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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?

it must be that wistful time of year, Valentine’s over, the snow still lurking in the wings for another few months of gray, nose-icicling cold. i kinda want to hide on my couch until spring.

i am apparently not alone. CBC radio, that bastion of Sunday morning entertainment in our house, is playing Stuart MacLean’s collection of sad songs again today; Tom Waits and Joni Mitchell and an old early Sinatra tune and Leonard Cohen and whatever else i can’t remember though i’ve heard the show twice, now, and my brain wonders…was it last post-Valentine’s weekend they played this the first time? has a year really slipped by so fast? and i boggle, but it is an aside, because we are clotted up in February right now and it is impossible to imagine that time will ever slip again.

towards the end of this unorthodox Vinyl Cafe repeat is a trio of pieces by singers who’ve spent much of their lives in this tiny province, my home by birth and, wryly, choice…and i am overwhelmed by this triumverate, the late Gene MacLellan and his daughter Catherine and Tanya Davis, her friend. the joke goes, of course, that all we Islanders not only know each other, but are related…still, i do not know them, only by reputation. i sang his songs in childhood, his daughter is the friend of a friend, and Tanya i nearly saw at a poetry slam when i first moved back here but then i got airlifted and things fell apart and when i came home without my firstborn poetry frightened me, in public, because tears came too easily. Gene was best-known for writing “Snowbird,” the song that made Nova Scotian Anne Murray famous in the year or so before i was born…and he committed suicide one winter thirteen years ago, just as his daughter came into her teens. she had a daughter herself not long ago, in the year between Finn and Oscar’s birth, that year where i was raw and acutely aware of every one else’s successful childbirthing. i envied her, then. now, i only envy her talent.

so the MacLellans’ sad songs and Tanya’s poetry make tears come today…but i am safe on my couch, not exposed, rather just as happy to ride the catharsis of others’ sorrow. i like sad songs. they make me feel better, even about February.

i remember having one of my finest bar debates, back in the day, with somebody who was convinced that a truly great love song had to be a happy song, one that ended in the lovers’ happy ending. i scoffed and sucked on my cigarette like i was Leonard Cohen, and pronounced, bah. a real love song, said i, several gin & tonics in, is emotion reflected on in the tranquility of after, love elegized and eulogized. if the artist can make us hear beauty and poignancy in love even in the midst of sorrow and the relationship gone into the shitter, then he or she is a bard, said i…citing The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York and Mitchell’s Case of You as paragons. and, taking it further, slurring Cohen’s lyrics and blowing smoke out my nose, i proclaimed that a love song requires both the holy and the broken Hallelujah. and then i think i passed out.

all these years later, buoyed a bit by Tom Waits’ growling, i wonder if this propensity for sad songs is a bit of a Canadian thing. Leonard Cohen is, after all, a Canuck. and Gene MacLellan lived through a lot of PEI Februarys. in sunny climes, is the dissection of what’s been lost nearly so comforting, when there is no long season of endurance and sufference?

do you have a favourite love song that suits the dreary days of February?

i’ve been blogging long enough now that i’ve almost forgotten that it wasn’t always a part of my routine, my life…that once, the only audiences i had for this internal monologue of mine were Dave, my journal, and occasional mutterings to myself my imaginary friends.

but thanks to the medium of the blog, i am blessed with people - apparently not imaginary, the lot of you - who come here and actually read the things i go on about. and say stuff in return, most of which is amazingly generous and kind. fascinating. and i confess, i actually try really hard to be worthy of the audience…i edit, i ditch stuff, i try to sound less whiny. my grandiose goal falls somewhere between an attempt at authenticity and an effort to create a voice that might come off the page and connect, somewhere, with somebody. there are rough attempts at craft, here…working with the real to try to make it, somehow, literary. or literate, at least.

but there is a lot of real that never sees the light here. a lot of real that slips under the bridge, silent…or silenced. much of it is mundanity…i assume that since the detailed content of most of my days isn’t amazingly compelling to me half the time, it’s unlikely to enthrall you, either. i assume, like any audience, you’re expecting a modicum of restraint and discernment on my part, a serving up of tidbits rather than an exhaustive menu. grand. but there are other bits, total tidbits, ripe for the exploring, that i hold back, stay utterly mum about. even, sometimes, the ones i actually need to write about most…the ones that make me feel vulnerable and broken or furious and caged.

they’re the bits about other people.

sometimes i wish that back when i started this blog i’d been smart enough to tell the world that my name is Zelda, that i live in Outer Slobovia with my pet porpoise Fluffy, and that i am actually a unicorn. or something like that. i certainly wish - sometimes - that i hadn’t told anyone who actually knows me in real life that i blog.

because this is not a private blog. this is a candy-floss edition, in a sense, of my life…not all sunbeams by any means, but still sanitized. Dave’s parents are two of my most faithful readers. some friends from high school stop by occasionally, and my former mommy-coffee posse check in occasionally. my co-worker’s wife reads the blog, and every now and then i meet someone at the local Farmer’s Market - someone on whom i have never laid eyes before in all my days - who tells me they like my writing. surreal. yet, all this is good. all these people are good. none of these people comprise the Sartrean “enfer” i lifted for the title above…hell is other people.*

but not all people are good. or all good all the time, at least. i have wounds, see…yep, i know…shocking. so special. but some are old and complex hurts, tied up in family dysfunctions that baffle me and leave me feeling negated and small, tongue-tied. some are newer, raw spots, places where i’m neurotic and over-sensitive, grievances that have sat with me as part of my grief for nearly three years now and which i am too polite to ever bring up in any productive way with those who caused them. some are so new they still bleed fear. all of them are connected to or triggered by or the direct result of the actions or lack of action of others, in a few cases intentional, in most not. they are, collectively, probably not all that special as the wounds of a lifetime go. but they are mine. and sometimes i think writing my way through them might be helpful, even healing.

however, because i blog without the convenient screen of mysterious privacy over this persona i’ve constructed here, i can’t write about ‘em. i feel nasty writing about other people in any way i’d be uncomfortable having them read. i don’t like conflict, and like passive aggressive attacks even less. if i know that the people i know know i have a blog, even if they’re not regular readers, and if i write what i really think of some of those people in the heat - or morose bleakness - of a particular moment, then i am, in my own mind, slagging those people on the virtual equivalent of the high school bathroom wall. taking pot shots that are neither private nor direct. and that just seems…cheap.

incredibly tempting, sometimes, though. oh god, how i long now and then to come here and unburden my little wounded heart on this audience, to say can you believe this! and have the chorus come back with intonations of judgement and brimstone heaped on the offending party, and the gentle balm of righteousness anointing my lily-white self. oooh, i fantasize. but genius that i am, i came out as exactly who i am, and so there is no mask behind which i am comfortable letting the dirty laundry breathe.

piss.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

the lovely - and i assume equally un-masked - Julie Pippert asked how we deal with the issue of writing about other people as part of this week’s Hump Day Hmmm. i’m always fascinated by the unwritten rules that govern boundaries within a community, so i’m curious to see if others, even those whose blogs are far more anonymous than my own, still have compunctions about writing about other people.

what about you? who do you allow yourself to write about? where do you draw lines, if at all? how much personal dirt do you like to read?  do writerly lamentations often come out sounding like victimhood to you, no matter whether there’s a chance of the other party ever reading the post or not?

and if you DO know me in real life, rest assured, if i ever mention you here…that’s a sign of how perfectly, benignly happy with you i, erm, am. and don’t anybody go search for a blog by Zelda the unicorn, ‘k? i need someplace to let off steam.

*from No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre

Friday night and Dave & i got to talking, reminiscing about this guy we both used to know long before we were a couple, this guy who was loud and funny and brash and shameless. and since we knew him mostly at different times we were swapping stories and i, of course, won because this guy once passed out on my couch and - literally piss drunk - had a little accident and then fled into the night, a fact which came to my attention the following morning when the new potential sublet people came over to see the apartment and perched themselves on the couch and said, with an odd nervous look creeping over their faces, “it’s wet.”

old friends, they’re golden. and because i am a sentimental sort and wanted to see that guy’s goofy face again i beetled upstairs and dug out the old photo albums, the ones i kept faithfully pretty much from junior high straight through until about my 30th birthday, when a year of backpacking and the advent of the digital camera killed my fetish for the photo collection stone cold dead. flipping through the pages of the albums looking for the one with goofy friend and the giant bouquet of daisies he brought over the day after the piss couch incident, order and layout all coming back to me faintly because i once spent hours arranging all these photos just so…i was, suddenly, overcome with sadness.

i don’t scrapbook. i barely print my photos anymore. but up in the den are close to fifteen thick albums of my former life in pictures, me trapped forever in huge pink Coke-bottle glasses and a “Frankie Says Relax” tshirt, drunken shots of the college rugby team, of New Year’s Eve parties from 1987 through 2000, photos of my grandmother in her last days, kids i taught up North who later committed suicide, me holding babies who are now in high school, and my wedding, and Dave’s a year later. all so real at the time, and all so long ago. the albums are catalogues of a life that looks so linear laid out in pictures like that, a life that seems to have receded utterly into the past along with the people who populate the sticky, yellowing pages.

but what made me sad was that the albums themselves seemed as anachronistic as the smiling photos of me and First Husband. they are dead media just as what once was a “we” is now a relationship i peer at through the cellophane covering the pictures and try, in vain, to remember. they are antiques, artifacts of another time. in my world, at least, video never did kill the radio star, but flickr has annihilated the once-cherished medium of the physical, tangible album.

Oscar has never shown any interest in the photo albums in the den, though they’re brightly coloured and stored at his eye level. this morning when he and i got up, the old album with the photos of the piss couch guy was still sitting on the coffee table where Dave & i’d left it. after three rounds of “Hop on Pop,” it finally caught his eye, and so i hoisted it up onto our laps and opened it. and my son was floored. this was not a book! this was pictures of mama! and other people! and cats he hadn’t met yet! he looked for pictures of his father and seemed comforted when i was able to scrounge up one or two toward the end. he displayed a curious interest in photos of First Husband, even when i didn’t show up in them. he seemed amenable to the medium of the photo album overall, if quizzical about a collection of pictures that included none of him. but when we came to the end, he promptly slammed the heavy book shut, turned to the laptop beside us, and shouted “more!” he wanted to look at flickr.