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once, i thought we were a matched set of shoes, toes pointing together.

the bloom is off the rose. he is a cowboy boot, i see it now. or maybe a brogue, stitched and sewn in ways that will never match my own. but still i admire the curve of a heel, the shape of something different and curious.
***
he approaches every new thing as if it is the first, the only.

i noticed it first in our early, lazy days, expats with too much time to kill. drinking and smoking and sex are exquisite hobbies, and talking into the night is an art form we perfected. but when a pair only work fifteen hours a week, they are eventually forced back on their resources.

i taught him to play Scrabble.

i thought of Scrabble as a delightful way to share the pleasure of words. i liked to coo over my competitor’s seven-letter accomplishments, work together to see if we could make the board a patchwork of poetry. he read the two-letter-word list from the dictionary and was kicking my ass within a week.

when he takes to something, he goes at it heart and soul, to win. that took me aback, at first: i took it personally, his ethic of competition. i did not grow up with that. but then neither did i grow up with the ethic of self-application, of intentional effort. i did not know that what did not come easy could still be gained.

he has taught me.
***
he is learning guitar.

i grew up a folkie, my Bowie fetish aside. i played dolls to Joan Baez and Kris Kristofferson, branched out to Dylan and Guthrie – father and son – in high school. John Prine was a legacy i inherited from my father and stepmother, Janis Joplin who i wanted to be when i grew up. i knew all the words to everything.

i got my first guitar at almost 23. first Christmas far from home, in a smoky basement apartment on Davie Street in Vancouver. i didn’t even know how to hold it, didn’t know a chord from a carburetor.

it was the first thing in my life i ever worked at.

i played by ear, and from the small book of chords that came with the case. i eked out “Leaving on a Jet Plane” first, with full stops in the singing where i had to change chords. then “Me & Bobby McGee,” a signature Kris/Janis blend that made me puffy with pride. i learned to pluck a string or two for “Wish You Were Here” and “Friend of the Devil,” but that was the apex of my vocation: i never got much past four chords and a simple strum. it never entered my mind to master, just to make a joyful noise. along the way, i taught myself to sing. i found my key, and my voice, and i was happy.

my calluses have faded over the last few years, though two guitars sit in our living room. at Christmas, Oscar’s grandparents bought a wee one for him. it came with an instructional CD, way over his head, but apparently quite entertaining for his father.

because suddenly, he plays.

in a month, Dave has learned things on guitar i never will. he’s working on a fingerpicking riff that sounds remarkably like “Dust in the Wind.” fifteen times or so a day. he’s taking lessons, now.

i do not mind being left in that dust, this time.

my children watch him, and learn that if they work at something, they will get better. i watch him, and pick up my old guitar, and try to catch up.

maybe it will last, this music…my slow plunking a balance to his passion, a reason to keep going. it’s hard to say. i tease him that he is part crow, drawn to the next bit of shiny.

and yet, he is still here.

and we walk together, not matched as i once thought. but maybe better.
***

do you think likeness matters, in a partnership?

we were rushing our way through the half-abandoned mall to Oscar’s speech appointment upstairs. he was fifty feet away at the coffee shop table, his white shock of hair sticking straight up.

everyone has a visual imprint, a way of walking or sitting, the cock of a head, the way a hand punctuates speech.

my grandfather, even at ninety-one and shrunken and far less mobile than he’d like to be, still lords over his lunchtime newspaper, shaking a paw at the ridiculousness of the world.

the boy and i ran up and greeted him. hail fellow well met and smiles, gentle hugs.

my grandfather manages lunch on his own these days, mostly at this coffee shop at the old mall. it is just down the hill from his house. his hands are shaky, the driving worries me, but he manages.

i seized the moment. do you have any dinner plans?

i do not see him enough. he has a nurse – a crew of nurses, really, headlined by a stunner whom he adores – and my father and stepmother drop in nearly daily. but not me.

well, now, he began, and this is an old deliberate routine between us, dating back to the years after my grandmother died when i’d come home from college and call him up. were you looking to ask me out, young lady?

he and Oscar and i made plans for all of us to meet at one of his usual dinner haunts that evening. lately his short-term memory’s been poor, and phone calls to make dinner plans haven’t worked out so well. but i figured that evening? was only a few hours away. i hugged him, and Oscar and i dashed away to our appointment.

love you, Grandpa! i threw over my shoulder.

from the open stairs leading up to the speech therapy clinic, i watched him rise and fumble for his cane, sunlight glinting off the white crew cut grown shaggier than he’d once have tolerated.
***

my grandfather’s ancestors down the Stewart line sailed here two hundred years ago or so, when their Highland glens were cleared for sheep and politics.

they came with the Selkirk settlers, three boatloads in the summer of 1803. hardy and self-reliant, destitute but proud and canny, the lot of them are said to have landed in the virgin forests of PEI barely knowing how to wield an axe. today, this island is as green and bare as their Isle of Skye, and far more tamed. waste not, want not, ran the strain of steel through their mantra. they wasted not an inch or a branch of the place, the lot of them.

apparently the stewardship my clan were named for did not necessarily extend to environmentalism. rather, they expanded, prospered; became respectable, if still a wee bit fey.

my grandfather had an Uncle Dan who was apparently legendary in local horse-trading circles for two things: his fits of temper, and his punctuality. you could set your watch, legend has it, by when he’d start shouting.

and my grandfather’s Great Aunt Mae, at the end of her days, was given a room of her own in the nursing home for throwing her cane at her roommate. her roommate happened to be Great Aunt Maud, my grandmother’s equally cantankerous relation. the fact that Mae & Maud’s young family members had married apparently did little to assuage a lifelong bloodfeud.

the cane my grandfather uses these days? is Mae’s.

my whole life, my grandfather has been five minutes early for everything. he can be touchy, yes, if his particular code of propriety is breached. yet with his dirty jokes and his upright resilience and his fierce loyalty, he has been, for me, a sort of rock, a stability in a family tree long cleaved by separations and silences.

my mother came from a different line of Scots from a different island in the Hebrides, who landed here on this small isle within twenty years of the Stewarts, give or take. McNevins who somewhere became MacNevins, to hide their Jacobite roots and grow more staunchly, dourly, acceptably Protestant, i assume. my mother was the last of that line to carry the name. we gave it to Finn, his second middle name. it died again, with him, and i did not have the heart to try again.

and so Oscar is Oscar Charles Stewart Cormier, with the nod to Bonnie Prince Charlie hidden there in between his Acadian-sounding proper name. on one side and the other, his heritage falls almost entirely on the losing side of England’s burgeoning eighteenth-century imperialism. Culloden and clearances and expulsion, with a stray Irish Catholic thrown in now and then in the line for good measure.

and his mother tongue is English. och aye, o ye winners of history.

but last night, as i drove him home sleepy from his first Robbie Burns night concert, i told him the Stewarts were once kings.  i told him of the Charles Stewart who lost his head to Cromwell, and of Bonnie Prince Charlie the hapless, and i sang speed, bonny boat, like a bird on the wing, like i have since he was a baby.

if you are going to identify with people who have lost, then you’d better know how to make beauty out of sorrow. waiting for the once-and-future king only sounds romantic in songs.
***

he stood us up the other night.

i bundled the kids from school and we picked up Dave and rushed to the restaurant because it is not right to keep a 91-year-old man waiting. and there was a bit of a line and so we bounced the kids and sent Oscar on a scouting mission and even before we got a seat i had a sinking feeling and i called. i got his message machine.

and so the four of us sat at our table for six and ate, all the while keeping an eye on the door for a white head and an heirloom cane.

we drove up the hill after, just to make sure he was okay. and i was relieved. his nurse’s car was there and the lights on, and i assume they went elsewhere for supper, as they do sometimes.

we didn’t go in. there is no need to remind a person of failings he can no longer control.

it isn’t the first time, but the fourth or the fifth in these months or so since he came home from the heart attack and his long hospitalization. that he is home at all is a victory.  that i keep making this mistake is my own damn fault: my failure, not his.

i need to change my strategies, start calling immediately before, or making our dinner dates through his nurse and not through him.

i know this. i accept it, and i will do it.  because then there will be dinners with all of us present, and that is what i want.

but every time i see him, and his eyes light up, and he says were you looking to ask me out? i am sure, entirely sure, that he will be sitting there at the table five minutes before our agreed-upon time.

and i wish there were a song that i could sing to Oscar, to explain.

…i think he’s wondering how he got here from there.

on a May night almost ten years ago after a copious quantity of liquor, i doubt he looked at me and thought, “now, THERE’s a woman i can play dolls with early on a Sunday morning ten years hence. before we even get any coffee. RAWRRR. i wonder how she looks in a ratty bathrobe.”

let this be a warning. none of us ever quite know what we’re getting into.

and we protect what we’re in. it is the unwritten rule, for most of us out here. we don’t write about partners, at least until the bond is falling apart or gone and they are relegated to the dead letters file of mere stories.

a relationship is an impossible thing to put into words.

but this year, i want to put it into pictures. because in some ways, it’s slipping past us, the time we once spent fostering and celebrating this messy, lovely, human thing between us eaten alive by early mornings, latenight laundry folding, the pull in a hundred directions of duty and career-building and responsibility. and yet in there, somewhere, under all the dolls and the grimly contemplative face, i see him, still.

he suggested doing a 365 of some sort this year, the two of us, a collaborative project. i reminded him that – child-rearing aside – our creative collaborative projects always involve at least one miserable evening of me sobbing “we CAN’T WORK TOGETHER!” and taking all my toys to the other side of the playroom. it was ever thus, and ever thus shall be, right from the first time i edited his book waaaay back when god was young and visions of a Sunday morning piled under dolls sounded more like a Warhol film than a shared future.

i do not have the headspace for a 365 commitment right now. but once a week, here, i’ll post a shot chronicling THIS commitment, the flesh-and-blood foundation on which this little house stands.

the home project.

not our home in any domestic glory sense, but he and i. the part of him that is my home.

he said he might even take a picture of me, some Mondays.
***

if you have a somebody, and you want to play along, any Monday, i’d love to see who you love, in his or her house-muse humanity. #thehomeproject on Twitter.

the rumours are true: David Bowie and i celebrated our twenty-fifth anniversary this past week.

for Christmas 1985, i requested and received the ChangesOneBowie album on tape. in the week that followed, i played that poor, beleaguered tape over and over and over. and i fell deeply, incontrovertibly in love.

i’d already liked him, in my limited knowledge of Let’s Dance and China Girl and Space Odyssey when it came across the late night airwaves. but i liked him like i liked twenty other fleeting passions of the moment, all of them embodying some kernel of cool that i didn’t really understand but clasped to my bosom in hopes of enhancing it.

at that age, i was wide open, looking for someone to be, desperate for visions of adulthood that made sense to me. i wanted a life of art and ideas, and had no clue where to begin.

there’s a quote from Changes that opens The Breakfast Club, about children being spit on as they try to change their worlds. its presence in the film twigged for me that Bowie might know more than i’d given him credit for. and so, sans internet or mentorship, i searched through record stores and old issues of Creem trying to figure out which album would magically hold the key. ChangesOneBowie threw me head over heels into the world of Ziggy Stardust and the plastic soul of Young Americans and the queer ironic rebellion of Rebel Rebel and John, I’m Only Dancing. and i had come home.

after that week between Christmas and New Year’s of 1985, i was a one-man woman. or a one-man thirteen year old, rather. if i’d had a passport and any money and a sense of where David Bowie had actually lived, i’d have shown up on his doorstep and offered myself as concubine and songwriter, innocent of the ridiculousness of either offer.

what i wanted, really, was just to be his shadow, his partner in adventure, his doppelganger.

and for twenty-five faithful years, i kind of have, even if he’s never once called.

***
ten years ago this week i ended a marriage.

it was hot and there were cockroaches, and trails of ants drowned in the sticky stream of Southern Comfort we’d left on the night table. we sat across a Formica table in a cheap hotel in Bangkok over triangles of white toast and fake whipping cream. it was him who made the final move, spoke the decisive words. but it was me, really, who made the decision. i’d driven us to the cliff and handed him the keys, thus orchestrating joint ownership of the implosion. he played his part, because that was how the part had been written.

i think. maybe i’m misremembering.

i thought it was an amicable and sad ending. i thought it made perfect sense.

what he really thought, i’ll never know. because what i lost in the end of that marriage was the relationship that it grew from. i hadn’t expected that, which seems achingly naive and yet was the foundation of my position. i thought the relationship was forever, a central part of who i was: i thought just the marriage had been a mistake.

he won out.

ten years seems like an impossibly long time, when you look back and realize you made a life decision that big that long ago.

***
i bought Dave two books for Christmas. the other day, i read one of them, cover to cover.

it was Just Kids, by Patti Smith. rock-n-roll and a young Robert Mapplethorpe and the Chelsea Hotel in its seedy bohemian squalour and glamour. from the hide-a-bed in Dave’s parents’ rural New Brunswick basement, i lived out the NYC part of the fantasy of my adolescent dreams. i read the book half-breathless, as if it were a sacred guide and i once again an initiate, looking for someone to be.

and then i laughed at myself. i turn thirty-nine next month. and still, some small part of me is wide open, hopeful about the magic around the next corner.

mixed in with Just Kids, in the orgy of quietude that i squeezed in while the children slept and everyone else watched football and hockey, i also read from next term’s reading list, a stack of books on human identity and narrative.

according to that purdy pile of Christmas presents, different personalities and circumstances and experiences lead people to gravitate to particular imagoes (and ten bucks to the first person who can tell me how to pronounce imagoes so i don’t mortify myself in fancy company) or character types.

the maker, the lover, the sage, the caregiver, the escapist, the friend: these here are your stock characters, people. these are the stuff we mortals are made of. we come to understand ourselves through the stories and roles we cast ourselves in.

now you know. you’re welcome. drop your nickel in the “The Doctor is IN” bucket at the door.

sometimes our imagoes don’t transcend all life stages, so we get stuck, need to expand our internal narratives to include new stock characters we can incorporate into ourselves. or incorporate ourselves into. tomato tomahto, imago a go-go.

it occurs to me that some part of me has been stuck since thirteen in a rock n roll fantasy imago. that the consummated and bonded but still ephemeral Smith-Mapplethorpe friendship that Just Kids describes guided most of my life decisions up until the point i had kids myself. but i’ve never seen it overtly described before, and the recognition resonated like a shock.

if Patti Smith had been thoughtful enough to write her retrospective a couple of decades earlier, i’d have had a much clearer map to my early adulthood. i’d have understood that the boy i married and i were simply working from two different scripts: mine one where marriage was a contingent experiment aimed at giving each other safe harbour while we struggled to learn to be grown-ups; his, the cultural norm, the one in which endings are betrayals, the worst thing that can happen.

it has taken me a decade to completely understand. it has taken me twenty-five years to realize that what i’ve been looking for in my devotion to Bowie is not Bowie himself but me, a version of me.

luckily i have other imagoes or stock character guides that have carried me and my relationship with the real-life Dave through the last five or six years of our entry into parenthood. the mother and the storyteller and the teacher have sustained me as the rock-n-roll fantasy has withered in the domestic hothouse.

but this is the last day of the year, the last day of a decade that has been rich and strange and full of growth and changes.

i want more. i still want rock-n-roll, even in the midst of parenting and studying and bills and laundry. i want a life of art and ideas.

and perhaps the biggest difference between me at thirteen and me at nearly thirty-nine is i can almost see my way there. i’ve lived enough to be my own guide.

i don’t really want to be Mrs. Bonnie Bowie, even if that pesky Iman does drop outta the picture.

i want to be Bon, partner to Dave. i want to be mother and writer and thinker and witness and friend…and maybe middle-aged rebel rebel, whatever imprint that makes in the warm, impermanent sand.

bring it, 2011.

happiest of New Years, my friends.

***
who are your models, your imagoes, your mentors? what do you hope for from the coming year, and the coming decade of your life?

i am in the doorway, saying goodnight.

i blow kisses and, to stem the inevitable Mommy! i want to tell you one more thing! i begin to sing. the song is a direct result of the chapter book Oscar and i have started this week, his first ever. Anne of Green Gables. it is his Island birthright, i tell myself. or my own.

this song – the title track from the musical version of Anne that my mother and i will take Oscar to next weekend – has lain dormant, unsung and forgotten by me for twenty years. but i start in, full of sudden inspiration. the first notes are familiar like old shoes and my own voice pleases me, which is rare in itself. i gather steam and launch into the high notes and suddenly, i am crying.
***

my grandmother took me to Anne of Green Gables, The Musical, every summer from the time i was Oscar’s age. it was our special outing, the tickets carefully saved for. i remember the cool vastness of the theatre, and the slight scratch of the plush red folding seats that bounced under me. i’d lean back and gaze up at the huge triangular light fixtures, like giant taco chips across the ceiling, and thrill to the cacophony of the orchestra warm up. every year i wore my best old-fashioned dress, the most current in an ongoing series of ruffled wonders.

i admitted once that it was my heart’s secret hope that some year, some unspecified tragedy would overcome the lead actress and all action onstage would stop, until a finger pointed out into the audience straight into my eager, waiting face, seeing what no one else could. You, little girl. You. and i would step into the spotlight in my puffed sleeves, and a star would be born.

i admitted too that it was through the triad of Anne, Marilla, and Matthew that i understood my own family as a child: myself, my mother, and my grandmother, all in our preordained roles, in the still-familiar cloister of this clannish island culture a hundred years after the story was set.

i did not admit, though, that leaving my grandmother’s house for school as a kid, swinging my schoolbag along the old, pebbly sidewalks, i used to sing the slightly maudlin Anne of Green Gables theme song at the top of my lungs.

Anne of Green Gables, never change, I like you just this way
Anne of Green Gables, sweet and strange, stay as you are today
Though blossoms fade and friends must part
Old grow the songs we’ve sung…
Anne of Green Gables, in my heart, you are forever young
(Harron, Campbell, Campbell & Moore, 1965)

i’d get so caught up in my performance to nobody in particular that i could move myself to tears. the song is the one that Matthew sings to his Anne, in the play, as he sits dying in his rocking chair. i was a child with a primary caregiver and kindred spirit nearing 80. in that song, i came face to face with the concept – and the inevitability – of loss.

and in that song, i understood what my grandmother could never quite put into words: the way she loved me.

i had forgotten, until it spilled from my mouth and there she was, waving in the window of her sunporch.
***

i had forgotten because i worked as an usher at the theatre the summer after high school and glutted myself on the show. eight times a week is too much Anne, even for a lifelong enthusiast and sentimental sap. for the first week or so, i wept like a baby every night when Matthew died. after that, his passing stood as the measure for ten minutes til curtain, twenty til we hit the bars. for years after, the only version of the song i’d sing was the naughty parody teenage usherettes made up to wile away the lonely hours shifting from foot to foot in ugly cummerbunds and bow ties at the back of the darkened theatre: Anne of Green Gut, you filthy slut, i like you on your knees…

(may the Island Gods forgive me.)

hell, it’s hard out there for an usherette in an unflattering outfit and a job market saturated by the Anne-dustry. catharsis comes in many forms.

but suddenly, my children are freshly bathed under quilts and i am explaining Rachel Lynde and Avonlea and there it is, that old faithful friend, this song, and this time round i do not need the puffed sleeves and no one need beckon me onstage because i have this captive audience of two. this is the star i was born to be, the stage i was meant for: to make them laugh, and bring them to worlds where they will come face to face with all that it is to be human. and i am caterwauling and beneath the tears that prick i laugh, because this – this – is my time to shine and i look into their faces and understand finally, fully, exactly how my grandmother loved me.

as my Mother’s Day present to my long-suffering mother, i went with her to church last weekend.

church is the centre of my mother’s orbit in this life. her social whirl, her weekly schedule, her sense of what matters are all directly and primarily shaped by the faith community in which she grew up. the church is having a clothing sale? the kids must have something they’ve outgrown. a fundraising dinner? she’ll mash potatoes by the bucket, even if her swallowing disorder means she hasn’t eaten pork roast herself in a quarter century. sponsoring a refugee family? she’s suddenly on Wikipedia for the first time ever, learning everything she can about Somalia.

i could, on the other hand, spend weeks in Somalia, and my mother might eventually look up what side of Africa it was on. she is generous with her time, loves her grandchildren, loves me. but despite the fact that the age difference between us is small and that i have friends her own age, my mother has not even a foot in my world, or even in her own generational world. David Bowie, whom i’ve been set since the age of twelve on marrying someday, is a year older than she. yet only if David Bowie came to sing at her church would she ever suddenly develop any interest in being able to identify his music. i suspect she’ll recognize him at the wedding, but only just.

so i’m a little jealous. i’m an only child. it’s hard to share your mother with God, okay? look what happened to Jesus.

ba dum bump.

my mother’s church, and my grandmother’s before her, and her grandmother’s before that, is housed in a big, old, austerely grand building with wooden vaulted ceilings. it has deep, dour Protestant Reformation roots: it does not draw attention to itself. there is no showy witnessing in its circle, no language of prayer and The Lord permeating everyday conversation. as i cringe when people attribute daily actions and outcomes to deities – unless they’re swearing – the circumspection and minimalism of the place suits me. i like sitting there, my back against the pew, stained-glass-light dappling the old people’s hair in front of me. if i squint, i can imagine that i’ve time-travelled, that one of the bluer rinses a few pews ahead is my Nannie, gently croaking out an old staunch hymn the congregation hasn’t sung in forty years. i love that.

but i don’t go.

i have this private hubris that i’m a Personal BadAss. now, Personal BadAsses eschew church and all its middle-class bourgeois self-satisfaction. rows of women in fur stoles, passing the peace of Christ? earnestly updated hymns laden with sentimental theology? Personal BadAsses are deeply uncomfortable with all that…comfortableness. they like Mapplethorpe exhibits and whatever makes other people squirm. they only wear fur they killed with their own teeth. why, they’d smoke, still, just to blow it in somebody’s face, if the habit hadn’t gotten so gosh-darn expensive and wouldn’t land them in an emphysema ward.

the problem with being a Personal BadAss is that it does not wear particularly well after the age of 35. unless one is PJ O’Rourke, i suppose. or Mickey Rourke. or Mr. Roarke from Fantasy Island, but he was more suave than bad.

God did not make me suave. i should ask my mother to speak with him/her about that.

anyhow, one day you look around and you’ve been carrying your diaper bag to work as a purse for six months and your car is a glorified mini-van and even the haircut you thought had edge makes you look – at best – like an aging Depeche Mode fan and you may as well haul granny’s fur outta storage and go sit in a pew.

so last week i went to church with my mother.

we stood in the pew where i sat as a child. no one stared. no shouts of “blasPHEEEMer!” went up in the sanctuary. i smiled nervously.

and then the heavens parted.

i am not a believer, plain and simple. which is the main reason simply being in a church makes me feel like a wretched hypocrite. but it was Mother’s Day, which i figure is forgivable by any standards.

and by Jesus, God went all out fer me, people.

my daughter, the hurricane, sat quietly in her grandmother’s lap for half an hour, then went to sleep on my shoulder for the first time since she weaned six months ago. Oscar led the procession from Sunday school with Mother’s Day carnations and a beatific little smile. i sang beside my mother and the words to the old hymns were quick on my lips. a tear leaked down my face.

i thought JESUS, Jesus. you trying to do me in?

there were no furs, no self-congratulations. in the prayer, they spoke to mothers who grieve, mothers with AIDS, mothers who wait for babies that never come. the sermon was as radical a piece of public discourse as i’ve heard out loud in years, replete with visuals of gay adoptive parents interspersed with biblical stained-glass allegory.

i was ready to shout Amen. which would have embarrassed my mother almost enough to qualify me as a BadAss all over again.

the last shot that went up on the screens projected at the front of the old church was Michelangelo’s Pieta. the mother cradles her broken adult child, her body braced to hold his weight. he is gone; she is utterly alone.

i looked down at Posey in my arms, eyelashes fluttering. my lip trembled as i smiled on her. i made sure she was breathing.

over her head, my eyes met my mother’s. we both nodded at the miracle between us, the slumbering child. my mother raised her eyebrows in bemusement, i shrugged my shoulders in response.

we laughed. aloud, right in that moment of perfect silence before the offertory.

the Very Model of a Modern BadAss Family, i told myself, raising my chin with great pride.

***

i didn’t go back to church with my mother this morning. if i were a good daughter, i might’ve. maybe. there’s still that little hiccup of belief standing between me and the way i was raised.

my mother began bringing Oscar to Sunday school last September. he loves going, she loves bringing him, and we figure it’s a fine education in community and literacies plus an hour with one less child every weekend. but for the first time this morning as the two of them walked out the door hand in hand, i felt grown up. because for all my respectful mother has never once asked me to come – even last week, i volunteered – every week the part of me that remained petulant Personal BadAss sulked with self-consciousness at the very idea of church. even though no one was asking me.

until today, i really couldn’t quite have told you whether i stayed home out of personal ethics or because i am secretly Twelve. it felt nice, finally, to figure out the difference.

today, i just smiled at my mom when we met her at the door.  Posey reached for her shoes, and i said, no honey, no church for us today.

nap! she chirped, protesting, and my mother and i both broke out laughing. again. clearly, we all have our own ideas about what church is for.

so i stayed behind, content in my lack of belief. and my mother and Oscar went off to the bosom of her Other Family and i waved from the window.

and it was good.

i was dragging two kids and some bags in the door. an envelope stuck out, lemon yellow, not the business kind. a belated Easter card, i thought, or an early birthday card for Oscar. i pulled it from the box, went to shuffle it under the electricity bill.

then i saw the writing. and the name.

she wrote me back.

in December, in a fit of what some might call romanticism, i sent my one and only Christmas card to an address in Ontario whose recipient i knew only by name. for five Christmases, we’d received a card for the former residents of our house. each of the five years saw the handwriting on the card get a little shakier. something in it reminded me of my grandmother.

i wished Mrs. F a Merry Christmas, and told her where the former owners of our house live now. on a whim, i went further. i included a picture of my kids, and told her how i’d mailed Christmas cards for my grandmother every year when i was younger, and how she’s reminded me of what i’d forgotten: that cards are meant to be a way of reaching out. i thanked her. and i smiled and went on my merry way, my little grinch heart a few sizes less tight.

today it sprang free from its confines entirely.

an Easter card, and a picture of an elderly woman standing beside a blond lady in her 50s, behind a man about the same age. an elderly man perches in front. a note, too, typed in a script font and signed in full.

she wrote:
Dear Bonnie and family –

It took me a long while but I am now getting around to telling you how much I enjoyed getting your lovely Christmas card with a picture of your children. Your note really moved me – it was not just letting me know of my mistake, but giving me the possibility of a new family.

It’s hard to put into words my feelings but if you are agreeable, I would like to try to be an Honorary Great Grandmother to your children. It is not very likely that I will get down to The Island again as I am 87 and in excellent health but with legs and feet that make it difficult to do much traveling. But there is always mail, phone, and email. If you would let me know birthdays it would be a pleasure for me to send cards then and at other special occasions. Does this sound like something you would like to be involved with? I’m not trying to replace your grandmother, but it might be fun for us both to keep in touch. And if you should get up to this part of the world I have room for overnight visitors.

Think about it – no harm in trying!

Yours sincerely,

E_____ F______

P.S. Please excuse the typed letter but I have “familial tremor” and sometimes my writing is legible and sometimes not.

P.P.S Julius (the picture identifies the younger man in the picture as her son, the blond as his wife, and the elderly man as Julius) and I have been separated since 1983 and he lives in M______.

i wept.

an 87 year old woman whose stray Christmas card i very nearly threw out invited me – a complete stranger – to stay at her house. with my rabble of a family. and told me a great deal about hers, in one photo.

we’ll likely never go. and i need a new penpal like a hole in the head. but also maybe like a hole in my heart, in the place where one never gets too old to need a grandmother.

because i understand that this is extension is not about what comes of it, whatever that may be. it is about the reaching out, the saying i am here, and i see you there, fellow traveler. and i nod.

i will write Mrs. F back and say, yes. you bet. your picture’s on the fridge. and again, thank you for reminding me.
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almost three years ago now, i reached out – with the thin words that come struggling in when things are dire and wrong – to somebody else, one of my first blog friends out here in this fellowship of travelers. she had written something a few months before that had stayed with me, her positivity a light i kept coming back to.

i hadn’t seen nothin’ yet.

when i wrote that post three years ago, i didn’t know that Whymommy‘s real name was Susan. i didn’t know much about her except that she was a scientist and a mom of two little boys, and that she was, in a way i was only beginning to understand as i forged tentative “real” relationships with so many of you i’d met out here in the ether, my friend. and i hoped that the reaching out would be some small thing to remind her that she was cared for, even by people who’d never met her.

since then, she’s become both a very real – if still never yet met in the flesh – friend, and my unintentional teacher.

and like Mrs. F did today with the generosity of her offering, she’s made me weep. when she had to give up BlogHer after her diagnosis that summer of 2007, she offered me her ticket. i couldn’t go – i’d just started a brand-new job, had no spare $1000 or holidays for a trip to Chicago – but i sat at my desk at work the day i got her email snorting back tears like a big wet hen. and the following summer, when after months of bedrest – months Susan could relate to, having being laid up flat on her back almost her entire pregnancy with Little Bear – i got far enough along with Posey to finally dare anticipate this longed-for daughter, she sent me a box of baby girl clothes and trinkets, bought for the girl child her firstborn turned out not to be. they were packed in tissue, as if each one had been gently patted, then let go. she’d had her ovaries removed – a preventative measure – the week before.

the little white and pink wooden basket she sent sits by Josephine’s crib. Oscar – a budding collector – kept ferreting pinecones and chestnuts away in it last fall, until i had to explain to him that his sister could choke on them, and empty it. but i thought nonetheless that the scientist in Susan might approve of the use we’d put it to. this past weekend, with the weather finally decent, my girl collected her own first pinecone. what she didn’t eat of it is in the basket.

Susan found out a week ago that her cancer has returned. it’s breast cancer, though she has no breasts anymore. it’s metastasized to the lymph nodes under her arms; six tumours. she will have them out tomorrow.

Susan has taught me, in a way i never understood before, why cancer research matters so much. there is no research yet that can tell her conclusively whether to have the tumours out tomorrow, or start chemo instead. if she did start chemo, there is no research to tell cancer patients when maintenance chemo can be stopped.

there are not enough answers. not yet.

i want there to be answers for Susan. but i don’t have any. none of us do.

all we have is the capacity to reach out. to get the word out about research. to tell Susan we love her, and we’re thinking of her. to tell her how she matters to us. to tell her to kick ass and walk tall.

Susan’s friend Jean of Stimeyland is hosting Team Whymommy’s Virtual Science Fair today.

friends of Susan’s, new and old, flesh and ether and all grades in between, are invited to join in. we’ve all done a little something special with our kids this past week, something with Susan the enthusiastic and inquiring scientist in mind.

for us, here, it was this.

seeds. the faith that life will spring. that the nod at the earth is worth the time, just as people, sometimes, are worth reaching out to. that come summer, there will be big beefy tomatoes. and possibly more cauliflower than we can ever eat in this life.

i still hold out a bit of hope that i may finally, belatedly, make it to BlogHer after all this August. and if i do, i better find Susan there. because i will have tomatoes for her.

my grandfather is back in the hospital.

for two weeks, he was out. in a community care facility, a convalescent ward carved out of the old, cavernous, high-ceilinged Protestant hospital where i drew my first breaths.  decommissioned thirty years ago in the name of ecumenism, the place has been relegated to the old and the frail: we newly non-sectarian citizens gained a modern, Star Trek-style facility in the bargain. but i remember the old hospital from childhood, my grandmother and i trolling the rabbit-warren halls and narrow doorways with the Ladies Auxiliary snack cart, great workers for the cause. there is a big new plasma tv where the canteen used to be: i glance to that corner and see both, equally present, shadows competing.

he had a roommate named Chuck, a retired RCMP officer. they watched Jeopardy, and Chuck liked to pronounce on the failings of modern society. i snapped out answers on American lit before Alex Trebek had the questions out of his mouth, so Chuck approved of me, grudgingly. and my grandfather sat in his contraband LaZboy, shifting from side to side to ease his bedsores. he ate licorice, shared freely. Oscar liked to visit. Grandpa was walking to the common room for meals, getting speedy with his cane. they came very close to sending him home. we all held our breath, uncertain.

then, a week ago, a midnight run in an ambulance, back to the “new” thirty-year-old hospital, the one with actual nurses and meds and doctors. congestive heart failure again, and one arm swollen up like a football, red and hot and angry. cellulitis. antibiotics. catheter and IV and no appetite, once again. he lay in the bed, small and crooked, white waxy-ice feet poking out from the bottom of the sheet.

i asked. he nodded permission.

when you go back to the hospital, the pretense of being able to do it yourself drops away.  i picked up those waxy, frozen, narrow feet, the nails yellow as horn, and gently rubbed them, mindful of small sores and broken skin.

and just like that, we stepped beyond a veil that has separated us for nearly four decades, since i was last a bare-assed infant in his presence.

cream for his thin legs, his wide back, scabbed from skin degeneration. the arms, one big as Popeye’s.  my hands in his soft hair, only gone white these last few years, straight as a pin and cowlicked. i held his teeth in my hands and marvelled at the oddity of dentures, a whole generation plucked jaw-clean. for the first time in my life, i saw his face naked of glasses and teeth, and smiled to realize i still know him under all that i had not recognized as artifice.

he held himself with grace, accepting this breach, this intimacy.

the line around us all is invisible.  we construct it for our children as it was constructed for us, strengthening it with each step away from diapers. we make it sacrosanct and powerful, and if we do our jobs well it  holds their small but burgeoning bodies as we ourselves are held – unwitting within its iron boundary for decades. we pour energy and identity into protecting it, equating it with worth, making it a requisite of pride. we hide our waste, our blood, our wetnesses. this is what it means to be an adult.

we live in bodies and pretend they are private, machine-like. we prefer not to acknowledge we were ever cast from the Garden of Eden.

for most of us, only in childbirth, illness, old age, do we find ourselves naked and exposed in all our human vulnerability. if we are lucky, it is a fleeting thing. if we are not, we must shift, find a way to continue to live without the invisible garment of privacy protecting us.

to grow old and frail is to be stripped of the privilege of hiding from the unspeakable shame of…ourselves.

to be alongside someone facing their own decline is to be stripped of the comfort of that privacy. but also of the lie that independence is a necessary part of dignity.

that is the gift, if you can stay and not look away.
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my grandfather is a WWII vet. when i was a little girl, his stories of the war were still under oath, still secreted away, parceled out only in small, screened nibbles. i knew he had been a spy, knew a little about places he’d been, though Yugoslavia or Tehran or San Francisco were no more real to me then than Disneyland, and less interesting. what i did like, and he shared freely, to the eternal tightlipped disapproval of my dourly beloved grandmother Hilda, was Colonel Bogey.

if you have ever seen A Bridge on the River Kwai, you’ve heard Colonel Bogey.

whistled, it’s a jaunty tune, a wartime march. it was written in 1914, and was a million-seller, but somewhere between the two wars it took on a whole other life as a jolly, vulgar insult ditty, in the vein of “I Don’t Know but I Been Told” and rugby songs of all stripes.

the version my grandfather taught me goes like this:

Hitler has only got one ball
Goerring has two balls but they’re small
Himmler has something similar
and Doctor Goebbels has no balls at all
(la da da da da….)

no one can say my childhood was not rich in history.

the other night at the hospital, after my grandfather’s skin was creamed and his feet covered, i realized that i had no clue how to lift him safely and properly back toward towards the upper middle of his fancy Craftmatic, which, when lowered, had unceremoniously slumped him down towards its own left foot. with the IV and the catheter and the oxygen tubes all protruding, and his arm swollen and tender, he wasn’t able to maneuver far on his own. i called the nurse.

she came in, prompt and kind, and pointed out to me the blue pad underneath him. she and i positioned ourselves on either side of the bed and tugged upward. he came easily. he is not heavy now.

his johnny shirt, caught under him below the pad, came easily too. a little too easily. and though my brain shrieked don’t look Bonnie!, just like a personal Ray Stevens novelty-track in the back of my mind, my eyes were not so quick.

there are things a granddaughter ain’t supposed to see, in this life. we all know it. i still saw. and he knew, and i knew he knew.

the nurse covered him swiftly, all business-like. she walked away. i smiled at him, swallowing my own embarrassment. i asked if he was comfortable.

he met my eyes, grave and present. i looked back at him and decided if he can live without the veil, so can i.

i’m good, dear, he said. thank you. then he paused, sized me up, made the joke he couldn’t resist. and nope, i’m no German.

he winked at me and began to whistle Colonel Bogey, his good hand dancing, conducting the march.

here’s the truth of it, in all its ugliness: raising a boy is making me a better person. not a better parent, mind you. but a more rounded human being.

i didn’t know i needed reinvention. but turns out those beer ads from college were correct: what does not kill you makes you strong.

or at least, less of a bigot.

i blame SuperBowl XXVI for some of my former wayward and biased assumptions. in 1992,  my birthday was the same weekend as the SuperBowl. i spent most of my supposed “party” perched on the corner of my boyfriend’s dumpster-dived couch choking on the acrid fumes of weed and spicy chicken wings for eight straight hours of joyous pregame- and game-centric celebration with a pack of 200 lb boys and ten 2-4s of beer. nobody – boyfriend included – said two words to me other than, “chips?”

what’s wrong with that, you ask? even in college, i didn’t like beer. or football. not even a little. and chips are nice and all, but they are not birthday cake.

somehow, i have been bitter about “manly” pursuits ever since.

on twitter last week, there was a brief flurry of discussion on moms of girls only vs. moms of boys only. it raised the question of whether boy moms and girl moms end up being different from each other, in spite of being otherwise similar in age, tastes, class, career, education, etc.

and the consensus seemed to be yeh, a little, overall.

and i can see it. or at least, i could see it in ME, had things gone a little differently.

(aside: those of us with children of both sexes were cruelly ostracized from this conversation. please note that we need enlightenment too, people! a little “are you a bi-mom?” quiz would help me know myself, please and thankyou. stage direction: end self-mockery of stereotype i am actually trying to explore.)

when i was a little girl, and lived in a mindscape constructed mostly of cast-off and stolen characters & scenarios from Victorian children’s literature, all hard-knock lives and depths of despair and pretty pinafores, the so-called world of boys seemed like a foreign land.

i tried, occasionally, to venture there. not so much in person: the boys i knew were relegated, in my egocentric universe, to occasional supporting roles of annoying little brother or know-it-all classmate. i did not know enough about dinosaurs or Star Wars to talk to them past first grade.

i thought of their world as a strange exotica populated by Spiderman cartoons, boring little metal cars that never went anywhere and Dukes of Hazzard pyjamas.

i created families in my doodle pads, large multi-generational family trees populated by imaginary people with extraordinary names. i killed off the parents ruthlessly, dull folk named George and Sandra and Ervin and Eunice, gave them dates of death and tidy tombstones. but their children, whom i frequently sent to orphanages dressed in middies and awkward lederhosen sewn from curtains a la Sound of Music? well, some of those children had to be boys. so i drew Jasons and Norberts and Antonys, and relegated them to the rat-infested basements of the asylums inhabited by their far more interesting sisters.

i didn’t really them see them, as a whole, as characters, worthy of empathy or inner lives.  i mistook the stuff that didn’t interest me – the superheroes, the sports, the whole discourse of boyhood – as a sign that the entire gender were dismissable.

yeh, i liked a few of ’em. but i treated boyfriends – particularly after that unfortunate SuperBowl birthday – as rare fossilized humans trapped in the amber of maleness, that most regrettable rock.

and i never imagined myself the mother of a boy. i wanted girls, absolutely. but beyond that, far more importantly, i thought that to be the mother of a boy was to be forever stuck at that SuperBowl party with nobody to say three words to and my nose permanently crinkled in bewildered distaste.

and that, i venture, is exactly how i’d feel today if i’d never had a boy.

mothers are, uh, female. meaning that that most of them were once female children. and a lot of the female children i knew back when i was myself a female child shared exactly the same opinion of boys that i did: ewww. admittedly, a lot of us later changed our tunes, at least regarding individual exceptions to the rule, but i suspect that for many the prejudice against male things and manly pursuits and so-called “boy stuff” remains. fair enough. i still don’t like football.

but i don’t get to perform my parenthood as a bastion against it, draw simple lines that exclude it and keep me and my offspring safely spared, relegated to our “girl things” and smugly superior in our remove. i don’t have to encourage my son to like it, but i do have to reign in my contempt, consider it, try to offer him literacies and considered views as he begins to negotiate the world of what boys are “supposed” to like.

i don’t know if it’ll ever do my kid any favours. but i think it may have actually made me a bigger person.

that, and the nachos i’ve just eaten writing this post through the SuperBowl.

i am 38 today.

i remember my mother’s 38th birthday. i was in grade 10. i have no recollection of what i bought her, what she might have liked at that stage in her life. i have even less sense of what i might have thought she liked at that stage in mine. it was only a few years past the birthday i bought her the Kids from Fame tape, with my own money. in hindsight, not an altruistic purchase.

38 seemed close to 100 to me, then.

it seems like last week and yet a lifetime ago. and my mother? seems oddly younger to me now.  a 23-year age difference between parent and child is so little, really. but at almost fifteen, any age or power differential is a chasm. when my kids are fifteen, i’ll seem old to them. hell, maybe i’ll be old. maybe there’s no difference between the two.

something about postponing having children – and, y’know, any kind of stable career arc – until, uh, “later in life” has created a surreal sort of plateau in my sense of my own age. the fact that i drag my carcass to bed by midnight even on Saturdays has far more to do with the shining faces that wake me at 6 am Sunday than it does with any sudden maturity or rejection of 3am raucousness. inside, i don’t feel terribly different than i did ten years ago. and beyond the extra softness that three babies and bedrest have wrought, i don’t live in my skin all that differently than i did twenty years back.

clearly, i am high on delusion. my own private fountain of youth.

but it is running out, slipping from me. 38 seems to be to youth as 14 is to childhood: the point at which you suddenly, irrevocably find yourself on the far side of the line. i catch myself in the mirror in woolen pants and high heeled boots and shiny jewelry, and i realize that i have, belatedly, grown up. my hair is sedately mid-length. my old, beloved army boots sit unworn at the back of the closet, gathering dust. i have entered my professional years. i am a few years late and my edges still need ironing, but here i am, securely and blatantly smack-dab in the middle-aged middle class, no matter how that makes me laugh at myself. i no longer live on the outside of much of anything at all.

i blink. i am Dorothy in Oz, bedazzled by her own shoes.

from the time i turned 14, or maybe even a few years longer, i’ve been peering forward, gazing ahead, trying to get to some indefinite point at which my life would actually, y’know, happen. i’ve spent my adolescence and entire “adult” life in a haze of vague, infinite possibility, afraid i’d miss something.

but when your field of vision is too wide, you can’t actually see.

apparently, for my birthday, i got bifocals. because for the first time in my life, i feel like the things i want – the goal things, the apply yourself and work towards it things – are in focus.  i see paths, where once i saw the whole damn mountain. it feels heady, this 38. it feels like i am just, finally, maybe, hitting my stride.

i have no model for this kind of aging.

if i showed you pictures of my mother at 38 and today, you would see little change. her hair was fully gray by 30; by 38 she’d found the style that has become her signature. she had a job that paid the rent and exhausted her; she has one now. her hobby is the community life of her church, alpha and omega.

when i went away to college she was a month short of 41. i am her only child, her one dependent. i pushed, then, for her to go back and finish her own degree, started a lifetime before and abandoned early in her marriage. but she could no more see her way clear to that kind of upheaval, that kind of change and debt and longterm planning than she could up and fly. she had she formed herself, and was, and thus remains, eternal.

she is no coward, do not misunderstand. she has the strength to endure and abide and stare down what would crush most people. she has lacked only luck, and family. those who risk are usually either headstrong or sure of someone to catch them. she was not made to be the first, and has never had the latter. wings are a privilege.

i have been headstrong since i turned 14. and once i left home my mother, without recriminations, gave me every inch of wingspan she could. i have believed, that entire time, that i am different from her.

it occurs to me only now that i’ve been full of shit; that i am only maybe beginning to differentiate now. my mother is the stablest foundation i could have asked for.  in relation to her, it has been easy to be the wild young thing lo these many years.

but in clinging to that sense of myself, i too have been unchanging, her younger opposite and doppelganger, all in one.

it occured to me, late last night, that i don’t want to be the wild young thing for the rest of my life.  it occurred to me that if, at 61, i am as able and as busy and as fulfilled as my mother seems to be, i will be happy. both these realizations came as a complete surprise.

it is in the years in the interim that maybe our paths will be truly different, my mother and i. as she would want. as i am beginning to be able to bring into focus.

damn, this wisdom with age stuff. bring on the prime. and the cake. i’m 38.

me, stunned to realize i have reached the age where people crowd your birthday cake with candles and then make jokes about seeing it from space. yeh. bring it.