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i always wanted to be a Beat, a bohemian.

instead, suddenly i find myself  in the Business section of the bookstore, just an aisle over from Philosophy.

i hunker down, intent, studying the titles on the shelves with the rabid eyes of a shark looking to game the casino. i am giving myself a personal, experiential education in How To Maybe Write a Bestseller About Ideas and Social Media. go hard or go home, they say where i’m from.

i has me a literary agent.

i pinch myself.

all these years of dreaming of being discovered for my sizzling cool. instead, i stoop in the Business aisle, plotting the story of self as brand in the world of social media. a dissertation and a trade book. book first. with capital letters, cold hard ambition you can lay out on a table like a cadaver and dissect.

it is the story of how people with my artsy-fartsy prejudices and my humanities degrees and my bohemian posturings are – thanks to the way social media works – ending up in the Business section of the bookstore. it is also the story of how business itself is – for the same reasons inverted – becoming more literary and humanities-focused in its discourse and processes. the unholy marriage of never the twain shall meet, indeed.

it is, in the end, the story of the reputational and relational economy of the digital.

it is the story of brand as a personal rather than a corporate attribute; as a brave new world of identity. brand is not the sell, nor is it without soul. i LOVE this shit.

Allen Ginsberg, i think, would wink at me. or maybe hoist himself up on a soapbox and rail, soliloquize, erase me with the scope of his supermarket excursions. i bow to his shadow in either case, and smile.

i feel like Alice down the rabbit hole. you see that vial labelled Drink Me? hand it over.
***
i want help, though.

it’s a shameless kind of want, the same kind of shameless i always imagined would see me perched with my folk guitar outside some far-flung library strumming Dylan songs, the really long ones, with my guitar case with the embroidered Grateful Dead bears open for donations and a handwritten sign, If you Fear Change, leave it here. life takes you funny places.

instead i sit here in my hometown hoping you’ll tell me stories…yours. or those you think might resonate. i need a few case studies, poster children whose selves and brands i can explore and dissect.

i want to know, in these stories, about how the so-called real and the online self.  about how you and your virtual identity get along. i want to know if the lines between them have changed for you, over the time you’ve spent engaging online.

you don’t need to be a Big Deal to tell me about your “brand” and yourself. you don’t need to like the idea of brand at all. in fact, i might like it a lot if you didn’t.

you can email me, if you want, or leave as many comments here as you want. i may pry further. i may come and park myself on your floor and read your virtual Tarot cards like some social media fortune teller, promising the inevitable dark, handsome stranger and a future of millions of Twitter followers. i may offer my effusive thanks in the acknowledgements of something printed on paper, someday, knock wood. that something may be a Ph.D thesis or a tome you can buy on Amazon and in the Business aisles of better bookstores, or both.

either way. i am sitting, waiting for the story hour to begin.

all those years i dragged myself through Korean and Slovak and Turkish streets at dawn not looking for an angry fix but another drink, a smoke, a conversation to be in, arms or words there was something transcendental out there burning for the ancient heavenly connection, i knew it, i saw it in tatters and hollowed eyes and tenement roofs illuminated. but in the end, i came home and found it here, in the ether.

and so i laugh and burn my beret, and ask what you think it means to be a self in the world of social media?
***
edited to add: if not your story, whose? who should i be tracking down to explore success in social media and ways it intersects with personal identity? who’s your idea of an exceptional, or reluctant, or conflicted, or interesting “brand”? even if they’d never use the word themselves? and who or what (feel free to email rather than comment, as you wish) make up the benighted practices reinforcing the concept of personal branding as some kind of Amway Cult of Personality? all recommendations gratefully received.

i might even buy you a beer to keep you talking.

*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 this morning, after i dropped the kids off.

i pulled up at the stoplight just a second too late to coast through the grace period left behind in the wake of a turn signal.  i was too busy cursing out the dawdler ahead who had damned me to a whole forty-five seconds of waiting to even notice her at first. i am not good at waiting. i harrumphed.

and then some motion, her posture, drew my attention.

she was to my right, in a boxy American sedan of a certain age, waiting for the green. there was a booster seat in the back of the car. she was alone.

she was weeping.

or rather, she was bawling, howling, self-immolating in the driver’s seat of her car. weeping sounds demure. her shoulders heaved and shuddered against the back of her seat and her hands fluttered against her face and there was clearly snot in with the tears and my heart leapt out of me in sympathy at the sight of her.

my hands, though, flapped against the steering wheel uncertainly. i felt frozen, as if i’d stumbled upon someone masturbating, or taking a dump: some animal activity we are civilized into pretending none of us engage in. verboten!! my eyes screamed at me, and averted themselves. then i looked back. i could not stop looking. her open mouth – soundless but for the background noise of my local morning radio show – reminded me of my children’s faces, slack and gaping in their sleep.

i did nothing. you do not get out of your car at a light and walk over to a perfect stranger and intrude upon her sorrow, whatever it may be. you do not.

but sometimes, when the strange hermetic veil that bestows order on us all lifts for a moment, you will want to. your breath will catch and your knees will shake in correspondence with the Other and you will know that there is no Other, only elaborate acts of Othering we all engage in in order to survive.

i mouthed words to her, though she did not see me. I am here, i said, kind of stupidly. then, whispering, You will get here. it was a prayer. then i added, i moved the bedroom furniture around last week.

the light changed and the car behind her honked and she lurched away. i watched her taillights and exhaled.
***

i moved the bedroom furniture. finally.

five years ago, i drove to the paint store a few days before Mother’s Day. the paint had been ordered weeks before. Dave had rushed in in the interim to try to ensure that the kitchen colour wasn’t too school-bus-yellow, and to choose a primer, but he was back at work that day. i had thought i should leave the house.

i’d never painted a room in my life. i’d never owned a house before. the girl behind the counter lined up four bright cans of paint and a can of primer and issued a barrage of how-tos into my gaping, blinking face and i nodded obligingly and took the brushes she proffered and the rolly thing. she asked if i had any plans for Mother’s Day and my mouth hung open further and i shook my head and felt my entire nervous system jangle, barbed wire tugging my spine. i fumbled for my bank card and punched in numbers i could not quite see.

then, behind me, somewhere in the store a baby cried and, like a valve, the pressure behind my swollen left breast let go and i stood there, a flower of milk expanding darkly on my tshirt.

i stood there holding a can of grass-green paint for the nursery. for one beautiful stark moment i saw the store as a Jackson Pollack canvas, spattered violently with green paint and droplets of milk. i wondered how hard i could throw the can, whether i could break glass. in my throat a dragon rose, ready to take wing.

i knew if i tried to speak him free, no words would come; only men in white coats.

and so i hefted the awkward paint cans and my bag of brushes and i hightailed it to my car. there, in the pretend sanctuary of that parking lot, in the cloister of an ugly blue Hyundai, i cried raw and hopeless and despairing, until the dragon was spent and my shoulders heaved back against the seat and i was alone.

i had given birth to a son six days before, the same day we took possession of the house. my firstborn. our first home. my first Mother’s Day.

but my child was gone, and i had only the uselessness of milk, and a house full of boxes, and nursery paint, and i did not give two shits whether i ever got out of that car again.

that first Mother’s Day came and went. i painted a lot of the house, those first weeks after Finn’s death. none of it was, contrary to what polite society might prefer to believe, particularly cathartic. grief itself is a learning curve, as is surviving it: having to attend to the house at that time and continually confront my own ineptitude was like insult to injury. but perhaps anything i did in those days would have felt like that.

then i finished, and things gradually found a place and we were moved in. we got on with living. and for five years, i have lived in this house like a truce.

grief eats energy. even long after you think you’re done with it, you go to lift a finger and find that one small act is just too much, a thread that unravels every effort you’ve made, and you collapse back again into whatever puddle you have managed to form yourself into and you begin again from the beginning.

for five years, Dave & i have slept in a bedroom that is neither especially inviting or comfortable, let alone restful. five years of collecting books and clothing and kid stuff gradually resulted in the room looking and feeling vaguely like a junk room, with the furniture haphazardly arranged and stuff piled precariously on top of other stuff. but every time he mentioned changing it, i bristled.

not because i liked it. not because i’m change-averse, though i am, in many ways. but i was once an inveterate re-arranger of rooms, a person who found joy in creating space, however humble.

instead, for five years, grief and its long fucking aftermath have made me slow and weary and unable to even contemplate how i want the damn bedroom, let alone able to actually drag the bed from the corner and confront the dust bunnies lurking there. i don’t want a different bedroom, my brain would lash out at me in the early days, i want my CHILD. even long after i accepted that he was gone and never coming back, i’d have cheerfully burned the house to the ground just for daring to remind me of its artifactual self. stupid world’s greatest consolation prize, i called it, in my heart. and so i taught myself, without even thinking, not to confront it. i cleaned it, tidied it, refused to engage with it. if Dave brought up making it more pleasurable to be in, i’d close the conversation and turn in on myself, exhausted by the mere idea.

until last week, alone with the four walls for the first time in what felt like far too long, i stood in my bedroom and dared to actually consider what the bed would look like on the other wall. then i stopped and waited for the exhaustion and the snark and the hurt to swim back in over me.

nothing.

i took a deep breath and i nodded to the strange land of my own psyche and the house itself and to whatever of Finn remains within these walls that should have been his first home. and i smiled and started pushing furniture and possibilities and myself, past the sorrow that claimed me in the car that day five years ago and into a world where bedside lamps on either side of the bed are no longer too big a deal to think about.

grief recognizes its own. sometimes, though, there is still nothing to say, or no space to speak within; sometimes you have nothing to offer to the suffering of somebody else except words that trail out into silence long before they hear them.

someday, lady at the red light, i hope you can rearrange your furniture too.

we went away for a week and i was mostly offline and i did not die.

yes, gather round, all ye internet hordes, and quiver at my testimony. i unplugged and lived to tell the tale.

here’s the shocking part: it was easy. hell, i didn’t even flop around on the ground like a dying carp, gasping for wireless. i expected to. i was ready. Dave was under strict instructions to carry me up the hill to civilization anytime i was noted typing notes into thin air. but no signs of withering or requiring plug-in were forthcoming.

instead, we both wandered up the hill and online from time to time to connect with our magical worlds and responsibilities out in the ether. but mostly, we hung out below. played cards. walked on the beach. had a bonfire. in the early mornings, normally reserved for mobilizations that small military juntas would envy, we lounged in jammies teaching Oscar how to play Junior Monopoly. Posey stacked the little property houses and the sun sparkled on the water. only the birds tweeted.

apparently Oscar has a knack for property acquisition and his father and i had better be good to that kid or we’ll find ourselves renting our own bed from the wee robber baron oh, say, next week.

but other than the shame of being soundly beaten in a competitive arena by a four-year-old and the mortification of having Dave actually notice me care that i was losing to a four year old, i remained hale and hearty throughout.

it was too easy. i am suspicious.
***

i don’t believe in the great divide our culture tends to build around that which is technological in its origin or medium and that which is not.

living in a much-hyped “digital age” means we inevitably also live in the midst of a discursive backlash against the digital, a sociocultural conversation positioning whatever is not digital on the side of the pure and the unchanged.  i don’t buy it. no, i did not put unplug and find myself suddenly living a life to make a Disney Princess eat her heart out, bluebirds perched on my shoulders and wholeness and wholesomeness magically within reach.

both versions of that not-quite-Cinderella story are lies. the prince is not an iPad. neither is it a world with only rotary phones and singing birds.

to me, the “digital age” is not about the technology at all, but about people. we fool ourselves in emphasizing the so-called digital nature of contemporary society: we are post-digital already. we have been for years.

post-digital is not “after digital,” but “after the digital becomes commonplace.” the technology has become so omnipresent that we need to start looking beyond its novelty and allure to the human practices it enables and limits and shapes.  we are not going back, barring cataclysm, to whatever pastoral analog version of society people’s selective memories like to cling to. but so long as we remain focused on the digital trappings that mark our society as visibly different from its predecessors, neither do we move towards any cultural maturity in this new form.

we are the equivalent of a 40 year old woman still enraptured by the oh-my-golly of her training bra. it ain’t cute anymore. and it’s getting limiting. if we actually want to mature into the possibilities of this new form we’ve taken, we need to focus past the sparkly bits on the surface and invite others to do more than snap our straps.

the part of post-digital life that seems hardest for some of us enthusiasts is boundaries. we have opened ourselves to community and connectivity and near 24/7 availability and presence and persona, and in the end, there are only so many hours in a day and so many followers and friends one can do anything meaningful with. yet going offline makes us sweaty. who are we without our appendages, our screens?

then we do it and it feels…perfectly normal. occasionally irksome, sometimes pleasant, momentarily – if we are lucky – extraordinary. like life. rather like i feel if i go braless for a morning: wouldn’t want to try to go to work that way, but it has its moments. most of which are about other things, particularly those things with small hands who clamour Mommy! Mommy! and make me long – lovingly – for the civility and distance of twitter interactions. until the laughing starts, and then i’m hook, line & sinker, never known anything in flesh or screen so beautiful as them.

i did hear more birds at the beach, and their songs made me breathe deep and slow in a way i’d forgotten to for far too long. and the radio silence meant there was more time and energy for internal things. social media is performative, and it never sleeps. nobody can entertain thousands of people a day without downtime, even in very tiny increments…not over the long haul.

still, had there been wireless at the cottage, i might have birdshit on my MacBookPro right now, people. and i suspect i’d still have found balm for my soul in the journey to the shore.

i’d like to test that theory again. soon.
***

how do you pace your relationship to the online world? do you go offline? does it make you anxious to be unplugged? or does being a cyborg make you feel a little dirty sometimes? what would a post-digital society look like, for you?

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.

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.

four years ago today, at the rolltop desk in the upstairs den, i opened my old laptop – long since gone to Jesus, as has its replacement – and wrote my very first blog post.

welcome to the crib, i warbled tentatively, voice new-born and flippantly uncertain. i’d grabbed the first name for the blog that had come to mind, not wanting to spend too much time agonizing over it for fear i’d talk myself out of the enterprise altogether. i thought the handle was a bit twee, but then, i thought the whole idea of a blog was a bit twee, too.

and yet i so very much hoped that someone might be out there listening. i unspooled the first post half-breathless, feeling as if the keys were a microphone i was tapping: is this thing on?

if you’d asked me then, i couldn’t have made an honest bet whether i’d keep it going two weeks or two years. four was beyond my capacity to imagine.

i was in that late, waddling point in pregnancy when you’re wide open, all possibility, living with the swollen, sciatic awareness that even four days may alter your life irrevocably, let alone four years.

but it was more than that. i’d simply forgotten the long, streaming flow of time when things are normal and decent and mundane.

the only thing i ever took out of high school physics class was the idea, only half-understood and possibly half-garbled, was that Einstein said time is not the same for everyone, nor for any person over different periods.

i get it now. because when i look back at then, i avert my eyes.

i’d just come out of two months on hospital bedrest. in the same hospital where less than a year before, i’d delivered another baby. his ashes were in my bedroom. and we’d only been back in the country fifteen months, and had carried multiple part-time jobs – those i didn’t lose to hospitalization – the entire time, with periods for both of us where no work was forthcoming. unlike most Canadians, we had medical bills, for the airlift almost exactly one year before. we had a house to pay for, bought the day our son was born: perhaps the biggest booby prize in the history of first homes.

time and the world were heavy on me, then.

four years was a useless measure to me, from the vantage point of that rolltop desk. i was Lot’s wife, looking backwards, but in far shorter increments. at any point during the 11 and a half months before i wrote that first post here, i could’ve told you precisely how long it’d been since i’d held Finn in my arms.

grief seems to be like that, at least unless you are particularly gifted at ignoring it. it measures itself incessantly, gapes like the wound it is. you know time is supposed to be its only anaesthetic, but time crawls, refuses you the mercy of oblivion. and as it crawls, it obliterates what shreds you have to cling to: the crispness of a memory, the smell of a blanket. i had lived lifetimes some days, that year before.

four years was also irrelevant simply because it was far too large a measure. at any point in 34 or so weeks before i wrote that first post here, too, i could have told you exactly how far along i was in my second pregnancy and how long it would be again until this baby would pass the 26 week, 1 day mark at which Finn had been born, and the 28 week mark at which s/he’d ostensibly reach lung maturity. my life was measured in weeks, then. i had been boiled down to gestational time.

and even still, even at the nearly 35 week mark where i sat down and wrote the blog into being, i didn’t truly, fully believe that everything would go right and the baby would be okay, would come home with us. i didn’t care, really, what a charming little boy he’d be at four: that was no more real to me then than the sort of 50 year old he may turn out yet to be, when i am old and gray. i only cared, that April four years ago, that maybe he might cry when he was born, and breathe.

pregnancies after loss seem to be like that, no matter what.

that baby was Oscar. and he has grown to be more than i ever dared imagine him to be: my small companion, my heart on legs. but so has the little blog with the slightly embarrassing name that has given me a place to write my world slowly back to a place where time is joyfully, mundanely, normal.

i look back at that first post now and my heart goes out to a woman i no longer identify with: brittle and braver than i hope i ever have to be again.

the blog is four. four years olds are energetic and imaginative and boisterous and silly. i think my voice could use more silly. it’s matured over the past year, developed an internal compass that feels, for the first time, like skin. but three is a watching age, a pleaser’s age, the point at which change and consistency are primary focii. four year olds are ready to adventure. and perhaps my voice is too.

back when polyester was still a glorious gift to humankind, i started kindergarten at the ripe old age of four-and-a-half. this coming September, when this blog is four-and-a-half, i will start school all over again. a Ph.D program, in education, here at UPEI.

i am thrilled that i got accepted. i am still recovering from that year of everything going wrong. when things go right – when i wake up and realize i have two kids, and a job, that the faithful partner and friend i feared i’d lose in the chasm of 2005 is not only still here but has learned to do laundry…and that now, finally, for once, i didn’t get rejected for something i really, really wanted – i flop back on the pillows, flattened by gratitude.

i’ll be researching social media, so i suppose it’s possible i may put the blog to another four years of service. maybe i’ll write more about Einstein. i hope i’ll write less about loss. i hope these next four years fly, with the busy-ness of normalcy and mundanity and the joy of growth.

thank you for being here, for keeping me company no matter what. when i sat down four years ago hoping somebody out there would hear me, receive…i couldn’t really have imagined.

feel free to send cake. or just eat it, in copious amounts.

…they say goldfish have no memory
i guess their lives are much like mine
and the little plastic castle
is a surprise every time

- Little Plastic Castle, Ani diFranco, 1998

it takes about ten years for hindsight to focus, for the dirty judgement we call clarity to settle on a bygone era.

before that, it’s just yesterday. then suddenly, you wake up and note that everything’s incontrovertibly different. that most of the clothing refugees your closet harbours from that era look suspiciously dated. that you had bad hair then. the photos prove it. you blush.

the times, it occurs to you, with a slight queasy nod to mortality, they have a-changed.

this past week, with all the kerfuffle and brouhaha pinging back and forth between the blogosphere and mainstream media on the subject of mothers and bloggers and bears, oh my, i’ve realized that a part of me pines for that suddenly historic epoch: the 1990s.
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the 90s were an ugly decade, i thought while they were happening. perms and big hair and the square, boxy shapes left over from the 80s hung on far too long into the decade. i wore a lot of army boots with flowy skirts then, plus thrift-shop shirts with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders and those giant, scratchy sweaters from Guatemala. my hair was by turns geometrically puffy and super short, except for 1999 when i grew it long and parted it straight down the middle, my ironic homage to Pocahontas. or Crystal Gayle.

i didn’t know what i was doing much, in those years. i was in my first year of university when we rang the decade in, and at the tail end of a short and not-so-stabilizing-as-i’d-hoped marriage when it all rang out ten years later. i was a student most of those years; a teacher in between. i lost my virginity in the first days of the 90s. i took up smoking somewhere in those strange seasons of eternal, cynical youth, and learned to play guitar. i hiked mountains, slept on trains, backpacked my way coast to coast. i was bulimic, then recovering, then vegetarian. between 1989 and 2000, the 90s plus a shoulder on each side, i experimented with whatever remnants of drug culture landed in my lap. before and since, clean as snow.

i thought i was extraordinary, a unique marvel waiting to be discovered. but i was a fucking caricature, just a child of my times trying to muddle my way through to adulthood with a whole generation of others like me.

in the rearview mirror, it’s clear as day. i grew up in a bygone era.

i spent whole chunks of the 90s – in my early 20s, my peak pick-up years, here, people – without shaving my legs. i catch sight of young women today with their flat-ironed hair and their ubiquitous spray tans and their waxed eyebrows and suspect their legs and nethers are equally primped and smooth, to a one. they make me feel vaguely Neanderthal, those nubile hairless wonders, and yet merciful free. to my eyes, their uniforms of mandatory perfect flesh look as confining as corsets, as pointy 50s Maidenforms.

in the 90s, girls got to be angry. our boobs were mostly our own business, as far as fashion went. our words, though, were pointy. especially the ones accompanied by music.

Ani diFranco and Liz Phair were sister-goddesses in heavy boots, with big words and loud chords, and every time i gave the finger to The Man i was cool as Kim Deal, baby. the Indigo Girls sang me into an un-selfconscious social consciousness, and for all the problems of the world, it was just plain powerful to be a young woman with a voice.

even the papers said so.

and i thought this was normal, even a bit trite. the mid-decade platinum-selling angst of Alanis Morrisette embarrassed me. i took the privilege of disdain for granted. i still believed, then, in the modern myth of progress…that we were inching ever closer to a world where equality and complexity would be prized; where anger would make way for better things.

i was so fucking cute i make my teeth ache.

it took me well into the next decade to find a venue for my voice. i knew, even as i fumbled painstakingly over my F chord and my Janis Joplin renditions back in my first days with my very own guitar, that nobody was ever gonna pay to hear me sing. and i had a journal, all those long transient winters of finding my way into adulthood, but the concept of a public journal via the Internets was years ahead of me, back then.

still, the voice i eventually wrote into being here was a voice shaped more by the 1990s than by this era i’m living through, in many ways. and i think an awful lot of the so-called mommyblogs are similar, just by virtue of their writers’ demographics.

we are the girls of the 90s grown into women, writing our lives with the expectation that it is right and proper to use the voices we have.
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times change, though, and with them, the bounds of propriety, most especially for women. today we live in a world of Hannah Montana and her young, sleek, interchangeable ilk, each of them more hairless and bland than the last. the angry girls are gone, for the most part, and if the media fixes its gaze on them now it’s because they’ve pulled an Amy Winehouse and self-destructed. again.

we live in a world of blogs and social media, but many mainstream media stories still make women’s use of these out to be frivoulous, or marginal: relegated to the domain of the domestic alone.  anything else is gold-digging; any run on capital and perks by a female can still be positioned as inherently suspect and unjustified.

we live in a time when being labelled overtly feminist is, for many, more cringe-inducing than Facebook photos of our early-90s snowplow bangs.

given these foundations, the furor over mommybloggers – whatever particular furor it may be, and whatever particular outrage of the week it may engender – shouldn’t be such a surprise. look back through the rearview mirrors of history: these are old stories, elderly tropes and narratives, rendered powerful again by uncertainty. they make me nostalgic for the good old days of my day when the bad girls were media darlings.

the belittling stories and the omissions are worth taking on, challenging, absolutely. that’s part of the point of having a voice.

but in the long run, having a whole generation of us out here writing our own stories has the potential to be far more subversive to those narratives of how dismissable we all are than our protests against them.

we get to write our rebuttals every day.

because the pendulum will swing, sooner or later. the hairless beauties will give way to the natural glory of the furry crotch once again, and girls will don boots instead of heels for awhile. and maybe that next generation will get somewhere with it all, or maybe they won’t, but maybe somewhere along the line some of them will find our words out here and realize that womanhood in this decade, whatever the heck it ends up looking like in hindsight, wasn’t entirely sleekness and sippy cups.

that we were more. that we hadn’t entirely forgotten that we grew up in the 90s, even if we did eventually get better hair. and learn to wax.

so. confess. do you miss your Guatemalan sweaters? do you depillate in a 90s or contemporary fashion? and do you care what people in the New York Times or Globe and Mail say about blogging by women and mothers?

classes start tomorrow.

the campus is all preened, gussied up in Institutional Fresh, with just a hint of aspirational ivy.  the air is crisp and sunny yellow in a way it only seems to be in September. and the little Lisa Simpson who’s lived in me all my life is chomping at the bit, ready to go Back to School.

it’s been four years since i last taught a class of my own, and longer than i care to remember since the first time i stood up in front of a group of curious, wary faces and said, i’ll be your teacher this year.  i remember pausing that first time, half-expecting a camera crew to pop out of a bookshelf with kazoos in hand, shouting ha ha! just kidding! puh-leeze.

when they didn’t materialize, i was only half-relieved. if nobody was going to show up to send me back to the gutter, that meant i actually had to teach that rabble in front of me.

i’m less afraid, now, than i was then. i wonder if old standup comedians get like this, punch-drunk with been there, done that? it’s not like the crowds change, after all. this September, there will likely be the same few frowns behind the desks, the two or three Very Serious Folk there on suffrage of some sort, who need to put the teacher on notice straight off the bat. the difference is that i enjoy those people, now. they may challenge me, in either sense of the word…but i no longer mind. i smile and bide my time.  i am a mountain. the final exam will come.

i glance in the mirror and see Monty Burns staring back, rubbing his fingers together with glee, whispering Excellent, Smithers.  i grin.

(sure, i can be all Simpsons’ characters at once. i am legion.)

most students, though, no matter the culture or age group, bring an earnestness to the classroom that always surprises me, humbles me.  i teach English academic writing this year, to foreign students. and i am excited.

i realized yesterday, staring in bewilderment at the glut of eighteen-year-olds suddenly filling up the city in their little Shinerama frosh tshirts, that it has been twenty years since i started university. twenty years since my mom and i took a ferry over to the small university town just a couple of hours away on a sunny September morning, and she left me there – mostly happily, i think, on both sides of that equation – to start what has become, in effect, my life.

i didn’t know it, then. i stood in front of the mirror, that first day of class, peering at myself, wondering if i looked like a college student. my shirt was a button-down, a stained-glass coat of many colours.  i tucked it in, then pulled it out.  i tied my hair back with a bandana, then tried a barrette. it was 1989. hair needed pouf.  my jeans were old, just perfectly so, pegged at the bottom.  i cringe to admit i wore boat shoes. i cringe to admit i even remember all these things.

but i do, because that morning twenty years ago is burned into my mind, and it feels like yesterday.

going away to university at seventeen was in a sense a stupid thing to do.  i’d spent my adolescence chafing under the motherlove of a parent who believed in authority with a capital A, and so the minute i was esconced in the freedom of my concrete bunker dorm, i dispensed of any recognition of convention or authority whatsoever. i eschewed the bovine festivities of frosh week, for the most part, but took up Drinking 101 with an enthusiasm only matched for my English lit intro and the shabby-bearded political science prof who slouched cavalierly and spoke like David Bowie. i kept my scholarship, but skipped all 8:30 classes, and wasted learning opportunities that would have done me far better had they come a few years later when i’d learned to actually think for myself, not just posture as if i did.  in my first years at university, i was more Bart Simpson than Lisa.

god help me if my children ever turn into such impossible, impertinent little ingrates.

and yet, those years were invaluable to me, too. because standing in front of that dorm room mirror that morning in 1989, i was truly on my own for the first time in my life. i was paying, with loans and scholarships and money socked away from a $4.50 an hour job. i had no curfew.  the people i met i could meet on my own terms, and the things i fucked up i fucked up on my own terms. consequences of my actions were my own.  i have never – even in moving countries, marrying, divorcing, losing my child – known a divide quite so great between before and after.

that September morning in front of my dorm room mirror i didn’t understand that the person i’d been in high school would fade for me so quickly, become a blur i cannot yet, twenty years out, quite bring into focus, while the girl who stared back at me would become my first memory of myself.

i wish she’d known then that her skin was dewy and that shirts three sizes too big should never be tucked in, and that morning classes were not necessarily the handiwork of the devil, after all.  i wish she’d understood that she was smart and worthy, and stood straighter and learned earlier to ask questions. i wish she’d known how quickly twenty years fly by.

tomorrow morning, when i stand in front of the faces of my students, most of them just flown in from around the world and on their own for the first time, there will be a part of me that yearns to gather them in close, show them the girl in that mirror with her dated hair and her silly shoes, and exhort them to gather ye rosebuds while ye may, carpe diem and live deliberately and all those things that ring silently in the September air.

i won’t do it. they’d laugh. they’re business students, most of them. they’d be more inspired by a pie chart of earnings corresponding to time invested. and yet, as the term rolls on, they’ll struggle and stumble over the same heady temptations of independence and consequence that i did, lo those many years ago. and i will watch, and nod, and reach out a hand and try to teach what i know, very little of which has to do with English academic writing.