.”

Thank goodness.

It would have ruined it.

Those years are now almost a decade behind us.

The children are adults. Our old house belongs to other people. I assume the drywall has been repaired. The road hockey nets have disappeared. No one needs help attaching a cape or remembering to bring a pillowcase.

And yet, last night, when the two families were together again, the old choreography returned almost immediately.

People moved around the kitchen getting dinner onto the table. Someone cut the limes. Someone found serving spoons. Dishes were carried in and cleared away without much discussion. We talked over one another. We asked about everyone’s university year, summer jobs, future plans and the less precise life plans that begin to appear when your children are old enough to be making choices you cannot make for them.

The adults talked about our own lives gradually tapering toward retirement.

This seemed improbable.

Surely we had only recently been debating whether the children were old enough to ride their bikes to the park alone.

After dinner, my eldest put on an art show.

He brought out his work and talked about what he had been making. The rest of us sat and looked and asked questions. It struck me that he was showing his work to a room full of people who had loved him from the beginning.

They knew him before he could draw.

They knew the little boy who ran between the two houses, played road hockey in the street and stood at the kitchen counter wearing some partially completed Halloween costume. Now he was standing in front of them as an adult artist, explaining his work.

There was no need to make a great ceremony of it.

That is one of the privileges of being deeply known. The people who remember you at four can also take you seriously at twenty-two. They hold the whole record without needing to recite it.

I went to bed with a full heart.

Not because the evening had been grand. It wasn’t. It was dinner. There were dishes. People talked about school and work and what they might do next.

But all evening I had been looking at evidence of two families interwoven.

Not metaphorically. Practically.

In meals eaten, doors left unlocked, costumes made, children corrected, rides given, gardens shared, illnesses checked on, holidays observed and hundreds of ordinary afternoons no one thought to photograph.

Parenthood can feel intensely private when you are inside it. The worry, the responsibility, the endless calculation of what a child needs and whether you are getting any of it right.

But looking back, I can see how many other adults were there.

Adults who held them slightly differently than I did.

Almost, though never quite, as their own.

I woke this morning thinking about the adults who did that for me.

The people around my parents who remembered my birthday, asked about school, invited me along, found me a bed, fed me dinner and behaved as though my place in their homes did not require explanation.

As a child, I did not understand what they were giving me.

Children rarely do.

Only later do you understand the size of the circle.

And later still, when your own children are grown, you understand what it meant that other adults stood inside it with you.

They did not replace the family. They enlarged it.

Last night, our children sat around the table as adults, although I suspect none of the parents saw only the adults.

We saw the babies and the university students. The Halloween costumes and the summer plans. The child holding a hockey stick and the young artist holding up a painting.

All of them present at once.

Then we cleared the table, finished the dishes and began talking about when we could do it again.

~ Danielle