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she had white carpet in the entryway.

there was a mirror there, but i have no recollection of my reflection in it, only the shock of the blood seeping into the white quilting of my new shirt, proud-bought just days before with the month’s babysitting money. it was the very last morning of my first summer job.

but I was not there, at that tall gray house with the two little boys, three blocks up a hill and right at the stop sign. i was in a stranger’s hallway, spilling blood onto her carpet, scraped hands trying to catch the bright, thick drops that splatted quietly into the plush.

i grabbed at them like gumdrops, willing them back, attempting to unmark the snowy surface and wind time backwards as if the trail could lead me back through her door whole.  the white foyer yawned, a witch’s mouth, and i scrabbled for escape.  my body melted, would not cooperate.  i leaned into the doorjamb and made a bloody handprint on its creamy surface.  everything was white and red.

i gave her a number. she called my mother. i could not make my mouth move properly and a tooth hung like a cat door, teetering back and forth, fascinating my frightened tongue. she spoke into the phone hesitantly, Are you Monnie’s mother? it was not yet eight in the morning.

then we were in the car and speeding across the city, my mother and i, my mother who is cautious and measured in every action. we still had trains then, here, in that long ago summer, and blocks before the hospital there came the ding ding ding of the crossing and we were no longer moving and the sun poured in on the black upholstery. suddenly it was stultifying in that little Toyota and the train rumbled on forever and my mother, my upstanding mother, hissed Jesus Christ, fuck, come ON, and i thought absently that i must be dying.

i do not remember any pain. that only came later, when the technicians tried to lie my on my back over and over and over again for head x-rays, and the piece of my jawbone that had snapped in the centre and at the hinge kept falling back into my eardrum. they will not radiate a head like that, today.

i had my period, still a novelty at thirteen, and somewhere between the stitches and the torture sessions at x-ray and the trip across the city again to the orthodontic surgeon’s office and back, my mother propped me up in a tiny washroom in the ER and proceeded to induct me into the arcane mysteries of the belted maxi pad, long out of date even then but all that the hospital dispenser provided. and i sat there, trussed and broken, nose packed with gauze and wondering how many more holes my body could stand to lose blood from before i would myself would fade to white.

then there was the blur of anaesthetic, counting backwards from one hundred, and the waking to find my face encased in bandages and jaw immobilized with hardware and then the pain, oh the pain and won’t you shake hands, sweet sister morphine? and then nothing is clear for weeks except a memory of finally coming home and seeing beetles emerge from under the radiator in the swelter of an early August bathroom and losing my shit, a sudden phobia emerged full-blown on the heels of trauma and withdrawal and my mother holding my full-grown body, bigger than her own, in her ams like a baby while i screamed in terror with my mouth wired shut.

and every time she changed those bandages more gravel emerged from my face, black spots in the red-brown stains on white gauze.
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i think i have told some of this story before.

what i did not tell is that on a hot summer day when i see bicycles with long-legged children on them darting into the road i see splashes of red against white backgrounds, like Pollack paintings or blood drops on white carpet. i see my Supercycle, frame twisted, lying in the middle of a torn-up street with my retainer next to it in the gravel as it was when i pulled myself up and stumbled bleeding into the doorway of the woman who had been out retrieving her paper when i sailed through the air in front of her.

Dave started biking last year. it is healthy, earth-friendly. and i have essentially not been on a bike in almost 24 years.

yesterday, i stopped at the toy store. and there in front, on the grass, was a shiny red Radio Flyer first bicycle, with training wheels and white handlebars. it was beautiful, and just almost exactly the size Oscar will need next summer.

and i took a deep breath and told myself i will buy it in August when it goes on sale.  like throwing salt over my shoulder, i will pretend that it is not the colour of blood and i will teach him how to pedal.

and i will put this story away, forever, because the stains it left do not belong on him.
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tell me your stories of bicycles, instead. when did you learn to ride? what colour was your first bike? what are YOUR memories of hot days and bicycles?

i hear it everywhere, popping out from headlines, referenced casually until it begins to smell of truth. and stink a little with the impotence and collective rot it creates.

a whiff of faint bewilderment, the fear of mortality and obsolescence. the thrill of feeling one has eaten from the prescient tree of knowledge, even if the tree is plastic, planted in sand.

our children will not be like us, it whispers. they are wired, and thus wired differently. they are beyond us, aliens of the future. sit back and watch the reckoning. wash your hands.

it is no Kahlil Gibran, this voice, cautioning acceptance and unconditionality. it is more Bradbury, laced with the pleasures and promise of the macabre. it tells us these children we’re raising are blasphemous offspring of the cultural collision of the human and the technological - beings whose integrated circuits are inherently foreign to our own, digital natives whose minds we will never entirely fathom.

in all this repeated discussion and dissection and fretting, there is one note missing.

yes, they will grow up in a digitized world. they play their games on screens, in many cases. they conduct entire relationships on Facebook. their cognitive synapses may fire slightly differently from those of us who grew up with only Candy Land. but if they are cyborg, oh my friends, do not fear.

they are no more so than we ourselves.
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if i invited you over for a playdate, if i sat you down on my couch with a coffee or a glass of water or a mimosa  -whatever your poison - and looked into your eyes and said, so, hey, i’m a cyborg…i suspect you might be taken aback.

cyborg. huh, your head might shrill, as you’d politely flatten yourself against my door, eyes wide and darting, looking to grab your precious babies and run for the hills.

she seemed so pleasant on her blog. barely batty at all… and she never even talked about Star Trek, let alone cyborgs. jesus. this is worse than an Amway party. is there an eject button here?!?

i know.

but if i say it here in this ether space where we are accustomed to interacting and performing our rites of friendship and social grooming…maybe the words will not seem so alien.

i am cyborg. and so are you. precisely because of this space.  we have evolved in our own lifetimes, into creatures of 20th century myth.
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the cyborg was never truly about technology.  we may not yet have our screens embedded into our retinae or curliqueue wiring connecting flesh to metal and plastic, and we’re still - inexplicably - bound to the keyboard and print text…but we all of us who live out parts of our identities in front of our screens, whose lives are rich with people we know and bare our hearts to and exchange ideas with daily in many cases yet have never, ever laid eyes upon? cyborgs, all of us, creatures of the integrated circuit.  and so is our parenthood.

our lives are couplings between organism and machine. our internal worlds are not circumscribed by the mere physical, and our external worlds - even and perhaps especially our days spent hands-on with the children we cherish - are not an existence solely of or in the body.  this world, wherein we write and speak and interface and connect, is always present or available on the internal screen of our minds. it is a room of one’s own, even if our houses overflow with toys and dishes and no space that is ours alone.

Donna Haraway wrote The Cyborg Manifesto almost twenty years ago, now.  her cyborg was, as she wrote it, a creature without origin and without innocence, resolutely committed to “partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity.” its existence breaks down the old dualisms of nature and culture, of public and private - it exists between, a hybrid.

as we do out here, in this ether. we write representations of ourselves that are partial, constructed…simply by the very nature of time constraints and audience, we cannot write ourselves whole. thus the “us” we speak through out here is an avatar, without innocence, aware of its origin as a narrative, a story told in once upon a time fashion.  we exist between the public and the private, all of us negotiating the boundaries of how these avatars interact and integrate with our flesh selves and the others in our lives. we connect. we interface. some of us pay a high price domestically for the space for self we carve out here, this intimate space where we are so often ironic and perverse.  the patriarchy, Haraway cautions, is threatened by the cyborg, its bastard child, unwanted issue. illegitimate offspring, she notes, are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.
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the cyborg mother, of course, ought to be a contradiction in terms. the mother image is organic, the original origin story. but the cyborg is contradiction embodied. and the cyborg mother lives firmly in the postdigital age that the voices of doom and essentialistic difference do  not realize has reached us. the digital age is as much a part of us as the technology of the telephone or the pencil. we have incorporated it into ourselves - our baby monitors, our Dr. Google, our youtube videos of our children or for our children, our networks of identity and friendship and expression and marketing. who we make of ourselves as a result will be different from the mothers we grew up with, indeed, as will our children be different from the 70s and 80s versions of self we once were.

but our children as aliens, morphing inexorably into creatures of a vaguely foreboding future we cannot conceive? nay. not to those of us out here already, living on the integrated circuit, connecting, living beyond the boundaries of our flesh and in it, holding those selfsame children by the hand.

now if only the cyborg as mother could just break down the pointless polarization of good mother and bad.
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what does it mean to you, the space to be connected, ironic, intimate, perverse? if it all collapsed tomorrow, this online world, what of yourself would you find amputated?

hot days. finally summer.  i live on an island with beaches that get touted in ads around the world.  we ran a campaign in the 80’s that sold PEI as “the warmest waters north of Florida.”

i remember a local comedian quipping, c’mon. don’t shit me here. i took geography. the warmest waters north of Florida are about a mile past the Florida border, people.

he had clearly sampled the testicle-shrivelling waters of our heralded beaches in the month of June.

so rather than take the kids out to eat sand and freeze their tootsies in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, i figure they could eat sand just as well at the park.  i like the park. it is not so crowded, requires less sunscreen, and does not involve either a long car ride or the indignity of me sporting a a bathing suit.

Dave has been in England. he came home to find there’d been a cancellation on the vasectomy waiting list and i’d booked him in for only 28 hours after his arrival home. that‘ll teach him to travel. but in the meantime and until he and his bag of frozen peas can get comfortably off the couch, my mother, bless her, has been coming around at the end of the days when she can, helping to get the kids bathed and to bed.  she came along on our late-day park journey, the four of us galumphing down frost-humped sidewalks with a plastic tricycle.

the baby was tired. both kids were sick the whole time Dave was away.

until Oscar had surgery last December to have tubes put in his ears, every cold he got had a tendency to turn nasty. he’d fill up, cough for a day or two, and then end up in the ER not breathing properly, no matter how carefully we applied the preventative puffers and avoided dairy and followed the asthma clinic’s recommendations. but since the tubes? golden. he gets a cold, he coughs, wakes up at godforsaken hours miserable and whatnot, but…no ER. the asthma clinic actually released him in April, saying that very likely he does not actually have asthma, as his attacks only ever came when otherwise sick.

at the park, Posey and i stopped to chat to another mother & baby pair, and to look at some leaves on a tree, and to wipe her nose call down armageddon on all & sundry. Posey does not like having her nose wiped.

i looked over in the midst of her howling and noticed O having a bit of a fit of his own with my mom. odd, as the two of them are tight and he is generally at his shining #1 grandson best with her, the pleaser in him rewarded by her proverb-loving approach to the world. but they were at the swings, which has never been his favourite park activity, and he was also in a baby swing, which he generally eschews now even when he consents to swinging.  with Daddy away, however, he’d been playing “baby” all week. i figured perhaps i’d wander over.

as i got closer, i heard him.

but Nannie, but Nannie… great gulping tears here, and the plaintive confusion of a frustrated child who’s hit a wall he doesn’t understand.  but Nannie…i just want to RUN.

this park is a relatively spartan space, and as a result has a long expanse of green that Oscar loves to run free-form through, his little legs pumping, growing tinier and tinier as he beetles away from me until i can see him for how small he still really is.  he knows that he is only allowed to run through a particular space in the park, far from the cars, and he’s a pretty good kid. he has never transgressed those boundaries.

but when he’d run over to Nannie at the swing set, she’d heard him breathing heavily. and had decided that the thirty feet he’d covered were plenty, and he might have an asthma attack - though he has never once so much as threatened anything resembling a classic asthma attack brought on by exertion - and plopped him, unwilling, into the baby swing.  she was exhorting him in the urgent voice she uses when she’s anxious to “just slow down, be calm.”

your body needs you to be still, she said, while he wailed.

i looked at the two of them and made a judgement call, one that was perhaps as unfair as i’ve ever been.  i sided with the three-year-old.

i thrust the baby at my mother and released Oscar from the swing. he ran off, sounding for all the world like a kid with a slight cold.  i maneuvered the baby into the swing instead, and stood pushing her gently, shaking, trying valiantly but probably unsuccessfully to sound like a grownup.

Mom, he’s okay running, i think.

i only have a single memory of my mother ever running. i was still quite small, so she could not have been yet thirty. we ran through a park one day, just a shortish run to get to some play destination whose shape eludes me now. it is my shock i remember. my mother could RUN! faster than ME!

she is not an unfit person…she works on her feet, she walks, she is a bustler by nature. but outside that one vague childhood recollection, i have never once seen my mother actively exercise.  rather, she cautions against excess, dogmatically distrusts anything that involves sweat or physical discipline.  i grew up believing that the moment something hurt at all…even just a twinge, a slight catch in my breath, i should stop.  beyond that limit was some amorphous fear, some bogeyman of unseemly danger.

my body needed to be still.

so i was. and grew into a lazy arse who’s had to spend a disproportionate period of what ought to be my comfortable middle age learning to push myself.  not necessarily in terms of regular exercise…i still struggle to find the will for that, given how i was encouraged to dismiss it utterly from the earliest of ages. but rather just to function - to continue, as one must, to care for the kids even when one is sick, to push through the strain of sore arms to keep digging in the garden, to trudge on with the baby growing heavier in her sling by the minute. i have learned in my thirties that my body is far stronger than i ever gave it credit for. and that knowledge has been a powerful, beautiful thing, allowing me to learn to trust said body - just a little - for the first time in my life.

i am, if truth be told, happy about Oscar’s relatively cautious nature, and scared shitless of the fearlessness Josephine exhibits even at nine months old.  i want my children to care for themselves and their bodies, of course. i do fear them getting hurt, and i want them to know how to be calm and still when calm and still are called for.

but.  i also want them to know the free feeling of running until they can’t run any more, the confidence that comes from finding some of their own physical limits and learning to trust that their bodies, mostly, can do more than they think. learning to trust that their bodies heal. learning to trust that their bodies are their own, and not just disconnected shells which must be treated according to externalized rules.

i do not want them to think the body should always be easy and quiet. perhaps i should get off my duff and take them to the beach.

he came up as a suggested Facebook friend.

that application baffles me, i admit.  it repeatedly pimps my brother’s dead dog’s memorial account, along with the guy who groped me most awkwardly - and somewhat traumatically - on that camping trip in college.  erm, no.  thank you.  and then there’s the gaggle of people i swear i’ve never heard of even if FB is convinced they were in my high school graduating class. i come from a town with ten last names, Facebook. i know these folks are strangers.  lovely strangers, i’m sure. friends i haven’t met yet.  but seriously, there are a ton of people i’ve lost touch with that i did actually know and like, once upon a time. couldn’t you throw me a bone?

but his name came up and i did a double take, and clicked through, and there he was, in limited profile.

he would be nearly nineteen.  the shock of recognition that came at seeing him was visceral, instant, even though it was not in fact recognition but a trick of genes and time.  he is the spitting image of his father, same jutting chin and curve to the nose, same post-adolescent pocked cheeks, same searching eyes. i looked for his mother in the planes of that face and found no trace of her, my long-ago friend.

and yet the summers before and after he was born came back to me like yesterday, so present i had to shake my head and do the math and blink in wonder.  one gets so old so fast.

she got married the summer i was eighteen and she was nineteen.  we were both a year out of high school - i’d gone off to university to learn to drink out of funnels and shot glasses; she’d gone to college and met a fast-talking boy with angry, hungry eyes. she’d dropped out by Christmas.  they had an apartment downtown, plastered with vintage posters of The Wall that i coveted dearly.  he and i got along, in our way, intensity drawn to intensity around the calming, gentle oasis that was my friend.  he and i talked music, politics. she and i talked pregnancy tests, that summer.

when she asked me to be her maid of honour, i’d never even been to a wedding. the pomp and circumstance bewildered me, and i thought getting married at nineteen to a man whose interest in his impending fatherhood was vague at best was a ridiculous prospect.  but i stood with her at the front of that church when he gave her a showy kiss and they were pronounced man and wife, and i clapped, and caught the bouquet, and tripped over my taffeta frock.

Jesse was born in February.  i had just turned nineteen, she was a month shy of twenty. i had never held a newborn until i came home that weekend, hitchhiked into town special just to see him, not realizing that barging in on a mother who’d just given birth might be anything but thoughtful. i cradled him, tiny squashed face still bruised from a rough birth, and wondered at his perfect nails and brought him a hardcover Richard Scarry book and handed him back with relief to return to my life of books and things that seemed so much bigger than that tiny, dark apartment with the bassinet perched by the futon.

i spent that summer with them, baby Jesse and his mother, working shiftwork not far from where they lived. she and i took him to the playground at the school i’d gone to as a child, and spread out blankets and watched him sink sink sink, buddha belly to the ground as he struggled to learn to sit up.  he had fat cheeks and laughing blue eyes and i thought him impossibly beautiful.  and i looked at him there and tried to imagine one of my own, casting tea leaves against a future i could not see.

that summer, outside in the grass, my friend talked of her days and i watched her with troubled eyes, this sunny girl with the boy-husband who did not really want to be a husband at all, and i swallowed all the sorrow that welled up on my tongue, the sorrow that comes with being a child left behind by a father who never really became a daddy, and i hoped for different for them both.

it did not unfold that way. the boy-husband left, eventually, found someone new, started a life that at last notice barely included Jesse and the younger brother who came into their lives just before it all dissolved. my friend struggled, went back to school, started again, found a life i think and hope makes her happy.  we ended up in the same town together briefly, ten years ago now, one of the few times i’ve seen Jesse since that summer i was nineteen.  he was still a little boy ten years ago, but long-legged, all motion, and i was flummoxed, wondering where the baby on the blanket had gone.

today, i looked into the face of a young man.  my eyes combed his, searching for the blue-eyed baby of nearly twenty years ago until i realized, finally, that that baby is lost to all but memory.  he is grown.  in a blink.

this time the tea leaves spread themselves out like trollops in the sun, crystal clear.  this is the future, they sang to me.  this is how fast it goes.

and so today i will spread a blanket on the grass in my backyard and watch my baby tumble and try to stand, and taste grass and other delicacies, so that tomorrow when i blink and find her grown i will have this baby face still burned on my memory, open and tiny and laughing in the sun.

who was the first baby to ever make you imagine yourself maybe a mother, someday?

a long time ago now, i went North.  to teach.

i’d crossed the Arctic Circle once before, as a kid; the summer i was ten years old, i spent six weeks with my father in a landscape that looked like the moon to me - the sand and lichen and hardy little flowers of the tundra, dotted with patches of snow even in July. we caught fish. i had my first dark chocolate at the Hudson’s Bay Store. at 2 am in the midnight sun, i went outside - me who’d never been up past nine - with the other kids around town. i started grade six, because school starts in August up there. i was the only white kid in my class. there was a girl who was pregnant. the teacher was decapitated in a three-wheeler ATV accident a few weeks after i went home, back south, to my mother and a world i understood.

that six weeks was both the freest and loneliest i’d ever been.

thirteen years later i caught a plane the size of a sardine can and flew again up past the tree line, to a hamlet in the middle of the Northwest Passage.

i had a teaching license myself, this time around, and stayed away from ATVs. i taught the very first grade ten classes ever available in the community.  the end of the residential schools, the long history of students being forced to travel far from home to be given what the dominant culture considered an education.  nowhere near the end of their colonial legacy, of course. but i didn’t know that.

i thought education was an uncontested good.

one of my students was older than i was.  at least 50% of them were parents, or pregnant.  i taught To Kill a Mockingbird, brimful with naivete. i taught Midsummer Night’s Dream reinterpreted as Inuit legend. i taught a Canadian history curriculum that my students did not even exist in; a curriculum that rendered them absent, invisible, less than footnotes.

i did not understand why i was so angry.

something in me loved the North. the light, where the world tilts on its axis, flooded me whole.

the rest of me felt alien, Alice down the rabbit hole.  it was culture shock.   most human beings find it uncomfortable to be Other, to be constantly read as representatives of a foreign group rather than as an individual. i was not only white, teaching students who assumed i’d lived a Beverly Hills 90210 existence back at home, but a white teacher, part of a long history of imposed “education” implicitly aimed at colonizing the Inuit mind into a proper externally-determined subject.

i stayed two years. by the second year, i was no longer angry. but i was still uncomfortable. the job had made it impossible for me to ever see education as a neutral, straightforward process again.

it’s now twelve years since i left the North. some of the students i taught are dead now, lost to suicide and cancer and overall the lowest life expectancies in North America. many are grandparents. Nunavut has come to the Inuit, and brought with it not necessarily the self-determination hoped for, but a neo-colonial layer of bureaucracy that threatens - say a lot of Inuit voices - to stifle everything they aimed for.

and i have the chance to be involved with work there, again. research, ironically, on how the education system of which this research would be a part is perhaps incompatible with the traditional knowledge structures and ways of knowing of the people it has ostensibly tried to “help” for generations.  research that would explore how the research construct itself privileges, once again, the belief systems of the dominant culture and contributes to making the Inuit “Other” even in their own eyes.

part of me chomps at the bit. theory is what i love, where my mind takes flight.  and yet the prospect of this research makes me feel free and lonely like i did at ten, running wild in the midnight sun at two in the morning, wondering if i have any place in this at all, wondering if i can de-centre myself enough to ever really understand.

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i know the content of this post is pretty esoteric. but what i’m getting at is, i’m afraid of agreeing to stick my nose where i’m not sure it has any business being.

and at the same time i’m excited.

and i’m wondering, would YOU leap in?

i saw a beggar
leaning on his wooden crutch
he said to me
you must not ask for so much

and  a pretty woman
leaning in her darkened door
she cried to me
hey, why not ask for more?

- Bird on a Wire, Leonard Cohen

Josephine pulled herself up yesterday for the first time. i turned my head and there she was, looming precariously over the old wooden chest on trembling legs, laughing like a banshee and trying to bounce.

the old chest is a relic from our Korean days, with metal strapping for hinges and pointy metal studs on top. perhaps an alternate coffee table substitute is in order for the next few months.  she’s growing teeth fast, but not as fast as she could snap ‘em off toddling ’round that hazard.

Oscar knows the names of all the dinosaurs, all of a sudden. we sing dinosaur songs to the tune of “I’m a Little Teapot, ” detailing the secret lives of the various species: who plods, who roars, who eats rotten meat. “I’m a Stegosaurus” is a particular favourite, not because stegosaurus is an especially interesting creature in and of itself, i don’t think, but because Oscar shares my affinity for rhythm, for the perfect fit of word to tune.

i will take him to the dentist with me this afternoon, for the first time.  this was the dentist’s idea, let me state for the record, in case he terrorizes the place while i’m stuck on a chair with tubes sucking spit from my throat.  but i don’t think he will, somehow.

they are growing up, these two.  part of me wishes wistfully for time to slow.  part of me hangs out the window like an eager dog, drooling as i peer into the wind, trying to see where we’re going.

in other news, i am researching tubal ligations.  Dave’s Big Snip got postponed…again. one of the only two urologists in the province has cancer, so the remaining doc’s practice has been suddenly overloaded.  if anyone has any caveats/personal experiences/information about tubals and particularly about their impact on women with predispositions to ovarian cysts, please share.

because i find myself suddenly done with the liminal state in which we’ve been floating since Posey was born, and i want a permanent solution, now. on this one front at least, i want to feel sure i can see where we’re going, be certain that there are no surprise turns in the road. so i can enjoy my, ahem, prime. erm, once i get just a little more sleep.

and i have another job interview tomorrow, this time in a department of the university i worked in back before Oscar was born. the position as they’ve advertised it fits tidily with my skill set, but seems limited in scope…i plan to try to go in and pitch the job i want to do, explain the vision i have for what the program could be, and see how the chips fall.

this scares the daylights out of me, of course. because i risk losing the competition by pushing too hard.

part of me figures if i’m not going to magically land in one of those nice mythical pensioned titles you can die in, then my absolutely next top choice, from a work-life balance perspective, would be to go back to this particular office at the university.  i like the people. i like the environment. once O switches to the university preschool this summer, Dave & Oscar & i would all be heading to one destination in the mornings…and Posey will be eligible for a sibling spot once he starts. plus my very best friend since junior high started working there last fall, as well. seriously. and the walls are made of candy. erm, no. but you get the picture.

part of me figures there is no point in me taking a job that does not challenge me, at this point in my life, no matter how pleasant the work environment.  i can make money doing freelance bits & bobs, researching and grant-writing and whatnot.  but to commit to an actual job…i want more from that. and i am afraid to ask for too much, at the same time.

i am hanging like a dog out the window, hoping not to get my head taken off, wondering if we’re there yet.

we talk about it, her father and i.

without hand-wringing, because it is neither of our first priorities, but with curiosity nonetheless, because observation of humanity is a hobby here. like a betting people taking wagers, we muse about it with gravity, as if it mattered…and in the same breath, with cavalier pretense, as if it didn’t.

will she be pretty?

it’s not a polite thing to talk about.  unless offering up compliments or weighing aesthetics and symmetry, ’pretty’ is not a subject for public discussion.  society is more comfortable with those judgements kept under catty cover, spewed all over reality tv but never actually parsed out at the dinner table.

and yet…her father and i ruminate on the topic like cows at a cud, chewing it over.

she’s as cute as a bug’s ear, we’re clear on that.  fuzzy head, skin like butter.  her blue eyes are bright and, we’re quite sure, intelligent. we’ve been known to break into parental rhapsody over the edible nature of her fat little legs.  we also call her Piggy Nose.  hey, it’s a piggy nose. facts is facts.

do not get me wrong.  her little face with its elfin gaze and double chins is precious to us: the most beautiful baby girl face we know. because it is hers…and we love her, without qualification or caveat.  but still we wonder.

maybe it’s simple validation-seeking, a co-dependent search for the cheap pat-on-the-head that says we has us a pretty baby and thus must therefore, by genetic extension, be not so terribly fugly ourselves.  could be. we are not above cheap pats-on-the-head, us.  but i think it’s more.  especially since we never once had this conversation about Oscar, who is equally the fruit of our loins and really rather a pretty boy, if i do say so myself.  but in this one area, there is no gender equity.

we shouldn’t care if she’s pretty, after all.   smart, sure.  kind, yes. resilient, absolutely.  empathic and hard-working and thoughtful would be nice too.  with a side order of creative, thank you very much and i’ll deal with the crayoned walls later.  but pretty? beyond the flattery to our own gene pools, why would we care about pretty?  the exotica of the child beauty pageant circuit holds no lure for us; trolloped-up little girls in mascara and pint-size prom dresses give me the heebies.  we eschew sex-specific toys, let our son’s hair grown long, harbour hope and suspicion that gender is mostly a construct.  pretty shouldn’t matter to us.

but pretty always matters more than it should.

no matter how feminist our politics, there’s no escaping the fact that we live in a world where for girls, “worthy” and “pretty” end up conflated more than they should.  even if we reject the connection utterly, others will eventually take it up.  it’s in the ether of this culture. we will teach her that beauty is inside, and mean it, and love her for every inch of herself. but that will not protect her from the pageant that is simply living in a female body, coming to selfhood in a skin that gets appraised and assessed and reflected and judged, every day from puberty through to cronehood.

pretty is bound, at some point in her life, to be the yardstick against which she judges herself.

part of me thinks our musings on the subject are us trying to guess at how and when she and the yardstick will collide, readying ourselves to help her negotiate a relationship with pretty that does not subsume or damage all the other things she is.  because pretty is a brutal master, no matter what one’s face actually looks like.

Dave swears that his personal early research into Women, the Species, shows that the girls who grew up believing themselves “the pretty ones” often ended up stunted, their personalities self-restricted, externalized, by the emphasis placed on their surfaces.

i was the opposite.  i grew up in a house where pretty never came up.  when my father left, he took with him my mother’s sense of her own attractiveness…and i was well into college before she took any of that back.  i was expected to be clean, pleasant, pleasing, polite…but  ”pretty is as pretty does” was as far as my mother ever went towards an assessment of my looks.  i grew up with the overwhelming sense that being embodied in female form was a vaguely shameful thing, and that my flaws - crooked nose, pudgy belly, short humpy neck - were horrors barely to be tolerated.  i was 21 the first time i ever remember being called pretty, flat out pretty.  i was so grateful i nearly fell over myself to sleep with the flattering party, to an REM soundtrack in a dirty little room.

so yeh, my late-blooming sense of my own appeal did inspire me to develop a sparkling, uh, wit and intellect as compensation, but it also led to a deep, longstanding insecurity in the worthiness of my physical person.

i don’t want either extreme for Josephine.

and so we talk about it, this unspeakable thing in terrible taste. we hope she’s pretty, but not too pretty.  we hope to teach her that even if the question of pretty is always out there, waiting to tempt her or cause her doubt, her worth is more than the sum of her parts.  no matter how lovely her parents think they are.  or how loony they sound talking about it out loud.

do you talk about pretty?  do you wonder, for your own daughters?  have you worked out your own relationship to your looks and how they’re taken up by others, in this life?

my mother tells me i walked at nine months old.

she has been telling me that for as long as i can remember. she’s also prone to mentioning that i spoke in clear sentences by two, and stayed dry through the nights shortly after.  

oh, i was a starbaby, clearly. and my mother’s pride in the accomplishments of my infant self has been a reliable camp stove for the cockles of my heart for, um, ever.

sure, i’ve done other things in my life. i have a good eight or nine years of post-secondary education under my belt, been around the world a few times, have written a few things i’m proud of.  but ask my mother, and you’ll get the distinct impression i peaked in 1973.

it took me a good 35 years to figure out the sad truth about my child prodigy status. 

being the first among my little friendlets to walk never actually made a better walker than they were.  i spoke early, yes, and admittedly i haven’t stopped…but once you hit grade three or so, being a monolingual, publicly verbal creature ceases to be so impressive. and i seldom wet myself, true, but so far as i’m aware, neither do many other thirty-somethings.  (well, except for those unfortunate post-partum bladder indiscretions…HUSH. for years i was continent, people. totally, reliably continent.)

my mother has spent my entire life exuding beatific pride in perfectly normal milestones that almost all typically-developing children meet somewhere within a twelve-month period.  i was no freakin’ Mozart, composing symphonies in Pampers, for crying out loud. i walked early. i stopped pissing myself a few months before some of my friends. 

i spoke in sentences probably a full year before my son did. but now that he’s reached what the charts call age-appropriate fluency…whaddaya know? he says stuff just as smart as the kid who started talking a year earlier.

my handy-dandy parental primers, mostly used as helpful doorstops since the early days of Oscar’s infancy, all have the same message: the  delicate self-esteem of a child has its first roots in the reflections cast back to said child by his or her caregivers. you are good, you are special, we communicate to the little folk, and THIS is why.  

i made them doorstops because they all communicated to ME one troubling message: my self-esteem is rooted in the very same old sacred cows that i’ve been railing against since i turned thirteen.  dammit. 

my mother, bless her good and earnest heart, wasn’t trying to set me up for a middle-age of nagging insecurity. she is, to her core, a believer in Authority. she appeals to it, honours it, makes an occasional shrine of it.  and left alone young, with an infant to raise, she turned to Authority to bolster and validate her efforts.  enter Dr. Spock, with his normative charts.

if i walked early, she must be doing a good job. spoke early, and without that pesky island accent? she was offering rich language development resources in the home environment. toilet trained before two? clearly, despite the pinched disapproval of single parenting amongst the Good Families of the city in that time, she must be morally upright enough to earn some stamp of approval and seal of quality, else i’d have been soiling myself all over town until well past three.

you see where all this goes wrong, right?  i grew up with the idea that doing things early was not only a marker of my great, if vague, potential…but that it was a good in itself.  i was good because Authority declared me good. and prompt. that is all. thanks for playing.

my mother’s Dr. Spock book - i read the damn thing myself in adolescence whilst plowing indiscriminately through her bookshelf - stopped at age three.  and so did any discussion of my skill set, my qualities as an individual.

the school system eventually took up where Dr. Spock had left off, as Validating Authority for my mother’s efforts to raise an acceptable (and preferably slightly above average) child.  the school system was generally kind to me, because i had been raised with literacies it appreciated.  and when the school system was done with me and had convocated my Honours-achieving hind end out its doors - early, yet again, as i graduated high school at 17 and had completed two separate bachelor’s degrees at 22 - i assume my mother believed some other benign system of authority, some Dr. Spock of the professional world, closed to her but in her mind a meritocracy clearly waiting to welcome me with open arms, would step in to take me up on my promise, my potential.

for a brief period, she even stopped talking about my potty training achievements and instead offered up my degrees as social appetizers at every occasion, even having them framed at her own expense and hung in her apartment.

but i did not arrive.  i worked hard, but had no idea how to leverage the skills i had into opportunity.  i didn’t even understand the concept. 

when i finished school, i knew i’d walked early and toilet-trained early, but other than that my personal canvas of self-description was filled only with my own adolescent graffiti.  ”i like to imagine myself as David Bowie’s personal concubine” is not a self-description one could go far with in the depressed Canadian economy of the early-90’s recession.  and so i floated, town-to-town, up and down the dial, always working, trying every path. and  i came to find myself in my late-ish thirties, writing about tutus and wondering what i want to do with the rest of my life. 

and my mother, who loves me and whose ambitions for me only ever extended so far as me being acceptable to Authority - a line i’ve been falling on and off of like a wagon since junior high - has gradually settled into an apparently contented relationship with my achievements, wherein her acquaintances relate stories of their adult childrens’ law practices and government pensions and sojourns with Doctors without Borders, and mom chirps “Bonnie’s always been gifted with words. Do you know she could speak in full sentences by the time she was twenty-two months?  Of course, she walked at nine months…she was always bright…and she was dry through the night by the time she turned two. Children these days seem to be in diapers right until kindergarten…have you noticed…?”

…and then all the maters cluck in unison, and magically, any discussion of my current skill set disappears entirely from view.

which i’m starting to see the benefit in.

 if my mother wants to bask in the glow of my prodigious tippy-toeing across a carpet during the Trudeau heyday (or Nixon’s China visit, for you south-of-the-border readers)…well, that’s her prerogative.  it keeps my potential open. and i’m beginning to think maybe there’s potential in being a late-bloomer, after all.

so as Josephine closes in on nine months happily flat on her puffy diapered ass, i say dandy. pass the cookies. take your time, kiddo.  

what was your sense of your own potential, growing up? where did it come from? and do you think you’ve fulfilled it, in any way?

when i was four, i wanted to be a ballerina.

i think it was the tutus. you couldn’t just buy a kid a dressup tutu at the Woolworth’s back then; dressup was old plastic jewellry and mom’s clunky platform shoes to break an ankle in. unless you had a real live ballerina in the family, tutus were relegated to the category of fairytale items, confections of crisp, gravity-defying tulle glimpsed only in picture books.

i coveted.  i fantasized. with a tutu, i would be transformed.  i would be fabulous.

ballet lessons, therefore, were a magical initiation by which i would undergo my metamorphosis. i had no concept of ballet as an art, no concept of sport or applied discipline or unrelenting practice.  i thought i would put on a tutu and slippers and be a ballerina, lithe and graceful, about to take flight.

i jonesed for it all so bad my beleaguered mother finally signed me up for lessons.

my first clue that not all would be as i’d imagined was that there were no tutus; rather i got a stretchy, polyester black leotard that sagged and bagged off my bum.  i did get slippers, but they were my aunt’s hand-me-downs, rescued from twelve years in a closet and cracked and black, not even that pretty pastel pink that looked like bandaids and gum.

my ballet teacher still comes to me dreams sometimes, 32 years later. her face is vague, but her tight-bunned silhouette is has become a mythology unto itself, for me, as if all the evil stepmothers of legend and story were rolled up into one sharp-nosed, straight-backed harpy. she was not from the school of coddling children. she wanted us to work, which was affront in itself to a puzzled five-year-old with little interest in the boring foot positions. i just wanted to soar. 

but the real conflict between my five-year-old self and Serious Ballerina was about costume.  costume, from my perspective, was the core of the whole thing, the reason i was there. if i couldn’t have a tutu, i was set at least on making my dowdy, saggy short-sleeved leotard pretty by wearing a frilly blouse underneath, sleeves and collar peeking out.  

i thought i looked beautiful. i thought beauty would make me dance.

i remember the feeling of a bony hand digging into my shoulder, marching me back to the dressing room. i remember vaguely the big bulbous lights that surrounded the mirrors there, casting yellowish shadows on the cement walls. i remember the goosebumps on my naked arms, stripped of their finery, and the heavy clumsiness of my feet as they tried to turn out and in and tripped over themselves through the repetitive drudgery of classes. i remember my bewilderment; my certainty that if only the dragonlady would allow me dress the part, i could dance.

i took ballet lessons for three months. by the time i turned six, my career in the ballet was closed.

a friend told me recently she’s traditionally dated as if she’s job-shadowing; picking people not for their personal qualities but for their interesting careers/lives/families/circles of belonging. i’m the opposite. i’ve never started a relationship with anyone who really even had a career. the fact that Dave had a car when we first got together seemed glamourous. my career goals have never been based on anything so concrete as job-shadowing, in or out of love.

my aspirations have mostly been based on the same premise as that first dream of the ballet…a completely groundless and non-empirical faith that if i do this, i will be transformed.  

i’ve never learned the lesson.  the promise of the costume, the role, always shimmies in front of my shining eyes, waiting to work its magic on me, transform me from a jack of all trades to a master of…something. i fall again and again for the siren song of the incantation that will release my secret inner potential; i believe each time that if i only take on the mantle, i will soar.

i didn’t get that federal job i did the three-hour interview for a few months back. i did start a small, one-day-a-week gig in the interim, researching research grant opportunities for the university. it’s not my research, in the sense that if i do ever continue that Ph.D i once started in a whole other life, this will not be my area of focus…but the grant knowledge is transferable. and i had the opportunity to adjudicate some local arts grants recently, which was a process i enjoyed way more than i should have, probably because it’s been a very long time since anybody - ahem, i mean YOU, three-year-old - expressed any interest in the whys of my decision-making processes.  i applied for another, non-grant-related job last week. and i actually did some writing that stretched longer than a blog post for the first time since last summer’s workshop.

but the truth is, my focus is still all over the place, professionally. if one were an optimist, this could be said to leave me with many options open; a flexible skillset. if one is less rosy in outlook, one could also level the accusation that i still don’t know what i want to do when i grow up…that i am still, at 37, looking for the tutu that will magically make me dance.

both are true.  and even after all the years i’ve put in doing the grunt work and discipline of learning to teach and research and project manage and write and strategize, i still perch precarious, seemingly aimless and undirected between them all.  i wait, bewildered, for the role to come along that will unlock my potential, even as in the same breath i decry the determinism and passivity all that  implies. 

in some part of me, i still just want to be the ballerina of my childhood mind’s eye, to know what it is to soar. 

how did you end up choosing the path you’re on, whatever you do with your days? and is there some kind of tutu still out there in your dreams, calling your name?

she’s been out now longer than she was ever in.

yesterday marked sixteen months since the day i found out i was pregnant with Posey. it was an eight-month pregnancy that felt like eighty. and eight and a half months later, i think i’m finally recovered-ish. send flowers.

they say we humans have a fourth trimester to pregnancy, the final one spent outside the womb thanks to the engineering clusterfuck of large brains and tender perinea.  i say four-schmore.

i’m more of a six-trimester mammal, myself.

both times i’ve come home from the hospital with a baby, it’s taken an entire pregnancy-length again for me and the offspring to begin to show signs of being human. the colicky infant and the feeding machine who doesn’t sleep more than three hours in a row are not functioning people, people.  they are still gestating, albeit perhaps in separate beds. they are creatures of the body, days dictated by routines of demanding bellies and sheer exhaustion and a lot of mindless wiping.  of everything.

the taller of the pair may occasionally engage in conversation and give the impression of being a thinking adult, but do not be fooled.  that is not thinking. that is just the habit of talking in complete sentences, which is hard to break even when one actually has nothing to say other than “i wiped vomit off my shirt seven times today.”

it gets easier after that fourth trimester, sure. but only after the full mirror pregnancy has been ticked off the calendar do i actually feel as if my body or my life are in any way my own.  slowly, my self creep back, at first distorted, hard to recognize. slowly, between six and eight months after the baby arrives, my sense of being utterly consumed, of being with child in a way even more total than during pregnancy itself, trails off…not with the bang of birth, but with a whimper.

one morning i wake up and notice that i’ve actually slept. all week. ’til an almost-civilized hour. and i go in to find my little baby laughing at her brother, who’s peering into her crib, and she’s watching him knowingly as if she’s more than cognisant of exactly what’s going to come next and i realize that our rhythms have shifted from pure bodily function to social patterns - that i no longer have an infant, but a very small, very sweet, watchful, fierce little girl.  in a baby body, but a baby body that rocks and crawls and explores and feeds itself whatever it finds on the floor, indiscriminately, and gets closer to independence every day.  she loves the cat. she has a sense of humour. she high-fives, and dislikes lentils.  her lip quivers when i tell her “no.”

and i congratulate myself and say, “hey! you! you had a baby!” and then i look around and know that it is done, survived, that long, brain-numbing road of extended gestation that seems to be my lazy, elderly arse’s response to infancy and colic and sleep-deprivation and nursing.  it is done, except for the nursing, and even that begins to wane, takes less precedence, demands little except a happy cuddle.

we are two now, almost fully. semi-civilized both, my baby girl and i each brought safely to ourselves.

the whimper that escapes comes from me.  and i do not know if it is relief or longing, for that strange half-life for two that will never come again.

Posey eating shoe. she's worth 16 months.

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i know not everyone seems to have these pitifully long elephantine gestations, in the sense that some of you bounce back into your jeans and your actual senses of self miraculous weeks after birth. i consider you robots amazing specimens.

did you have that sense of being still utterly baby-consumed after birth? what was your mirror gestation length? and how did you feel coming out the other side?