My daughter will be starting her third year of ski lessons next week. For her, this means spending Saturday afternoons barreling down the tiniest of hills (at the highest of prices) laughing hysterically, and for me it means having 90 minutes to myself. All you parents out there know how exciting that is – so exciting that the first year she began taking lessons, I booked snowboarding lessons for myself. After all, why shouldn’t I barrel down the hill laughing hysterically too?

My friends thought I was slightly more crazy than usual and were determined to discourage me by sharing their snowboarding horror stories with me: one had such a bad fall that she ended up in a back brace for a month, and another face planted so often that she began to fear for her front teeth and soon gave up. Ha! said I, I used to wakeboard and waterski (no need to mention that this was years ago, and pre-motherhood).

Lesson one went well – my three year old and I both managed to get up and down the bunny hill in varying states of uncontrolled momentum – my daughter crossing her skis and crumbling to the ground at 8 second intervals like a rag doll, and me managing to stay in control despite attempting slow motion turns (not so impressive when you’re sharing the same flat bunny hill as kids who are barely potty trained). She was so excited to see me struggling nearby that she forgot that she was in fact standing on two long sticks in minus 20C and sliding uncontrollably towards frozen haystacks.

The next weekend was lesson two, again on the bunny hill. It started well. So well that I tried wider turns and adding more speed. That, coupled with gently shoving toddlers out of my way off the magic carpet (the trick is pretending to be unable to control your snowboard), meant that I was zipping up and down, and feeling rather proud of myself. Add a little hair tossing and flirting with my (underaged) snowboard instructor, and I felt like I’d broken the ‘mommy mold’ – the one that assumes we’re too old to learn snowboarding next to our toddlers, or that we should use the time waiting for them to scan the latest cookbooks in order to prepare menus for the coming week, or that at best offers us the choice between skiing what has to be the flattest hill in the Laurentians or strapping on (yawn) snowshoes to tramp through the woods to meditate on our wrinkles.  Well, pas moi les amis!

You know how parents like to boast that they can hear their child’s scream from miles away, or flaunt that they have Spidey senses when it comes to their children being in trouble? I used to be one of those parents, and I thought I still was, as I glided along.

And then I heard it: “Paging the mother of Lily Burke…will the mother of Lily Burke PLEASE come to the bunny hill!”. I looked up and there was my 3 year-old, lying on her back at the bottom of the hill wailing away as though someone had skied over her nostrils, while her instructor looked around in despair and my friends ran over to see what was wrong with her. Apparently the bubble had burst and my child had realized that having Mummy learn to snowboard next to her while basically ignoring her was notgonnahappen.

I dutifully aimed my snowboard down the hill and grabbed her before she became a popsicle of frozen snot and tears, and realized that…I’d left my snowshoes in the car. Next to my cookbook.