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the place lurks in the dustier corners of my brain, almost like a dreamscape…a warren of banally familiar rooms and hallways examined in tedious detail over months of enforced, enclosed exposure…and yet i do not think about its innards, have never even tried to connect all its pieces and the experiences they represent into any kind of coherent whole.  it is too much to try to take in.  it sits there, institutional, a monolith acknowledged only at the surface, in donations at the local Dairy Queen and testimonials of happier endings from telethons and fundraising letters.  from the first time we drove out from under the parkade barrier, new parents and childless all at once, this hospital has been an indelible, impossible temple of our past and our possible futures, both.  our first child lived his entire life here.  he died in my arms in a rocking chair nurses set out for us, a tableau wherein all but us knew their parts well.  at his death, it was decreed that any future pregnancies - those that got to the twelve week mark, of course - would be monitored here, on an outpatient or inpatient basis as required.   this hospital is the place we faithless hopeful turn, no matter how uncertain its promises or fraught with pain and memory, no matter how incessantly bad its food, year in, year out.

the first time i came here i was airlifted in, all urgency, to wait in isolation for weeks for a birth that turned out worse than we’d ever really believed it could.  the second time i came packed, warned by my doctor at home that the next regular checkup would likely result in preventative hospital bedrest.  it did.  i stared at the walls for weeks on end, grappling with fear and boredom and the assaultive power of memory to overwhelm one with something so mundane as the shape of a drawer pull, the baby blue of a ratty curtain.

and so i came this Tuesday for the standard ultrasound, at the appointed time in the expected place, and still i was struck by the utter weirdness of being there and how i felt like a sad, small child, inanely proud at knowing where everything was, which doors in the Fetal Assessment Unit lead to where.  the 7th floor, Fetal Assessment and bedrest ward combined, have seen more of me than some apartments i’ve rented.  and were looking to see more…that ultrasound’s results were not so standard after all, and so we agreed that i would return the next morning, to stitch my weakened cervix in an effort to allow this pregnancy to reach viability.

a cerclage is only minor surgery, maybe fifteen minutes.  it means two days in hospital at most.  and yet the night before i was clingy, anxious, almost desperate to get things in order. some part of me expected to stay, to be removed from my life for weeks or months, held in stasis…and i felt helpless, unprepared.  i have been expecting a stint in this hospital during this pregnancy, only later…just as i expected a stint for the last pregnancy, which - had all gone differently and November not brought miscarriage - would have come about now.  so the place has been looming large in my expectations for months…but i was not entirely ready, not at all.  the place is too much to ever be fully ready for.

i went in Wednesday morning, checked in, had blood drawn.  the admitting clerk directed me to the third floor, which took me aback, because in my mental map of the place, the third floor is the NICU.  Finn died there.  we have been back since, to see other babies…but like the college room where you lost your virginity if you were a late bloomer like me, the place remains quite singular in my mind, a stage for that one event.  i recalled, on the way up the elevator, that the convenient maze of protection my memory has put up around its unrevisited sore spots had utterly blanked the fact that he was also born on the third floor, that that’s where L&D is, too, a wing of the hospital i’d never been back to despite all the months i spent there pregnant later with O. 

he was born in room 310, i saw as we rounded the corner.  the nurse led me through the wing.  i paused for a second in front of that room i hadn’t seen in almost three years, in front of the door, compelled to look in and yet awkward about barging in unannounced on someone else’s labour.  i wanted, i think, to see if i could see some shadow of my child more clearly there, the little son i barely glimpsed at his birth; if the configuration of walls and light and machinery would trigger some gift of recall my conscious mind cannot.  but i did not.  i got corralled, instead, down the hall to a small utility-type holding cell with a stretcher in it, where i dolled myself up in a johnny shirt and spent the next two-and-a-half hours lolling about on the cot and left the past behind and forgot, for awhile, even to fret about the present.

the surgery went well.  my doctor announced three times that it had been a really good idea to do it now rather than later, which i found oddly comforting even though, really, it’s news more dire than one would hope for.  recovery was odd.  they’d given me a spinal and my hips and legs were so utterly deadened that i kept reaching my hand down to my meatlike thigh and wondered why they’d entrapped me in a fat suit.  my brain was convinced that my poor legs were all cramped up in frog-fashion and that i desperately needed to straighten them, even though they were actually sticking straight out in front of me and i couldn’t move a muscle in any case.   my nurse was kind.  the lady on the other side of the curtain had twin girls.  we listened to them, all new and healthy, and the new mother lamented that she’d been told she’d have to stay three nights with them because one was small and i bit my tongue and tried to focus on the sound of the babies, telling them apart, wishing them well.  her luck does not take away from mine, i whispered to my meatloaf frog-legs.  we are just both here.  we are just both here.  now move.  one foot twitched, at a bizarre angle.

they were supposed to move me originally to the seventh floor, the bedrest floor, to stay.  then the sixth, where Dave & Oscar had been waiting, unbeknownst to me.  then word came back that i’d be going to the one floor in the hospital that i have no association whatsoever with: the fifth floor, the nursery floor, where moms who’ve delivered normal, healthy babies go.  i thought this was entertaining.  but my room on the fifth floor wasn’t ready so they wheeled me back out to the third floor L&D ward.

i had forgotten the room, but i knew it, well.  it’s a birthing suite, not that different from 310 three doors down where Finn was eventually born.  the night i stayed in it, three years ago, was the very first night i spent in this hospital, flown in with my water broken, Dave rushing by car to make it from Charlottetown.  i remember it as low-lit, with many nurses coming and going in hushed tones, checking for contractions, to see if labour had stopped.  i remember trying to come to terms with what 24 weeks might really mean and whether i could comprehend what it would mean to us to have a child with serious disabilities and struggles ahead of him or her.  i remember trying to comprehend the possibility of death, and mostly failing.  i remember seizing, though, as best i could, on the fact that labour had stopped for the time being…and very consciously deciding that i would not let my fear overcome me, that i would love and attend to the baby within whatever might happen, that whatever time we got together, i would not turn away from.  i did that, and i never regretted it.  but i realized Wednesday, staring at the same walls, that it was not a decision i could ever truly make again.  i am institutionalized now, broken, in a sense, no longer whole enough or naive enough to be able to summon that purity of spirit without cringing in fear of the after.  i whispered an apology to the stitched-in fetus for what i wish i could give again but can’t, and waited for them to take me upstairs.

and i whispered again to my still-tingly legs, this time about the two versions of myself, there is no comparison.  shit luck does not always mean shit luck.  we were just both here.  we were just both here.

Bon is still in the hospital, she’s holding up fine, at first blush the proceedure was successful and she’ll be back online tomorrow… I reiterate. bon is good.

and there, my friends, ends the coverage of your regularly scheduled programming.

When we decided to take another walk down the road that never seems to follow any path that we expect were were a little… timid. Three tries: eleven starkly beautiful hours with our 2 pound warrior in 2005, 36 anxious weeks of waiting the O-man in 2006, and an early term miscarriage late last year. Not terrifyingly great odds when you add to the fact that I’d had two early miscarriages in my first real legal partnership.

One of the things that was obvious from the get-go was that this was going to be 40weeks + of … something. In saner moments I’ve wondered whether we really had enough left to go through the process. The waiting can be excrutiating, the potential for loss a pall over the days as they pass, the possibility of a 10 + week convalescence for bon in the same place where Finn’s short life was lived and where she spent 9 weeks with Oscar’s pregnancy. And she smiled, and we shrugged our shoulders and decided that it was worth it.

But nobody told me there’d be days like these

Two days actually. It all started yesterday, with dropping bon off at the hospital. She was going to be in for 2-3 days, and the O-man and I were going to get our chance to try out 2 full days chillin’ with each other. We could be doing it for ten this summer… so practice is nice. We’ve been staying at my sister’s place while she’s in Florida and it pretty much has everything that you could ever want to entertain a two year old. Plus, plus I say, that’s not all, oh no, plus we are in Halifax, which has much better shopping than our quaint little home town.

but then oscar got sick

For those of you familiar with bon’s literary jaunts here on the crib, you’ll realize that when the O-man gets sick, there’s about a 50/50 chance that it will necessitate a trip to emergency. But, no problem there, the emergency is in the same hospital that bon’s is staying in, no biggie. We muddle our way through the morning, the O and I, with only a seemingly short visit from

the home alarm installation team

They came by about 10:30am, we chatted, and they figured they’d be done by about 12:30pm… no promises the very effective man says, but we’ll do our best. So, they start out by doing all the installations in the room that O will be sleeping in and we head off to the grocery store.

which was a howling disaster of snot filled chaos

but we managed to get ourselves together and back to the home range in time for lunch… this is rarely a problem for O, and, true to type, he gobbles down the goodies i managed to grab while fending off the little coughing dervish. We head upstairs, he yowls a bit for mommy, for daddy, for the neighbours… but it’s with that tone that says he’s really not pleased with the whole jigger, but that he’s fine. and he drifted into a cough filled, semi-peaceful sleep

until they started testing the alarm bell

It seemed that due to some unforseen challenges they weren’t going to get done before about 2pm, thirty minutes after the alarm bell sounded and twenty nine minutes after the O explained in no uncertain terms that he was done his nap. All counted 45min - not enough for O. So we head to the hospital to bring bonnie her stuff… I had no one to send in the short term (lots of fine folks in halifax, but most of them work and the phone numbers and contact info for bon’s blogger friends are all in HER head, which i had no access to) So I arrived there and quaranteened the O man for an hour it took them to figure out where bonnie was going to be. We moved into her room to be, found she wasn’t there, got her phone hooked up, stuff unpacked, requisite chocolate and room warming present purchased and O entertained (barely) for another hour in our little room

and then they moved her

Pack everything back up, head up one floor and find bonnie… we had a pretty nice time actually, as I’d brought the computer and a video (thanks for the suggestion dad) and O watched richard scarey’s best abc ever while bon and I talk about how she’s feeling (crampy but good)… we had supper, and we went home… and home, well, we made it through. I try not to watch the clock on nights like that, but i watched the clock all the way to bedtime.

and oscar was up most of the night (not to mention the toast fiasco, apparently toasted spelt bread tastes like melba toast)

So we ‘woke’ up this morning and the little bugger is hitting the high point of his illness - and he’s really being a trooper about it, but he is ill and 2 - and tried to pull together some semblance of a morning… and I discover that I’m not really feeling well. Just kinda lethargic, which i pass off as a lack of reasonable food, sleep and stress. So we skim by the hospital, hand off some more food to bon to supplement the cinamen and sugar on white bread that she apparently doesn’t think qualifies as a nutritious breakfast (I ask you, who puts that on a menu). And we head home

to the sound of chainsaws ‘trimming’ trees in the park behind the house 

Amazingly, Oscar gets to sleep. And stays asleep. And I sit down with a banana and a beer… no joke, i figure enough food to count (it’s two fruit!) and enough of a sedative to get me to sleep. Or, potentially, to give me some kind of vicious food reaction. (not susceptable) So I crawl up onto the couch, manage to make to ill-runs to the bathroom before O wakes up…

and well… the day continued. There’s a part about almost fainting in the Subway, and curling up with Oscar while he patted my head, my father having heart fibrulations which meant they couldn’t come and a family member put into paliative care.

But that’s not what I broke into the blog talk about. 

Today, I got my parent badge. Barely able to stand, sore all over, I managed to feed and ‘entertain’ my child. It puts me into a long line, through thousands of years and millions of similar moments, of parents getting it done, of being tired, sick, starving… and finding enough in themselves to do what was necessary.

It wasn’t near the worst day of my life, but it was the day where i caught my own eye in the mirror the most. (minus, of course, my teens) I found myself looking into myself, muttering encouragement, finding clever solutions to getting O to stay in a room with a couch. I know there will be many more of these on the horizon,

but today, i know a little more about courage. watching O try to comfort me while he was sick, seeing bonnie in the bed desperate to find a way to make the day easier, and, inside me, something more fulfilling then the thousands of hockey/soccer/rugby games that I thought had tested my endurance.

I lurk, and find encouragement in all your voices, and am finding not just Oscar who is already wrapped into my life, but the ‘act’ of parenthood, swiftly becoming something that is very important to me.

first day of spring, and a holiday to boot. freezing rain. crocuses still nowhere to be seen on horizon.

on paper, twelve weeks today…though i suspect that auspicious jubilee won’t really roll around until Sunday or Monday, given what the ultrasounds have shown and my tendency towards longer cycles. silly, to be equivocating about a couple of days…but when you deliver preemies, accurate dating and even a few days extra gestation matter. or rather accurate dating and even a few days extra gestation can matter…they haven’t, in my own personal experience, but they can. so it’s more my doctors focusing on the discrepancy for the moment. my fingers are plugged deep in my ears, and i don’t really want to hear anybody.

maybe least of all myself.

i have been silent, absent. even in person, i find myself wanting to retreat, be left alone. Dave is living with a shell who repeats robotically, i’m tired, i’m hungry, i’m nauseous, shouldn’t that cat litter go out? i am unavailable, at any level below the surface. it’s not a lack of things to say, exactly, but a lack of things i want to say, want to hear myself saying, want to lay out on record. i remember now why i did not start this blog until just two weeks before Oscar was born…i’ve wondered, in the interim, why i hadn’t taken Dave’s suggestion months before, and blogged my way through all that bedrest? but now i remember. at some random point, i began to believe that O would really come to be…and only then was i able to construct any kind of coherent narrative to describe how i felt about him, about carrying him, about being pregnant again. until then, i felt like a balloon full with toxic waste and hope and love and fear and recoil all sloshing around together, and i never knew, if pricked, which would come pouring out.

and i am as reluctant to put my hope out there to be seen and made vulnerable, pitied, as i am to uncover the paranoia, the sludge, the scar tissue that puckers and pulls and mars my relationship to the whole concept of pregnancy.

i don’t want to hear myself when i wake at four in the morning, heart pounding, certain it’s over and this baby has died and that i will simply have to check myself into the psych ward this time because i just do not have the resources right now to adjust my sense of myself to accommodate loss and despair any further, as if that were something anyone could control or delimit by saying, um, no, no thanks, not now. and even more certain that even if i did turn myself, supplicant, on the mercy of the white coats, they cannot and will not help me there, that i will be left alone again, Humpty Dumpty, to put myself back together.

nor do i want to let my penchant for dates and seasons run away with me, and wax effusive about how the long season of advent and waiting after the miscarriage in November now culminates in my thus-far-safe arrival into something like a second trimester just at the beginning of spring, however much those treacly sentiments flit through my brain. they are there and in a sense most narratively pleasing, and yet they are false promise, all bedecked in Easter bonnets. they make me feel frivolous and foolish even for entertaining them. they make me rage at the blind innocence of the “out of the first trimester and you’re fine” discourse that makes those of us who bear its untruths into Medusas in a world where people are uncomfortable being reminded that 12 weeks is no guarantee of anything.

but oh, how i wish it were. just as i wish the snow would go, and it were really spring, and with the mud and the rains and the cruel rawness of April would come the promise of new life as sure as crocuses and the balloon man who whistles far and wee.

i want to know how to speak this. i am just waiting for the ashes in my mouth to turn to rich, red earth, waiting for time to tell. two more seasons, yet, to abide.

awhile back, Julia tagged me for the book meme, where you grab the nearest tome that happens to be lying about and post three sentences from page 123. it’s taken me some time to get around to actually honouring the tag, in part because the last couple of times i looked around all i could find to hand were books like Baby Duck and the Fuzzy Blanket, and Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever, neither of which can boast a page 123…but over the weekend i actually picked up a couple of the serious, heady pieces of non-fiction from our dusty bookshelf and started - gasp - reading. i’m not sure why i suddenly felt like i had the time, let alone the brainspace, to tackle scholarly fare…and i secretly suspect i don’t and have simply forgotten something very important that normally sucks up all my spare hours and i will shortly be catapulted back into the reality of my drudgery, but in the meantime, i’m reading.

what i’m reading - or at the nearest selection of what i’m reading, because i have a habit of starting three books at once and finishing none - is the Edward Said Reader. and page 123, specifically, in terms of the tag, comes from an - ahem - provocatively titled and controversial little essay called Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims, with the fifth sentence on the page reading:

“On the one hand, it is associated with debauched and paupered conquerors, an arena lent by the Turk to fighting beasts, a part of the despotic East: on the other, with “the brightness of Western freedom,” with nations like England and America, with the idea of neutrality (like Belgium).”

light stuff. of course, as i’m reading the essay entitled Orientalism and not the one above, at the moment, i can glean that what Said’s talking about above is Israel and the discourse surrounding it, but am uncertain about the era, the context. and wonder if perhaps i ought to have stuck with Baby Duck and the Fuzzy Blanket, at least for public consumption.
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the hangover, of course, of a weekend spent reading Said and Derrida in small interrupted increments, is that i cannot quite shake the pull to speak what cannot be tidily spoken, to inscribe it here and thus make space for it, give it shape in all its ambiguity.

the story happened three years ago, to the day. if i were making a conventional narrative, i suppose i would call it the beginning of the end. it foreshadowed tragedy, certainly…but i did not know it as tragedy at the time, was utterly oblivious, like the character in a silent movie who is unable to see the piano careening down from the fifth-floor window towards her head. it felt more like debacle in the moment, grandiose in its awfulness, but not tragic, not truly. later, i thought - and looked forward to reshaping it as - comedy. reclamation in humour. only when i discovered too late that it was not a part of my story but someone else’s, did it become too sad to ever speak of again.

when Dave and i moved home from Korea i was three months pregnant and it was January and there was a hiring freeze going on in government in my little economically-unimpressive hometown and so i took a lowly part-time job at the local university to get my foot in the door at a third the hourly rate i’d been accustomed to and started substitute teaching the rest of the time, taking all the calls i could. because in Canada, the government, bless it, offers a year of moderately-waged maternity leave to parents who have worked 600 hours in the year before their child is born, and i figured six months was more than enough time to get 600 hours in and pride be damned and i would make it happen. and so it came to pass that on a Wednesday morning, the 9th of March, i found myself (nineteen-week belly still half-hidden under an ugly polyester blazer that declared little about my maternal status but screamed “i’m pudgy”) staring down a class of rabid bears grade 10 French immersion students.

there is a trick to successful substitute teaching. it is, i imagine, a profession rather akin to that of the lion tamer, who must enter the den of the animals fearlessly, always fully believing in his or her own control…except that for the substitute, the illusion of control must be relinquished. power is what a substitute cultivates. not blind power, either, accorded by mere status…if you walk into a class of students expecting that you will be automatically treated as powerful, or attached to the idea of your own power, you will be eaten up and spit out and burped on before you ever get to the roll call. but if you can walk in with your own personal wattage turned up as high as it will go, and demand just by that presence a moment of the students’ attention, then you have a chance by which to establish real (momentary) power, if you offer respect and a fair exchange. eye contact helps. humour helps. sarcasm, if they’re old enough for it…though not unkindness. substitute teaching is above all else relational, and if you go in clear that you are, after all, the sub and not a doormat or a dragoon, most classes will allow you to be a reasonable version of your better teaching self.

but they can smell fear. and on March 9th, 2005, i was fearful, because the class i was teaching were not only the first class i’d had at this particular school, meaning that i had no reputation to precede me, but they were a French class. and i do not speak French. barely at all. Dave had actually gotten the call for this class but was already booked at another school - we were both subbing, then, an awful whirlwind of disconnected days as we tried desparately to get on our feet in a new country that we’d almost forgotten how to live in - so he’d handed the phone to me. i’d been clear with the teacher that i really didn’t speak French. he’d been clear that he had absolutely no one else to ask. Dave had had the class a month or so before and declared them a wild bunch, used to eating subs for breakfast. i was clear in my own mind that we needed the money and the hours towards my mat leave. and that was how, on that morning, i found myself in front of 30 sixteen-year olds trying to stand as tall as i possibly could.

it started well. i opened in rehearsed French, introducing myself, checking out the room, pausing, waiting for the inevitable parries and heckles of kids trying to exert a little control over the institution around them…then surprised them, switched into English, got them on board with the idea of it being a “translation” day and was actually riding a rising tide of what in adolescents counts almost as enthusiasm when it happened.

five minutes into a day teaching a language i don’t speak, standing directly in front of 30 teenagers with no desk or door within ten feet of me and with absolutely no warning, i felt a distinct, warm surge of wetness down my leg, like i had peed myself. not a gush, but no trickle either. enough that i knew my underwear were soaked and very possibly, visibly, my pants.

i did not look. my first instinct was to grab at my crotch in horror and prance to the door like it was grade 1 all over again and i’d just had an accident, but…my self-preservation instinct caught on to the fact that no students appeared - as of yet - to be staring at my nether regions and howling and pointing. so i stopped my fluttering hand as it crept to my ass and i pulled down my best teacher mask over what must have been my momentary look of horror and i kept on speaking and i stood there without moving, legs slightly apart like a boxer’s. and when i thought they had a reasonable understanding of the task they’d been set i asked if there were questions and then, as their heads dropped to work or stare or doodle, i verrrry slowly crab-walked the fifteen feet across the front of the room to the door and said i’d be in the office for a minute and backed out and ran like hell to find a bathroom in that utterly unfamiliar school.

and i thought, thank jesus i’m wearing black pants. and i thought, my god, isn’t it early to lose bladder control? and for a second i thought, could it be my water broke but it wasn’t that much, see, maybe a half-cup and no blood, no mucus, no nothing, and i thought i vaguely smelled pee and was mortified sitting there on that strange toilet, trying to wring out my panties so i could get back to class because i was still only eight minutes into what was looking like a very long day.

so back i went, to French class. i called my doctor’s office at recess but she was on call at the hospital and so they could only fit me in for the next day, unless anything further happened or it looked like an emergency, which, except for my pride, it didn’t.

and the next day i had a scheduled ultrasound in the morning and the tech was unconcerned and uncommunicative and apparently saw nothing wrong, and i saw my doctor in the afternoon and she was concerned but swabbed for fluid and found no sign of any, and so i swallowed my shame and the sheer awfulness of that moment in front of 30 kids, torn between childhood nightmares and very adult fears, and i accepted that my bladder must just have gone on me and decided, this is going to be a funny story someday and i was proud of myself, see, proud of myself for handling it and not running screaming from that room like a little girl and never going back.

and just for a minute, for the briefest span, i finally had it, the perfect narrative, the Most Embarassing Moment to beat all embarrassing moments, just suitably humiliating but due to the excuse-all of pregnancy utterly safe for work and with the perspective of distance, funny as hell, to be trucked out at all slightly drunken events with a “yeh, well, i peed myself flat out in front of an entire class of grade ten students in my first five minutes as a substitute teacher in a language i don’t even SPEAK!” and yep, i swear, it’s all true and i know, wouldn’t you just die?

except we were all wrong, the ultrasound tech most of all, and it was not my bladder but fluid after all, and that early loss of fluid was what compromised Finn’s lungs enough that even though he was plenty big to survive when he was born seven weeks later he did not, and that was, to me, a tragedy even if the start of it all felt like it had to be comedy because what else could it be, standing there wet-pantsed in front of all those staring eyes?

of course, they are a false dichotomy, tragedy and comedy, the seeds of the other always inherent in either.
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and it feels almost like sacrilege to even lay this story out here, a story whose narrative reads like it ought to have a punch line, and yet on a subject so sacrosanct, so recoiled from, that the discourse does not allow for funny stories. but i have no other way to tell you what day it is, how it marks the beginning of a fifty-day personal Lenten journey that does not end, my friends, in resurrection…at least not for the character whose voice the story silenced, the one i still miss, the one i bear witness to.

you can carry a baby for twenty-six weeks and laugh at all the wrong things and not know. and years later, maybe, you will mark the date and realize that there is no room in the language to say what you want to say. and maybe you say it anyway, because even if it is unspeakable, it is yours to tell and there is perhaps more harm in the silence.

i spent the morning today home with Oscar, a rare treat for us, his sitter off travelling, we two in the morning sunshine wandering to the thrift store for a serious pants-hunt (one pair of elastic-waist chinos, size 2T, check!) and to the coffee shop for some mother-son lollygagging and discussion of world events and trucks going by outside the window. O took to this grown-up social milestone like he’d been to the cafe born, and sat up on the chair as if he were about to expound on post-modernism or call for a revolution. he waved to every single person in the place and my heart puffed up dangerously and left me blinking back tears.

and then we visited the kittens at the pet store and walked home and i did exotic, housewifely things like vacuum and add soil to my long-suffering houseplants, and we tried exploring the wonders of Play-Doh for the very first time and all the while all i was trying desperately to keep my brain turned off, my internal monologue at a low thrum.

i do not have what, for want of a better term, one would call a maternal instinct. not that i am not maternal towards Oscar, licking his cowlicks back with spit and ever-nimble fingers…or even towards Finn, in the paltry ways available to me…but i lack a pregnancy maternal instinct, the one that enables people to just “have a feeling” that their baby is a boy or a girl or a turnip or what-have-you, the one that keeps them serene and calm and certain in their sense that everything is alright there inside the mystery of the uterus.

this is not entirely a side-effect of my history, either. even the first go-round, when all was innocent and fresh and i was shocked and delighted to find myself easily pregnant, i still had no sense about what was going on with the miracle of life inside me. bleeding bad, heartbeat good. in between evidence of either i existed mostly in the surreal in the early days of that pregnancy, a suspended state of hyper-awareness to what - when nausea was not having her way with me - felt mostly like not much at all, or at least nothing i knew how to interpret.

when one assumes that all this surreal nothing is likely to end okay, it’s still weird. my second go-round, with Oscar, i assumed only that pregnancy was a cruel, brutal joke bound to backfire on me at any minute, so it was weirder. i had no morning sickness to boot, so instead spent the first trimester grieving both Finn and what i continually assumed was the imminent loss of the clearly-nonviable second child i so longed for. only when i began to feel him kick did i begin to believe that he was even alive, no matter what the ultrasounds said. only when i brought him home did i truly, fully believe he was more than a figment i’d conjured from the proverbial broken heart.

with my third pregnancy, two years later, i’d done a lot of work to try to overcome that raw fear, that despair. i thought positively. i felt crappy, and rejoiced in what i assumed were signs that all was well. i was utter hubris; never saw it coming til it hit me square. i had a missed miscarriage.

so this time, freshly raw all over again, i am chastened, hapless. i trust neither my body nor my instincts to tell me if something is wrong. i know i am pregnant, i’m well aware of the myriad of symptoms riding bareback on my hormones, acutely conscious of each twinge, each surge of my gorge. but i have no faith that these symptoms mean anything. and hope? my hope is like this precious, skinless thing that cowers in the crook of me, shivering, waiting for the other shoe to drop and flatten it. some days i am brave enough to dress it in feathers…other days, i cannot even look at it, though i keep it close and warm and pretend i do not feel it shudder.

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they called me back to OB’s office Tuesday to re-do some swabs and talk about last week’s ultrasound. there are some things, they said, but they’re probably not a problem, they’re probably nothing to worry about…the techs here don’t do first-trimester ultrasounds as a rule, so they wrote these up as markers for early loss, as additional risk factors…but we talked to your perinatal in Halifax and she says they’re really quite common, no big deal likely, and you see her in only three weeks so, so long as you get that far we may find that both have resolved themselves by then in any case. you know, that or Dr. Google says they’re signs of chromosomal abnormality if they don’t resolve and they do increase your chances of just having that strong little heartbeat simply stop out of nowhere sometime over the next couple of weeks…but they’re pure flukes either way, unrelated to any of the other problems you’ve had so, um, all we can do is hope.

in the three days between then and now, when my bless-her-heart OB stayed after her shift at L&D so i could come out for another one of those under-the-table ultrasounds because my tilted uterus renders mere dopplers useless, all i wanted was to be living in another part of my life, a time when things are quiet and i have come to terms with whatever happens to me and this fool dream, when the brutality of acceptance is done and this thing with feathers does not hold so much of me vulnerable in its tiny hands.

the heartbeat was still there.

heartbeat good. no bleeding good. tealeaves foretell stress ahead.

i am thirty-six years old.

i have been now, actually, for almost two weeks.  the birthday was ushered in at the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds, art deco palace extraordinaire, with the queer early-morning wakefulness of jet lag.

off kilter and groggy, but curious about hotel lobbies and the  wet shadows of English streetscapes at 5:30 am, i went downstairs and had porridge.

oatmeal.  before dawn.  i am so totally ready for middle age.
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i was always the youngest in my group of friends, just a bit younger in times when age was measured in quarter-years rather than decades, a January baby in a province where the cut-off date for starting school demanded you be 5 by January 31st of your kindergarten year.  i was 5 on January 24th.  i was 17 when i graduated and moved away.

i always felt like i was running double fast just to get old enough to count, to do something interesting, to be heard.  to be worthy of being heard, to have enough life under my belt to stop being treated like an ingenue.  i never felt like an ingenue, not inside.  under the chipmunk cheeks that got me carded until i was 25, i was an old soul afraid i’d miss some corner of the human experience, trying to suck out all the marrow of life…right now.

funny, but after a couple of decades of marrow and human experience, some self-inflicted and some totally random, like train wrecks, i’m full up.  i am weary.  more raw than i like to admit.  sitting there on the morning of my birthday, sedately spooning up my porridge and looking back over my neglected but beloved journal as i dribbled cream all over the fancy linen tablecloth, i realized that if i could look ahead and see no more loss, no more despair, or grief, or desparation…only quiet, domestic pleasures and a unglamourous, undramatic life ahead of me for the rest of my days until i fade gently into that good night with my affairs all in place (and preferably a few grandchildren), oh my god i would be so fucking grateful.

i used to want to be a rock star.   i used to want to be older and more experienced.  i was young and stupid.

now, i’m thirty-six years old and terrified.  that there’s more.  i just want to hide under that linen tablecloth, with my live baby boy and my other blessings, and pray to all that’s holy and unholy for Passover.

we leave tomorrow for five days, off to Blighty for work, both of us. without Oscar.

i am excited - any chance to travel is cool by me, especially to historic parts of Britain previously unvisited by my Anglophilish self. even if they do make me work while i’m there.

while we took Oscar with us when we went to England last spring, i’m not entirely sorry he won’t be accompanying us this time around. the flying wasn’t a gay old time, to say the least. i also wasn’t working on that sojourn, just tagging along on long-saved airmiles so O and i could wander the streets of London with our transplanted friend Elise, which was grand. that first trip, though, planted seeds that have recently blossomed into this work trip, and since i’m officially part of the work bit this time around, the whole deal would probably be somewhat less effective and productive with the charming ankle-biter along. i’m still a little amazed (um, read, frantically ill-prepared) about this journey really happening…certainly two trips in a year to England is the sort of thing i fantasized about throughout a childhood when i very literally never went anywhere.

but i have these monsters that live deep in the cellars of my heart. i keep them muzzled most of the time, but the upcoming trip has unleashed their voices. weak voices, but shrill, insistent. they’re nothing special, i assume, these monsters, nothing that any of you who aren’t parents or even just children of parents yourself wouldn’t recognize. and they’re tamer than many…but they scare me. i don’t worry about my boy in the loving, generous care of his grandparents while we’re gone…in that i am blessed. but i fear planes falling out of the sky. i fear terrible, random horrors.

i fear not coming back.

i cringe in shame at the half-finished will kit in our desk drawer, given up because the complications of trying to sort out the proper language for bestowing custodial rights to others on our own. i kick myself for not having made that lawyer’s appointment to clarify precisely those things, now that it is too late to do so. mostly i stick my head in the sand and mutter the quiet litany of “we’ll be back soon, love” over and over in my semi-conscious, willing it to be true because really, the stark truth is that Dave & i want to be here to love and raise our child and we’ve been too chicken to contemplate any other possibility in all its naked, monstrous ugliness.

and yet, you can’t hide from living because there are monsters under your bed, or in your heart. it is as true now as it was when i was six.

in her less touristy and far more courageous way, Whymommy has been staring down those same monsters over the last seven months, since her diagnosis of inflammatory breast cancer in June. she’s been fierce with them and their terrible whispers of weakness and statistics. she’s looked them straight in the eye through months of chemo and nausea and pain, and refused to look away. she’s been fierce because she too is unwilling to contemplate any other possibility than being here to see her two little boys grow up.

tomorrow, while we drag our bags to the airport, Whymommy goes to the hospital for a double mastectomy. she has spent nearly the last three weeks counting down to this surgery…day by day, staring the monsters straight in the eye and telling us all why she’s looking forward to an event that in itself would scare the living bejesus out of most of us…and many, many of her reasons come down to two primary, precious things: her boys.

i wish you godspeed in healing, Whymommy, friend, and the continued strength to keep fighting. with each day, you not only beat cancer, but doubt and fear.  and i thank you, for your fierce hope, your reminders these last many days of all the things that make a life rich and joyful and worth living.  for the grace and honesty you’ve shown us all as you face the monsters down.

may Sunday bring us both safely home to the boys we love.

it’s been three years.

three years since we got up at 5 am on a frosty morning and rushed by cab to the bus station and then across the street to the other bus station, dragging luggage like a wedding train, because we could never remember which place sold the Express Bus tickets. and then i found out that the Express Bus was sold out and was flabbergasted because it was 5 in the bloody morning and i’d never seen an Express Bus sold out but hey, there was a tour group and all my righteous indignation wasn’t going nowhere. so we caught another cab to the train station, Plan B…you lugging the bags and stuffing them in and out, bless you, and then you put me on the train bound for Seoul and by transfer to Incheon airport and i made it in time and changed plans at Narita outside Tokyo and then Vancouver, i think, or Toronto, and diverted to Montreal in a snowstorm and all the while i had an ultrasound photo stuffed in my passport just in case the opportunity arose to show it off and maybe get myself bumped up to a seat that reclined - hey, i’m pregnant, you know, and isn’t that special and just out of my first trimester, this trip is 36 hours door-to-door and getting longer all the time, any chance of an extra blanket and getting my pillow plumped? - and i was moving home, coming home, prodigal returns and kill the fatted calf.

my mother came out in that snowstorm by cab at 1 in the morning just to make sure i had someone to meet me. i had been gone almost sixteen years.

but i was coming home to make good and i had sent so many resumes on ahead and you would follow two weeks later when your contract got tied up and we were going to have a baby, a baby, a baby finally, and for the first time in my life i felt like i’d made choices rather than just being buoyed about by opportunity or lack thereof and i was so goddam happy and filled with possibility and grateful that you were willing to risk this small, insular place, this place where you’ll always be “from away” even though “away” is a four hour drive, in your case, and not really so foreign. and i woke up that first morning on the hide-a-bed in my mother’s apartment to a world that was snow white and blanketed three feet deep and i felt young again, surrounded by the childhood things of home, and safe.

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it has been three years, and you made it but so much else didn’t that i thought for a long time we’d drown in the water under the bridge. and yet here we are, still here, with this house and that blond boy upstairs sleeping and tonight it is snowing again. and i am happy and filled with possibility again and grateful just to have you with me, the two of you…father and son.

but the memory of that morning is like a snapshot i revisit every year, when its anniversary comes up…when i remember all that hope, that fleeting glimpse of a simple, steady life, for a second, for a season. and i wonder who the girl in that picture was and why i feel so dead inside when i try to look at her, to imagine being her again, on that first morning. it is her naivete that i find so incomprehensible, an affront to my eyes. i can see her glee and her relief and her tentative sense that surely if we just put our minds to it and work and endure, from here, it will come together, because we’ve got the important things in place, you see.

and i do not know if it is her that i feel so sorry for, knowing how the pages of that story unfold…her or me…who will never feel safe like that again.

we have stayed longer than i ever thought we would. we are peaceful here, i think, for now. nothing has been as i’d thought it would be…and yet, i am glad we came. and i would not go back to that morning for anything. i cannot imagine what it would be like to live in that time, anymore, everything open and possible still.

i’m always surprised, startled even, by the occasional intersection of my own small part of the planet with The Big World, with fame or notoriety or the evening news. i remember struggling, as a kid, to truly grasp the idea that people far, far away read Anne of Green Gables and actually took it seriously, thought of it as a good book. not because i didn’t - at that age the only judgement i had for Anne was sycophantic, heart-singing adoration - but because it’s set on little old PEI, the mundane backwater setting for my own, erm, slightly less poignantly uplifting story. i knew i thought the world of Anne and her impish, earnest shenanigans. i just couldn’t believe anybody else - out there, you know, in the real world - had actually heard of her.

i’ve been in a bit of the same state of shock this past couple of days, as every time i turn on the radio CBC news tells me again, on national broadcasts, about the tragedy in Bathurst, New Brunswick this past weekend. those of you outside Canadian borders may not have heard…late Friday night, on the way back home from a basketball game, a van of high school basketball players and their coach and family hit some ice on the highway and slid straight into the path of an oncoming tractor trailer. seven of the players are dead. so is the coach’s wife, who was a teacher at the school. the coach, who was driving, survived, along with his daughter and two players, so far as i can make out. they were nearly home, minutes from the exit that would have seen them safely off the highway.

it is a terrible story, and of pretty epic proportions, though i’m still shocked to see it at the top of Newsworld every hour. this is a part of the country that tends to get rather minimal news coverage outside of our own insular regional broadcasting, and doesn’t factor much in the national picture other Canadians seem to carry in their heads. when i lived in Vancouver, briefly, at twenty-two, desperately homesick, i took up daytime smoking mostly to have reason to congregate outside with the other smokers at the market where i worked, and at least twice heard people say they were from “out east” only to have my pitiful crows of “oh my god, really!?! i’m from PEI!” met with raised eyebrows and the blase comeback, “i’m from Guelph.”

Guelph is two hours from Toronto. in the middle of the country. but people seem to forget we’re out here.

i first heard about the accident early Saturday morning, before the details had even come in about where it had occurred, only that a van of high school athletes had crashed on the way back from some game and there had been multiple deaths. and i was struck, teacher as i once was, with what a shock wave this would send over the school, whatever school it might be. i had visions of adolescent grief and mourning that made me cringe against the rawness, the open wound of it all. one of the schools i work with here on the Island just went through its own heartbreaking accident a week ago, with one student killed and others hurt, still in recovery, and i know that entire community is still struggling to assimilate the reality. having the fabric of things torn open by death is a weird kind of shock at any age, but in adolescence there’s a particular vulnerability and confusion and instinct for the grandiose that makes it especially cruel. high school is bad enough without death.

i am not an adolescent anymore, at least on my better days. i’ve been up close to death and having the fabric of things torn open a few times now, and though the shock always takes me out at the knees, i like to think i’ve gotten beyond my base, juvenile instinct for making more of it than i have right to…and particularly for connecting myself, maudlin-like, to sorrow that is not my own.

yet the sorrow of the Bathurst High School boys’ basketball team has been living in my house the past few days. tears well in my eyes whenever i hear yet another story about it, and along with the disbelief that this has really made the national news and that the Prime Minister may attend the funerals on Wednesday, is something else there…something very personal, though ephemeral. i am not grieving those boys exactly, or the teacher who died, much as i have seen their names and faces now and looked, hard. i am in grief over proximity. i am grieving, for once, having been passed over…the exultant, fearful sorrow of those who, if destruction comes close, expect that something will smite them over the head, and are left shaken when it doesn’t. i am grieving the twenty-years-hence that will never happen for those boys.

because Dave went to Bathurst High School. he graduated as Male Athlete of the Year. he spent his high school years in those vans, on those roads, with that same poor surviving soul for a coach. there’s a Bathurst Phantoms rugby tshirt, almost a rag, still in our bureau. he still has his red and black hockey jacket, though it lives down at his parents’ cottage, a castoff brought out only on cold summer nights. the glory of the high school athlete was something he didn’t find hard to leave behind, i don’t think, and yet it is a part of him i barely know, hardly recognize, because i was so not an athlete and so not an athlete’s kind of girl that it isn’t a topic of conversation that, erm, comes up often.

but he wrote a post yesterday, trying to clear out some of the weight, to bear witness. Dave’s older brother, Stephen, died suddenly at 22 the week after Dave started high school at BHS. Dave wasn’t quite 15. he’d just made the hockey team, been given Stephen’s old number. he never got to tell him. and it was in those team vans, crowded, with tunes playing, pinging everywhere across the province late at night no matter the road conditions, that Dave found his way through the loss of his brother, found his feet despite that gaping hole. i think the vans were a kind of sanctuary for him, in those high school years that are hard enough in the first place.

and i think in my tears each time i hear about the Bathurst Phantoms are guilt and thanks, in the shock of proximity, that he made it through safe and largely unharmed, to me, this man now so far removed from the boy he was.

and my tears are sorrow, too, for those boys who will never get to find their way past high school to the maybe someones who might have loved them, chosen them, raised children with them, and looked at their old treasures in the closet and said, “oh yeh? did you use to play basketball?”

i am shocked, you see, that you might have heard of them, these boys from the little town of Bathurst, population 16,000ish. because to me they are all just Daves, in other incarnations.

stop pushing me.

remember what i said awhile back about mudita? about not being a callow, vindictive snark embittered by the poison of schadenfreude? that i wouldn’t bristle with childish “why can’t that be me?” whinging the next time some talentless, hard-living celebridee twit popped out a perfectly healthy baby in the glare of every grocery store aisle in North America? that i wouldn’t allow myself to wonder why i can’t get dealt fame, fortune, or a plain old healthy pregnancy? that i’d take the high road, be a better person, release good karma and fluffy bunnies into the world out my bum, and all that?

i did my best, world. i tried hard. even after the miscarriage, i kept trucking, kept my head up, kept trying to be decent.

even in the midst of all the Britney Spears new baby rumours, i went blithely along, gritting my teeth shouting “lalala i can’t hear you!” inside my head very loudly. this was the best i could summon for Ms. Trainwreck, whom i’ve despised ever since that “I’m not a Girl, Not yet a Woman” tripe descended upon all that was holy and tasteful and remotely empowered about womanhood.  my contempt - at first merely artistic - became heightened and more personal when i exited the maternity ward with my dead firstborn right around the time Brit announced her documented-Starbucks-by-every-freaking-Starbucks first pregnancy.

i’ve bitten my tongue on all the snide remarks that’ve tried to escape my head.  i won’t try to explain what it’s like to be literally bombarded with images of the uber-klassy Brit visibly procreating like a gerbil (and parenting like one, for that matter) when you yourself are awash in the shock and grief of losing a child.  or two.  or not being able to have one in the first place.  if you get it, well…you get it.  if you don’t, just thank your lucky stars and, um, go carolling or something.

but now all bets are off.

Britney Spears may or may not be pregnant again…only her stylist knows for sure, apparently. or her manager.  or whoever it is that’s this week’s Flavour of the Month.  and i’ve managed not to care, not to feel persecuted by the fact that she can apparently have perfectly healthy pregnancies while i can’t.  i’m winning that battle with myself.  but her sixteen year old sister, the one with the, ahem, Nickelodeon show? yep. up ye olde spout.

with, apparently, the due date i would’ve had.

universe, that’s just cold.

such a magical time of year, this.   perhaps i could send the Spears family a little holiday card?  reading “dear Spears sisters.  fuck mudita.  please stop procreating?”

fa la la la la, blah blah blah blah.