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i heard once that it takes seven years for a body to completely regenerate its cells…that every seven years, we become - on the physical, cellular level - an entirely new person.

i also heard, more recently, that each child a woman has carried leaves a cellular trace within her body forever, altering her own cells permanently…marking its path through her, as it were.

clearly, these two accounts of cell biology are a tad incompatible.

and while it may surprise you to learn that i once had a brief but bright flirtation with the field of biology, a twenty-year-old high school transcript - particularly one with physics marks as bad as mine - does not a discerning scientist make. i checked with Wikipedia in the interests of calling the bluff of these cellular mythologies, but my pitiful little search of “cell regeneration theories” reaped a harvest too confusing to be helpful…unless “muller glia” and “satellite cells” mean more to you than they do to me? when it comes to the urban legends of cellular identity, i cannot say if either tale is true.

i can say that today marks seven years since my grandmother died. and if i have indeed regenerated, wholly, then there is nothing left of the physical me whose hand held hers…we are both of us, as we were then, gone. how strange.

i can also say it is two years yesterday since i was airlifted to the regional neonatal hospital, twenty-four weeks pregnant, awash in blood and amniotic fluid. two years ago today i lay on strict bedrest in an isolated room where everyone but Dave had to wear masks and i steeled myself for stillness and waiting and hope, and i spoke to my Nannie out there in the ether and i said “call in some favours, Nan” and i spoke to my wee Runt - pet-named because the first early ultrasound months before in Korea had measured small, and we were tender toward this little vulnerable life - still blithely and bravely kicking away and i said “rest, little one, hunker down there, don’t rush” and for the very first time in my life i consciously let go of all the control and fear and minutiae that consume my anal self on a regular basis and focused myself down to that one small being and my own positivity. and i did it. for two weeks and a day or two, i existed in a world hardly bigger than my bed and my baby-to-be and the conversations in my own head.

and it was a blessing. because i still have records, hidden away, of 3am songs i tried to write down for that baby when i could not sleep. i have the visceral memory of earphones stretched over my belly to play EmmyLou Harris’ “Red Dirt Girl” for Runt, and Runt kicking in time…my hands tapping back the same rhythm to the little feet inside. i was freed, in that couple of weeks, to be fully and wholly the expectant mother that i’d barely had time to be in the crush of moving continents that had been my life up until the airlift. and in those few weeks i burned my wee Runt into me…and then he was here, and gone. and yet for months afterwards, even long after i’d railed and keened and finally swallowed the bitter fact of Finn’s death, i felt for Runt when i first woke up in the morning…i still slept curled around my belly. and that too is strange.

i don’t know if there are traces of him still in my cells, my Runt who became Finn, firstborn. i’d like to believe it. i had so little of him that every scrap of memory and physicality that attests to his having been here is precious to me, even specious ones that may only exist in narrative, in my sense of myself and my cellular existence.

i do know that this time of year my body and my self sing out for the both of them, my grandmother and my baby boy. i hope they each took a little of me with them wherever they went, whether rubbed off in cells or saturated into spirit with the force of love. i hope. because even if my cells actually bear no witness, i have them both with me. and i feel their absence.

when i was a little girl, my elderly grandmother and i spent a lot of time together…just she and i and a series of star-crossed cats she had whose names i - the name-obsessed - can never quite recall.

my grandmother was born in 1904. she married late, at the spinsterish age of thirty-four, a thin, solid-legged woman in a cap of black hair that became a blue-gray coldwave perm long before i came on the scene. she and her husband raised my mother - only child of the younger brother of this woman i called Nannie - from the time my mother was about seven…but my grandmother never had children of her own, really, until me. her husband died two years before my birth. my father left in my infancy. somewhere in the mess of those abruptly altered lives, she and my mom and i became an odd but complete family. we mostly lived in separate houses, across town from each other, but i spent my lunch hours and my after-schools and my summers with her, in her world of little old ladies, while my mother worked.

i got the best of her, this woman launched into widowhood and independence unwillingly, this timid, proper pillar of her own narrow world…dry and provincial and shy in public. in the house she’d been born in, alone with me, she laughed and played dress-up, and told jokes, and listened to lies and stories tumbling from my imagination for hours on end. she let me love her with my whole heart.

and my Nannie, who was not one to reflect deeply on change, gave me more of an Edwardian childhood than anyone born in the 1970s had any right to have. i am a fount of ancient Scottish pudding recipes and proverbs regarding appropriate behaviour, a vessel of hymns no church has sung for generations, and a sentimental repository of quaint sayings and folk rhymes that decorate the calendar of my mind, announcing themselves every time the month changes or a holiday of the British Empire rolls around.

March was always my favourite. every year, on the first and last day of the month, my grandmother and i pontificated on the weather like the chorus in a Greek tragedy. “If March comes in like a lion, it’ll go out like a lamb,” we’d intone in unison. “If it comes in like a lamb, it’ll go out like a lion.” then we’d drag back the (sheer) curtains with high drama, already knowing full well what the weather was outside, and squeal “lion!” or “lamb!” and dissolve in fits of laughter. if you have never seen a good Protestant lady in her eighties mimic the curling hooves and “baaa” of a lamb, or watched an otherwise too-cool-for-school preteen roar like a lion for her grandmother’s amusement, you truly have not lived.

my grandmother has been gone for almost seven years. the seven years before she spent struggling fiercely against death and the loss of the independence she’d never wanted foisted on her in the first place. it has been fifteen years or longer since we played our game. but i think of her, always, on the first and thirty-first of every March, and i miss her like i cannot say.

so today Oscar and i made March go out like a lion.

it’s fitting. he started the month on hands and knees, still my baby lamb. now he’s fully upright, roaring his own independence more everyday. i told him today that he was March, going out like a lion. and we pulled back the curtains to watch the snow, and i laughed until he joined in. and i smiled and gave thanks for him, and for my Nannie, who taught me.

i will do my best to pass on bits and scraps of an anachronous, coddled Edwardian childhood to him. it is the legacy i have to give.

Oscar, boy.

in a book that your eager father will probably read to you sometime…oh…next year, there is a short little, old little person named Bilbo Baggins, who is having a birthday party. Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit, which is a furry, hungry, pleasant sort of little creature that you quite resemble, actually, except for the furry part. but give that time, my son. i regret to inform you that genetics indicate that fur is your destiny.

in any case, the book that your father loves and to which i am referring opens with a birthday party that Mr. Bilbo Baggins, hobbit, is throwing for himself. he is eleventy-one on this particular birthday, which is a hobbit way of saying one-hundred-and-eleven, but much more fun. and a ripe old age, no matter which way you count it.

i have always thought there was something a little magical - fey, even - about the number eleven.

i have been sure, for quite some time, that there is definitely something magical about you.

you are eleven months old today, Oscar. still a baby, but barely…on the verge of a kind of selfhood that must be what the word ‘toddler’ is meant to signify. and you are different every day, which is probably part of why you seem enchanted…in my world, normal everyday folk are not nearly so changeable. but you are busy discovering the world, and i suppose that changes one. you are doing a good job.

your discoveries are mostly, at this point, still mostly made by mouth…your grandmother worries terribly about your teeth snapping in half, you know, but i suspect you have good sense about you…but recently you’ve begun using your hands for more than slapping at the world and are grasping things, pulling at things, using your snazzy pincer grip to select small, forgotten items of interest off of our floor and bring them to your mouth for further analysis. you have not yet discovered one single thing in the entire world that you will not accept in your mouth. i like this about you. i suppose fussiness will come - in truth i used to see fussiness as a sign of personality development, but now i wonder if it was merely a substitute - but thus far, you are open. you will try anything.

this wide-openness about you is more beautiful than i can say.

at this juncture in your life, Oscar, you are one of the most sociable people i have ever met, of any size. you have a habit of playing coy, sometimes, and ducking your round head into my shoulder when greeted by a smile from somebody else, but then you turn your head back and your mouth opens in a gap-toothed smile and you bat your eyelashes…which to my great delight did finally come in a few months ago. they are beautiful. you are beautiful. you are also a flirt. you learned to wave just this month and have been gracing grocery shoppers and street signs around the city with your bountiful gestures…fat little hand turned up at the wrist, demanding and friendly, graceful in its insistence. you made a friend the other day while we waited in a lineup - a lovely young woman of about twenty - and from your perch in the shopping cart you must have waved at this girl a hundred times, glee on your face, all the time making eye contact with her and squeaking your presence and your pleasure. she was quite charmed, if a little embarrassed when you did not stop after the first three minutes or so and she had run out of things to say to you. you were not deterred. you are not easily deterred, in anything.

the cat is your friend too…though you take more overt delight in her than she does in you these days, since “gentle” is still a word we’re working on, Oscar. but you light up when she comes into the room, and make a high “hee hee” sound that you reserve specially for her. i think, deep inside, she’s honoured. she follows you on your speed-crawling journeys from room to room, just out of reach. i call you Butch and Sundance, the two of you, one humping away from me madly, giggling in his diaper, the other picking her way alongside.

soon you will be walking away from me, baby O, my bunny. you stand now, for seconds, unsupported, before your legs v out and you flop down on your bumtail. soon, the steps will come. and the words too, singling themselves out from the babble and hisses that punctuate our conversations. i am waiting for “mama,” still…mama for me. and i wonder when it will come and even if…the fear of autism and language delay and disconnect that worms its way around the back of my head…and then you smile at me when i come into the room and i know that i am special to you no matter what you say, ever in this life, and you are only eleven months old anyway and for me, you are the sun in the sky.

you are eleven months old, Oscar. it is a special birthday.

“… joy and sorrow are inseparable. . . together they come.
when one sits alone with you . . . remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.”                                         - Kahlil Gibran

maybe it’s the lack of sugar in my system, or a February thing that’s held on like a bad cold, but i have a lot of sad these days.

i don’t especially mind it…it’s not unfamiliar, or unwelcome, even…it’s just not very social, this sad i have. sorrow takes up space. it has lodged itself under my skin, like sweat…and i am contained within it, afloat on my own private sea. it is almost all the companionship i can handle.

i think O can feel it, and that makes me feel bad. but sad has always made me feel bad, i realize. i fear to disappoint. i fear i might cause some discomfort, or unleash some judgement, if i acknowledge my pain or my confusion. it sounds funny - laughable - when i write it out like that. but i do. i was raised to pull myself together, to put on a happy face, to exorcise demons and win. anything less would be vaguely shameful. sadness is an affront to propriety.

but i am sick to fucking death of propriety.

it was only when Finn died that i realized what a desperately uncomfortable weight sadness is in our society. i came home from three weeks in the narrow confines of a hospital ward to a house we’d never slept in, a house we’d only gained possession of the morning i’d gone into too-early labour, a house we’d bought for our new family, for our baby. we came home without that baby. i’d lost my job, because of the indeterminate nature of the bedrest i’d been on to try to keep him in. it all seemed like a bad, bleak joke. it was the week before Mother’s Day. i was unmoored, and very nearly unhinged. the sea of my sadness had no shores…and i very much just wanted to drown.

Finn had held our fingers in his tiny hands, and squeezed. i’d held him for the last hour of his life, touching him, trying to comfort him, memorize him. he’d filled me with wonder, and joy, and a defiant pride.

the evening after he died, my first day out of a hospital bed in nineteen days, i stood in the brambles on the bank of the Halifax Arm at the old Dingle tower, and said into the wind, “i had a son. his name was Finn.” i needed to say it aloud. i was afraid of anyone, even Dave ten feet away, hearing me. but i needed to speak that child’s existence, to sing his birth, to call him my son. so i spoke to the rain and to the water because i did not know how to say it to anyone else. i didn’t know how to lay that sadness at anybody’s feet.

i am not so raw, anymore. almost two years have passed, and the wound of Finn’s death no longer gapes between me and the rest of the world, paralyzing me in the simplest of conversations. “do you have any children?” asked the lady at the paint store that first week home from Halifax in May 2005, three days before Mother’s Day, six days after i’d given birth. i stared at her, choking on the “no” and the “yes” with any answer threatening to expose me and skin me. milk streamed, useless, secret, underneath my shirt. i don’t remember what i said, but i know i hid my suffering as best i could…because i’d already blundered on enough platitudes and awkwardness and outright stupidity even at that early point in the grieving process to understand that freshly dead babies were too much for casual conversation. too much for others to handle. too sad to be simply accepted by those not grieving them, and too sad to be comforted away by the uncomfortable, nervous offerings meant to make those who’d happened upon my sorrow feel better.

it isn’t easy to just live with someone else’s sadness…to accept it, and honour it, and not try to rush it out the door so you can get back to the pleasantries of living. hell, it isn’t easy to live with one’s own. trying to learn to has been the longest journey of my life, and it is early yet.

i don’t know what place i want sadness to live in our house. i know that from the day we moved in, it has been here. i know that O will grow up with it around him, perhaps more than he should…and that makes me sad, too.

but i wonder if that worry isn’t misplaced. because in O’s innocence, his ignorance of that which is proper and socially acceptable, he has greater grace in dealing with another’s sadness than i’ve ever seen in an adult. if he sees tears on my face, he looks at me hard and reaches a hand out. he’ll lay his small fingers along my cheek for a second or two, very gravely. he says nothing…nor does he need to. he just marks the sadness. he doesn’t diminish it, or dismiss it, or trip over it, or turn away in fear of it. and then he smiles and a little of it evaporates, usually. the sea of tears grows smaller.

if Oscar can keep some of this gentle ease with sorrow as he grows…if he can learn that joy and sadness are two sides of the same coin, and not to fear his own or others’, he will be a better human being. and a rare one. perhaps this is a legacy his brother can bequeath him. if Dave and i have the courage not to hide from him. if we allow the sadness and healing to take their sweet time.

valentinenudie

Originally uploaded by oscarcormier.

ah, it used to be that a bath on Valentine’s night meant candles and bubbles and a boy….and maybe a little wine.

this year, i went in for something slightly different.

traded in the old model of bath boy for a fresh one, ditched the candles, eschewed bubbles for Johnson’s No More Tears, and replaced wine with a little whine, but lots of giggles. and love. real, mind-blowing, twitterpated kind of love. didn’t even need to shave my legs.

Oscar, you’re my favourite Valentine ever.

(and out of respect for your dignity, i have refrained from posting any of the bath photos without strategically placed washcloth…you can thank me later).

so, pretend your child is the cutest thing on fat legs.

especially when he sleeps…because, now that he’s finally free of that pesky (read: invaluable to mommy) sleep positioner thingy that kept him safely on his back or side for all those months, he’s taking to sprawling face-down on the bed like it’s Farrah Fawcett and he’s a lovesick teenager from 1977. (erm…well…perhaps that isn’t the most appropriate visual…)

what he’s taking to doing is falling asleep with his little face smushed down into the mattress and his sweet diaper-puffed bumtail up in the air, waving like a little mushroom.

it’s adorable. it’s the sweetest, most beautiful sight you have ever laid eyes on in this life. it’s cuter than kittens.

your child is so heartwarmingly dear that he could make Dick Cheney coo and ovulate.

so what do you do? well, obviously, like any proud mother, you swagger into his room after bedtime with the camera, to photograph his little rump bump for all the world to admire. then, you reason, they too can say “awwww” and share in the preciousness that is your offspring, and his cute butt. it would be selfish to do otherwise, to hoard this bounty of adorableness for just you, right?

bad plan, mommy.

flash photography, particularly when executed in dark peaceful nurseries, can apparently be very disturbing to what may otherwise appear to be a sound sleep. cute sleeping infants, when disturbed, can - it’s rumoured - quickly morph into loud, wailing, inconsolable infants, whose little bumtails are not so arrestingly adorable when topped by flailing arms and screaming heads as they were when at rest. and teething babies, so it’s said, when wakened by their irresponsibly idiotic mothers from their innocent, bum-waving sleep, have a very difficult time returning to any semblance of that sleep for, oh say, the rest of the night.

or something like that. serves you right, really.

…and perhaps goes a ways to show why i don’t have any pictures to decorate this post and explain why i’m still up at two am? the wee butt is back up in the air, and the sweet boy is back in dreamland. but i’ll have to leave the visual to your imagination.

thegymnast

Originally uploaded by oscarcormier.

i was never exactly…ermm….athletic as a child.

i did enjoy dance lessons, until the ballet teacher insisted i stop wearing my pretty ruffly blouse underneath my leotard, and the bloom fell off the rose of my ballerina dreams almost immediately.

i quite loved my shiny patent-leather tap shoes, but never did figure out how to use them to make anything other than loud, awkward stomping noises. unless you count that time i used them to trip myself onstage, in front of a recital audience made up of my entire elementary school. yay.

and i had a morbid fear of balls and moving objects that lasted well into my adulthood, until Dave started throwing socks at me. i now catch a sock with great aplomb, but am still not precisely what any sober person would call an athlete.

so the fact that i look at Oscar trying to learn to move about the world and rhapsodize, internally, about teaching him to swim, and skate, and do cartwheels makes me blush.

but i do. not because i care if he wins any ribbons (though his paternal grandmother will likely see to it that he does, since she’s a better athlete and coach than i’ve ever had the privilege of meeting before) but because i want him to love to move. i remember that feeling…my body airborne, moving fast, executing something clean and beautiful. it’s been years, now, since i’ve felt that. he makes me want to experience it all over again, with him.

(okay, he makes me want to rent Flashdance and bounce around the house in boat-necked sweatshirts kicking my feet over my head. little boys love that sort of thing, right? or perhaps i should work harder on my sock catching?)

watching Oscar learn to move makes me wish i’d never stopped. i hope he never does.

maybe when he learns to run, he’ll do a lap for me?

Originally uploaded by oscarcormier.

okay. mark this day, friends. i have officially turned into that blue-haired biddy i warned myself about six months or so ago.

it’s all going by too fast. waaaaay too fast. and i’m starting to say it out loud, to everyone i meet. let me say it to you, officially…and you can repeat after me. it all goes by so fast! insert maternal wailing and gnashing of teeth here, for good measure.

Oscar is nine months old today. he’s been around, a breathing, feeding, squalling little bundle, for a whole month longer than i was even pregnant with him (he came at 36 weeks). it shouldn’t surprise me, then, that he’s made some progress in these nine months…in merely eight he went from being an egg and sperm on a blind date to a six pound infant, after all. but still. i woke up this morning and realized that my baby has turned into a boy. a full-fledged, mobile, kinda communicating, cute-as-all-hell little boy.

this shouldn’t be such a shock, i suppose…this boy epiphany. it’s not that i was suffering from any kind of gender dysphoria on his behalf…he’s always been a boy, straight from the sixteen-week u/s at which he flaunted himself like a Chippendale’s auditionee, and he has the requisite blue Pooh sleepers and manly brown baby blankies to prove it.

but he has been a baby boy.

and i wasn’t ready to see the “baby” part of the description fade so fast…but already i can see it pulling away from us, riding off into the sunset. now, suddenly, astoundingly fast, Oscar’s turning into a little person. every day he does something new, discovers something new, delights in something new. i look across the room at him and my jaw drops, because a little boy is sitting there, astride his ride-on car, laughing and trying to pull the cat’s tail. he blows me away…all this, already?

my own shock has led me to hatch a new theory about why mothers tend to think their children are geniuses. we’re not ready to let go. so when our little ones begin to launch themselves away from us, and creep and crawl pell-mell towards the big wide world, we’re sure it must be them who are advanced, not us who are chickenshits.

i am a big chickenshit, indubitably. i love watching him flower, this beautiful boy child whom my baby is becoming…but it strikes terror into me too. some part of my heart that wants to hold him like this, safe and innocent and snuggly, just a little longer.  a lot longer.

world, be kind.

and you mothers of newborns and mothers-to-be, consider yourself warned: the biddies are right. it goes by way too fast.

there’s nothing like Christmas to get right to the heart of this motherhood thing, and vice versa.

i wasn’t expecting much “heart” out of this Christmas…i was excited about it being O’s first, sure, and was ready to burn it into my mommy brain for all posterity or risk having to pay for his therapy later. but other than that i’ve been struggling with the whole holiday. i stopped being “religious,” in any formal sense of the word, a long time ago. and the commercialism of the season usually feels like a crass joke: as i get older and more able to buy, i discover how little any of what’s on offer seems to really be of any use. so all in all, i’ve been more of a Scrooge this Christmas season than i ever have before…the trappings and presents and circus of it all had me feeling worn out and disgusted well in advance, before i even made it to a mall.

but there is one aspect of this Christmas season that has been unexpectedly magical and joyous for me, in spite of all the detritus. the true meaning of Christmas has, after all these years, permeated my thick skull.
the whole damn thing is about a baby.

and this year, that’s been striking me as profound, and beautiful, and utterly worthy of celebration. ring out the bells! bring on the wisemen! alleluia, there’s a baby over here!

now, i know it’s not officially about MY baby. officially. there have been neither visits nor annunciations from the angel Gabriel, and the word “virgin” hasn’t been applied to me in some decades, friends. nor had i lived under a rock for the thirty-odd Christmases leading up to this one - my childhood Sunday school teachers did their jobs (at least in the short term) and the whole “Jesus’ birthday” tagline wasn’t like, news, or anything. but “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given” didn’t mean much to the childless, rather agnostic self that was me. all the old Christmas carols with their evocations of sleeping infants and peace and joy were simply pretty, sentimental remnants of childhood, seasonal as mistletoe, but no more meaningful.

this year, though, i got teary everytime the radio veered away from “Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer” and anywhere near the realm of holy infanthood. i’ve spent the last two Christmases pregnant, in my own long advent…treading into the unknown with trepidation and trembling, hope and grief. this year, i felt almost like the Christmas carols were for me, like i was the vessel that had brought this gift of wonder and joy into the world. in the tinned music playing in the malls and on the radio, i heard baby celebrations everywhere. this year, in the secret pageant of my mind, i got to play Mary. and the role made motherhood full of grace, for a moment or two. while O and i shopped, and while i fed him and changed his bum, and while we played and laughed…all the while i sang him carols hundreds of years old, announcing the arrival of light into a dark world. light in the form of a baby. and this year, i understood what that meant, and how bright that light could be.

unto me & Dave is given Oscar, whether we’re worthy of him or not. alleluia.

but i was right that i didn’t really need much from the store, after all.

Merry Christmas to everyone out there…i hope the holiday treats you kindly, whether you celebrate or simply order in Chinese food and relax. and here’s to a little peace on earth in the year to come.

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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