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when you meet my kids, you will note – without fail – that they resemble their father. if you are like most people, you will offer a slightly sympathetic laugh, a nod that acknowledges the long months i spent carrying them only to have them pop out entirely HIS. i will nod back, smiling, helpless in the face of the truth.

the likeness is blatant, uncanny: in all the lines of their faces, the bones, the spacing of their eyes. it makes me prone to cracking snide remarks that i don’t have genes at all. or better, that i’m too stingy to share what god gave me, that i’ve hoarded my genetics all to myself. it is okay, my laugh will respond to yours. only my heart is in these children. that is all.

it’s a lie, though.

my children do look like little carbon copies of Dave and his extended family. Posey is a pint-sized Dave in a dress. Oscar and his father in open-mouthed laughter, heads together, remind me of mirrors reflecting into infinity. yes, in certain light, with my eyes squeezed nearly shut, i can project glimpses of my own ancestral clans over their laughing faces…a tilt of a nose that reminds me of my mother, a chin that seems squarely familiar. but overall, they’re Cormiers, Doucets, Guitards; Acadians through and through.

still. the older they get, the more i see myself reflected in them. not in their appearance, but their actions, inclinations, personalities and strengths and…oh especially…weaknesses.

children are a mirror for the flawed soul. and when you watch them struggle with the same self-defeating tendencies that have plagued you as far back as you can remember, you will sigh, and wish that it was true; that you really had hoarded your genes all to yourself.
***
personality isn’t inborn, i remember her saying, my first year psychology prof in the Child Development course, in some kind of disjointed prelude to Piaget. i was slouched in my seat, seventeen years old and away from home for the first time. something in the words perked up my bad-ass ears and i flew away for a moment, across the strait to my proper, earnest mother and i snorted.

a head turned and i blushed and ducked my own.

for years i had discarded, unassessed, most of the things my mother had told me. we were like magnets, the two of us in my adolescence, poles mostly turned apart and pushing. i felt caged and contemptuous: i denied her authority, rejected her range of knowledge and experience out of hand. too small, too fearful, too parochial.

even things neither of us understood, new things, processes, systems – i picked up faster and so shut her out. if the learning went awry and she dared try to step in, i was a study in impossibility. once, when my electric typewriter refused to load its correction ribbon properly the night before a high school essay was due, my mother had reached over the kitchen table to help and i’d shouted I’m doing it RIGHT! It’s just WRONG! until her hand snapped the dislocated piece into place and i seethed in humiliation.

all this, except in relation to one thing: the absent presence she unquestionably knew – or had once known – better than i. my father.

she didn’t say it often: she was careful not to label with negativity. but in moments of exasperation it slipped from her tongue, half-accusation, half-wonderment. You’re just like your father. and i’d peer into those words like they were tea leaves, scrying for belonging, for some meaningful reflection of the elusive inner self i longed to have identified for me, the one i wasn’t sure anybody could see.

my father had been gone since i was six months old. i had his chin, his smile, his nose, his temper, and apparently most of his undesirable qualities, the kind that make poor, beleaguered mamas want to rend their garments and gnash their teeth.

personality isn’t inborn, my ass, i muttered to that psych prof, slouched over my doodles and notes. you talk to my mother.
***
he is four, my son, my second-born and eldest all at once. and he reminds me daily he is his own self.

the old white laptop from 2005 has been handed down to him in the past year, windfall privilege of growing up in an over-technologized family. he is learning to use a paint program, doing his “work” onscreen like mommy and daddy. ouch, i say, to the chorus of silent condemnation in my head, the one that wonders if he shouldn’t be outside learning to catch. but he is fascinated. the beauty he creates fascinates me.

(his father built him a blog for these paintings; a small gallery, a room of his own. the artist happily fields comments.)

but the artist does not happily field the notion of being wrong.

i could pretend i do not know where he gets this. i could pretend i believe only in nurture, not nature; that my chipper soliloquies of mommy’s learning French and it’s SO FUN; mommy’s practicing her (wobbly-arsed) bike-riding and WOW! i like learning new things and mommy made a mistake and has to start all over and (grit teeth) GEE! i sure am learning a lot doing this a third time! make some ripple on the cosmic pool of his small self. maybe they will. maybe he will learn to recognize frustration far younger than i ever did, and name it and own it and master it with patience and self-regard.

in the meantime, on a Saturday afternoon while his sister naps he explores the new paint program. there is glee, mommy, hey! look at this! and the satisfying splat-splat-splat of squares of yellow landing on a red background. then growling. growling i’d never heard before, except maybe in the recesses of my own mind. growling like a furious, feral animal enraged beyond containment.

my son. four years old.

he must have inadvertently clicked on something he didn’t intend to. the program had shifted modes, so that backtracking was impossible. i said, looks like you have a little problem, huh? and then my hand – my stupid, stupid hand – reached out for the mouse. while my mouth – my stupid, stupid mouth – said maybe you clicked the wrong thing?

i rendered him, in one fell swoop, not just wrong but beyond capacity to solve his own problem.

his own hand swatted at mine like i was a mortal danger and he began to scream – SCREAM – that he had done it RIGHT and it was WRONG but he had done it RIGHT and ouch on the old ears, little man.

perfectionist much? need control much? need the world to make sense and make you feel you know everything much?

ouch, mirror mirror.

i picked up the laptop and shut it. we do not shout in our house, i said quietly. we do not hit. the computer is a privilege, and you will not be allowed to use it if you cannot learn to make mistakes and learn from your mistakes without screaming. what i wanted to do was to pull his small body into my arms and somehow scrub him free of all those heartbreaking tendencies to be his own worst enemy, to be so achingly, willfully blind to his own mistakes that all learning that doesn’t come easy is a torture better skipped.

i cannot.

but i can scrub myself. i am trying, in the late years before i turn forty and bloom into my middle years, to become someone better than nature and nurture happened to cobble together through happenstance and genes, someone who doesn’t make her mama want to rend her garments and gnash her teeth.
***
whether genes or learned behaviour, how do you see your own challenges reflected in your children?

*In the Irish Fenian Cycle, the hero Finn McCool gains all the knowledge in the world
when his mentor, the poet Finnegas, catches the fabled salmon of wisdom. The boy is
helping Finnegas cook the fish over a fire when a drop of fat burns young Finn’s thumb.
he lifts his thumb to his mouth, and thus is the first to taste the fish. Finn
becomes the wisest person in Ireland and the leader of the Fianna.*

the summer i was ten, my father took me fishing.

i was far from home and nearly sick to my stomach with the heady out of place-ness of it all. a six week odyssey with a family who were my kin yet nearly strangers, summertime visitors i only clapped eyes on every second July. the day-to-day father i’d longed for all year, present and material but more complicated than my fantasies had prepared me for. plane rides west, then north, way north, on what seemed a tin-wrapped hot dog with a bathroom and a stewardess. on the tundra in the land of the midnight sun.

i played baseball that summer at two in the morning. i had never stayed up past nine in my life. i had never played baseball before.

change is a heady thing, discombobulating and lonesome and free. that summer laid the groundwork for my experience of every major shift period in my life thereafter: i swallowed all those giant empty feelings of being cast adrift in a sea without shape until late in the night, in my bed, they all welled up in a panic like a balloon and i heaved a little.

i was ten. i cried for my mother.

i threw up my stepmother’s pea soup through my nose that summer, and refused to let Ernie Lyall feel me up in the canned goods aisle of the Co-op even though he was a strapping thirteen and said the word “fuck” like it was a good thing. i dragged my youngest half-brother – smaller than Josephine is now – around the prefab northern bungalow on his duck blankie, and drove my other half-brother’s mini-dirtbike into garbage cans until i finally learned to do a wheelie. i learned that the map of Canada wasn’t paper but a vast span of emptiness and tiny square subdivisions all amazingly replicate from the air, like a land of tiny model houses. i saw a field of Alberta canola like neon against the sky and my father called it rape and i was mortified, puzzled, curious. i ate a Yellowknife eggroll the size of my plate. i sang The Rose until my patient stepmother threatened to make me walk the four thousand miles home to PEI.

and i went fishing with my father, on the tundra, north of the Arctic Circle, in the black-fly-infested height of midnight-sun summer. my almost-eight-year-old half-brother and i in a tent that never quite got dark. we watched a herd of muskox thunder by miles in the distance, a swarm of speeding pinpricks that made the earth shake.

we caught char, fresh Arctic char: i know this from the photographic evidence, two children in rubber boots smiling into a camera with bright, silvery fish hanging gilled and gutted from our fingers. i remember the impossibly thick fleshy weight of them, their slippery bodies trying to escape even in death. my smile, gap-toothed, wavers between pride, obligation, and utter revulsion.

for as long as i can remember, i have hated fish. i would as soon eat bugs.

and yet, that night, i bit into the salmony flesh of the char, tender and raw, because it was my duty as a daughter.

my father told us stories of the Tundra Monster in the twilit tent that night, the three of us perched at the top of the world. i remember thrilling with my terror, with laughter, with the light of my father fixed on me like Christmas in July.
+++

in the present, a weekend with old friends from our expat days. between us, five preschoolers. there is smiling, staring at each other in wonder at this bounty of children and wholesomeness and chaos from lives that just yesterday seemed so gin-soaked and littered with ashtrays.

we took the kids into the woods, on a little trail on the back of Dave’s ancestral lands. and we spun our heads back, three of us at once to see Posey in her tutu and her grandmother’s fake plastic pearls chomping heartily away on…something.

three parental mouths opened in unison to say what’s she eating? and then Dave crossed the three steps between him and her in only one and he pried the berry from her mouth. ew, she said.

he grabbed the culprit to ask the internet, once we were back at the house.

baneberry, it said, and his eyes met mine, because nothing that starts with “bane” can really be good. white actaea, a cardiac poison, and then she started to throw up as if on cue, her little body heaving and her blue eyes so much like his boring into mine and i made my gaze as calm and easy and comforting as i could, like the safest place in the world, even if i lied.

we were in the car and then there was an ambulance and for a second i thought i might start to cry and then it was okay, all okay, and the hospital pronounced her free and clear and she got a bear with a paramedic tshirt for her troubles and i realized i miss those days of gin and ashtrays. my fingers twitched.

lucky. lucky.

then, news of my father, from back home on PEI. his motorcycle, smashed.

a driver made a left turn with his head bent away, talking to his son in the passenger seat, and the bike was totalled and the car wrecked and my father, my complicated father, somersaulted over his handlebars to take out the car windshield with his back and then…bounced. he landed on his feet in the grass, a cat.

i caught my breath and felt as if i, for once, had landed myself in the safest space in the world. guilty careless mother, absent daughter, but no matter. absolved, mine house passed over. lucky. lucky.

i am wary of too much luck and i crossed myself and spat and threw salt, all in the temple of my solitary mind, because everybody knows bad things happen in threes.
+++

on our last day of vacation, Oscar goes fishing with his father and grandfather, his father’s father, for mackerel. his first time. the phone rings at the house. his high sweet voice pierces the line even though the wind takes most of his words. i understand he has caught a fish. his first fish.

i understand i will be eating mackerel for supper and i curse, because this, then, is my perfect third for the triad of luck. fear and catharsis, love.

i would as soon eat bugs as fish, even now. but the proud mother of the young fisherman will not let on.

i meet them on the shore, and Dave cuts the shining head from the last of the catch. i watch my son, four and innocent, observe the bloodshed and i think, this boat is your birthright and i wonder at what happens inside a little boy when he watches an animal die for the first time. i wonder at how close we all live to the old law of kill or be killed and i think of sociopaths in barns and attics torturing the four-footed and the eight-footed and i heave a little.

it is not fear. it is the letting go.

until now, i have made for my children as coherent a world as i can, one where the shapes make sense and what they encounter is scaffolded and processed aloud: where people are mostly decent and the lie of safety emanates from my arms, my eyes. they do not lie awake in panic, scrabbling for comfort, for a port that will hold them until the world makes sense again.

i still do.

i know the world is big and cold and strange and luck is a finicky friend, and every time we cast the dice we risk everything we have. i know the path of life will teach my children this eventually, and i shudder with the knowledge, because they will inevitably hurt for it.

i know too, though, that life is full of reprieve and second chances; that we are never as alone as we feel at three in the morning.

and that last night of vacation, i stare at the mackerel, barbecued in its skin, on my plate, and i bite because it is my duty as a mother, and i smile and give thanks for fish.

Oscar with his father and his father’s father, fishermen all, and his first fish

it was the clinic doctor last Christmas when both the kids had ear infections. he looked up from the white-draped table where Posey reclined obligingly. i was wrestling Oscar’s turtleneck back over his head now that it was his sister’s turn. i thought i’d misheard.

what?

it came out more snappish than i’d intended. i am not snappish with doctors. i have occasionally wished in hindsight for more snap, but when it is Christmas Eve and you are the physician kindly humouring my family through the investigation of ear pus and “mommy, it hurts” mere minutes before the pharmacies close for three days, any snap you get from me is just weariness. i promise.

you know she has a heart murmur, right?

my head tilted, as if to accommodate the weight of that tidbit. its meaning registered in stages, internal standup comedy. heart. those are important. but MY children have lung issues, not heart problems. don’t be silly. Finn’s lungs, underdeveloped. Oscar’s asthma. all those visits to pediatric recussitation. i don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ no heart murmurs. Posey is my healthy one, my never-once-admitted-to-the-hospital baby. fuck off, heart murmur. what the hell does that MEAN, anyway?

i remember feeling profoundly stupid in that moment, neglectful in my ignorance, as if i’d failed to read the fine print on the instruction manual that had come with my daughter.

is that a big deal? i asked, hesitant.  no, he said. and so i nodded and more or less promptly forgot about it.

when you experience a major medical catastrophe with a child, the kind where doctors start speaking in hushed voices and you feel like you’re probably being superdramatic to ask if it’s bad but they say yes and then the bottom sinks out of your world and everything changes, there are two ways you can go, after.  you can live scared for a very long time. you can fret over coughs and lather with Purell and generally treat the world like a bus waiting to hit the precious ones left to you. which, with all due respect, it kinda is.

or you can build a wall behind which you hide, where so long as nobody ever speaks the words “he probably won’t recover” ever again, you’re golden. untroubled. pretty much everything else sounds petty next to that, after all.

so when you rush an eight-month-old to the hospital in the dead of winter gasping for air and they speed you through to the oxygen tents and then say, oh, probably asthma, you exhale with an almost palpable relief. you have to catch yourself, actually, and stand up straight and ask all the right questions and try not to look so bizarrely grateful. and your brain does take a circuitous loop through the swamps of guilt where you wonder how this prognosis will impact the life of the once-again pink and happy baby in your arms…but your brain does not remain there. it is too busy hightailing it back behind its wall, where inhalers look pretty damn pasty and thin compared to the shopvac wail of the NICU ventilator you still hear in your sleep, sometimes.

obviously, i chose the wall. or it chose me.

Oscar was a relatively sickly baby, by most standards. by the time he was fifteen months old, he’d been hospitalized on six different occasions, in two different countries, and had spent almost a month of nights in neonatal and pediatric wards. he had respiratory issues and colic and a variety of possible allergies. and it exhausted me and worried me, in the sense that i worried whether i was doing right by him with every choice we made about milk and reflux meds and steroids, ad nauseum. but never did i actually, seriously, worry about him. compared to his 2.2 pound brother with the tube forced through his chest wall, Oscar was hearty and breathing pretty fine.

and with her brothers as a baseline, Josephine was the Gerber baby. sure, she had jaundice for a few days at birth, and the cursed colic, and from the time she could roll over showed a terrifying predilection for banging headfirst into anything that could possibly get in her way, but this one, she was healthy. roly-poly. fiesty. sweet as pie and tough as nails.

so the heart murmur news caught me off-guard. but when the clinic doctor and Dr. Google both concurred that it was no big deal, i shrugged and booked the ECG and went along my merry way, behind my Wall of I’ve Heard Worse.

i stayed there through the ECG, which was prompt and painless, and straight through the followup appointment with the pediatric clinic a few months later, because i was so damn chill i forgot to actually take the child to her appointment. as did her father. yes, we got coupons with our Parents of the Year awards.

but i think my wall is crumbling.

we had the followup to the followup today. Posey beetled around the doc’s office in a diaper and socks and pigtails, admonishing the toy blocks to stay put and then shouting, look Mama! i RIDIN’! as she scooted across the linoleum floor on an eight-inch-long plastic schoolbus. she sat, watchful but patient in my lap as this new specialist listened to the mysteries inside of her little chest. he took a long family history, listened some more, checked her pulse at various points throughout her body. and he then lifted his head and i asked, what do you hear? and he said, well, i think we should do more tests.

it’s not a big deal, not in any serious sense: just not the innocent murmur i’d hoped. a thickened muscle, possibly, perhaps with a hole or ventricular septal defect. no immediate risk. possible surgery down the road, if it doesn’t close on its own.

we got to go straight down to xray, then for another ECG. there will be an echocardiogram at some point, later. followups. pediatric cardiologists. not a big deal.

but still a bit of a deal. an uncertain deal.

by virtue of lack of exposure, my armour is slipping. i spent all my pregnancies in and out of the doctor’s office and the big regional specialist hospital, constantly subject to poking and prodding and ultrasounds and blood tests. between Finn’s calamitous birth and two months of hospitalization before Oscar was born and then his many admissions, i was hospital-proofed, inured. not only had i heard the worst, but i never got far from the sharp alcohol tang of the hospital handwash. until Posey. since Posey was born, my only trips to the hospital have been for Oscar’s ear tube surgeries.

i was not ready. when i called my boss to say i’d be late for our lunch meeting, juggling Josephine and a sippy cup and a sheaf of requisitions in my hands, i felt it for the first time in years, that metallic taste of fear.

because here we leap, naked and vulnerable, back into the world of medical machines and systems i am glad for, grateful for, but would far prefer to never see again as long as i live.

***

the doctor asked today, is she fragile? timid? does she get overexerted easily? i laughed.

i do not know much about heart murmurs, would appreciate anything you can tell. so i can bolster up my wall with knowledge, and keep exhorting her to bounce higher.

i dreamed last night that she was all grown up.

i wasn’t any older. or i don’t think i was: i never caught sight of myself. the only reflective surfaces were her eyes. her exact blue almond eyes, only bigger, like anime. i could not see myself.

my imagination balks at the conjecture of my own becoming, of looming middle age. but this was Josephine, no other. just the two of us, in women’s bodies, in some timeless place.

they were beautiful eyes. i told her so. she glared back at me, baleful and adolescent, wary of being made out to be something other than she was. i met her gaze and for a moment i was confused, bewildered, bereft. how had we gotten here, to this squared-off stance, to these opposite sides in a conversation i couldn’t even remember? hadn’t she only that morning propelled herself small and round and  into my arms, tiny hands flapping, all glee and shouts and prime directives?

i reached out for her. there was glass between us, suddenly, primary colours washing her skin. and i was afraid.

some part of me knew i was dreaming. some other part of me knew better.
***

i didn’t think i was afraid of the teenage years.

i work with late adolescents, just starting out at university. i used to teach high school. i remember, still, vividly, the angry, caged, abandoned howl that choked the words off in my throat at fourteen, when the teacher slammed me up against the cinderblocks of the school gym and i knew there was no recourse.

i entered parenthood afraid. the first time i laid eyes on Finn, he was being whisked away from me in a shower of blood and alarms. fifteen yellow-suited specialists ran into the room in a neonatal code ballet. they took him away, to the NICU. one came back to say he would not make it through the night.

we had our hour, where i held him. i sang. mama’s gonna buy you a billy goat…and if that billy goat don’t…

i didn’t know what came next.

i didn’t know what a child would want with a billy goat, or a diamond ring, for that matter. my child needed lungs better than those he had. i had only stupid billy goats to offer, and my arms.

i held him until the machines said he was gone, until the nurses said go to bed. it’s nearly morning.

the one bargain i have with the gods and the fates is this: please let that morning be the hardest i ever know as a parent.
***

when Oscar came, and Posey after, there was colic. long nights i revisited my own blind helplessness. i was desperate to salve and soothe and ease. i could not. the billy goats and looking glasses could not. even my arms made no appreciable difference.

i was afraid.

but these two i kept, they grew. they began to laugh and speak and interact, and i did not feel so helpless, so afraid. i know them, now. their curiosity, their sweetness. they are ying and yang all mixed up, risk-aversion and fearlessness, stubbornness and patience, each a wonder and a challenge. Josephine tests the scope of her small voice, gleeful and shouty. she slaps her thighs, kicks at the world. she knows exactly where she wants to go, repeats every word i say. i call her my mockingbird, and the sting of the song eases just a little.

i have been thinking it will get easier, this gig. i have been thinking that i will rock at parenting teenagers, because i know how to sit alongside them when their shoulders hunch and they lash out or turn away. i am better with a crying teenager, i tell myself, than a crying baby.

i begin to believe that the dumb luck that got them here will hold, that my days of fear are done. that my hardest morning as a parent is behind me.

then i read about Henry Granju, nineteen and beautiful and brilliant and drug-addicted in spite of all his mother’s love and help and hope, and i see. you do not get to pay your dues and just walk off into the sunset.

i dream of Josephine, grown and unreachable. and i wake and think of Katie Granju on this hardest morning of her parenthood, waking to the realization that it is true and Henry is gone.  and i whisper to the ether, mercy.

go hold her up, give her your billy goats and your arms. make no mistake, there but for the grace of god or fates or sheer dumb luck go we all.

five years ago tonight i’d been in the same hospital room without leaving for more than two weeks. friends brought Lebanese food for supper, we laughed and ate. one commented lovingly on my little belly, which was finally blossoming past the pudge stage to a belatedly discernable bump. i talked to Dave on the phone: he was staying at my father’s, ready to rise and shine early and go get the keys to our new house, our first home.

i watched a Law & Order-style show of some indistinguishable flavour on the tiny hospital tv. i was restless. i spread earphones over my middle, played a little EmmyLou Harris for Runt. Red Dirt Girl.  the baby i thought was my daughter kicked, and i patted back in time with the music. i still believed the first ultrasound was right, that he was a she. i still believed it mattered, just a bit.

i still believed a lot of things. i believed, with all my cynical heart, that everything would be okay. we were 26 weeks. 75% of babies born at 26 weeks survive without significant complications, i’d read just that morning. there were no signs of labour, no signs of infection. i was adjusting to the institutionalization of bedrest, had recently had the quarantine imposed by my just-out-of-Korea status lifted, and was as prepared as i could be to sit on my enlarging ass right through April and May and well into Gemini and straight on til morning.

i went to sleep earlyish that night. i wish i hadn’t.

five years seems incomprehensible, as if now-me must be some time traveller from the future. it can’t be five years. it’s like yesterday. i’m no different.

that’s a lie. i’ve been different ever since. the girl-woman who fell asleep that night has been gone ever since, as gone as Runt, who became Finn, who made me a mother and changed me once and then twice with his own metamorphosis.

i am wary of wishes. from the day Oscar was born healthy and breathing, and his sister after him, i made myself stop wishing. playing Sophie’s Choice with the living and the dead scares me. from the day Oscar was born, i did not dare wish for Finn.

but tonight, here on my couch, i sit baffled at the affront of time. five years is too long. too strange, that it can be true.

and i wish, just for a moment, that i could time travel; that i could lift the veil between me and that creaky hospital bed i’m so sure i see clearly. the stark spring light, sun late in setting. the navy velour hoodie that stretched over my belly. how connected i felt to those little kicks.

i would not erase this life i live now, this half-decade that has passed since that last night before i became a mother. my wish is not to change the outcome. that seems too big, beyond the scope of my altered capacity for belief. just a night, just a few minutes of an ordinary Thursday night in April.

i’d change only one thing: i’d stay awake.

i’d sit vigil with my son on the eve of his birth, because i’d know that instead of a beginning, we were at an end of sorts. i’d know that we were parting, and i’d sing, rub the belly gently, drink some juice just to wake him up. he liked cupcakes: i’d scrounge some, somehow. cupcakes are small change compared to rips in the space-time continuum. i’d finish the little story i started for him in my hospital notebook, the one that still sits upstairs in the drawer, by the memory box. i’d tell it aloud, so he could hear my voice.

he would know i loved him. and just his presence would comfort me.

it was the last time that he was with me, not hurt and broken. neither of us hurt and broken.

i sit vigil anyway, here on this other side of five years, remembering. the veil flutters. i squint, close my eyes, try to feel the memory of that first-time belly under my hands. i fail, mostly. but not entirely.

happy birthday, littlest.

four years ago, right about now, we left for the hospital.

a little late, as it turned out. i’d been stretched out on the futon upstairs, practicing my breathing, hope a thing with feathers in my throat. i’d sat at the island in the kitchen, perched on a stool, writing in my journal. i’d broadcast the fact of labour to my three faithful readers, even though two of them were my inlaws and we’d already called them. the title of that post is still my very favourite, to this day.

we only live five minutes from the hospital. it was nearly midnight: the roads were empty. but suddenly, at a red light about halfway across the city, my body ramped from 0 to 60 and my seatbelt became a cruel instrument of torture. i writhed in my seat and tried to stand up,w hich is difficult to do inside a Kia when you are a reasonably tall woman with a watermelon belly. i became quite certain i was about to break in two from the inside out.

that’s Oscar. he’ll sneak up on you, beguile you with his gentleness. then he’ll blow you out of the water.

but he came out at 1:47 am, safely at the hospital. he breathed. he cried. i did too. and they placed him in my arms, swaddled in his blue blanket, and i blinked and thought, well, that’s who you are then. hello. and he blinked back at me, and i felt the first faint rustle of it, this love that still swallows me whole.

he was blond and scrawny and peaceful, somehow, with an enormous head and hands like baby meathooks. all i knew about him was that he shared a birthday with Iggy Pop and with the Queen. i figured that had promise.

i didn’t know, then, that he would grow into a dinosaur expert, a puzzle-master, a daily rescuer of heroic proportions. i didn’t know he’d be sweet and funny, that he’d wrap his arms around his younger sister to comfort her, that he’d remember whole verses of poems by heart. i didn’t know that he’d live in a world of magic and imagination, where towels become dragons. i didn’t know he’d drag me in by sheer force of will and delight.

i’m glad i do now. he has brought us laughter and sweetness. he has made my life infinitely more, just by being in it.

happy four, little dragon, with your very fierce claws.  use them wisely, and with joy.

i am heavily asleep, each time, somehow. this is not possible, and yet i would swear it true.

after three wakeups in the same night, deep sleep only occurs right in those precious three seconds before the next bloodcurdling scream of ma-mAAAA!!!!  i lift my head as if from a pool of sticky cobwebs. i blink, shake. wet dog. my feet are on the floor before i know where or who i am.

Shakespeare was a pansy, or MacBeth was allegory. motherhood murders sleep. end story. curtain.

my brain finally catches up with my ears about the time i hit the door to the kids’ room, and i pause. odd.  it is the elder child calling, the one who for two blessed years has slept like a rock, at least until quarter to crocus each bleary morning.

i creep in, floorboards creaking. i take the little body in my arms, note both how big he suddenly is and still how small. he sobs, falls into me. i wedge myself into the toddler bed beside him, because this is the third time he has been awake. i hold him, rubbing my hand across the spacemen that dot his pajamas.

i mutter, for the third time in as many hours, bad dream honey?  what happened? you tell mama.

but the horror of the unspeakable holds him in thrall. he shudders. we drift.

one of my earliest memories is a recurring dream i had around Oscar’s age. a giant carnivorous dinosaur, cartoon green, would emerge from behind the giant KFC bucket that hung suspended on a pole along my tiny city’s main thoroughfare. i would be driving my little red car. its enormous teeth would loom in front of my windshield, and then it would eat me.

sleep is a Pandora’s Box that unlocks our fears, all the busy-ness of our minds.

it occurs to me that he may not have the words for what has unfolded in the theatre of his own head.  so i ask again, differently. what scared you, buddy? it’s okay, whatever it is. you give it to me. i can help. i can listen.

the little shoulders shake again. and then the deep inhale.  it all tumbles out in a cry.

mommy and daddy got eaten by a shark. with big teeth. eaten up dead. and Finn died. and will Great-grandpa die soon? or Nannie? how do we know when we die anyway? and – this last with the sob of deepest fears given voice – when daddy dies, will he still be his…b-b-b-buddy?

my heart.

he is not yet four. and he is staring down the abyss.
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and my answers are shreds, Kleenex to mop up a river.

love stays with us, i whisper, even after people are gone.

no, we never know how long we have, honey. i don’t know when i’ll die. i hope not for a long time. but i don’t know. i can promise you my love will still be with you even if, someday, i’m not.

yes, Nannie will die. yes, mama too, sweetie. someday. probably not soon. people only die when their bodies are done, sweetie. sometimes that’s a surprise. usually not. my body is strong, baby. i’m very lucky and healthy. just like you.

yes, usually people die when they’re old.

no, Finn wasn’t old. Finn died when he was just a new baby. he came early, before he was ready, sweetie.  his lungs weren’t strong. your lungs are GREAT. blow. see? those are some serious lungs.

yep, he’s still my baby, sweetie, still a part of our family. we still love him. yes, we would love you even if you died. you’ll always be my son, forever. whether we’re alive or not.

yes, i miss him, sweetheart. you miss him too? i bet you do. oh, you’d share your dinosaurs with him? WOW. i think he’d have liked that, Oscar.

well, i don’t really know if he liked dinosaurs. but i bet he would.  he was just a baby, sweetie. he was little, very little. he had brown hair, like Josephine’s, and a cute little nose like yours. just like daddy’s. what did he do? well, he held mummy’s finger. like this. very tight. isn’t that neat? he could do that. but no, we didn’t get to find out if he liked dinosaurs. i would have liked the chance to read dinosaur books with him, yes. i love to read dinosaur books to YOU.

where is he? well…um…some of his ashes are out under the maple tree in the backyard, honey, helping it grow strong. everything that dies helps other things live.

is he here? he might be, Oscar. he might be. sometimes i think that. i would like that, to believe he was here with us, in the air we breathe.

he’s here though, in my heart, Oscar. feel my heart?  there’s love in there for all three of you, you and Josephine and Finn. my babies. no matter how big you get or how long you live. nothing takes love away. i’m sure of that.

yes, Great-grandpa loves you. no, he probably won’t be eaten by sharks. mummy or daddy either. there aren’t really any sharks around here, buddy. the water’s too cold. i promise i won’t go swimming with any sharks, okay?

yes, daddy will be your buddy as long as you live, your whole life. whether he’s here or not. you’re his special buddy, and he’s yours. that’s forever.

it’s okay, sweetheart. you sleep now. it’s gonna be okay.
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it is true, and it is not.

i lie there in the darkness, thinking of all i do not know. whether his brother watches over us.  what days are granted to us.  whether it is better to lie to a not-quite-four-year-old asking about death, or tell the lonely truth: we do not know.  you are loved, and yet alone. this is the human condition, the nightmare we never fully wake from.

i think of my friend Whymommy, fighting cancer for the second time in just under three years. i wonder about 3 am at her house and my heart catches. i say aloud, It is Not Fair.  i feel small and stupid and unforgivably lucky, just for clinging to the belief that it somehow should be fair.

i think of my friend Sue and her sister. my coworker’s dad, whose leg will be amputated tomorrow. the friend who just lost her third baby in a row.

i breathe deep into my son’s tangle of sweaty curls, and unfold myself from his tiny bed.

the spacemen rise and fall peacefully, and i watch in the blue glow of the nightlight. i am remembering Finn’s chest, punctured by tubes, his tiny fingers blackened from lack of oxygen, all just as beautiful to me as this boy.

your father would’ve called you little buddy too, i whisper to the air, just in case.
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only stories comfort this oldest of aches. what do you tell yourself at 3 am? and what do you tell your kids of fear and love and loneliness, and cabbages and kings?

on Friday, we had a snow day. and a very small special guest.

Theodore is seven weeks old. he’s a jetsetting babe, born in Korea just before Christmas, now circling the globe meeting his grandparents. he has the cutest passport picture in the world.

his parents are good old friends, of ours and of each other. we knew them before they were a couple. they knew us before we were a couple. we go back. and this first baby of theirs was awaited and loved even before i got to put my arms around him Friday and marvel at his tiny feet and froglegs, his fuzzy head.

Josephine delighted in him, bouncing beside his car seat pointing and squealing baby! baby! Oscar made him a special – if possibly slightly dangerous – mobile of Tinkertoys. Dave picked him up in a fussy moment and swung him gently side to side, chuckling at how light he is.

from the corner of my eye, i caught them. it is an unmistakable thing, the posture of your partner – your person – with a newborn cuddled close. my head snapped around to meet them. my heart caught.

the first time i saw Dave hold a baby, Finn was in his arms. tenderly, fearlessly, he cradled him. two pounds and two ounces can take great strength. and big hands can hold the tiniest ones with a gentleness you never thought possible.

he held Oscar the same way, all the long colicky nights we walked the floor, and Posey in her turn. but she leaps in and out of his arms, now, laughing, begging to be spun upside down. her baby days are gone. our baby days are gone.  we’ve been sleeping through the night for a year, now, more or less. so holding Theo, Dave looked utterly different and entirely familiar all at once.

i held my breath, waited for the wistfulness to rock through me and my lungs to fill with longing.

nothing.

i breathed, but it was a sigh of relief. no want. no nothing, except bemusement. well, there you go, i thought. THAT’s what done feels like.
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i went for my annual exam – in other words, ahem, PAP TEST – last week, just after my birthday. the doc who saw me smiled and asked, so what are you using for contraception?

and i had a teensy little panic attack.

for twenty+ years i’ve been answering that question. for twenty+ years i’ve been answering reliably, perkily even. i am deeply eager to appear responsible. i am the Lisa Simpson of pap tests.

given that, the fact that the question caught me off-guard was odd, really. but what happened next nearly convinced me i’d fallen straight down a rabbit hole of 38-year-old dementia. my mind skittered around in my brainpan like a terrier, unable to latch onto anything salient whatsoever. contraception? it said to itself, nervously. it knew there should be an answer, but each time it wandered down the lurid paths where memories of contraception lurk, it came up empty.

sex, yes. protection? oh sweet merciful crap.

terrier brain screamed at me, o mah gods! you’re not protected! and i hyperventilated, spun round in circles, and tried to hide under the itty bitty johnny shirt i was sporting.

CAUGHT, finally, after all these years. i flailed and slumped like i do when Dave notices that the Nibs bags are all empty. i turned the colour of a tomato.

just as i was about to leap off the edge of the exam table and flagellate myself with the speculum, click. i remembered. vasectomy.

oh right. jaysus. permanent contraception i don’t even have to think about is NERVE-wracking.

but even in the moments when i couldn’t remember, i noticed there was no brief candle of hope  for another baby.
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Dave rocked Theodore, and the baby fussed and peeped. i smiled, and Dave caught my eye. don’t go getting any ideas, he warned.

nothing is further from my mind, i replied, and i held his eye. it has been a long road, 5+ years of pregnancies and babies and sorrow and colic and hope. it ended, really, a few months back. but Friday, i noticed. and it was good.

then we nodded at each other, and handed that sweet little baby back to his parents. we breathed a big ol’ sigh of satisfaction, and maybe relief, and stepped over an invisible threshold into whatever the hell comes next, together.

did you ever know, suddenly? how did it come about?

or are you still waiting for that feeling? hoping? even without the actual expectation – or even possibility – of fulfillment?

i have this suspicion i don’t talk about in polite company. i don’t say it aloud.

i don’t say it aloud because i hear you lurking in the cloakroom, you cackling voices of tweenage doom & gloom.  these are the easy days! you caution, glorying in your foreknowledge of the horrors awaiting us, we who clearly lack the sense god gave chickens. i see your eyebrows arch, your voice drop gravely as you detail the backtalk, the rejection, the Hannah Montana concerts. and i shudder, and nod to your sage foreboding.

but i still think this parenting gig gets easier over time.

i know, i know. you scoff. you think me naive, a babe in the woods oblivious to the summer’s day that is soft baby bums and toddler trials. i’m not, not really. already, i see how quickly it speeds by, what gets lost.

i just keeping that having time to breathe is a decent tradeoff. and the heartbreak? that i’ll get inured eventually.

okay. NOW you can cackle.
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it is late at night, a December storm.  i get Oscar up to pee before i head to the sanctuary of my own sheets and the whistle of the wind on the other side of the cold wall.

he’s fully trained, has been for months, except for the teensy fact that neither his body nor an earthquake will raise him from slumber in the wee hours, unless he has a nightmare. and dry mornings come later than wet mornings, so his father and i are pleased to deliver him to the potty in the late evening so as to assure a little lie-in for all concerned. say, til 6:20.

i lift him, warm from the cocoon of his quilt, and heft him from the room, floorboards creaking. his sister stirs in the crib. his legs curl up like a small, solid frog, vestige of our human heritage as nomadic beings. we are still made to make carrying easier, even in our sleep.

if i am honest with myself, i like these nighttime potty excursions. this child is growing like a weed. before my eyes, he morphs weekly into something ever less toddlerlike, ever more boy.  he spends half his days pretending to be a machine, the other half a dinosaur. he shouts commands like a drill sergeant, despite the fact that his parents obstinately refuse to comply. he is still when building tinkertoy wonders, when lost in a story or talking back to an episode of Blues Clues, but he is seldom touchable in repose. even in his infancy, there was little stillness to this child, little patience for the passive comfort of skin. he either snuggles like a roto-rooter or keeps to himself.

so the nightly marches to the bathroom, his arms around my neck, are sweet for me. i pet his back, breathe in his sweaty little head. i understand, in those moments, the mother in the oft-derided Love You Forever, who skeeves everybody out by crawling in her man-child’s window long after he’s moved out to rock him in his slumber. it’s a story of the heart, people. i won’t stalk him in his adulthood. but it is a human thing, the simple, heavy joy of holding your child, no matter how big. and it is a window closing fast, for me.

because this night, suddenly, he comes awake as i take him from his room. his head snaps back and his eyes focus, and instantly his body tightens, squirms from my arms with a No. I can WALK.

he is out of my arms and marching to the potty without further adieu. i follow, sit in front him as he slumps again almost into oblivion. then up, pulling his pants with both hands like a Beverly Hillbilly, small arm held out against my interference.

Snap.

in the night light, i stand in the hall and watch him make his way back to bed. i blow him a kiss, then, when he’s knocked out again, sneak in and pull the quilts tight around him, one hand brushing his brow. i stop at the crib, where Posey coos and snuffles in her sleep.

i feel strangely useless, suddenly redundant. and i get it. this is how it’s going to be, for a hundred moments, a thousand, until the day i stop breathing.
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i am not entirely sorry.

a day comes when the child no longer considers every object in his sightline a candidate in the choking hazard Olympics. eventually they learn to go downstairs on their feet, not their heads. and some morning will come, i promise myself each day whilst i try to apply mascara with neither eye focused on the mirror, when i can perform my rituals of personal grooming without anyone attached to my leg.

i do think sometimes the people who hearken back to the golden days of their children’s youngest years either had very slow-moving children, or are forgetting a lot.  there’s simply no downtime with little ones, especially in the 12-30 month range. if they’re awake, you’re awake. if they’re moving, you’re moving, usually in three different directions. the ceaselessness of bodily needs, of mess, of sweetly inquiring hands stuck up your pants or in your hair.

when i try to imagine what apocalyptic turn of events could lead people to reminisce on these days as easy, i get nervous.

but then Oscar rejects me in the middle of the night, and i think i understand.

in a sense, parenting is about boundaries. or their absence. your infant wants to grizzle on your nipple twelve hours a day and keep you awake at two-hour intervals around the clock? you cope, blearily. and you become more useful to another human being than you’ve likely ever been in your life. heady stuff, that. you grow used to it, the intimacy, the interdependence.

and then they begin to outgrow it, somewhere around 11 pm on a Wednesday night when they are three-and-a-half. or, you know, every week from thereon in until they ultimately fly the nest. they develop their own boundaries against you, when you have so few against them.

and you sniffle a little and take to your bed and think, ouch. followed immediately by, does this mean soon we get to sleep in?
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i know, i’m probably delusional. maybe this is the easiest age. maybe thirteen has been an absolute joy in your house. what do you think? is there any golden era where the balance mostly works out, where they fall somewhere between utter need and independence?  or is this mostly a matter of how different personalities experience the reality of being needed and/or rejected?

they were shorter than i remembered.

coming home to a three-year-old and a one-year-old is a like entering a fun-house mirror. in your mind, these tiny creatures who whip your sorry ass out of bed at ungodly hours and spend half their waking moments trying to boss you into oblivion just seem…taller, somehow. they are large in spirit.

until you burst through the gate at the airport and the impossibly tiny boy who is your big kid hurtles in your arms laughing and you realize his little body is barely heavier than a suitcase.

and then, home finally, you come through the door and tiny legs run thump thump thump to meet you and your body sweeps up its baby like a missing piece and there are tears in your eyes.

you don’t know whether it’s going to be good to get home until you get there.

it was. and i was relieved to find it so.
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seventeen years ago, i sat on a back fire escape in Montreal on an October night, weeping into a boyfriend’s arms. we were scheduled to leave the next morning, head back to the tiny college town that had been our stage and our womb for 3+ years. Magic Johnson had just announced he had AIDS. the boyfriend’s father had just announced he had diabetes.

neither were the source of my misery, only the flavours that separate that trip from the others in the cloudy, grotty puddle of memory.

i just didn’t want to go back.

i don’t think it was the seedy charm of the big city, or even the pressures of the daily grind as a senior honours bulimic with a manic-depressive roommate and no clue of what to do with myself after college.

it was me. i just didn’t want to go back to the confusion of being me at nearly 21. a Thanksgiving weekend in somebody else’s parents’ apartment was a vast relief. i ate pumpkin pie made with Splenda and said thank you and washed up the dishes and everything was nice and externalized and tidy and i felt validated and safe.

the kid i was that fall hadn’t felt particularly safe in a long time. and the year that was about to follow would knock everything out at the knees – my first real breakup, my first betrayal, a reckoning, the scattering of my circle to the wind post-graduation. and in the midst of it all, my grandmother’s house, the one she’d been born in, the one that’d been my only constant home in a childhood of apartments, sold and lost as the slow decay began.  i didn’t know any of  that out on that fire escape, watching the city, but i think maybe i sensed it, smelled the shift on the air. or maybe i simply knew i didn’t have a clue how to handle the inevitable closures that accompany one’s last year of anything.

i was scared shitless. i grew up risk averse and yet reckless, a combination not so uncommon among those who have little to lose in status and material goods. i had no long-term planning skills, no sense of agency to choose next steps or any belief that the choices i made would actually impact anything much. i felt like i was supposed to be figuring something out, but i couldn’t, for the life of me, sort out what it was.

i remember thinking, if we could just stay here, skip all the next steps, the part i don’t know how to do. get to the next chapter, whatever that is.

i found myself thinking the exact same thing last week.  different fall evening in Montreal.  no fire escape, no tears this time.  and the illusions of safety centered around leaving the city rather than staying. homecoming as escape from having to get to the next chapter somehow.
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i spent our five days in Montreal last week wondering if we could live there, if  i could drag a whole family of four to the city and have us stay afloat, financially and emotionally.

while we were there, i met with a woman who analyses writing and discourse and rhetoric for a living. she’s kind, funny, disarming. open. and she stated flat-out that she’s willing to work with me on my long-neglected Ph.D, be a mentor and supervisor for my dissertation. i’d need to commit to two years in the city.

they have little Portuguese pastries there, and a Czech bar. they also have rents three times our mortgage. there are museums, places other than MacDonald’s to take kids to play on a rainy Saturday. there are waiting lists a mile long for childcare, and apparently you have to know where you’re going to be living to even get on them. there would be no Nannie there…my mom gets traveller’s cheques just to leave PEI. which is an occasion reported on the local news.

i meet tomorrow with a representative from the fledgling Ph.D program here.  two faculty members here, whom i respect and am deeply fond of and whom i’ve worked with for a few years now have also said yes, they’d take me on.  if the program will accept me, because they’re only taking four students next year. four is a teensy little number. a number so small it hurts the ego to attempt it, because Everyone Will Know. (that and the blogging about it. that always helps with the privacy).

not much funding for first year in either program, so far as i can tell. my mouth gets dry as cotton when i look at the proposals, the grant applications.

it’s heady and daunting both, an eight-ball of self-doubt and projected glory.  part of me tells myself it makes sense, either way – that investing in my education, after my childbearing hiatus, is the kind of long-term planning i’m still struggling to master.  part of me wants to flatten myself to the ground like a hedgehog and stay stock-still until i can just wake up in the next chapter.

i need to do something about that instinct.

but i have these little kids. they were born in the aftermath of upheaval and sorrow like i hope never to know again. and since they came along, grounding me, making me happy to come home even from the glamour of a hotel room with cable, change scares the shit out of me even more than before.

halp. what would Jesus do? what would you do? i know people move to big cities all the time, even without much capital and with kids. but lord above, this all has me nervous, people. even staying. just the risk of putting it out there, applying, courting the possible no. and the possible yes.

talk me down off the fire escape after all these years, friends. tell me how to think about it all in a way that doesn’t hurt my head quite so much?