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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.

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

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?

from the expressions on their faces, can you tell which of these beautiful people (each of whom share half my genetic material, oh yes) is traipsing off to London tomorrow?

yep, it’s the one with the lip on. kids sure are ungrateful these days.

my mother, aside from a trip to Disneyland in 1961 - the exotic Technicolor souvenir of which i spent my own childhood covetously poring over - has never been outside of Canada. has never been west of Ontario. has never, in fact, left the Maritime provinces (check us on a map, we’re small) since i was an infant, which i assure you was long, long ago. she got travellers’ cheques for the four hour trip to Halifax once.

when i was a kid, we didn’t travel. my mum and i lived where i do now, in this small self-styled capital ‘city’ of Canada’s smallest province. unlike nearly everyone else in said province, we had no relatives in “the country”…which means anywhere more than fifteen blocks from home, in this town. so we seldom left town. when we did, it was so my grandmother - who learned to drive at 69 but feared left turns and speeds over 30 kilometres an hour - could visit her friends at their summer cottages. which were a half hour outside town. that was my idea of a long trip, until i was about thirteen.

i always hankered for movement, for the worldliness of travel, the freedom to wander incognito in far parts of the globe. from long before i left home at seventeen, i dreamed of Europe and the other mythical locales of my western-centric literary education (read: Europe + Katmandu + Istanbul-which-is-half-in-Europe-anyway) like my friends dreamed of hockey players or Sting. i figured Sting was in Europe, along with David Bowie, and if i just got my jailbait ass over there, they’d naturally swoon for my obvious songwriting talents and take me on as some kind of junior concubine/muse/partner.

i was almost twenty-nine before i actually got to Europe and found that aging rock stars are harder to find and woo than one might expect. but i enjoyed myself anyway. and i loved Istanbul. i never got to Katmandu but spent a good four years checking out pieces of Asia while on holiday from my incredibly sweet four-months-paid-vacation gig as an English professor in Korea. i have no retirement plan, true, but i have passports full of stamps from places that were once magic on a map to me, and i consider that a fair draw. i’ve flown around the world four times. i’ve sung off-key Maritime ballads in a pub in Ireland. i’ve studied in the Swiss alps. i’ve backpacked through Turkey by myself, for a month. i’ve stood naked on a balcony in Bangkok at dawn. i’ve lived, by any standards that the thirteen year old i once was would have respected.

but it makes me wonder, as we prepare to take Oscar along to London and Prague three days after his first birthday…what, then, will he hanker for? all this freedom, so long-awaited and hard-won, for me, site of my identity and rebellion against the parochial insularity and “why would i go anywhere else? this is God’s country” attitude of the place i grew up and the poverty i grew up with…what will it be to O but normality?

he’ll never remember this trip, except through photos. more than that, it will in a sense take his “travel virginity” forever…the long wait to launch himself on the world will not be his experience, his particular fantasy, his goal to work toward and shape himself around.

just as it was never my mother’s, and never will be, no matter how i encourage or offer.

i suppose my longstanding wanderlust is a generational signifier, and maybe a class one, or both, and more. as i’ve been packing and finally ticking off the list in my head of things that Must Be Brought in order to make travelling with a one-year-old less daunting to my otherwise fearless self, i’ve also been clearing room for excitement. London. Prague. the words are shiny in my mouth, and i can taste them. i am beside myself, suddenly, with anticipation…like i’ve won the lottery. we are travelling tomorrow. this is my childhood dream of adult life come true (minus the rock stars, yes. but still. my own Dave is quite cool. and our friends in Prague have a band.)

neither my mother nor my son are ever likely to know this feeling…not quite like this. it doesn’t taint it. but it makes me wonder. and it makes me write.

i have been remiss. or at least a little slow.

the older i get the more i seem to unable to be quite as mannerly as i’d like to be…and it’s not just my ornery genes at fault, either. i am, inevitably, slightly out of step with the etiquette appropriate to a given situation. after two years back in the fine fishbowl that is my hometown, i’m still feeling like a permanent newcomer…benignly on the margins of this culture on display, mildly confused by the locals and unsure what to do with my hands. it took me a few months, upon return from years in Asia, to stop bowing at my former elementary school classmates when i happened upon them in the grocery store aisles. i still don’t know how to negotiate the intricacies of small talk…in English, which is the only language i speak. i say and do odd things at the wrong times, and i bumble through perfectly ordinary encounters completely unprepared.

all in all, it’s probably best that i stay at home a lot, these days.

but unfortunately, i’m pretty much the same when it comes to my interactions here in the blogosphere. i still feel like a new kid…and am, really, when it comes to realizing that the rest of you are out here too. so i tend to agonize, in those quiet moments on the can of reflection whether i’m trodding on anyone, or committing sins of omission, or just generally exposing myself as horribly gauche by how i comport myself here.

the other day, when Christy and Mrs. Chicken so kindly bestowed on me the bounty of not one but two Thinking Blogger awards - and i know some of you have had hundreds of the damn things rain from the sky but hey, to me it was cool and i really felt honoured - i inferred that at the time of blowing my own horn i was also supposed to pass along the honours to others with whom i’d like to share the happy.  or more seriously, others who provoke and move me, who enrich the internal dialogue that spins in my head and keeps me company.  others who make me less lonely in this journey of learning.

i didn’t.

not that there weren’t a big bunch of worthy people to choose from. i’m just, as ever, a little out of step…a little uncertain about how to proceed. i wanted some time, you see, to check out new blogs and try to go back through my favourites’ older posts and, all in all, just see if i could find people who hadn’t been tagged before, who - like me - might be fresh to this interactive element of blogging and kinda psyched by being chosen. because being chosen doesn’t mean so much, i don’t think, when you’re chosen all the time. and i’m not sure there’s a meritocracy at work in the so-called blog world, anyway.

but then, of course, this is coming from me. who can barely talk about the weather. all this overt socializing that tickles me so damn much here in cyberspace also paralyzes me, because i don’t really know yet what the norms are for this community, and how to negotiate them while still appearing moderately sentient…and neither Stepford-blogger nor insulting eejit.

everyone i read, i like. or i wouldn’t read them. but i’m probably not supposed to give awards to my entire blogroll.

and i read some great blogs that aren’t really momblogs…even if the writers are moms.  so much metaconversation has been had over the past week on the topic of whether mommybloggers are marginalized by the very terms used to delineate our writing that i hesitate to step outside this community for awardees.  because i don’t know.  i don’t know the politics of this new neighbourhood very well.  i don’t know how to avoid causing slight.  i obviously can barely figure out how to give kudos where due.

so in the end, i’ve just chosen five writers who make me feel happy to be stumbling my way through this community, however awkwardly…because they make me think, and laugh, and nod my head not only in agreement but with wild respect for the beauty with which they use the English language. they make me forget that i don’t know what i’m doing out here, in the social sense, and make me just want to interact, to comment, to communicate…even if i do it a little off-balance. or a little belatedly.

every one of them has given me pause at least once in the past couple of weeks.  i thank them all.  and the rest of you too.

please raise your mouse and clap for Kate at Sweet / Salty.

for Wordgirl at Half of the Sky.

for Ovagirl at L’eggs Up and Laughing.

for the already repeatedly honoured but so outstandingly thought-provoking and articulate i just can’t help myself Bub and Pie.

and for Christy at Cakerwakers.

and from the other Christy, who tagged me, i copy the rules of this particular meme with great delight.   if any one has any other sets of rules they’d like to send me so i can figure out what the hell it is i’m supposed to be doing and where…fill yer boots.  but the thankyou cards for your offering will probably come late, i’m warning you.

morningpeepshow

Originally uploaded by oscarcormier.

or daddy of O, rather.

it’s Dave’s birthday. and when he gets home from work tonight, Oscar will greet him with a squeal of happiness that comes from his little soul. every single night, Oscar gets thrilled to pieces by his daddy.

it’s a good way to approach your loved ones, really.

for my part, i’m mostly relieved when Dave comes in the door at the end of the day. he’s the pinch hitter, the extra pair of hands, the balance that tries to keep me from tipping with the weight of those eighteen small pounds. his appearance doesn’t engender squeals of delight from me.

he deserves them. i just don’t want to look silly.

i’ve learned a lot watching Dave become a father. i’ve learned how beautiful a man who cradles a howling baby with tenderness and humour at three in the morning can appear. i’ve learned that a man who trails beer caps and socks and wrappers around the house like Hansel & Gretel left breadcrumbs can still faithfully replace the baby’s Zantac in the medicine cabinet, and his little sleepers in their drawer. i’ve learned that he will jump up and warm a bottle if i call, no matter what he’s doing, no excuses. i’ve learned that grief and disappointment will not destroy him. i’ve learned that i missed a lot, not growing up with my father. i’ve learned that he’s still learning from his, all the time.

you’re a good dad, Dave.

you’re also a good partner. and i’ve learned that parenthood is an easier journey with a friend along.

thanks for being you. thanks for making me less lonely, even after all these years. thank you for our children…and for being there, for all of us. happy birthday, daddyO.

there’s a Dairy Queen cake in the freezer.
all i have, and love.
Bon

at Oscar’s six month checkup on Friday, they asked me whether he knows his name.

i think i blushed. and foolishly, wishfully called out “Osssscaaaar!” in my sweetest singsong-y tone…which he flatly ignored. shite. all the “good mother” brownie points i’d been hoarding for myself like stars on a kindergarten chart went flying out the window…kerthump. um…he’s supposed to know his name by now?

i smiled apologetically at the doctor and called out again. this time O turned his head and smiled, beatifically - and a few little gold stars crawled back in the window, redeeming my motherly vanity. but in truth, i suspect O’s compliance was more a response to my voice than to his name specifically. it’s not his fault. i don’t call him by his name very often. if he could talk, Oscar would most likely tell you that his name is Bunny.

i didn’t plan this pet name for him. he was “BabyO” and “Little One” at first. then, as he filled out, he was “Muffin” for awhile, and “Pumpkin” and “My Sweet Baboo”…which devolved into “Boo,” and then the apt, if unfortunate, “Poo.” it’s not that i don’t like his proper name…i love it. but in discovering my inner mother, i’ve learned that this new, heretofore secret self thrills in singing tuneless, repetitive babble to her offspring all day long. and she likes the tuneless, repetitive babble to rhyme. nothing, sadly, in the English language - nothing whatsoever - rhymes with Oscar. so Little One-Son Muffin-Puffin Boo-Poo-You-Baboo he became.

and about two months ago, in the midst of one of the singing extravaganzas which will likely render Oscar musically scarred for life, the name Bunny came out. my funny, sunny, Sonny Bunny. it’s stuck. the rhyme is fun, and sweet, sure. but my affinity for the syllables probably goes deeper than mere phonetics. Bunny is a name that, for much of my life, i prized above all others. not for myself…no, “Bonnie” has been plenty cutesy enough, thank you kindly. but Bunny evokes a rush of comfort and tenderness in me…and was for many years the name of my most beloved.

for Oscar is not the first Bunny to grace my life. rather, this fine gentleman on the right, the blue, threadbare beanbag rabbit who is actually older than Dave and wiser - in the estimation, at least, of the child who brought him to life in her imagination and made him a confidante, security blanket and precious friend - than anyone…he was my first. he is almost thirty-three years old, and could use a right eye and some fresh whiskers. but he is, to me, still beautiful.

however, i hadn’t connected Oscar-my-Sonny-Bunny with Bunny my plush companion, or even noticed the fact that i - naming snob that i am - have utilized such an obvious moniker twice, until today. today, CBC radio’s marvellous Stuart MacLean unwound another story in the ever-ongoing Dave & Morley saga, about a stuffed rabbit named Bunny who comes to live with the family when daughter Stephanie is small and afraid of the dark.

i caught the word “bunny” first, and began mindlessly singing to Oscar. then Dave pointed out that the story was about a stuffed bunny, like my Bunny, and i pricked up my ears. but things didn’t develop quite as i’d expected. as Stephanie grows, her faithful Bunny goes everywhere with her…camp, sleepovers, even treeplanting…until, one day, when Stephanie’s off at college, Dave finds Bunny in her closet, left behind. unnerved, Dave takes to carting Bunny around with him for a few weeks until he too learns to let go. the Bunny is eventually passed on to another little girl who needs comfort from the dark. end of story.

i listened with tears in my eyes. tears of recognition, at first, because i am a sap. and as the story unfolded, tears of bewilderment. i felt bristly, defensive. how could Stephanie just leave Bunny behind? how could her father just give him away at the end? because i, of course, did not leave my Bunny behind when i went away to college, but dragged him with me, gave him place of honour in my tiny dorm room along with the empty Southern Comfort bottles and my dubbed tape collection (and my books, i should mention, in case my mother happens to be reading). i didn’t leave him behind when i moved further, either…out West, up North, to Korea, Eastern Europe. Bunny - who is better travelled than most people i’ve met - always came. to my marriage bed, and a couple of other beds before and after (avert your eyes, mother). by the time Dave & i got together, when i was nearly thirty, i considered meeting Bunny to be a rite of passage in admitting people to my inner circle. anyone who did not accord the proper respect to the deflated sack of bilious blue polyester, with his one sage eye, was not worthy of any great trust.

there is a great debate now in child-rearing circles about “transition objects,” as teddies and bunnies and security blankets are formally known. it is thought that perhaps the need for a transition object suggests a lack of secure attachment in a child…that having a “lovey” implies trauma and a poorly adjusted personality. perhaps. i suppose i can’t very well hop up and vouch for my own well-adjustedness after having just admitted that i slept with a blue stuffed rabbit into my thirties. but i can say that Bunny has been incredibly good for me. and to me.

when i was small and needed tubes in my ears, and a hospital stay? Bunny wore a bandage tied around one ear for three winters. when people moved, or died, and the constancy of change was too heavy and lonely to deal with? Bunny burrowed against my chest, comforting in his constancy. when i was angry, wounded by the injustices of grade school? Bunny was a safe repository for secrets and lamentations. i once threw him across the bedroom in a broken-hearted fury…but - due to his dignity, in which i believed wholeheartedly - he also deserved and demanded chagrin, and apology. in Bunny, i invested my best: his silent, one-eyed gaze was a lens through which i judged myself, and he was both infinitely loving and eminently, scruprulously exacting.

i dragged him with me into my adulthood because i couldn’t leave him behind. through loving him, a la The Velveteen Rabbit, i’d made him real to me - he was my childhood incarnate, but externalized. and through all the mess of my struggles to grow up and truly grow into my adulthood, he was with me, held to my chest when i needed him. he helped me keep loving myself at times when i don’t know if i’d have been able to do so otherwise, because - through him - i could still access and comfort the child within.

it was only when Finn died that i outgrew Bunny. it wasn’t just the staggering magnitude of the loss, but the nature of it that suddenly rendered the rabbit impotent, external. for the first time, i hurt in a way that had no connection to me as a child. Finn had made me a parent, briefly…and it was as a parent that i grieved. not for the remnants of any child i’d been, but the one i’d carried, held. no small creature in my arms could give comfort if it was only plush and stuffing. so i was doubly bereft…both of my firstborn, and of the lifelong sense of sanctuary i’d always found in the little blue rabbit.

but time is healing.

these days, Bunny lives on top of the bureau in our bedroom…no longer a tactile part of my daily life, but still present, still faithful. i pet his blue head now and then, and find benediction in that mild, familiar, plastic gaze. i am learning again to pay attention to the child within, and the stuff she needs…and i am grateful for Bunny’s ongoing readiness, and reminder. Oscar - who has his own stuffed bunnies but no transitional object of choice just yet - is the child i focus on most of the time, though. and i am deeply grateful that i get to.

i have been blessed twice with Bunnies. loving the blue one taught me, i think, a great deal about loving and listening to the boy one. i hope, even now that i seem to have grown beyond my symbiosis with the little blue rabbit, that i can remember what i learned. Oscar could do worse for a nick-namesake.

but we still need to work on the child knowing his real name.

i went on a date last night.

not with Oscar’s father, no. too conventional, that…better to get gussied up for someone else and keep Dave on his toes.

of course, the person i actually poured myself into pantyhose for is my nearly eight-seven-year-old grandfather, so Dave wasn’t exactly eaten up with envy or anything. but still, i wore eyeshadow. which, these days, is the equivalent of squeezing into a ball gown and sticking a rose between my teeth - a Big Event.

my grandfather called three weeks ago and asked me if i’d go with him to the Mayor’s Dinner this weekend. we’ve gone out now and then over the years since my grandmother died, whenever i’ve been in town - traipsed off to weddings or the Fireman’s Ball together. my grandfather likes to be seen with a girl on his arm. i like the fact that our more than fifty-year age difference makes me look vaguely like a girl, still…and i like my grandfather’s company.

but from the event itself i didn’t expect much. i figured on an awkwardly jovial political dinner, part of his local worship’s efforts to curry favour for next week’s municipal election. the electoral equivalent of a Rotary meeting, essentially. i wasn’t entirely clear on why my grandfather was invited.

turns out it wasn’t a campaign dinner at all. the Mayor’s Dinner is a ceremony, rather, to honour local veterans…twenty-three of them this year, my grandfather among them. i began to suspect that my assumptions about the evening might be a little off when we walked into the banquet room and i noticed that everyone else had gray hair. and poppies. and medals.

my grandfather was a communications agent during World War II. a spy. he worked for British Security Coordination under Sir William Stephenson, the man called Intrepid, and Bill Donovan, first director of the CIA. he trained at Camp X, a top-secret commando camp, working with codes and with early computers. he parachuted into Yugoslavia, and was at Yalta and at the Teheran conference, where he had a drink with Molotov (not cocktails, he swears). he was at the first UN conference in San Francisco in 1945. when the British closed Camp X and burned the records in 1949, he turned down the offer of a CIA posting in Washington, returned to PEI with my grandmother and my infant father. he is still officially bound to silence about aspects of his service, under a British oath that will not likely expire before he does.

spies get a glamourous rep. Ian Fleming, who trained at Camp X, fictionalized his wartime exploits in the persona of 007, James Bond, world’s suavest agent. my grandfather, however, is not overwhelmingly suave. he walked away from the spy game and became a mechanic, apparently without looking back. at eighty-six, he still goes into the auto-electric shop everyday. his hands are permanently grease-stained, and usually gouged. he’s pigeon-toed, and near-sighted: a tough, sometimes ornery, mischevious old bugger. we were actually at the mayor’s table during the dinner last night, and had to have a little conflagration over in our corner about which was the salad fork and which was dessert. this ended in a joint admission of complete ignorance, at which point my grandfather started picking at his salad with his fingers.

what spies don’t seem to get is a lot of recognition. there are no medals for most of their missions, and the solitary nature of their work means that few of them have grown old alongside brothers in arms. so last evening - sitting at the mayor’s table, having his service record read aloud, getting to be public about what was such private, secret work - meant a lot to my grandfather. his eyes shone, wet and pleased and humbled…and far away, replaying a time and a world i’ll never really understand. when the British burnt the Camp X records in 1949, my grandfather told me, they did so because they knew that in fifty years another generation would excoriate them for the things recorded in those files. he lives with that. with all those secrets.

and me, with my conflicted misgivings about the military butted up against my crush on history and my deep affection for this fine, rough, sweet man who taught me all the dirty jokes i know…i was just proud to be there with him.

there was a somewhat staid dinner of brown food, some oversweet cheesecake, an open bar on the mayor’s tab. and then twenty-three individual awards of recognition, each with a recap of the honouree’s service. some were gunners on the beaches of Dunkirk, others nurses posted to Halifax for the duration of that war. a few had served in Korea.

Oscar will never know this generation of veterans. they are frail now, many bent and wispy and rheumy, unsure of which direction to smile in when the photographer tries to snap their picture with the Mayor. by the time O is an adult, most of them will have faded into history, as have the World War I veterans i remember from elementary school assemblies…a whole era of cultural memory gone extinct.

i cannot pass on to him what i do not possess. but i can record last night in this baby book blog for him, and mention how glad i am that he came in time to meet his great-grandfather, and hope that he someday finds his own way to honour what he cannot remember.

this is who you come from, son.

Oscar cut his first tooth yesterday. i was so proud, you would have thought he’d sculpted the Pieta or achieved world peace. he seemed less tickled, himself. apparently having a hard, sharp object come bursting through one’s gums isn’t much fun. and the thing really is rather sharp, i can testify.

the milestones suddenly seem to be coming in a big clot all of a sudden, leaving me breathless. the tooth cut through the very morning after he spent his first night in his big crib, and i would have thought those two firsts were enough for a mama…er, baby…to adjust to in one week. but hot on the heels of the tooth has come his first cold, replete with his first runny nose: he’s none too thrilled about this development, so far as i can see.

but he is quite fascinated with his left foot, which suddenly entered his consciousness this afternoon. we were in the midst of our third round of “Doe, a Deer,” which has an astoundingly calming effect on O when he’s cranky: i suspect my Julie Andrews impressions are so incomprehensibly off-key that they stun him into silence. somewhere about “la, a note to follow so,” (the weak link in the lyrics, in my own personal opinion) i noticed he was no longer paying attention. he was, instead, grasping his stripey sock, mouth agape and cooing. he’s spent a lot of the week chewing away on his hands to ease the trauma of his swollen mouth, but i imagine the fat little foot looked far more promising and tasty, once he noticed its presence. the sock got a good gumming henceforth.

it’s funny that all this is happening at once, and this week. as the 9/11 anniversary commemorations were invading our airwaves and consciousness yesterday, i was marking a more private anniversary for O and i; a gentler one, less in line with the infamy the day’s become synonymous with. it was exactly a year yesterday that i got the BFP (that’s big fat positive, for those of you who aren’t babycenter.com addicts) on the pregnancy test; since the awareness and anticipation of Oscar began for me. it’s a happy anniversary, for us, and one of wonder, for me…only a year, and he already has teeth? amazing.
but listening to the broadcasts from NYC yesterday didn’t seem so out of place as O and i celebrated his tooth and our own anniversary. with the anticipation of Oscar - the realization that i really was carrying a second potential child - came the bleakest, scariest fear i’ve ever known. it slithered up under my skin and twisted itself around me, chilling me. it wasn’t just the fear that comes with parenting, the kind that makes you leap out of bed to check and make sure the baby’s still breathing. it was the kind that comes after. after they stop breathing, after the unimaginable loss…after the unthinkable has happened and you can no longer just ramble along assuming that the heartbreak of the world will not visit itself on you. it was a fear of hoping…and a fear of forgetting, too. i heard a lot of that fear in the voices of people interviewed yesterday. their voices were like mirrors for me, except that their stories trailed back five years, and mine only one.

i spent the first weeks and months of carrying Oscar almost paralysed by my fear. i counted off days like rosary beads; in thrall to the superstitious, obsessive tallying of semi-random numbers that Joan Didion calls magical thinking. only forty-three more days until we were safely out of the first trimester, only twenty/twelve/two more weeks until the baby reached viability. only however many weeks until we passed the 26 plus one mark at which Finn was delivered…and only however many weeks backward since i’d held him in my arms, where he’d died. last September, those two sets of numbers - forward to the new baby surviving, back to the lost one slipping away on us - were almost even. every time they shifted in the favour of a living child, i tried to mend myself, pull little shreds of belief and hope back together. i never entirely succeeded.

now, when i look back on that torturous round of calendar watching, it feels as though it were a part of another life. because it is. time has healed me, in a sense…just as the passage of five years has offered some peace and distance to the wounds of 9/11. but time isn’t enough on its own, as the voices in yesterday’s coverage pointed out. for me, it has taken Oscar, and the practicality and purpose of caring for him. and the wonder of watching each milestone line up, too - seeing him bloom into a beautiful little person, and taking comfort in his being in the world. i’d like to say more about that, but he’s crying the husky, throaty cry of the teething, and he needs me.

so i’ll just say i’m grateful, for him and for the year gone by.

Oscar has a brand new baby cousin. and he’s a boy, to boot…which delights me, in a brand-new kind of way.

i think his parents might have suspected a girl was waiting in the wings, as the family was statistically due for one, but Angus Phillip Joseph Lastnamehere made his grand entrance safe and sound on Thursday morning. he’s beautiful…in the two pictures i’ve seen, his eyes are huge and he has that wary hangover look that newborns carry off so much better than adults.

and he makes me want another, suddenly and fiercely. from another province, separated by four hours of driving and a sizable body of water, i pine to hold him. not because i’m short on baby-ness over here, but simply because he’s so new. even though Oscar is a wonderful wee snuggler and well within carrying size, he’s no newborn now…he’s a full-fledged person, with communication skills and wants and a will to see them served, if one takes the time to pay attention. and i love that…love watching him laugh and grow and pout and interact. in truth, he’s a hell of a lot more fun now than he was four months ago. but, looking at Angus, i realize how far we’ve come, and i miss O being new. and i long for that…that wondrous, momentary gift of holding such total vulnerability in one’s arms. until i had Oscar, i really didn’t realize how quickly that moment fades…and like all things fleeting, it glitters in the rear-view-mirror with a particularly palpable sheen.

“but if we did have another,” says me in my must-be-addled-to-even-be-considering-this mind, “chances are good it would be a boy.” this is simple fact. i’ve had two sons. statistically, for some strange reason, couples who’ve had two boys line up with a 55-60% chance of having a third. the Internet swears it.

even two years ago, if you’d told me i’d be happily considering having a third boy, i’d likely have spat, crossed myself, and tottered off to a corner to hide, perhaps permanently.

i mentioned months ago that i decided at the ripe old age of four that all my children would be girls. obviously, i neglected to register this decision with the Ministry of Storks, or whatever random power determines these particular matters: “all sperm vying for fertilization opportunities, please line up here…ys on the left, one cross each…”

boys scared me, to be honest. i secretly thought of them rather like viruses…something one might catch if one were unlucky. at my most generous i viewed them rather as a cat person looks at dogs…nice for other people, but an awful lot of unpleasant work for those who aren’t inclined that way. i really didn’t know any better - i’d never been around boys. i believed all the snips and snails stuff…i thought everybody did. then i had Finn - tiny, sweet Finn - and lost him. now there’s Oscar…who coos at me and delights in show tunes and has the gentlest nature i could have ever imagined in a child of my own, and yet is all boy and a bruiser for four months, and will likely play hockey before he can form complete sentences. and i wouldn’t trade him, or even change him, for all the girls in China. just the fact that he is himself trumps all my old prejudice and preferences.

but it’s not as if having boys has wiped all thoughts of girls from my mind. i still feel vaguely jealous of other people giving birth to girls, just as i feel envious of other people giving birth to healthy, full-term babies with no complications. to long for something that you cannot have, or at least cannot control, is like having an open wound that will not entirely scar over. yeti am blessed…and i know it. i wanted children, and was able to conceive them. i have held both of them. and i wake to Oscar - and his father, who is my friend and love and partner - every morning.

having boys, then, has taught me that it is babies that are wonderfully sweet and delightful…that their gender is irrelevant. an unavoidable part of life, yes, and something that gets read onto each of us with various sets of expectations, and then internalized and performed…i took my Queer Theory classes. but i really didn’t know how little gender affects love. and having Angus join the family has hammered that lesson home…because he is the fourth male grandchild born into Dave’s family, and yet - and this is what i really did not know could happen - he is just as warmly, excitedly welcomed as if he were the first girl. he is special, because he is himself.

god, i’ve been dense all these years.

welcome to the world, baby Angus. thanks for teaching me something so valuable, so early on in your career…may it be a long and wise one.  can’t wait to meet you.

we drove to New Brunswick last night to Oscar’s grandparents’ house. and the whole length of the four hour car trip (five when you count the hour spent breastfeeding him in a gas station parking lot), we played music. not kid music, though we’ve been given some wonderful children’s CDs. our music. i confess - we are actively trying to brainwash his tiny eardrums.

Oscar does not come from what one would call musical stock. to my great sorrow, i am as tone-deaf as a stump. at my fifth grade provincial music festival, my choir teacher suggested that rather than sing out loud, i merely mouth along with the melody so no one else would be thrown off key by my warbling drone. Dave’s not much better. he does occasionally channel a great Debbie Harry falsetto, but is otherwise nearly as musically challenged as i. yet we love songs. i know the words to everything. and while we secretly hope that Oscar is carrying some recessive “carry that tune” genes somewhere in his makeup, if not, we still want to expose him to the joy that music can bring even to the tuneless. so we’ve been constructing a soundtrack - a musical primer - for his edification.

i believe that - if you listen to the words - music can teach all you need to know about the human condition. and i also believe that the music a person learns early on - the music eventually remembered from childhood, no matter if it matches later tastes or not - will shape that person’s sense of not only what music can be, but what it means to be human. so Oscar can get down with his bad self on gangsta rap and pop fluff later, if he wants to, should those genres mysteriously thrive. but for now, he’s being groomed into a groovy little folkie, with bardic ballads and funky sounds all around. i secretly believe this may be the best way to pass on wisdom about life and love and the universe and everything: subliminally, with a pleasant back beat.

this theory comes straight from my own experience. my poor mother wonders how, with her fine upstanding example as model, i grew up to be such an amoral vagrant. i barely watched TV as a kid, and i read only Anne of Green Gables and The Velveteen Rabbit and other umimpeachable classics of children’s literature. however, the old stereo in our apartment got a lot of use throughout my youngest years, and i blame Kris Kristofferson for my adult ambivalence about social and moral conventions. in kindergarten, i got lost at Kmart. thinking my mother would hear me and find me if i sang - even then i sensed my voice was…uh…attention-getting - i wandered blindly through the aisles, belting out my favourites. i was eventually located in the menswear section giving an offkey rendition of “Help Me Make it Through the Night.” i thought it was written for Kristofferson’s teddy bear.

i’m hoping by the time Oscar reaches that age, he can wow the Kmart shoppers with all umpteen verses of Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue”. or maybe a little Leonard Cohen. at the very least, i hope he learns that beauty and joy and sorrow have a place in all human lives, and are wonderful to express in song. even if that song comes out a little flat.