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of the many things keeping me awake at night these days, add one new item to the list.

why, oh world, do little kid pants suddenly stop coming with elastic waistbands once they hit the size 2T? why, exactly, does a not-quite-two year old need to be wearing narrow, slim-hipped jeans that cling just like i wish mine would an Olsen twin’s? is everyone else’s offspring sprouting into a lithe, willowy, diaper-less supermodel the minute those 18-24 month sizes start getting a bit snug?

you hear what i’m really saying here, right? is Oscar the only husky little short-legged munchkin in Canada whose cloth-diapered derriere still requires cute little bubble-shaped baby pants?

am i emasculating and infantilizing him by being blind to his need for big-boy streamlined skinny jeans?

or is the consumerist marketing fashion machine just evil? is Pampers designing for Old Navy these days? cause sending O out to daycare with half his diaper hanging out the back of waistband and his cuffs rolled up to his fat little knees seems to be the only option available to us once he’s outgrown those last wee tot rags we’re still squeezing him into.

i mean, dudes. he’s not even two. he doesn’t need tight back pockets to slip his pack o’ smokes into, now does he? he just needs some fanny in his freaking pants.

dignity, folks. dignity in children’s clothing. where do i buy that?

what you can`t see, in this picture, is the big furry red monster. the one who materialized magically, bigger than life, at the weekend`s Jack Frost winter festival.

Oscar was beside himself. the boy has a thing for Elmo. it`s not just a man-crush, it`s a shine, a full-on pure-hearted love and delight that i can`t quite begrudge him even if Elmo`s cloying over-marketedness irks me. when the Elmo impersonator enfolded him in his fluffy red arms moments after this shot was taken, i think Oscar thought he`d been transported to heaven…or he would have, if we talked about things like heaven in our house. we don`t.

but then, we never talked about things like Elmo in our house, either.

i ran away screaming the first time one of those “Elmo likes to go up up” dolls assaulted me in a toy aisle, and i`ve mostly eschewed toy aisles since. we`re a hibernatory, bookish people. we don`t watch tv, really, and the DVDs O owns are mostly of the Little People, Baby Einstein, and Richard Scarry variety. even then, i kinda feel i should flagellate when he watches more than one. so, other than a replica of his namesake Oscar the Grouch, replete with trash can, i didn`t think my boy knew Elmo and the rest of Muppetkind from a hole in the wall.

erm, okay, i was pridefully SURE he didn`t know Elmo and friends from a hole in the wall.

until the day, before Christmas, when my mom and i decided to take a rare Saturday morning shopping trip with Oscar. he was in the cart, happy. we steered through the seldom-visited toy aisles, because my mom was thinking she`d like to get him something nice and developmental and, um, smart. or something. and he lost his mind.

every time we rounded a corner, my wee darling morphed into a cart-troll, howling an unrecognizable blue streak at the top of his lungs and flailing fiercely at…something. i thought he must be tired. i thought he must be overstimulated. i thought we should find him some bloody playdoh or something and get the heck out of there. but just as we were about to flee, my mom happened to stop the cart quite close to one of the displays, so she could find her wallet.

fur flew. red fur. not one but two separate Elmos came flying off the shelves in the fat, gleeful paws of my son, who held them aloft like victory itself and crowed, “Mamie!” and i realized that that was what he`d been shouting for the ten minutes previous, each time within sight of a different Elmo toy.

what happens when a toy-snob sanctimommy discovers that, unbeknownst to her, she`s been raising not only a child who knows Elmo but a child who would clearly sell her outright for a furry piece of red plastic that sings in a saccharine falsetto?

she caves, friends. utterly caves.

over the past few months, i have come to live in a Muppet universe. we didn`t buy the singing Elmo toy, or any other Elmo items from the toy aisles, admittedly, but we started watching old Sesame Street Elmo clips on youtube. and then Oscar the Grouch clips, which seemed…welll…a natural extension. then Grover, and Kermit…and before you knew it we were sliding down the slippery slope into hardcore Muppet Love and watching Swedish Chef reruns and “Beaker sings Danny Boy” every night before bed. we sing “Rubber Ducky, you`re the one” in the tub, and “The Rainbow Connection” any time we`re feeling snuggly. we have Sesame Street stickers all over most surfaces of the house. Oscar still calls the whole Muppet crew “Mamies”, and loves them indiscriminately…though i think his heart belongs to Elmo first and foremost. and i - gasp, i, heartless cynic - have begun to think Elmo’s kinda cute. sometimes.

so when we saw Elmo - or the dude in the Elmo suit - at Jack Frost on Sunday, i didn`t react at all like i would have even a few foolish months ago. not a nose-hair did i raise in disdain. nope, instead, i did a double-take and stood there with my mouth wide open like i`d just been confronted with the spectacle of superstardom there in front of me, live and in the fuzz. because in Oscar’s world, this was like running into Elvis…and since we’ve never done any of these kid fair things before, the whole presence of Elmo stunned me just as much as if it had been Elvis in front of us. then i came to my senses, grabbed my boy, hightailed it over in front of that ersatz Muppet, and beamed like a twit at the joy on my little Mamie-obsessed rerun-addict`s face. and after Oscar had gotten his hug and was backing away from the plush wonder, stars in his eyes, i had to remind myself that the sixteen-year old kid inside the Elmo suit really didn`t need a hug from me, too.

because for a second there, the delight on that little face overcame me and i was small again too, eight or nine, trying to understand why the words to “The Rainbow Connection” made my eyes fill with tears…for a second there, with Oscar and Elmo, i almost believed.

so thank you, mass marketing…for the unexpected joy i’ve found in being wrong, about Elmo and tv shows and all the rest. now to just get that boy hooked on “Fantasy Island” and “Little House on the Prairie”…oh, yeh, and “Dukes of Hazzard” and “Mr. Dressup,” or maybe really “Mr. Dressup” should come first because Daisy’s short shorts are way more risque than Casey & Finnegan’s purported relationship…and oooh yeh, maybe some “Polka Dot Door”…nah, they were lame…

every great artist finds his medium and muse in the everyday, the mundane of what is constant in his world.

ze artist considers. bah. zat ees not pretty!

ze artist repositions. stop your patronizing smiling at me, woman! i am ze artist!

ze artist causes mummy’s delicate eye skin irreparable damage.

i can’t wait ’til fingerpainting starts.

he is getting so big.  and i see him so little when the days are washed and measured; so little time, really, for catching his eye and smiling, for playing, for holding him close while he still fits in my lap.

Saturday and this hits me, you see, right before we leave him for days to fly across an ocean, because the brain is a guilty, sentimental kind of muscle.  Saturday when he and i are mostly alone from 5:45 am on because Dave is working, and though that kind of early always finds me incompetent and staggering through the first few hours, it is still one of those sun-pours-in-like-butterscotch mornings that have been all too rare lately, gray days with flurries being the norm of the season this year.  the sun brings me back, suddenly, to last year’s cold, crisp winter when i was at home with a boy just learning to play, and just as suddenly the open rhythm of those cold, long, repetitive days seems utopian.  lately our days home alone, just O and i, have been storm days or sick days or just altogether draining days, me trying to catch up on the multitude of things to be done while a toddler wreaks havoc around me.  but Saturday, with the shafts of light beaming in on the floor, Oscar and i race toy horses round his train track, and line up Thomas the Tank Engine (and friends) all through his farmhouse in every possible permutation, and i can see through time to a Saturday someday when this playroom will be a dining room again, and the baby who will be 21 months tomorrow will be 21 for real and gone and grown.  and the two of us on the floor, huddled in pajamas on brightly-coloured playmats, laughing, are suddenly a snapshot to me, ghostly and precious and impossible to recapture.

we go for a walk a little later in the morning, O bundled within an inch of his life in the stroller, and we browse and window shop but mostly stay outdoors because it is a Great Affront to my opinionated young sir if i should try to remove the plastic windcover from his stroller or his hat or mittens from his person inside a store, despite the fact that i suspect he will melt if i do not.  and thus we bounce along the icy, crusty, slush-bound sidewalks, more flashbacks from the winter before and our daily walks to break the monotony of being housebound, and i had forgotten what a great workout pushing a stroller can be this time of year and i am happy and O is happy but the sun is in our eyes all the way back and between closing his eyes against the glare and all that bouncing, bouncing, by the time we arrive home he is fast asleep.

one of the visions i had of motherhood that never really came to pass was the one where i would sit, adoringly, with my sleeping offspring in my arms…or slip in by his bedside to watch him in the night.  O started life early and colicky, and sleep was a battle for a long time and one that no amount of rocking ever won, though i tried, and Dave tried.  he goes down easily, now, most nights, lies peaceably with his baby and his stuffed rabbit and his sippy cup of water after multiple stories, and we say goodnight and he says “bye bye!” and we seldom see him before, erm, 5:45 am…but slipping into his room is an urge i gave up on awhile ago, when my attempts resulted in dire regret.  so it’s rare that i get to watch him while he sleeps, this boy almost out of babyhood.

i drag the stroller up into the porch and remove the windcover and his boots and still he stays knocked flat out, snoring a little, lashes fluttering on his cheeks.  and i sit for a minute, smiling at him quietly.  i am joined by the cat, the two of us keeping vigil…one for novelty and love and one because the stroller is her preferred porch perch and i believe she was trying to stare him into wakefulness.

as i watch him, time slips for me again to the permutations of possible futures, and i can see in the shape of those still-baby-fat cheeks the stubble that will come, and the harsher planes of bone, and i am struck with the realization that someday someone else, perhaps, will watch him sleep like this, drifting, lashes fluttering, on a pillow probably far away from here.  and i remember mornings of my own past, waking next to those chosen or ill-chosen few who suddenly, in sleep, seemed impossibly beautiful to me and how i was filled with tenderness and knew that i was in trouble, or love, if the two are ever different.

the same tenderness filled me Saturday morning, watching my boy asleep in his stroller, understanding that i am in love in a way that swallows me whole and that this one i cannot even wish to have grow old with me, because such is not the way of things.

he will grow, and he will - i hope - find his own way, his own loves, his own sun-filled mornings with lovers or with children.  but this time i caught the snapshot - two, actually - for later, for the time when these moments are only memory.

and in keeping with the brand-new all-technology all-the-time motto here at the crib (don’t worry, i can’t keep this up), i present to you my son. twenty months old. on his first skates.

yes, we are so Canadian it hurts. now go coo at my offspring, y’hoser.

um…please.

for big and for small.

three little boys here all together at Grandmaman & Grandpapa’s house, the whole clan, Catholics and Jews and a lapsed Protestant and the atheist all overeating in fellowship, playing with trucks and trains and sleds and plastic duckies, chocolates hidden away until darkness falls and the babies are asleep. 

Oscar has discovered - probably at the babysitter’s - that there IS such a thing as Santa Claus.  joyous greetings of “Sha sha!” fill the house, discoveries of fat men in beards and red suits around every corner, as Grandmaman is well-decorated.  the snow continues to delight.  snowmen, built by older cousins, are better than Christmas itself.

and yesterday morning, watching Oscar and his cousins, all born within two years of each other, race firetrucks around the basement like small, happy banshees, it struck me with an urgency that i haven’t felt in ages…the ache, the absence of the little second-born cousin who should be there in that pile.  my first child, darkest-haired of these four boys, forever smallest.  and the tears welled up and spilled but i could swear i felt him there for an instant, felt him in that longing, knew him all over again, celebrated him.  and that was a Christmas gift, that instant where i could see him, almost, a wee shadow with the other boys, all laughing.

may you all have joy this season, and peace.  we too, are blessed, every one.

it is, for those of us who celebrate on the Christmasy end of the holiday spectrum, a season of wishing.

when i was a kid, it was wishing - with an ache and excitement so pure i can still nearly taste it almost thirty years later - for some cherished marvel carefully selected from the pages of the Sears Christmas catalogue, the wish book that arrived in July and provided my mother with hours of free childcare in the ensuing months.

when i was older and away from home for years and years, it was wishing - this time with a different ache - for comfort and joy and some sense of meaning and familiarity from whatever celebrations got cobbled together in places far from family, where the small rituals and traditions that had marked the season for my mother, my grandmother and i had little place.

now that i am a ripe old thirty-five and barely holding, i am still wishing.  but this year’s wish, oh Santa, it’s the simplest ever.  and the least likely to be granted.  i am wishing for sleep.

copious, bounteous sleep, the heavenly peace kind that the Christmas carols make sound just so damn luxurious and restful.  i want piles of it.  i want to be saturated in it, as if it were mulled wine and i was a plump, boiling raisin.  i want it bad.  and i don’t want to horde it, either…i’d like to share it around, wrap it up, give it as a present.  to Oscar, particularly, and to Dave.  because he’s been trying to give me extra by cutting into his own, bless his little heart, but it’s starting to show.

early Friday afternoon, i was hunched over my desk at work, researching Creative Commons Licensing and trying to write an email to a bunch of tech developers without sounding like a hopeless Luddite.  i was wishing that my headache would disappear, because some kind of ick had settled across my temples and in my throat like it planned to stay awhile, scratching to dig itself in. then i got the phone call: the babysitter.

Oscar had been down with the progenitor of my own case of ick throughout the week, resulting in Dave and i alternating half days home with him, or picking him up early and then catching up on our own missed work later into the evenings.  since he also wakes up earlier when he’s sick, poor lamb, the long winter naps in our household had been growing steadily shorter.  but Friday morning, despite an ungodly early start, he’d seemed good.  better.  we’d dropped him off at the sitter’s and trotted off to work.  until the sitter called just after lunch to say that his temperature had spiked three degrees and her own daughter seemed to be coming down laryngitis and really, maybe it would be better if i came to get him.

i grabbed my gloves - i was already wearing my coat, as my office is in a former cold storage room in the university library, and when they decommissioned the “storage” part of its handle they forgot to do something about the “cold” bit - and hit the road. picked up my glassy-eyed, wretched-looking little boy and bundled him home, where i administered infant Tylenol and sat with him in the rocking chair, singing Christmas carols and petting his ducky fluff head until he fell asleep.

then i took some nice extra-strength Tylenol for my own sick head (alas, the company pays nothing for all this fine sponsorship), crept downstairs, opened the computer and started in on my email to the tech dudes again, thinking how pleasant it is to work in these flexible times, where much of what i’m lucky enough to do is portable. secretly i was hoping that the late nap and the Tylenol would combine in O to produce a sleep so heavenly and drawn-out that i could basically get done everything i would have done at work, while still listening for my boy and feeling like a good mother. and enjoying the central heating of my own home, to boot.

ha.

ten minutes. ten whole minutes it lasted, that sleep. then little barking coughs so loud and urgent that i knew he couldn’t sleep through them, and…moments later…the cries. i went upstairs, picked him up, sat back in the rocking chair with him while the coughs wracked his hot little body. and then, faster than you can say “Merry Freaking Christmas,” he gagged and let loose with a spray of vomit so powerful and potent that he covered me like toilet at a frat party. still in my work clothes, holding a sick, frightened hot little child who i wanted to hold close and comfort, but didn’t really want to marinate in vomit.

there was no more napping that day.  the rest of the weekend’s been kinda the same.  little Oscar Lou Who, who is no more than two, has been a sad, sad specimen of a wee holiday urchin, without much interest in eating, sleeping, playing, or really anything at all.

but there’s Christmas shopping still to do, and groceries that need to be bought for the hugantic storm that’s coming this way today, and a fugly fake tree that i put up ten days ago but still need to decorate, plus piles of pukey, diapery laundry, and all that missed work to catch up on from last week…and a Christmas party last night and cards that still have to get written if they’re going to reach anybody before 2008 and i swear, baby Jesus, all i want is a twelve-hour nap.

so nine days before Christmas, just in case anybody’s been wondering what to get me, this is my wish…a little more healthiness, and a lot more sleep, and maybe a few elves to get caught up on all that seasonal stuff that this old Grinch hasn’t gotten to yet.  and maybe the heart to do it all.

but especially the sleep, if somebody could please slip that down the chimney with some eggnog…?

Oscar Lou Who (who looks just like this, minus the pink bows) would thank you.

when i was a little girl, elementary-school age, i went to bed every single night all winter long fantasizing about two things…two magical overnight transformations.

the first involved me waking up with long, flowing locks of hair - preferably curly - instead of my real-life mushroom cut, which made me look rather like someone had tied a dog dish to my head and snipped around it. the second was about snow days.

i never got the former until high school, but the latter - bless you, frozen north of Canada - were relatively regular occurrences. waking up to a world blanketed in snow and having the rush of routine and everydayness startled into vivid, cozy technicolour by the cancellation of school and the prospect of a whole unforeseen day of leisure: definitely magic. in my adulthood, it’s occurred to me that snow days have all the side benefits of tragedy - the release from menial responsibilities and work duties, the gathering together, the shedding of unnecessaries - without the actual, erm, tragedy. they’re the candy on the calendar.

and since i am, by trade, a teacher, and currently work at a university, i still get to experience the luxury of snow days even now that i’m long grown. this morning, in the darkness, two lazy adults stretched out under the duvet listening to the peeping, “i’m awake now, thank you” sounds emanating from the other bedroom and the long, long list of cancellations coming from the radio. after the peeper was retrieved and changed and fetched some milk, the three of us retreated back under the covers in hopes of hearing the magic words. and they came: a snow day.

now, we’re still working, for part of the day, because the kinds of work we do can be done online and we still have power and all those good things. but i also got to get other things done - things that would have been pushed off to the weekend, like dragging the fake Christmas tree into the porch to air out, and getting the new hemp liners for O’s diapers boiled and ready for use. homey things. i will put something in the crock pot to cook in an hour or so, just ’cause. and i got to start it all late, because after the cancellations came, Dave and Oscar left me in the bed alone for two solid hours of rollicking, dreaming, rejuvenating morning sleep, my very favourite kind.

i hope it’s a very stormy winter.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Oscar has taken to the arrival of snow in his world with great interest, bordering on fetishism. we have shutters on the inside of our bedroom window, and this morning just as the sun was coming up, before he and Dave departed to let me sleep, he pulled himself up on the old wooden crate that sits under the window, holding books, and threw open the shutters, shouting “‘no! ‘no!” and beating his little hands with glee on the frosted window. later, when his father got dressed for shovelling, O grabbed a hat of his own and a pair of adult gloves from the basket in the closet and beelined for the back door. he was outraged when we wouldn’t let him outside to play. he tamped his feet on the mud porch floor, then, with great frustration and deliberateness, shook his gigantically be-gloved paws at us and said, very clearly, “mitt. hat. ‘no.”

it must be a terrible trial to have parents so stupid that they can’t even tell when you’ve dressed yourself to go outside on a snow day.

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 is such a secret place, the land of tears.
- Antoine St. Exupery

 i got my first positive pregnancy test three years ago today.

we were trying, but i was so sure that we could not possibly ever get a positive on the first try - i’d been told since i was sixteen that i was an iffy ovulator - that i waited until i was three days late to test. and even then, when Dave and i flipped that little stick over after the two minute wait, the two clear lines staring back at us left me with an overwhelming sense of unreality, as if i’d - magically, happily, gratefully - landed in a scene my imagination had never fully dared flesh out.

i’ve pretty much felt the same ever since…stunned and unprepared.

only a week after that first positive test, i started to bleed. we were in Korea then, and it was a Saturday night, so Dave and i bounced from emergency room to emergency room all over our city of a million souls, looking for one with an English-speaking doctor on duty. after an hour on a stretcher literally one curtain away from a woman in the full-on throes of labour, i was brought into an exam room where a new curtain was dropped between me and my nether regions. the perky nurse then proceeded, with no explanation but many cheery smiles, to insert some small and painful object into my lady parts. panicked by the ensuing sounds of liquid, i asked in very bad Korean what she was doing…and she answered “draining,” most sunnily. dear god, i thought, they’re vacuuming me out without even checking to make sure the baby’s gone! turns out it was actually a catheter. i nearly fainted with relief.

but my relief was only temporary. i did not miscarry Finn, but kept him long enough to believe we were safe, past danger, and that my traumatic first experience of prenatal care was just a funny story. it turns out it was more of a hazing, a gentle initiation into how the road to motherhood would be for me: overly invasive and kind of a shock to the system, every step of the way. i was reminded of it again the other day, listening to the sounds of a newborn in the hallway outside the room where Dave & i waited for my d&c, realizing that not once - after three pregnancies, two live births, and one reasonably non-crisis-type birth - have i ever gotten to do what that new mother was doing with her newborn: just sitting with him or her, nursing, breathing, holding. even after Oscar’s birth i was whisked away, completely unprepared, to the OR to tear open my unwanted epiosotomy and retrieve the placenta. i waited there for hours in the middle of the night, shaking, unable to believe that a living baby would be waiting for me when they finally saw fit to bring me back.

this is where i am these days, after this miscarriage. i am grieving, though not this pregnancy per se…not solely that, or even primarily that. i am grieving all of it, this whole road, all the damage done along the way. i feel like meat that has been gouged, roughly and repeatedly. the road into motherhood has brutalized every single cherished hope and expectation i ever had of it, and made me wonder what it was about my simple hopes that was so unreasonable, so completely impossible to fulfill?

not all has been sorrow and burden, not at all. moments with Oscar have been gifts of the surprise variety: magic in the way his sticky little hand fits into mine, gratitude for his healthy mind and body, more or less, the wild beauty of those first, tentative, successful communications where he and i shared a giggle, a moment of joy. i could not have been raised in a way that prepared me less to parent a son, and yet i am enriched by this man-child in ways that make the idea of any alternative life seem intolerably black & white. blindly, i’m fumbling my way through a job both more drudgerous and more joyful than i ever imagined it could be.

but each bend this road has taken in and out of the land of tears has left me breathless, in a shock primal and visceral enough that i can barely stay standing, let alone walk. and i am there right now, on my knees, trying to dust myself off and let go of the counting of weeks and hopes, unwind myself back to zero. it is hard. it makes me angry…which for me is really just a way of saying i hurt. i hurt badly, and i do not want to. if i yell loud enough, can i frighten you away, sadness? but sadness is, alas, hard to scare. and the worst of it, this particular time, is that there is so little this loss can add to the vast sum of lessons learned last time that it simply feels like a rehash, like having scabs torn off for no purpose except random amusement. so i sit with all these old wounds piled up around me on the road, unable to go forward just yet, in this secret landscape that i cannot really call up with words, and yet that i know so many of you walk in too, our ghosts passing each other.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

i am not used to this. i’ve struggled, i’ve been disappointed and broken-hearted in other places. but the desire for children, when you have it, is so primal and success so completely out of your personal control, that it’s a mindfuck…especially when it goes badly. and the world’s way of dealing with it - which is largely to say as little as possible, even among medical personnel, even in circumstances that are obviously tragic and awkward - only furthers that sense of surreality. the surgery doctor greeted me Monday with a hearty “it’s d&c day!” and yeh, i was happy and relieved to be getting things over with. but the date wasn’t marked in my calendar with sunbeam stickers, y’know? yesterday, when i called my regular OB to make a follow-up appointment, i was told late January was the best they could do. which means i’ll be 36 by the time anyone looks at my cervix to see what damage, if any, this surgery has wrought, and if there is damage it’ll be scar tissue by then. sigh. but what really hurt was the callousness. if you answer the phones for an OB practice, and someone calls to say they had a d&c two days ago for a missed miscarriage, is it really so hard to say “i’m sorry?” it ought to be sheer reflex. even if you don’t mean it…just acknowledge me, my sorrow, my circumstances. the day after Finn died, my first day on my feet in three long weeks, a nurse at the desk on the bedrest ward i’d been returned to suggested i try walking to the lounge, to build my strength. they were having a baby shower for the other, still-pregnant residents of the ward at that time…in the lounge. she never made eye contact with me again.

clearly, i’m raw. i will heal…i’ve been walking this road long enough to know that no stopping place is permanent. we will try again…and the prospect fills me with wry humour as well as hope, because i wonder if such gluttony for punishment isn’t unhealthy, when experience blatantly suggests that perhaps we’d be more successful with a different pursuit of the heart, like, say rescuing kittens?

but, for all the damage and the hurt, i do not regret the last three years, nor starting out on this road. it has been hard, far worse than i ever expected. but far more worthwhile too, for all the tears.

and i still get to hope, when three more years roll around, that we will have more happy stories to add to the collection, more joy, more children in our house.