Most people consider the kitchen to be the heartbeat of the home; the hub, the core, the grand central station. Ours is no different, except that I work in the middle of that grand central station.

This is useful for the people who live here, when those people can’t find their good jeans, their wallet or the car keys. It is useful for Maggie who thinks a keyboard is a cat bed. It is useful for those who are running late, are really hungry or need another word for “euphemism”.

It is not good for someone who works from their kitchen. I attempted to set up shop in another part of the house years ago, even going so far as to buying a lovely desk and cabinets. Ari, 18, loves it. It holds his computer perfectly. Somehow, a decade spent madly writing away in a cubbyhole in the kitchen works for me.

Because we are truly a modern family, I will often send the kids a text telling them dinner is ready if yelling hasn’t produced results. Christopher, 21, is on my Skype list, which means I can send him a message on his computer. It’s called Instant Messaging, but I call it instant ignoring. The other day, I told him to get his brother for dinner.

“Ari’s not answering me,” I told him.

“I’ll just hook you two up as Skype contacts, and you can tell him yourself,” he replied.

“I hate that stuff, I’d rather yell,” at which point, I yelled again. A few seconds later, Ari came down the stairs. I started telling him to get plates, when he passed me and went to his brother.

“What are you doing, putting her on my Skype list? Are you nuts?” I took offense to this. Though I’ve been known to send the occasional link to cute cat pictures, or really interesting news articles, I’ve never abused this privilege. Never.

“She’ll start sending me pictures of Maggie!” he went on. Maggie and I glanced at each other, wondering what the downside of this was.

“Don’t worry, she’ll only do it on her big computer. She hasn’t figured that out on her iPad,” replied Christopher, as if I wasn’t in the room.

Horribly insulted, I announced my leave-taking and told them to do the dishes. If my computer is on, I’m working, thinking about work, or avoiding work. When dinner is over, I shut it all down and leave the room.

This frees up the best chair in the house. My office chair. Christopher is usually at the dining room table in the evenings. He sits on a normal wooden chair, until the magic moment I sigh loudly and announce I’m heading upstairs. He asks if I had a productive day, if he can pour me some wine, or if he can tidy up after dinner. I’m lying; he doesn’t do any of those things. He grabs my chair.

He calls shutting down my computer the closing ceremonies. He tells Maggie to get Mommy to go to bed; yes, in my head my cats call me Mommy, though in their heads they probably call me Food Woman. I’m aware. I sit in my kitchen all day and go to bed at 7pm – you expected something different?

As Christopher made a beeline for my chair, I hesitated.

“Wait. This is stupid. I can’t become that woman who drinks tea all day and talks to her cats and goes to bed early. That’s pathetic. I mean, think about it, Christopher, where will that leave us?”

“It’ll leave me in your chair,” he replied.

When Christopher, now 21, was about 3, my sister and I were clearing up the cottage to head home. I handed him a container of stale sugar doughnuts, those little white ones that are awesome the day you get them, and decidedly more like sugar-covered cardboard the next. I plunked him on the front deck, telling him to feed the chipmunks. It would keep him occupied while I packed up.

When I went to get him twenty minutes later, he was covered in white sugar. His face was plastered with it. I asked him if he’d eaten the doughnuts. He shook his head vigorously, and told me with a straight face that he’d only fed the chippies. I learned my lesson: a toddler will always eat the sugar doughnuts.

I watched an ad for a home monitoring system the other day. The tagline was something close to “wouldn’t you like to know what’s going on in your home every second, even if you’re not there?” I’m sure it’s meant to reassure me of the upside of having this knowledge as I fiercely dial and order up something that goes way beyond home security.

No, I think to myself, this is something I distinctly do not want to know. Maybe it’s in spite of having offspring old enough to be left alone; maybe it’s because of that. In another home, I had an alarm system installed because I was frequently alone with a new baby. I bought into the alarmist ads for alarms, until I realized that my tiny cat set off the motion detector too often, and the thing scared the wits out of my mother when she forgot the code. I wrote the code over the keypad.

I agreed with the now-quaint notion of an alarm that sounds if someone tries to break into your home. But this new breed of Big Brother goes past safety and in the wrong hands, could surely be a huge invasion of privacy within families.

If, at 16, I’d come home from school with a headache, an unexpected spare or a bleeding, broken heart, would it really have helped if my parents had been given a notification that I was at home? They trusted me enough to leave me home if they went away. Yes, friends came over but nothing got broken, nobody got arrested, and if it hadn’t ended well, it would have been a teachable moment, as some shrink might say. If my father could have monitored that from three hours away, would any of us really have been any better off?

Many new cars now offer you the technology to constantly monitor whoever drives your car. You can download the trip and check speeds, locations, and rolling stop signs. Manufacturers mistakenly believe that I, Mommy, will love this. I hate it. If you don’t trust your kid, you don’t give them the keys. New drivers should be taught well, have the trust leash let out inch by inch, and deal with the consequences of screwing up. In my house, that’s a yanked car. It’s a big deal, and they have to treat it that way.

I worry about generations growing up under a microscope. I encourage my sons to talk to me, but there are things I don’t want to know because I’m sure of the things that matter: if there is trouble, they will come to me. I trust them to correct mistakes they can recover from on their own, and they trust me to be there if the pitch goes wild.

Besides, it’s pretty hard to lie about eating sugar doughnuts.

As I descended the stairs early one morning, I heard someone knock on the door. I glanced down at the giant red American Eagle hoodie I’d just pulled on over a limp t-shirt and dirty jeans; I was going out to garden. I’d been on my way to a baseball cap because my hair has a war with itself each night and wakes up looking like there was no clear winner. My glasses are thick, with heavy black frames that take up half my face.

And yet there was a man on my doorstep, insisting that he recognized me. I have been overestimating the power of mascara for some time, it would seem. I sighed. I rarely answer the door, but had been caught off guard, having not yet downed my first cup of tea which is the only way I can truly start my day. When you’re trying to extricate yourself from an unwelcome interruption, anonymity is your ally; now I’d have to top my “please go away” cupcake with extra nicing.

“I’m sure I know you,” he continued. I danced from foot to foot, trying to edge the door shut.

I do not buy anything on my doorstep. Not gas contracts, not driveway sealing, and most especially not religion. Yes I’m aware they give it away for free. But salvation in a pamphlet? My mother told me if something seems too good to be true, it always is.

Apart from baby Girl Guides who sell my sons cases of cookies each year, my house is not a marketplace. I work at home, and an unexpected knock usually goes unanswered unless I see the big courier truck out front. I stopped being pretend- polite when one year, two women selling religion actually pushed opened my front door and yelled, “we know someone is home!” I’m not sure if there’s a commandment about unlawful entry, but there ought to be.

The two gentlemen who stood before me did not look even a tiny bit felonious, but I still was trying my usual mumble of “thanks for the offer, I’ll rot in hell with all my friends”, when one indicated the press car sitting in my driveway.

“I see that’s a hybrid,” he said. “It’s good to see you’re doing your bit for the world. You know the world is in a very bad way,” he finished. Yes, I know that. I also know it was simply luck of the draw that it wasn’t a gas guzzling Jaguar or Porsche sitting there; I drive what I’ve been assigned to drive. I felt guilty not explaining, and then decided that I’d take the unearned world saving credit he was offering. I was racking up the sins in record time: sloth, wrath and now, omission.

Why do I feel obligated to answer a question just because someone asks it? The element of surprise works very well on anyone who is basically polite. I’m sure that’s taught in door-to-door hustling school: catch ‘em off guard, then sell them a vacuum cleaner. You do not have the right to stand on my front step and ask the most personal of questions, whether it’s “have you accepted the lord as your saviour?” or “have you ever eaten a whole box of Thin Mints in one sitting?”.

Pammy, 21, wandered downstairs an hour later.

“Who was at the door?” she asked.

“Religion sellers,” I replied.

“They’re going to try to save you? Good luck with that,” she giggled, leaving the room.

Just for that, she can buy her own Girl Guide cookies when they come around.

I tired early of the false promises of flyers that practically gave off a whiff of new cut cedar when you opened them, headlines like sirens luring me onto the rocks of failure. It’s not do-it-yourself; it’s do-it-myself. The clerk in the little orange apron who helps you paint a mental picture doesn’t actually come home with you to paint the actual project.

“Mom! You better get up here!” yelled Ari, 18, the other day. They rarely beckon me to come to them. This did not bode well. I went into the rec room, where Ari has his computer set up, to see him standing on the short counter that runs along one end of the room. Water was dripping onto his head.

“It’s leaking,” he said unnecessarily. “What do I do?” When your roof is leaking and water flooding into your upstairs rec room, the answer is fairly obvious. You get a bowl and a towel. He did this.

“Do I just stand here?” he asked, tucking towels into the dropped ceiling and picking at bits of wet ceiling tile.

“Did you have any other plans for the day?” I asked him. “It’s leaked there before. I’ll call Manny.” Manny is my sister Gilly’s husband. He knows roofs and has tools, facts he has tried to hide from me for nearly two decades.

Ari set up a big bowl to keep an eye on, and went back to his computer, nervously eyeing the rest of the ceiling. I know in the event of an emergency, I would grab Maggie the cat. Christopher, 21, would grab his girlfriend Pammy, and Ari would grab his computer. I’m hoping the other cat JoJo will grab the baby pictures.

With a call in to Manny, I got back to the weekend’s main problem. I have no grass in my backyard, so we’d rented a rototiller. I discovered I love rototilling; it makes me feel like a farmer, and after an hour of turning the earth I wanted to buy a farm, raise a barn with helpful neighbours and have a corn roast. After two hours of rototilling I wanted to sell that farm and buy a condo.

With the boys taking their shifts, my sister Roz and her husband Daryl showed up. He is good at landscape-type things, and had offered to help me seed. Roz was inside making lunch, and looked at a hole in the drywall. Renos to the bathroom last year had left some bits and pieces not quite finished.

“You know you have a hole in your dining room?” she asked me.

“I’ve run out of brothers-in-law,” I responded. “It’s on the list.”

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have a list. From finishing trim to painting kitchen cabinets to tiling the laundry room to finishing the basement to changing the lightbulb in the outside light to hanging pictures to rebuilding the deck to replacing the barbecue to cleaning the garage to painting the bedrooms to oiling the lazy susan to buying more paper to make more lists, I am Sisyphus and my house is my boulder.

After an emotionally torn week of praying for no rain because of my leaky roof, to lots of rain for my new grass seed, it was with great relief that we headed over to Gilly and Manny’s for dinner. They have a lovely house, where I marvel at finished trim and a glorious deck.

As Roz and Gilly sat talking in the kitchen, Roz gestured through to the living room.

“What’s going on with your fireplace? Are you going to put in a new mantel?” asked Roz.

“It’s on the list,” replied Gilly.

When a handful of faithful believers were waiting for the recent Rapture on December 21, 2012, I had other concerns on my mind. While they fervently believed the Mayans had predicted the end of the world and only the truly faithful would be saved, my brain once again punted around the debate of whom were truly “good” people, and who just thought they were.

I read cases of families selling all their possessions, quitting their jobs and hunkering down for The End of Times. I felt badly for their children, no doubt terrified with what their batty parents were preparing for, and also no doubt terrified that somebody would see them naked. That was one of the most notable parts about the proposed rapture, after all: where had once stood your faithful, trusting body would now just be a puddle of the clothes you’d been wearing. Wherever you were catching that connecting flight to didn’t require attire, I guess.

My father would be raptured each day during the gardening season. As daylight faded, he would come into the garage and drop his muddy clothes where he stood down in the garage. There would be his sawed off rubber wellies, gumboots he used to flush out with the hose once in awhile. He’d tuck his socks in them, because everybody knows you can always get another day out of gardening socks. His jeans – usually some design backfire he’d found for 3 bucks somewhere, like the 6 pairs of purple Levis he once scored – would hit the deck.

My mother would stand in the doorway and ask for the t-shirt, desperate to wash something, anything that was leaving his body. He’d usually refuse, unless it was a few days in and the t-shirt was trying to make a break for my mother’s outstretched arm. Dad never got the concept of cleaning something that was just going to get dirty again the next day, and Mom never got how you could put on a pair of pants that fit you like a muddy body cast.

Our house was festooned with my father’s garments at various stages of not-dirty-enough. Lumberjack shirts hung on the side door, and various hooks in the basement and garage held rain jackets, caps, shorts, long sleeved shirts and t-shirts. In the bedroom, draped over a small chair by the bed would be golf shirts that still had a wear left in them, and hanging in the closet – on a hook – would be his “good” jeans. Like some kind of farm version of Mrs. Howell from Gilligan’s Island, my father had an outfit for every occasion.

My mother of course, would just go around once in a while and gather up everything she could find and wash it. He’d storm around angry, as if fresh work clothes sucked a little of the masculinity out of the work.

I know why he did it. When we say today that we “did the laundry”, it’s not like we hauled it down to the river and beat it with rocks. Machines do the work; we push buttons. But that luxury still hadn’t made its way into my father’s mindset.

I’ve been doing heavy duty yard work this spring, and yesterday I came into the garage and hauled off my muddy workboots. Dropping my filthy jeans where I stood, I smiled and thought of my Dad. I came in the side door to find a muddy pair of pants and a sweatshirt, work shoes peeking out.

Ari had been helping me. Guess all three of us will end up in the same place.

I hope my father’s not in charge of wardrobe.

Every household has a second language, even if they don’t know it. We speak English and Family. You probably do too; all those words that are shortcuts through the communication forest. The one that draws the most raised eyebrows from outsiders – crabbyapplesauceface – didn’t even begin as ours. It’s still one of my favourites.

For decades, my parents had dear friends, Katie and Gale. Gale and Dad were friends from their rooming house days in Hamilton where they both worked at Dofasco. Katie and my mom became great friends. They all got married around the same time; to each other, not as a group.

Katie and Gale never had children, which was unfortunate. Uncle Gale, a big tall guy, never went anywhere without his cowboy hat. He would let me put it on, but then he’d always take it back. I really, really wanted that hat. When I saw it on his coffin over a decade ago, I burst into tears. He used to call us ‘the boys’ because we were girls. When we were little, we’d giggle ‘we’re not boys, we’re girls!’, knowing we were being teased and knowing we could count on it. He called us boys until the end.

They had a perfect house (because they had no kids, my Mom said) and his workshop was one of the best places I’ve ever been. Perfect bench in perfect order, unlike his best friend, my father: our garage looked like a before picture to Gale’s after. They also had a pool table and a bar. We’d sit on the bar stools and laugh at the clock that went backwards and drink Coke. He’d let us play pool, and I realize now that was a big deal for a perfectionist – letting loose a bunch of little girls with pool cues around his beloved felt.

Katie was as straight-laced as Gale was outgoing. More stern. Gale used to tease her. She was a tiny thing, and he called her Satchillass. I had no clue what a satchillass was, until one day he finally told me her butt looked like the book bag he carried as a kid growing up on the farm. Even then, I thought he was saying ‘satchel lass’ and they smiled. She used to smack his arm and say “Gay-al”. They loved each other. Forever.

Gale had a concrete driveway put in at their perfect Stoney Creek home. Katie didn’t drive, but they had two cars: a Dodge Colt he drove for work and a big something- that -looked- like- a- Caddie-but-wasn’t for the weekends. I do know my Mom was jealous they had a fancy car. We had station wagons, because of all those blasted kids.

Now, if you pour a concrete driveway, every kid with a hockey stick is going come to your house. You just know it. Katie didn’t know it. One day, a pack of little buggers (I’m quoting her) showed up and started playing in the empty double drive. Gale was at work, the other car was in the garage. They probably figured nobody was home. Katie was home. She leaned out and scolded them. And one yelled back at her “be quiet, you crabby applesauce face”. And ran away.

Appalled at their sass, Katie told Gale that night, and he told everyone else. They’re both gone, but I love that I get to tell that story whenever I use the word, because then I get to talk about them. We’re storytellers by nature and it’s how we hang on to those we love, even through the mist of missing them.

The doctor’s waiting room had that weird hush about it, where several people pretend they can’t see each other. Christopher, 21, had the clipboard in his hand and was busily filling out the blank spots. I scrolled through my phone, trying to catch up with some emails as he did this.

I glanced at him working away, once again noting that he clutches a pen the same way he clutched a crayon in kindergarten. Kids today, I said to myself. All keyboard, no cursive. The fact my own writing is illegible is a fact I handily put aside when I comment on the shortcomings of youth.

“Wait. How come you ticked ‘common- law’? You’re not married,” I told him, leaning over the page.

“Because Pam would kill me if I checked ‘single’,” he said, very matter-of-factly. They recently celebrated their third anniversary, something I respect immensely, even as it confuses me. At my age, three years seems long; at their ages, it’s practically dog years.

“This isn’t Facebook; Pammy isn’t here, and she’ll never see this form. It’s an official medical thing. You need to put’ single’, because that’s the appropriate box,” I told him. He sighed.

“You don’t understand.”

“Uhm, yes, Pam lives with us. But with us: your Mom and your brother and you. You two don’t live together,” I explained.

“She’s with me when I fill stuff out at school. I’ve been putting ‘common-law’ all year.”

Christopher has always been my black and white child. There has never been any room for grey. It’s a curious mix as the boy becomes an adult and recognizes his own shortcomings: how do you punish yourself? If he was always right, there wouldn’t be a problem. Since he isn’t, he’s developed into a debater without peer. Even (or especially) when he’s wrong, he will wear you down with arguments woven from gossamer; if you stop long enough to look away from how pretty they are, you’ll be able to blow them out like a birthday candle.

I agree with him, somewhat, on those stupid boxes we are required to check on forms. I’m old enough to remember when I had to handwrite ‘Ms’ on some, because I thought my marital status was my own business. I was 15 at the time. I’ve also had people tell me the gut punch the first time they have to check the ‘widow’ designation. It’s all boring details, until it’s not. Having your life outlined with 4 or 5 quick ticks can be tough.

Do they even matter? A few months back I glanced at my open file in a dentist’s office. I’d filled the form out so long ago, they still had a contact number at an office I once worked at. I told them I’d been fired – 13 years ago. I’ve also been known to test if they even read them: where it asks ‘what do you prefer to be called?’, I’ve put’ Goddess’. Where it asks who to call in an emergency, I’ve put ‘911’.

I watched him hover over the emergency contact section. Eventually, he wrote Pam’s name.

“What if Pam’s in class or something?” I asked him. “That still needs to be an adult they can get hold of to make big decisions.”

“I can’t put our home number. If you’re not home, you know Ari won’t answer the phone. I could be hanging from the edge of a roof.”

“So, your mother who they can’t call won’t find out from your brother who won’t know unless the girl who isn’t your common-law wife tells us?”

“Well, they don’t have a box that says ‘it’s complicated’.”

If you ever venture north in this province, you’ll know what you leave behind in the fall may be gone come spring. Businesses bloom and fade faster than a cherry blossom, meaning relationships of long standing are both special and rare.

There is a restaurant not far from our cottage that has somehow withstood the slow choke of the new bypass highway. The kids know I can be cajoled into breakfast at Memories of Muskoka with little effort; breakfast is perhaps the easiest meal but with the most pots and pans.

A little farther down the road one of my Dad’s favourite places, Mark’s Restaurant, was shuttered one fall only to turn up that spring, it’s windows papered over and signs declaring Girls! Girls! Girls! When Ari, now 18, was about 10, he asked what that meant. I said it meant that we wouldn’t be going to Mark’s anymore, though my father might have admittedly felt differently.

Marge had been a waitress at Memories forever; a tiny wisp of a woman with a growl like a longshoreman, she’d stare at each kid in turn, order pad poised, and announce they’d be having The Special. Nobody ever argued with Marge; she’d been on this planet more years than most of us combined, and a special is special, after all.

Marge was as deeply enshrined in our cottage history as a deck of 51 cards. One time, with the boys and their friends at the restaurant, I hauled out a camera. I knew that capturing Marge’s one- of- a- kind scowl should be added to our album as surely as I knew that one spring she might not be there. As the kids lined up with her in the middle, I pressed the button only to capture Marge lighting up in a pageant winning smile. I’d never seen it before; I’ve never seen it since. A new chapter for the endless mythology.

As more years passed, we watched the signs at Girls! Girls! Girls! fade a little. I can’t attest to the business it did; I tended to drive by at noon more often than midnight, and I’m sure in a township that counts its population in the hundreds darkness was a welcome cover. It was Christopher, three years older, who had finally clued Ari in. The resultant snickers as we passed with each new crew of friends became as much a part of the landscape as the rocks.

Maybe because an old cottage puts so much into suspended animation each year, or maybe because the harsh winters remind us of just how punishing the elements can be, traditions seem more important. Upon trekking into Memories early in the season a few years ago, the kids looked around expectantly for Marge. They had a couple of new friends in tow; the promise of being told you were having The Special was not quite believable, and had to be experienced.

I scanned the room, noting a couple of new waitress, no doubt students. One smiled in greeting, counting off menus in her arm. Before I could pull her aside, Ari spoke over the morning noise.

“Hey, where’s Marge?” he asked her. I hesitated, and braced myself.

“Oh, she’s working down the road now,” said the young woman.

In my relief that she was, in fact, still alive, I forgot about my son for a moment. Ari gaped in horror as he stared at the waitress.

“Marge is working at Girls! Girls! Girls!?” he yelped.

Over the winter, it had once again become Mark’s Restaurant.

I sat staring down at clouds last night, the wing of the plane I was on slicing through the cold night air. We’d just finished the tugging climb through the cotton, the buffeting not unlike the break of waves on a beach. Calm on the sand, floating in the water, but tossed through that boiling barrier that separates the two. I knew it would settle, though a little guy a few rows ahead had his doubts.

I didn’t blame him; I often think there is a certain lunacy to handing over all control, travelling 10,000 metres feet in the air at 800km/hr in a metal tube that is predicated on science I don’t understand. And yet I do it, because it is in these surrendered hours that I feel most calm. I’ve spent a lifetime feeling an obligation and duty to control everything, or at least believing I do. I’m aware I’m kidding myself.

I’ve flown in small planes that seat 12 people or so, a narrow aisle so cramped you can’t stand up. I do what I do on huge ones: I stuff my bag under the seat, plunk down and do up my seatbelt. We will fly and we will land and I will stroll off the plane, or we will fly and we will crash and I won’t stroll off the plane. The time to weigh that is when you say you’ll go; commitment is a funny thing that way, and hopping on an airplane is a wonderful example of discovering if you’re capable of going all in. Of trusting.

During a particularly perilous approach high in the Colorado mountains a few years ago, several adventuring young college students sat in the back of the tiny plane we were on, hands clasped across their chests, praying. As the plane caught on drafts and sheered wildly, the pilot made a couple of unsuccessful approaches. He looped back once more, the kids in back in tears.

“It’s okay,” I yelled, not knowing if it was or not. Their knuckles were white. “He knows what he’s doing and this is normal.” I wasn’t nervous, though I didn’t think it would be reassuring to tell the youngsters we would live or we would die, and the Colorado Rockies are a pretty spectacular resting place.

When I was small, we used to drive to Saskatchewan to my grandparents. My grandpa had been born in 1898, a fact that would fight inside my young brain like two cats in a bag. That someone might be able to span three centuries like a long-legged spider was fascinating to me, and I decided he had superpowers. The one he lacked? He refused to fly.

For years we drove, until he was finally convinced to fly to us. I’ll never forget his eventual explanation for his long-standing reluctance. Holding his hand level, he told me he was scared the plane would tilt if people walked while it was in the air. He tipped his hand to demonstrate, and I indeed imagined crew and passengers tumbling along an airborne teeter totter.

If this man who might span centuries could be convinced to relinquish control, then I knew I could too. It remains one of the few places I trust someone else, this space above the clouds. The fact it’s a complex combination of people I don’t know and physics I can’t do should scare me. Instead, I read, as the noise of the engines cocoons me and suspends the world.

I’ve spent a long time believing I can’t trust anyone; apparently I just needed a new perspective.

An alumnus of Princeton University, Susan A. Patton, recently published a letter in that school’s paper telling current women attendees to get their arses in gear and snag a husband before they graduate. She noted that they would never again have access to such a worthy pool of mates, and we all know how devastating it would be to go through life armed only with Princeton degree and not a Princeton man.

It reminded me of my own years at McMaster University, where I was stunned to discover some girls quite frankly admitting they were attending to earn an MRS degree. It was probably the first and only time in my life I thought I was a silly romantic.

Patton neglected to note in the original piece that she was recently acrimoniously divorced, and while her sons were Princeton prizes, her own ex-husband had attended “a school of almost no name recognition…a school that nobody has respect for, including him, really.” After 27 years (!), she realized the error of wedding such a failure, while attending Princeton events with her sons. Note to her sons’ potential mates: these worthy Princeton boys come with this mother attached.

When I was accepted to university, my parents were thrilled. I would be the first in the family to go, and it had always been my intention. But when I excitedly told another family member, this person looked at me and said “people who go to university are idiots”. This person knew exactly one person who had a degree, and that person was indeed an idiot. I’m sure I had a thought about correlation and causation (a term I am so sick of hearing clueless people lob onto a debate like a grenade), but instead I slunk away, wounded.

Do I care that Susan A. Patton is essentially blaming her lousy marriage and subsequent divorce on her worthless husband? No. I care that she is rebooting a depressing argument that a person’s worth is somehow defined by a piece of parchment. At a time when so many graduates are entering a non-existent workforce behind an eight ball of student debt, I nearly question the intelligence of marrying this double barrelled debt along with the affianced – Princeton calibre or otherwise.

While I eventually did marry someone I’d met at Mac, we also divorced. My best (and longest) relationship to date was with a man whose collar was decidedly bluer: as I was busily devouring Milton and Marx, my respect for my bricklayer father only increased. You’re better off asking a man what he values, instead of what he’s worth.

Patton’s unfortunate argument isn’t about higher education; it’s about class war. It’s about pairing off resumes instead of individuals. Some women responded vociferously and disgustedly that they weren’t desperate to marry, nor to marry “correctly”. Others took offence to the idea that a degree, and pedigree, ensures marital bliss.

I can only cut Patton some slack as a parent. My own mother was fond of saying it was just as easy to marry a rich man as a poor one, which of course left me looking at her quizzically; we were decidedly not rich. She was guilty only of what most parents are guilty of -  wanting better for their children.

While I was busy ignoring trust funds (it must be said; they were just as intently ignoring me) and instead searching for young men who treated me well and made me laugh, it was my father who weighed in with the winning wisdom.

“Earn it yourself,” he’d growl in my ear.

Sorry, Mom. Marrying rich won’t top that advice.