Kaitlyn Kochany is a Toronto-area freelance writer and editor. She had her son, NS, in January 2016, and has been trying to sleep and write since then.
An incomplete list of things I fear as the mother of a 21-month old boy: // cancer; drowning; dying in a fire; dying in a Trump-related nuclear conflagration; getting hit by a car; growing up and going to university and …
Tonight, my no-longer-a-baby baby, clad only in a diaper, climbed on top of me and bellowed “I’m a punk!” the way a wolf would howl gleefully at a moon. He’s 20 months old. In baby terms, he’s a teenager—funny, wise, …
Many years ago, I read an advice column about ending friendships. The columnist pointed out that it’s not like a romantic breakup, which has a protocol and a timeline and had been immortalized in fiction and onscreen (mostly by John …
There is a picture of me somewhere—I’m not sure who took it or where I’ve seen it, but I have—of me in high school. In it, my hair is wrapped in a pink scarf, I’m wearing a vintage Coca-Cola shirt, …
I love breastfeeding NS. At first, it was a source of worry—is he getting enough? too much? at the right time? is he latched? is he full? fuck, what are my boob doing all the way down there?—but these days, …
When I was a kid, my mom favoured the kind of art that you might thing of as “boring museum:” gauzy and romantic, featuring lots of children in straw hats, mothers in white lace dresses, lazy days on a skiff, …
Straight off the bat, I’m just going to say it: Margaret Atwood makes me cranky. She’s been, like, the Grand Dame of Canadian Letters since forever; frankly, I haven’t drank that Kool-Aid in a long while. Books like Oryx and …
I didn’t know I wasn’t really a baby person until I spent a year with one. I love NS, obviously—everyone loves their own babies—but babies are tedious little creatures sometimes. They’re in there, but the humanity is sketched broadly and …
It’s been a hot minute since I’ve put pen to paper / finger to keyboard, and basically the reason is that our lives are really fucking tough right now! So it’s hard to be breezy about fun pants I want …
I have a bike trailer and the kid, inside the trailer, has one fist inside a stainless steel container filled with organic dried apricots. We are riding along the lakeshore, me in a pair of performance sport sunglasses, the kid …