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snowbound on this New Year’s Eve and it is naptime, sweet silent naptime. the flakes float down like feathers, nesting on us, forcing us to nest in on ourselves, and there is coffee aplenty – with Bailey’s Irish Cream, to be festive – and oatmeal on the stove in this yellow kitchen.

oatmeal’s for remembrance, isn’t that how Ophelia rhymed it off?

for me, at least, oatmeal is “Auld Lang Syne” and snowfall, all wrapped up in one: thick hearty scotch comfort food to line one’s ribs in case of power outage and call up all the days and generations gone before, making one misty with the smells and textures of childhood, of heritage, of cultural memory.

or maybe that’s just the Bailey’s in my coffee. really, i’m a shame to the race and ought to be drinking the single malt Dave’s got squired away in the cupboard with the Tupperware that doubles as our liquor cabinet…but i come from a long-line of Methodist teetotalling Scots, so my drinking genes got stunted in that regard, and i struggle to appreciate the liquid gifts of the old country and its usquebaugh quite in the way i appreciate oatmeal.

i suppose a New Year’s resolution to learn to like Scotch whisky isn’t really concordant with the rest of my procreative hopes for 2008…

but it is still 2007. and not only do i have drinking on the brain, but i’m not quite ready to look ahead to the new year, to forge blindly and boldly forward, with hope or trepidation. i am not ready for New Year’s resolutions. rather, here in the last hours of 2007, a different sort of resolution calls me…a looking backward, attempting to pull together the threads of the year gone by, to resolve and cohere what is being left behind.

because when this year is a long-ago memory, deep in the realm of the bygone, its legacy, i think, will be mostly one of contentedness and coherence. of the events of the year, last month’s miscarriage still resonates heaviest right now, a fresh footprint and a scar on the plans i’d stored up in hope and wishfulness. 2007 contains within its bounds the brief existence of the little Junebug who will never be. and always, in looking back on the year, i’ll nod to that little wish, raise my glass. but the year itself isn’t summed up in melancholy. overall, it has been a good year, in its quiet way, a year of healing and growth in which Dave & i’ve gone from two tired, grateful, frazzled people with a baby to a fully-fledged, integrated family of three.

last January 1st, Oscar crawled forward for the first time, scooted his way across a friend’s floor early New Year’s morning. 365 days later, he runs and shouts and plays in the snow, lines up his farm animals and firemen in an orgy of pretend play, expresses wild indignation if his demands for more milk are not met NOW. he kisses (sometimes bites) and pats and generally interacts with us as a member of whatever group we happen to be in, which was not so much the case back in far-off 2006, which seems, suddenly, a lifetime ago.

and on January 1st last year, i had no idea most of you existed, those of you whom i do not know in person. now, you feel like friends, ringing in the New Year around the world…not auld acquaintances, perhaps, but true ones, fine ones. cherished ones.

happy new year to this old world of ours, spinning faithfully. may the year bring you all good things, and may tonight bring you all a little fun, however you celebrate.

us?  we’ll be the ones partying with shovels and oatmeal.  wheeee. ;)

sometimes running away from home for a few days is just the very best thing in the world.  except maybe for coming home again.

Dave & i took off from his parents’ place in the forenoon on Boxing Day and drove the six hours to Quebec City.  by ourselves, just the two of us.  Oscar stayed with his doting grandparents, who, in thus providing us with fifty-three hours of uninterrupted, non-working, non-nap-scheduled time, gave us the very best post-Christmas present ever.  we spent two nights and one whole wondrous day wandering around historical, atmospheric Vieux Quebec, which we’ve both been to but not for a decade and never together.  we checked out museums and architecture and boxing day sales and as many restaurants and cafes as we could humanly manage, all while gentle snow fell.  we even rode the Funiculaire, the almost 130-year-old elevator rail line that scales the old city walls.  we walked more than we’ve walked in months, cumulatively.  for that matter, we got a lot more exercise in a myriad of ways than we have in months, actually.  ahem.  i do love a king-size bed.

but the very most marvellous part of the whole trip for me, other than possibly the three ridiculously bone-chilling minutes i spent in the hotel’s not-nearly-heated-enough outdoor pool with snowdrifts blowing onto my nekkid neck while i dog-paddled around its circumference gawking at the city lights, was the drive.  the road trip.  the glorious adventure of being just two fools in a car with gas, coffee, and a pile of cds.  oh, and Grandpapa’s borrowed GPS, which admittedly took some of the terror out of my attempt to actually drive into the city myself without panicking and throwing myself into the Saint Lawrence when confronted with seventeen different off-ramps at once. 

in the nearly three years since Dave and i shed our expatriate backpacks and became settled, pregnant-and-or-parenting dwellers of my smallish hometown, we’ve driven a lot.  to exactly two destinations – his parents’ house in northern New Brunswick, about four and a half hours away, and his sister’s house and/or the IWK hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a shorter trip by about an hour.  the landscape on each road has become so familiar that new potholes are noteworthy, but overall, it’s monotonous, destination-focused travel, the stuff of survival.  we load the car with sippy cups and diapers and try to time our drives for optimum napping.  one of us usually ends up performing a puppet show from the front seat for part of the trip, whilst we debate whether the Velvet Underground really counts as lullaby music.  it’s family travel.  i love it, with all its labour-intensive cheer.  but it is not – i repeat, NOT – a road trip.

Quebec was a road trip.  we had a choice of routes to take, open road in front of us allowing options, freedom to flip a coin.  neither of us had been on either highway in nearly ten years, so the low mountains and snow-capped woods were all a discovery, a fresh landscape, dotted with cheese shops and gas stations selling pain au chocolat.  we could blast the stereo as loud as we liked, whenever we liked, or lapse into long, introspective silences just watching the expanse of forest wind away from the road.  we could stop when we wanted, or not at all, and not once did i feel bad for failing to entertain Dave with a lively chorus of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”, complete with hand clapping and nose beeping.

it was good.  out on Highway 20 where the high road and the low road merge, i drove past ghosts of my younger self in different cars, spinning up and down the highway, a passenger in cars and lives that intersected with my own for a moment, or a season.  spring break 1991 i hitch a ride with friends to a ski hill even though i cannot ski, half an ounce of hash on us as we cross from Quebec into the US.  December 1992 and four girls in a beatup borrowed Volkswagen drive all night to a funeral for our roommate’s father, suddenly dead at fifty. summer 1993 and fall 1994 i take the train through these parts, running along the Saint Lawrence parallel to the highway, wild-hearted and broken here, riding the bar car to a new life in Vancouver there.  August 1997, my honeymoon, spent mostly camping or visiting in-laws, with one memorable night in a hotel so skanky the only furniture in the room other than the bed was a bench seat from a car, bolted into the concrete floor.

i saw Dave too, on his way to Neil Young concerts and the Lilith Fair and probably countless other trips i don’t know about or have forgotten the tales he once regaled me with.  i heard him, in the cds we played, the full collection of neglected oldies and burnt mixes from the Napster heyday.  i heard us laughing at 3 am, back in Korea in the early, early days of our romance, drunk on bad wine and each other, sharing tunes from our respective formative years, convinced that a mutual taste in Kris Kristofferson had to be some kinda sign.

the familiarity and yet the novelty of it, all this silly road trip freedom, made us giddy…and filled us, reaffirmed us, in a way that a hundred days at home couldn’t have.  i felt all those fragments of foundation and vagabond days as a gift, a reminder that life has not always been Elmo and organized overpacking.  i felt twenty, and twenty-five, and thirty all collapse in on me, rejuvenating this almost thirty-six.  i felt like a friend and partner, and like myself, all my selves, all carried within.  i put my feet up on the dash and revelled in the joy of selfishness, all the way there.

and most of the way home.  until we got about two hours away, at which point we two overgrown wish-we’d-been-Deadheads began to long aloud for the little boy we hadn’t seen in two days, and then the game was up.

Oscar’s smile met us at the door.  i saw nothing more beautiful in Quebec City, nor in all the years i rambled.

but his parents brought back deeper, more rested, connected smiles to him…and so the trip was a raging success.  tomorrow, we drive the rest of the way home from Grandmaman & Grandpapa’s, a family ride, fully stocked and carefully timed.   i think we will try to teach Oscar some Iggy Pop tunes along the way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

erm, uh, wait…wrong photo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and then, in the midst of a busy weekend in the midst of busy week, at a time of year which smells of schedules and three-ring binders and the promise of untold work to be done, there was an afternoon.

outdoors, in the fickle sun.

in the open air, crisp and salt from the incoming tide.

Oscar and three generations of his forefathers, as they brought my eighty-seven year old grandfather’s vintage 1974 jet boat to ground for the winter:

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i have been waterskiing behind my grandfather’s boat since i was eight years old…its vinyl snap-on cover is cracked now, and the sky blue hue has faded and yellowed a little. maybe there will be another summer, a gift, unwarranted, where i will gasp and submerge myself chest-deep in the chill water and sink back, catch my balance, and call “hit it!” across the forty feet of rope and the echo of the harbour, and my grandfather will gun the engine just so, just the right speed to drag me from the water on one ski like Atlantis rising, seaweed dragging from her ass, arms akimbo and taut with strain, and then i will be up and buoyant and fast, like flying, and we will weave across the water, that old man and i, together in this dance he taught me, this one athletic skill i possess. maybe there will be one more time. maybe.

but even if, my grandfather is eighty-seven. Oscar will not learn to waterski from him. and there were tears in my eyes as we watched from the cliff this afternoon, O and i waving, my grandfather chewing on his cigar as he and Dave towed the raft to shore for the end of the season.

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not far from my grandfather’s cottage is an apple orchard. we now have twenty pounds of apples sitting atop our freezer, looking for something sugary to belong to.

all little boys, i think, should have an afternoon in an apple orchard.

O rode in that wagon, and chased it, and chased his father, and patted the apples, and licked a few, and chased the wagon some more. then hitched another ride.

i was fascinated with what captured his attention. the apples on the trees, or the trees themselves? no time for them, even when i lifted him high into the branches. he was all about the wagon, all about the baskets, and putting apples in and taking them out. one tree over, at one point, was a family with a little girl of three or four…and unlike O, she was all about the apples and their colours, about the search for the perfect specimen of fruit. both of them were laughing, both sundappled, both delighted, each with their separate, age-appropriate enterprises. and i was thinking back to my grandfather’s boat and the weight of this maybe being the very last year, when i realized that even if we come back to the apple place next fall, it will be entirely different too. because Oscar, by next September, will be a wholly different child, and will perhaps have no time for the wagons, or for carefully emptying apple baskets. he will not remember today.

but i will, all of it.

with every season, pass things we will never do again. but this fall, this September, he is most indeed my honey…part baby, part boy, all sweet.

Dave is in England this week. jolly, charming England, with all those trains just waiting to take you to spots you’ve been reading about in literature and history for years. and the cute accents. and Marks & Spencer snacks.

i, on the other hand, am in PEI. where the train tracks were all torn up fifteen years ago and the local accents sound like English people forgot to put their teeth in. plus, erm, MacDonald’s? certainly no Marks & Sparks and its organic smorgasboard of savoury delights.

but i’m not jealous. and not just because i am practicing mudita so hard it hurts. nope. the reason i am not eaten up with envy is that i have apparently reverted on the evolutionary chain to being a single-celled organism.

i dodged one deadly sin, but invited sloth and gluttony over for a five-day sleepover instead.

by day, i appear to be regular old me, up with Oscar, off to work…bustling about making sure diapers are clean and blocks are stacked and the boy is fed and my body is washed and clothed and dentifriced and made presentable (not easy with twenty-five pounds hanging off my leg, i will note…Dave’s contribution to household routines is blatantly obvious in his absence) and my job performed with reasonable diligence and enthusiasm.

when work is over, though, the charade begins to peel.

not immediately. Oscar seems a little bewildered by the mysterious disappearance of his father, peering behind all the doors in the house with a questioning little litany of “Dada? Dada?” on his lips. oof, dear heart. and he’s been giving the hairy eyeball too, mouth twisted in a peevish suspicion, as if he’s angry that someone is so clearly missing while the rest of the world has the affrontery to go on as normal. Sin pointed out earlier this week that at this age we really have no clue what their internal life is, these wee kids…they look babyish yet, still shedding their roundness and softness, yet they almost indubitably understand far more than they are able to say, or share, or even make sense of. they are more complicated than we know how to credit. thus in a hopeless bid to stave off some deep crisis in O’s consciousness, i’ve been morphing into more-attentive-than-usual-Mummy when we get home, all snuggles and eye contact and shape sorting and security-giving, oh yeh. with long blathering narratives about “you remember when we were in England in the spring, blah blah blah, well Daddy’s there now and he will be home in four or three or however many sleeps” and at the mention of the name the Oscar boy is suddenly exuberant again, shouting “Dada! Dada!” and leaping up to look around expectantly.

but inside, while externally i am failing miserably at trying to support and comfort my offspring through whatever existential angst his father’s absence may be triggering…inside, i’m abdicating, melting. into a puddle. a happy, globby puddle that at 7:30pm, when O is laid down in his crib with kisses and a “bedtime, Boo,” slithers itself up to its own bed and deposits itself for the night.

by night, i am a slug.

i have spent the past three evenings truly whiling them away, a passive pile of ooze surfing mindless brain rot on teh internets. whilst eating half a leftover donair from before Dave left, plus a whole lot of chocolate. and tonight, some prepackaged crap i shall not even dignify with a name. i am having the time of my life.

last night, for almost three hours, i did absolutely nothing of any usefulness to anybody. no writing, no commenting, no working…i read a few blogs but mostly floated about the ether of the net, high on sugar and the vast pleasure of doing nothing of consequence. i did not leave my bed except to replenish my snack supply, and even then…i resented it. i think i was near catatonic by the end. it felt like a honeymoon.

i used to be pretty damn comfortable with my own company. i grew up as an only child, a reflective kid used to spending time alone, entertaining herself. as the obligations of being partnered gradually became second-nature to me, through my long history of serial monogamy, i lost some of that. when Dave and i first got together, even its vestiges went out the window. because he is my favourite (adult) person in the world. and demanding. and funny. and my friend and my Other and an occasional empath and we’ve always spent chunks of time away from each other, every year of the past six, big chunks, but it’s always been a strain, a lovely painful strain, an ache.

this time, i may have dragged his tshirt from the laundry to bury my face in, happily, blissfully, but mostly i was using it as a napkin. because i have not fully shut down, nor shut off, in longer than i can remember – taken the “open for business” sign well and truly from my window and stopped communicating.

it is luxurious, to be a puddle, now and then. so if you see a slimy, Cheeto-encrusted trail meandering pointlessly across your blog in the next 72 hours or so…know that was me. i’m around. i’m just…not entirely myself. :)

…or was that a pox on both houses? oh literate readership, weigh in. but Shakespeare can’t have meant me, in any case. i only have a rather modest little home. we don’t even have a cottage. surely my humble abode doesn’t deserve no nasty plaguepox…?

but it’s got it, dammit. a bug. a stomach bug has crept in with the summer weather, along with the requisite couple of seasonal earwigs who braved my soap-spray Berlin Wall along all the thresholds of entry. and compared to the stomach bug, the earwigs are pussies.

i don’t mind illness, in theory. i’ve learned not to wither inside when confronted by the urine/decay/detergent smell of hospitals, and while i feel bad for others when they’re sick, the helplessness of being completely useless at alleviating their misery – beyond provision of canned soup and the occasional cold compress and translation of whatever Latin name their symptoms may have been tagged with – doesn’t weigh on me much. they’re sick, i’m sympathetic…it’s what i have to offer. while a certain party who lives with me might swear that i whine inordinately when sick myself, i can assure you that that party is entirely unreliable as a source for these things and is, in fact, rather prone to embarrassing displays of lamentation about his own illnesses, coupled with a manly dose of stubbornness about actually taking anything to relieve my ears his suffering.

but when the child is sick? oh god. we’re all wretched.

and not just literally – because whatever Oscar catches seems to travel through the house, carried on fat, curious, little hands – but literarily, epically, consumingly. Dante’s nine (or is it ten? clearly, i don’t actually read, just pick up cheap quotes from Reader’s Digest) circles of hell have nothing on being parent to a sick baby. not only do i feel like A Very Bad Mother for having failed to protect my child from whatever vermin are having their way with his little body, but the helplessness that doesn’t bother me when sick adults are in my care sits much more heavily on me when it’s O who’s miserable. because he is still so small. because he doesn’t understand why it hurts. because it is my job, as best i can, to make it all okay. and because i want to, with an urgency that must be hardwired into the biology of the species somewhere, at the primal level, just because he is my child, in my care. for him, i would take the nasty little poxplagues all on myself, and gladly.

but the poxplagues do not ask. i do not get to spare my child’s pain. sometimes i don’t even know how to ease it. and that, for me, is the hardest thing about being a mother.

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and yet…and here i tread in waters deeper than i understand…i am not sure what we would be, all of us as people, if our mothers were able to take our pain for us, and would? would the extent of that protection deny us our own experiences, our own paths? leave us somehow like the foolish little boy-man from Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, who takes and takes and takes and cuts the nurturing tree down to a stump for a sailboat? (or something…something frivolous…i can too read, i swear. i just have a bad memory for narrative detail).

i don’t know. i have been blessed enough to have known, all my life, that my mother would do anything she could to protect me from pain, from illness, from hurt, from harm. and she & i have been fighting about that for more than twenty years now…me trying to surface and breathe under the weight of all those warnings, all that love.

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i never understood my mother’s fear for me until the first moment i held Finn in my arms. the NICU is an assaultive, adrenalin-ridden, alarming place, rife with loud noises and harsh …and it stinks of that fear. i was ten hours post-delivery and had been wheeled back up to my bedrest room because i’d been busily passing clots the size of cats…but they came for us, up there, because he was going to die. and because he was going to die – i think of those words as punctuated, each of them, like whole sentences unto themselves, though i can’t remember if anyone actually spoke them aloud or what they said, at the time – they removed him from the isolette where he’d been heartily squeezing our fingers the hour before with tiny, magical fingers, and disconnected one of the many clattering machines, and laid him in my arms, wee creature, still bloody from birth and all his trauma.

and in the hour that followed, while he slipped away from us, our skin in contact with his, whispered to, sung to, told he was loved and wanted, Finn made me a mother. because i stopped tasting the fear of the NICU, stopped hearing the machines, stopped wondering what the hell was happening to all of us and where in god’s name we’d found ourselves and how we’d cope with this. we just…were. we got to discover him, the curve of his brow and the unmistakable presence of his father’s nose, just as any new parents might. but i knew. i knew he was dying. and for one second, at the very beginning, the fear and the helplessness almost swallowed me. i am shamed, still, by that second, by the “you are going to die” horror that washed over me…but it was all i knew of motherhood before it happened to me. i had thought all my life that it is death itself that haunts mothers, keeps them up at night worrying about whether their offspring are chewing their cookies thoroughly…even long after those offspring have gone off to college. what i realized, in that moment, is that it is not our own pain, as parents, that we fear…but that of our kids. their suffering. our incapacity to comfort.

loss may haunt, yes, and grief run deep and long. but in the moment, with Finn in my arms, all i cared about in the world was that he felt my joy in holding him, somehow. and so it was that joy that i focused on. for that hour, easy and natural like i’ve seldom ever been, i beamed out love and comfort, because it was what i had to give. because he was my child. because i didn’t want him to be afraid. i would have given anything to spare him, and couldn’t…but the pain of that incapacity was my pain, not his. mine i could bear.

in getting to be there, to be the comforter of that small soul…i got a peace that few other mothers of children living or dead ever get.

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just before Oscar was born, i looked back at Finn’s birth and death and wondered whether this new baby would ever – god willing all go well, please go well, i don’t think i can do the aftermath a second time – get so much of me in a lifetime as Finn had in that hour. i worried a lot about those potential imbalances then, fearing, i think, that the second child might someday feel a queer shortchange in his prosaic, living place in the family…and totally inexperienced as i was in loving a child i got to raise, i was anxious about how a more normal entrance into the world might affect the intensity of feeling my still-grieving heart might be able to raise for this baby i carried.

i laugh now. every time O has a stomach bug, or a miserable cold, or cries out in pain, there it is…that same pang, no different…just as fierce. mother love. the primal need to comfort, and the helplessness of having to accept that that comfort is only ever partial.

i can not spare him. but i can love him through it. i hope that holds true for a long, long lifetime…and that the comfort he learns to find in it carries him through well beyond my days.

but i still hope he feels better tomorrow.

a year. a whole year.

Oscar, baby boy, you are one year old.

it feels dreamily like yesterday or maybe last week that i went into labour, mama Cheshire Cat sitting smugly through the evening’s book club, timing my contractions, breathing most cleansingly. all my earth mother zen flew out the window in the car on the way to the hospital, when i suddenly lost the capacity to sit without being ripped in two with excruciating immediacy. i was six centimetres dilated when we arrived. the rest – two hours, you were in a hurry, son – belongs to that other country that is labour, wherein i crawled outside myself, almost, beyond any capacity to ground or gather myself and i remember mostly your father’s eyes and your grandmother, my mother, trying to pray inconspicuously behind his shoulder.

then you.

you, Oscar, warm and crying and cheese-coatedly new…and breathing, breathing all on your own and i think it’s taken me a full year to really let out my own breath and believe that you are here and safe but there you were, wrapped and peering, a foreign creature older than time and more innocent than kittens, all in one. yourself. my own. nothing like me, little visible trace of me even yet in your blond, solid boy-ness, nothing like your brother yet so clearly your father’s child.

you are Other to me, a mysterious surprise who grows more and more enchanting all the time. i get to open you every day. i am amazed by your unfolding into a person, by your developing sense of humour, your sturdy implacability, your gentleness, your fierce, stubborn determination. and your trust. your trust, which has been there from the first moment they laid you in my arms. you looked at me, as if to say “qua?”…and then you relaxed, acceded, gave over. as did i, to the blue-eyed blond boy i’d never imagined, and have not since that moment been able to imagine myself without.

i love watching you learn. i love holding you snug against me as we read But Not the Hippopotamus for the seventy-third time, love hearing you hiss “sssss” when you are deeply pleased with yourself, love the smack of your fat little hand on my skin as you explore the terrain of my face without compunction. i love nursing you down into fluttering sleep, this almost-gone shadow of what already feels like your long-distant babyhood, the suck of your open mouth. i love the steps you are taking away from me, and the ones that bring you hurling yourself back into my arms.

i cannot think of anything better to celebrate than your birth, Oscar. you have brought us joy, your father and i, and a strange, disrupted peace that i would choose over all the free time in the world. you are loved, and you are good.

i wish you a lifetime of happy birthdays.

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.