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my mother and i went to a funeral this morning.  for a family friend, a big, warm bear of a man whose daughters i was close to when we were children, a man who then left that family and started another and whom i hadn’t seen in nearly twenty years when i wandered into his antique store in December of 2005.

it was just before Christmas, but i was the only one in the shop.  i recognized him and introduced myself, asked how he was, innocuously.  and i watched him, suddenly, without warning, crumble in front of me.  it was his first day back at work.  his wife, his second wife, had died just weeks before, on the operating table where they’d expected to save her life.  instead she was gone.  oh.  how was i?  oh.  we were seven or so months out from losing Finn, and i’d gotten used to saying, “fine,” to putting on the mask, but i didn’t then, didn’t need to…couldn’t.  it would have shamed us both, somehow.  so i told him, and he listened, and we stood there amongst the dusty wooden rockers and the phonographs with tears on both our faces and it was the most honest random conversation i think i’ve ever had in my life.  with a man i barely knew and yet had known for as long as i can remember.  it was the only real conversation we ever had.  i was grateful for it, then and now.

and they piped him out today, Donnie who always wore his kilt for occasions, the Skye Boat Song and roses for everyone to take home with them because Donnie loved to give flowers.

we couldn’t go to the cemetery because they don’t provide wheelchairs or chaise lounges for the bedresting,  so my mother brought me home.   and told me, on the drive, that she doesn’t expect to see me in heaven after she goes.

this came out deadpan, a total non-sequitur.  i laughed a little nervously, uncertain if a lecture on my moral failings was about to follow.  it did not…which was a relief of an almost palpable nature…rather, my mother wanted to inform me of her own theological predilections so that i could instruct whomever takes command of her funeral when the time comes that mention of “hanging around up there, waiting for you all” is not to happen.  my little black heart could not have swelled bigger.  my mother and i have our differences of faith - she has one, i do not, a rather significant difference - but it appears in this we are almost…alike.  the afterlife is mysterious to both of us, veiled.  and i find bizarre comfort in this unusual synchronicity.  i told her if it turns out we’re wrong and heaven really is all gowns and harps and reunifications, i’ll understand it if i get there and she’s sulking in the corner, refusing to talk to me just because she doesn’t want to admit having made a mistake.  she retorted that if heaven really turns out all that conventional, she doesn’t expect i’ll be showing up at all.  and we both laughed.

she also told me she’d like a piper for her funeral, like Donnie had.  i nodded at this, tears suddenly in my eyes.  we live in a part of the world where nearly half the population is still pure-blood highland Scots, two hundred years removed from clan and the auld country but fiercely attached to what remnants remain of that dour legacy of clearances and imperial machinations.  i would like to take her to Scotland, someday…but i don’t think she actually wants to see the real place.  the Scotland in her mind is hers, her own.  if we went , she’d risk feeling less connected to the reality than she does here, at a remove, where its romance and sentiment are keystones of her birthright, her identity, the community to which she belongs.  none more Scots than the Scots abroad, och aye.  so she will have a piper, i promised.  i asked for one myself, just in case.

speed bonnie boat, like a bird on a wing
onward the sailors cry
carrying the lad who’s born to be king
over the sea to Skye

i didn’t tell her that the other songs on my secret personal funeral list are “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead and Sinatra’s “My Way”…and that really, if we have to have a funeral, why not make it all-music, an all-night hootenannie, with plenty of liquor?

i’d like to keep her around for awhile if i can, not kill her off with horror.
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have you ever thought about your own funeral…what you’d want said, or read?  played?  any suggestions for my ever-revolving list of (secular) life-affirming classics?  though i do have a soft spot for old staunch hymns, i must admit…but i doubt Dave would allow them any play, if he outlived me.

i have this list.  it involves things i like to fantasize that i will do in order to make myself more sane, more human, more humane…just more.  it evolves, changes daily sometimes.  more frequently, it gets shoved to the back of my mental clutter drawer, ignored until some trigger calls it forward, calls it back to my attention.  often, in regular life, i get too busy and consumed to pay much attention to it.

one of the gifts and cruelties of bedrest is that i am not too busy to pay attention to it.  it worms its way to the front of my subconscious and perches there, accusing me in the lulls between work phone calls and doctor’s appointments.  it shouts, you could be writing the great Canadian novel!  you could be learning tax law/saving children in Botswana/improving your French/organizing the back porch recycling pile!  you could be doing something useful!

it’s not wrong.

and the longer i turn a deaf ear on it, the worse i end up feeling.  so last night, with work winding down in a couple of weeks, and another three months of bedrest to go if all goes well, i sat myself down and let the list reel out, loose and wild.  i came up with a couple of things, all of which were salient reminders right now - as i bob helpless and prostrate on the waves of whatever shores destiny has in mind for me, feeling more like an aimless couch lump with every swell - that i am still making choices, even if i don’t control everything i’d like to.

1. i need to stop eating corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup.  i have insulin resistance, for chrissake…mild insulin resistance, but hell, mild diabetes doesn’t really sound nearly as good as no diabetes.  i have eaten three entire bags of red licorice in the last week…i’ve gone on a Nibs kick, and have been eating them like they’re a drug.  which, given their contents, they kind of are.  it’s not just the gestational diabetes heebies on my mind, either; it’s the whole subsidized corn industry in North America, my discomfort with the ubiquity of all this over-sugared, processed corn in every bloody thing.  we protect corporate giants whose products infiltrate our grocery carts like secret spores, even when we try to make finer choices.  i do not want to be a part of it.  i do not want the poison.  erm, except, of course, it is so silky and sweet in my mouth…but i will stop.

2.  i need to start cooking in general.  pregnancy does weird things to my appetite, makes me ravenous and finicky all at the same time.  vegetables molder in the fridge while bananas get consumed as if Curious George lived here.  Dave cooks, and i wrinkle my nose and crave corn syrup, impossible to please.  the work of food - the sheer labour of it - makes me feel defeated and paralyzed and like there are no decent easy options and then comes the whole poison lure again.  but cooking makes me feel creative, and even frugal and virtuous if i approach it as challenge rather than chore.  i can chop sitting down, and choose recipes that don’t take a lot of physical exertion or standing to cook.  i can.  i’ll feel better.

3. i need to get out and interact with other human beings not interested in taking my medical history at each encounter.  i called one of my oldest friends last night and asked her to take me out on a dinner date next week.  i called the local food bank and asked if i can volunteer to make sandwiches there and serve them (whilst sitting) one lunch hour a week, so long as i’m not in the hospital.  i need a place to be that is not here.  i need to feel useful, part of something outside this house.  i need random encounters with people…little conversations, snippets of other lives to intersect with, concrete things to do.

4.  i want a wife.  Dave and i are taking applications, actually, for a mutual wife of the Betty Crocker variety, if anyone has any candidates they’d like to volunteer.  there’s a sweet-faced farm girl at the local market who’d be perfect…she makes the best lemon squares, and is hearty and capable, like she could whip the place into shape in no time flat, making our home more organized and economical and wholesome and preferably installing solar panels on our porch in her spare time too.  she’d weed the garden, which is choking to death already, before the window boxes are even planted, and would have a dustbuster concealed under her apron to suck up all the cat fur congealing in the corners.  she would bring me cold water every hour, whilst i write on the couch.  she would be all the caretaker - cooking and childcare aside, we can handle that - that Dave and i want to be but are unable to achieve in these strange, imbalanced days…me invalid and him overloaded, flotsam piling up around us.

5.  i need to create something, engage in making something tangible, more permanent and protectable than consumable meals and mortal offspring.  not the great Canadian novel, probably, but something.  four summers ago, i spent a week in the Swiss alps with filmmaker Peter Greenaway, as part of the Ph.D that languishes unfinished and largely unmissed behind the letters in my name.  Greenaway, famous for “The Pillow Book” and “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover,” is a piece of work, a charmingly fierce and self-replete personality…and inspiring in ways i never expected.  what i took away from that week of mornings sitting around boardroom tables watching short films and doodling in my notebook is mostly encapsulated in this four word note: dude is obsessed with lists.  his work, from the earliest days, is all about cataloguing, layering narrative with signs, permutations of order, rosters.  i groove on this.  my imagination was fired by this.  fiction and history with trivia and minutiae…squee. so i am making a private list for my daughter, this long-imagined daughter whom i still cannot believe my own fortune in getting, whom i still cannot believe will cross safely into my arms.  we are fifteen days before the threshold of viability, this daughter and i…and this list will be fifteen stories of mothers and daughters, my lineage, what i know.  i figure i’ll finish it sometime before she learns to read.  or will have something to prove to myself she was here in the now, squirming as i type, no matter what.

6. i cannot be a lover right now, on strict pelvic rest, but i need to find ways - beyond desserts - to inhabit this swelling body that i’ve been ignoring now for months on end, eyes averted not from the externality but from the inner secret of this divided house, afraid to be madonna, not allowed to be whore.  i spent years of my early sexual life disconnected from myself, caught then in cycles of self-loathing i did not believe i’d ever heal.  fear is more disembodying than self-hatred, i discover.  and yet i long to relax into myself, loosen myself, stop living closed away like a prim, crisp bakery box that might spring open if even looked upon too lushly.  milkshakes are not cutting it.  i miss the loving, the release.  but what i need is to find ways of being present in my body without those, for now.  preferably without involving the young farm wife.  advice welcome.

i am still here, still abiding.  i am trying as hard as i can.

i think i know now why i blog.

the company’s good and the outlet is needed, and appreciated, sure.  but they’re not the primary reason.  turns out blogging is the only thing keeping me from having to face the stark fact that i am actually, secretly, an incoherent twit.  yep.  oh, the shame.  i blog to keep up my self-esteem, folks, to maintain the facade that i’ve actually mastered some command of my mind, heart, and the English language.  snort.

basically, i am congenitally incapable of expressing myself concisely and thoughtfully in any form other than writing.  seriously.  i’m gregarious and all, and i can chatter away and be a pretty good conversational reflector of what the other party is saying, but ask me to actually form an unprepared idea in words, out loud, in real time, to an audience…and i hem and haw and turn into that painful, stereotypical grade 9 chemistry teacher who rambled on and on in ever-pitiful and incomprehensible circles until the students were all asleep or trying to burn their ears off with Bunsen burners.

and after six weeks on bedrest, sitting in my house all day writing work emails and making small talk with, um, my cat, i’m getting worse. the raging head cold isn’t helping, either.

last week, i got to take an afternoon off of babysitting my couch and trucked off to the local CBC station to record a Mother’s Day-focused conversation with some other Maritime mummies.  i was psyched.  an outing!  a conversation!  a chance to talk about parenthood in what i hoped would be a multi-faceted way!  then i put the headset on and sat in front of the mic…and died a thousand small deaths.  my brain began flitting about aimlessly, unable to organize itself without letters and lines of text to confine it.  each question - and these were not shocking questions, folks - left me stunned, unprepared, searching desperately for a train of thought to land on.  apparently trains are running sparse in these parts.

when the interviewer asked if we’d always wanted to be parents, i answered yes, and said honestly that i remembered being twenty-nine and newly single and suddenly wondering if motherhood would ever happen for me and realizing that some part of me would never fully come to fruition if it did not.  dandy.  then, following the base rules of logic and conversation, that pesky interviewer followed up with, “oh? and what would that part of you be?”

uh…um…errr…my knee?  nope, nope, that’s not right.  focus, Bonnie, focus.

i sputtered and floundered and rambled on for a few minutes, saying basically nothing, blathering on about how important it seemed to get to shape a life from the start, thus probably coming off like a controlling nutjob and offending countless adoptive parents of older children in the process.  even as the words rolled out, all tripe and cliché, i knew they were the wrong ones…ones that didn’t really get close to the feeling i was trying to express…but i couldn’t collect my thoughts, couldn’t line them up and sort them and make them shiny and incisive and pretty, not for the life of me.

all the while in the back of my head a blog post eloquently composed itself, but only for the benefit of my keyboardless fingertips.  my tongue was left to fend for itself, and i was left wishing i could rip it out.

it happened again today.  a visitor dropped by and in the process of feeding me lunch, bless her, asked me a real question, a genuine, complex, recount how you feel about all this kind of question, and i was so delighted to have someone to actually talk to that i launched into a disconnected diatribe worthy of the Jerry Springer show.  my guest smiled politely throughout, but again, i had this weird sensation of failing, profoundly, to get across what i was actually trying to communicate.  and i faintly wished she could have called in her question an hour or two before, y’know…just to give me a chance to process, to get my thoughts down.

i could have a whole sheaf of papers taped to my chest!  why do i love parenthood?  see page 23!  how do the dynamics of my extended family impact me?  that’s a whole chapter, pages 40 through 57!  how am i handling all this bedrest?   what?!  can’t you tell i’m doing splendidly?!?!  see the frozen terror in my eyes at the prospect of human contact?!?!  maybe that one is actually kinda taped to my chest…or face…figuratively speaking and all.

so here’s what i want to know…is this incoherence - at least the part of it that isn’t solely housebound battiness - just me?  is this a phenomenon common among bloggers?  could it be part of the reason so many of us are drawn to writing, this pleasantly editable, controllable space for presentation of our most intimate thoughts, but dressed up in their best lingerie?   does blogging make it harder and harder to actually adjust to the ephemeral messiness of real-life conversation?  am i just slowly beginning to lose all semblance of social skills the longer i spend perched on my couch in isolation, fighting off cabin fever?

note to self: do NOT watch The Shining while on bedrest.  and lock all the axes in the shed.  i have my nice blog, and don’t need any other ways of expressing myself, thank you very much.

i grew up as an only child, but i actually have siblings, half-siblings.  three of ‘em.  all younger, from two to nearly thirteen years younger, my father’s second family.  they spent summers here when i was a kid, most years, but their lives were lived thousands of miles away.  we were more like cousins, growing up in different cultures and different houses, homes with utterly different expectations and socioeconomic relationships to the society around them.

when i left my home to traipse around the world and seek some kind of place for myself, two of them were still children…little kids i saw some summers, little kids with big eyes and squeaky voices and runny noses, kids i loved and enjoyed but barely knew.

these kids, they grow up, hey?  the two ‘little’ ones, now well into their mid-twenties, are having babies.

and they live here now, this whole clan who couldn’t have been further away all those years.   it is a strange thing, having a whole extended family where once there were none.   we float near each other’s lives, not terribly closely tied…but still curiously kin.  i feel protective of them, especially those little kids now grown to adulthood, but i also feel shy, outsider and insider both.  we have never had a lot in common. and yet, if all goes well, there will be three babies born within four months or so of each other, three little cousins.  and i wonder.  whether family ties will tighten as the younger two form families.  whether as adults we can come to be the siblings we never truly were as children.  whether the older of the brothers and his partner - who have three school-age kids between them but can have no more, and have lost - are wounded by the projected image of three little babies on a blanket next Christmas.  whether anyone knows how afraid i am that this image of the three, willful fantasy and foolishness though it is, will not come to pass.

my sister, the youngest of the four of us, had her first baby and the first of the expected three two days ago.   a healthy boy, wee Nigel,  absolutely gorgeous…and my sister a pint-size madonna with her infant, a natural, unperturbed.   he was 7 pounds, 8 ounces…bigger by far than either of my boys, and yet i forgot they came that small.  i always forget they come that small.  the new addition brings Oscar’s cousin count to six…all boys, on both Dave’s side and mine.  my father is convinced he’s getting a whole baseball team.  my brother’s girlfriend, though, is adamant she’ll have the first girl.  i look at her sidelong, trying to remember what it felt like to believe the things you want are simply the things you are entitled to, the way things will go.

i am afraid to wish for a beautiful boy like Nigel, bright-eyed and suckling.  and i am even more afraid to wish for the girl i was always sure i’d have - that wish seems so long ago and so ridiculously impossible, like wishing the baby turn out to be a lion cub, or a magical fairy.  i just wish that he or she come to exist, safely, not too early.  i’ve already lost one baby i hoped would be Nigel’s playmate…back in the fall, my sister and i were due only five or six weeks apart.  now it is not quite twenty-two…likely less, given the generally short duration of my pregnancies.  it feels like a flash and a lifetime, at the same time.

outside my window, a peaceful snow is falling. tulip buds huddle tight closed against the icy blanket. we had to drag out Oscar’s winter boots again this morning. part of me thinks this is ridiculous - that after a winter this long, this laden with storms, that spring is somehow obliged to hurry up and arrive once Mayday is only a week away.

another part of me - the part that spends all day indoors, on the couch - is more equivocal. meh, says the shut-in, snow, schmoe. i don’t own a chaise lounge. what do i care if it snows all summer?

it will not, i know. but this is Canada. we’re a snow-ridden folk. i remember driving home from college for the summer one year, with my childhood best friend, in a late April snowstorm so bad we had to follow the taillights of the car ahead. the road was whited out, and at one point as we crawled along, inching down the highway, we mulled over the ironies of dying in a snowstorm on summer vacation. oh callous youth, so unfearful, so amused.

i am no longer that girl. my mind still plays the wry ponies of doom, casting narratives, but they do not entertain me any longer. they make my heart leap in my chest, make me swallow dryly. my eyes dart, seek escape. and these visions are with me always, now, no longer novelties of an out-of-season adventure. that restless, invincible, curious self of youth, with summer stretching out before her, all possibility and late night beers to be drunk…she caught the last train out of here a few years back.  i do not think we will see her again in these parts…she was young, and i am not, and will never be again.

instead, i nest inside, internalized, waiting for a summer of waiting. i try not to obsess about the disconnect of the fact that i still do not look or feel terribly pregnant, that my belly has not popped this third time around like it did the second, that i’ve only felt tiny flickers of what might be movement, that i know too many people now who’ve suffered the brutal blow of a heartbeat just…disappearing…and that i live that nightmare every time i let my mind stray near it. in a fit of neurosis this morning, i ordered a Doppler. it arrives Monday. a part of me hates the thing i’ve become, the fretter, the wretched, tied in knots by my steady stream of fears.

but i know well that spring is not really obliged to come, you see…and for some, never does. the summer stretching out wild before you disappears - forever a mirage - once you understand that it is not truly an inevitable promised land, but only a turn of luck that can change in an instant.
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of course, three hours after i ordered the Doppler, i felt it, hard under my waistband, the tap and flutter and queer twist of the small life inside. unmistakable this time, insistent. and it kept up for minutes and i lay still and laughed, hand cupped on my belly, tears streaming down my cheeks, watching the snow fall outside my window.

one of the strangest things about bedrest is that it’s never as restful as i think it’s going to be.

three springs, now, i have spent the lengthening days prone, watching the sun brighten outside my windows, imagining i can smell the warming earth.  at least this spring it’s my own windows, and they open…though we’ve barely crept above zero this morning so the breeze coming in is brisk.  Monday, we had snow.  i think spring is doing its best to delay itself in hopes of making me less jealous.

truth is, i shouldn’t dare say this aloud, but i don’t mind bedrest.  or not as much as i think i should.  it’s an excuse to lie down a lot, and i’m rather fond of lying down, if not necessarily of having to lie down.  it’s a respite from the bustle of things, and for a short period of time, it offers a window of solitude that few of us get in our busy lives unless we are sick or otherwise miserable.  i am neither.  and i am busy enough that boredom is really only a state of mind.  i’m still working from home, ostensibly full-time, plus trying to tie up external projects and commitments that have been lying fallow, and organizing our taxes - i haven’t even turned on the tv yet, in two full weeks of couch lounging.  i am not yet stir-crazy.  but i am growing lonely, as the days pass.  i miss being out in the world, interacting, making choices, being an agent - however modest - in the shaping of my own day.

the worst part about bedrest is the passivity.   one must buy into the notion of one’s incapacity, on some level, in order not to keep leaping up and doing things when no one is watching.  bedrest this early, when there is not even a belly and more than a flutter to remind one of who this is all really for, is an exercise in disassociation, in foregrounding fear, in unharnessing oneself from one’s usual responses to impulse.  truth is, i disassociate from my body quite easily, relic of years of disordered eating and internalized shame, but the process carries baggage.  i feel vulnerable when i am not free to do for myself.  i feel subject and beholden to those who have to do for me, and apologetic for the burdens my incapacity places on them.  and thus i disassociate not only physically but socially, pulling inward, conserving myself.  the isolation begins to show.

and i do not know how to break it up, to remain engaged yet still.  there is no motion here, not while Dave is at work and Oscar at the sitter’s, no coming and going except by the cat.  she brings me her measuring tape, her beloved plastic string, and sits patiently, staring up at me as if i might magically leap from the couch and race about the house trailing it like Tantallus.  i do not.  she continues staring.  i work, focusing in spells, consumed, and then drift, unmoored by the lack of routine and context.  i consider the date, count days, realize i could reasonably be doing this for another sixteen weeks.  the mind boggles, bounces.  i flit back to the date: it is the 38th birthday of my college boyfriend, my first love, and nearly fifteen years since the day after graduation when i last laid eyes on him.  gone, just like that.  i try to remember what his skin felt like, and fail utterly.  i bounce again, note that it is the 42nd or 43rd wedding anniversary of my ex-inlaws, who for a time were family…but they are gone too.  i send them anniversary wishes, from my head to theirs, and wonder, absently, if the date has any significance to anyone currently a part of my life.  i decide no.  i decide that i need some mental discipline, that i need to get back to work.  my brain trudges reluctantly to the tasks at hand.

i’d hoped for things to be different.  my full-time job was supposed to come to an end March 31st, and i was going to be working only three days a week, one at the office, two from home.   the other two days i was going to have Oscar home with me, and we were going to run errands and go to Jellybean Gym together, and take spring walks with his new tricycle and i was going to sort through all the old toys and rearrange stuff around here and shed the clutter and paint the new windowboxes and i was excited, so ready, so looking forward to spring days with my boy, doing stuff.  but i cannot do.  and i cannot have O home with me right now, not alone, because i cannot lift him, nor chase him.  we cannot go for walks.  and i sorrow, a little, at the spring i imagined - our last gasp just the two of us, you see, or so i hope with wistfulness on all sides - slipping through my fingers as i lie here dull and quiet, staring at the dust on the ceiling fan.

we made it safely home, four hundred vomit-free kilometres plus a few.  my couch and i are learning to live with each other in a whole new intimate way that may actually precipitate me finally giving in and getting rid of this wretched, stained, scratched-to-shit eleven-year-old Ikea special in favour of something, um, larger than a loveseat.  and work is crazy busy and so i have not had time to be bored on the couch yet, nor to internalize much about the fact that it is April and i am on bedrest.  bedrest at fourteen weeks.

already, says my conscious mind and i know it will be long, starting this soon, and i brace for the endurance test.  of course, already, says a voice that echoes deeper.  it is April.  did you think you could just breeze through April, blithe, unbeaten, unscathed?  and i hear laughter - peals that skate down my spine - and i want to duck but i cannot tell which direction the threat is coming from.

twice before i have been pregnant in April.  twice before it has seen my children into the world, early, untimely…once safely so, once not so much.   i fear April in an animal way…warily, primally.   i have never made it into May still pregnant.  twice before, April has brought death into my house, my inmost heart…its eldest, the first who made me know i was loved beyond all else, and its smallest, the first i ever loved like that.  even in the joyfully bittersweet April that Oscar was born, the first boy i ever kissed died of AIDS and was buried just a block away from here on what should have been Finn’s first birthday.  April is a month of shadows, of stark wastelands around the crocuses. in April, i see ghosts everywhere i look, things lost: selves we all used to be in other springs that will not come again.

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i have been sitting bovine on my couch, intent on not thinking any of these things. i have been succeeding, working placidly away, hollering for water and happily confined to the present.  until, on a wander to the kitchen for a refill of my water glass, my eye caught the artist’s card in the junk dish that lives on our kitchen island gathering bread ties and old batteries and change and bits of things that would probably be better off elswhere.  the artist’s card for the bracelet Dave bought me for Christmas, the one that only came just before my birthday late in January, the handmade one, smooth blue stones set in silver with a deco fastener.  the one i loved.  the one i realized, in the instant my eye recognized the card, that i have not worn in…awhile.  that i knew was lost even before i went upstairs to check fastidiously, desperately.  the one i knew instantly i’d lost without even noticing, somewhere in the course of the last few weeks.  i only had it perhaps eight or ten weeks, altogether…and somewhere, unattended to, its fragile clasp slipped from my wrist and fell, and i did not hear it.

i hate losing things.  i can still list the things of value i lost in childhood and young adulthood - a beloved boy doll left behind in a mall on a trip to another city, a ring swallowed by a public swimming pool, unrecoverable, when i was about nine, the crisp, disappearing fifty dollar bill my grandmother gave me for new school clothes at the start of high school, a copper bracelet - my mother’s - that flew off my wrist into Montreal harbour during college.  over seventeen or eighteen years, these were the things that got by me.  i was careful, perfectionist about honouring and valuing what i had, what had been given to me to use or take care of.  i grew up poor but rich in heirlooms, only child of an only child.  every thing in my life and my world and possession had a story, a legacy, almost a life of its own.  at the very least, even the new things were carefully saved for, representing someone’s doing without.  and so every loss made me cringe with shame and panic.  every loss made me feel i’d dishonoured the giver.  every loss was immediately noted in my own internal log and accounted for and atoned for ten times over.

but never before have i lost something i valued like this bracelet and not noticed for weeks.  it’s thrown me off-balance, the fact that i was so utterly unaware, that i missed not only the moment of loss but the aftermath…that there is nothing to trace.  i cannot even remember, not for the life of me, when i last had it on.  and i do not like the way that feels.  i am wracked with guilt about a bracelet that - while it cost a hundred dollars, making it the most expensive bracelet i have ever owned - still only cost a hundred dollars.  i feel vaguely sick about it, and vulnerable in my oblivion.  it is a watershed, in my mind, you see, a harbinger: all i value could suddenly be slipping away from me and i would not know, would have no warning, no recognition, no clue.  and later, there would be no chance for making anything right…it would all just…be gone.

Freud much, anybody?  it is no wonder, whenever the heck i lost this bracelet, that i didn’t notice until April.

but…but. some other small part of my troubled little brain has the temerity to hope that somehow, somewhere, that beautiful silver bracelet is rather a ransom, that it is the something greedy April has to take from me.  that my unwitting failure to note its loss will somehow allow me to escape with the rest, with the other Christmas/January gift i am so afraid will slip from me beforetimes, be lost before my fool believing self even knows the difference.  April’s blood money.  silly.  i know.  magical thinking.  and yet i prefer it to the idea of foreshadowing, as i peer out at this long, stretching month ahead.

i don’t really believe it.  but i wish i could.

home.

i’m on “pelvic rest” ’til, um, September.  no lifting Oscar.  no carrying anything over ten pounds.  no sex.  no excitement.  no laundry, supposedly, or vacuuming.  no exercise.  horrors.

ice cream is allowed.  sitting is permitted unless i feel any twinging or cramping, in which case i should lie down.  my colleagues at work will likely find sudden bouts of horizontitude a little, erm, disconcerting, as i work in a cubicle in a shared office with a bunch of computer dudes, but…i’m moving to part-time, so i’ll see if i can just keep the lying down for home.   commence devolution into whiny, frabjous couch dictator with ass the size of Alaska.

but i wanted this, and still do, so much.  this is still all perk, for me, compared to the alternative.  i was taken aback by the fact that my cervix was so weak as to need the cerclage this early, but i am perversely glad to have it, glad to have made it to the point where a stitch is advisable, an option.  it is external validation, i suppose, of the reality of a pregnancy i find it otherwise hard to believe i haven’t conjured out of utter wishfulness.  so i am trying to respect its reality and limitations, the stitch, hard as it is to adjust in the moments when my child falls and cries and i leap to scoop him up and remember, too late, that i am not supposed to…that there is fishing twine embedded deep in my most intimate bits and it is there to do a Very Important Job and tearing it through my compromised flesh would be Unpleasant and Bad, both.

confronting the diaper pail upstairs and judging its weight and realizing i have to ask Dave to take it down kind of sucks too, surprisingly. mostly because i hate to ask for things, hate incurring any karmic debt involving household chores.  i harbour a secret fear that i will be paying for the next few months well into our retirement, envisioning conversations circa 2047 that involve ancient moi wheedling “honey, can you put my polyester slacks in the washer, mon chou, as i am indisposed shining my new dentures?” and hearing “dang, woman, i washed your pants with my bare knuckles uphill both ways all the time you were pregnant with Hughloise (insert helpful name suggestion here, please) and i gave Oscar all his baths for FOUR MONTHS and got zero lovin’ and clearly you are an ingrate now go pick up my socks and, uh, sugar? i like fabric softener in my dainties.”  or something like that.  except Dave being Dave, there would be no details; more like, “i did all your laundry for YEARS.”  lordly look.  end of conversation.  i cringe.  laundry, you may guess, is usually my domain…and i am accustomed to my high horse.

and yet those are the things i hope for, really.  i hope there is a happy ending, so that all this lumpishness and helplessness can someday be something Dave lobs back at me, mock-hard-done-by, this period a memory made worthwhile by the presence of another little face that shouts “mine!” and tears about the house making us frazzled and happy and grateful.  it may well not.  but it is worth every crappy moment of the shot.

(so long, of course, as he does not leave me beached on the couch, Oscar unbathed, socks piled up about the house like mouse droppings.  which is what i secretly fear, i think, in becoming less of what i am used to being, all of a sudden.)

becoming an effective invalid is damn hard on the self-esteem, and on the relationship one conducts in one’s head with one’s love and partner, even if one’s love and partner is willing and adaptable.

Oscar had to go back to the emergency room the other day, when his breathing suddenly bottomed out again after almost five months without an ER trip.

he’s been using an asthma inhaler twice daily since the last ER visit in October, and we had a consultation with the local asthma clinic to discuss how to manage symptoms if they began to appear again…and he’d fought off a number of colds with no sign of impact to his lungs, so really, we thought all was going well.

so well that we put him back on dairy…which we’d dropped, at least in the form of milk, after that same last visit back in October. though formal medical channels made no peep about any connection, Dr. Google had most kindly informed me that a lot of kids with asthma symptoms have dairy sensitivities, so we started soy milk and moved to rice milk after a visit to a naturopath in November. the naturopath was a bit of a bust really - all about evangelizing veganism and making presumptions that any child not currently taking wheatgrass suppositories must be living off Cheetos and Coke (which, um, thanks but could we talk about my kid? the one right here with the tofu smeared on his face?) - so we dumped his willfully deaf self and fast…but still cobbled a few of his lofty dietary prescriptions into our own big picture of what may be going on inside O’s little body.

plain, unsweetened yogurt and rice milk and lots of protein in the form of soy and legumes and eggs it’s been, through the winter, with cheese here and there without incident. plus noodles, avocado, fruit, the usual.  O seemed, January ear infection and the spate of runny noses aside, pretty healthy. at least his lungs were great.

so great that i decided last week that really, i’m no freaking dietitian, and it was a snake oil quack of sorts who got us started on this rice milk stuff - which organic and whole grain and fully of fluffy unicorns though it is, has no protein in it, you see - and oh my god what if i’m causing beriberi or something by not giving my child the milk of friendly cows? so out i trotted and bought a four litre jug of local, farm-fresh-ish homo, and by the time we got to the bottom of the jug, O was in the emergency room with blood oxygen sats of 88 and it all just came on overnight no matter how many puffers we pumped into his little lungs.

now, i realize this could just be coincidence. one event does not a scientific trial make, and all that. but for the moment, i’ve restocked the rice milk, and think we’ll go back to what was working at least for another month or so, and then when i’ve wrapped up the big project at work and we have a little more time for hanging in the emerge, maybe we’ll try those happy cows again. all the while watching very carefully.
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what i’m wondering, though, since the traditional medical community here seem largely oblivious or resistant to the idea of any link between dairy and asthma symptoms and thus i don’t really have anyone to ask except Dr. Evangelivegan (the other naturopath, the one i really want to see, is on maternity leave), is whether any of you have experiences, anecdotes, or knowledge to share about kids and dairy sensitivities and breathing “issues”? just curious. and grateful for anything you’ve got to add to our pastiche of a picture.
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this province has the highest asthma rates in Canada. we’re by far the smallest and one of the most rural provinces in the country. high levels of pesticides due to mass farming practices are suspected…and yet, we ourselves live dead smack in the middle of the (admittedly teensy) capital city, and O’s only ever driven by farmer’s fields a couple of times in his life, never even during spraying season. the cows, though…i dunno. they’re probably living a little closer to those pesticides, if, indeed, the assumptions of a link aren’t specious. or maybe Oscar just has problems because he was a 36 week baby, or maybe the five rounds of experimental prenatal steroids i got as part of a study while i was on bedrest with him have actually backfired and weakened his lungs, or maybe he’s allergic to the cat or the dust mites that likely party in his room at night despite my semi-diligent HEPA vaccuming…all these things are possible, are part of our picture. and it is probably too early to tell, definitively. and he may grow out of this. if he does not, it does not worry me overmuch…there are worse things. but it interests me, fires my mind, you see.

and so i wonder if you can help, if you can tell me what you know, too.

days slip by and it’s like there’s nothing i can find to say…as if all the threads of narrative got wound up like dust bunnies and shoved behind the furniture, hidden by the bulk of everyday living.

but under my skin, my busy, moving skin, i am here. wanting to speak. wanting to be heard. wanting to find space in the riot of routine to make words.

i wrote poetry when i was a kid. never reams of it, but terse, crafted experiments with rhyme and free verse and the siren song of rhythm…odes to stormy weather with titles that mortify me now, and efforts to rework what i thought of as the sheer literary perfection of Duran Duran’s “Hungry like the Wolf.” there were early forays into themes of becoming, too, and a few pieces half-remembered that i wish i still had, that dart across my memory taunting me with the idea that my career as a poet peaked at fourteen. it was like alchemy for me, this writing, a spell cast with words and ideas, woven on scraps of paper but always intended, secretly, in my emo-kid heart, for the world.

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i grew up listening to the poetry of Bob Dylan on my mother’s Joan Baez albums. we were not a radio family, and the years of 8-track passed us by. we had a big old streamlined veneer turntable left behind by my father, and a collection of perhaps a dozen records that i figure he deemed too lame to bring with him when he went away to find free love: John Denver, Anne Murray, Roger Whittaker, The original Sound of Music Broadway recording, Simon & Garfunkel, some Salvation Army lady singing hymns, and the cream of the crop, Kristofferson and Baez, two albums each. the anti-establishment soundtrack of my oh-so-ironically-conservative single parent home, where middle-class respectability was the heighth of aspiration. yet i grew up singing along to “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word” and “Hard Rain” and my mother wondered later where i’d picked up my iconoclastic strain. she is not a person overly inclined to listen to the words.

i was well into my teens when i discovered that it was Bob Dylan who’d written half the songs that had held me rapt with their stories and their power on those scratchy Baez albums. i developed an acute case of hero-worship. i threw myself headlong into the canon of post-folk Bob, meandering through the intro-level cool of “Like a Rolling Stone” and the rest of Greatest Hits Volumes 1 & 2, progressing to Big Pink and “Isis” and “Brownsville Girl” and “Tangled up in Blue” over a period of years, different rambling tales enthralling me as reflections of my own love stories and wanderings and at the same time as universal, the only universal i ever really believed in.

the one thing i ever wanted to be when i grew up, all those years, well into my twenties, was Bob Dylan, bard. it is a sad, even silly thing to long for a voice that is already taken. i wrote derivative bits here and there, but was contemptuous of their obviousness, their sub-par Dylanesque parody. i ached to be wise, prescient, conduit of a generation. but while i could see, on an instinctive level, the rawness around me in that strange early-90s recession world on the cusp of grunge, i could not speak. i wanted to reap what i could not sow. my poems shrivelled and died. i turned my back.

i learned to play guitar, instead. badly. i sang folk songs, and i made a joyful noise of other’s words.

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i come now, with age accompanied by hairs on my chinny-chin-chin, to the realization that i am ill-suited to bard status in any case. even if i were able to shed all the extraneous responsibilities that eat my time and my internal narratives, i am not that type. i am no loner, no prophet. i like company, particularly in my misery. i hate being misunderstood. i fear offending. and i always fail whenever i try to frame things allegorically. but it isn’t just temperment and talent keeping me from my original life’s goal, oh no. it’s drive. i dabble. i am not courageous nor focused enough to master the craft of poetry and metaphor, to speak broad truths in permutations unending, to be the mirror of society that people quake to see themselves in. even if i could, i wouldn’t. i’d chicken out, over-analyze, get distracted by the laundry piles and fail to practise. i would assume that vocations come with no assembly required.

this doesn’t make me sad like it would have if i’d been able to see myself in this place some twelve or fifteen years ago. because i do speak, here, even if sporadically, even if sometimes only of diapers and songs i wish i’d written and themes that get repetitive after awhile. i speak as an editor at heart, the studied one who stints out her words and focuses on minutiae and details, small truths. but i keep making myself come back and speak, trying to learn my own words, to get back to that magic of alchemy that i tasted at fourteen, and keep the furniture from taking over completely.

but i marvel at those whose voices are bigger than they are. and i wonder if the opus unborn lives in all of us, somewhere under the clutter and the words we carve out from our days, or if these collections of the mundane are enough, are opus in themselves in these ether-bound rooms of our own?