No, it doesn’t involve Viggo. Nor James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser. My most potent fantasy is shared, methinks, by all those females with hangers-on of the genetic variety: the fantasy of being alone. Flavours abound.

When you’re breastfeeding, it’s the fantasy of detachment (not emotional, but literal). Going out for more than two hours at a time. A yoga class. Lunch with a friend. Grocery shopping without the electric shockage of an inside-out baby at the checkout. It’s not profound time, but it’s paradise.

In the thick of it (the two-month birthday), you’re convinced that time like that will NEVER, EVER happen again.

When you’re toddling, it’s the fantasy of free will. You primp, go downtown in that pair of supercool boots you never get to wear, get ten thousand things done, feel fabulously indulgent and faintly hip. Or perhaps not. Perhaps you don’t shower until 3 PM, let the morning drift away in fleecy frumpitude with a pot of tea and a portobello omelette (which you take an hour to eat, just because you can) and a pile of trashy magazines.

Either way, you’re off-duty from your post as Chief Killjoy. Pure decadence. A day-long smile of contentedness.

Speculation due to lack of experience: when you’re preschooling or tweening or anything in the middle or beyond, it’s the fantasy of offspring self-government. Or government administered by someone else. The space both inside and outside your head is yang-free, exempt from intervention (yangs and whines being, from my perspective, potentially more taxing than the physical demands of ten babies put together).

I can imagine, looking ahead: plain and simple peace and quiet. Off-duty from your post as Chief Bad Cop. Bliss.

I sat the other day in the parking lot of the hardware store, alone, eating a sub and a bag of ketchup chips. And smiling, thinking to myself: This is great. This is the BEST LUNCH I have EVER HAD in my WHOLE LIFE. What should I do next? Hmm. Let’s just finish this yumminess, and then we’ll see.

That’s the great thing about living the fantasy. You’re so tickled to be in it, you’re easy to please. On fantasy day, playschool day, nothing can dim my spirits. Cashiers smile and drivers wave and the sun shines and Frenchy’s gives up yet another epic haul. And I get home and still have two hours before the boys come through the door.

Two days per week. Butterflies flip when I see him again, when he squeals MAMA! and explodes through the door, clambers into my arms and sings to me while we roll around on the floor, giggling together. I am refreshed.

That’s more potent than an entire roomful of Viggos.

Lord, I love the dig. And I’m not the only one.

I have a method, an approach plan. Toss all the pinks aside; watch for interesting fabric. It’s usually attached to the holy grail: the Good Label. Eureka! A teeny-tiny kung-fu outfit. A suede cowboy vest with a fringe. Endless 70s-era t-shirts. A handmade puffy cordouroy jacket. Retro toques with giant pom-poms. And bottomless Gap, Old Navy, Stride-rite, exotic European brands, all givens, some never worn, topping out at about a buck apiece.

Frenchy’s is a maritime phenomenon, well-loved and documented. There’s at least one in almost every small rural town—Bridgewater is enormous, the Coldbrook twins own Halloween, Windsor is hot and cold, Sackville is a hidden gem. We’re excursionists. We take an afternoon and hit half a dozen, once every few months (station wagon required).

People elsewhere think they know secondhand, but they don’t. Not until they know Frenchy’s—and score the kind of haul that gets taken home in a garbage bag, bursting at the seams.

I am a treasure-hunter, the third generation of Robson women who troll the bins. Still squeamish? Behold the prize of vintage plaid and shearling.

Day One

7 AM, Halifax airport. Hope springs eternal. That the 29E – back row, middle seat – on my boarding card is a mistake. That a non-reclining Kate-sandwich is not my fate for the next six thousand miles to Vancouver.

Airport breakfast features bacon-flavoured strips + tetra-pak eggs + perfectly uniform, cube-shaped potato missiles (drown in ketchup from communal trough dispenser: check). Redeeming it all, globbing it all together into an unrecognizable, congealed mass: melted ‘cheese’ slices for my inner trailer-park-girl. The kind of petroleum by-product that justifies a ‘zed’ on the end (the equivalent, in the cheez world, of putting your “hands way up in the air, and wavin’ like you just don’t care”).

<fast-forward>

Surreal. Totally surreal. Awake for more than 20 hours. Feel:

• 50% raised by wolves
• 25% like we never left, and Evan was just a dream
• 15% sentimental
• 15% incapable of coherent thought (or simple mathematics), and already fearing defeat by exhaustion

Am trying to nap in this hotel room but the city waits outside, mocking me. I am here! Eyes are two pissholes. Time for blow-torched mackerel, starting at midnight Halifax time.

Later this night, after wandering:

• Immaculate, delicious-smelling gay men and wasted, convulsing junkies everywhere. Why must everyone inspire either awestruck-gaping or nose-holding? Is there no middle ground?
  
• Maybe Nova Scotia is more home to me now than I knew. I was so busy mourning for my mistress, I hadn’t noticed. It is as spectacular as ever, but all feels foreign.
• At Robson and Burrard, a man wearing nothing but running shorts and fuzzy green slippers walked in front of me and ran into traffic, yelling. No one blinked.
• My hotel room: tonight’s scene for full scale let-it-all-hang-outedness. Despite the appreciated saferoom of marriage, nothing quite beats the lack of witness a hotel room provides to oneself.
• Turning the corner on yet another downtown mountain view corridor still stops me. Fashionistas and junkies and asian school girls and yoga instructors pile up at my back like Augustus Gloop stuck in Willy Wonka's chocolate pipe.

Day Two

Greasy breakfast, japanese lunch, liquid supper. Fabulously smart people. Amazing how easily one slips back into office life, funky bricky coffee-breaky life, despite the accustomed dining room table. CEO smirkily asked how’s life in Tatooine? Earned moderate street cred with at least it’s not remote as the spice mines of the Kessel galaxy, which are millions of light years away.

Day Three

Greasier breakfast, thai lunch, liquid supper, liquid dessert. The mistress is mine again. It’s fantastic, this interlude. I am collaborating, and it doesn't involve anyone else's bum. Am zipped back two years like magic (except for the boobs).

Day Four

People keep saying, Your first time away? Poor you! Does it feel like your arm has been cut off? Are you worried? Have you been sleeping? And I want to answer FRIG no! Frig no! Frig YES!

I miss him like a best buddy, a treasured companion. I can’t wait for the moment when I see him again… drench him in kisses, get entangled in him once more. The thought of it makes me giddy (not to mention the thought of my own personal turnout-gear-clad Mr. July).

In the meantime, I know they're fine. All the world is filled with exotic possibility, company, time, food, Granville Island Cypress Honey Lager. And I must say – mothers everywhere, nod in affinity – This. Is. Decadence. Incarnate.

Day Five

Today was Friday, my last day in the office. Not much writing accomplished this week, but rare and priceless face-meeting, stake-planting. The more that happens on this trip, the less I feel the need to reflect. It is an invigorating blur, such a high.

Day Six

One last free day in Vancouver. Took aquabus to Granville Island, wandered, met friends, had lunch in Deep Cove, wandered, went for hike on Mount Seymour, wandered. All I saw and tasted and felt was sweet and lush and deep… and it all became normal faster than expected. Am now dosed up with career and mountain methadone, ready to see my two fellas.

I can go home, the place I now know is home, satiated.

I leave for Vancouver tomorrow morning, a business trip. How will I feel when the plane circles to land? I always felt a rush of exhilaration, landing. I was the luckiest person in the world on the approach towards the north shore mountains, our mountains, coming home to our extraordinary city. Rainforest walks and thousand-year-old trees and downtown beaches and cherry-blossomed streets and hidden islands and white peaks…

It's an illicit getaway with my mistress. Relentlessly bewitching, she is.

First time away from the boy for more than an evening. Six days of alone time, grown-up time. Time during which I won’t be called on to rescue, to squidge, to upright, to tickle, to wipe or to squish. I am officially clocked out: daddy, grammy and grampa are clocked in, bless them. Time for me to be devotedly on the job, revive the me of two years ago, disallowed from fishing sweats out of the dirty laundry pile. It’s clicky-shoe time.

That’s the magic word, isn’t it? Time. For six days it will all belong to me, to do with whatever I please. I will spend too much money on sushi and teeny-tiny beers. I will not sing skinnamarink. I will write and write and write, working with people who are much like me. I might even feel like my old self again.

Maybe that’s what I’m afraid of.

Perhaps it happens during a nap, or in a house full of family, all of whom want to play. When Evan is on someone else’s watch, a switch turns off in my head.

My brain says: Hey. Are we alone? We could shower. Or eat. Or sleep. But let’s not. Let’s make a pot of hot tea, and read a book. No, a magazine. Let’s not be social. Let’s not cook, unless it’s indulgent. Let’s untwist. Please, please, please?

The irresistible pull of open-mouthed-breathing downtime can only be understood by other parents. All time to oneself is stolen, and is therefore highly precious.

You are owned by another, by one who grants packets of rest like crunchy biscuits or spoonfuls of peanut butter to a well-behaved golden retriever. You treasure it, guard it, shovel it into your soul as quickly as you can for fear that it might be taken away: the chance to be engrossed in something that is both unnecessary, and of your own choosing.

The boy is six months old. We’re at the first peak of the roller coaster, about to drop into the ride. We thought the ascent was crazy – higher and higher, nerves twitching, stomach turning with every clickity clack – but that was nothing compared to the corkscrews and up-enders that await.

Six months from now he’ll run away from us, growl like a tiger on command and say No! at bedtime. He’s well on his way. Pulling himself up to standing on rough and tumble legs. Squealing with delight at the new ticklish spots we discover now and then. Exploring the world of jolly jumpers and rice cereal and flipping on the change table. And the newest revelation - he can get his toes into his mouth. Joy!

But here comes the recurring theme: harried new mother yearns for solitary pedicure.

That desire to be myself rather than someone’s mom, just for a day or so. It’s simple things. Being able to wear my hair down with long, dangly earrings, exempt for a short time from those relentless little fists. Not wearing a nursing bra day and night. Eating slowly. Savouring a meal, instead of taking turns shovelling.

This morning I caught a glimpse of an MEC catalogue and said to Justin, ‘Remember when that used to be us? When we used to go onto glaciers and islands and snowfields and take pictures?’

Now, the only excitement we get is when we forget the diaper bag.

We fondly recall the era when our life was all about us. But this is magic in a way those days never were. He knows us, he knows we love him. I’ll surprise him in a crowd, and he lights up and looks at me like we share the world’s most marvellous secret. That’s worth a thousand B.C. weekends right there.

Six months old. We’re gods for him, in this brief window of omnipotence. Bearers of safety, warmth, giggles and tasters. But I know what we really are. We’re not gods. We’re sidekicks.