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she had white carpet in the entryway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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me up in a tiny washroom in the ER and proceeded to induct me into the arcane mysteries of the belted maxi pad, long out of date even then but all that the hospital dispenser provided.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

on Sunday afternoon, at the park with the kids, my bracelet broke.

online friends made the bracelet for me shortly after Posey was born last fall. an ornate art deco clasp, and three strands of silver beading, each with the name and birthstone of one of my children. Oscar & Finn, April, crystals. Josephine, September, sapphire. it was gorgeous. and i cried when i opened the little package, because this bracelet made and sent by semi-strangers had all three of my babies’ names on it, the only thing in my possession linking the three so visibly.

it made me smile.

the strand that broke last Sunday was Finn’s. i scrabbled in the early spring grass, trying to contain the beads as they rolled brightly away and at the same time keep Posey from swallowing the ones i retrieved.  i found a few of the crystals, found the F, the two Ns. but the little square bead with the I escaped me. i got down on my hands and knees, traced the dirt with my fingertips. gone.

the strand of my broken child, always so elusive, broken. the wind blew my hair into my smarting eyes.

then i caught myself. i raised my head to the sharp gust and the dry leftover leaves skittering. he is not in a bracelet, i told myself. he cannot be lost again. he is everywhere, dust, in these leaves, in his brother and sister. he is written on you.  i stood up, spun my head around almost as if i expected to see him there, some little colt-legged shadow with a brown bowl cut.

hello, you.

i left that bead somewhere in that playground, lost like the child himself, relinquished to the world, the universe. it is there, somewhere, in that grass. i just cannot see it.

it is fitting, the bracelet perhaps more honest with its broken strand than it was before.  this is my family picture, three children, one floating free, without an I.  and on his birthday this year, i do not sorrow any more. where once there was a hole where he had been, a gaping wound, now time has left mostly love, indelible, stronger than death.

happy fourth birthday, my Finn…my wee one, my shadow baby, my son. i smile at you.

with  trepidation, i’m planning to send this letter later today…to the hospital where Finn was born and where i did all the bedrest with O and the legion of ultrasounds with Posey.

i’m struck every single year by the ridiculous way in which this fine institution handles its fundraising. i’m not a fan of telethons in the first place, as the emphasis on “look at the cute little hard-luck children and their miracle stories!”  makes me uncomfortable in that eerie 1950 flashback way…but the annual mailout of miracle stories to a population that inevitably includes many bereaved families seems grievously insensitive, even this year when i’m feeling pretty healed and pretty equivocal.

i could use feedback – how does this come off? i want to make my point while still sounding positive and…um…uncrazy. help? please?  all suggestions/constructive criticism welcome. (deep breath).

and yeh, this is the real institution – the blog has been too public to insert false anonymity now. if you’re local, please don’t consider my critique a reason NOT to support the hospital – rather, i’m hoping to inspire them to revisit their fundraising strategies so that more families can support them without being brutalized by mail every spring.

April 28^th, 2009

Dear Mr. Shaw,

I received your PEI Cares Telethon newsletter/solicitation in the mail this week, and needed to write to you to explain why your institution’s fundraising efforts unintentionally but regularly raise my hackles.

Mr. Shaw, four years ago tomorrow my son Finn was born at the IWK. I’d been airlifted to Halifax a few weeks earlier, when my water broke at 24 weeks gestation. Finn was born at 26 weeks and a day. He weighed 2.2 pounds, and had brown hair and his father’s nose. He did not make it through his first night; he died in my arms early in the morning of April 30^th, 2005. He was our firstborn.

I was and am incredibly grateful to the IWK for the effort expended to try to save Finn’s life, and for the care shown him and me, both then and in my subsequent pregnancies with his younger brother and sister. We – along with some family and friends – have made memorial donations to the IWK every year in Finn’s name and memory, and plan to continue to do so. I recognize that fundraising is an integral part of the ongoing operations of the hospital, and that it is a significant challenge to mobilize the necessary funds to keep the standard of care at the level of excellence Maritime families have come to rely on.

But, may I suggest that including bereaved parents in your regular fundraising mailout is insensitive and in poor taste? Last year, one of the children featured in the mailout and on the telethon was a little girl from here in PEI who was born at the exact same gestation as my son, at only ¾ his weight, on his actual due date in August 2005. We happen to know this little girl and her family personally, and celebrate with them the fact of her survival and healthy development. But it is painful nonetheless to be faced with the public spectacle of that “miracle,” particularly as part of an emotional appeal designed to raise money. It creates a discourse wherein the children who do not have the happy ending or the camera-friendly story are further negated, in a culture which already treats infant and child death as the last frontier of horror. The telethon only reinforces the isolation of bereaved parents by reinforcing the “Oh, I couldn’t possibly imagine” response.

I give in my son’s memory because he mattered to me, and because I wouldn’t want another family to go through the same grief that we did if it were at all avoidable. But I can assure you that being confronted with intentionally emotionally manipulative mailouts asking me to “imagine” the difficulty of having a child in hospital does not make me at all more generous.

If your hospital were a cardiac facility for adults, I suspect you would not solicit donations among the widows of lost patients by sending smiling pictures of happy heart attack survivors: “This is Fred. He had a massive coronary but what a precious champion – he’s a fighter and today he’s back golfing again! Fred never gave up. His wife Joyce is just so grateful to all of you who made this miracle possible through your generous gifts.” It would be understood, implicitly, that such a mass fundraising strategy would be offensive, salt in the wounds of those whose partners did not survive their heart attacks. Losing a child is no less difficult than losing a spouse. Please show me, my family, and the other bereaved families whose children have not been lucky enough to leave the IWK healthy the same respect you would accord us if our loved ones had been adults.

Perhaps a separate database could be established, Mr. Shaw, wherein families who’ve made memorial donations for their children could have a simple, tasteful, “We’re fundraising and would very much appreciate your continued support in memory of your child, should you feel so inclined” letter sent, instead of the standard telethon-focused “miracle” onslaught?

I genuinely want to support the good work the IWK does, and would be happy to volunteer my assistance in revising your fundraising strategy amongst bereaved families. I ask you to please consider doing so, and in the interim, to please remove me from your mailout list. I will continue to donate, but on terms that respect my son’s memory rather than erase him from view simply because he was not, in telethon terms, a “miracle.”

Yours sincerely,

Bonnie Stewart

the blog turned three the other day. and it snowed.  huh.  fuck you too, April.

i  could swear i’ve had no time to bake any celebratory blogoversary virtual cupcakes this year, except…erm, they’re virtual.  practically instant. perhaps it just feels like the circles we run in out here are too choked with sadness and fear lately for anyone to want to eat any.

grief makes me uncomfortable.

when i was in high school, five friends and i put on a play called Passacaglia in the local drama festival. we played the denizens and matron of a nursing home, rhapsodizing back on dreams deferred. my cynical, virginal self had to speak the line “we made love” aloud without dissolving into ironic distance or giggles. we powdered our hair, wore Tender Tootsies. the six of us spent a lot of time together that spring, talking about aging and who we hoped we’d be when we got old.

the following spring, one of us drowned, with her older brother.

their funeral was, as you would imagine, enormous. they played U2′s With or Without You. and i sat in the back, compelled and repelled all the same by the proceedings, my eyes on Sarah’s white coffin and the bent heads of her parents. i felt sad and angry. and scornful at the same time, at the weeping and the wailing from those whom i knew had known her no better than i, those who cried because it was a time for crying.

i wanted to say, i knew her. i knew what she wanted to be when she was ninety years old. but my claim to her seemed so small, so peripheral, that to speak it at all felt like playing a part. i did not know if i deserved to mourn.  to do so publicly felt somehow distasteful…not to do so, almost disrespectful.

i always feel weird when private sorrows become hugely public, go viral. our society creates spectacle out of grief, and part of me recoils, afraid of appropriating, claiming what is not my own.  and yet to pretend grief is not in the room when it has swallowed all the air…that only harms, i think, never helps.  grief is the dirty underbelly of living, of community, of friendship.  if ever you think it’s not present, scratch a little deeper. or wait.

in the three years of its existence, the blog has been the site of more public grieving on my part than i care to think about.  it is the place i put things i cannot say in my real life. i do not want to walk into the grocery store today and say, hi. did you know that this is the anniversary of the day things went irrevocably wrong for me?  that four years ago this morning i was airlifted to the IWK because my water broke? i was 24 weeks, almost. my son was born a couple of weeks later. he died the morning of the last day of the month. my son. my Finn, firstborn.

i am so uncomfortable with grief even after the intervening four years that if i had say the words above aloud to someone today, i’d grin all the way through, my rictus of pleasant polite-itude desperately trying to counter the message.

so i tell you, here.  because it is April, again, and i need to mark it.  without the grin. without needing the grin, or tears either.

i’d feel ridiculous telling anyone in person that tomorrow is nine years since my Nannie died, after a good long life and a miserably long death.  but i tell you.  i acknowledge, remember aloud, onscreen. a line or two is all.

and my heart is calmed, having borne its small witness to these people whom i loved, thrown those words into the chorus of sadness and memory and love that exists out here.

which is, i suppose, what we are all trying to do as we muddle through this mess of an April.

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in one of April’s happier anniversary dates at our house, a “yellow cake with a yellow train” has been requested for Oscar’s third birthday next week. i tried to talk him into chocolate, to no avail. nearly-three-year-olds are a hard-headed people, i am discovering. and as sweet and quirky a kid as Oscar can be, he knows what he likes…so yellow his cake shall be. and possibly homemade, if i do not chicken out and buy a box of Betty Crocker yellow.

now, i have no clue how to actually make a cake from scratch, let alone make it, uh, yellow without adding brain cancer food colouring. but i like a challenge, so if you could bring on your best yellow recipes whilst i mutter curses at the babysitter for cultivating strange, non-chocolate-centred tastes in my offspring, that’d be great.

if it’s too ugly to serve to the three-year-old set, rest assured i will hand out virtual slices – and photos – here. one can always aspire to be on Cake Wrecks, if nothing else.

ah, blogging. you make everything just a little less lonely, at least.

the cuts seem to be coming hot and heavy now, after months of doom and gloom breathing down our necks. the downturn is crossing class lines, impacting manufacturing and media and corporate finance alike.

the shit from an inflated, entitled culture that fed on bogeymen and retail therapy is hitting the fan. now the bogeymen appear to be closer to home, bankers and polluters, a different kind of us & them than we’ve grown accustomed to stressing over in the past decade. it’s change, at least. we’ll see about hope.

i am looking hard for hope, peering around corners and down the decolletage of all the pretty girls tarted up to distract me from cultural dissolution.  ooh!  Olympics!  food porn!  mommy bitchfests!  my hands dip into the pop culture well and come up empty, grasping me and mine to me all the closer. i am looking for work in this economy, and i have kids i want to provide both a home and a healthy world for in the midst of this hysteria. i do not want to be the Joads, fleeing the dustbowl in our jalopy. i do not want to go up in flames or fourhorsemen.

part of me tires of hearing it all, wants to close in on myself and hunker down with my backyard tomato plant and my babies. i want to say, i feel helpless.

but a little voice that speaks an old, blood tongue deep in my familial bones says, don’t.

yes, there are terrible things going on.  yes, there is insecurity.  fear is eating at us, as a culture.  this is not a fear we can wall ourselves away from…this fear chews at all the fat we thought we’d socked away, untouchable. this fear makes us angry and protective and shrill, seagulls from Finding Nemo.

it’s easy to be transfixed by the sight of our ship that was a-comin’ in going down instead.   but the voices of my grandmothers, who lived through the Great Depression young and poor and Scots Protestant proud whisper, if we live as islands, we will die as islands. i think they mean at least metaphorically, but they were fierce and a wee bit harsh, those grandmothers. plain speakers, they hiss, stop yer whinin’ and get out and DO. grow. help. share. use your talents, use what you got. or helplessness in the face of this recession will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

the human interest stories i used to hear on the news don’t seem to be getting much play lately. we’re all downturn all the time, visuals of houses foreclosed upon our Dorothea Lange equivalencies, unemployment stats riveting us. these things matter. but if a magic wand fixed it all tomorrow, our world would still be a place of hurt, with cancer and hunger and loneliness.  helplines still need volunteers.  kids still need recess monitors.  seniors and their caregivers still need support in the face of dwindling health care and mental health resources. places like the Greater Good Network, where you click ye olde mouse once a day to accrue sponsored donations to causes like literacy, breast cancer research, rain forest preservation, animal shelters, and hunger are finding their clicks have dropped significantly. but all it takes is a computer and two minutes.  will it save the world? nope. will it save your mortgage? nope. but as long as you have a computer, can you do it every day? yep.  and you can buy fair-traded products from their sponsors for everybody’s birthday gifts, too, for less than you’d often spend at Walmart. the habit of considering the greater good, even in something as simple and surface as clicking a daily link, may help all of us begin to reconstruct our society as the place we’d like it to be.

hope won’t hurt. the lovely and talented shutter sisters are vying for the grand prize in Microsoft’s Name Your Dream Assignment – $50,000 plus the glass & technology to travel the world. they want to photograph stories of hope, focus our eyes on hope. you can vote for them here, if you like. check out the contest, at least. if you use Microsoft products at all, and even the most open source and Machead-inclined among us end up doing so almost inevitably at some point, you may as well direct a little of what the company is doing with its profits. beats what banks seem to have been doing with theirs.

there is an old adage of questionable origin that an ancient Chinese blessing and an ancient Chinese curse merge in the words, may you live in interesting times. we do, unquestionably. whether we make of them a blessing or a curse is, at least in small part, up to us.

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what are your hopes, for your self and your family, for your culture and your world?  what do you feel you can and can’t impact?

if there were no calendars i would have no sense of how to tell my story, any of it outside the press of now, of in this moment I Am.  a chorus line of dates has spun through my head since childhood and even my I Am is always counting, ordering, tallying the numbers according to who I Was, trying to leave a trail of breadcrumbs hardy enough that maybe someday i can find my way home.
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my baby is six months old.

six months ago this morning i was in labour, water broken nearly twelve hours, cerclage finally wrested from me by two grunting doctors while the blessed anaethetist stroked my hair (erm, hairnet) and tried to get her drip to keep up with the escalating carnage below.  in the end, the double loop of wire ended up in a waste disposal somewhere, too much scar tissue on it to be offered as a prize. and i didn’t care.

the prize, of course, was Posey, born seven or so hours later dark and lusty and shouting, on the very last dregs of that epidural cocktail so that i felt the asunderness of it all but maybe not it all and i was present to my body and hers as she slid from me and somewhere in those moments of gasping i glimpsed something powerful and primal and i understood it can be good like this and some part of me sighed and let go.

or almost. the letting go is the way i’d like the narrative to read. it is so close to truth.
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four years ago this morning in the same hospital i lay on an ultrasound table twenty weeks pregnant for the first time all nervous and excited and a little puzzled because this was my first Canadian ultrasound and in Korea where i’d been until a few weeks before they’d always let me see the screen but this technician was gruff and closed like a box, four walls sealed tight and grim.  i was anxious because the day before i’d had this sudden gush that had first embarrassed and then frightened me and i was eager for the reassurance and i smiled at the lady, that Nurse Ratchitt with her jellied wand but she did not so much as make eye contact. there was Stan Rogers playing on the radio – the Mary Ellen Carter, of all ironies – but when i singsonged, oh, i love this!, still shocked to be back in a country where music i recognized played on the radio, the technician said nothing.  when i mentioned the incident of the day before and asked if she could check my bladder – because i wanted desperately to believe it had been my bladder that had failed me in front of thirty high school students, the alternative being too terrifying, too oh Bonnie stop being dramatic - her monotone response was only, the requisition doesn’t say bladder. when after what felt like an eternity of her cold and silent machinations over my belly, screen turned away from me, i got up the courage to ask, is anybody awake in there? because it was my first pregnancy and i still had not really felt the baby move, she answered, could be.

could be. huh. as in, fuck off and shut up, it’s not your turn and i will give you information when i damn well have to and not before and don’t go getting uppity and asking QUESTIONS. when she did turn the screen to me it was with a perfunctory baby looks fine, see? lots of movement and fluid looks fine and i am not permitted to tell you anything else.  and i smiled with relief and tenderness at my wiggling, floating cargo but went home shaking, feeling almost violated and utterly dismissed and disappointed.

and then he died, my Runt, our Finn, eleven hours after he was born because it was fluid and his lungs had been damaged in their development by its absence around the twenty-week mark.

and it’s not exactly that i blamed the technician once i dug her up from the bowels of my memory in the aftermath. stunned and heartbroken, i gave her very little thought. logically, i understood that it was quite possible that despite her appalling bedside manner, she’d been thorough and no fluid loss had actually been evident. certainly i’d had a fluid ferning test done at my doctor’s office the same day as the ultrasound and they’d found no evidence of amniotic leakage. perhaps she’d just been having a bad day, or is a generally unpleasant person with a shit-ass personality. perhaps she did not actually dismiss my concerns the way she dismissed me, the human being. whatever.

i still, in a very off-hand, not terribly time-consuming way, hated her with the fury of a thousand suns.  from that day to this.  not even for the what-ifs so much as for the simple fact that as Finn’s mother, i resent the fact that she got to be one of the few people who ever had the privilege of seeing him, even in utero, and of being a part of his story.

she is the piece of damage and mistrust and resentment i didn’t let go of when Josephine was born.

whoever she is, that technician, i don’t want her anymore.  i’d like to leave her here, in hopes you will receive her, take her from me, help me let her go.  is that possible? can you just drop someone from the calendar of the mind? can i drop the little tic in my head that says March 10th…Posey’s half-birthday, oh, and that was the day of that awful ultrasound with that raging fascist…

right, letting go.
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friends of ours had a baby boy last week, their third baby, second son. we were pregnant together the first time, back in Korea…even had accidental back-to-back appointments at Our Lady of Mercy Virgin Mary Gynecologist and Obstetrician – which is, you have to admit, the funniest name EVER for an OB office – on the very day they found out Euan was a boy and we saw Finn bounce and wiggle his fingers at us for the very first time.  we moved back to Canada shortly thereafter; they went to Australia. we have not seen them since, not in person…but they were brave ones, staying close in touch even when the unspeakable came between us.

their little boy’s name is Finian. he will be called Finn. he will be my boy’s namesake.

and that this fills my heart only with joy and the happy kind of tears is a sign, i think, that there has been healing, and luck.

there appears to have been a rip in the space-time continuum because both my children are currently sleeping. in the daytime. in their beds.

lest you think i exaggerate the rarity of this blessed event let me explain that the younger one is just learning to nap like a civilized infant whilst the elder one is – cue wails from the maternal peanut gallery – in the processing of outgrowing his tenure as a civilized infant and instead barreling whole hog towards being either a Big Child or a pirate, depending on the day, and neither Big Children nor pirates nap particularly well, unfortunately. i suspect it’s all the swaggering and roaring, in either case, but at the moment both my offspring are dozing and i am lying here on my side on the couch sans the company of short people and thinking that the gray light flooding in the window makes it feel rather like the beginnings of bedrest last year and wondering if i’m any different now than i was then.

i wonder this because i have this pesky attachment to the idea of myself as a dynamic, improving being. it’s the old modernist myth of progress boiled down to the individual level, where i get all twitterpated each time i become conscious of some personal failing as personal rather than the only reasonable and normal response to a given situation – oh, huh, not everybody goes into paroxysms of fury at drivers who fail to signal? – because, my stars! the emancipation! the agency! i can shed this flawed skin and emerge from my chrysalis new and delightful and better! now with more cowbell!

sometimes the change is real. i can learn. i now reserve all my turn-signal righteousness for my poor, beleaguered mother, who – as she is also capable of learning, if not of turning on her blinker before she engages the car in a turn – now simply refuses to drive me anywhere. win win, jolly good, pip pip.

but mostly i suspect that the idea that we are ever-improving beings is shite. it’s a dangerous siren song, and one so ubiquitous that as a culture and a species we repeatedly steer blindly towards the paths of our own demise. we choose short-term gains in spite of long-term damage and in almost all areas carry on as if nothing rotten is ever really going to happen to us. we’re engaged in progress! we’ll be fine! i know all the seventy-three reasons why high fructose corn syrup is bad for my glucose-intolerant self and my goal of looking less than four months pregnant again someday and my commitment to avoiding the agro-industrial complex where possible, but i saunter by that pack of Nibs in the store and damn! they are just so shiny and purty i swear they hop into my cart of their own accord. every time i go grocery shopping, it’s like groundhog day in the candy aisle.

some self-sabotaging habits are easier to make fun of than others.

from the time i was four, i wanted a little girl of my own. i had Finn and lost him and broken/brokenhearted realized i wouldn’t have traded him for a thousand girls. then Oscar, and i adjusted my expectations and the joys of a baby boy became the rhythm of my days and i understood, for the first time, that my preference had been a prejudice passed down and picked up, and i was shamed. then a miscarriage, and i began to bargain with precisely the sort of god i don’t believe in for just one more baby and damn the vagina i’d be more than blessed with another sweet boy and i meant it, i really did. except that underneath there was still a wistful part of me that ached – and seethed with a dirty, private jealousy – each time someone i knew who’d wanted a girl just…had one…seemingly magically, first try, no complications, as if plucked from the sky. i figured that this embarrassing allergy to other people’s good news was me being ungracious about not getting what i’d set my mind on all those years ago. and i’d wallow a bit and then kick myself and give thanks for my wee pirate-in-training and within a day or two the ugly green head of my jealousy and self-pity would bury itself again and i could get back to going about my life.

then i found out Josephine would be, indeed, Josephine. and i was amazed, because wanting her had come to seem like wanting the sky. and i said, self, take note. sometimes it comes easy. remember. you did not need to adjust your expectations. so get over yourself. a persecution complex ain’t pretty.

last spring i lay on this couch and wondered if maybe i’d be a better human once my heart’s desire of this healthy baby girl got safely here and the quavering over whether it would ever happen for me ended, once and for all.

i can report that the answer is…um, alas, nope.

one of my most beloved old friends is having her first baby. she’s 38. she’s always wanted a girl, and said on the phone last week that she was sure it was a girl, that she hadn’t really given any thought to it being anything else. turns out she was justified.

this baby will be loved and delighted in, by me almost as much as by her parents. she & Josephine will be close in age, and i know that my friend will be a beautiful mama, a good mother. but my first, visceral reaction? the same old jealousy, green and slimy and bilious. i cringed at the pique and said nah. really? but before i could even get the rejection formed it had delivered its soliloquy of woundedness and petty pity. why so easy for her? she didn’t even know she was pregnant until she was almost three months…she did all the things i never did, and bang, she gets her heart’s desire, nonetheless perfect and healthy.

oh, ugly. why not her, after all? i don’t know better people than her. and we all have our lucky breaks and our broken places and this friend of mine deserves all the joy in the world and i’d give it to her if i could so what in hell is this curmudgeonliness? i lack for nothing. there is no zero sum economy. life is too short to compare. adjusting one’s expectations can be good for growth. and yet there it is, the jealousy, naked and quivering. it helps nothing; i do not want it. but like groundhog day, it pops up. and i need to unlearn it, somehow.

she will not know, my friend, not from the face of genuine celebration i turn to her. it is not her burden. i don’t want it to be mine. but change is not so simple as skipping the Nibs aisle.

oh frail human. the same mistakes over and over, the same songs and refrains of willful blindness and short-term self-interest and stupid jealousy that sometimes i get so full to boiling i just want to spit.

today is the day after groundhog day, and i wanted to wake up different.
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i hesitate to publish this. jealousy is like the final frontier of friendship taboos…especially the messy stuff, the real stuff that runs way deeper than the cultural cache of yo bitch! your kids are sleeping?!? hate hate hate that counts as sisterhood these days. and i know – both out here and among real-life friends who struggle with IF or have lost babies or unlike me did not get one of the gender they’d set their heart on – that i risk revealing myself as an ungrateful moron when a sweet pirate and a baby girl sleep upstairs.

i sat with friends a few weeks ago, all of us mamas a few times over, and a pregnant one (not to be confused with pregnant friend above) recounted the drama of telling her infertile SIL about her news, after SIL had responded to another family pregnancy announcement by crying all day. the pregnant one found this frustrating, hurtful. i found it heartbreaking.

both are true, i think, depending on where you’re standing. i believe we most of us have our heartbreaks, and also that we’re responsible to those we love to try to fix our shit, try to be as good as we can be. i despair at how often it feels like we’re just groundhogs running on hamster wheels, stumbling over the same old thought patterns and habits and emotional minefields, blind and unable to flip the calendar over to a fresh page.

is it just me? do you have responses – emotional and otherwise – that you’d like to leave behind? how do you do it?

it feels like rage.

like metaphorical acid reflux, lava-hot. it splashes up without warning, spatters out of me in mutters and expletives and tears, my face raw and shocked.  i am all powder, fuse worn down to a nub.

i am fine, and insane, all in the span of thirty seconds.  and when i am fine i think the insane is probably a drama queen, self-aggrandizing and blown out of all proportion.  and when i am not fine i think we cannot all get out of this alive.

it is lack of sleep and the bitter loss of the happy, weary infancy i’d dared think we’d finally gotten, third time lucky.  it is two weeks of asthma attacks and flu and both children up several times a night, in addition to the colic, the brutal colic, the sweet-merciful-Jeebus-seriously-who’d-i-torture-in-my-last-life colic that stomps on my last, frayed nerve and breaks my heart and makes me feel helpless and cruel, a mockery of comfort and motherhood.  it is the laptop broken and the furnace rusted out all at once and all the lightbulbs burnt in chorus and the diamond earring lost raking leaves, my only diamonds, ever, gone…like money hemorrhaging, like lurking failure and chaos have found me easy prey.   it is the call i got yesterday that Oscar’s ear surgery – scheduled for this Thursday – has instead been postponed to the day before Christmas Eve.  because heck, when better to trek to the hospital with a two year old and infant for the day?  what else would i be doing that time of year?

it is all these things, and none of them.  it is that they all add up.

one last straw, again and again and again, and in my head i listen for the laugh track and hear only crickets and then the anger surges and i am awash and afraid all at once.  i see red, literally.  i flail, inside, look for things to throw and then despair even of that release because, fuck it everything’s broken anyway.

everyone else’s happy babies send me into paroxysms of mourning and self-beratement.  the warm buzz of the early, contented-ish weeks and you deserved a break this time around has fallen silent.  i did not deserve a break, after all.  apparently if i can squeeze out a live baby i should expect no further mercy from fortune.  apparently it is my lot to watch helpless and frayed as my children suffer, one after the other.  colic is better than tubes and a ventilator and blue-black toes and death, i know.  i know.  and yet it all feels bizarrely similar from where i sit watching my days unravel…the useless mother, unable to comfort, unable to protect.  perhaps that is where the rage comes from.

there are few witnesses, save for a screaming infant and the little boy.  i hide my face from them, afraid of this ugliness, this fury.  i do not want to be this way.  i do not want to mark them, leave them pocked with  acid.  i do not want them scarred.  i do not want to excuse rage as a reasonable, acceptable response.  i do not want to be what i am right now.

it will end.  the part of me that is fine and rational intones this.  the insane part knows that doesn’t matter in the moment, unless it ends now.  another month, perhaps, given that she was nearly a month early….in the grand scheme, it seems so little to endure.

but in the moment, exhausted, choked with bile, it is too much, too unfair, too big, and i wonder if the next cry or the next stupid broken household item will be the one that breaks me, and i long for a protector myself, for someone to rescue me from this powderkeg while i am still fine some of the time.

unstable/embittered but housebroken thirty-six year old, up for adoption.  seeks mother.  will travel. likes pina coladas and predictability.  free to good home.  bonus miniatures included, requiring tlc and earplugs.

this morning, scrubbing vomit from Oscar’s dismantled bed and diarrhea from the playmats downstairs, shaking out the day’s third load of innards-encrusted laundry before noon and sanitizing my chapped hands one more time to try to protect the howling Posey from her brother’s ongoing misery, i located my brain.

it’s been AWOL, lost in the buzz of sick kids and late-onset colic and seasonal sadness and the secret certainty that i am utterly useless, overwhelmed, depressed.  whatever you call it, it’s ugly.  it’s been a perfect shitstorm the past couple of weeks, all of a sudden, out of the blue…a swell of internal and external afflictions that coincided like Murphy’s Law personified.  and i’ve become like an old-school tv after the channels go off for the night…all snow, no picture.  blank.

when i found my brain this morning, it was rocking in a metaphorical corner, musing.  why do we use the word “uncle” to indicate surrender? it asked me, rather plaintively.  who’s Uncle? whose uncle? i shrugged, waved at it, happy to note that it was thinking about something, at least.  i told it i’d ask you guys.

who, tell me, friends, is this mythical uncle we can surrender to?

and will he pick up the pieces for me, do my laundry, help me pet one child to sleep without the other screaming like a banshee?  if i surrender, if i admit i’m failing here, will Uncle step into the breach?

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i am not sure why i’m even telling all this, except to get it out, to put it somewhere outside of me so it does not leak out at midnight when i’m trying to settle a baby who’s cried all evening long and suddenly find the tears pouring hot down my own face.  i am not as alone as i feel,  nor as bad as i sound.  but i am overwhelmed.   and the chiropractor hasn’t helped the colic, and Oscar’s sitter now has the flu, so for the seventh straight day here we all are, crying.