Finding sanctuary in a stroller: How pushing my kid around Toronto became my therapy

This is the story of the death of a stroller.

Well, not really the death of a stroller, I guess. But our exceedingly well-used UPPAbaby Cruz V2 did indeed pass quietly into a second life with a grateful online buyer newly arrived in Toronto from upstate New York one recent December morning while Dad here slept in on a day off.

It was no accident that the stroller left swiftly and silently, with neither fuss nor fanfare — on a day that fell a couple of weeks short of my daughter’s sixth birthday, suddenly approaching with impossible and frightening haste on Jan. 3 — while I was unconscious one floor up and oblivious to its departure. Dad here knew this day was coming, my wee Polly knew this day was coming. And although we’d both betrayed some shared emotional distress from time to time at the “Inevitable Exit” looming at us for a good two years wherein we constantly conspired to find new reasons, new “missions,” to delay our final parting with that battered, beloved UPPAbaby Cruz V2, the weaker link in the arrangement was obvious to all informed observers.

So my long-suffering partner got the stroller the hell out of here when Dad here wasn’t looking, spared the neighbours a probable puddle of ugly crying on the front lawn and pocketed a few bucks towards a bench that, despite her claims to “decluttering,” now actually takes up more space in the porch. And fair game to her. The stroller had to go. Polly’s been too big for the damn thing for several seasons and rocks a pink Globber scooter with sparkling, LED-lit wheels with terrifying confidence along the west-end sidewalks when she wants to. She’ll be cycling by the spring. I dream of a future when she might want to come hiking with me.

But, oh, how we clung to that stroller. As, I’m sure, has every parent who’s ever parted ways with a “pram” of some sort since the very birth of the stroller itself — which dates back at least to William Kent’s invention at the behest of the Duke of Devonshire in 1773 of a “baby carriage” that was “extremely lavish and gilded with gold and silver and designed to be pulled by a miniature pony; evolved into more practical form when an African-American gent named William H. Richardson patented the first reversible “bassinet” model in June of 1889; and took great strides toward the lightweight, collapsible standards known and loved (and hated) by moms and dads to this day when Owen Finlay Maclaren, a 1920s test pilot-turned-aeronautical engineer hailing from my familial Essex hometown of Saffron Walden, became a grandfather during the early 1960s and took a formative inventorial interest in the field. For 250 years, then, millions of parents and children the world over have forged crucial common memories of early parenthood and early childhood within toddling distance of a stroller, be it gilded with silver and gold and pulled by a miniature pony or not. The stroller gets you to the places where “growing up” happens outside the home, where a previously immobile blob transforms into a wobbly voyager into a curious blabbermouth, all too quickly before your very eyes and where you, too, “grow up” into a parent.

Once you start wheeling your kid around in one of those tarted-up human wheelbarrows, it’s official: “I am a parent.” There’s no hiding it. You’re constantly marching tangible evidence of your parenthood into (and often abruptly out of) innumerable logistically unmanageable locations, from brutally overcrowded streetcars and subways to unfeeling banks, disdainful coffee shops and micro-labyrinthine corner shops in your own neighbourhood to airports, bus depots, train stations and hotels where the absolute last thing anyone around wants to see is a young child in a stroller. You’re a bother everywhere you roam. Yet, suddenly, you’re also getting smiles and the odd “hello” from miserable old pensioners and attractive young hipsters alike on your street who’d previously pretended you didn’t exist and – crucially – every so often you cross paths, stroller-to-stroller, with another recent victim of childbirth during a moment your kids are both out cold and you have a rare moment to yourselves and you exchange a supportive nod that says “You are not alone” and you know you’re not alone.

Anyway, I dug that stroller. We referred to ours as the “Midnight Express” because Polly could be counted on to fall dead asleep in it within a block or two of any point of departure from Day One. There’s scarcely a trail within the limits of the GTA she hasn’t dozed through at one point or another, and Dad here was carting her sleeping form to vistas atop Signal Hill in St. John’s and Mont Royal in Montreal well before she was old enough to appreciate the surprise. We loved our “dadventures” and we wore out a couple of sets of tires because of the many, many miles we put in touring the town with our UPPAbaby.

Here, then, is the solipsistic/therapeutic point of this spill. A couple of years ago, I went batty. Legit “Draw the drapes, I’m gonna kill myself” -level batty. I couldn’t work and, to be honest, I could barely get out of bed for a few months, and yet I would pull it together every day at 5 and emerge from the blankets to fake some normalcy for my daughter and make sure we went on a mission after daycare. Then, long story short, COVID-19 hit and Polly, then three, was home with me for six months straight and that stroller saved my life.

There was no room for depression anymore. My partner trains crisis counsellors for a living and had serious work to do from our kitchen, so Polly and I were out with that stroller and all the gear and snacks we could jam into its frame all day, every day, rain or shine during on/off lockdown days when the streets were deserted, the playgrounds were taped off and pretty much any artificial distraction that couldn’t be accessed from or ordered into your dwelling via a computer screen was officially forbidden. We’d leave in the morning with no particular destination in mind and wander from our home base at Dundas and Ossington to wherever the day took us: to the hills above Casa Loma and Spadina Museum, to Ashbridges Bay and the R.C. Harris water-filtration plant in the east end, to the bandstand at Earlscourt Park and our enchanted tree below the Stockyards on Black Creek, to the butterfly sanctuary in Humber Bay West Park. We’d go trainspotting on the West Toronto Railpath and in Runnymede Park and sing sea shanties in the rain while walking the Humber River trails. We befriended horse cops and their horses at the “secret” lakeside strip east of the Palais Royale we still call Needle Beach. We went swimming at our de facto second homes of Ontario Place and Toronto Island at every available opportunity, and vowed never, ever to get in the water at Sunnyside Beach again after huddling together through a sudden, violent thunderstorm in the low brush along the shoreline and witnessing a storm sewer burst and engulf the entire lakeshore in horrific brown foam. We had so much ridiculous fun alone together at the darkest of times that Dad here finally felt normal and healthy again, and that stroller was central to my recovery.

Perhaps, then, you might understand why Polly and I were so reticent to part with it, even though our relationship with the UPPAbaby Cruz V2 had dragged on well past its expiry date. The final mission was anticlimactic, too. We were gonna do one last Toronto Island run for old time’s sake but conceded that it was too late in the afternoon during the onset of dwindling autumn daylight to make any sense and departed for a double-hit on the north and south playgrounds at High Park instead, also for old time’s sake, and …well, it was a lot. I’m pretty fit, but even minor uphill grades were wearing me down on the trip west because I was no longer pushing a baby around but a brassy kid far too large and heavy for such a conveyance. We watched a fairly violent and bloody police takedown outside the Tim Horton’s near Bloor and Keele for far too long than is probably appropriate for a five-year-old, in fact, because it gave me a moment to breathe before pushing Polly through the ravines.

And that was that. Not the classiest final memory of the stroller’s service, but fairly fitting if you know the dark sense of humour I share with my offspring. Several days later I woke up and the UPPAbaby was gone, but it will always occupy a special place in my heart. My daughter saved my life, but that stroller helped it happen. Long may it run.

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