cribchronicles.com

i don’t normally do much in the way of product review here. okay, i never do anything in the way of product review here, unless chronic colds can somehow be counted as products and my lamentations considered a review. colds? boo.

this absence of the commercial sphere from the blog isn’t entirely a reflection of my pure high-mindedness…it’s not that i handknit all O’s toys from my own belly button lint and meditate for entertainment or anything. i’m basically just too crappy a self-promoter to have been able to swing this blog in the direction of happy, healthy low-key capitalism for all…and i kinda prefer it as a hobby rather than a job.

rather like i feel about sex, frankly. (dear in laws, i know you’re out there and love you dearly.  this would be a good time for you to go admire your Christmas tree.  please. it is very nice. very shiny. look look!)

but a couple of months ago, i got an offer i couldn’t refuse. a free book. a brand new free book, published locally, hot off the presses. a book i’ve been hearing about for a year, because this town is so small that all the over-literate types pretty much know each other, and while one friend edited it another polled a group of us about what ought to be on the cover. stilettos? she asked, or fluffy bunny slippers?

the book is called Sex After Baby: Why There is None, by Kathleen Hamilton, published by the lovely and mighty Acorn Press.

(they went with the stilettos, sort of. a part of legs in red stilettos and fishnets trip over a baby’s rubber ducky.)

i leapt on the informal offer of a review copy. i ate the book up in a couple of nights, giggling a bit at parts, puzzling at others, reflecting on my own postpartum nightmares of a badly healed episiotomy and exhaustion and avoidance and skin-saturation from constant nursing, and whether i could ever have felt remotely prepared for the impact that had not just on my sex life but my sexuality, and my sense of myself.

i was all set to write a pithy little piece about the book, and how i mostly found it charming and thoughtful if occasionally flaky and a little histrionic but overall, bold and funny and worthy of reflection and just plain important, in its effort to bring to light a discussion that’s sorely missing from most of the literature about life as a new mama. my piece was going to start with the mock lament, “Good God! am i really on the road to wreaking such havoc on my poor pink bits and my poor libido - and erm, poor Dave - all over again?!?”

because, of course, i was pregnant then.

and then, i wasn’t. with a hellish gap of uncertainty in between…during which i found myself utterly avoidant of all things remotely sexual, because my body had become foreign territory, unaccounted for, with secrets even i could not dig up.  and it is one thing to approach your partner pregnant with a wanted baby, ripe with hope and tenderness, another to approach him or her in grief, or confusion, raw with need and pain.  i’ve tried both, and certainly prefer the former, though each has its moments, its comforts. but to actually inhabit and offer a body that you cannot identify as one or the other…it froze me.  i turned away not from Dave but from my own incorporate self during that eight day wait, to an extent greater than in any other episode of my life, whether after birth or loss or assault, or even during the long years when i denied my body almost entirely through disordered eating and fervent loathing.  even then, i could thread soul and body together when i wanted to, if sketchily.  but not during the limbo of this november.

i considered, briefly, trying to review the book during that strange interminable wait, starved as i was for something to write about, something to distract me.  but again, i froze.   there was no place in me for the lightness OR the seriousness of the topic, no place for the conversation at all in a narrative so suddenly changed.  so Kathleen’s book has been waiting, patiently, in the pile under my coffee table, for me to inch my way back to a self i recognize and can celebrate.  for me to get my groove back, as it were.

i’m still not quite dressed in fishnets and a short, perky elf costume, singing “Santa Baby” at the office Christmas party…but, um, that’s okay.  when what energy i’ve got left at the end of the day isn’t eaten up by present-wrapping and just the general madness of the season, i’m all…well, quite groovy, thank you.  (inlaws, go look at your tree, huh?  yes, again).  i’m groovy in a way that is still fresh, because it only resurfaced a few months back in the first place, emerging gradually as O began sleeping through the night, and as i finished nursing him and started working outside the home again and just generally felt less like an exhausted house drudge most of the time.

so i’m curious.  the drought - and accompanying identity crisis - that Kathleen writes about in Sex After Baby: Why There is None resonated with me, though our situation never got quite so dire as hers did, nor did i find it quite the horrifying development that it was for her.  for me, the dearth of sex through my pregnancy with O (pelvic rest) and after he was born played on fears that were more about relationship damage than identity crisis…probably because i’ve never seen myself as much of a sex goddess, but have been damn grateful since this relationship started that it’s really the first in which i’ve felt like a truly healthy sexual partner.  either way, i despised my own exhaustion and avoidance, except i was too tired to really summon up much energy even for that hating of the situation.  i just was.  i was busy.  i had a newborn.  and some post-traumatic stress about scissors that got set off every time the nerve damage in my episiotomy scar made itself known…but that was mostly gravy on top of the deadening that colic and sleep deprivation had set up just fine by themselves.

i hoped it would go away, in time.  and gradually, and with a bit of work, it did.  and it does, each time we slip back there.

but i knew it didn’t have to be like that.  i knew that after Finn’s birth and death, for all we were both bleary with sorrow, and i was physically worn out from bedrest and a difficult birth and torn cervix and reluctant placenta, we were still a whole lot more able to draw back together relatively quickly.  part of that, of course, was the simple fact that with Finn i passed a head the size of small grapefruit, not Oscar’s riotous bowling ball, but i think a far greater part of the difference was the presence of the child himself the second time around.  caring for a newborn, at least for me, was a shockingly consuming job.  it ate up almost everything else i had to give, for awhile.

what about you?  for those of you who did not birth your young as holy virgins (actually, i guess even Mary had Joseph there and probably feeling mighty red-blooded by the time Christ came along), and were in relationships that may have felt the impact of childbearing in the aftermath…how did it pan out?  was your libido impacted?  did it ever exist in the first place?  if there was a slump, did your sex life rebound, eventually, or were you one of those who was happily and eagerly back at it in days?  was it hard to talk about?  did you find much discourse about it in The Baby Whisperer?  dish, please.  it not only beats wrapping presents, but the biggest refrain that kept singing through my head as i read Sex after Baby was…Kathleen should have had a blogging community.  they would’ve helped her out.

(still…she’s done a pretty good job helping herself, writing it all out from the remove of a couple of years.  if you’d like to read Sex after Baby: Why There is None, or stick it in someone’s sock this year as a nice, juicy present…come visit me, friend, and we’ll do some fine local shopping.  and maybe talk about sex over too much mulled wine.  the offer stands.)

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.

i’ve never said it aloud, so it comes out halting, lurching from me the way old ketchup blobbed from the glass bottles of my childhood.

i don’t know where i think they are, our sons, their souls. i look for Finn, now, but i can sometimes barely feel him, like the connection is weak or i just don’t know how and i feel so…so…discombobulated. like if all i ever get of him is his spirit, some sense of him, that’s okay, it’s okay with me, i can accept that, now…but i don’t. i don’t feel him. and i worry that he’s alone, a baby needing his mother, and i can’t find him.

blurp. or maybe it didn’t come out like that; the words were different, but the shame and the emptiness squeaked out all the same, the wall that unbelief and grief and healing built exposed, me naked for a moment.

she lifted her blond head in the dark room and said whenever i think of him i assume it’s him speaking to me.

and the wall crumpled.

i’ve spent a lot of my life constructing and cobbling together my own coping mechanisms, my own metaphysic, my own personal Jesus or lack thereof. i’m okay with cherry picking a particular piece of comfort to steep with my cynicism, have no qualms actively trying to construct a view of death that involves no angels nor meant-to-bes, but does not entirely cut me off, either, from the child who was my firstborn. i want to believe…but i’m fussy.

and while i’m not sure i will ever be wholly sure in the conviction that every time Finn crosses my mind some part of him stronger than his body has reached out to me…the notion itself will help me nonetheless. allow me to continue to heal without clinging to the immediacy of grief in favour of that bleak nothingness that threatens to swallow all the love i still have for my child. the notion gives me a way to offer tenderness to the idea of him, to reach back. if there truly is nothing there, then i will spend long moments of my life in a dance with myself, i suppose, smiling into the ether, blinking full at heart at unfeeling molecules of air. and when the end comes, i’ll smile ruefully, staring at the worms. but without regret. because that fostering of love will have made me better.

thank you, Kate…for planting that seed. i don’t know if anyone else could have.
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she blew in on a Remembrance Day rainstorm, with a sleeping bundle in his carseat and a flurry of brightly coloured cottons, all stripes and patterns and imprints and smiles…graceful, she is; poised and frank at the same time, at ease and funny and generous and searching. sweet, and with the tears still fresh on her. aptly named.

i couldn’t believe she actually came.

i couldn’t believe she hadn’t been here all along.

she came bearing presents for Oscar, generous with funky leggings and a metal Neville engine that marks the beginnings of The Train Age, and he was appropriately taken with her but smitten, i think, totally and wholeheartedly with wee Ben. beautiful Ben, who smiles more directly and with more joy than any baby i’ve ever seen. bright Ben, who started life even smaller than Finn did…who has come so far. twelve pound Ben, who slept snuffling in my arms for hours on the couch while his mother and i sat up talking, reminding my numb forearms of all that i hope is ahead for us again and making me think how lovely it’ll be. Oscar thought Ben was a doll come to life, and even though my boy spent the morning cranky and enamoured of his new high-pitched scream, he still touched the baby ever so gently with his big toddler mitts, still looked for him long after they’d left, wandering the house with a plaintive “baybay? baybay?”

they were beautiful together, our boys.

and somewhere in the long trail of conversation that got started at a comfortable, solicitous pace and tumbled out of us late into the night, the happy and the sorrowful and the bloggy and the gossipy and the motherly, all easy, i realized why this very first meeting with someone whose gift as a wordsmith awes me was so oddly natural: there was nothing we had to say that frightened each other. no space either had to back away from as too sad, or as shocking, or too weighty for the fragility of a conversation between tentative new friends. i do not know anyone else, in real life, who has lost a child, held him while he died, leastways not in the same hospital, both boys born months before a shared due date two years apart. that in itself…that would probably be enough for communion, for the sense of sisterhood that crept over me like an old forgotten remnant, a familiar garment left behind after college nights spent cultivating closenesses and bonds that time and living have not entirely frayed, but mostly.

but it was also that the stories were already unfolded. that i knew the outlines of them from posts i clicked through to frantically in May and June, sometimes with tears in my eyes, that i read now for pleasure or a laugh or just the taste of good writing when the work day grows dull and blurry. i knew this person already. i have never met a fellow blogger, either, before now. and i think our plans for these constructs of ours, these private public spaces for our own souls to get worked into words and therefore some kind of reality, took up nearly as much of our conversation as did our children, and our griefs, and our partners, and our lives.

i forgot to ask her a lot of things i wanted to know, though. she will have to come back. or we will go to her.

soon, i hope.

Do you still sing of the mountain bed we made of limbs and leaves:
Do you still sigh there near the sky where the holly berry bleeds:
You laughed as I covered you over with leaves, face, breast, hips and thighs.
You smiled when I said the leaves were just the color of your eyes.

a long time ago, lifetimes ago, when i was someone i barely remember, i knew - and had the arrogance to tell him, sitting on my kitchen floor at 3 am well-past halfway through a bottle of Southern Comfort - that a part of him belonged to me.

because i knew it was the truth, and i knew it was the bravest thing i’d ever said aloud.

we didn’t touch then. we never did. we were spoken for, both of us, lives long entwined with others, and the twines of friendship with each other suddenly grown tight and choking and ill-fitted…too many taboos between us to call it love, to even begin to understand this thing that shone and confused and compelled, made me look for my own reflection in his eyes.

he left my kitchen floor, and went halfway back around the world. and a month later, in the fall when all was unravelling around me, he sent me this tune, these old Woody Guthrie lyrics set to song by Billy Bragg and Wilco…just the kind of thing we’d always sat up late and made the world spin with. we who would not look on love. we with this impossible, futureless tie. and i thought he was a fool, for not knowing it was a love song. and i thought i was a fool, for wishing it were.

i thought, in that wretched September seven years ago, that if all i could have of him was our own metaphorical mountain bed, even if it were a kitchen floor, and those frozen moments of connection and actuation, even if ours were chaste, that it would be enough. better than never having. better than never making it up the mountain at all. yet i believed the dichotomy the song sets up, even though i’ve seen Bound for Glory and know Guthrie was relentless, a womanizer, and of course he wrote it like the mountain bed and the true love that feeds one’s soul is a place away from the breast of one’s woman and child. of course there are two women, and never the twain shall meet. and she, the muse, the friend…i wondered where she went when she came down down from the mountain bed. i wondered if anyone noticed the leaves in her hair. and i wondered if this were what he was trying to tell me, sending it to me. and yet still, i knew it was our love song, flawed as it was. flawed as we were, and hopeless, still we had made each other more just in the knowing.

i remembered all this tonight, uploading pictures to flickr. of Oscar, covered in leaves this afternoon in the backyard, his father raking them high and spraying them forth in bursts, the crinkly decay of fall in the air, the shrieking of O’s laughter in my ears. and behind that, these chords, still burned on me. and though i never got to smell his hair that night on the kitchen floor, he washed over me again, these seven years later, suddenly and urgently, the minute i allowed the word “leaves” to play on my mind. and i laughed.

All this day long I linger here and on in through the night
My greeds, desires, my cravings, hopes, my dreams inside me fight:
My loneliness healed my emptiness filled, I walk above all pain
Back to the breast of my woman and child to scatter my seeds again.

i laughed because Woody Guthrie was wrong. but so was i. the threads of muse and partner are not necessarily ones that cannot be woven. and the impossible can come out of heartbreak, heartbreak several times over. we made our way, he & i, through many more bottles of various comforts and many more nights on floors all over the world…and the seeds have not been scattered so much as distilled. down to little faces, and earlier nights. but still, a part of him belongs to me, and i to him. and i would never, never have believed it…but here we are.

our mountain bed never existed, except in the eyes of two people who saw something in each other that both desperately needed seen, and not flinched from. and it is the place where Oscar was born, all the very same.
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once upon a time (or last night if anybody’s actually looking for accuracy) our fair city held its annual Fireman’s Ball.

erm, uh, wait…wrong photo.

and wrong man.  the Fireman’s Ball, for the past three Octobers, has been the occasion of my annual date with my grandfather.  he was a fire chief back when i was a little girl, and still drives the 1929 LaFrance engine, thing of beauty that it is, in all the city parades.  the Ball is for all firefighters, current and retired: it’s small town swank, all matrons in overstretched glitter and young firefighter’s girlfriends in leftover prom and bridesmaid’s dresses, a motley crew of people who clearly do not run in circles that regularly include dressing for balls.

my grandfather cleans himself up all shiny, and scrubs his fingernails and dons his medals, and i drag items out of the closet that i haven’t worn since the previous gala the year before, because the truth is that i am no different from all the other prosaic people there, and this is the only dress-up occasion outside of work that i ever go to.  i eschew the recycled wedding party attire, but wear my dancing shoes.  because my grandfather, at 87, still loves to cut him some rugs on the dance floor.

for all its frumpery and the fact that we sit at the retirees’ table where i am the youngest soul by decades, i enjoy the Ball.  i am proud to go, in a fierce, funny way.   pleased to be asked, i suppose.  it’s partly a favour, or i flatter myself by pretending it is - i wouldn’t want him to go alone, and since i love to dance and never do and don’t know any firemen anyway, then i don’t need to worry about my particular (read: queer, vaguely dangerous to others) dance aesthetic causing me any great embarrassment.  the first year, i did worry about it shaming my grandfather, as i noticed we got a few looks out there under the disco ball, him shuffling and grinning, me flapping like a blue heron, but after he invited me back last year i shed those qualms and now just groove my heart out, flailing to the oldies.

but last night it was clear to me that it’s him that’s doing me the favour, bringing me to the Ball.

the city started this event years after the death of my grandmother, and for all my grandfather is on one hand a consummate dirty old man, full of off-colour jokes and saucy little inuendoes, he is at his core faithful to her, even still…he would take no one else in her place that might ever be considered a replacement.  and he is gallant, in his pigeon-toed once-a-farmboy way.  he held the door of his truck for me, as i hopped up into it, wondering all the while how in god’s name he gets his old bones in and out of there every day.  he made sure i had drinks, was introduced to people.  he told me i looked pretty.  and as we waltzed to “The Rose,” slightly off time, me trying not to trod on his old, fragile feet,  i laid my head on his shoulder and he pressed his face into my hair.

i have never been anyone’s princess, or daddy’s little girl.  my grandfather’s son walked away from my mother and i when i was six months old, and spent my first twenty-odd years in another place, far away.  my grandfather, bewildered by that abandonment, that rejection of his own division-of-labour marriage and my grandmother’s staunch uprightness (my grandfather has never really been upright, but she made him look it, and that was one of their implicit divisions) shied away from me and my more bewildered, wounded mother except for dutiful contact occasions and waterskiing until i was well into my teens.  i grew up among women…women who had been left behind by men.  when i married, i laughed at the idea of being given away, though my mother stood with me, my “best woman.”  i did not have a first dance, even with my husband - we had a bonfire, instead, and played guitar.  my adult relationships with men have been partnerships of mind and heart and - in the current incarnation - even soul, but not of chivalry or many rituals of romance.  i was never proposed to.  i am seldom taken dancing.  i have not missed the feminine rites of passage, much, and have mistrusted them in any case…too often they reek of paternalistic condescension and misogyny and some kind of reduction, some kind of minimization.

but when i was ten, you see, “The Rose” was my favourite song.  that summer, just the once in my childhood, i spent nearly six weeks with my father and his wife and my half-brothers, one of them still a baby, out in Alberta and up in the Arctic.  i was a kid who had never been to Moncton, and there i was, more than half a country away from home, with people i barely knew.  and i was homesick and happy both, thrilled to be spending time with my father, unsure of how to fit in to their family dynamic.  i coped, so goes family legend, by torturing my father and very patient stepmother with loud, multi-verse renditions of “The Rose” in all its glorious emotive sentimentality.  if it came on the radio, i begged to have it turned up…and i remember dancing by myself to it in their living room one afternoon, them laughing from the kitchen.  kindly.

but no one’s ever danced with me to “The Rose.”  ever swayed through it with me, hand on my back, while secretly in my head i sang the words at the top of my lungs, Bette Midler’s doppelganger.   until last night, when my grandfather stepped in and did what i only realized in the moment that i wish my father had done twenty-five years ago, just once.  and it was lovely, without bitterness, because i felt ten all over again in that moment, like a little girl and a lady all in one, a little girl being taught to waltz.

my grandfather is, in his own words, fading.  he couldn’t keep up to the faster beats at the Ball this year, and i could tell, by the end, that even during the slow songs he was starting to hurt.  but it was me who finally called it a night, dragged him out of there.  he is an old soldier, a never give-up, never turn down a good time kind of man.

there is a line in “The Rose” that pronounces, “it’s the soul afraid of dying that never learns to live.”  when they sang that, last night, as i waltzed with my my grandfather, he turned his head and winked at me.  and i felt a bit like Cinderella, dancing with a Prince.

as a lefty-ish, po-mo loving Canadian with an obsessive-compulsive fetish for vocabulary and saying things with just the right emphasis, i don’t encounter too many regular interesections between my self-image and Mr. George W. Bush. continent of origin? yep. species? erm, okay. putting food on my family? i suppose, though i’m working hard to discourage that trait in Oscar and really have to start setting an example.

but we’ve got one clear and indubitable tie, me and Dubya, no matter how far apart we may be on any societal spectra. i’ve spent my whole life wanting to be The Decider, too.

i grew up as an only child. with a single parent. clean, blatant lines of authority, clear roles, direct communications, nobody to play off anybody, and nobody requiring consultation. we may have battled through my teens, my mother and i, but for as long as i lived under her roof, i lived with her decisions. i frequently loathed being the subject party TO those decisions, admittedly…particularly the ones which brought my mother’s pantyhose-wearing notions of a ladylike social life into conflict with my own. but i admired the ergonomics of it all. it was my norm, and all i knew, and all - for the longest time - that i could imagine of what parenthood might be.

during the many eons in which i fantasized about babies whilst waiting to get my life in some sort of order before all my eggs dried up and moved to Rio, i noticed that most of my fantasies involved a very decisive, capable, nurturing version of myself in the mama role, and a very hazy, charming, miniature baby-sized model of myself in the kidlet role…but no papa. or rather, papa, if present, did not seem to be a speaking role.

this worried me, because while i didn’t mind the notion of being a single mother, i was - at the time - married. and later, when that particular barrier to my future as Head of the Family was removed, my secret vision of myself as The Decider still caused me worry. would i find someone else with whom to procreate? how, with all that ambivalence about the papa job? i don’t tend to be terribly attracted to people who don’t want speaking roles. but i could not imagine the irritation of potentially having to negotiate every single choice made about childrearing, either. nor the loss of control it implied.

i went into motherhood secretly terrified, not that i would be a bad parent, but that i would be absolutely driven mad by having to share parenting with someone else. even someone as otherwise fine as Dave. because i knew too well that he’s inclined to ideas, and that he makes a crappy yes-man.

what i didn’t know, of course, is that the decision-making that i’ve always found so simple and rational and easy to live with my entire life long has absolutely NOTHING to do with the kind of decision-making one is faced with as a parent. the kind where there’s not only probably no right answer, but the only way to play the game is to pick and see how it all works out. with your child as guinea pig. the kind where when your partner’s been away in bleeping England for five days and your child’s in the midst of a nap strike, your sitter calls to say that her own daughter - a fierce little elfin figure in your child’s home day-care environment - has chickenpox. or some other mysterious dread outbreak of sores all over her small body. but you can bring your child in tomorrow nonetheless if you need to go to work…your call.

or rather, my call. my call…whee. The Decider. i’m really The Decider now.

and i’m here to tell you, it sucks donkeys.

because being The Decider in relation to your child means never knowing what the consequences of your decision will be, no matter how much effort you put into gathering information and hedging bets. it means weighing the fact that Oscar’s been vaccinated for the pox against the fact that the sitter’s daughter has as well…and still has spots between her wee toes and in her mouth, this is no mere vaccine reaction…and acknowledging that he’s already been exposed but without knowing whether prolonged exposure puts him at greater risk in spite of his vaccination. being The Decider means having to add up all the things i’m supposed to do at work tomorrow and trying to see how many of them could still be accomplished from home if - gods willing - there was a naptime, and how many of them would cause serious problems or offense or render me further obliged to parties i’d rather not incur favours from. and it involves judging whether or not it is fair and right to ask a mother to care for my child while her own is sick, and judging whether it is likely that mine will get the care i want him to in that instance, no matter her efforts or the sturdiness of his vaccine.

and if i’m wrong…it’s O that wears it all, the consequences of my choices. that’s the kicker. and this is not a life or death decision, or shouldn’t be…but they’re all complicated, once you involve a child. piss. shoulda known power wouldn’t be all glorious and fun…stupid chickenpox.

so i’m, um, thinking maybe i should stay home, at least until final diagnosis comes in? and i’m definitely thinking of abdicating from my lustful pursuit of Deciderhood…of rounding out my fantasies so they look more like the reality i’m realizing i’m blessed to have, when it’s not buggered off to Blighty. and i’m thinking i should call my mom and say thanks for wearing that mantle, that responsibility of deciding, alone, year in, year out, all through my growing up. i had no clue how heavy it was, how unrelenting.

(and can anybody get me in touch with Georgie W sometime real soon? i really really want a second opinion on this whole chickenpox thing….)

Oscar tried corn for the first time the other night. fresh corn, local, sweet and tender…manna from heaven, this stuff. it’s been a poor growing season here this summer, with a cold, cold spring and a dry, brief summer, but the corn - unlike last month’s pitiful strawberry crop - seems to have emerged unscathed and hardy. so we had corn on Friday, and some corn on Saturday, and some leftover corn again at lunch today. because in another week or two it will all be gone, and the only corn left in the grocery store will again be those bright, supersweet, woody cobs that come all the way from California in what must be flavour-leaching containers. those, and the cans, and the dessicated niblets sold as a toddler snack…plenty of options, really…but none of them bearing much resemblance to the crisp, fresh corn straight from the field.

these vestiges of seasonal food are rare in today’s world, this sense of what lands on my table having any connection to my calendar, to the turning of seasons, to the weather outside my window. i like anticipating corn season, waiting for it patiently, resisting the lure of imported cobs, the temptation to jump the gun. only in this small window of my life do i have any understanding of what those who advocate saving sex for marriage may be on about…what sense of satisfaction they get from their choice, from their abstinence. what titillation prolonging pleasure brings. with corn, i am a born-again virgin.

my son, though? no virginal delicacy for him. within minutes giving him his first taste of, we’d graduated from shearing the sweet, wet niblets off the cob for him to handing him the whole damn thing to devour whole. and he’s taken the experience in an entirely different metaphorical direction. my boy loves his corn like it’s a drug.

(please refrain from showing these pictures to Children’s Aid)
first hit on the corncob pipe

the after-corn giggles

too much corn, dude

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in other, non-vegetable-enthusiast news, i have finally begun to reconstruct my nice collection of buttons that lamentably disappeared last month when i updated my WordPress installation. i am still digging for some in the bowels of my email account…but i’m trying. and, thanks to the estimable Mrs. Chicken, i have a new one to add…the Power of Schmooze award.

i am delighted, and honoured, but bemused.

in real life i completely lack what i think of as schmoozing instincts, despite being a friendly soul. in face-to-face conversations, i will ask a lot about you, and tell too many rambling and often self-deprecating stories about myself, but i will not ’schmooze’ you, not so much. i lack the instinct for sales, or for furthering my own agenda with any grace. i’m sensitive to the jockeying for content and control that shapes social discourse, and while i’m quite happy being acclaimed as centre of attention (oh, stop now, don’t…stop…:)), i’m uncomfortable pushing for my piece of the pie. schmoozing usually feels painfully inappropriate to me. it’s not that i specially mind being inappropriate (anyone who enjoys publicly discussing corn in comparison to sex or her child’s initiation into the corn-eating set as a parallel to smoking up can’t in any honesty pretend to respect all social niceties), but i like social exchange best when it’s reciprocal, not one-sided. i’m a better liaison and facilitator of conversations than i am an initiator.

but schmoozing in the blogosphere works differently. this unbounded world of connections functions, in a sense, like a giant dinner party, except where we can all have our space in the conversation without impinging on anyone else’s. if you don’t want to read my ruminations on corn, i’m not pinning you to the wall yakking your ear off against your will…you get to click on by and i don’t even get my feelings hurt. but if you’re saying something over in your little space in the conversation that i want to support or encourage or giggle at, i can. and others will too…thus facilitating conversations and explorations that many of us may never have in our real lives, in the exposed world of face-to-face conversation where we fear taking up too much space in a conversation. i see commenting, out here, as facilitating conversations…and thus i’m proud to be a schmoozer, thrilled even. especially because i’ve been a bit of an (unwilling) skinflint with my comments this summer, stretched thin as i’ve been feeling…i’m grateful to Mrs. Chicken for seeing what i’m wanting to do with the few words i’ve spread around lately, rather than what i’m necessarily succeeding in. because i do want to be involved in this community, passionately.

my little real-life corner of the world is known, at least to itself, for polite hospitality and webbing together of tales and tellers into rich mythologies…in many ways, for the same emphasis on drawing together communities around locii of need that the Power of Schmooze award is honouring. and out here on the eastern shores of Canada, poor and proud, we have a rich if small community of bloggers who foster deep, heartfelt attachments and connections and support for the larger community, who both lay themselves bare with beautiful words and raise up others who need words too. so, i pass along the love to Mad Hatter, Sweetsalty Kate, and Thordora, my triumverate of Maritime schmoozers, all of whom have held me up with generosity and wit and warmth, and do the same for so many others…plus new coastal blog buddy Hannah, who i’m so happy found me.

don’t we make y’all want to come to a downhome BlogHer East festival next year? with fiddles?

i like women.

had i understood that on the rainy morning ten years ago when i donned my something borrowed (amethyst necklace) and my something blue (periwinkle dress), and marched myself up that aisle of lawnchairs to say “i will” on a cliff overlooking the Northumberland Strait, then today my life would be…

nah, just kidding.

this is no coming out…i’m not even sure whether the title of this post and its first sentence are connected. this really is my tenth wedding anniversary, but i left that marriage nearly seven years ago.  i don’t regret that cottage wedding, nor the civilized divorce that followed deep sadness and unrest in the marriage.  and i do like women, quite passionately, but that fondness is a social proclivity on my part, not a missed turn in the road of self-hood and identity. (not that a sapphic confession would have surprised anyone coming back from BlogHer, anyway, with all the boob-groping that’s been advertised as having gone on there. ;)) i once used to swear to my best friend, who happens to like women in a more carnal, committed way than i do, that my ex-husband was my “last man”…because, in my late twenties, straddling the worlds of my second-hand army boots and my wedding ring turned out to be profoundly uncomfortable for me. but when matrimony eventually disintegrated and i went searching for that more comfortable skin, i discovered it didn’t belong to a woman. or any woman other than myself, anyway.

but i still like girls. my friends, my deepest friends? almost exclusively women. this has been true all my life, notwithstanding that awkward and confusing window where Dave was my friend before he was my partner. but outside of the circle of he & i, the people i gravitate toward, talk to most easily, turn to for understanding? women. girls. almost exclusively.

what i’ve been realizing over the past week or so of wild, hectic, almost manic sociability, as i try to catch up with all the pile of girls and women crowding into my world in this brief window, is that i was late in discovering that this was weird. i grew up in a family of women. i drew my soul and strength from the (occasionally fickle) friendship of my girlfriends, and, weaned straight from my mother’s milk onto the sweet cordial of Anne of Green Gables, i believed that all females were as i was, eternally searching for kindred spirits. i had no clue about the discourse of men; the teasing, the jocularity. through high school, i became a self-conscious, stricken moron the moment any guy i had the most remote attraction to came within ten feet of me. i was ‘that girl’ - the slightly awkward one, the funny one, no guy’s girlfriend but an awfully good friend.

and i lived a life of blissful ignorance. because i thought i was - in the way of adolescents convinced that the depths of their keening angst and individuality have never been plumbed by mortals ever before - normal.

it’s only over the past few years that i’ve come to notice that a significant proportion of the female gender don’t generally feel the same way about other women. and it’s starting to freak me out. because i’m hearing it even among my nearest and dearest, even among women i know to be capable of generosity and intimacy, women who are far more than the Shopaholic caricature of shallow feminine superflousness.  but the more i hear other women talk about women’s cattiness and cliquishness, the more i notice it, start to be influenced by those perceptions. yet…it’s not as if i’ve been in an attic all these years. it’s not that the closeness and ease of communications i’ve felt among girls and women haven’t been real.

like i said, i’m not sure where i’m going with this.

i know i struggled ten years ago to ratify my notion of self as funky young rebel with the choice i’d made to be married, because “married” to me meant all the social baggage of whitebread and settled.  it turned out that i was nearly a decade short of ready to fly that freak flag, which i now rock to the limits of its rather stale crustiness, despite the fact that i officially live in sin.

but the female thing?  the friendship thing?  tell me, those many of you who said you’d hate going to BlogHer for all the airkissing and arsekissing and cliques, those of you who have long preferred the company of boys and men and the simplicity of how things are supposed to be over on that side of the gender divide, those of you who’ve simply been hurt irrevocably by women…is any part of the distaste about image of self vs. image of norm, about you not being one of those shallow princess-types that other women seem increasingly portrayed to be in our society?

and then…the real question….are they?

just wonderin’.  on this day when i look back fondly on my misguided choices of yesteryear, i’m wonderin’ about lots of stuff.  and if the kindred spirits thing was silly and foolish all along.

(some of my visitors? made me think yes.  others?  hell no.)

me & some college roomies circa 1989-92 in my backyard over the weekend.  i am, as ever, the one with my mouth open.

pssst. come in a little closer. i got a secret. or a confession. or something to shout from the rooftops, i’m not sure which.

i bought a bathing suit. first one in about four years.

and the experience did not send me into paroxysms of self-loathing. not when i bought it, not when i think about it, not at all. i’m stunned. confused, even. i’ve been awkward in my skin since puberty, alternating between cringing shame and brief bouts of defiant exhibitionism. i have lived with the excruciating self-criticism of a negative body image for so long that i hardly know what to do when i find myself…um…redeemed? saved? ransomed?

praise the Lord. i bought a swimsuit, and i think i might be able to wear it without major mental effort.

evangelizing metaphors are, erm, unusual for me. but this placid indifference to the prospect of public summer semi-nudity is rather precisely like being born again. rescued, and not by my own long battle for balance and self-acceptance, my slow surfacing over bulimia and anorexia, the mastery i wrung over those demons. rather, while i wasn’t looking, the demons seem to have finally slunk out of the building.

i may be the one woman in a thousand who can say this, but i think childbirth and mothering have deeply improved my relationship with my body.

now, granted, i haven’t actually worn this bathing suit for its god-given purpose yet, nor actually outside the Old Navy dressing room. even Dave hasn’t laid eyes on it, and i most certainly have not had to parade my pasty flesh up and down a poolside or beach sporting it, thanks to the unseasonally craptastic weather that’s marked the late spring and early summer so far here in sunny frigid eastern Canada. but, y’know, the day will eventually come when it will actually be nice enough to take O for his long belated first swim, and i’m thinking that the muumuu i’d prefer to wear for the occasion would perhaps risk getting both of us caught in an undertow. so the bathing suit is on notice, ready to be donned any day. and i am cool with this, for perhaps the first time in my life.

nothing particularly magical has happened, which is why the fact of my own indifference puzzles and interests me. i did not accidentally wake up in a supermodel’s body one morning, long though i prayed for that precise occurrence. i am, in fact, not much changed, at least not for what an objective party could call the better.

i am thirty-five years old, and getting a little veiny about the legs. my people are of underground stock, so white we glow blueish, and my skin either repels the sun entirely or burns beet red. i don’t exercise nearly enough, and i jiggle in parts. my girls are lopsided. my belly, which stretched out to accommodate two babies in less than a year, curls up next to me like a silvery-striped pet slug when i lie on my side, despite that two weeks of diligent situps i did last March. and you don’t even want to know what the horrors of a post-prolapsed bladder really look like.

but when it actually gets warm enough out to go swimming, inshallah, there i’ll be, rocking my tankini, probably even without proper depillation.

because for the first time in my life, i think i’m actually living in my body, fully and daily.  i’m not precisely sure how and when that happened…there was no single moment…but i suspect it was largely the immediacy and physicality and vulnerability of pregnancy and motherhood that triggered the shift. until i stopped nursing last month, i haven’t been able to ignore my damn body in the two-and-i-half years since i first got pregnant with Finn…every day, there it’s been, present and accounted for.  and doing something necessary, something i’ve depended on for the sake of my child(ren).  it has become, for the first time in my life outside of the blessed window of sexuality, an instrument for me. a demanding instrument, which has announced its efforts in ways that have forced me to eat far more fibre than any human being should really have to, true…and a very flawed one, which has failed profoundly.  gravely, even, Shakespeare would pun. my body failed Finn, in the most literal sense possible. and would perhaps have failed Oscar too, had it not been for those eleven weeks of bedrest that robbed it of any core muscles it may once have possessed. yet somewhere in the brutal grief and hormonal haze and sleeplessness of the past two years or so, i seem to have forgiven my self/body not only that greatest of failings, but all the other litany of petty failures and imperfections that once were the only lens i knew how to see it through.  i have pitied this body, my turning it inside out to try to become a mother, and made peace with it at long last. i think the Cartesian duality of mind/body that once nearly threatened to destroy both me and it, inescapable one as we are, is healed.

healed.  i never thought i’d ever feel safe saying that.

my body has brought me to motherhood, twice, made possible for me the wonder of positive pregnancy tests, the swelling of belly that freed me for the first time of trying to suck myself in, the joy of holding my newborns in my arms.  this in itself, even had there only been Finn, only for those hours, would have been more gift than i was owed from a body i’d given so little love to.  but the shift and healing go deeper than just what my body has wrought or allowed me…rather, in coming into motherhood, i have come into myself - in all senses of the word - in ways i couldn’t have even told you i was missing, before.  my body has become primary to me.  this body rises every morning when my child cries, despite the fact that it craves more sleep. my breasts fed that child for over a year.  these things matter.  but most important, i think, is that for the first time in my post-adolescent life i am in a relationship that is truly bounded by the body.  Oscar does not really know a me that can be distinguished from my physical self…ours is not a relationship that could grow long-distance, through words alone.  my hands are safety for him, my arms comfort, my voice…home. he doesn’t give two shits for the wit and intellect of my online communications.  and this daily intimacy, my need, ultimately, for what it has brought to my life, has made me unable to maintain the external position of judgement i rebuked and reviled myself from for so long.

so…bring on the summer, folks.  i am going to be that mom on the beach, in the bathing suit…the garish one, with the funny sunhat and the cottage-cheese thighs.  the one who doesn’t seem to notice what she looks like.  i will be oblivious, playing with my boy.

praise all the gods.  i am so ready.  i am so glad.

nope, not at all. i was going to regale you with more of my deep thinky thoughts on the cheap methadone that is facebook, or make fun of Dave-who-is-now-my-coworker in order to cover the fact that i’m actually really kinda enjoying working alongside him and realize how lonely i’ve been for aspects of our adult, peer relationship (oh halt, gutter minds) all this past year while i’ve been at home.

but something’s come up.

i’ve spent a lot of the day cracking WhyMommy from Toddler Planet’s sitemeter wide open, clicking on it again and again, hoping for news about her breast cancer biopsy yesterday.

scratch that. i was hoping for good news. the “oh, whoops, gee all that alarm for nothing and who said anything about breast cancer? here’s a lollipop” kind of news.

but she didn’t get that kind of news.

Whymommy has breast cancer. she starts chemo in two weeks, the day her younger son turns six months old. she is 34.

we’re not old friends or anything, Whymommy and me. i don’t think i know her real name, though something at the back of my brain twigs and tells me i do and am just stunned into forgetfulness. but i have known her, out here in this world of words where all our most secret and mundane selves and hopes go on display, for awhile now. back on the first of March, when i was still slowly unpeeling the onion of this community and discovering - eleven months into blogging - that i wasn’t alone out here, i came across this gorgeous post, this song to her second son, her “last baby.” he was six weeks old then, product of a hard-won and brutal pregnancy and wailing with gas and pain from a milk allergy she was diligently working to accommodate her own diet to. i had been there myself, with O’s gastrointestinal misery of the summer before, and it had nearly eaten me alive…the sleeplessness and stress and cheese deprivation. but she wrote of joy, Whymommy did. of sitting with her Little Bear on her chest through the night, tender and unresenting, unpanicked, comforting him. because he was her last child.

her words have been with me since. i am not so good at taking the long view, much of the time…i flap and flounder, get overwhelmed by petty things. but Whymommy’s post about sitting tenderly with Little Bear stopped me short, made me really, fully realize how quickly Oscar’s babyhood was passing, how precious and fleeting and one-shot-only it is, how all the tedious little things i do with him daily - and did so much more of when it was just the two of us, at home - might be my last experience of this babyhood thing…this strange, hard, precious gift. i don’t know if O is my last baby. i hope for more, but know that hope is no guarantee of anything. so ever since, i have held Whymommy’s words close to me, a little private mantra. when i am tired, or impatient, i pull O a bit closer and i remember that he may be my last baby. that all of this parenting, even the roughest parts, will be over all too soon…and may never come again. that he is a gift. and then i rise to the occasion, not quite the beatific madonna but still…content. reminded.

for this, i owe Whymommy, big time. she is, in the odd but very real way of the blogosphere, my friend.

and i feel helpless to help my friend, except to send more of you over there to be her friend, too. she doesn’t want pity, or sadness. she has a plan, and the will to fight, and a tenacity that even through teh internets has always been plain as day. this is the woman who sat up all night with a colicky baby and smiled tenderly upon him, beaming. cancer, i expect, will cower in the face of her fearsome will, slink its ugly tail between its legs, and go the hell home.

i hope.

i know hope is no guarantee of anything. but hope is powerful nonetheless, and there is power in numbers. so go, wrap her up in love and positive focus and stand with her. don’t tell her she’s an inspiration or how sorry you are. just tell her she’s strong, and be there so she doesn’t have to be strong all the time.

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and if you’re in Canada, and you have the legs to waddle, the Run for the Cure is a damn fine way to spend an early fall afternoon raising money to beat breast cancer’s ass. last year i ran for my grandmother, and for Oscar. this coming year, i’m thinking Whymommy and her wee boys will be on my mind, too. breast cancer affects one in eight women. anybody want to join me?