What a Kids’ Book Taught Me about Parenting Through Grief

A month ago, my kids and I decided we would try to read every Canadian picture book published this year.

Admittedly, it’s an immense undertaking. The “fairly comprehensive list,” provided by Meghan Howe of the Canadian Children’s Book Centre, comprises well over 300 new titles, from Angela’s Glacier by Jordan Scott to Ruth Doyle’s The Zoo Inside Me.

So far, the biggest hurdle has been sourcing the self-published titles that aren’t in the Vancouver Public Library catalogue. Otherwise, it’s not all that daunting for someone who loves to read library books to his kids and make lists, and has found that, without an immense undertaking or hyperfixation, there’s nothing to do but continue to process the untimely death of my mom in 2022.

If anything, this project has made bedtime more enjoyable for everyone.

More educational too. Not only are my children learning lots about topics that aren’t top of our mind in our house — disability access, religion, dementia — but I’m doing deep market research about what a good picture book is supposed to accomplish.

I sold my first children’s title, I Just Have to Race All These Ghosts, to Tundra Books this past summer. But even then, much was uncertain, like: Who am I writing for? Children? Their parents? The publisher, the editor, the future illustrator? Me? Younger me, and if so, is it selfish to write for my lost inner child when his children exist?

If this sounds like overthinking, I assure you that it isn’t. All these questions arise when you sit down to write children’s literature.

You’re likely to find that the process has actually been underthought. Good writing is all about voice, but in the process of speaking to children, your voice changes.

It takes time to master the new voice, and time may not be on your side.

There’s no space in a 32-page picture book to prevaricate until you hit your stride. Eight hundred words sounds so easy when your last book, a memoir for grown-ups, surpassed 80,000.

But maybe I should have known then that my gift wasn’t brevity.

“I would have written you a shorter letter,” somebody clever once said, “but I didn’t have time.”

I read the first draft of my picture book pitch to my children. My six-year-old couldn’t sit still, and my four-year-old son, whom the book is about, said he hated it. So did I, after that.

It occurred to me then that my artful approach didn’t mean shit to them. So I wrote a new draft, little critics in mind, and refined it, again and again, to align with their little attention spans, senses and neurodivergence.

My new editor is waiting on another draft, and once again I find myself at odds about my audience, my voice, and what I want my debut picture book to do. Which is fine. I’ll be fine. When I’m stuck, I read others, and lucky for me, there are hundreds of books on my list that we still have to read.

The ‘Green Baby Swing’ was a powerful vehicle for processing grief

Last week, we read The Green Baby Swing by the great Thomas King. It’s a heart-warming book about loss and the power of family with muted watercolour and pencil illustrations by Toronto-based artist Yong Ling Kang.

If not for my list, I might not have discovered this title. I usually seek out humorous works, and this book doesn’t look funny. It looks sad, an emotion I’ve tried to avoid at all costs since the loss of my mom, who was known to my children as Nana. For two years, I’ve cried at the drop of a hat; some evenings, hats seem to fall from the sky.

Sure enough, The Green Baby Swing begins after a funeral. A young boy named Xavier, his mother, and their kitten go upstairs to the attic. The sorrow on his mother’s face was perfectly captured, so clear that I gulped, well before we discovered that the person who passed in the book was named Nana.

Xavier’s mother is trying to clean up the attic and keep it together. Her son is exploring, unpacking the boxes, and playing with powerful keepsakes. He’s asking big questions. He pulls out the ring sling his mother once used, and her mother before her — the titular green baby swing — and he asks to be worn, like a baby.

I remember the feeling of trying to parent while drowning in grief, of sobbing so loudly my children broke into the room to bear witness.

The Green Baby Swing made me sit in that feeling, reflect on the beauty of mourning one’s mother while raising her grandkids, who won’t understand until you’re in the ground and they’re up in the attic with yours.

At bedtime, Xavier wants to be cuddled, the same way my son insists, night after night. He asks if the green baby swing can be used as a blanket that covers them both, and his mother says: probably not.

But it can.

I tried to move on to the next book. But it was too late. I was already crying. The kids asked me why I was crying, and I tried to answer, but there were no words, only tears. So I buried my head in my hands to cry harder and, hopefully, work through my big feelings faster. Nobody had time for this. There’s a list.

Four little hands squeezed my shoulders as two little miracles made their way into my lap.

I had to sit up straighter to accommodate them both. They seized every inch of space. And then they hugged me while I wept.

My wife came by, spotted a group hug in progress with room for one more, and she gathered us in. Then we sat there and mourned my birth mother together.

And I thought: this is what good picture books are supposed to accomplish.