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he called Sunday night, said he wanted to check on how i’m doing with the ongoing bedrest saga. you’re just jealous, i said, of me getting to do all this laying around.

no no, he laughed, i’ve got enough of that going on myself. it’s terrible.

it’s supposed to be nice tomorrow, i said. i think i’m in good enough shape to drive the whole fifteen minutes outside town. you want to lay around together?

and he responded with something Child Protection Services would not approve of a grandfather saying to his granddaughter, and we both laughed and winked on our respective ends of the phone line, this arch repartée as old for us as the dirty jokes he’s dragged out and dusted off for every family dinner since my grandmother died and left him a second childhood.

that was how i came to sunburn my legs yesterday afternoon, reclined on the porch of my grandfather’s old plywood cottage on the shore just opposite the finest homes this city has to offer. even the old tumbledown cottages over on our side of the river are sprucing up, despite the fact that the land is rented in perpetuity and no one will ever be permitted to buy…two new facades have sprung up where there were once weeds and rot and paint jobs older than i am. the cottage next door has been a peeling-yet-bright minty green for as long as i can remember. yesterday, suddenly, it was faced in subtle brick-red siding, tastefully trimmed, gutted, a new deck gracing the view over the cliff.

my grandfather and i leaned back in our respective lawnchairs like two old coots. we gossiped, talked of our aches and pains, wondered at the state of the world and a few of my relatives. we watched a duck dive for fish, and marvelled at how far they swim underwater. he smoked his cigar, most courteously, with his right hand so as to keep the fumes out from under my nose.

he’s eighty-eight. he fell this spring and tore the muscles down his back and they’re not healing. he still goes into work every morning, at the autobody shop, still works a bit on ambulances and grants inspection stickers, but mostly i think he oversees or just sits, because work is somewhere to be. i come by my Really Useful Engine propensities naturally.

by noon, these days, he cuts out and heads home or to the cottage, because the pain is too much. that he’ll admit it, too much, so frankly and without pity sets off a panicky fluttering in my gut. i have a sneaking suspicion that his “too much” would be my “kill me now.” but painkillers wreck his appetite and he’s already lost twenty pounds, and so he sits on the florid vinyl lawnchair pillow with an icepack stuffed into the back of his flappy pants and nurses a rum for a few hours and watches the water to see if it calms.

any other year, he’d have hoisted the inflatable dinghy over his head already and made his way down the twenty feet of stairs that cling to the red mud bank, his white chicken legs comical, and rowed out to the small power boat that’s moored just where the high tide floats the motor. and like the Pied Piper, his appearance would have caused children to materialize around the raft, clamouring to waterski and kneeboard, and the afternoon would have been spent zooming across the water in ever-patient arcs, the second and third generation of skiiers and boarders he’s taught to lift themselves out of the water and balance and spin and spray all trailing behind him.

but this year, only one kid came around, just to see if he needed to be rowed out to the boat, if he was planning on skiing. i smiled at the kid, just growing now into his man’s body, still gangly and awkward. i remember holding the same boy steady on the kneeboard when he was all of five or six, a wild little towhead who forgot to let go when he fell off and might’ve been scared silly except my grandfather took most of the rest of the afternoon to make sure he got a proper ride and wasn’t left fearful. he’s a bit of a sour kid, or has been the odd times i’ve caught sight of him in the intervening decade. but yesterday he was polite and considerate and i beamed at him, full of gratitude at his offer, his remembrance.

they did not go out on the water, though. my grandfather’d had his rum and the wind was up a bit. maybe tomorrow, he said. and i realized, with a start, that even if they do ski tomorrow i cannot. he taught me when i was eight, and i have skiied behind him almost thirty summers. but not this year…if my doc does not approve of walking, no waterskiing probably goes without saying. as does the maybe never again.

i pretended there was cigar smoke in my eyes.

and then we sat there in the breeze and kept each other company, a matched set of shut-ins parked in the sun, enjoying the afternoon in spite of ourselves. and i have not felt either so useful nor so understood in months.

one hundred years ago today, a woman who would be known to posterity as L.M. Montgomery, a spinster in her thirties living in a rural farmhouse belonging to relatives, received a package in the mail.  it was the first edition of her first novel, titled Anne of Green Gables.  it went through five printings by fall of that year, and became a bestseller, with a longevity that would have stunned its author.  she did not live to see it transform the pastoral island that was her home into a red-headed orphan industry for the tourists from Japan and Romania and Tennessee who flock here every summer to lap up raspberry cordial and handmade soaps and cheap tshirts with the lead character’s freckled likeness stamped upon them.  she did not live to see the quiet Cavendish corner cemetery road become the site of the town’s first stoplight, with a Madame Tussaud’s knock-off across the road and her own grave tarted up sometimes like Jim Morrison’s at Père-Lachaise, only with more Hello Kitty, less whisky.

it must have come in brown paper, that first edition.  i imagine her unwrapping it, gazing at it with a sort of amused disbelief.

in the same tiny province, some miles away, a little girl celebrated her fourth birthday on the same day Maud Montgomery marked her own birth as an author.  i do not have to imagine the girl, as there is a faded sepia snapshot, disappearing more each year, of she and her friend Doris at a table set for tea.  there is a cloth on the table, with lace edging, and a white bow half as big as the birthday girl’s head holds back black curls that spill, as if coaxed, behind small, round shoulders.  the girl sits, clutching a doll, looking into the middle distance with the timid Mona Lisa of a smile that remained hers for nearly ninety-six years.  her black-booted feet perch demurely on the chair rung.  the plate of cookies appears to belong entirely to Doris, whose face is pinched and gazes directly into the camera, pigeon-toed Mary Janes kicking.  both girls wear puffed sleeves.

i know that Doris and the birthday girl lived across the street from each other nearly all their lives, well into their nineties.  i remember Doris myself, a tiny, gentle woman, bird-like and brown, who lived with another elderly lady as “the Missies Tait and Matheson” all through my childhood and my growing-up, in a yellow house with a goldfish pond in the back garden.  one day late in my teens a light dawned and i began to wonder if Doris and her friend were as quiet and conventional as they seemed…but i did not ask.  sapphic was not a word that tree-lined street seemed acquainted with. in staring the fierce four-year-old Doris in the face, in the photo, i wonder again, and smile back at the faded girl and all the unspoken mysteries that mark the century between us now.

the girl who turned four that day a hundred years ago was her mother’s eldest living child, though her father had a much-older daughter from a first marriage, who’d been whisked down to the Boston States upon her own mother’s death.  and there had been twins from the girl’s parents’ own marriage, boy and girl, born too soon and gone in the year or two before the birthday celebrant’s safe arrival.  there would be one more sibling, three years down the road; a three-pound boy child also born too early, kept in the oven in a shoebox, fed with an eye dropper.  in between the girl’s birth and his, i presume losses, miscarriages, other premature arrivals.  but like Doris and the older half-sister, they are mysteries, their absence now swallowed by time.

i wonder, wryly, if the imprints of our lives are writ for us in the leaves of family Bibles, patterns repeating themselves until they work their purpose out, or until medicine becomes so modern that their weakness is eradicated.  when i was a child, i knew no one else who was the elder half-sister, far away, who watched siblings grow up like distant cousins with a father to spend their birthdays with.  when my firstborn died, i knew no one else who had borne and lost her child, knew no one who inexplicably tended to premature delivery.  and yet there they were, these doppelgangers shaped like me, crumbling in old ink on the family tree.  i do not believe in destinies, and yet i am pleased, strangely comforted, to find them foreshadowing me, as if in continuity perhaps there is something meaningful, something more than simple waste and sorrow.

the birthday girl’s unborn brother would, in his late thirties, of course, become father to my mother.  and he would die, too young, and by the time of my birth the girl would be a nearly seventy-old childless widow who had raised her niece and would help her niece raise me.  i called her my grandmother, and every year on the twentieth of June we celebrated, our small left-over family, and every year the expression that peeked out in pictures from the face of the birthday girl grown old was that same prim, self-contained almost-smile that hid a heart made of pansies and crocuses.

in L.M. Montgomery’s novel, the orphan Anne comes, rather by accident, to stay with an upright, rather dour farm woman and her shy bachelor brother.  the dance of the three, between spirit and indulgence and the Protestant work ethic, taking in the kinship of the young with old and the pull of societal shoulds and responsibility against imagination and the sentimentality of a child who has understood disappointment early, all form the web of the novel, its structure, its imprint.  it was my first literary model for identity, for understanding the shape of one’s life by seeing it reflected in pages, long before i ever looked in the family Bible for other incarnations.  it may have been just because we were three, my mother, my grandmother, and i, and rooted in the same cultural impulses Montgomery understood and subverted, cunningly, that the three of us played out our roles almost like a parody sometimes, my mother serious and practical and concerned that i be tamed into goodness, my grandmother less directly responsible and thus more free to cultivate mischief and sentiment, and more open, in her shy way, to what the love of a child brought into her life in those late years.  whatever the reason, in Anne i found that first shock of recognition, the first realisation that patterns exist in human interaction, the first taste of meaning larger than the mundanity of my own life.

i gather that no one bought my grandmother a first edition of Anne of Green Gables for her fourth birthday; i don’t suppose they were even in the stores yet.  certainly if one was ever owned, it disappeared, another lost mystery, possibly sold to the auction man like my mother’s 1959 Barbie and a hundred other maybe-treasures of the attic that got cleaned out every few years when money got tight because my grandmother’s shyness and politeness made her the most vulnerable touch on the street, and she never did learn that the old would come back in value where arborite and paperbacks might not.

but it was her, i know, who bought me the book first, when i was seven or eight.  and it was her, every summer, who paid to take me to the theatre where the wondrous hidden orchestra would warm up with scales and the lights would dim and my breath would catch and then Anne would strut on stage in all her musical glory and a bright red wig.  and i would sit high up in my seat in my most old-fashioned dress singing along, fervently hoping and praying that some unfortunate actor would trip and fall and require replacement and some knowing director would peer out amongst the audience and see me there with my brown bowl cut and my puffed sleeves and say, you, little girl, you. yes.  come up here.  i did not know about understudies then, only that i longed to shine.  i do not think my grandmother was well-versed in the ways of theatre, either, this being the only show we ever went to.  but had she known what i was imagining there in my seat, she would have patted my hand as sure as sure, and said, well, i don’t know, honey, i can’t see how they’d pick anyone but you.  and i would have beamed, knowing someone saw me as i truly was, and she would have smiled the same Mona Lisa smile that she had at four years old.

one hundred years ago today.

Father’s Day has always been my least favourite holiday on the Hallmark calendar.  my father spent my childhood thousands of miles away, a voice on a phone, a series of semi-regular notes and letters in a cursive script round and beautiful.   he was, always, my father.  he was not a dad, though, never a daddy - neither rulesetter nor guide of my heart nor anything else the painfully gendered and whitewashed selection of Father’s Day cards at the gift shop have ever suggested he might have been, had he wanted to.  i have called him by his first name since i could speak.  every year for the past twenty-five or so, i have gone looking for a Father’s Day card for this man with whom civilities have always been observed with some pleasantness, and have struggled to scrounge up something that does not use the words “Dad” or “Daddy”, that does not refer to the great wisdom he imparted or patience he showed or money he doled out at my every whim, and yet that neither diminishes him to some couch potato stereotype ineptly blowing up a bbq, nor makes fart jokes.  every year, i am baffled to discover that such a card does not exist, except occasionally when The Far Side saves my ass.  this year, i had to resort to a card that ran along the lines of “i didn’t get you a bad tie, i just got you this card.”   i was rather shamed.  i love my father, for all…well, for all.  i think he deserves a better card than that.  but there was nothing else there that did not ring ridiculous, that did not cue the tumbleweeds to come blowing through the holes in the scenery, making them obvious, even cruel.

so i didn’t try to get Dave a card.  if our local supplier doesn’t carry much for the post-divorce family, finding something touchingly appropriate for “my not-quite husband on one of those fake holidays we hate anyway and have loathed particularly since we spent our first versions thereof as parents without a living child and thus realized just how wretched and contrived and surreal the whole shebang is” seemed, well, unlikely.  but i did let him sleep in, and made him an omelet and coffee.  and i hope somewhere in there i said thank you to him, because Oscar is too young to say it yet, too young to know that life doesn’t always come this way, with a dad who is willing to love you up close and everyday and with patience and joy in your accomplishments, who is able to be present and steady, who is able to teach you to laugh at yourself and at him, too, and who will love you without reservation.  but i am grateful on O’s behalf that he has this kind of dad, more grateful than i can say.

and as i watched the two of them play today, daddy and boy, i realized i never fully knew how much i was missing all those years, growing up for all cultural intents and purposes without a father.  i am grateful for that too, because the twinge of comprehension does not cut nearly so deeply as it would have had i not come to the recognition here and now, as a part of something beautiful and strangely healing, this partnership and gift that parenting is, for us, when we are paying attention.

there is this song of mothers and daughters, one i have been rehearsing my whole life. i have been trying to lay down its lyrics over the past few days, sounding out the verses, testing what is honest. it is hardly work, this writing…it lurches out of me in spurts and clots, memory and wish and history all webbed together, the fabric of identity.

i am playing Scheherezade, counting down the days to this baby’s viability with stories, hoping to lure us past the danger zone. it is a fiction, of course, this deliberate narrative convention: i know that stories do not knit tissue or keep blood flowing, seal vulnerable sacs of fluid, hold cervixes tight. i know that the 24-week threshhold of viability is itself a fiction: this baby had a brother born fifteen days past that point, and the odds failed him utterly. yet there is nothing else i have to give.

it is not that i will love her more, this girl child. she will be her own surprise, whatever she is, no more or less mythic than her brothers once she leaves my body. but i did not know there were mythologies of mothers and sons - i grew up the only daughter of an only daughter, no men left standing in the family - and so in this liminal before-time, the idea of a her signifies a continuity i have been immersed and engaged in since my earliest consciousness, a song i have anticipated singing since i was four years old. it has nothing to do with ribbons and bows, sugar and spice. its ties cut deeper, and cut sharp, sometimes.

the caul of my protective shell has been torn away, the one that held some part of me numb and disconnected and able to believe that none of this was real. this baby moves, kicks, somersaults inside me, a sudden presence, an Other demanding recognition. in acknowledging her, opening myself to the possibility of her, i am made all the more vulnerable. i feel the prickling of my skin, the terror that this may be all the time we have. but it is enough for stories. i like to believe she can hear my voice.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

i come from a long line of women, i used to tell myself…as if the family tree from which i’d sprung were solely female, made up of vines extending across generations on the x chromosome, the men present only as pollinators. i imagined the mystery of my own murky fertility as a logical extension of the pattern: someday, under some suitably Bohemian circumstances, some fine, decent man-friend of mine would make it possible for me to bring forth a daughter and go on about my destiny. she, in her turn, might eventually manage to free herself entirely from the extraneous male half of the population and spontaneously self-fertilize.

this mythology was born, of course, of wounds, of an effort to turn absences and holes into strengths, into some special twist of fortune. it was also born of the pleasure i took, in my peevish, fraught adolescence, in shocking those women i came from, those unintentionally unconventional women who in spite of themselves had taught me that men were not needed in a family. they are not iconoclasts, these women we come from, daughter…not most of them. i once thought i was, and the memory makes me smile. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

we all of us women are daughters, at least once over, at least for a time. perhaps that is why some of us hope and long for girls, because it is what we understand of parenting and childhood. perhaps that is why some want nothing to do with such a mess.

all these things i am scribbling these days, grafitti and narrative, a song i hope her voice will add its own verses to, someday…some time far from now when how it all ends in this verse is clear and inviolable.

they’re still there, gathered in overstuffed chairs and a greater cacophony of chintz patterns and floral fabrics than i ever imagined could exist in one room, possibly with a fire going, talking.  and talking.  and talking.  some more than others, though (ahem) perhaps the quieter souls are getting their turn more frequently now that i’m out of the way.  certainly, everyone is getting a better shot at more dessert now that i’ve made my exit, though i don’t know who’s nibbling up everyone else’s cake crumbs anymore.

Friday was a big day for me.  the ultrasound and the relief of good news and the shock of actually, possibly having a little girl - we were told Finn was a girl, mind you, so we won’t be entirely convinced until she’s safely here…but i actually got left alone with the u/s machine for five minutes and after the hundred-odd scans i’ve had in the past three and a half years, i was rather convinced even before the doctor came in and confirmed the news - and a sunny afternoon where i got to be out and about and Dave took Oscar and i for gelato.  good times.  then, with doctor’s permission, i got to hop in the car by myself for the first time in seven long pitiful dependent weeks and i hit the highway and drove into the sunset like i was Thelma and Louise all wrapped into one, nervous and free and under my own steam.  i sang along with the stereo like i was ten years younger and it was Friday night and i was off to party with my girlfriends for a weekend, feeling like for once, all was actually maybe alright with the world.  weaving along by the ocean and little fishing villages, i didn’t feel beholden to anyone, didn’t feel like a lump on bedrest.  i felt happy, and lucky, and sort of bedazzled by the unfamiliarity of it all.

i was amazed that i didn’t run into or over anything.

i made it to the restaurant first. i waited, watching boats on the harbour and chewing my nails, like an eager suitor at the world’s biggest blind date.  and then they spilled in in a bunch, all familiar from words and pictures yet new at the same time.  how weird to know so much about people and yet so little.  how surprisingly comfortable it was, and how entertaining.  and we ate and talked and ate some more and i finished Mad’s and everybody else’s blueberry grunt along with my own and looked down the table at one point and realized, heh, that’s Bub&Pie and that’s Thordora and they’re here together and it felt rather like suddenly finding yourself at dinner with celebrities, whose lives you know from reading about them in grocery store lineups but there they are, real and laughing.  and we cooed over Hannah’s cuddly five week old James and Kate’s ever-charming Ben, and then i got Niobe utterly lost and when we made it to the heritage Inn where Laura Ashley and the Victorians went to die, Andrea had joined us and Cin had her hair down and her camera out and we sat up talking and drinking tea and wine and beers until 1 am, musing about what we’ll tell our kids of our wild years once they’re grown.

and did it all again the next day.   and now, gone, i can think of fifty things i wish i’d asked and i almost regret not taking any pictures of my own, except i know theirs will be better.

i liked them.  i’m not by nature a group person, sociable as i am by nature…i’m most comfortable in smaller conversations, intimate gatherings.  but this was good, surprisingly good for nearly twenty-four hours of nine women getting to know each other…sharing histories and establishing commonalities.  i liked their quirks, the personality streaks and charms and idiosyncrasies that don’t come through in writing.  i liked their warmth.  i just liked being around them, all of us different - in history and personality and opinion - but linked by this shared hobby, this penchant for words and exploration of lives.

i’m back home now, back on my couch for another fourteen weeks or so of bedrest if we can keep bebe in that long.  back to poor miserable Oscar with his cough and his ear infection and his nasty recurring rash under his eyes (eczema, anyone?).  back to hun-nee, could you get me a glass of water?  the joys.  but i’m better, more myself than i have been in a long time.  even if i wasn’t taking a wheelchair trip to see Leonard Cohen tonight, i’d be good.  they filled me up, these women, these friends, that chance to be out on my own and with them.

and they are still there and i miss them already.

it would be easy to say my mother never really knew her mother.

she was an only child, my mom, born to parents in their hardscrabble thirties in a postwar town that never quite boomed. her folks had long before given up on babies, but she came anyway, a surprise, a little black-haired come-by-chance with her father’s square brow, one of a thousand Barbaras born the same year. in the few pictures that exist of her first years, she gazes out from the stark b&w image under crooked bangs, an imp with curious eyes and a Mona-Lisa half-smile.

her father was a landscaper, a seasonal worker in years before there was employment insurance to carry families like theirs through winter. they lived in the old family home with its coal furnace, and even into my childhood lost pebbles of decades-old coal littered the gravel driveway, relics of a dirtier, smokier time. all i know of her mother is that the Doris Day fifties passed her by: she worked, this woman who was my unknown grandmother, in a time when it was a little bit shameful for a married mother to have to work. she had no education, she smoked cigarettes, and was the only female ancestor of mine who ever towered above 5′3. she was raised Catholic, my mother’s father Protestant; when they married, her family disowned her.

they had a rocky, loud marriage, apparently. disappointment on both sides, stress, conflicting temperments. my mother shared a room with her mother; her father had his own lair in the house. he was a packrat, and had once been a scholar…in the winters, off work, i suppose he would have been his daughter’s caregiver, so that unkempt, book-laden room is the only one my mother describes with any clarity from that era. mostly, she remembers going outside a lot, roaming. but even today, strangely acontextual quotes from Shakespeare leap from her mouth at odd times, chants five decades and more old, offered up like proverbs or incantations. the ironies of quoting Polonius have never troubled my mother’s self-image excessively. the lines are family jewels, and when she unwraps them her eyes shine and the little girl in them looks on her father again, lord of the book pile.

when my mother was six, a month after she started school, she got pneumonia. in those days it was a serious thing, taking months in the recovery and still claiming lives every season. but her mother could not stay home with her; her father, presumably, was not equipped to play nursemaid. the little girl was trundled across the street to the home of her aunt and uncle, a childless couple in their mid-forties. the uncle had a stable, middle-class job at the phone company. the aunt did not work. my mother, little Barbara, stayed with them until almost summer, losing a year of school, but recovering her health. she had her own room for the first time in her life. she was carried across the street to her own house only once, at Christmas. there are more pictures of her from this year of convalescence than from all the other previous six together.

she went home, then, my mother, to a mother and father who struggled. i do not know what the homecoming was like. i do know that less than three years later she crossed the street again to take up residence in that little back room of her own, and that she never moved home again. i know that her mother was sick, by then, and that she knew her mother was sick, that her mother had collapsed one day on the sidewalk taking little Barbara downtown on some rare excursion and had been doubled over in pain, unable to get up. i know now that it was cancer, colitis gone untreated by a family too poor to pay doctors and turned deadly. i know that my mother’s mother died three days before Christmas the year my mother turned eleven, and was buried Christmas Eve. i know that the woman who i called my grandmother all my life was actually my mother’s aunt, who raised that child who came across the street with pneumonia and gave her the first safe haven she’d ever had, and loved her…and eventually me, in my turn.

but i know so little about the woman who was my mother’s mother, absent and mysterious. i wonder at the disappearance of a mother. i can see the imprint of my mother’s father on her yet, but of her mother…not even shadows. for six or more years, this woman slept beside her child…breathed beside her, must have held her, brushed her black hair. for eleven years, she watched her daughter grow. i wonder how she felt about that move across the street…the first time, and the last. i wondered if she was relieved, unburdened…or if she was ashamed of having to turn her child over to her prim older sister-in-law for care. i wonder if she ached and raged at the unfairness of it all, if in the throes of a slow and cruel death she wondered what would happen to the girl child she’d borne, or if she knew all along that somewhere she’d lost her, maybe even abandoned her herself. i wonder if she had any peace.

i wonder what remains of her, unspoken and perhaps unacknowledged, inside my mother’s skin. i wonder if my mother misses her, thinks of her today, on Mother’s Day.

i don’t know. i don’t know if it is fair to ask. and yet i think of her, and i wonder, at this strange and terrible power of motherhood to render us so vital and so helpless all at once, so indelible and yet so utterly erasable.  her name was Thisbe, my grandmother.  and loyal child that a part of me is, i do not know if i am supposed to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day, or not.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
to my mother, who has, to her credit, shaped every corner of who i am…and loved me in ways i know she never knew.

i married Isis on the fifth day of May
but i could not hold on to her very long
so i cut off my hair and i rode straight away
for the wild unknown country
where i could not go wrong
…

she was there in the meadow where the creek used to rise
blinded by sleep and in need of a bed
i came in from the east with the sun in my eyes
i cursed her one time, then i rode on ahead

Isis, oh Isis, you mystical child
what drives me to you is what drives me insane
i still can remember the way that you smiled
on the fifth day of May, in the drizzlin’ rain

- Bob Dylan

we do not have the usual kind of anniversary.  there is no ceremony to commemorate, barely an event that marked one day from the next to anyone around us.  we began almost in secret, taboo, old friends evolving from one life to another in a window crowded with empty bottles and full ashtrays and late, late nights that became early mornings crouched at sunrise on damp concrete stoops together, still talking, whilst a foreign country woke up around us.  and i had known you too long not to know that a part of you belonged to me, beyond faithlessness, and yet was sure the boundaries on the rest were tied in chains.  and how heady, how terrifying, to watch the chains slide, to hold the Pandora’s Box of you & i in our hands and risk opening it, risk losing it all.

we slipped in eyes wide open, staring at each other, afraid to look away.  it has been seven years.  i still remember the feeling of relief, the recognition of now, i have lived.

we have lived more than i’d bargained for, and survived.  you have remained my friend, the one who knows me, the one i trust.  you have held me up through days and years i couldn’t see my way forward. you have had the grace to let me hold you up, in my different way.  we have each become something we were not before, and there is balance in it, better.

i look for the itch.  i know it well, have lived its dissatisfaction, its loneliness, its regret and wonder and longing for elsewhere…in another life, eight, nine years gone.  but i cannot remember its contours, anymore, cannot see its shadow.  we chose well, i think, in this gravely embarked upon and most serious fling.  this life’s work.

and too i remember the way that you smiled, that very first morning.  i made oatmeal, served up in plastic bowls.  it was the fifth day of May, in the drizzlin’ rain.

all i have…and love.

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.

i got to meet Mad this weekend.

it’s an odd thing, to meet someone whose internal monologue you’ve been reading for a year, someone whose smarts and wit and unflinchingness won your respect a long ways back, someone whose life you know more about than you do most of your real-life friends. it is especially poignant, this first meet-up, when one of you is very newly “out” as pregnant and the other has very recently and traumatically miscarried a much-wanted pregnancy. it is particularly weird, if you are me, to be for the first time ever on the non-bereaved side of that equation, fearing treading on wounds you know well but are still not immune from bruising others with. so i sidled up to the hotel in the Saturday night snowstorm all a-twitter with excitement and trepidation, like a puzzled suitor. were we old friends? was it a first date? did the fact that she’s waaaaay more experienced in the ways of bloggy meet-ups make me a comparable bumbling virgin-type? would we trust each other, like each other in person as much as we do behind these pleasantly constructed versions of our best selves, with spellcheck?

um…yeh.

the play by play is probably irrelevant…the best evenings leave little to report but much to feed on. we fed on curry and chips and high ideas and low gossip and filled in the gaps left out of these online personas, or started…and she brought me a copy of the Tom Waits & Crystal Gayle album that i’ve been looking for for literally nineteen years…and i was humbled, and happy, and delighted just to be there in her company. and we were able to talk about some of the various elephants in the room and then we were just getting into the really good stuff, the scaffolding of ideas and what lives under a person’s skin when the truly awful cock-rock cover band started up and made me want to stab myself in the eardrums, so we kissed goodnight (chastely, Jen, i know you’ve got her heart) and made for home.

but not before we - in an act of shameful heterosexism which should have appalled our feminist sensibilities but was instead, erm, entertainingly ironic…maybe - set up a betrothal brunch between our offspring. M & Oscar…born for each other…with M’s sweet maturity of three and O’s youthful exuberance of 22 months, and the fact that their parents both belong to couples where the woman is the elder partner, and the fact that he willingly shared his blueberries with her (her favourite too! kismet!) and she was not only generous with her tube of funky sea critter toys but also quite bewitching with her shy but ready smiles, i think Mad & i should be procuring ourselves a nice, shared grandchild to blog about come about, oh, 2035.

i - i shit you not - frocked Oscar up in his best corduroy jacket for the occasion, and wee M was gorgeous in her red smocked dress and tights, and then, hapless creature that i am, i forgot to take the engagement photo.

so i leave you only with us future proud grandmas. she made my weekend. she’s way cool, and mad, indeed….and if any of you want to join us at the now-going-to-really-
happen-come-hell-or-sea-water Maritime BlogHer 2008, leave a comment. we’re a very cheap conference, and friendly too.

(and yeh, i really do wear the hat all winter. i told you, but i know nobody believed me. just to try to keep poor Hat from getting overexposed, i even left it home for Sunday’s brunch, but then forgot to take pictures at all. sigh.)

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