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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.

it’s been three years.

three years since we got up at 5 am on a frosty morning and rushed by cab to the bus station and then across the street to the other bus station, dragging luggage like a wedding train, because we could never remember which place sold the Express Bus tickets. and then i found out that the Express Bus was sold out and was flabbergasted because it was 5 in the bloody morning and i’d never seen an Express Bus sold out but hey, there was a tour group and all my righteous indignation wasn’t going nowhere. so we caught another cab to the train station, Plan B…you lugging the bags and stuffing them in and out, bless you, and then you put me on the train bound for Seoul and by transfer to Incheon airport and i made it in time and changed plans at Narita outside Tokyo and then Vancouver, i think, or Toronto, and diverted to Montreal in a snowstorm and all the while i had an ultrasound photo stuffed in my passport just in case the opportunity arose to show it off and maybe get myself bumped up to a seat that reclined - hey, i’m pregnant, you know, and isn’t that special and just out of my first trimester, this trip is 36 hours door-to-door and getting longer all the time, any chance of an extra blanket and getting my pillow plumped? - and i was moving home, coming home, prodigal returns and kill the fatted calf.

my mother came out in that snowstorm by cab at 1 in the morning just to make sure i had someone to meet me. i had been gone almost sixteen years.

but i was coming home to make good and i had sent so many resumes on ahead and you would follow two weeks later when your contract got tied up and we were going to have a baby, a baby, a baby finally, and for the first time in my life i felt like i’d made choices rather than just being buoyed about by opportunity or lack thereof and i was so goddam happy and filled with possibility and grateful that you were willing to risk this small, insular place, this place where you’ll always be “from away” even though “away” is a four hour drive, in your case, and not really so foreign. and i woke up that first morning on the hide-a-bed in my mother’s apartment to a world that was snow white and blanketed three feet deep and i felt young again, surrounded by the childhood things of home, and safe.

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it has been three years, and you made it but so much else didn’t that i thought for a long time we’d drown in the water under the bridge. and yet here we are, still here, with this house and that blond boy upstairs sleeping and tonight it is snowing again. and i am happy and filled with possibility again and grateful just to have you with me, the two of you…father and son.

but the memory of that morning is like a snapshot i revisit every year, when its anniversary comes up…when i remember all that hope, that fleeting glimpse of a simple, steady life, for a second, for a season. and i wonder who the girl in that picture was and why i feel so dead inside when i try to look at her, to imagine being her again, on that first morning. it is her naivete that i find so incomprehensible, an affront to my eyes. i can see her glee and her relief and her tentative sense that surely if we just put our minds to it and work and endure, from here, it will come together, because we’ve got the important things in place, you see.

and i do not know if it is her that i feel so sorry for, knowing how the pages of that story unfold…her or me…who will never feel safe like that again.

we have stayed longer than i ever thought we would. we are peaceful here, i think, for now. nothing has been as i’d thought it would be…and yet, i am glad we came. and i would not go back to that morning for anything. i cannot imagine what it would be like to live in that time, anymore, everything open and possible still.

old Christmas.

i’ve always loved the word ‘epiphany,’ gloried in the way it slips off the tongue, like an icicle: shining, elusive. its multiplicity of meanings lures me, too, rich and complex as it is in both its Christian usages and its secular incarnation. and suddenly, writing this, the connection between the visitation of the Wise Men and the flash of intuitive insight strikes me, and in the meta-moment i smile, abashed at never having noticed before. an epiphany about epiphany. how geeky. how entertaining. how lovely. writing does this for me, makes things evident i’d never see unless i trapped them in print, wriggling into meaning.

seven years today since i walked away, for good, from a marriage that was safe yet sad, in ways i never had adequate words to explain. seven years and i have had no epiphanies on that one, only the slow crusting over of a scar one has made on oneself, with sorrow and some guilt, but zero regret. the decision made and agreed upon some weeks before, i strapped on my backpack, and trudged down a crowded Korean alley to a cheap hotel which offered sex toys in a vending machine and a bed for a price that wouldn’t break my bank account. my friend Sarah, who was even more newly arrived in the country than i was, stayed with me. we eschewed the vending machine, though giggled at the, erm, delicate circumference of some of its offerings. we committed great cultural offense whenever we failed to remove our shoes at the door to our room, a pink linoleum palace awash in garish satiny relics, like some vintage, campy Marilyn Monroe trailer. we learned to order takeout, by phone, in Korean.

i read a lot of Dorothy Parker, then. on that epiphany afternoon in which i first laid down my bags in that pink waystation to everything that came after, i stole her words for “sanctuary” for my journal.
the land is bare of chattering folk, the clouds are low along the ridges
and sweet’s the air with curly smoke, from all my burning bridges.

she brought me comfort, wry, caustic Dorothy Parker, mistress of words.
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i am a person who looks back, personally - Lot’s wife had nothing on my capacity for casting backward glances, taking stock of where i’ve been - but also culturally. in the 21st century pastiche environment of media and information, i’m a firm and entrenched throwback, a dinosaur of sorts. i am a paragon of the print era. in grade 5, my teacher used to ask me for help spelling things. in college, i kept my pissant scholarship based not on class attendance but on some innate, unfailing sense for constructing an effective written essay, even though i left assignments to the night before. reading and writing is as natural to me as breathing.

born too late, i whisper to myself in the wee hours, counting topic sentences and finely honed turns of phrase to soothe myself to sleep.

because this inclination of mine represents no longer the keys to power, nor to cool. this heavy pull towards all things print-based, towards the structures and invisible codes of a medium whose day has been and gone, renders me increasingly ananchronistic in my sensibilities. i am linear, structure-focused, frustrated by breadth without depth. i like the considered nature of print. i am an essayist in a world of tweets and facebook notes.

i’m open to technologies and to those new-fangled media that are primarily non-word-based, but from the perspective of a cultural anthropologist visiting a very foreign land. i love my computer, but i use it to read…and to write long, journal-style blog entries. i seldom turn on the tv. i only listen to music in the car, and even then prefer the wordiness of CBC radio for most short trips. gadgets befuddle me. i don’t have an iPod. and the website development Dave & i’ve been working on this weekend, where i’m trying to design content (for a writing course!) without a visual sense of what the finished product will look like and what hierarchy or structure it will fit within, makes me into a wretched, tortured, evil cow. really. ask Dave.

because he’s different, you see. the wiring of his brain makes new things fun for him, apparently, and makes him far more willing than i to venture outside the pleasant, familiar, pastoral world of paragraphs and conclusions to risk his metaphorical neck using new media for experimentation and expression. he’s decided to do a live one-minute video blog every day, all year, during 2008. that’s 366 video clips, folks…originally titled 365 but, erm, he forgot the whole Leap Year deal. his loving public fixed that fast. 366 minute-long blurps of Dave sitting in front of the Christmas lights in our playroom/office (because Oscar likes those lights and even though everything else has come down for old Christmas those will stay, so hath declared the indulgent parents) blathering on without structure, without planning, without editing. just to try it. just to see if he can do it…an art project of extemporizing. i, who can say nothing in less than a thousand words, each one carefully chosen, shudder at the thought.

but i’m proud of him. or at least pleased one of us is living in this century.

and willing to take a few steps in that direction myself, just so as not to become so comfortable in my little world of print here that the epiphanies other media may have to offer aren’t entirely closed off to me. a few weeks ago, in the mad rush of the day before we left for the holidays, i remembered i’d promised had the privilege to be part of a live webcast in the Worldbridges Solstice Webcastathon. if you’re trapped in traffic and think my “ummms” and ramblings about how much i love the mommy blog community might help to while away the lonely hours, the link’s at the top of this post, for your listening pleasure.

and i’d like to do more. i did a few live webcasts when i first started the blog, back in 2006, but organizing guests and conversations with a newborn and a blog audience of three proved challenging. now, i’m thinking…maybe you could help? if i could, say, Skype you…or even call you on your home phone…and pick your brain about some topic you’ve been writing about, and maybe gather a few people together for occasional roundtables on, um, stuff. cool stuff. we might be able to take this community to another level of conversation, people.

and launch ourselves boldly into the brave new world of the 1930s radio broadcasting podcasting while we do it!

if you speak, and speak English (sorry! i’m limited!), and would be willing to speak to me…leave me a comment. be warned, though: i’m ever more long-winded without the benefit of those invisible edit and delete keys.

not that i wish to mar the clean slate of ‘08 by trodding in its new fallen snow, its blank white pallet of words and thoughts as yet unformed with such ingratitude as may (be warned) be thought to follow…oh no, nay, never…but i ask you, o wise ones:

when one’s first day back to work in the new year is cancelled due to snow, extending the pyjama-clad lolling about of the holidays by one more lovely twenty-four-hour increment, could not the shrieking, battering wind carrying aforementioned snow not shut the $^&#@ up just long enough to let the dear children have a blessed nap?

please, won’t someone think of the poor parents trapped in the house at their wits’ end children?!? or at least my wee child howling his lungs out in his bedroom, because even with the fan on high the place sounds like it’s about to spin off for Oz and points west at any terrifying moment?!?   hush, snowflakes. really, i’m going to write a letter to my meteorologist about the rudeness of weather these days. just as soon as i ply my unsleeping son with rum sing my sweet baby back to sleep.

apparently 2008 is going to be a year of great, erm, wakefulness and wildness. we’re just hitting the ground running…or will, as soon as we dig our way out the door.

sometimes i imagine we are a thousand years old. i have no record to show otherwise. in photographic testimony of the past near-twenty months, Dave and i are only props, background to The Child.

and i am happy enough with that, because time, she has been catching up these late years. grief and fear and sleep deprivation, they all show in the eyes, show one up brittle when one tries to make up nice. and no one can compete for cute with a baby whose skin is fresh from the gods, in any case. safer behind the camera.

if it is just the two of us, Dave & i, one of us is asleep before midnight. it never occurs to me that the camera could be just for us, could have a use after Oscar’s bedtime. i am a pre-digital creature, who learned decades ago to hide her vain poseur’s delight in photographic evidence of her existence, in proof of a misspent youth. no need to take too many pictures of yourself…because those Polaroids? you didn’t fuck with those, man. they cost money.

but we are still here, for what it’s worth. hibernatory, muddling through…in a place where there is little to articulate. but here. still, alas, both of us completely without any evident musical gifts whatsoever, as we proved when i forced Dave to sit up and sing Christmas carols with me tonight, over much wine. (we eventually found the David Bowie/Bing Crosby “Little Drummer Boy” duet on Youtube and that was less painful than my warblings of “Greensleeves” and “O Holy Night.” damn songs have too many notes, spread much too far apart.  someone tell those composer types, thank you.)

and you should thank Santa and the bebby Jesus that despite the fact that we taught ourselves to play “Feliz Navidad” on the guitar just like a mariachi band this evening, oh yes, so vividly that i imagined pompoms hanging from the brim of a very different hat than the trusty pink deco plaid that keeps me from having to do my hair all winter, we did not capture that abomination of all things holy for your viewing…erm…pleasure.

there is, instead, only these, to remind me someday when this time is long behind me and i am able to look back on it, to peer behind me wondering where it all got to, that he & i were not so old yet as i thought. that silly, wasted years could still be eked out from the daily grind of loving and bearing all this adulthood we’ve reaped. that we were here, even through a time i cannot imagine being worth remembering much about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

d & c tomorrow morning, 8 am.

the drugs have done nothing thus far but bloat and clean my digestive tract with vigour, making the weekend a cramped affair spent largely in bed or curled up on the bathroom floor, nauseous and exhausted, wishing vainly for bleeding. and for the small mercies of closure, the avoidance of surgery. i was wishing also - and equally in vain - for the comfort of having my body get something right in this drawn-out comedy of errors that seems unwilling to just end, already. i’ve given up on that, and am now merely hoping to get out without permanent harm, without further damage.

i hope it is not too much to ask. the doctor i spoke with yesterday, when i reported my reaction to the drugs, suggested it could take another month for my body to miscarry on its own, which i - impatient creature that i am - think sounds like a torture sentence. particularly as with this kind of pregnancy and the fact that as late as last week my hormones were blithely trucking along, climbing, there’s a one in two chance i’d need the d & c at the end anyway. so i’ve made my choice, and chosen the certainty of now, hoping it means we can move on, regroup, try again in January. the part of me that chance and luck have already beaten down like a kicked puppy cowers in the corner, peering up at the miniscule risks of this choice as if they are writ like a destiny i do not believe in but cannot shake: marked for struggle, deposit random bad luck here.

beyond the exaggerated sense of vulnerability, i’m mostly angry right now. combined with the, erm, hormonal load i’m operating under, this makes me a bit of a loose cannon, dreaming in red, wanting to spin loose and wreak vengeance, somehow, wanting power back over that which i am powerless to change. and therefore i’m retreating from people and conversation, because i do not trust myself nor almost anyone else. people sometimes say dumb things. i am likely to say even dumber things in return. so i think i will keep my mouth shut for a little while, because the kind of damage i’m likely to cause with my tongue right now could last longer than the hurt i’d be blindly trying to assuage by lashing out.

that’s the thing…i understand, very clearly, that this will pass. underneath the petulance and the foot-stamping at the world and all the obliviously pregnant people in it, i am…okay. not numb, not destroyed, not devastated. wounded, yes…but confused by the unfamiliarity of these wounds, uncertain how to cope with them.

i hurt. but this is so different from my prior experiences with grief and loss, so much less weighty, that some part of me is inclined to dismiss it entirely as just an eyebrow wax, a momentary ouch. because this time, what grief i feel is for me. and for Dave…and our parents who clearly hurt to watch us hurt…but really, at the core, mostly for me. it’s sheer self-pity, and kind of ugly in its Old Testament righteousness…but it is, at the same time, relatively gentle as grief goes. because it is for me. i grieve this loss as the person to whom it has happened, not - even in part - as the mother of someone to whom it has happened. that difference, the weight of that difference, is huge for me. there was no fetal pole. there is no baby to mourn…not as i see life, the universe, and everything. i sent my heart down that rabbit hole just to make sure i wasn’t quashing something it needed to honour, but came up peacefully empty. i loved the idea of this baby-to-be, without qualification. but that idea was my own…and it is easier, i think, for me to know that this baby i dreamed of never had a heartbeat than to try to sort out the messiness of souls and motherlove and comparisons between a nine week fetus and a two pound, two ounce boy with brown hair who squeezed my finger and had his father’s nose. and for that, that particular exemption, that measure of relative luck, i am glad.

so this sadness and frustration feels like grief lite, like a cheap imitation of something that i only know as ravenous and all-consuming. i feel surreal, a little like an imposter in the world of the broken, because i can see the road back this time, even if it is hard ground. it is strange to reconcile the fact that tonight we will probably use the concert tickets i bought Dave for his birthday back before all went wrong with the fact that early tomorrow morning i will go to the hospital to have this pregnancy finished, once and for all.

and yet, sulks a part of me, how much nicer it would have been to have this one night out - our first in months - without all this hanging between us like bloody sheets on a clothesline. why can’t we catch a break, even of timing?

but i do not know the answer to that question…and suspect there is none.

But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain’t the time for your tears.

- Bob Dylan
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll

the lyrics above have been going through my head all weekend. or rather, more honestly, the lyrics above have been popping in and out of my head all weekend, making their appearance whenever i managed to wrench said head out of the lather-rinse-repeat cycle of agitating and fretting over the worry beads of this pregnancy. on which there is no news. more blood taken this morning. doctor’s appointment Wednesday. sometimes i soar with hope like a thing with feathers, certain that some little life really has taken harbour inside and will grow into a child of ours, a little person, despite the ultrasound’s Cassandrine proclamation. mostly i am quite equally certain that all is over and this nausea is just a trick being played on me by the universe, which is clearly still in junior high and has totally bad taste in humour.

especially since everyone else i know seems to be happily pregnant. happily, early announcing, oblivious, healthy-like-horse pregnant. which of course isn’t true, though i can count eleven of them who are…only one of whom has any previous history of loss, of this particular, exquisite sorrow. so i’m feeling a little like really it’s not my turn, thank you very much. but i guess it always feels that way when it turns out to be your turn…or at least it does to me. am i alone in that, that bafflement, that naive belief that suffering should even out sometime, and preferably soon? possibly a personality flaw.

i digress, in a way. the lyrics above, while they may cast uncomfortable shadows of insight on the vengeance some bruised part of me wishes to wreak on those faceless hordes for whom happiness always seems to be an unproblematized given, were actually on my mind because in Canada this weekend it was impossible to avoid the spectre of a dead Polish man named Robert Dziekanski. and because we watched the Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back on Friday night, too…but mostly because of Mr. Dziekanski, who died last month at the Vancouver airport when after ten hours of being apparently confused and unable to find his mother (who had driven in from a city hours away to pick him up) or speak English, kinda lost it about midnight, started breaking stuff, and then pretty much gave up when the police arrived, four of them, officers much younger than he. when he raised his hands, they tasered him. and he died.

and since the video that a bystander caught on his phone and submitted to the police as evidence has finally - after a legal battle on the part of said bystander - been returned and released to the media, there’s been an outcry around the country, and some hand-wringing, and some backlash, but not so much as i would have expected in an era when it’s begun to seem like anything done in the name of Airport Security is sacrosanct.

and the call to action of The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll wends through my mind and I wonder if the cry for justice will actually prevail here, maybe, just maybe? and i wonder what justice would actually mean in this case, because we can’t bring Mr. Dziekanski back, can’t spin back the loop of tape and have his mother find him at the airport, her lost adult child, and whisk him to safety and obscure tourist pastimes. i don’t really think that hanging those four cops out to dry addresses the issue, unless they were truly aberrations, vigilantes in uniform who just happened in some random perfect storm of stormtrooping to be thrown together on this distress call? and i suspect they were not. i suspect they were told “foreigner, doesn’t speak English, out of control, threat, threat, THREAT” and while they acted outside the realm of seemingly reasonable action, four to one, on a spent man with his hands up, they still acted as a part of this culture we’re living out right now, this xenophobia, this terror, this fear that if we do not act decisively with force we will somehow deserve the havoc wreaked upon us in our weakness. because if we believed anything else, at our core, i don’t think this would have happened.

if i were a Dylan-esque bard, this would be the tragedy on which i’d build my rallying cry. because it’s such a wretched, pointless mistake…of power and culture and fear. it is this culture that i’d like to see society wreak justice on. i’d like to hope we can, with patience and persistence. if people’s sorrow about the pitiful last moments of Robert Dziekanski, their anger about the unfairness of what was done to him, lasts beyond the usual soundbite lifespan to galvanize us as a society into actually looking into the face of this fear that drives us, maybe.

there will always be part of life in which there simply is no justice. who gets to bear children, who gets ill and dies, who gets the breaks of privilege and talent. but there are other aspects of life in which the groundswell of human outrage may actually make a difference, in the long run.

now ain’t the time for your tears, i sing to myself, because i want to believe it in so many ways, on so many levels.

…i got to see you speak, live, in person, yesterday.

you, who married Canada’s most flamboyant Prime Minister when you were only a 22 year old kid. you, who left him seven or eight years later and ran off - more or less, because we all know life is never quite as it appears in the papers - with the Rolling Stones. you, who had a son die, almost ten years back but the weekend still fresh in my mind, one of those jarring moments where tragedy comes to nest visibly in the golden houses of the land and icons are made vulnerable and exposed in the awful, unstoppable glare. you who have been in and out of the public eye intermittently since, partly for charity work that builds wells in Africa and partly for hospitalization in mental institutions.

you’ve lived quite a life, Maggie.

and you spoke about all of it yesterday, all of it wrapped up in a flowing, gracious narrative punctuated with some real humour and some rueful moments that i’m not sure i believe (c’mon, you really regret the Stones? dude.) and some heartbreaking moments of aloneness and grief - a few of which hit closer to my own raw spots than i’m comfortable experiencing in public and thus my eyes burned and i blinked furiously…i think my table-mates must have thought i found you awfully moving - and you spoke the words aloud that seldom get articulated at these fancy society-plate luncheons (except when they’re run by the Canadian Mental Health Association, of course): bipolar. mental illness.

Margaret, you’re cool. in kind of a froufy, earnest, endearing, slightly entropic way, yet with the poise that comes with thirty+ years of playing the political game and the press and the spotlight, the poise that comes of a lifetime of living in circles where you know the right fork to use. your father, a Scots immigrant, was a federal cabinet minister in your childhood. you were 18 and vacationing in Tahiti when you met the then-Minister of Justice, who was twenty-nine years your senior and - in my humble and entirely irrelevant opinion - dashing as old hell. your life has been one of privilege. easy? no. you have my respect, both for all you’ve weathered and survived, and most especially for standing up and owning your mental health struggles, openly and without shame, without hesitation. this tour you’re doing, and the attendant media blitz - all aimed at deconstructing the stigma and silencing and marginalization of mental illness - is really powerful work, and i actually think you’ll make a difference. your name still carries weight in this nation…and in many ways the self-image of the nation is still in part what your once-upon-a-husband made it. people will turn out to see you, even if just to verify whether you really do seem as kooky as they’ve privately thought for years. and you’ll hold your head high and speak with dignity about bipolar and about choosing sanity, choosing life over suicide, choosing to accept diagnosis and move forward from there. and that matters, a lot. and i applaud you.

but Margaret, seriously, did you really manage to talk for an entire hour on the theme of mental illness not just in your own life but in general, and appeal to your audience for greater understanding and acceptance, and not once acknowledge the dramatic ways that poverty intersects with mental health issues in an overwhelming percentage of people? did you really emphasize how lucky we are to live in Canada while people in Africa are poor, at an event intended to raise awareness of the single greatest common denominator among Canada’s homeless population? did you really just tell a $75 a plate luncheon crowd that your life turned around when someone in Ottawa, at a party, told you they had a job for you and how that job helped you find meaning again? i celebrate that, for you personally, and i realize that a former first lady working for $11 an hour after taxes had to be a bit of a life adjustment, to be sure…i get that, i really do. but did it, erm, occur to you that $11 an hour after taxes for helping new diplomats to Ottawa settle in and find just the right grocery store or drycleaners or whatnot isn’t necessarily the kind of job that the average person with a mental illness has fall into his or her lap every day? that actually most of us - whatever our mental states - don’t get offered jobs at parties at all, alas, just to keep us busy and fulfilled? i don’t mean to nitpick at you, Margaret…i really don’t. but you know, you left me heartsick there. because i think you just reinforced one terrible ancient pillar of stigma, however good your intentions; a pillar with a whole throng of tenacious roots in our societal pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps epistemologies. and that pillar is marked “those lazy fuckers just need to go get jobs”.

you have five children, Margaret. if you’d needed to raise them on that $11 an hour salary while struggling with your mental illness, you might have felt differently about the job. if you’d even been able to find one that well-paid in the first place. and if you’d been able to keep it.

you said you hated 24 Sussex Drive because you were trapped with a staff, unable to do simple things like cook for your family, or have any real privacy. and i sympathize, because as pleasant as the fantasy of never having to clean my friggin’ kitchen again may be, i cherish the sanctuary that is my home. and i wouldn’t want a staff, not really. but i can tell you that i’d prefer a staff trained to do my beck and call and clean up after me and my offspring to a staff struggling to find a shelter bed for me and said offspring on a winter night. and i don’t imagine there’s much privacy there, either.

Margaret, these things are not your fault, by any means, and i know that. nor do i fault you for your privilege, nor for any part of the life you’ve led. but if this banner is one you’re going to take up for the long haul, and i hope it is, then it is incumbent on you to take a good, hard look at the population for whom you’re speaking and advocating, in all its diversity. and to speak for all, not just those whose privilege mirrors your own, or who have resources on which to fall when they stumble. because an advocate and a stigma-battler is a teacher, first and foremost. and if you teach Canadian society only to love and accept the mentally ill who are like you, polished and financially secure, then i worry about what further stigma will be heaped on the heads of those left behind, those “undeserving” who do not only need our acceptance and respect but also, sometimes, our tax dollars and our goodwill and a sense of belonging to the mosaic of this society that may not be able to come from a job but is still their human right, under the Charter that ol’ Pierre worked so hard for.

please.

i work in a university.

i’m not a prof, though i’ve taught lectures on and off over the past ten years. i’ve done program admin, too, and these days i manage a grant housed within the ivy-clad walls of my local institution. i like it here. i figure i’ll finish my Ph.D, sometime in the distant, blurry future, and - if the boomers ever make good on their long-forecast mass retirement from the tenured jobs - live out my working days in the ivory tower, in a squidgy little office lined with dusty books and increasingly obsolete technologies.

i can’t think of anything i’d like better, professionally, barring waking up tomorrow as Annie Lennox.  which i don’t believe i’m actually qualified for.

really, from the time i was a bespectacled, bookish adolescent, slightly overearnest and a little odd, people looking to project a future of any sort on me always told me i was destined for academia.

but destiny hasn’t always been a comfortable fit.

yesterday afternoon i was bouncing down a staircase in the Education building, after having dropped off some papers for signature. two girls passed me on their way up…younger than i, significantly younger, but not really dressed quite like students, either. they looked formal, yet awkward, like they’d pulled themselves together in an unfamiliar way, as if they were playing dress up. and it clicked for me - the building i was in, the time of year. those two blond girls were education students on their first teaching practicum - artfully arranging the dress clothes that they normally wear clubbing in such a way that they magically - so they hope - appear as benign authority figures, teachers, members of the grown-up club. they didn’t see me stop behind them on the staircase, gazing up at their frayed cuffs and tipsy heels with the wistful fondness i normally reserve for kittens in pet shops. i wasn’t really seeing them. i was seeing myself, fourteen years ago.

i thought, when i was first an undergrad, that my small liberal arts college was a bohemian paradise. i confused academia with intelligentsia, and thought my job, in university, was to be literate, verbose, and proudly poor, authentically prole.  it was my time to shine, babee, to let my freak flag fly. when i graduated from my B.A, though, i had little sense of how to successfully leave the warm bosom of my alma mater, so i pursued the practical option of a one year Bachelor’s of Education degree back in the same small university town.

i was entirely unprepared for the world i was about to enter.

that one year program was academia by the middle class, for the middle class, and all about the middle class - the most aggressively normative, banal, and exclusionary experience that i’d ever had in the eighteen years of successful schooling i’d enjoyed to that point.

this program talked about education in terms of standard deviations and quantitative  assessments, and centred around Sunday gatherings so cordial and chipper i half expected Ward Cleaver to arrive.  there was no irony, no half-baked philosophical ramblings about teaching and society and what it all might mean.  there were, so far as i could spy, no questions, only answers.  the program focused on the sporty manly boys and the keen girls who stayed after class to discuss readings with their professors not because the readings were interesting but because that was just what one did: people made small talk after class like churchgoers leaving Sunday service, echoing the high points, creating a chorus of belonging. according to what this chorus never needed to say aloud, but reinforced consistently, schools existed to reproduce society just as it was for these particular people - pleasant and status quo, without awkwardness or surprises wherever possible. a certain discourse of friendly, unthreatening, vanilla congeniality permeated the entire enterprise. as did expectations not only that one would conform to this, willingly, but that one would know how to.

i did not know how to.  i felt like i was from Mars.  one girl whispered to me, at the end of year dance, that they’d called me the Bad Ass of the Class.  i wasn’t sure how to take that, though i felt vaguely proud.  i have never been so lonely in all my life as i was during that long, long year.

my students, with the exception of one group of advanced grade 12 students whom i raced neck and neck through Wuthering Heights and learned one hell of a lot from, liked me. the teachers i worked with, for the most part, liked me. but every time my professors came to see me in the classroom - to judge my efforts, to evaluate me - i felt small and wrong, unable to make myself into the image of “teacher” as they saw it.

because my lack of fit wasn’t all attitude. i remember standing in front of my dresser in the blue, bay-windowed room i rented that fifth year of university, the room with no heater, trying to choose what to wear for my first day of teaching. i had more clothes, that year, than i’d ever had before, because i’d spent the summer previous hooked up with - in a casual, old friends kinda way - my high school prom date from four years before. a hippie kid who’d lived in a commune until fourth grade, he was by that point the scion of the local second-hand clothing store, literally heir to the bales of polyester and vinyl that were shipped in weekly, twelve feet high. he and i had spent our summer dancing late to the local funk band and doing what we called “midnight shopping” - with his father’s blessing, we could pick through the mountains of clothing for treasures to keep so long as we sorted what we discarded. i had a wardrobe fit for a queen…so long as she liked to sit on cement floors.

it was 1993, the heighth of grunge fashion. i wore ancient, butter-soft plaid shirts with pearl cowboy buttons, and i’d cut them down sleeveless. i wore them with long, wrinkly skirts and army boots, or kneeless Levi’s 501s. my “good coat” was a shiny vintage vinyl blazer circa 1972, and my sweaters were all sized XL, though i - in hindsight - was not. i owned a lot of cool tshirts, mostly advertising local unions or pee-wee baseball teams in towns i’d never heard of. and i had two good dresses, one a leftover from the grade 11 Christmas prom six years before, the other bought on sale for a wedding more recently. i’d bought a pair of reasonably sedate black heels the summer before, in anticipation of teaching, but i literally had no money to add to this questionable wardrobe. and i personally thought everyone else looked frumpy, in any case, with their staid little button downs and pantyhose, but i knew, suddenly and certainly, standing in that drafty room trying to decide what to wear for my very first day of teaching, that i was never going to fit in in the close, jocular quarters of that corner of academia, my B.Ed program.

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

what i realized yesterday, watching those girls in their awkward finery teeter up the staircase past me, is that only now, at thirty-five, do i have the full set of class literacies i would have needed back then to succeed.  my program heads would have taken umbrage at the idea that they were classist - why, they were very considerate of the needs of underprivileged students and taught us all how to treat “them” with the special attention that their circumstances so frequently demanded.  but they remained a “they,” to them…to the program as a whole.  those of us who came into the program without a lifetime behind us of being comfortable, who came with more questions than answers about what education was for, who came without knowing how to rub elbows over the banalities of sports teams and recipe exchanges, because that was not what our home lives had prepared us for, came in at a drastic disadvantage.  not necessarily because we had learning disabilities, though that was the only context in which poverty ever came up during that year, unless “Breakfast Programs? Charity or Necessity” were being debated.  i was at a disadvantage in that program because it expected, at its core, that we all want the same version of society.  i think it had the learning disability.

the B.Ed program at my otherwise fabulous undergraduate college closed in 1996.  no great mischief, said i.

it taught me a great deal about what the academy and education shouldn’t be.