cribchronicles.com

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.

i had to drive today, for work, an hour westward and back in the sparkling cold of a sunny December morning.

i forget that i live on a beautiful piece of earth. i live my life these days between my house and the sitter’s house and the campus i work on, with occasional forays to the grocery store and other such exotica. i stay within the city bounds, quaint little slush-bound urbanite that i like to imagine myself, and forget that on a crisp winter morning there are snow-covered fields only twenty minutes away, and stands of pine with pillows of white blown onto them, rail fences breaking the winter sweep of rolling hills into perfect, shining patchwork.

i forget that i live in a frigging Christmas card.

the change of scenery made me draw my breath in, hard, and open up my eyes despite the glare from the snow.

i have been antsy the past few days, unsettled at my core in a way i haven’t felt in years, the familiar ache of wanderlust and anywhere but here washing over me, taking me out at the knees. i sat at work yesterday afternoon, the mail server down and thus me temporarily semi-incapacitated, and langourously browsed the facebook photos of friends in other places, full of longing for elsewhere, for the other lives that i could be living right now. that longing was once my status quo but it scared the living shit out of me to find it again, just under my breastbone, alive and well, singing its siren song of discontent and disdain and pain that can be outrun.

and yet it was freeing, like a fleeting full circle, to find the ghost of that longing, too. because it was once so much a part of who i was that i thought it would never stop dogging me, that it was as much a part of me as my scars, my tattoo, my laugh. maybe it is, in the sense that it seems to be my default setting. but i have moved beyond it, since i chose this place to come back to almost three years ago, this pretty, secretive, insular place i finally accepted as my home. i learned, years after i left and tramped around forever looking for the Place that would Make Me Happy, that discontent can find you anywhere and every place is worthy of its own special brand of disdain, and most important, pain can never be outdistanced… but can be survived, if one abides. i have not tried to run away in a long, long time. i had forgotten, almost, what it felt like to be in constant readiness for flight…and i didn’t enjoy the reminder, though it brought its own adrenalin to the party, and that was kinda fun, for a minute. it is not elsewhere i was seeking, really….not all those years, not yesterday.

i am learning, always anew, that it is that sense of coming through the other side that i am longing for.

so i abide, tempting though it may be in moments of December slush and the crush of seasonal ridiculousness to run off to Thailand and start a whole new career as a lounge singer.

i am lying fallow, these days, like the land beneath the snow in those fields. i move towards the darkest evening of the year and watch the woods fill up with snow, and am quiet and still, abiding.

but not oblivious to the beauty, even of this place that is not elsewhere and this sadness i cannot yet escape.

right on cue, straight from December’s central casting, we had snow today, making the leftover pumpkin in my back porch look suddenly very out of place indeed. winter has begun.

it is the beginning of the dark season, of the advent creep through the darkness - through the wonderful, bare-bones nadir of solstice - back to light. it is a season of hibernation and turning inward…and, old carry over from a semi-religious childhood, of counting the December days off, one by one, enduring the wait ’til Christmas, ’til all the candles can be lit again.

lying awake in bed last night, unable to sleep for hormonal nosedive of sudden post-pregnancy, i smiled, wryly. i realized that - for once - i’ve got impeccable timing. the symbolism of the Christian advent - the hope of a child, a second coming - does not escape me. because this coming month will be cold-molasses slow…i can see that already, one day in. i am all aflurry, urgent, heart unwilling to accept the do not pass Go - return to start card crumpled in my hand. when i sleep i dream of babies floating by, slipping from my grasp. i waken, stricken, compelled. i fantasize about twins, like a crazy woman. waiting this month out, aching to start again, to leap back on the hamster wheel of hope, will be almost as agonizing as waiting for Christmas that year i was six and had my whole heart set on the magical wonderland of the Weeble Haunted House. almost.

and i know this is normal. i am resigned to a little crazy with my fruitcake over the next few weeks, in the eternity of waiting for things to settle, for a cycle to establish itself, for my body to do what it needs to in order to heal. and i hope in the process there will be some letting go, some lessening of the urgency. but in the meantime i will count out the days of December, like a child with an advent calendar of chocolate, walking out the long wait with good company and the comfort of treats. because treats, in our house, are a big deal…as you can see.

it seems only fitting to finish this on a Friday, but i do not have the heart for haiku.

there is no good news, my friends.  the sac is still too small, and shows little growth over the past eight days.  there is no fetal pole, no heartbeat…which given that the positive pregnancy test came nearly five weeks ago, is conclusive.

there will be no June baby.

after work tonight, after dinner and cake, i will take a bunch of pills that sit on my sideboard taped to a sticky note, and see if i can’t avoid surgery.  because my history labels me as having an incompetent cervix - which is completed unrelated to the current state of affairs but particularly unfortunate given the fact that missed miscarriages have the lowest likelihood of passing effectively on their own - a d&c is to be avoided if  possible.

if possible feels like just another shoe, waiting to drop.

it is Dave’s birthday.  i bought him Blood on the Tracks, prescient enough…but don’t quite know how to wrap this particular bitter gift, this ending.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

thank you, to all of you, who’ve waited with us and sent love through the tiny eternity of this past week.  i know there is never anything to say.  and yet, so you know, it is heartening to hear your voices, nonetheless.

so, anybody ’round these parts friends with, um, Tom Cruise & Katie & their fun Scientology crew?

’cause if you’d like to theft their much-reported personal ultrasound machine and bring it on over to my house, that would be really, like, cool.

i saw my doctor today. my blood hcg levels are rising appropriately, apparently, so that means that either there’s a baby in there that last week’s ultrasound missed, or that nobody’s filled my poor body in on what’s really going on. totally inconclusive. and because we live in a city (or rather, a glorified hamlet) where the six OBs all share one clinic but have absolutely zero ultrasound equipment at said clinic, i have to wait until the overloaded, overstressed diagnostic imaging department at the local hospital - who do every x-ray, CATscan, MRI, and ultrasound for every medical condition within a fifty-mile radius - get around to fitting me back in. maybe tomorrow.  maybe two weeks from now.  sweet merciful jesus, the waiting. i don’t know who has the mental stability this waiting demands. i don’t…i’m eroded and drained and cycling through the stages of despair in ever shorter circles, like a poodle chasing its tail.

and yet, i couldn’t title this post “the sixth circle of hell”…i tried, and changed it. because there’s still this shred of hope. and it’s excruciating even to contemplate, and feels mostly like a nasty trick i’m trying to keep juggled up in the air along with all the lead weights just waiting - aching - to fall on my head. but it’s there, waving its eager hand in the air while i try desperately to master the mysterious art of non-attachment. and i’m trying to look at it as good, that hope.  i remember realizing with surprise, after Finn died, that the not knowing that had been so torturous during the long weeks of bedrest with that failing pregnancy was not nearly so terrible as having to confront the finality of knowing, in the end.

i do not think it would be quite that way again, this time. but still, i’m trying to let hope linger around and not kick it to the curb prematurely. trying.

but if anybody wants to FedEx me that Tomkitten ultrasound machine thingy, only slightly used…that would be most kind.

when one is in the midst of a torturous limbo, it is very helpful to have a toddler around.

with a toddler around, it’s difficult to slip entirely into the doldrums. not only are there beams and giggles to buoy one up, but also the adrenalin of constant demands that threaten to escalate into disaster: one’s toddler may at any moment morph into a raging hippopotamus if one is not on one’s guard for signs of impending recalcitrance. this keeps one busy. as does the constant rampage of activity that doesn’t leave an excess of time for thought of any sort, let alone the melancholy kind. and the headbutts - a reliable and loving source of maniacal toddler laughter - that must be neatly dodged if one wishes to escape concussion…they’re good too.
basically, Oscar is a comfort to me. an exhausting comfort, but a comfort nonetheless.

however, he’s not a great listener.

i don’t mean in the “please put your shoes over there, Oscar” sort of way. he’s pretty entertained by the praise he gets for compliance with these little locational requests, so he listens, and beetles around, placing objects in their respective spots. and we clap. we’re either teaching orderliness or an unhealthy reliance on external motivations…yay for parenting by guesswork! at least the closets are tidy.

it’s in the deeper realm of heart-to-heart communications that O’s skills seem…off. i hold him tight before bed these nights, breathing in his downy head, and i tell him, low and soft, how much his mama loves him. and he kicks me, hard. or i pet him gently, rocking, while he shouts “baaaaaaa!” with the intensity of a rugby captain. i get the feeling we’re out of sync, my boy and i, in the give and take of our conversations. and it’s not just him. the other day, he gazed into my eyes with grave seriousness and pronounced, “ma ba guh weewa papap oooo.”

and i thought, erm, yes dear. was that “the cat is orange, mama”, or “i have existential angst about my place in the world”? ’cause, y’know, they maybe warrant a different response, just possibly. but me? clueless.

clearly, i do not speak toddler.

communicating with Oscar these days reminds me of my early days abroad, in whatever country i happened to be in at a given time, since i spoke the local language of, erm, not a single place i ever went. (except Scotland. but i didn’t understand them either). rather, i spent most of my life as an expat engaged in the exaggerated and poorly paid art of mime, at which i came to believe i excelled. whenever i wanted something whose name was not in my minimal vocabulary, why, i did not fear, oh no. i stepped boldly over the threshold of whatever nearby establishment seemed most likely to be related to my need, armed with a smile, and began to gesticulate wildly and frantically to the poor soul behind the counter. drinks and smokes and stationery? no problem. bus tickets? all good. toilet paper? sometimes a little more embarrassing to act out…especially for the third time in a row, when one’s confused - or bemused - charades partner keeps directing one off to the toilets (which, outside North America, seldom come with built-in wiping materials) rather than ponying up the paper goods to bring to said toilets. when i first found myself pregnant with Finn, in Korea, requesting “pregnancy test” from the lady at the local pharmacy turned out to be a passion play that involved half the neighbourhood and may have left one older gentleman scarred for life by that brazen foreign hussy and her penchant for peeing on babies.

these exchanges, always, were earnest and intense, peppered by basic words in two languages, but often completely at cross-purposes.

which is, i think, what’s happening with O and i. we don’t share the same language, right now. we share an understanding of simple nouns, in English, and if we keep our conversations confined to that subject matter then we can chat along like a house on fire. but whenever we get past basic requests for water or a kiss, observations of “a bird!” or “a plane!”, we struggle. we are like citizens of different countries, thrown together in the same house, each trying desperately to comprehend why the other acts so bizarrely, and figure out what s/he wants. and we flap our arms, or wheedle and cajole, or grin and babble and throw tantrums, all in the name, i think, of that very basic human desire: to be understood.

and even if he can’t fully understand me, he’s already doing exactly what i want and need…my small, funny, semi-foreign son, reminding me - no matter what - that not all is lost.

ultrasound today
inconclusive she said, but
her eyes spoke sorrow

two sacs, too small, one
just a dot; one a silent
mysterious well

the dates are certain
ides of November, mocking.
et tu, little wish?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
we wait now for blood tests, and a followup ultrasound.  but i saw that screen, and i know that better news is unlikely.

it feels a little cruel that i am still tender and swollen.  it feels a little cruel that this is the first pregnancy i’ve had no early bleeding in.  it feels a little cruel that there is still a tiny shred of hope that i can only sit with, neither nurturing it nor crushing it completely…just waiting.

a part of me wishes we’d told nobody, and i could hide myself away under blankets to lick my wounds, my bitter disappointment, my sadness, my impatience to just have things hurry up already…but then, we waited to tell, with Finn, and the guarantees of safety failed.  waited with Oscar, so sure i was that the sky would fall at any moment.  with my history, “safe” means seven months pregnant.  i console myself, had i gotten that far along, somebody would have guessed.

and i wonder, if this is really happening, when my body is likely to catch on?

i’ve never said it aloud, so it comes out halting, lurching from me the way old ketchup blobbed from the glass bottles of my childhood.

i don’t know where i think they are, our sons, their souls. i look for Finn, now, but i can sometimes barely feel him, like the connection is weak or i just don’t know how and i feel so…so…discombobulated. like if all i ever get of him is his spirit, some sense of him, that’s okay, it’s okay with me, i can accept that, now…but i don’t. i don’t feel him. and i worry that he’s alone, a baby needing his mother, and i can’t find him.

blurp. or maybe it didn’t come out like that; the words were different, but the shame and the emptiness squeaked out all the same, the wall that unbelief and grief and healing built exposed, me naked for a moment.

she lifted her blond head in the dark room and said whenever i think of him i assume it’s him speaking to me.

and the wall crumpled.

i’ve spent a lot of my life constructing and cobbling together my own coping mechanisms, my own metaphysic, my own personal Jesus or lack thereof. i’m okay with cherry picking a particular piece of comfort to steep with my cynicism, have no qualms actively trying to construct a view of death that involves no angels nor meant-to-bes, but does not entirely cut me off, either, from the child who was my firstborn. i want to believe…but i’m fussy.

and while i’m not sure i will ever be wholly sure in the conviction that every time Finn crosses my mind some part of him stronger than his body has reached out to me…the notion itself will help me nonetheless. allow me to continue to heal without clinging to the immediacy of grief in favour of that bleak nothingness that threatens to swallow all the love i still have for my child. the notion gives me a way to offer tenderness to the idea of him, to reach back. if there truly is nothing there, then i will spend long moments of my life in a dance with myself, i suppose, smiling into the ether, blinking full at heart at unfeeling molecules of air. and when the end comes, i’ll smile ruefully, staring at the worms. but without regret. because that fostering of love will have made me better.

thank you, Kate…for planting that seed. i don’t know if anyone else could have.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
she blew in on a Remembrance Day rainstorm, with a sleeping bundle in his carseat and a flurry of brightly coloured cottons, all stripes and patterns and imprints and smiles…graceful, she is; poised and frank at the same time, at ease and funny and generous and searching. sweet, and with the tears still fresh on her. aptly named.

i couldn’t believe she actually came.

i couldn’t believe she hadn’t been here all along.

she came bearing presents for Oscar, generous with funky leggings and a metal Neville engine that marks the beginnings of The Train Age, and he was appropriately taken with her but smitten, i think, totally and wholeheartedly with wee Ben. beautiful Ben, who smiles more directly and with more joy than any baby i’ve ever seen. bright Ben, who started life even smaller than Finn did…who has come so far. twelve pound Ben, who slept snuffling in my arms for hours on the couch while his mother and i sat up talking, reminding my numb forearms of all that i hope is ahead for us again and making me think how lovely it’ll be. Oscar thought Ben was a doll come to life, and even though my boy spent the morning cranky and enamoured of his new high-pitched scream, he still touched the baby ever so gently with his big toddler mitts, still looked for him long after they’d left, wandering the house with a plaintive “baybay? baybay?”

they were beautiful together, our boys.

and somewhere in the long trail of conversation that got started at a comfortable, solicitous pace and tumbled out of us late into the night, the happy and the sorrowful and the bloggy and the gossipy and the motherly, all easy, i realized why this very first meeting with someone whose gift as a wordsmith awes me was so oddly natural: there was nothing we had to say that frightened each other. no space either had to back away from as too sad, or as shocking, or too weighty for the fragility of a conversation between tentative new friends. i do not know anyone else, in real life, who has lost a child, held him while he died, leastways not in the same hospital, both boys born months before a shared due date two years apart. that in itself…that would probably be enough for communion, for the sense of sisterhood that crept over me like an old forgotten remnant, a familiar garment left behind after college nights spent cultivating closenesses and bonds that time and living have not entirely frayed, but mostly.

but it was also that the stories were already unfolded. that i knew the outlines of them from posts i clicked through to frantically in May and June, sometimes with tears in my eyes, that i read now for pleasure or a laugh or just the taste of good writing when the work day grows dull and blurry. i knew this person already. i have never met a fellow blogger, either, before now. and i think our plans for these constructs of ours, these private public spaces for our own souls to get worked into words and therefore some kind of reality, took up nearly as much of our conversation as did our children, and our griefs, and our partners, and our lives.

i forgot to ask her a lot of things i wanted to know, though. she will have to come back. or we will go to her.

soon, i hope.

so despite my Biblical level of whining and all the righteous lamentations (your contributions and commiserations greatly appreciated)…yesterday turned out not really so terrible.

apparently if we let the little crying creature peep it out a bit during this weekend nap transition, he will manage to put himself back down for another forty-five minute sleep cycle. which weird though it is to be back to those punctuated naps of infancy, is still another forty-five minutes for his mother to rest her lazy carcass on the couch and eat bonbons.  or actually work, since my bonbon supply was really and truly worn down to the peanuts this weekend, alas.  but still, there was couch-sitting to be had.

so, huh.  my child does not have the sense of humour of a cranky jackal, after all.

the time change didn’t go too terribly badly, either. O slept until 5:30 am new time this morning, which would have been 6:30 am old time and really quite impressively late for him (sigh). and hell, it was his father’s morning to get up with him anyway.

hurricane Noel seems to have passed through our region without major mayhem…except for the swaths of Nova Scotia who expect to be without power ’til Tuesday, of course.  but moi?  fully lighted, safe and warm, thank you very much.

and i found a new detergent that may keep my Fuzzi Bunz absorbent and effective in future.  will keep you posted.

ultimate conclusion?  apparently i’m actually NOT being punished by the universe.

this is always slightly embarrassing to realize.  i puff up in indignance, recognizing the inflatedness of my complaints, the reality of my good fortune.  why am i NOT being punished by the universe, anyway?  i had a FINE litany of grievances!  i’m worthy of being singled out for the trials of Job (new, lite version)…i have it rough, really i do.  see these bags under my eyes?  just you DARE tell me i’m lucky!

but i am.

i feel ashamed of myself, you see, with these posts of vitriol and complaint that leak out of me now and then. oh, my child wakes up too early! oh, my offspring gets sick and spoils all my vacation plans! oh, there might be chickenpox/measles/bubonic plague at daycare!  oh, this porridge is too hot!  and i wonder if you mutter to yourselves, suck it up, Buttercup. i wonder, with more concern, if you think i’m a shallow, whiny, twit…and if i’m acting like one.  because my laments are petty, i know that. i know that no matter how much i may feel i’ve woken up on the unjust side of the bed, millions would give their teeth to have it as bad as me, with my pile of nibbled, rejected chocolate-covered peanuts.

and yet every now and then i’m reminded that it’s actually a good sign - relatively - that i can get all caught up again in the tragedia minutiae of my life.  because it means, overall, that i’m mostly managing to feel not very persecuted at all.

for a long time, i did.  for months really, after Finn died, when i was lost on the sea of looking for work when i should have been home with my baby, of fighting a bill for an medical airlift i’d been assured would be covered, of having to go into the stores we’d ordered paint and flooring from for our new house, our first house, and wince my way through the “congratulations! the baby must be here!” conversations and then the shocked silence and that feeling like i must have left my skin at home, of walking past pregnant women whose big, round bellies were sharp as tacks…all those months, i felt quite persecuted.  the burden of grief weighed more than i knew how to carry, especially socially.  i did not know anyone else to whom anything like this had ever happened - my friends were either childless or in the midst of a joyous, uncomplicated baby boom.  and any time i tried to talk my way through it, to begin to unload even a little of the bafflement and rawness i felt, the wounds became doubly sharp.  because people told me about angels.  told me life doesn’t give us more than we can handle.  told me it was probably for the best, and he might have been seriously handicapped. told me all sorts of crap that i assumed was meant to make them feel better, ’cause it seriously did fuck-all for me.  except make me feel like most of them just wished the conversation would go away, because it was so damn painful, and awkward.  we’d hit the wall of platitudes before i’d said  much of anything, at all.  so i said as little as possible.

but alone, or with Dave, late at night, smoking furiously in our shed, trying desperately to act on my appetite for destruction and fury whilst causing as little actual harm as i could get away with, i wailed.  i lamented our persecution.  and i wished it were them, those sunny people with their cliches who seemingly never had to adjust their expectations for anything.  i didn’t really want it to be anyone, in truth, not really, not much…i just wanted it not to be me.  i wanted not to be living a constant, months-long moment of “let this cup pass from me.”  i wanted it not to be real.

what i didn’t realize was that i was as impossible as they were, then.  and that even those brave few who had the courage to ask about Finn and really try to listen, who waded through our self-censored narratives and pushed for more, really couldn’t have done anything right.  because there was nothing anyone could have said that would have helped me outrun that pain, that grief.  it was mine, for no reason except that it landed on me by an accident of Finn’s birth.  it was no great judgement on me, either of fault or strength.  but nearly every single thing another person said about it, beyond the simple comfort of “i’m so sorry,” felt like a rebuke.

i remembered all this when i happened upon a post by Whymommy, today.  Whymommy has cancer, inflammatory breast cancer (which you do not need a lump to have!), and she’s 34 years old and she’s smart and generous and bald at the moment and thus wearing her own personal pain and struggle out there for all to read, as it were.  and as with all particularly terrible things that people don’t like to imagine can happen to them, there’s a shock and awkwardness that permeates some of her conversations these days.  well-intentioned people are taken aback and sympathetic, and their disbelief that something so grave really can happen to someone so vital comes out in innocent phrases like “but, you’re so young and healthy!”  and thus, Whymommy has to socially negotiate other people’s struggles with the unfairness of her situation, with the universe and her failure to fit their comfortable assumptions about her place in it, at this moment.  and that feels like a rebuke, to her, sometimes.  keeping it together in the face of your own assumptions of safety and “it won’t happen to me” disintegrating is hard.  keeping it together when people’s innocuous words jar you with the reminder that it is happening to you?  some days, not possible.  some days, Sartre was right…hell really is other people.

so my mundane complaints, and my pose of stricken woe?  in a way, for me, it’s a merciful, blissful performance of my own happy normality, undeserved but damn welcome.  and appreciated.  a day when the quality of your candy is what you’ve got to complain about is a day you’re safe and warm and fed and unbroken, and a day when you’ll be sure to find company to share your trials and bolster you up with camraderie and humour.  and being able to trust that the company will help?  that in itself is a great gift.

i am grateful.  to all of you.  and to the universe, for benevolences bestowed.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ in more gratitude, our little trees in the backyard are still standing, post-hurricane. stripped nearly bare now of the last leaves that were clinging to them, they were the only things i really worried about…we planted them for Finn, that first Mother’s Day after his birth and death.  one of the three, in particular, is small and sickly, and i watch it helplessly, afraid it too will die and i will have failed it, somehow.  but i watched it, in the wind, buffeting and bending, this little clump birch…and for the first time, it seemed strong enough.

and speaking of strength, belated but heartfelt thanks to both Flutter and Whymommy for the Perfect Post for the leaves and the song.  in typing both your names just now, i was struck by…well, by who you are. if there were such as thing as the Pain Olympics, you two, in your past and present struggles, have gold-medal narratives…and the blog personas that represent our individual seasons of sorrow could all go limping down the track together, one big pile of things that shouldn’t have to happen to anyone. and yet this post that you both felt spoke to you is a love song, just a regular old love song - it addressed nothing of any of our personal obvious crosses to bear. which makes me smile, and reminds me that we are all more than the worst things that happen to us.  so thanks, on both counts.  please do come on over for Bridge Mix and petty whinging anytime you need some.