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here’s the truth of it, in all its ugliness: raising a boy is making me a better person. not a better parent, mind you. but a more rounded human being.

i didn’t know i needed reinvention. but turns out those beer ads from college were correct: what does not kill you makes you strong.

or at least, less of a bigot.

i blame SuperBowl XXVI for some of my former wayward and biased assumptions. in 1992,  my birthday was the same weekend as the SuperBowl. i spent most of my supposed “party” perched on the corner of my boyfriend’s dumpster-dived couch choking on the acrid fumes of weed and spicy chicken wings for eight straight hours of joyous pregame- and game-centric celebration with a pack of 200 lb boys and ten 2-4s of beer. nobody – boyfriend included – said two words to me other than, “chips?”

what’s wrong with that, you ask? even in college, i didn’t like beer. or football. not even a little. and chips are nice and all, but they are not birthday cake.

somehow, i have been bitter about “manly” pursuits ever since.

on twitter last week, there was a brief flurry of discussion on moms of girls only vs. moms of boys only. it raised the question of whether boy moms and girl moms end up being different from each other, in spite of being otherwise similar in age, tastes, class, career, education, etc.

and the consensus seemed to be yeh, a little, overall.

and i can see it. or at least, i could see it in ME, had things gone a little differently.

(aside: those of us with children of both sexes were cruelly ostracized from this conversation. please note that we need enlightenment too, people! a little “are you a bi-mom?” quiz would help me know myself, please and thankyou. stage direction: end self-mockery of stereotype i am actually trying to explore.)

when i was a little girl, and lived in a mindscape constructed mostly of cast-off and stolen characters & scenarios from Victorian children’s literature, all hard-knock lives and depths of despair and pretty pinafores, the so-called world of boys seemed like a foreign land.

i tried, occasionally, to venture there. not so much in person: the boys i knew were relegated, in my egocentric universe, to occasional supporting roles of annoying little brother or know-it-all classmate. i did not know enough about dinosaurs or Star Wars to talk to them past first grade.

i thought of their world as a strange exotica populated by Spiderman cartoons, boring little metal cars that never went anywhere and Dukes of Hazzard pyjamas.

i created families in my doodle pads, large multi-generational family trees populated by imaginary people with extraordinary names. i killed off the parents ruthlessly, dull folk named George and Sandra and Ervin and Eunice, gave them dates of death and tidy tombstones. but their children, whom i frequently sent to orphanages dressed in middies and awkward lederhosen sewn from curtains a la Sound of Music? well, some of those children had to be boys. so i drew Jasons and Norberts and Antonys, and relegated them to the rat-infested basements of the asylums inhabited by their far more interesting sisters.

i didn’t really them see them, as a whole, as characters, worthy of empathy or inner lives.  i mistook the stuff that didn’t interest me – the superheroes, the sports, the whole discourse of boyhood – as a sign that the entire gender were dismissable.

yeh, i liked a few of ‘em. but i treated boyfriends – particularly after that unfortunate SuperBowl birthday – as rare fossilized humans trapped in the amber of maleness, that most regrettable rock.

and i never imagined myself the mother of a boy. i wanted girls, absolutely. but beyond that, far more importantly, i thought that to be the mother of a boy was to be forever stuck at that SuperBowl party with nobody to say three words to and my nose permanently crinkled in bewildered distaste.

and that, i venture, is exactly how i’d feel today if i’d never had a boy.

mothers are, uh, female. meaning that that most of them were once female children. and a lot of the female children i knew back when i was myself a female child shared exactly the same opinion of boys that i did: ewww. admittedly, a lot of us later changed our tunes, at least regarding individual exceptions to the rule, but i suspect that for many the prejudice against male things and manly pursuits and so-called “boy stuff” remains. fair enough. i still don’t like football.

but i don’t get to perform my parenthood as a bastion against it, draw simple lines that exclude it and keep me and my offspring safely spared, relegated to our “girl things” and smugly superior in our remove. i don’t have to encourage my son to like it, but i do have to reign in my contempt, consider it, try to offer him literacies and considered views as he begins to negotiate the world of what boys are “supposed” to like.

i don’t know if it’ll ever do my kid any favours. but i think it may have actually made me a bigger person.

that, and the nachos i’ve just eaten writing this post through the SuperBowl.

on Friday, we had a snow day. and a very small special guest.

Theodore is seven weeks old. he’s a jetsetting babe, born in Korea just before Christmas, now circling the globe meeting his grandparents. he has the cutest passport picture in the world.

his parents are good old friends, of ours and of each other. we knew them before they were a couple. they knew us before we were a couple. we go back. and this first baby of theirs was awaited and loved even before i got to put my arms around him Friday and marvel at his tiny feet and froglegs, his fuzzy head.

Josephine delighted in him, bouncing beside his car seat pointing and squealing baby! baby! Oscar made him a special – if possibly slightly dangerous – mobile of Tinkertoys. Dave picked him up in a fussy moment and swung him gently side to side, chuckling at how light he is.

from the corner of my eye, i caught them. it is an unmistakable thing, the posture of your partner – your person – with a newborn cuddled close. my head snapped around to meet them. my heart caught.

the first time i saw Dave hold a baby, Finn was in his arms. tenderly, fearlessly, he cradled him. two pounds and two ounces can take great strength. and big hands can hold the tiniest ones with a gentleness you never thought possible.

he held Oscar the same way, all the long colicky nights we walked the floor, and Posey in her turn. but she leaps in and out of his arms, now, laughing, begging to be spun upside down. her baby days are gone. our baby days are gone.  we’ve been sleeping through the night for a year, now, more or less. so holding Theo, Dave looked utterly different and entirely familiar all at once.

i held my breath, waited for the wistfulness to rock through me and my lungs to fill with longing.

nothing.

i breathed, but it was a sigh of relief. no want. no nothing, except bemusement. well, there you go, i thought. THAT’s what done feels like.
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i went for my annual exam – in other words, ahem, PAP TEST – last week, just after my birthday. the doc who saw me smiled and asked, so what are you using for contraception?

and i had a teensy little panic attack.

for twenty+ years i’ve been answering that question. for twenty+ years i’ve been answering reliably, perkily even. i am deeply eager to appear responsible. i am the Lisa Simpson of pap tests.

given that, the fact that the question caught me off-guard was odd, really. but what happened next nearly convinced me i’d fallen straight down a rabbit hole of 38-year-old dementia. my mind skittered around in my brainpan like a terrier, unable to latch onto anything salient whatsoever. contraception? it said to itself, nervously. it knew there should be an answer, but each time it wandered down the lurid paths where memories of contraception lurk, it came up empty.

sex, yes. protection? oh sweet merciful crap.

terrier brain screamed at me, o mah gods! you’re not protected! and i hyperventilated, spun round in circles, and tried to hide under the itty bitty johnny shirt i was sporting.

CAUGHT, finally, after all these years. i flailed and slumped like i do when Dave notices that the Nibs bags are all empty. i turned the colour of a tomato.

just as i was about to leap off the edge of the exam table and flagellate myself with the speculum, click. i remembered. vasectomy.

oh right. jaysus. permanent contraception i don’t even have to think about is NERVE-wracking.

but even in the moments when i couldn’t remember, i noticed there was no brief candle of hope  for another baby.
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Dave rocked Theodore, and the baby fussed and peeped. i smiled, and Dave caught my eye. don’t go getting any ideas, he warned.

nothing is further from my mind, i replied, and i held his eye. it has been a long road, 5+ years of pregnancies and babies and sorrow and colic and hope. it ended, really, a few months back. but Friday, i noticed. and it was good.

then we nodded at each other, and handed that sweet little baby back to his parents. we breathed a big ol’ sigh of satisfaction, and maybe relief, and stepped over an invisible threshold into whatever the hell comes next, together.

did you ever know, suddenly? how did it come about?

or are you still waiting for that feeling? hoping? even without the actual expectation – or even possibility – of fulfillment?

i am 38 today.

i remember my mother’s 38th birthday. i was in grade 10. i have no recollection of what i bought her, what she might have liked at that stage in her life. i have even less sense of what i might have thought she liked at that stage in mine. it was only a few years past the birthday i bought her the Kids from Fame tape, with my own money. in hindsight, not an altruistic purchase.

38 seemed close to 100 to me, then.

it seems like last week and yet a lifetime ago. and my mother? seems oddly younger to me now.  a 23-year age difference between parent and child is so little, really. but at almost fifteen, any age or power differential is a chasm. when my kids are fifteen, i’ll seem old to them. hell, maybe i’ll be old. maybe there’s no difference between the two.

something about postponing having children – and, y’know, any kind of stable career arc – until, uh, “later in life” has created a surreal sort of plateau in my sense of my own age. the fact that i drag my carcass to bed by midnight even on Saturdays has far more to do with the shining faces that wake me at 6 am Sunday than it does with any sudden maturity or rejection of 3am raucousness. inside, i don’t feel terribly different than i did ten years ago. and beyond the extra softness that three babies and bedrest have wrought, i don’t live in my skin all that differently than i did twenty years back.

clearly, i am high on delusion. my own private fountain of youth.

but it is running out, slipping from me. 38 seems to be to youth as 14 is to childhood: the point at which you suddenly, irrevocably find yourself on the far side of the line. i catch myself in the mirror in woolen pants and high heeled boots and shiny jewelry, and i realize that i have, belatedly, grown up. my hair is sedately mid-length. my old, beloved army boots sit unworn at the back of the closet, gathering dust. i have entered my professional years. i am a few years late and my edges still need ironing, but here i am, securely and blatantly smack-dab in the middle-aged middle class, no matter how that makes me laugh at myself. i no longer live on the outside of much of anything at all.

i blink. i am Dorothy in Oz, bedazzled by her own shoes.

from the time i turned 14, or maybe even a few years longer, i’ve been peering forward, gazing ahead, trying to get to some indefinite point at which my life would actually, y’know, happen. i’ve spent my adolescence and entire “adult” life in a haze of vague, infinite possibility, afraid i’d miss something.

but when your field of vision is too wide, you can’t actually see.

apparently, for my birthday, i got bifocals. because for the first time in my life, i feel like the things i want – the goal things, the apply yourself and work towards it things – are in focus.  i see paths, where once i saw the whole damn mountain. it feels heady, this 38. it feels like i am just, finally, maybe, hitting my stride.

i have no model for this kind of aging.

if i showed you pictures of my mother at 38 and today, you would see little change. her hair was fully gray by 30; by 38 she’d found the style that has become her signature. she had a job that paid the rent and exhausted her; she has one now. her hobby is the community life of her church, alpha and omega.

when i went away to college she was a month short of 41. i am her only child, her one dependent. i pushed, then, for her to go back and finish her own degree, started a lifetime before and abandoned early in her marriage. but she could no more see her way clear to that kind of upheaval, that kind of change and debt and longterm planning than she could up and fly. she had she formed herself, and was, and thus remains, eternal.

she is no coward, do not misunderstand. she has the strength to endure and abide and stare down what would crush most people. she has lacked only luck, and family. those who risk are usually either headstrong or sure of someone to catch them. she was not made to be the first, and has never had the latter. wings are a privilege.

i have been headstrong since i turned 14. and once i left home my mother, without recriminations, gave me every inch of wingspan she could. i have believed, that entire time, that i am different from her.

it occurs to me only now that i’ve been full of shit; that i am only maybe beginning to differentiate now. my mother is the stablest foundation i could have asked for.  in relation to her, it has been easy to be the wild young thing lo these many years.

but in clinging to that sense of myself, i too have been unchanging, her younger opposite and doppelganger, all in one.

it occured to me, late last night, that i don’t want to be the wild young thing for the rest of my life.  it occurred to me that if, at 61, i am as able and as busy and as fulfilled as my mother seems to be, i will be happy. both these realizations came as a complete surprise.

it is in the years in the interim that maybe our paths will be truly different, my mother and i. as she would want. as i am beginning to be able to bring into focus.

damn, this wisdom with age stuff. bring on the prime. and the cake. i’m 38.

me, stunned to realize i have reached the age where people crowd your birthday cake with candles and then make jokes about seeing it from space. yeh. bring it.

i went to the woods because i wanted to live deliberately
to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life
to rout out all that was not life
and not, when i came to die, discover that i had not lived.
- Henry David Thoreau. (or Dead Poets’ Society. take yer pick.)

when a part of your life is over, the realization usually comes as a surprise, an after-effect.

i woke up Saturday morning with no deadlines hanging over me. the Ph.D application – or one of them, at least – is submitted. the last day for add/drops for the hundred-plus students who’ve inundated my office over the past two weeks? done.  i opened my eyes and mentally scanned the day ahead, blood pressure gearing up to jet speed.

then i paused, remembered. it’s done. my eyes fluttered wide, like an extra in Bambi.  i realized i had no clue what to do with myself.

then the kids woke up.

i beamed at them, all amends for my previous busy-ness. we lazed, cuddled. we considered breakfast, planned homemade cookies for the afternoon. it was at this point that i noted that my throat felt rather as though someone had pricked it all over with nails.

after further signs of impending plague, i woke Dave up and crawled back into my glorious warm bed to pass out, still thinking, so what if i’m sick? what a lovely, relaxing day to be sick.  i lounged for a brief moment on twitter, drinking coffee with milk i’d taken time to foam – a rare treat – and waxing philosophical about trying to live deliberately, now that my mad rush was behind me.

stupid Pollyanna.

by the time i woke up again, Dave had put his back out. at a gymnastics class for three-year-olds.

respite cancelled. the rest of the weekend was the sort of tragi-comic blur where you meet yourself coming and going all at the same time. in the dark before sleep i whimpered, bone-exhausted, run down. in the dark before dawn i came alert again, ready to hit the day running, to rise to what i needed to be.

and it occurred to me to wonder if my days of deliberate living were behind me, for the moment, or if being busy and maxed out were simply habit, the hardest in the world to break.
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the scion of the local autoelectric shop dropped my grandfather’s last cheque off yesterday afternoon. he came to the house shyly, only a couple of hours after his own father and uncle – who own the shop – left. he walked into a vacuum where words sat, invisible but still shockingly electric. i do not know if the room – the brown recliner, the old leather footstool, the tv reeling disasters beyond our ken – looked normal to him.

i don’t think it will look the same to me again.

i was the one who spoke the words. gently, i hope, but firmly, repeatedly. these are your choices. this or this. only these. your decision. now. i watched my grandfather’s eyes the whole time, drawing him back to me, seeking him. i said, time seems to be strange for you right now. sometimes i know you’re right here with me. other times i can’t tell whether you’re in a different space or just trying to change the subject. his eyes flashed at me, caught. a hint of a smile, perhaps? i smiled back. we are not so different, he & i.

i know. it’s not fair. i’m sorry. but this is what you get to decide. this or this.

the bath or the hospital. he had been in the same clothes for a week. he had been in his chair three days, bathroom trips spacing further and further apart to the point where we began to wonder if his kidneys were failing entirely. he would brook no help, no crossing of the boundaries of personal space. we made up his bed with clean sheets but he would not or could not go the twenty steps. he was soiled, skin breakdown imminent. he slipped out of his chair at 5 am. my cousin on the couch beside him, a geriatric nurse, helped him up. but that was all he would accept.

one by one, we expressed our concerns. he waved us all gently away with a flick of his hand.  the flash of white was comical, figurative. bared teeth, that flick told us. he had been holding his dentures in his hands for twelve hours.

my grandfather’s LaZ Boy – in different incarnations – has been in the very same spot for as long as i can remember and longer. it is his throne, almost an extension of him. and so it was that yesterday afternoon in a quiet spell i breathed deep and looked at my father and then, with intention, we took our places at the foot of the chair and laid out our ultimatum. we love you. we can’t leave you like this any longer.  we knew and he knew – and we made sure he knew – the consequences of the choice we laid out.

at the end of the dance, he chose the hospital. we emphasized the pretty nurses. and i felt as manipulative and as relieved and as brave as i have felt in my life. i squeezed my grandfather’s hand and met my father’s eye. and then i walked from the room so i could exhale, because i was shaking.

when my sister and then young Charles arrived moments later, my grandfather was still in the LaZBoy. we had turned the tv back on. all was normal.

but the room was different, and i knew it.  the lion had given up his throne.

when the ambulance came in, respectfully, quietly, sirens off, he went without protest. my sister rode with him. my father signed him into the hospital this time, so he can no longer sign himself out. he is in congestive heart failure. when i went out last night, he was distant, polite but withheld. at first i thought he was angry with me, and i nodded, understanding. but then i noticed that one pupil was blown, far bigger than the other, and i wondered if that conversation in his chair will be the last i ever really have with the grandfather i’ve known, been loved by.

i do not know. but if it is, i will own it. a sad, proud thing, a deliberate thing. life.
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i want to thank all of you for your love & support & comments & tweets. it feels strange sometimes to share it, because it is so personal and so present, and mine is only one lens on this man who belongs to many. and yet it is all too human, this ending stuff that none of us seem to ever quite come to terms with.

i learned, profoundly, with Finn, that there can be privilege in walking with someone towards their death. i fear loss, absolutely. but last night as i left the hospital i stopped on my way across town and drove through the dark, snowy cemetery where my grandmother is buried. i do not go often. i do not talk to my dead. but  i laughed as i drove through the ghostly stand of tall old trees glinting silvery, headstones stark against the snow, because the scene was like something straight out of Thriller, and yet…beautiful.  i felt peaceful. i do not fear my dead. i love them, hold them in memory. in the private spaces we all seem to drift in at the end of things, memory is all there is.

so for a ninety year old man who has lived a good life on his own terms, i will not fear. only walk beside, and offer him company, and share him while i can.

when my grandmother was in her last years, and failing, she lost everything she cared about.

except my mother and i, who sat vigil at her bedside as her entire world narrowed to those two iron rails. but there was only so much we could do to stem the tide of what slipped from her, day in, day out.

first, the house, the house she’d been born in nearly a century before. the driver’s license she’d gotten only at 68.  her card nights. bowling.  a few years later, the apartment, independence itself. her marriage bed, her pots and pans, a lifetime of odds and ends collected over 90 years. no more fridge of her own, only a tray brought to a room in a “home”; a tray like all the other trays, a room like all the other rooms. then the health to go for drives and complete her crossword puzzles and enjoy All My Children in the afternoons. the pain began; it wasted her.

through all of it, seven interminable years of relentless, incremental loss, she struggled with despair and shame at her increasing inability to do. when you are ninety and have outlived your spouse by decades and watched your friends weaken and drop around you, your independence and strength become fierce components of who you believe yourself to be.

i suspect the rest, the whoever you might have been in the long life before, has to be left behind in order to survive the foisted cruelties and indignities of old age. nobody alive remembers that person anyway. and eventually, neither do you.

and if you are a relative of mine, it appears that at the centre of your fierce independence is the belief that you are tough enough to simply die in your sleep when you’re good and ready.

my grandmother didn’t get to do that. in the last year of her life, she lay confined to a series of nursing home and hospital beds, little bird bones poking through her skin. i watched her pull herself present through hazes of morphine to meet my gaze. she had blue eyes. in their reflection, i was always beautiful.

let me die, she would whisper. i’m done.

i love you, i would say in response, irrelevant and yet all i had to give. i refused to look away. i’m so sorry.

she was ashamed of being what she thought was a burden. i was ashamed at my powerlessness, my lack of courage to do for her what she could not do for herself.

seven years, it took.

my grandfather, from the other side of my family, turned ninety last month. his wife died nearly 22 years ago; he has lived since in the house they built together in the 1960s. every corner of it remains a testament to the glorious sleekness of the Bungalow Era. moss-green shag blends living room and family room. the space-age proto-microwave in the kitchen wall sits lonely, waiting for an opportunity to unleash the wrath of its radiation. he has not cooked since she died. not using that microwave may be the secret of his longevity.

he was a spy in WWII, a British Secret Intelligence Service agent who worked out of New York and Camp X, the commando training centre in Ontario from which Ian Fleming would later cobble together the mythology of Agent 007.  in the middle of the war, he married an 18 year old girl from the farm down the road. she had barely been to the metropolis that is Charlottetown;  three weeks after their wedding she found herself in an apartment in New York City. he was called away on a mission – Top Secret – the morning after she arrived. he could not tell her a thing about where he was going – she stayed on alone, in the city that never sleeps. it was six full weeks before he returned.

there has never been anyone else for him.

the war ended. my father was born at Camp X in 1947, while the Cold War took shape. in 1949, the British closed Camp X and burned all the records, and my grandfather turned down the offer to join the fledgling CIA . his wife was done roaming and wanted to go home. he and my grandmother moved back to PEI, bought a little brick house for $6000, raised four kids. he worked as a mechanic from that day until last week. yep, last week. at ninety, he was still going into the mechanic shop a few mornings a week. he likes his routine, my grandfather. he likes to be useful. he has no coping mechanisms for any other state of being.

my grandfather had a heart attack on Friday.

it was a reasonable-sized Cardiac Event, as evidenced by the levels of troponin in his blood yesterday indicating muscle death. he wasn’t in much pain, but his breath short and fast, and his colour gray.  he spent the night in hospital. i was there when the doctor came the next day at noon, saying “Lovenox and a few days and we’ll see and you can probably go home then.”

my grandfather heard only the “probably”. and by the time i returned after supper he was high-tailing it down the hall, hell-bent for leather on going home. NOW. against medical advice. with no chance of continuing the Lovenox once he rendered himself an outpatient.

my father arrived. a close family friend, who’s also a nurse. the three of us tried for an hour, together and separately. i made him look me in the eye, said, i love you. i’m worried about you. i know you’re afraid that this is your only way to control the situation. but i’m afraid this may mean you don’t heal enough to STAY independent.

he looked at me like a hunted animal.

we brought him home. and kept him home last night. he couldn’t breathe, he was panicky, having to struggle his way out to the cold air to catch his breath five times in the first hour. in his socks, in the snow. he wouldn’t let me put his boots on. he wouldn’t let me bring him a blanket. he was agitated, shocky, a clear candidate for oxygen and hospitalization and possibly some form of sedation.

i did not let him see the tears in my eyes.

i don’t know if the choice he made, in his own mind, was the choice to go home to die, or the flight reaction of a terrified human being who wants things desperately to revert to normal.  his face told me that either way, for him, it was a zero-sum game. there would be no argument. none of us have power of attorney, and i doubt one of us who loves him would begrudge him the end of his own choosing, would that we could only grant it.

he picked his hill to die on, and we brought him home.

but i learned, with my grandmother. life is not always so benevolent, nor ends so final. they can trail out, cutting you down body and soul with a thousand bloody, cruel little scratches. that is what i fear for this man who cannot stand to sit idle, whose heart – damage or not – is big and free, loyal as a labrador retriever.

he is home tonight, breathing a little better. the cigars sit, rejected. he had a little food. he is trying. and i sat beside him today and believed, for a few minutes, that this is not the end, maybe only the beginning of the end.  i hope it’s true.  i am not ready, never ready.

but whenever that good night does come, i hope it falls swiftly for him.  the losses all at once, clean and silent.

ours, not his.

around here, most of the Christmas lights stay up into January.

tonight, Old Christmas, the twelfth day in the ancient festival, is the end of it all.  the orange glow of electric pillar candles will disappear from the windows of the city tomorrow; the neighbour’s spruce will no longer cast a pall of sparkling blue on the snow by our driveway. the strings of outdoor lights, unplugged, will mostly hang around ’til spring, increasingly unseasonal decorative accents waiting patiently for their owners to drag them from the meltwater and retire them in favour of lawnmowers. but after tonight, few will shine.

it is Epiphany, the revelation of god become man. or the commemoration of the wise men’s visit, or the baptism of Christ, according to what sources and what heresy you go for. or the day my true love’s supposed to pony up for a whole truckload of lords a leaping, for the girl who has everything, you know.

i am a modern breed, me. no Old Christmas at our house; i stripped the tree and the decorations last weekend, before i went back to work. the outside lights are still up, admittedly, half-frozen to the rain gutters, but i have forgotten them already.

which is why, had you seen me earlier this evening in the cold, crusty wet slush of my backyard, scrabbling around under bare birch trees for a small wooden ornament shaped like a moose – and, separately and with some cursing, for the missing wooden leg of said moose – you would’ve been excused for not recognizing the passion play at hand as a Christmas celebration.

we had a storm last week. snow and rain, a mixed bag. but mostly wind. the highest winds in years, so wild the house shook and air seeped in, squealing. i loved it. until tonight, in a sudden panic, i remembered what might have been lost in that storm last Saturday and went leaping, not at all lordlike, into the snow in hopes of rescue before Christmas was officially over and i could be said to have just forgot.

every year for the past five Christmases, we’ve hung the moose on the trees in the backyard. for Finn.

i have no idea why it’s a moose.  the ornament came from Dave’s side of the combined family collection, that much i remember. he comes from moose country. and perhaps there’s something dark and ridiculous enough about the big, loping creatures, deadly yet not predatory, that seemed like a fit back that first Christmas Eve when i worked up the voice to ask him, sidelong and on impulse, if he wanted to come outside with me to Finn’s trees. his parents, visiting, had gone to sleep. i was pregnant again, tired. and so desperately sad i could barely breathe.

our first Christmas in our first house. our first Christmas after the birth of our son. and he was ashes in our bedroom, and under those trees.

the moose made Dave smile. we hung it on the maple between the birches. we each spoke our Merry Christmases, aloud.

we came inside, went up to bed. i drifted to sleep, Finn’s name quiet in my mouth, the little moose swinging from the tree. the act of including him was the most important thing i did for myself in that bleak midwinter of magical thinking.

the following Christmas was Oscar’s first. and we made the same pilgrimage with the moose, out to the trees late at night after the house had fallen to sleep.  that year i’d planned it, looked forward to it in the way of those who believe they’ve come to terms with what they can and cannot have.

the house was decked and warm, the tree laden with more “Baby’s First Christmas” ornaments – all gifts – than any plastic conifer with any dignity would bear. toys in shiny paper awaited the morning, the fat baby hands, the joy.

and then we trekked out in the snow to hang an ornament for our dead child. a single wooden moose, left out in the sleet.

i wondered and worried, before Oscar was born, if i would love him enough…if i would love him as i did his brother. after Oscar was born, i wondered and worried if i would keep loving Finn.

that Christmas Eve, i came inside and sat upstairs by the little urn i hadn’t touched in months,  rocking like a child. howls came out of me, raw and ragged. i can not believe Dave’s parents slept through. but they know what it is to be bereft.

i had a baby sleeping warm and safe in the little room down the hall. and a baby whose spirit i was still close enough to my own grief then to feel, viscerally, who had no place in that house we’d once bought for his coming. i was his mother. and for Christmas, i brought him a moose, and left him in the cold and the snow.

the cruelty of grief is in the helplessness.

i have never been comfortable with the external role of the bereaved.  letting Finn slip entirely into silence and memory would have been, socially, the far simpler choice for me. even with Dave, who loved him too, i always choked a little, wary – with no reason, no justification – of being judged for my weakness, my altered status.  i feared being dramatic. i feared being maudlin.

but he was my child.  even now, when it no longer hurts to think of him, and his absence is only a normalcy to me, the spirit i once felt mostly a closed door, he was my child. my love for him still is. it never got to grow, to deepen and delight in his idiosyncracies, his selfhood, in the way it does each day with his brother and sister. but nor does it end.

that awful wonderful Christmas of one sweet boy and one frozen moose, i decided – however empty, however pointless it felt, even to me – that i wanted to hang the moose outside each Christmas, with Oscar and whatever other siblings Finn might someday have. so that his name would be said. so that his absence had a space, all its own, no matter how stupid and shy i felt carving it out.

so like a child laying out shoes for Saint Nicholas or a stocking for Santa, i trot out the moose every Christmas Eve. we round up the small ones, and we trudge to the yard and we say, quietly, Merry Christmas Finn.  and there we all are for a second in time, our little family, the ones who breathe and the one with a moose and some trees for a stand-in.

(i found the moose. and his leg. they were under the snow, damp but none the worse for wear. some glue and a dry cloth, and i will wrap them in tissue and lay them away now, for another year.)

i am his mother. it is what i can do.

a new year.

we pass on the highway, separate units in our similar orbits, packed lock, stock, and barrels of monkeys into the little worlds that are our vehicles. a thousand holiday travellers, all hurtling past. we are invisible to each other, each on our own personal trajectories.

voices chatter and sing, slightly off-key. the baby, still riding backwards, intones “ba ba lee lee tiki tiki daaa” to the doll she flails back and forth into the car door like a weapon. her brother leads his father and i in an indulgently pious version of Away in the Manger, our voices all cracking on the high notes, the mentions of heaven. the road hums beneath us, salt spraying.

we roll into tomorrow, into a year clean as snow.

freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, i sing under my breath as i drift in the passenger seat, contented. my voice is well-suited to the acoustics of a Kia Rio, to an audience afflicted with the benevolent ears of family. i feel replete, pleasantly unmoored. most of what i love in the world is with me. we could go anywhere. the weight of a hundred loads of laundry slips from me.

i imagine in the new year i will live more freely. for a moment, i forget the two-hour frenzied dance of baby wrangling and organization that led to this stuffed small car.  i do not yet know that we have forgotten the bags of carefully wrapped presents for the cousins we are going to meet. i ignore the sunglasses left behind, in spite of blinding snow glare, and the fact that i did not put out the compost bin.

i imagine us a covered wagon, lurching overland in search of the mythical land of the free.

for a moment i’m all gingham and Little House on the Prairie. then i remember the Donner Party. i laugh unprettily, startling my travelling companions.

but the sense of going somewhere, anywhere, bound all together, still tempts.

we are doing it, of course. we do it everyday, waking to the lives we’ve made, in the midst of changing bums and making suppers and running to pediatric clinics. we are already there, in a life of comfort, of work and reward. the pioneers with their pestilence and their hunger and their lofty goal of eventual tar-paper roofs would’ve traded in an instant.

still, the simple act of moving tastes like possibility.

in a life with small children and duties and responsibilities and goals i haven’t gotten to yet, remaining open to possibility is the very hardest job. i chafe for time that is not already filled, demanded, eaten. i stress. i remember the taste of surprises, of days that simply evolved, conversations that meandered on into the night and lit me like the hundred cigarettes that burnt down around us.  i seldom remember how to be that person. i am wound tighter now, a Prussian officer humping along on schedule, trying to drag a checklist of completed items with me. the bohemian life looks dirtier, from here, than i could ever have imagined.

but three hours in a moving car where all i have to do is sit and dole out sippy cups and sing? glorious. packed away from it all in a tiny metal box, i coast on the fumes of gasoline and Diet Coke and imagine that ahead there are open doors and time to play, to think.

it gets me every time. it is my siren’s song, always just ahead. and damn the torpodoes, and the rocks.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

it is snowing, hard, when we return. the wipers swish ineffectively across the windshield, leaving little ice arcs in their wake. the road alternates black to white, where drift has laid three inches of slippery snow down.

we move slower now. we know about precious cargo.

we are in the hills, where the roads slalom gently back and forth and the drops from the shoulder grow steeper. a white cube van perches precariously on the side, and my eyes try to trace the track of his wheels and fail. my head cocks, and Dave answers.

he came from the other side of the road.

i see it then. we are abreast of the tilting van and his slide is evident. sharp turn just ahead. he careened through it, hit the snow, spun backwards across the lanes, was caught by sheer luck and gravity just before the tumble. phew. i am about to nod when Dave inhales.

another van hitting the same patch of snow at the same ill-advised speed just after the turn. he lurches out into our lane. we are collision-bound. i cannot tear my eyes away; my body spreads and flattens against the seat, futile protective instinct. my babies.

his wheels catch the road. he corrects. we pass.

i blink.

and suddenly, reminded of how enamored i am of the wholeness of my own skin, i get it.

we are always moving, in time, into the new and the uncharted, even when it looks like the same old pile of to-dos and busy-ness. there is always possibility and surprise ahead. surprise is not always benign.

so i will stay put and learn to carve out space and moments for ditching the Prussian Officer uniform. i will give thanks for the bounty of job and family and crap to be done, even as it bears down on me. and i will try to stop trying to do it all, for the egotistical sake of doing it all. i will keep learning to let go of what nobody needs.

i will even post my new year’s post a day late. take that, schedule.

happy 2010 to you and yours. may the surprises be mostly good. may you find strength and grace and peace where they are not. and may you all find time for possibility, whatever it means to you.

what does it mean to you? what do you hope for, from this still new-ish year?

…My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

***

…These woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep.

- Robert Frost, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening

the earth turns and i eat whipping cream.

this morning, at 4:59 am, that dread hour from which parents rarely wring any further sleep once wakened, a cry went forth from the little green room that is our children’s. i padded from bed and soothed and hushed until there was silence again.

they heaved and sighed and rolled over and were gone, back to slumber land.  too small to know the fear of not getting back to sleep again.  too small to know that their clockwork little bodies would be waking them – and me – again within the godforsaken hour.

i knew.

still, i tiptoed back to my bed in the blackness and burrowed into the warmth of duvets and the dark that blankets the long dawn of the shortest day of the year. and i lay quiet and bleary and consoled myself with the promise of pineapple cream for breakfast.

you may have to get up, the voice inside my head whispered gently, but you don’t have to work today. you and the kids can stay in your pajamas. and eat glorious Christmasy concoctions of whipping cream and, uh,  gelatin and crushed pineapple. sweet joy on a spoon. you can eat it ’til it’s ALL gone.

i cooed, and exposed my belly so the voice could rub it. then i remembered. i’d finished all the pineapple cream the night before.

i cried myself back to sleep and Dave got up with the kids
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when you are the only child of an only child, you inherit strange things. habits, insularities, responses to human behaviour that you eventually discover, launched from the nest, are not the ways of people accustomed to broader interactions or to jockeying for position within families.  but treasures, too. capacity for intense one-on-one conversation. all the family photo albums, from when god was young. a glass lemon juicer from your great-grandmother’s 1901 wedding, because your mother already got one for hers so to you comes the handmedown. your grandmother’s Art Deco engagement ring and wedding bands, worn on the third finger of your left hand in marriage and out, just as they were worn by her.

recipe books.

my junior high did not have a cafeteria. it was also only three blocks up the hill from my grandmother’s house. she was pushing 80 that year i started seventh grade and my mother had caught her eating a spoonful of ancient jam from the fridge and calling it “dinner” the summer before, thus it was decided i would have my lunches at my grandmother’s at least three days a week. my mother worked. my grandmother was lonely. and sandwiches? meh.

she promised my mother she would make me a hot lunch. this which she would not do for herself, she did gladly for me. i promised my mother i would go, faithfully. this which i’d otherwise have shunned for the cool autonomy of a brown paper bag, i did for my Nannie. or so i thought. my mother’s bargain was wise, a great gift.

we were always close, my Nannie and i. but this ritual of eating together, adolescent and octogenarian, brought me into an awareness of her world and the times she’d lived in a way that all the younger afterschool days at her house never had.

she was a contradiction in eras, my grandmother.  some days, i would arrive to old recipes, puddings from the old country she’d never seen or biscuits just out of the oven, the tiny ancient biscuit cutter made of iron, her mother’s. other days, the 50s reigned, and i would arrive to casseroles of tomato soup or cream of mushroom soup, served with bright green pistachio Jello pudding, her miracles of modern convenience.  she served me Tang until the last, believing it a treat. she bought pop only at Christmastime.

and at Christmastime, the pineapple cream.

it was a hybrid, relic of her Victorian roots yet reinvented in shiny 50s to incorporate handily imported canned goods. it is a miracle it was not reinvented to include Jello.

every year she served it in the same bowl, a thick glass objet d’art with deeply scalloped edges, so its gelatinized sides shaped the indulgence within. it was only made at Christmas. there was always a little left…carefully saved, slightly dried out…for me on the first day back to school.

it was rich and mild and creamy and just barely sweet. it tasted better than anything i have ever eaten since.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

in the last years, when my grandmother had to give up first the house she’d been born in and then the apartment a block away, the one my mother lives above right now, i inherited her recipe books. they were old things, crumbling, their pages stained brown with butter and time, larded with newspaper cutouts of recipes paper-clipped to the pages, and rich with her commentary scrawled on the entries.

“from Muriel R,” reads one, “keep oven low or a little tough.”

another, for dumplings, “sift flour carefully. Get lumpy fast.”

i have never made a dumpling in my life. but these books sing to me. and the one i love the most, despite its prosaic surface, is a coil-bound scribbler i bought myself just before i made the big move West.

you promise me you’ll eat, she’d said in passing, wet eyes acknowledging that i was already gone.

i promise you i’ll COOK, if you help me, i said in return a few days later. and i handed her the scribbler and a list of all my favourite childhood recipes.

i have it still, tucked into the island where we eat everyday. the pages are beginning to yellow, fifteen years later, and even brown in places where butter has smudged them. every time i open it, her handwriting stares up at me, her slanting tidy script from before it got away on her.

i was here, it says to me.  i loved you.

i have made it every Christmas, excepting that one year in Thailand. this year Oscar and i went to my mother’s apartment with the scribbler, and we made it in the heavy scalloped bowl which my mother has not seen fit to bestow into my possession just yet. i polished it off last night and woke thinking of it. i keep my promises.

PINEAPPLE CREAM (also called Bavarian Cream, can be made with fresh strawberries if in season – so sayeth the original notes)
2 level tbsp gelatin
1/2 cup cold water
1 can crushed pineapple (do not drain)
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp lemon juice
3 cups whipping cream (too much, say the notes. the first few years i raised my eyebrows at this, as i come from the there’s-no-such-thing-as-too-much school of whipped cream appreciation, but damn, she was right. 2 and a half? about perfect.)

Soak gelatin in cold water 10 minutes. Heat pineapple, add sugar, lemon juice & gelatin. Chill – when slightly thick, fold in (pre-whipped) whipping cream. Chill until set (preferably in pretty bowl).

It does not say devour. enjoy. but it should. Merry Christmas.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

i sent the card to Evelyn, replete with last year’s Christmas photo of the kids, since we didn’t quite get around to doing one this year. she won’t know, i figure.

i also discovered that the dude who works at the desk next to Dave’s knows the former owners of the house, so her card found its intended home with them, as well.

and…thanks to all of you and the faithful – and possibly illegal – frequent voting of my lovely and enthusiastic mother-in-law i came first, somehow, in the Best Personal Blog section of the Canadian Blog Awards! the raw data Saturday showed me in second, but i apparently squeaked ahead of the oh-merciful- heavens-why-wasn’t-i-reading-her Better Now not because of overall votes but because i was more people’s backup choice. yay for second-best! apparently close does count. http://cdnba.wordpress.com/finalists/finalists-and-winners-2009/

i also came second in the Best Overall Blog category, and third in Best Family Blog. a perfect trifecta, i think?i’m not much of a betting woman, though: i’d never have bet on this kind of result.  but i’m happy. and proud. and grateful, to all of you who took the time to help make me feel this good on a Monday when i’ve been mostly awake since 5 am.

we come home to a mailbox straight from central casting – all holiday flyers and cheer, so full that the top is flipped open and the envelopes dusted with snow. i drag and pull and one letter sticks, too wide for the narrow passage meant only, apparently, for business-sized communications.

a Christmas card.

we did not send any this year, a fact about which i feel apologetically unapologetic. i am trying to learn boundaries, trying to lay fewer implicit shoulds on this shoulders of this small, sometimes overwhelmed family. matched socks and Christmas cards bit the dust this fall. bill-paying also snuck out the side door for a vacation before i dragged its pesky hide back in by the ear.  breaking one’s internal narratives of pressure is handy only if the habits one lets go of aren’t your bulwark against foreclosure and internet shutdown. body and mind need a home.

still, i like to get Christmas cards. i flip the envelope over, excited.

it is not for us.

yet i recognize the sender’s name.

every Christmas for the past four years, a Christmas card has shown up at our house for the former owners. the first year, there were a few, and i dug up the family’s new phone number early in the new year to let them know.

the next year, frayed by lack of sleep and the bleary joy of baby’s first Christmas, i didn’t quite make the phone call to the old owners when this one stray Christmas card arrived.  it sat, for a day or two, on my counter, and then got recycled. the next year, it came again. and so on.

the sender of this card is elderly. her name is Evelyn.

she is a widow, i know, because she addresses the card to Mr. and Mrs. John S_______, though her own return sticker reads Mrs. Evelyn F_______.  i grew up around widows; i am fluent in the old paternalisms of proper address.

the years have not been kind to Evelyn. her handwriting, five Christmases ago, was perfect MacLean script, straight out of the primers childen once copied from like faithful automatons, careful not to introduce any stray personality into their machinations. this year, our address meanders across the envelope, each letter painstaking yet random in its final formation. my heart wobbles, noticing. i remember how my grandmother’s handwriting slowly disappeared on her, the birthday card that arrived unrecognized until i saw her name on the return stamp.

i do not know Evelyn, nor she me. she is only a name, a script that announces the human frailty of old age.  but i know she is steady, unwavering in her yearly mailout of her cards, always on time. i wonder if she drives to the post office, or has a neighbourhood mailbox she can still walk to. i wonder, as i turn the card quietly in my hand, how much work goes into getting this card into the mail each year, especially in December. i wonder if she has anyone to help her.

the networks of old ladies are visible in their Christmas card lists just as ours are visible in blogrolls and twitter followers. our change more frequently. theirs usually only dwindle. i picture Evelyn’s stamps, lined up for the job against a list of names; the people to whom she sends these yearly salutations. i wonder how many she gets in return.

i assume she does not know the family that once lived here especially well. if they were family, news of the move should’ve gotten back to her somehow, five years on. perhaps they were acquaintances, one of them a child of someone who was once a friend of Evelyn’s.  they must not send her anything, or she’d have updated the address.

perhaps they, like me, gave up Christmas cards for being all too much one year and just never got back to it.

i have never opened one of Evelyn’s cards. they are not for me.  beyond being some kind of federal offense, it would be…an invasion, somehow.

but this year, i don’t want to just stick the card back in the mailbox, either, or turf it unacknowledged on the recycling pile.

i am tempted to write to Evelyn. just one Christmas card, the only one i send.

i’d say,

Hello, Mrs. F__________.

You don’t know me, but I live in the house where the John S______ family, John & Debbie, used to live.  I’m sorry, I don’t have their new address to send on to you.

I’m writing because I didn’t want the card you sent to them to go entirely unanswered. I hope you’ll forgive my presumption.

My grandmother sent Christmas cards every year when I was a little girl. I used to count the stamps for her, and lick them, and separate her cards into “PEI” and “off-Island” addresses, for the separate mailboxes we have here for local and exotic destinations.

Ten years ago was my grandmother’s last Christmas. she lived a wonderful life, nearly saw ninety-six. I loved her more than I can say. I miss her very much this time of year.

She never met my children. Their names are Oscar & Josephine. I enclose a picture of them here…silly, I know, but in hopes that maybe, as I have randomly received your card in lieu of the S__________ family, maybe you will be kind enough to receive this greeting for me? It would please me, strange though it sounds.

I want to thank you, for reminding me what a pleasure Christmas cards can be.

I hope you are well.  I wish you a very Merry Christmas.

Yours sincerely,

B. Stewart
Summer Street, Charlottetown, PE

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
i might send it. i just might. it is the closest i can come to fulfilling the heart of those implicit shoulds i’ve tried to turn my back on. and perhaps it would be a random act of kindness, on both sides, hers and mine.

it is the closest i will come to being a believer in the Christmas miracle.

i have this suspicion i don’t talk about in polite company. i don’t say it aloud.

i don’t say it aloud because i hear you lurking in the cloakroom, you cackling voices of tweenage doom & gloom.  these are the easy days! you caution, glorying in your foreknowledge of the horrors awaiting us, we who clearly lack the sense god gave chickens. i see your eyebrows arch, your voice drop gravely as you detail the backtalk, the rejection, the Hannah Montana concerts. and i shudder, and nod to your sage foreboding.

but i still think this parenting gig gets easier over time.

i know, i know. you scoff. you think me naive, a babe in the woods oblivious to the summer’s day that is soft baby bums and toddler trials. i’m not, not really. already, i see how quickly it speeds by, what gets lost.

i just keeping that having time to breathe is a decent tradeoff. and the heartbreak? that i’ll get inured eventually.

okay. NOW you can cackle.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

it is late at night, a December storm.  i get Oscar up to pee before i head to the sanctuary of my own sheets and the whistle of the wind on the other side of the cold wall.

he’s fully trained, has been for months, except for the teensy fact that neither his body nor an earthquake will raise him from slumber in the wee hours, unless he has a nightmare. and dry mornings come later than wet mornings, so his father and i are pleased to deliver him to the potty in the late evening so as to assure a little lie-in for all concerned. say, til 6:20.

i lift him, warm from the cocoon of his quilt, and heft him from the room, floorboards creaking. his sister stirs in the crib. his legs curl up like a small, solid frog, vestige of our human heritage as nomadic beings. we are still made to make carrying easier, even in our sleep.

if i am honest with myself, i like these nighttime potty excursions. this child is growing like a weed. before my eyes, he morphs weekly into something ever less toddlerlike, ever more boy.  he spends half his days pretending to be a machine, the other half a dinosaur. he shouts commands like a drill sergeant, despite the fact that his parents obstinately refuse to comply. he is still when building tinkertoy wonders, when lost in a story or talking back to an episode of Blues Clues, but he is seldom touchable in repose. even in his infancy, there was little stillness to this child, little patience for the passive comfort of skin. he either snuggles like a roto-rooter or keeps to himself.

so the nightly marches to the bathroom, his arms around my neck, are sweet for me. i pet his back, breathe in his sweaty little head. i understand, in those moments, the mother in the oft-derided Love You Forever, who skeeves everybody out by crawling in her man-child’s window long after he’s moved out to rock him in his slumber. it’s a story of the heart, people. i won’t stalk him in his adulthood. but it is a human thing, the simple, heavy joy of holding your child, no matter how big. and it is a window closing fast, for me.

because this night, suddenly, he comes awake as i take him from his room. his head snaps back and his eyes focus, and instantly his body tightens, squirms from my arms with a No. I can WALK.

he is out of my arms and marching to the potty without further adieu. i follow, sit in front him as he slumps again almost into oblivion. then up, pulling his pants with both hands like a Beverly Hillbilly, small arm held out against my interference.

Snap.

in the night light, i stand in the hall and watch him make his way back to bed. i blow him a kiss, then, when he’s knocked out again, sneak in and pull the quilts tight around him, one hand brushing his brow. i stop at the crib, where Posey coos and snuffles in her sleep.

i feel strangely useless, suddenly redundant. and i get it. this is how it’s going to be, for a hundred moments, a thousand, until the day i stop breathing.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

i am not entirely sorry.

a day comes when the child no longer considers every object in his sightline a candidate in the choking hazard Olympics. eventually they learn to go downstairs on their feet, not their heads. and some morning will come, i promise myself each day whilst i try to apply mascara with neither eye focused on the mirror, when i can perform my rituals of personal grooming without anyone attached to my leg.

i do think sometimes the people who hearken back to the golden days of their children’s youngest years either had very slow-moving children, or are forgetting a lot.  there’s simply no downtime with little ones, especially in the 12-30 month range. if they’re awake, you’re awake. if they’re moving, you’re moving, usually in three different directions. the ceaselessness of bodily needs, of mess, of sweetly inquiring hands stuck up your pants or in your hair.

when i try to imagine what apocalyptic turn of events could lead people to reminisce on these days as easy, i get nervous.

but then Oscar rejects me in the middle of the night, and i think i understand.

in a sense, parenting is about boundaries. or their absence. your infant wants to grizzle on your nipple twelve hours a day and keep you awake at two-hour intervals around the clock? you cope, blearily. and you become more useful to another human being than you’ve likely ever been in your life. heady stuff, that. you grow used to it, the intimacy, the interdependence.

and then they begin to outgrow it, somewhere around 11 pm on a Wednesday night when they are three-and-a-half. or, you know, every week from thereon in until they ultimately fly the nest. they develop their own boundaries against you, when you have so few against them.

and you sniffle a little and take to your bed and think, ouch. followed immediately by, does this mean soon we get to sleep in?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

i know, i’m probably delusional. maybe this is the easiest age. maybe thirteen has been an absolute joy in your house. what do you think? is there any golden era where the balance mostly works out, where they fall somewhere between utter need and independence?  or is this mostly a matter of how different personalities experience the reality of being needed and/or rejected?