I remember the moment distinctly. My three-year-old son was on my husband?s shoulders watching a man swallow a flame.
It was his birthday, and this was BuskerFest in Toronto, which took place annually in the neighbourhood of our condo, so it was all in the realm of normal. BuskerFest always fell around his birthday at the end of August, and we would take credit for the festivities, dancers, musicians, jugglers, acrobats and endless vendors of delights, telling him we?d arranged it all for his birthday.
It was the kind of lie that young parents enjoy?a flight of imagination versus a decent into deception. That moment though, watching him taking that in, I questioned the baseline we were setting for his expectations of life. He was already being shaped by that market of five million people and he was still liquid. We could pour him into anything, and as long as we were together, he was happy. My own childhood couldn?t have been more different. My isolated small mountain town had around five thousand people. My carnivals were populated by ants I would find by overturning rocks. No less festive, I turned the ants into acrobats and directed them to walk tightropes made of blades of grass strung on, for height of ant sophistication, my dad?s toothpicks. I was mostly alone, but the anchor of my mother at the kitchen window was steady.
When I was liquid, that yard was my childhood container?one that I outgrew and left behind for university. Back then though, I was the creator of a ...