Mum’s the Word

Several years ago, thanks in equal measure to a stroke of good luck and a healthy dose of deliberate manoeuvring, I found myself in possession of a once-in-a-lifetime literary opportunity: a week-long writers’ retreat on a remote island smack dab in the centre of Lake Erie, with my favourite author on the face of the earth and the queen of CanLit herself, Margaret Atwood.

I’d applied not long but also a lifetime before — before I became a mother, before I got pregnant, before having a baby was anything but a distant possibility. Now things were different. I was a new mom to eleven-month-old Maggie, named for her mother’s favourite writer, no less, and I was still breastfeeding and co-sleeping and already plagued by the brutal affliction of “mom guilt.” For weeks, I wavered about going. I knew I could, but I wasn’t convinced I should, for a hundred legitimate and ridiculous reasons I won’t revisit here. I remember a sense of whiplash: elation at the sudden strange...