cribchronicles.com

i am, alas, not an ideal travel companion.

i’d like to be. i have a bit of an idolatrous relationship with the concept of travel, and - if i am honest - with my vision of myself as an intrepid, worldly soul. i had this particular affectation of identity long before i ever went anywhere…books taught it to me young. damn books, making kids all uppity.

but this specific form of vanity makes me, generally, quite a reasonable traveller - i’d rather shoot myself than appear gauche and colonial, and i try very hard not to wander through halls of history and culture squeaking “don’t look, Ethel!” between the hayseeds in my teeth. true, i am ever-willing to mortify Dave by forcing him to pose, teeth bared, in front of statuary of the ancient world, but everybody has weaknesses, right? other than a minor fetish for cheesy photos and a terror of insect life that made a month in Malaysia back in 2002 perhaps not the best choice Dave & i ever made together, i’m a pretty savvy, culturally sensitive, adaptable traveller type, even with kidlet in tow.

until you get me in an airport or other official/officious-type environment. then, no matter how many maple leafs i might staple to my backpack and how many Canadian passports and formal documents i wave, i become the quintessential Ugly American, expecting the order of the universe to align just for moi, just like home, and right the fuck now, thank you very much. (and i say this with no offense intended to all you lovely Americans who aren’t like this whatsoever and bear no responsibility for this unfortunate stereotype which i, with all apologies, have perpetuated not just here but at airports and customs offices and such around the world. though i do try to say “eh” at the end of my sentences when i get outraged, honest.)

i hadn’t entirely acknowledged this little, erm, predilection of mine until this trip. Dave certainly had, over years. i’d remained in denial, even after i actually tried to claw my way through a plexiglass wall to the little cage where skanky Czech Easyjet drone sat smirking at me and demanding money for the very same piece of baggage the London Easyjet agents had passed through with no problem three days before, as per their stated policy which i’d called from freaking North America to check on…because i thought my reaction to said smug living Bratz doll was perfectly reasonable. i felt that my urgent, primal desire to make her feel as randomly powerless and screwed over as i did was a rational one, friends, even if she’d likely have shredded my face with her Lee press-ons had i actually been able to get through the plexiglass dumb enough to resort to physical violence.

i thought this right up to the point at which i found myself giving the finger to a customs officer in Montreal. this is bad form, i know. this is not smart. this is particularly not cool to do in front of your child, even if his back is turned. this is not especially cool for one’s travelling companion either, apparently, particularly if he does not relish the idea of spending the night in a holding cell with a sick baby and a crazy woman at the behest of an offended official.

mind you, the official never saw me flip him off. which i knew he wouldn’t - his turning away summarily, dismissively, was what had precipitated my reaction. there was no offense registered, only released. but Dave saw. and when he (quite politely, i credit him) drew attention to it, i realized…perhaps i have rage issues.

they’re not general rage issues…though there is a strain of deep fury running through me, angry at the world for its injustices and slights, still wounded in the places i have tried to make whole through a lifetime of writing it out, self-salvation or at least survival through words. but i can usually contain the rage. only those closest ever see it, and only those - i am very careful, and have been for a long time - who are not easy prey. only once, more than a decade ago, have i ever lost my temper with a child, or a person in my care. long before Dave & i ever had children we had this conversation. i trust myself with Oscar. i know better. i will not wound him with my own damage.

but those people who do the business of official paperwork and rubber-stamping, who hold the huge power of people’s comings and goings in their hands and who are often free to use or abuse that power randomly and without apparent logic or consistency, them i sometimes wish to wound. it isn’t personal, this rage. it is, rather, the depersonalization of this aspect of travel that sets me off. if an airline or customs official is remotely civil, or offers moderately humane explanations for the Kafka-esque policies and regulations that sometimes crop up in the course of changing countries and continents, particularly with baggage in tow, i am - in return - a perfect lady.

but apparently, my view of the whole transaction is a little skewed. the onus isn’t on them to be civil, though many certainly choose to be. the onus isn’t on their countries or airlines or policy-makers to be transparent, or to communicate their policies clearly, or even for those policies to be fair - in some cases - to people who come from outside their particular political zones or cultures or what have you. intellectually, i know this. intellectually, i know that my saga of what Dave laughingly calls “poor white girl fights ridiculously cheap airline” is silly in the grand scheme of human injustice, and perhaps even offensive. but it’s not the moral rightness of my position that i’m interested in defending, or even exploring (at the moment). when i rage, i rage like a moralist, my vocabulary full of implicit “shoulds” that the offending official has failed to deliver. but i think i take the moral position as a last ditch before the abyss.

my rage is a cover for horror. not at lack of civility itself, but at the absolute nothingness that seems to be left when civility is stripped away. at the way power allows human beings to take advantage of each others’ vulnerability, even in petty official ways. at my own nakedness and complete incapacity in the face of another’s choice to be officious and self-interested, no matter how i prepare myself, no matter how right i may be on paper, no matter how much i scream…because i am far from home, far from recourse and redress in that moment. or worse, because no matter how hard i tried to find out everything i needed to know, that i failed. and now i am subject to the whim of someone who gives not the fuck what i do next. that very realization, at some instinctive pre-verbal level, makes me want to scream. and so goes the vicious circle.

some people, less privileged than i in their accidents of birth or their reasons for international border crossing, live their whole lives in these Kafka-esque moments of subjectivity to the uncaring, unhearing, officious world.

i shudder.

i wonder what kind of rage that kind of impotence creates.

and i realize i have no clue how to deal with any of it, theirs or my own, except by being a little kinder every time i have power. i wish i thought it were enough.

i want to figure out a more grown up way to teach Oscar to deal with the world, else we’re going to have to stop this travelling thing damn soon. ‘how i spent my summer vacation in a Thai prison because mommy had a tantrum’…yeh, that would go over well.

i want to be above the fury and the abyss of powerlessness. i do not know how to get there.

to those behind the “one day blog silence” idea,

while i find the events at VT terribly sad, and your intent to respect, reflect on, and empathize with “victims of our world” a noble one, your unilateral declaration of a random “one day blog silence” is really pretty shocking.

before making grand, sweeping declarations of silence in the blogosphere in future, you may wish to step back from your good intentions for a moment and consider that a) attempting to silence others or incite self-silencing by mass declaration rather than invitation is pompous at best, and b) that whatever date you choose for this silence is bound to have deep personal significance for someone, unrelated to the cause (again, however good) you are trying to promote and thus unsubsumable under your particular banner of silence.

in other words, who the fuck do you think you are telling us that “the Blogosphere (which, last i looked, was not a monolithic entity to be directed at your whim) will hold a One Day Blog Silence “?  and that it will be on April 30th?   because you said so?

do you understand the implications of that kind of dictate?

my firstborn, as it happens, died on April 30th, 2005.  i still grieve him.  my blog is the one place where i’m free to express that ongoing grief without feeling that i burden others too much with my sadness.  it is also the one place where i get to share his short life, and the joy he brought his father and i…where i am able, in a small way, to have him live on.  when you lose a child, there is too much silence.  silence is the problem.  my heart breaks for those families who’ve lost children and loved ones at VT…and for the silences ahead of them.  but the world knows of their children…they will not be forgotten, they will be eulogized and memorialized and written of and have their stories heard.  and cold comfort though that may be, it’s something.  memory is a lot, when there is nothing else left.  as a parent, and a blogger, my responsibility to my lost child is to mark his having been here too, to memorialize him as best i can.  on the anniversary of his death on April 30th, i can only do that with words, not with silence.  not with the blanket of silence you’re trying to lay sanctimoniously over the blogosphere.

i have no problem with you choosing to be silent on April 30th to honour the VT dead.  i know your intentions are good.  but to try to co-opt the blogosphere en masse to accord with your intent by making a declaration of silence, you leave some of us in the terrible position of appearing to disrespect the deaths at VT by honouring our own dead with words.  words are all i have to give my son.  and that date - or any other - is not yours, nor mine, to own.  invite people to join in your campaign, sure.  but do not dictate others’ speech or silence at will.

Bonnie the Very Angry

i’ve been noticing, lately, that a certain metamorphosis seems to have settled on me like a permanent new skin…much as i’ve tried to ward it off with incantations and denial. it sneaks up on me in mirrors and other reflective objects, announcing itself to my unwilling eyes, breaking through the bravado of my self-delusion.

i think i’m starting to look like a mom.

i mean, i know i am a mom, and i consider this a Very Good Thing, and an honour and a privilege, and all that. seriously. and i’m not interested in buying into the chic notion of the Hipster parent, particularly…though i do think that our cultural stereotypes of mom-hood are bound to change with the times, and just because i prefer my old Che Guevara tee to an acrylic sweater with Christmas trees prancing upon it doesn’t necessarily mean i’m confused about my role in society or refusing to grow up.

(mind you, i have recently purchased - and kept, out of sheer attrition - a pair of jeans whose waistband is just a little too high for comfort or coolness. but they don’t have pleats, man, or anything like that. i swear to god. i am not turning into my mom.)

i just look a little blurred around the edges, and i know it, and i can’t quite put my finger on it. this is a “more than the sum of its parts” kind of issue, folks. i need some help, here.

first part, without doubt, is my hair. i need a haircut. i’ve needed a haircut for months…and i know i’ve lamented this before, but i’ve done absolutely sweet fuck all about it, so here i go again. i had my last haircut in July, friends. i have an overgrown shrubbery of varying textures crowning my head. to say it is without style would be a kindness of exaggerated proportion. and i do not seem to have the wherewithal to deal with this issue. i don’t really have a regular babysitter…nor a hairdresser, for that matter, though there is a nice local drag queen who occasionally manages not to give me a mullet, avoidance of which is really all i ask of this life. Danny, however, closes shop at four everyday and isn’t all too keen on the rugrat set, so dragging O along or leaving him with his father (who works ’til five) seem like insurmountable hurdles to me. thus i have let the tresses grow. and grow. and grow.

the hair alone could leave me looking simply like a middle-aged student, though. there’s something more to this image reshaping that’s happened to me.

and the wardrobe of gray-flecked sweater and jeans mixed up with blue-flecked sweater and jeans isn’t getting me on any best-dressed lists, true, but i notice the change in me more when i dress up than i do in my regular mom uniform.

i stoop. i look drawn and tired, even on those rare morns when i’ve slept for seven luxurious hours straight. i sag. my eyes are slower to focus. i’m rumpled, even if my clothes - by some act of god - are ironed.

i don’t know what to make of this, or to do about it. i’ve been trying to get in shape, getting on that wild horse of an exercise bicycle almost every day, whipping a little shape back into my behind. the stripey little pooch that my belly, in all its stretch-marked glory, seems to have become doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, but i’m cool with that. it’s not like the pre-baby incarnation of my belly was much to write home about, anyway…i don’t mind being a little round, and soft. i don’t feel the need to erase the marks Oscar & Finn have left on me entirely. i don’t mind looking like O’s mom…i just don’t want to look like i’ve been stuck in the Walmart checkout aisle with my twelve shrieking offspring for the last ten hours all the time, know what i mean?

i’d just like to look as though all the vitality hasn’t been sucked from me by my baby’s little Hoover lips.

i’d like to look in the mirror and see someone who felt good about looking back at me.

(and if anyone thinks more chocolate is the answer to my bedraggled state, you should tell me. it’s wrong to horde that kind of wisdom. ;))

if anyone else has tips…i’m open. i’m asking.

my father has an ice-skating rink on the pond by his house this winter.

there is a Rockwell kind of veneer over this photo for me…this photo of my family on skates, taking by my dad on a sunny Sunday afternoon. a good afternoon. the ice was thick, and my skates clopped against it with that wintry schink-schink sound that’s almost like knives being sharpened, but happier. there were friendly family dogs on the banks of the pond, cavorting. we all took turns pulling Oscar in his little red sled. the photo may not show it, but there was much laughing. and whinging about sore feet.

we were like a full-page spread right out of a Canadian homemakers’ magazine, for gods’ sake.

and yet…there is no need break out the hot chocolate and gag on it, friends. the Rockwell bit is just a veneer, and part of me feels brittle and cheap even presenting the photo and its outdoorsy, clannish kitsch as a reflection of my life. i keep looking at it, liking it, trying to figure out what to make of it…trying to find a place for it, and relate to it on a level deeper than that of a friendly photo shoot. because this was no recreation of a childhood memory, for me, lived out in colour again for O’s sake. this was my childhood fantasy.

Oscar turned ten months old the other day. by the time i’d reached that venerable age, my father had left. not only left my mother and i, but left the province…and gone as far as he reasonably could while still staying technically in Canada. he took a nineteen-year old who happened to share my first name and who had previously been my babysitter along with him, which i suppose - this fine, insular island being what it is - made living closer somewhat inconvenient. they married when the divorce came through. they spent the next three decades in the Northwest Territories, coming home only in the summers. then, ten years after i’d grown up and moved away, they came back.

my father never saw me on skates until i was twenty-seven years old.

and all this winter, as i’ve been watching Oscar grow and (gypsy threats aside) bloom into a clever, watchful, laughing little personality, a small, wounded voice inside of me has been sitting in a corner, asking “how could he leave me that far behind, when i was small like this?” i see Oscar light up like a pageant contestant whenever Dave comes home from work, and, bewildered at how anyone could walk away from such blatant worship, that same little voice squeaks “what was wrong with me?”

i know better, of course. i’ve actually tried to stamp on the little voice, quite firmly, but only succeeded in making me feel sorry for it…ermmm….myself. and i resent that. i’m blown away by this vulnerability, this uncertainty. i’ve been told since i was small that the divorce was in no way a reflection on me, and i genuinely believe it. i’ve met both my parents. i’ve understood for twenty-odd years that the two of them, however civil, were no more meant to live together than they were to fly. i thought i’d worked through most of my baggage a long time ago.

then i had my own child, and lo, the floodgates of sadness came crashing open, apparently. because all the things that i am so fucking thrilled to share with Oscar, like his first Christmas, and his first steps, and his first time on skates (okay, i project) are things that i did without my father. i don’t believe in staying together for the kids. but really…three thousand miles away, eleven months of the year?

i know, petty problems. i don’t like feeling angry and wounded and childish. i don’t like the fact that i feel hurt…and in my hurt i feel embarrassed, too, like the statute of limitations has passed for airing of this particular load of laundry. but i don’t like the way that i feel small whenever i consider Oscar’s smallness, either. i feel protective of the child that i was. it’s true that when a child’s parents divorce before she can remember, there’s no specific image of family unity to grieve…those images all simply become veneered Rockwell paintings, part of a pop culture with no particularly relation to her own identity. but finding myself in the picture, now, with my own child, and particularly with my father behind the lens…ouch. that stings, and confuses.

i like my father, a lot. i love him, as well, and nurtured a little-girl crush on him from afar for years. but as an adult, i like him, wryly, and with a special eagerness i have no words for and no way of expressing to him except in the way i still become self-conscious around him, like a hopeful schoolkid. we don’t see each other much…distance is a habit i at least don’t seem to know how to break, any more, even when we’re close geographically.

but here we are, all in the picture on a Sunday afternoon. dark things lurk beneath this ice.

“oh yeh,” said i, back in those dim, fuzzy days before parenthood. “oh yeh, i’ll work from home when the baby comes. i can edit online, and maybe do some freelancing…it’ll be fulfilling, keep my mind sharp. i’ll just work when he naps.”

oh yeh. obviously, i spent most of Life Before Parenthood on crack.

my mind? sharp? i don’t even have the wherewithal to lament how blunt the instrument has become. naps? yeh, i’d love one, thanks. i drool at the thought. but i have this twenty-hour-piece of editing i committed to finishing up this week (errrr, well…last week) and i don’t think the child has napped a cumulative twenty hours all month. freelancing? right. unless The New Yorker is picking up my blog for syndication and has simply failed to notify me, i don’t think that will be happening until O starts writing columns himself.

apparently, i am not the born Mary Poppins cum intellectual wunderkind cum floor-polishing housewench i somehow once imagined myself to be.

i am okay with this, it seems. a little peeved, as i really did plan on getting more done with these days, but i’m genuinely okay with my own limitations and the priorities they reflect. Oscar? very important. laundry? a minor OCD i’m trying to work on. mindless internet surfing for at least fifteen minutes every couple of hours? hey, brains don’t just sharpen themselves, folks. they need input.

but this is all okay mostly because the fine Canadian government, in its rare but occasional wisdom, has seen fit to provide new parents here with what in other countries would be the equivalent of a bloody lottery haul. we get a year, more or less, of paid maternity/parental leave. not paid by our employers. paid by the government, in the form of what’s known as Employment Insurance. you work 600 hours in the year prior to delivering or adopting a child? you get approximately $1400 a month in EI for the year following, so you can stay home with that child. it’s not a fortune, by any means. but it beats a kick in the arse with a frozen sneaker, as Dave is so fond of saying. he’s freakishly fond of that phrase, actually…but that’s another post. this one is about the fact that i have approximately two months left of paid at-home child-minding, and then i need to figure out what i can do with myself to earn money while spending as little of that money on outside childcare. or i need to get a job and give up on the whole idea of working from home whatsoever. (other than that laundry compulsion, and the other little compunction about not letting dishes get moldy in the sink, and whatnot…the menial crap which makes households run without Children’s Aid visits.)

but writing/editing from home in twelve minute increments while Oscar peeps/whines/howls for my attention doesn’t seem to be working so well for me thus far. perhaps if he didn’t insist on getting new teeth every week his capacity for self-entertainment would be higher, admittedly…but he still has twenty teeth to go. sigh.

the work gets done, and i kind of enjoy it. i’m not doing it for the money right now anyway…just to keep my hand in.  but my hand feels…stretched.  it’s the kind of work that’s so much smoother when an unbroken hour or two can be dedicated to it…and by the time those hours are free in the evening, what’s left of my mind has disintegrated into a puddle of gray cabbage. such is my little problem. there are moments, at three in the afternoon when i am two paragraphs from finished and O is clearly two paragraphs past finished, when i would sell my mother for ten more minutes just to really focus on the task at hand and get it done and get that nice, rare little feeling of accomplishment that so seldom comes with laundry or bum-wiping.

and i guess that’s really where my little problem lies. i want it all. i want to be home with my child, and i want the ivory tower of an office to hide in and finish things too. i do, in the end, want to be the Mary Poppins genius prodigy TideeBowl queen. and i want more time, for all of it. sweet time, that once i squandered…this is a really nasty trick, this disappearing act of yours.

what do you all do, about time, and work, and juggling? did you go back to a job after your kids were born? did you stay home but do some paid work on the side? how’d you manage to carve out time for that work? (besides plying your offspring with crackers, which is my current, albeit only moderately successful, strategy) please tell. i need some help, here.

unless someone want to volunteer to nanny for the world’s cutest nine-month old (with a minor biting problem)? send resumes.

okay, i’ve been cheerful long enough. done now.

i tried to bring my most positive, reflective self to what posts i eked out over the holidays. now that the house has been purged of chocolate, though, and daddy and the multiple grandparents have all departed for those outside-the-house things they normally do all day, i am not feeling quite so bloody sunny about the gleefully biting little terror that is my eight-month-old. today, i’m with Linda over at Purple is a Fruit. today, i would like permission to mention that sometimes this “being home with the baby” thing sucks some serious, whiny, dirty little ass. amen, sister Purple. sometimes i just don’t feel like being patient and entertaining all day.

does Disney do house calls?

i thought not.

how about Captain Morgan, then?

bah. i suspect that the glamourous allure of drinking in the afternoon wears off pretty quickly, leaving one feeling even more like a haggard Joan Crawford-esque mommy dearest…but i’m still tempted. i’m grumpy, and frustrated. i feel housebound. heck, i AM housebound. literally. and it’s kinda my own fault, which only makes me grumpier.

Dave went to work with the stroller in the trunk of the car this morning. like i said, my bad. i could have retrieved it from the trunk just as easily as he could have, but never thought of it…though in my defense i was NOT the one who popped out to the car at ten pm last night and dug the bottle of absinthe we bought on our New Year’s trip to Halifax out from under the stroller without a care in the world, admittedly. (insert glare in Dave’s general direction, here. very impressive, withering glare). i also did not drink any absinthe, for the record, lest you all begin to suspect me of being a closet drunk. i just like to imagine myself in altered states…the reality takes too much recovery when one has to wake up and be mommy at six in the morning.

i’m the one who insists that we be a one-vehicle family because i can’t see the sense in paying for craploads of car and insurance when we live in a town that one can walk across in forty minutes, so i accept that i’m not always as mobile as i’d like. sometimes O & i get housebound, particularly in bad weather, and that’s usually okay.

but today is sunny and warm and picture-perfect, at least for strolling. and my fussy boy and i had a much-looked-forward-to “playdate” with our mommy coffee friends, who help keep me sane by getting me out of the house midweek every week and commiserating with me about how mommyhood isn’t all sunshine and Gerber babies. but, as Oscar now weighs a rather strapping twenty pounds even before his snowsuit is forced onto his unwilling body, i require the stroller if we’re going more than, say, thirty feet…and the coffee date is a twenty-minute walk away. you see my problem here.

so, while my lack of mobility may lie largely on my shoulders, i still believe that certain circles of hell are reserved for fathers who accidentally abscond with the family stroller on the sunniest day of the winter, and then turn out to be “in a meeting” all afternoon while the mothers of their children frantically call/skype/curse them. particularly when said children have already been bundled, flailing, into the cruel horror of their Evil Snowsuit before the stroller has been discovered to be missing.

i also believe that the Baby Mum-mum cracker bribe (note attached photo, titled “A Boy’s Best Friend is His Cracker”) is a perfectly acceptable way of coping with a fussy, stroller-less baby on a sunny afternoon when all you wanted to do was get the hell out of the house and see grown-ups and are bitterly tired and disappointed and wondering where all those nice, comforting Christmas chocolates got to, anyway.

the Baby Mum-mum cracker bribe also buys time to write a rant, and publish it…particularly if you have a large backup supply of crackers.

thank the lord for small mercies. and don’t report me to Children’s Aid.

just send Dave home with that damn stroller, already.  and maybe send me on another vacation?

so…i’ll shut up about New York soon, i promise. but i will mention, before i close the subject of The Very Exciting Trip, that taking a breast pump around the Big Apple wasn’t nearly as fun as one might imagine.

we’ve come a long way in the past generation, regarding feeding options for babies. in most parts of the Western world public breastfeeding is no longer repressed as an act of wantonness akin to pole-dancing, which is nice. breastfeeding in front of strangers is still a little awkward and/or discomfiting for many mamas, sure, but it’s less likely to raise vocal hackles from random passers-by than is bottle-feeding, in fact. in the swing of the pendulum that accompanies so many aspects of our knee-jerk culture, it’s socially acceptable (if persnickity) now to openly criticize a mother for not breastfeeding, whereas it’s seen as mildly Neanderthal to chide her for doing so. limited progress, methinks…but perhaps progress all the same, even if it merely shows that our modern minds can now once again handle the age-old fact that breasts’ primary purpose is suckling.

pumping, however, doesn’t quite fall under the amnesty that breastfeeding now receives. whipping out a teat in downtown Manhattan to suckle a plastic pump and thus keep the mammaries primed for baby feeding? that can getcha a citation for public nudity, a bunch of weird looks, and a brand reading “shameless hussy” burnt onto one’s forehead. or at least i think it can. except for a few brief and unproductive squeezes under my sweater and two layers of down jacket in the corner of a near-empty Korean restaurant, i was too shy to try during this last visit.

which meant i needed bathrooms. private, closed-door spaces where i wouldn’t be flashing my endowments and stretch marks at everyone in a fifteen-foot radius.

now, New Yorkers were a lot nicer than i’d expected. and the city - subways aside - was cleaner and far less Gotham-esque than pop culture had led me to expect, but the public washroom situation still left some civility to be desired. when i could find a private stall in which to sequester myself and get the milk flowing, it was usually decorated with overflowing garbage and the piquant scent of urine. if it was terribly nice and posh, i was usually rushing…or worse, occupying a single toilet while a line of New Yorkers queued outside. apparently, i should carry a little sign reading “Mom Pumping Breasts” to post on the door of such establishments: the colorful comments coming from outside the door while i held up the line were enough to shrivel my milk supply. apparently, pumping wasn’t quite what they imagined i was doing.

basically, pumping is a pain in the ass…particularly when one is away for three days in the most fabulous city on the continent, and the place one is staying is an hour’s subway ride from the cafe/theatre/restaurant/boutique/park/museum/monument that one happens to be near at that moment.

and i’d never intended to pump in New York. back when the Trip was planned, i was having serious milk supply issues and no guarantee i’d even still be nursing Oscar by November. i thought, if i was, that it would be a logical time to wean.

but as the date of departure grew closer, i got cold feet. O doesn’t nurse all that often - four times a day, most days, with at least two of those feedings supplemented by formula (we never did quite work our way back to a full milk supply). but i like nursing him. i like the convenience of it, particularly in the mornings when i’m exhausted and zombie-like: having milk means i can retrieve my dear boy from his crib and crawl back in under my nice warm covers with him for another few minutes of prone stupor, and snuggling. these are precious minutes, from all perspectives. i’m not quite ready to give them up…plus i figure the extra antibodies and other unidentified goodness he’s getting from the breastmilk are worth a few minor irritations. so i pumped my way through NYC, and am teaching him to be gentle with the teeth that are cropping up, top and bottom, through his gums. we may do this awhile yet. i do not have an end date in mind.

despite all this, though, i know i’m no poster child for breastfeeding…and i don’t really want to be. i’m delighted that O and i have managed to muddle our way through it, but it hasn’t been the picture postcard of madonna and Gerber baby that i’d been led to expect. before Oscar was born, if you’d told me that formula would be a steady part of my son’s diet from the time he was seven weeks old, i would have been indignant. and i would, i think, have projected myself a failure as a mother, at least in the eyes of society. and i think that’s sad.

i don’t think there’s enough frank conversation out there about the reality of feeding infants - the challenges, the miseries, the flexibility of options really available. sure “breast is best”, and i’m glad i’ve been able to offer much of that to my son. but like any simple maxim, “breast is best” leaves a lot of the story unspoken.

so why don’t you tell us the rest of the story? join us tomorrow morning, Saturday November 18th at 10 am EST, for a cribcast about feeding and what worked and what sucked…pun intended. moms who’ve breastfed, bottlefed, and run the gamut of options in between will be here to share how their stories unfolded, and why, and what kind of surprises and reactions they got along the way. if your babies were weaned twenty years ago, or were born last week, doesn’t matter. if they’ve never seen a boob, or if you’re still breastfeeding them at four, fill us in on your choices. Skype Cribchronicles to participate, or check out the chat room which will magically appear here on the site at 10 am tomorrow.

i just ate a chocolate cupcake for breakfast.

it’s ten am, and i’m still wandering around the house in bright red flannel pajamas dotted with snowmen, like a refugee from a tweenie slumber party in 1983. Oscar’s been asleep for half an hour, bless him, but i haven’t showered, nor have i lavished any much-needed attention on the laundry, the dishes, or the acrid kitty litter in the back corner of the porch. no, i’m not depressed. i’m just trying to deal with getting my resume in order.

this weekend an electrician came to install heat in Oscar’s room and managed to dust the entire house with nasty little remnants of wall and wiring. and summoning up the will to vacuum out - and thus confront and organize - the bulging horror that is our front closet, now home to the heating wires delivering warmth to wee O, filled me with despair. not because it’s really that much work, even in the nap-sized increments i have for working in. the despair comes because i keep wondering “if it’s this hard to keep things together now, while i’m at home with the baby, how in the name of god will i ever go back to work?!?”

i know people do it all the time. the how is the part i don’t quite get. i envision myself dragging my tail into some professional environment, wrinkled and spit-spotted, black circles under my eyes from a sleepless night spent trying to eradicate baby oatmeal splashes from my walls, pack the stuff to be carted to the sitters, wash the diapers, and hush Oscar back to sleep…not to mention shave my legs and pluck those stray hairs that have cropped up on my chinny-chin-chin. i envision myself falling asleep and drooling on my desk. in these visions, i look vaguely like a very old, washed-out Raggedy Ann doll in a power suit.

such waking nightmares of life as a supermom are the result of a fundamental contradiction in my person. i am compulsively tidy, craving organization and a sense of completedness in my environment. i am also pathologically lazy, with a deep embedded horror of work. it is, admittedly, a problematic combination.

it doesn’t mean i can’t work, or even that i don’t normally bustle about quite diligently, taking pride in my accomplishments. my abhorrence is reserved for the spectre of work, work in the abstract, the obligation to do. because once i commit to doing, my anal tendencies require me to do thoroughly, and to do well. i am doggedly loyal to my obligations, yet resentful and nervous of their claims on my time and energy…especially in my current state of constantly tired. thus, when i consider sizable or numerous tasks, a fluttering panic deep in my innards pipes up “you will never sleep again!” and, poor Pavlovian dog, i immediately lapse into grief and exhaustion and dauntedness, just considering the job(s) at hand.

i do try to hush this gut-bound voice of doom by burying it under chocolate. however, i’d need a whole Wonka factory to quell the overwhelmed feeling i get when i consider hopping back in the saddle of a full-time job. i haven’t actually had a full-time job in years, in the first place…i’ve done a lot of part-time work and sessional teaching and overseas contracts with twenty hour teaching weeks over the past few years. and juggling those things, even without kids at home, has kept me plenty busy, thank you very much. but once the Canadian government’s generously lengthy parental leave expires…well, i’ll need to bring in money, and i do kinda like the idea of doing something with all those degrees hanging in my mother’s basement. hence, the reason i’m tuning up ye olde resume. but i’m also dearly attached to the idea of someday feeling rested again…hence the reason i’m eating cupcakes for breakfast.

i’d like to find something part-time, something rewarding both professionally and financially, here in this small Maritime “city” famous for underemployment. i’d also like to win the Pulitzer for blogging, and win a Merry Maids spree. and lose twelve pounds eating all this chocolate, while we’re wishing.

in real life, i’m going to get that closet cleaned out, take a shower, and enjoy my boy. and perhaps another cupcake. and hopefully some of you can tell me how this job-parent-sleep balance thing really works out?

tell me the nice parts, mostly. i don’t want to have to go make brownies.

we had a big day today.

this afternoon was the 2006 Run for the Cure, the breast cancer fundraiser. i bundled up O in too many clothes - i have this nervous horror of him being underdressed - and we walked the route…along with my mom, her friend/longtime companion Henry, and my sister Erin.

we raised just about five hundred dollars for the event, which i thought was rather amazing. i haven’t fundraised since those nasty magazine subcription drives we were conscripted into in high school, when i couldn’t find a donor to save myself and ended up having to buy a year’s worth of Women’s World Weekly or some such schlock just to stay on the student council. but this was pleasantly different. when i registered for the run, i set my fundraising goal at $150, which i thought was modest but reasonable. after all, when one only gets organized enough to register five days before the run, one must not be too grandiose. but the generosity of family and friends blew me away.

Erin and my mom and i walked in memory of my grandmother Hilda, my father’s mother. Hilda died in 1988. i was sixteen then. Erin - who is my half-sister, the youngest of my father’s children - was three. my parents had been divorced fifteen years. but there was a bond stronger than mere marriage between my mother and her ex-mother-in-law…a shared staunchness, a respect and odd likeness. Hilda’s funeral was the first time i remember seeing my mother cry. so, we three walked today for Hilda.

Henry walked for his wife Laurene, who died almost exactly seventeen years ago, in early October of 1989. Laurene and Hilda would have known each other in the 60s, when Henry was minister at a then-growing suburban United Church where Hilda was a Sunday school teacher for thirty years. they would have known each other fairly well, i imagine…wives in their thirties and forties, raising children in the same small community, organizing lobster suppers together, dishing out potatoes in the big kitchen at the back of the church hall, holding fundraisers of a different sort from the run today.

i don’t think they could have imagined us…the very model of the modern muddled family, walking today in their memory. nobody aspires to be a statistic, however inspiring. Laurene would be in her seventies now, had she survived breast cancer. my grandmother would be in her early eighties. they brought us together this afternoon, our strange little group…just as the memory of thousands of other family members or friends or coworkers brought together the other runners and walkers and strollers and riders in the throng of white and pink shirts.

cancer scares the shit out of me. three of my four grandparents have died of it, two before i was born…it skulks in the gene pool, waiting. my mother celebrates her fifty-eighth birthday on Tuesday: she is just about the age Hilda was when she found the first lump in her breast. both of my mother’s own parents were dead by fifty-eight. and i looked at her today and realized how much i don’t want Oscar participating in the Run for the Cure in her memory. i don’t want him, like Erin, to have only faint memories of his grandmother. i don’t want him, like Henry and Laurene’s grandchildren, to grow up never knowing her at all.

and i really don’t want him and Dave left alone, to run in my memory. not anytime soon. not ever.

the pinny on my back this afternoon said “i am running for Hilda.”

but it wasn’t entirely true…and not just the part about the “running”. i walked to honour Hilda’s memory, and it made me proud to do so. but i walked for Oscar…Oscar whom i’ve nursed with these breasts, who i want to watch grow in the long term. so i think we’ll do this again next year. i’d like O to grow up thinking of the run as an annual event we do around Nannie’s birthday, with other families, for a great cause. and maybe if we can raise enough money to beat cancer, he’ll never have to walk or run in anyone’s memory…because we’ll be there with him.

i’m sleepy.

this isn’t anything out of the ordinary, though today’s stupour left me unusually, splendidly stunned…i kept forgetting whether or not i’d fed the baby, so he probably gained about three pounds in the course of the day…i erred on the side of “fed.” i also managed to wash the dirty diapers in with Dave’s work shirts. hopefully, they rinsed clean…i hear eau de poop is really out with the office set.

a doctor’s visit Tuesday revealed that Oscar’s teething cold is actually bronchiolitis. it’s a viral inflammation of the lungs that’s common in boys between three and six months, but which has scary statistical links to the eventual development of asthma. sigh. i left the doctor’s office feeling overwhelmed, a failed combatant in the primal mom war against germs and danger and affliction. Oscar is vulnerable, mine to protect. when i can’t - and i can’t all the time, no matter what kind of Herculean hand-washing efforts i remind myself to make - he risks being affected for life.

that still blows my mind.

we rented a nebulizer (an air mist thingy, with baby-sized mask) from Shopper’s Drug Mart to deliver the meds he needs. the mask covers more than half his face, and lets off steam like a smokestack: the first time, it terrified him. his pupils dilated and his face took on a look i’ve never seen, like a baby animal in a trap…the flight mechanism activated but the body unable to respond. his father held him and his flailing arms and i whispered the soothing, loving nonsense litany of mothers in his ears…”you’re okay, it’s okay, it’s alright little one, mama’s here baby, you’re okay.”

now he’s still wary but tolerates the treatment…then gobbles up milk like a piglet. high on breathing free, he peers at us afterwards like we’re the new Thursday night broadcast lineup sent in to entertain. between this medicated overstimulation and his still-present cough and general malaise, Oscar hasn’t been sleeping well. and so my days - and nights - have been getting long.

getting into the crib has suddenly become a Very Bad Thing in O’s mind. we try stories and books. we try some singing and some rocking. we feed a little, if it’s anywhere near feeding time in his routine. then “we” go to bed, and that’s where “we” part company, at least in terms of our division of labour, because from here on in Oscar and i each have separate jobs. he screams with all his sixteen-pound might. i pat gently, hold my hand firmly on his back, and repeat “you’re okay, sweetie, it’s just bedtime” for about twenty minutes. or thirty. his lungs may be inflamed, but they’re certainly vigourous.

last night, during a zesty howlfest, i tried to model good sleeping behavior by nodding off myself, standing up, with my head on the crib mattress beside Oscar. while those seconds of sleep were vaguely restorative for me, they failed to impress my indignant son…apparently my snoring is not a very convincing salespitch.

my nap was brief due the proximity of Oscar’s sobbing face to my ear. desperate to get him to sleep and hightail it to my own bed, i scrambled for something comforting to offer other than my usual “it’s okay, darlin’, mama’s here.” he knew damn well mama was here, i figured, and that fact was obviously failing to lull him into anything resembling sweet merciful rest.

i saw the chewable copy of “Goodnight Moon” sitting next to the crib. by the glow of the nightlight, i leaned in and started reading. Oscar couldn’t see the pictures, as his eyes were all scrunched up with screaming anyway, but i thought he might be listening. and when i couldn’t make out the words in the dark, i made ‘em up. i started enjoying myself. we said good night to the green room, to Oscar’s bunny, to his socks, to the moon, to all the relatives i could think of, and to the old lady whispering “hush”…who is a white rabbit in a rocking chair, for those of you not familiar with the middle of the book. by the time we got to her, i could have sworn i could hear her, rocking right there next to me, singing lullabies in a whispery rabbit voice - this sleep deprivation stuff is better than acid, sometimes.

eventually, about the time Oscar and i had said goodnight to all the condiments in the fridge, he wore himself out, snuffled a few times, and drifted off. i watched him in the faint light for a minute or two, his small fat fists gradually unclenching, splaying fingers over the blanket, huffing himself into sleep with little grunts.

he is beautiful.

but god, i hope he sleeps tonight.