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Matthew

This picture was taken when Matthew was just two months old, in early 1996. He was a very good natured baby at the time. He slept well and seemed to find an easy rapport with the photographer.

Check out the big shock of hair! I was there in the delivery room to receive him when he emerged from the womb, and I swear that the first thing I saw was a mass of matted black hair. Even the nurses commented on it (most babies come out virtually bald). Rebecca had a fairly short labour; we showed up at the hospital around noon and he was born roughly four hours later.

There were no complications, but the experience wasn't what we would term "pleasant". Our ob-gyn was out recruiting even though she knew Rebecca was due, and she took neither pager or cell-phone with her (nice, eh?). The hospital staff took control and virtually ignored our wishes from the beginning, and at one point, I had to elbow my way in to stop the stand-in ob-gyn from performing an episiotomy even though we had specifically explained to them beforehand that Rebecca didn't want one!

Of course, Matthew knew none of this, which is just as well. He grew quickly and developed quickly. He had a full set of teeth at nine months, and he gained a pound a week for the first few months. By the time he was three months old, the nurses were shocked at his size. We wondered if he might grow up to be huge, but now that he's five years old, he looks like all the other five year olds, so I guess it was just some kind of weird baby growth spurt.

Matthew in his favourite Mickey Mouse chair! He loved this chair almost to death; the foam inside both arms is now torn apart, so they don't hold their shape. But we still have it, and even at the age of five, he still uses it.

We bought it from Wal-Mart as I recall, which was pretty much the entire shopping menu in Sarnia. Now that we're back in Toronto, we still go to Wal-Mart for the occasional item, but we have the luxury of choice.

As they say, you can take the boy out of the city, but you can't take the city out of the boy. I tried the small-town life for four years. I met some very nice people, but after giving it what I thought was more than a fair shake, I realized that I wanted to go home to the concrete jungle, where the shopping is good, there's more than one culture, and I'm no longer the only non-white person in town.

This picture was taken at Lambton-Cundick park, just up the road from Sombra (another tiny town where we lived for a while). Some relatives had come to visit, and we spent a few hours there.

We used to walk to that park on a regular basis, and Matthew would play while Fuzzy waded tentatively into the water. Of course, it was the St. Clair river downstream of the Sarnia chemical plants, so there was always a chance that the water would burst into flames, but it never happened while we were there.

This picture was taken after moving back to Toronto. Little Matthew was still more of a baby than a little boy at this time, and Fuzzy tagged along behind him.

If I recall correctly, they are wearing their church clothes, as we were still sporadically attending church at this time. It couldn't last, of course. The only church in the neighbourhood with a lot of children (thus making it suitable for us to attend) was a Baptist church, and the more we talked to them, the more we realized that we had absolutely nothing in common with them.

They spouted bigoted comments about other religions (not to mention atheists) on a regular basis and they were creationists, with all of the irrationality that this entails. They talked often of how the ridiculously named "Creation Theory" would supplant evolution theory in biology class, and how they would overturn the "lie" that the Earth is billions of years old, in geology class.

It's simply not possible for a rational human being to spend too much time around such people without either desiring to escape their company or have harsh words with them, and so we parted ways with that church. Many of them were very nice, friendly people on the surface, but there was a deep undercurrent of anti-scientific feeling and religious bigotry.

The harsh reality is that we know full well that they would have eagerly joined Rebecca's family and our lying minister in their attempts to keep us from getting married, because of their belief in religious segregation (Christians should only marry Christians, Jews should only marry Jews, atheists should only marry atheists, etc). It's sad that such religious bigotry is still widely accepted in this world, but unfortunately, the Bible itself contains many justifications for such attitudes, so it's hard to imagine them going away any time soon.

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This was taken just before Christmas 2000, in the Sherway Gardens shopping mall in Toronto's west end. We haven't put much effort into indoctrinating Matthew with the Santa Claus mythology, so I'm not sure if he really got a whole lot out of his encounter with the Jolly one.

But the picture looks nice, and it's pretty hard to escape Santa Claus around Christmas. I remain convinced that even if we continue to teach him about Santa Claus in a lackadaisical manner, he will still probably absorb the Santa myth from television and movies and peers.

I'm not sure why we've put so little effort into teaching him the Santa myth. Maybe it's because I'm reluctant to tell him lies, even little white ones. Maybe it's because we're just lazy. Maybe it's because there are some things about Santa Claus which remind me of George Orwell's Big Brother (he knows when you've been sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows when you've been bad or good so be good for goodness' sake). Who knows ...

In any case, if he absorbs the Santa myth from outside our home, then that's fine. He'll figure out that it's a myth sooner or later. And if he never buys it, then so much the better. Maybe I can raise him to be a little skeptic.

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