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it would be easy to say my mother never really knew her mother.

she was an only child, my mom, born to parents in their hardscrabble thirties in a postwar town that never quite boomed. her folks had long before given up on babies, but she came anyway, a surprise, a little black-haired come-by-chance with her father’s square brow, one of a thousand Barbaras born the same year. in the few pictures that exist of her first years, she gazes out from the stark b&w image under crooked bangs, an imp with curious eyes and a Mona-Lisa half-smile.

her father was a landscaper, a seasonal worker in years before there was employment insurance to carry families like theirs through winter. they lived in the old family home with its coal furnace, and even into my childhood lost pebbles of decades-old coal littered the gravel driveway, relics of a dirtier, smokier time. all i know of her mother is that the Doris Day fifties passed her by: she worked, this woman who was my unknown grandmother, in a time when it was a little bit shameful for a married mother to have to work. she had no education, she smoked cigarettes, and was the only female ancestor of mine who ever towered above 5′3. she was raised Catholic, my mother’s father Protestant; when they married, her family disowned her.

they had a rocky, loud marriage, apparently. disappointment on both sides, stress, conflicting temperments. my mother shared a room with her mother; her father had his own lair in the house. he was a packrat, and had once been a scholar…in the winters, off work, i suppose he would have been his daughter’s caregiver, so that unkempt, book-laden room is the only one my mother describes with any clarity from that era. mostly, she remembers going outside a lot, roaming. but even today, strangely acontextual quotes from Shakespeare leap from her mouth at odd times, chants five decades and more old, offered up like proverbs or incantations. the ironies of quoting Polonius have never troubled my mother’s self-image excessively. the lines are family jewels, and when she unwraps them her eyes shine and the little girl in them looks on her father again, lord of the book pile.

when my mother was six, a month after she started school, she got pneumonia. in those days it was a serious thing, taking months in the recovery and still claiming lives every season. but her mother could not stay home with her; her father, presumably, was not equipped to play nursemaid. the little girl was trundled across the street to the home of her aunt and uncle, a childless couple in their mid-forties. the uncle had a stable, middle-class job at the phone company. the aunt did not work. my mother, little Barbara, stayed with them until almost summer, losing a year of school, but recovering her health. she had her own room for the first time in her life. she was carried across the street to her own house only once, at Christmas. there are more pictures of her from this year of convalescence than from all the other previous six together.

she went home, then, my mother, to a mother and father who struggled. i do not know what the homecoming was like. i do know that less than three years later she crossed the street again to take up residence in that little back room of her own, and that she never moved home again. i know that her mother was sick, by then, and that she knew her mother was sick, that her mother had collapsed one day on the sidewalk taking little Barbara downtown on some rare excursion and had been doubled over in pain, unable to get up. i know now that it was cancer, colitis gone untreated by a family too poor to pay doctors and turned deadly. i know that my mother’s mother died three days before Christmas the year my mother turned eleven, and was buried Christmas Eve. i know that the woman who i called my grandmother all my life was actually my mother’s aunt, who raised that child who came across the street with pneumonia and gave her the first safe haven she’d ever had, and loved her…and eventually me, in my turn.

but i know so little about the woman who was my mother’s mother, absent and mysterious. i wonder at the disappearance of a mother. i can see the imprint of my mother’s father on her yet, but of her mother…not even shadows. for six or more years, this woman slept beside her child…breathed beside her, must have held her, brushed her black hair. for eleven years, she watched her daughter grow. i wonder how she felt about that move across the street…the first time, and the last. i wondered if she was relieved, unburdened…or if she was ashamed of having to turn her child over to her prim older sister-in-law for care. i wonder if she ached and raged at the unfairness of it all, if in the throes of a slow and cruel death she wondered what would happen to the girl child she’d borne, or if she knew all along that somewhere she’d lost her, maybe even abandoned her herself. i wonder if she had any peace.

i wonder what remains of her, unspoken and perhaps unacknowledged, inside my mother’s skin. i wonder if my mother misses her, thinks of her today, on Mother’s Day.

i don’t know. i don’t know if it is fair to ask. and yet i think of her, and i wonder, at this strange and terrible power of motherhood to render us so vital and so helpless all at once, so indelible and yet so utterly erasable.  her name was Thisbe, my grandmother.  and loyal child that a part of me is, i do not know if i am supposed to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day, or not.

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to my mother, who has, to her credit, shaped every corner of who i am…and loved me in ways i know she never knew.

i think i know now why i blog.

the company’s good and the outlet is needed, and appreciated, sure.  but they’re not the primary reason.  turns out blogging is the only thing keeping me from having to face the stark fact that i am actually, secretly, an incoherent twit.  yep.  oh, the shame.  i blog to keep up my self-esteem, folks, to maintain the facade that i’ve actually mastered some command of my mind, heart, and the English language.  snort.

basically, i am congenitally incapable of expressing myself concisely and thoughtfully in any form other than writing.  seriously.  i’m gregarious and all, and i can chatter away and be a pretty good conversational reflector of what the other party is saying, but ask me to actually form an unprepared idea in words, out loud, in real time, to an audience…and i hem and haw and turn into that painful, stereotypical grade 9 chemistry teacher who rambled on and on in ever-pitiful and incomprehensible circles until the students were all asleep or trying to burn their ears off with Bunsen burners.

and after six weeks on bedrest, sitting in my house all day writing work emails and making small talk with, um, my cat, i’m getting worse. the raging head cold isn’t helping, either.

last week, i got to take an afternoon off of babysitting my couch and trucked off to the local CBC station to record a Mother’s Day-focused conversation with some other Maritime mummies.  i was psyched.  an outing!  a conversation!  a chance to talk about parenthood in what i hoped would be a multi-faceted way!  then i put the headset on and sat in front of the mic…and died a thousand small deaths.  my brain began flitting about aimlessly, unable to organize itself without letters and lines of text to confine it.  each question - and these were not shocking questions, folks - left me stunned, unprepared, searching desperately for a train of thought to land on.  apparently trains are running sparse in these parts.

when the interviewer asked if we’d always wanted to be parents, i answered yes, and said honestly that i remembered being twenty-nine and newly single and suddenly wondering if motherhood would ever happen for me and realizing that some part of me would never fully come to fruition if it did not.  dandy.  then, following the base rules of logic and conversation, that pesky interviewer followed up with, “oh? and what would that part of you be?”

uh…um…errr…my knee?  nope, nope, that’s not right.  focus, Bonnie, focus.

i sputtered and floundered and rambled on for a few minutes, saying basically nothing, blathering on about how important it seemed to get to shape a life from the start, thus probably coming off like a controlling nutjob and offending countless adoptive parents of older children in the process.  even as the words rolled out, all tripe and cliché, i knew they were the wrong ones…ones that didn’t really get close to the feeling i was trying to express…but i couldn’t collect my thoughts, couldn’t line them up and sort them and make them shiny and incisive and pretty, not for the life of me.

all the while in the back of my head a blog post eloquently composed itself, but only for the benefit of my keyboardless fingertips.  my tongue was left to fend for itself, and i was left wishing i could rip it out.

it happened again today.  a visitor dropped by and in the process of feeding me lunch, bless her, asked me a real question, a genuine, complex, recount how you feel about all this kind of question, and i was so delighted to have someone to actually talk to that i launched into a disconnected diatribe worthy of the Jerry Springer show.  my guest smiled politely throughout, but again, i had this weird sensation of failing, profoundly, to get across what i was actually trying to communicate.  and i faintly wished she could have called in her question an hour or two before, y’know…just to give me a chance to process, to get my thoughts down.

i could have a whole sheaf of papers taped to my chest!  why do i love parenthood?  see page 23!  how do the dynamics of my extended family impact me?  that’s a whole chapter, pages 40 through 57!  how am i handling all this bedrest?   what?!  can’t you tell i’m doing splendidly?!?!  see the frozen terror in my eyes at the prospect of human contact?!?!  maybe that one is actually kinda taped to my chest…or face…figuratively speaking and all.

so here’s what i want to know…is this incoherence - at least the part of it that isn’t solely housebound battiness - just me?  is this a phenomenon common among bloggers?  could it be part of the reason so many of us are drawn to writing, this pleasantly editable, controllable space for presentation of our most intimate thoughts, but dressed up in their best lingerie?   does blogging make it harder and harder to actually adjust to the ephemeral messiness of real-life conversation?  am i just slowly beginning to lose all semblance of social skills the longer i spend perched on my couch in isolation, fighting off cabin fever?

note to self: do NOT watch The Shining while on bedrest.  and lock all the axes in the shed.  i have my nice blog, and don’t need any other ways of expressing myself, thank you very much.

i married Isis on the fifth day of May
but i could not hold on to her very long
so i cut off my hair and i rode straight away
for the wild unknown country
where i could not go wrong
…

she was there in the meadow where the creek used to rise
blinded by sleep and in need of a bed
i came in from the east with the sun in my eyes
i cursed her one time, then i rode on ahead

Isis, oh Isis, you mystical child
what drives me to you is what drives me insane
i still can remember the way that you smiled
on the fifth day of May, in the drizzlin’ rain

- Bob Dylan

we do not have the usual kind of anniversary.  there is no ceremony to commemorate, barely an event that marked one day from the next to anyone around us.  we began almost in secret, taboo, old friends evolving from one life to another in a window crowded with empty bottles and full ashtrays and late, late nights that became early mornings crouched at sunrise on damp concrete stoops together, still talking, whilst a foreign country woke up around us.  and i had known you too long not to know that a part of you belonged to me, beyond faithlessness, and yet was sure the boundaries on the rest were tied in chains.  and how heady, how terrifying, to watch the chains slide, to hold the Pandora’s Box of you & i in our hands and risk opening it, risk losing it all.

we slipped in eyes wide open, staring at each other, afraid to look away.  it has been seven years.  i still remember the feeling of relief, the recognition of now, i have lived.

we have lived more than i’d bargained for, and survived.  you have remained my friend, the one who knows me, the one i trust.  you have held me up through days and years i couldn’t see my way forward. you have had the grace to let me hold you up, in my different way.  we have each become something we were not before, and there is balance in it, better.

i look for the itch.  i know it well, have lived its dissatisfaction, its loneliness, its regret and wonder and longing for elsewhere…in another life, eight, nine years gone.  but i cannot remember its contours, anymore, cannot see its shadow.  we chose well, i think, in this gravely embarked upon and most serious fling.  this life’s work.

and too i remember the way that you smiled, that very first morning.  i made oatmeal, served up in plastic bowls.  it was the fifth day of May, in the drizzlin’ rain.

all i have…and love.

i grew up as an only child, but i actually have siblings, half-siblings.  three of ‘em.  all younger, from two to nearly thirteen years younger, my father’s second family.  they spent summers here when i was a kid, most years, but their lives were lived thousands of miles away.  we were more like cousins, growing up in different cultures and different houses, homes with utterly different expectations and socioeconomic relationships to the society around them.

when i left my home to traipse around the world and seek some kind of place for myself, two of them were still children…little kids i saw some summers, little kids with big eyes and squeaky voices and runny noses, kids i loved and enjoyed but barely knew.

these kids, they grow up, hey?  the two ‘little’ ones, now well into their mid-twenties, are having babies.

and they live here now, this whole clan who couldn’t have been further away all those years.   it is a strange thing, having a whole extended family where once there were none.   we float near each other’s lives, not terribly closely tied…but still curiously kin.  i feel protective of them, especially those little kids now grown to adulthood, but i also feel shy, outsider and insider both.  we have never had a lot in common. and yet, if all goes well, there will be three babies born within four months or so of each other, three little cousins.  and i wonder.  whether family ties will tighten as the younger two form families.  whether as adults we can come to be the siblings we never truly were as children.  whether the older of the brothers and his partner - who have three school-age kids between them but can have no more, and have lost - are wounded by the projected image of three little babies on a blanket next Christmas.  whether anyone knows how afraid i am that this image of the three, willful fantasy and foolishness though it is, will not come to pass.

my sister, the youngest of the four of us, had her first baby and the first of the expected three two days ago.   a healthy boy, wee Nigel,  absolutely gorgeous…and my sister a pint-size madonna with her infant, a natural, unperturbed.   he was 7 pounds, 8 ounces…bigger by far than either of my boys, and yet i forgot they came that small.  i always forget they come that small.  the new addition brings Oscar’s cousin count to six…all boys, on both Dave’s side and mine.  my father is convinced he’s getting a whole baseball team.  my brother’s girlfriend, though, is adamant she’ll have the first girl.  i look at her sidelong, trying to remember what it felt like to believe the things you want are simply the things you are entitled to, the way things will go.

i am afraid to wish for a beautiful boy like Nigel, bright-eyed and suckling.  and i am even more afraid to wish for the girl i was always sure i’d have - that wish seems so long ago and so ridiculously impossible, like wishing the baby turn out to be a lion cub, or a magical fairy.  i just wish that he or she come to exist, safely, not too early.  i’ve already lost one baby i hoped would be Nigel’s playmate…back in the fall, my sister and i were due only five or six weeks apart.  now it is not quite twenty-two…likely less, given the generally short duration of my pregnancies.  it feels like a flash and a lifetime, at the same time.

three years ago.

it was three years ago today i left the hospital for the first time after nearly three weeks of bedrest. i’d been airlifted in during winter’s last April gasp, but in my hermetic isolation in ye olde Craftmatic, the ground had transformed into a mushy carpet, spongy with sprigs of green poking through it. i felt like Rip Van Winkle, utterly out of time.

we drove out of the city, to the old tower on its outskirts, the one i’d climbed as a child every time we visited. my legs were weak and i walked gingerly. i was not in pain, per se…just timid, afraid i would break. the tower was closed, too old, too dangerous to be left open for tourists any longer. i stood in front of it, staring, as if i looked long and hard enough i might catch a glimpse of a younger me, might disappear with her into a different time, any other time than this.

she did not materialize, that former self. and i realized, viscerally, that she never would again…that there was no going back. i had stepped off the side of my own flat earth.

i turned in the rain, then, and tested my footing on the slippery bank of overgrowth there that leads up and then down, eventually, to the harbour. i climbed a little, until i was alone on a low ridge, looking down through the brush on tiny sailboats, seabirds. and when i was sure i was far enough away that no one could hear me, i spoke into the wind, and spoke his name for the first time in the thirty-six hours since he’d died.

i had a son. his name was Finn.

it was only a whisper, spoken to raindrops. but i knew it might be a very long time before i had the courage to say those words aloud again, to risk exposing the gaping wound i had suddenly become, to risk being that crazy lady talking about her dead baby. i knew too that i needed, desperately, to mark him on the world, to tell someone of my joy and my pride in him, of my sorrow, to tell that he had been here.

my tears mixed with the rain and those eight words echoed.
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it was only in the year and more after his death that those echoes found expression anywhere, for me. it was here, where i could speak without having to meet anyone’s eyes, that i began to be able to write my way through the grief and love and anger that had left me unmoored, cut off at the knees. here, for the first time, i could own the whole of my story, find a balance within it - be the mother of a dead child without only being the mother of a dead child. and here, for the first time, i found people like me, mothers mourning and keening and raging and weeping, mothers bearing witness to lives too short.

i wrote to Finn on his birthday, i am okay now. i didn’t add that this blog has had a great deal to do with that healing - not just as a space to speak, but also because you have heard me, have taken in my darkest bleatings and said in return, received, here, listening. you have offered love. and more, you have offered that love to a child you never met, a child whom only a couple of people ever got to meet, to touch. my child. i feared him being forgotten, erased; feared never being able to sing him into existence, somewhere. thank you for being my somewhere. you have given me grace i had not imagined existed.

blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

the first few paragraphs of this post have two homes, today.

i am celebrating…it is May, the end of cruel April. i am still pregnant. i am beginning to hope.  but with the same words, i am also celebrating the start of a different kind of new beginning. six of us, all of us Medusas, deadbabymamas, are collaborating on a new blog called glow in the woods…what we hope will be a warm fire amidst the bleak cold of grief, a community for families struggling to get through infant loss, stillbirth, and sorrow. it would be in bad taste, i suppose, to call it our new baby…but it is May, people, and i am feeling more cocky and flippant than i have in a long time. please click over, come see us, and if you know someone who might find some solace in our company, please send ‘em our way, and our welcome. our doors are open.

…did i mention it was May? may it bring real spring, finally, and blessings to all.

it is your birthday, little one, and you are not here.

i made cupcakes last night anyway, and when your father and your little brother come home later we will go out into the back yard where your trees are budding, just barely, and have a little picnic and talk about you and celebrate you.  because it is your birthday, and you would be three today.

but you are not here.

i know the cupcakes are not for you.   these cupcakes are for the living.  they are an offering, i guess, a ritual, a way of honouring what we do not know how to touch.  they are a way for your father and i to tell your brother about you, now that he is getting old enough.  i do not really expect him to understand…i’m still not sure i understand, myself.  but he likes cupcakes, knows they are only for special occasions.   you liked cupcakes, too, back when you and i were a world unto ourselves: i will tell him, someday, that you two had that in common.  your little feet used to dance inside me, tapping out your sugar rush, making me laugh.  i used to tap my fingers back, in response, the two of us symbiotic and easy in our cupcake afterglow.

there is another little one there inside now, Finn, in that same fragile sanctuary, another brother or sister.  s/he too will have cupcakes tonight.  for you, for this special occasion, even though you are not here.  and s/he may dance or kick, just like you did.  and those cupcakes will be bittersweet.

there was so much i wanted to show you.  when you first died, i couldn’t look at things without showing them to you in my mind…these are clouds, little one, that’s a kitty and they’re soft, these are berries i don’t know the name of…aren’t they pretty?  i don’t know if i thought you could hear me, see through me somehow…i just…needed to tell you.  i still want to.  i want to show you the tulips that are coming up in the front yard, and the worms in the earth, and tell you how your mother loves you and just…be your parent, Finn.  because you are my child, you were my firstborn, my baby.  but you are not here.

what i can tell you is that we are not so broken, anymore, by your going.  that we are healing.  i didn’t want sheer bitterness to be your legacy, i didn’t want to honour you by becoming something less.  and yet it feels like such betrayal, for me to let go…to accept and say, it’s okay.  it was time when you went; i told you that then and i meant it, with my whole soul.  you were hurt, and hurting, and i could not help you.  you did nothing wrong.  i do not know if it will ever be quite okay that you’re gone…i doubt it…but it is easier, now.  do you understand?  and if i say, i am okay now, will you forgive me?  because even after three years, i am still afraid of losing you…wherever you may be.  i am still afraid of failing you.

i am still your mama, and proud of you.

i  love you, little one.  and down here with the tulips and the trees, we’re having cupcakes and remembering.  happy birthday.

the morning of his second birthday, last week, i trimmed Oscar’s hair.

having spent my twenties fussily tending to my own bangs (when i had bangs), various boyfriends’ hair, and the occasional drunken friend’s plea to “do something with this mop” - the last of which admittedly often turned out rather awkward and regrettable once the gin wore off - i felt reasonably confident taking nail scissors to the back of a toddler’s curly mullet. i was sober, he was sober, and he hadn’t asked for “the Rachel,” or anything fancy…what could go wrong?

in fact, little did, amazingly. Oscar, who was strapped into the long-outgrown Fisher Price recliner in which we still tether him whilst we shower, was engrossed in Richard Scarry’s “What People Do All Day” and mostly uninterested in the brief proceedings. he did protest when i had to bend his head down towards his chest at an unnatural angle thanks to the fact that i’d chosen to cut his hair in a freaking recliner, but other than that Darwin-award-worthy aside, all went smoothly. golden ringlets went cascading into the wastebasket, and mummy got a little sniffy at the sight, but overall it took about one hundred and ten seconds and Oscar emerged slightly trimmed but still with his Richard Simmons-esque baby ‘fro intact, which was what i was aiming for and didn’t trust a barber to do.

i told myself i cut it because it was getting so long that the curls were starting to straighten out. this is true. the back of O’s hair has always grown faster than the front and the top, and the back has a much coarser texture from being slept on and tangled and broken on a regular basis. it had gotten to the point where not only did his mullet stray halfway down his back in the bathtub, but where even when dry it sometimes refused to curl and just frizzed instead, leaving Oscar with a rather misshapen halo of wild fluff. i knew that the trim would remove some weight and help the curls come back, and tidy up the overall madness of his ‘do.

but motivations in mothering never get to be that pure and innocent. a few strangers had told us what a pretty girl we had. my mother had mentioned a few times that really he was due for a trim, in that tone that makes me feel about twelve and very, very tempted to let Oscar’s hair grow until the cows come home and he rivals Celine Dion’s son in hirsute bounty.

except that reaction didn’t feel very mature, somehow.

the truth is, i dislike most ways traditional masculinity is expressed in our society (no real props for a lot of traditional, stereotypical feminity here either) and particularly the way these gender conventions and expectations are imposed on children. i dislike little military haircuts on boys who are still, essentially babies. i mourn the fact that Oscar is quickly growing out of what i perceive as cute little boy clothes and into sizes that seem to leave me with the option of dressing him as a) a drunken frat boy, b) a NASCAR enthusiast, c) a trucker groupie, or d) a member of the military. the prostitot offerings that inundate the little girls’ sections of stores, and the overabundance of pink princess items over on that side of the gender divide mean that neutral, primary-colour items are harder and harder to find these days. but i seek them out. at an end of season sale this February, i bought O a beautiful red wool duffel coat with toggles, which he wore until the snow disappeared i gave up on the snow disappearing and just moved him to his yellow raincoat in disgust. with the red coat and the curls, everyone seems to assume he’s a girl. i, on the other hand, think he looks quaint, charming - a version of boyhood from Winnie the Pooh rather than the WWE. i’d dress him in sailor suits if i could find ‘em.

but this line is a fine one to walk. despite a lifelong longing for a girl, i’ve found having this boy to be all the delight i ever hoped for from parenthood, and more. in the ways O is ‘all boy,’ he is joy unexpected, discovery. i see his gender as a key part of who he is, and embrace it. he is a boy, a wonderful boy. but just as i would with a daughter, i balk at the idea of his sex being the primary factor in how i perceive him, and do not want it to be the sum total of how he perceives himself. he loves trains, it’s true, and his plastic airport with its things that go “wheeee!”. he also loves to paint, and listen to stories, and at the sitters’ with her daughters he runs around in pink sunglasses and thinks they’re beautiful. and i want this freedom in his own skin to last as long as it can.

and yet i want the freedom to be genuinely his, and that’s where i’m struggling. is such a thing really possible, given the power differentials between parent and child, given the way that gender and class biases emerge at every locus of consumer choice and every decision we make about what activities our child participates in? i do not want to use my child as a freak flag to flaunt my own unconventionality, or even my snobbish rejection of North American stereotypes of masculinity. i do not want to wear his hair in pigtails just to thumb my nose at social constraints i consider stupid. i do not want to treat him like a pet poodle. yet every single choice i make regarding what clothes are purchased for him and how his hair is cut and what toys and models and interests he has access to: all these things shape the gender identity he’s developing, and the gender identity people read on to him. like all social beings, he will forever be subject to people’s preconceived notions of what his gender status should mean, and how it should be performed. as his mother, i too will be judged on how i am shaping him to conform or confound with his gender performance, until such point as he is old enough to make such decisions for himself. (and likely long after, if the unflagging currency of pop-Freudian analysis of gay men and their mothers is any indication.)

i do not fear my son being a “sissy” - the feminized male is not a role i devalue, nor one particularly threatening in our family. Oscar will be who he will be, and a Marine would be harder for me to find peace with than a hairdresser, to be honest, but the choice is his.  i do fear, though, in this vulnerable period of childhood, him being taken up somehow as overly feminized, having his feelings hurt or confused by some stranger’s ignorant comments, because of choices i make for him while he is still too young to know different.

so i trimmed his hair, taking the easy way out, keeping it long enough to curl, short enough that it doesn’t look like barettes might be in order.

and i feel dirty, and yet in this muddle of raising children in a society that claims gender equality and enacts “equal but different” every time you glance at a toy aisle or a baby layette, i am not sure there is any such thing as clean, anywhere.

outside my window, a peaceful snow is falling. tulip buds huddle tight closed against the icy blanket. we had to drag out Oscar’s winter boots again this morning. part of me thinks this is ridiculous - that after a winter this long, this laden with storms, that spring is somehow obliged to hurry up and arrive once Mayday is only a week away.

another part of me - the part that spends all day indoors, on the couch - is more equivocal. meh, says the shut-in, snow, schmoe. i don’t own a chaise lounge. what do i care if it snows all summer?

it will not, i know. but this is Canada. we’re a snow-ridden folk. i remember driving home from college for the summer one year, with my childhood best friend, in a late April snowstorm so bad we had to follow the taillights of the car ahead. the road was whited out, and at one point as we crawled along, inching down the highway, we mulled over the ironies of dying in a snowstorm on summer vacation. oh callous youth, so unfearful, so amused.

i am no longer that girl. my mind still plays the wry ponies of doom, casting narratives, but they do not entertain me any longer. they make my heart leap in my chest, make me swallow dryly. my eyes dart, seek escape. and these visions are with me always, now, no longer novelties of an out-of-season adventure. that restless, invincible, curious self of youth, with summer stretching out before her, all possibility and late night beers to be drunk…she caught the last train out of here a few years back.  i do not think we will see her again in these parts…she was young, and i am not, and will never be again.

instead, i nest inside, internalized, waiting for a summer of waiting. i try not to obsess about the disconnect of the fact that i still do not look or feel terribly pregnant, that my belly has not popped this third time around like it did the second, that i’ve only felt tiny flickers of what might be movement, that i know too many people now who’ve suffered the brutal blow of a heartbeat just…disappearing…and that i live that nightmare every time i let my mind stray near it. in a fit of neurosis this morning, i ordered a Doppler. it arrives Monday. a part of me hates the thing i’ve become, the fretter, the wretched, tied in knots by my steady stream of fears.

but i know well that spring is not really obliged to come, you see…and for some, never does. the summer stretching out wild before you disappears - forever a mirage - once you understand that it is not truly an inevitable promised land, but only a turn of luck that can change in an instant.
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of course, three hours after i ordered the Doppler, i felt it, hard under my waistband, the tap and flutter and queer twist of the small life inside. unmistakable this time, insistent. and it kept up for minutes and i lay still and laughed, hand cupped on my belly, tears streaming down my cheeks, watching the snow fall outside my window.

…or how a three-day, two-party, four-cake,  triplicate-dinner bonanza of second birthday celebrations ensured that Oscar will now expect pure sugar with every meal for at least the next month.

every little boy should have a mother on bedrest for his birthday, apparently.  parties materialize from all corners.  mamas gain ten pounds and like it.  teeth hurt.  good times are had by all.

the first cake was gelato and sorbeto, at Auntie Cindy’s, with cousins and friends and Grandmaman & Grandpapa.  all cakes are now greeted with the gleeful cry of “ice!”

the second cake, upon return to Charlottetown, sported homemade boiled icing by Grandpa Tom.

in the full swing of the party spirit by day 3 of the party circuit, Oscar welcomed guests to party number 2, hosted by his babysitter.

and downed a cupcake to boot…

to cap the festivity round-robin, Nannie dressed as a clown to surprise Oscar at her house.

but the Elmo cake was the crumb - or ze waffer-thin mint - that broke the camel’s belly…and sweet Oscar blew up like Mister Creosote in that Monty Python sketch.  i swear, he said fug off, i’m full.  then he asked for more.

he is two, and wild and beautiful, and has consumed more sugar in the past three days than in the entire rest of his life to date.  he is my joy.

happy birthday, little one.  may every year be so sweet.

two years ago this morning i woke up exactly 36 weeks pregnant, rolled awkwardly over, smiled at Dave as the sun poured in our bedroom window and the cat perched atop my enormous belly, purring, and said, “God, i hope i don’t go into labour today.”

he looked me cock-eyed.  i was almost ten weeks more pregnant than i’d ever been before…and while we’d spent most of January, February, and March silently hoping each morning that the day would bring precisely nothing in the way of labour, never before had i actually spoken the words aloud.

but he knows me.  “why today?” he inquired, with the exaggerated tolerance of one who does not expect that the answer will hold much relevance.

“it’s Hitler’s birthday.”

“yes….” and when i looked stricken, as if his lack of immediate and evident reaction was dooming our offspring to a life of wretched, hopeless flailing against an evil horoscope, he laughed.  “ummm, yeh.  but nobody knows that,” he said.

“well, i know it,” was my reply.  and then the floodgates of neurosis burst.  “…and Finn died on April 30th, and that’s the same day Hitler died, and i don’t want some weird kind of Hitler theme in my children’s dates!”  i finished on a slightly hysterical note, and then sulked righteously, feeling silly but strangely content, entrenched in my petulance and my warm spot in the bed.

i’ve always remembered dates without effort.  my fixation on them, though unintentional, was a strange, ever-present part of the way i coped with the grief and helplessness of the year between Finn’s birth and Oscar’s.  the dates were a grim truth or consequences game of life and death, a measuring out of patience and endurance: on this day last year, or when i last did this, or it has been twenty weeks since he died and in another twenty weeks this baby might have a chance at viability. but that morning, serious as i was about the whole Hitler connection and also my sneaking suspicion that it meant i’d truly turned the corner into crazy, the conversation was…light.  it assumed that a baby born that day - however unauspicious the date - would live.  it was, for the first time in almost a year, the closest Dave & i came to joking about birth.

and so we kept going.  “how do you know all sorts of other horrible people weren’t born on other dates that you have no idea about?” Dave countered.  he rolled out of the bed and picked up the laptop. he likes obscure historical information.  and before he went to work that morning, Wikipedia most kindly helped us identify not only a variety of pleasant, innocuous things which had happened on April 20ths of years past, but which famous folk had been born on each day of the following two weeks.  i set my sights somewhere in May.  and promptly went into labour about 8 pm that night.

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Oscar was born at 1:47 am the following morning.  he made it safely into April 21st, thus putting him in the fine birthday company of Queen Elizabeth II and Iggy Pop, whose sensibilities visibly compete in his cusp-of-Taurus soul.  he passed through me like a thunderstorm.  i went into labour at book club, eating trifle.  for an hour or more i sat with my secret, a Cheshire cat silently timing the increasing, regular contractions.  when i left, i don’t think anyone but me believed that i’d be having a baby that night.  i made my way home at ten, found Dave webcasting live, smiled and waved, sniffed the tumbler on his desk to see who’d be driving to the hospital, and went upstairs to pack my bag.  we took some last belly photos, laid down for a few minutes to watch the Lamaze tape a friend had sent months before, before another year of childbirth classes got cut short by my untimely admission to hospital for bedrest.  i wrote in my journal in the quiet of our yellow kitchen, posted a quick post on the fledgling blog.  and about twenty minutes too late, not long before midnight, we left for the hospital.  by the time we arrived, five minutes later, i was in full-blown, five-centimetres-dilated and hard contractions every minute kind of labour.  the second helping of trifle threatened a reappearance at every turn.  and then, without warning, when the overwhelming pain would not allow me to bend in the middle and thus sit on the birthing ball i’d been so hopefully looking forward to “enjoying,” i went into a complete, disassociative panic attack.  it was what i’ve since discovered is a classic post-traumatic-stress-reaction panic response, not uncommon in women who’ve had traumatic or ill-supported births or post-birth infant losses associated with their previous experience of labour.  but no one had ever mentioned such a thing, and it had not occurred to me to anticipate it, look it up, prepare for such an eventuality.  not until my labour ramped from zero to sixty in fifteen minutes and there was suddenly no respite from the brutal, muscular jaws of my uterus and my scarred cervix and i could not catch my breath, could not breathe at all and the fifty-one weeks in the interim were burned away as if with acid and i was animal and desperate and pleading and frightened, so frightened, and this time i knew exactly what the abyss looked like and i knew i was not strong enough for that.

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i went into labour twice with Finn.  the first time, they stopped it with drugs and they airlifted me and put me on bedrest and high doses of antibiotics and more than two weeks later i began to believe all would be well when i woke up one morning in my hospital room with a strange twinge in my belly.  they strapped on monitors and wheeled me down to Labour & Delivery faster than i could even rescue my long-distance phone card from my bedside table, so i had to call Dave’s sister, locally, and get her to track him down in Charlottetown where he was closing on our new house, our first home.  he had just set foot inside the door, had not even signed for the keys, when he turned around and hightailed it back out the door for that loneliest, scariest four-hour race to the hospital.  there was no single day where, even stuck in different provinces, we just got to celebrate being homeowners for the first time.  just like there was no single day where we just got to celebrate being parents.

i did not believe, i don’t think, that the timing could really be that impossibly bad; that of the seventeen days i’d been in hospital to date it would, it could be that one, that one with the carefully scheduled dryer delivery and the phone and internet hook-ups and all the necessary paperwork that Dave had to be there for.  i had accepted that the baby would be early, had thrilled to reach the 26 week mark the day before, representing a 75% chance of survival.  i was feeling positive, prepared to deal with altered timelines, expectations.  but not that morning.  just not that morning.  i spent the first hour or two of active labour in total denial, sure the meds would stop the increasing tide just as they had before.  when it became evident that they would not, and i knew Dave was still hours away, i moved from denial to shock.  then the pain overtook me.

when you labour that early they strap you to your back on a delivery table, because the baby must be monitored at all times.  i had back labour.  i had scar tissue on my cervix that was preventing dilation, even though my contractions came a minute apart for almost two hours straight.  i had young nurses who were competent but inexperienced, unable to rise to meet me and hold my eyes through that fog of pain.  when i broke with all my own preconceived notions and begged for an epidural, i discovered the main body of anesthesiologists for the hospital were on strike, and due to some c-sections that morning it would be close to two hours before i could expect one.  it was exactly two hours.  Dave arrived ten minutes later, and for a window all was calm.  then the baby’s heartrate dipped badly, and suddenly it was rush and bustle and there were noises being made about a c-section and i said yes, yes please but the doctor, white-haired and cold and never met my eyes said no, no we’d have to do a vertical cut and it’s just not worth it for this baby at this point and i remember blinking, yet another shock because clearly my baby needed to come out and i didn’t give a shit about me thank you very much and i was honed in utterly on the 75% chance of survival, you see, because we’d already had a bad enough day so surely all would be well if we could just get the baby out.  and an older nurse who had come in a moment before with the 3 pm shift change, curly-haired, she looked me in the eye for what felt like the first time all day and said meaningfully do you want a second opinion?  and i said yes and then there was someone else there and he wanted to just check one more time manually and i felt nothing, numb, but he said the cervix is gone - the scar tissue had torn, finally - this baby is coming! now! and an alarm and two quick pushes and my eyes locked on Dave’s, beseeching, and in a rush of blood i saw one small, perfect ear as ten people in yellow gowns and masks rushed into the room and they whisked him away, our tiny son, the baby i had just birthed.  it was 3:24 pm.  he lived for eleven hours.

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so it was that i went into Oscar’s birth, exactly fifty-one weeks later, four weeks early, assuming that it couldn’t help but be better, that so long as i came out with a live baby on the other end all would be well.  and yet the irony is that i walked out of Finn’s birth broken-hearted but feeling nonetheless amazed and proud of what my body had done, however insufficiently.  i was awed by the fact that i had borne him, made him in the first place, from that perfect ear to his tiny toes, replicas of his father’s.  in the hours before he died, i was so high from the sheer wonder of having given birth that had you handed me an ashtray instead of a baby to hold in those moments, i think i’d have cradled it tenderly, fallen in love.  for months after he died, one of the only ways i could manage to treat myself with any care and respect whatsoever, to stave off the bleakness and the craving for destruction was to remind myself, “i am Finn’s mother.”

Oscar’s birth did not leave me with the same sense of anything, except ultimately, relief that he was safely out and then bewilderment and guilt that i could not summon the same high for a successful birth as i had for the doomed one. O’s delivery was quick and dirty and out of control, a clusterfuck of interventions i didn’t want and didn’t believe i needed, and it culminated not only in a third-degree episiotomy - done with scissors i still see in flashbacks - that i begged them not to do and that caused me raw pain for a year afterwards, but worse, in being rushed off to the OR only minutes after birth to have the stitches ripped open again because the placenta did not disengage.  i had good nurses, good solid nurses, and Dave with me until the moment they took me away, but they could not reach me where i was, in the grip of visceral flashback.  i was helpless, and then acted upon, quickly and without my consent, because all was happening so fast.  i did not get to hold my baby for more than a minute.  i did not get to nurse him, to do more than glance at his small self, to breathe.  after the placenta was scraped out and the hemorrhage stopped, i was left alone in Recovery, shaking and utterly beaten by the panic and a sense of shamed, helpless violation and failure, and once again, shock, that i could have managed yet again to be so completely unprepared for what birth would bring.  and sure, somehow, that when i emerged from that dark night of the soul, that this baby too would have disappeared forever, another tiny ghost ripped away.

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he did not, bless him.  he was there, squalling and puffy, three hours later when i finally got to cradle him for a moment, hours again after that when the morning shift ultimately brought him back for me to try to nurse.  and so i landed, finally, shakily, gratefully, in the place that comes after labour, in the land of the living and of moving forward, of babies and spit up and sleep deprivation and smiles and joy and bittersweet milestones.

but labour, to me, is like another country, that only those who have been there can begin to imagine or describe, and that never turns out quite the same in any two depictions.  only now, a full two years after the night O was born, can i look back on that birth and say, with any conviction, all that matters is a healthy baby.  it does, beyond all measure.  and yet i hate the phrase, wince each time i hear it.  because being torn and broken and alienated does matter, does impact how a person experiences new motherhood, no matter how truisms may shame or belittle her experience.  birth can be a trauma and wound in and of itself that requires processing and grieving just as real and profound as that demanded by loss.  birth for me has been a profound and great and terrible thing, a wild horse that brings me to my knees.  every minute of it, both times, was worth it, to meet my babies, to watch my beautiful living boy try to blow out candles for his birthday.  i will do it again, without hesitation.  and yet i am terrified, utterly. i am afraid of more shock, more surprises.  i am afraid of a reprise of the guilt of having my body fail one child and my endorphins fail to soar at the birth of the other, afraid of what possibly could go wrong that i haven’t even thought of yet.  i am afraid of being that afraid again.

i wonder, sometimes, if it is like this for everyone, each in our own way.  and i wonder, in some small, fool part of me, if hoping that the third time’s a charm will make everything easier when the time comes around again.

hopefully it will be months and months away from April.