How do we love our children? You can’t even count all the ways

Imagine loving your child so much that you would spend seven hours driving in roundabouts, just to help him or her with a science project.

Seven hours, 400 rotations. Round and round and round, surrounded by other drivers who don’t know what to do, while your too-young-to-drive teenager takes notes in the back seat about which other cars are signalling and which are not.

Because of the research she did on driver behaviour in roundabouts, Grade 9 Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate student Ruth Meyer will compete in the CanadaWide Science Fair in Regina later this month.

Calls have come in from Australia, Michigan and Europe to ask about her research, said Louis Silcox, who helps raise money and organize activities for local science fair participants.

“That was really good data,” said Silcox, who will go to Regina with Meyer and eight other young scientists from Waterloo Region. But let’s pause a moment. Behind almost every successful young scientist is a parent who loves his or her child with such passion that it is no problem at all, for example, to keep thousands of ants in your house, so your child can study the way the colonies behave.

So let’s also salute Meyer’s mom, Jodie Hancox-Meyer, for spending the equivalent of an entire workday driving the roundabouts of Ira Needles Boulevard. We do love our kids, don’t we? We sit up with them all night in the emergency room when they’re scream-

ing in pain from an ear infection. Ten years later, we’re still up all night, waiting for them to come home safely from the party.

In between, there are all the times we stepped on Lego pieces with our bare feet, suffered through drum practice, and quietly endured the agonizing pain of the first time their hearts were broken.

I asked some parents for samples of their devotion.

One mom stayed home for five months when the family lived abroad, so that she could home-school her daughter in French. This allowed her daughter to enter French-immersion classes when the family went back to Canada.

Another remembers a frantic night of phone calls to help her university-student daughter with a crashed computer right at the end of term. Mom and Dad were in Japan, daughter was in Waterloo. The new computer was chosen, bought, and delivered within a few hours.

And there is Maggie Dyck of Waterloo, whose 39-yearold daughter collapsed one summer night eight years ago. Dyck rushed into the room and started performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation while they waited for the ambulance.

It had been 35 years since she had learned the procedure, but somehow she remembered it. It saved her daughter’s life.

There can be no doubt that it was the burst of protective, parental love, an explosion we feel when our children are in trouble, that helped Dyck retrieve those medical instructions from the dim recesses of memory.

Mother’s Day is coming up, and Father’s Day soon after. Make them special.