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it is nearly the end of term.

the skies grow gray, the days grow short. the exam looms.

and for students – hell, for me – dragging one’s carcass  out of bed to come to class gets harder and harder.

teachers are a vast repository of entertaining if specious excuses for missed classes. we hear it all: the grandmothers who die three times a term, the mysterious “appointments” that seem to occur at the same time every second week, the belly aches that magically disappear just in time for the afflicted learner to be located lounging in a coffee shop.

i’m a bit of a hard-nose about attendance. i expect an email and a decent reason, just as if school were a job. and i notice. i have small classes, where an empty seat yawns like a missing tooth. i know everyone’s names the second week of class.  there’s no hiding from me.

but they are adults, my students, at least legally, university kids far from home for the first time. some of them straggle in at noon, late, flustered, clearly having just rolled out of bed. i gaze upon them with vicious, bare-fanged envy.

some miss too many classes. the exam for our course is a repeat of the placement exam they wrote back in September; a single timed essay, its purpose to determine whether or not they can meet the demands of full-time credit courses without additional English support. if they don’t attend, they have to wait an extra couple of weeks to write it.  no traditional grading scheme, not much to hold over their heads. their only real punishment is that they miss out on my delightful company and my wisdom, of course. and i miss theirs.

still, most buy in. it is an amazing fact of human nature that when treated reasonably, most people respond reasonably. i teach things they need. i make that explicit, strategic. and i am clear about my expectations without getting terribly het up when they do not meet them, particularly in the realm of attendance. oh, i give them The Look. and The Grave Talking To. I explain consequences in terms of things they actually give two shits about, like ultimately getting the heck out of our mandatory program. but i have been fifteen years a teacher. i do not get excited about their white lies, the emails that clock in three minutes after the start of class saying - again - dear Bonnie, i sick. tomorrow i will not sick.

i do not bite.

i edit these notes, sometimes, send back refined versions explaining how to craft an appropriately professional excuse for absence, but i do not get excited. i will know when they are truly slipping, endangering their term, beginning to shred under the strange, unspeakable pressure of navigating my world and their own internal lives and priorities and burdens. then i will flurry into action and do everything i can to whip & bolster & comfort them back into line, because then and only then will they allow me any real part in the process at all.

as it should be.

the fact that i expect them to come to class at all is an act of stunning hypocrisy. if my undergraduate profs had kept attendance records, i’d have had to apply to get them expunged in order to land a teaching position at any self-respecting institution.

i was once the Queen of Excuses. it started early, along about eleventh grade, when i simultaneously learned to mimic my mother’s handwriting and noticed that she left for work before i walked to school in the mornings. this happy coincidence, combined with the fact that i had English class first thing every second morning and my English teacher had a significant if unfortunate Valium habit, meant that i went back to bed a lot that year. i still like nothing better than to crawl back into bed an hour or two after rising. i do my best sleeping at about 7:53 in the morning.

i embarked on this first of my creative writing projects with enthusiasm, crafting regular notes detailing dramatic yet seemly reasons for not being in class. i made sure to keep most of them painfully normal: eye appointments, dental troubles, vague feminine complaints, flu. but i also let the purple prose of adolescence run away with me a few times: had my teacher been fully aware of who i was, i suspect he might have wondered why my mother occasionally wrote notes worded as if she’d recently escaped from Wuthering Heights. but he said nothing, poor lost man, even when i broke my own rule of no-more-than-twice-a-month and dozed through an entire week of Catcher in the Rye safe at home in my own bed, handing in notes that hinted, with the delicacy of bricks, that i’d been at exotic locales named in the book but utterly unheard of near our provincial capital: a prep school, the zoo. i stopped short of the mental institution that frames the story: i didn’t want to make my teacher feel embarrassed. still, i felt Holden Caulfield would’ve been proud.

over the years, as i gradually learned the art of intrinsic motivation, i stopped making excuses and learned to haul myself out of bed. and that was good.

but as i began collecting excuses from students instead, i realized you can tell a lot about a person by the kind of excuses they make.  in delving into our psyches to validate ourselves – however speciously – to authority, we expose a lot about what we’ve been raised to think of as worthy of excuse, of forgiveness, of coddling.

all liars, after all, ultimately want to believe themselves.

the students who present with a hushed, eyebrow-raised disclosure of “stomach problems” – or better, in twenty-somethings, “tummy problems”: oh, how they blush when i ask about their diarrhea.  and suddenly fifteen years falls from their faces and they are little children again, learning to keep their bodies the ultimate secret, the That Which Shall Not Be Named.

the ones who send vague notes like “i have a headache”? i call them to the mat, later, and ask, with great, head-bobbing interest, big headache? little headache? did the lights bother you? generally they blush and avoid eye contact, caught out in the act of having not bothered enough to write a decent excuse. i then teach them the word “migraine” and hopefully a lesson in being organized, intentional, and specific in all acts of writing.

i particularly enjoy the ones who describe their afflictions in detail, digging out dictionaries or Dr. Google to look up medical words. these are conscientious class-skippers, this lot, the kind of kids who generally work hard and feel guilty about their trangressions and are clearly accustomed to having someone take more than a passing interest in their health. they tend to equate severity with validity, even if they are most often found missing early morning consultations but assuring me heartily in their notes that they’ll visit the clinic and make it to class at 3pm.  i once had a student recover fully from what he described as acute pancreatitis by 3 pm. i asked the class to join me in offering praise for the miracle, particularly since i’d noted their stricken classmate downing a pizza in the Student Centre only an hour past the missed appointment.  alas, sarcasm is somewhat lost on intro-level ESL-speakers.

yesterday, however, i came face-to-face with an entirely new breed of excuse, one i wish i’d had the creativity to dream up all by myself.  i call it Medical Excuse by Obfuscation. the email which delivered it ran like this:

Bonnie, after I ate my lunch, I feel bad with my bingy, I have to go to the washingroom every ten minues.

bingy. huh. what in the nameagod is a bingy?

do YOU know? me neither. and for once, i was afraid to ask. and so this very lovely, generally hardworking student returned to class today utterly unmolested except for a vague “you okay?” from me.  and i bit my tongue, and thought, well done, dude. you got me. you foiled the Queen of Excuses.

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what kind of excuses do you make?

and please assuage my guilt and tell me i’m not the only one who perfected her mother’s handwriting? (if you’re reading, Ma, forgive me. it’s all made-up, total fabrication. Munchausen’s syndrome, i’m sure. i’ll be better by 3 pm).

Wednesday. i am on my knees under the high chair wiping up sludge that was once food for what feels like the twelfth time today even though i’ve only been IN my home awake for perhaps three hours of an already long day.

it feels like a yoke, this constant cycle of menial drudge stuff.  it is the thing that weighs me down, frustrates me, leaves me sharp and shrill and dreading the transition from work to home everyday.  in through the door we hustle, dragging shouting children and bags and dirty diapers, to be greeted not with sanctuary but the breakfast dishes.

garbage and compost and cat litter to be emptied. laundry to be folded or put away or retrieved from behind the washer where it fell, neglected, while waiting to be returned to its rightful drawer. everywhere i look, there is something that needs to be put away. every corner and cranny is full. and i am a pack animal, stumbling under the burden of this strange slavery to what ought to be a refuge.

it is not a mess, nor squalour, i understand that. we stay on top of it, just barely. but the omnipresence of it is slowly squeezing me until there is no time, no room left just to breathe. to be freed.

i should let it go. i do not know how.

to be a grownup is to have sanctuary become a day job. the sanctuary of the home swells, grotesque, until it is only a to-do list with no place to hide.

i want to live in a Japanese zen garden. i want two bamboo mats and a thick cotton futon and the illusion of space. i want minimalism and parallel lines and an artful flower, just-so, adorning the austerity.

i want to walk into this garden and fall down and sleep for a week.

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Friday.  the children in bed after a day that began too early and ended too ornery. i pull the tray of caramel apples from the fridge.  failures, prematurely dipped, candy coating now pooled thinly on the bottom of the tray.  i contemplate a second box, second try. i contemplate the party in the morning, the brownies to be made, the junk food to be bagged. my mind skips and reels, uncertain even how to fit ten or twelve or fifteen children and their parents in this little house without a basement.

i contemplate the after.  i wonder what in gawd’s name i’m doing, having a Hallowe’en party when i’m mess-averse and stretched thin and brittle. i know Dave wonders. neither of us have slept more than a few hours straight all week; old colds coughing their way out of our systems, deadlines driving us without respite.  we are horses pulling against each other, each of us headstrong and easily wounded. there has been no time to regroup, take stock, heal the scratches. i sink in my own sadness and it spills into hopelessness and rage and i say aloud, i cannot live like this.

i keep hoping someone will hear and magically make it all different.

there are tears in the second batch of caramel. it suffers from my distraction and a phone call and the fact that a meat thermometer is not, in fact, a candy thermometer. i miss the soft ball stage this time and go straight to hard crack, though of the candy rather than the drug persuasion. the first apple mires in the wicked goo until the stick breaks. i end up tossing the entire batch into the compost bin. it hits the cold plastic with a thwack like glass threatening to break.

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Saturday. our house overflows with people, most of them short and costumed and sweltering. i note that costumes are plush these days, no longer the paper-thin flammable plastic of my childhood. in the same breath i recall the quick-chilling beads of my sweat inside the white-backed masks with clown faces, Snow White, whatever other selves i became briefly in those Octobers of long ago. masquerading, i think, has always been hot work.

my mother, without being asked, herds Posey the wee caterpillar through the throng of three-year-olds and a few stray elder siblings. i gather the taller group on stools around the kitchen island and hand out weapons of mass destruction – globs of homemade icing, sprinkles, gummi worms, candied pumpkins – for them to amuse themselves with. things of beauty are born, sampled, discarded. my child licks his plate. Dave disentangles himself from the role of greeter & coffee provider and leads children and more than a few parents upstairs, a Pied Piper with a glow-in-the-dark Dr. Suess book and a maglite. they jam themselves into Oscar & Josephine’s tiny, darkened room.  i hear him through the baby monitor, clearing his throat, announcing A Spooky Story. the thrill of little giggles, scaring themselves. later we throw them all out in the leaves, bob for apples in wild defiance of H1N1 protocol. my doctor’s kid’s booger floats in the water.

the whole thing goes off seamlessly, a team effort that leaves me standing in my kitchen after, wondering at the relative lack of mess, at how dismissable those stray candy wrappers that remain can be.

i still want to sleep for a week. i still want a slim bamboo & paper screen that i can raise at will between me and the hurly-burly of this life that is by turns both rich, homey pageant and zero-sum grind.

i wonder which is the masquerade.

i look to Monday and try to breathe deep.

i tend to take research results with a grain of salt.

our accumulated human & societal experiments fascinate me. but when your own flawed self has been the architect of a plan or project designed to illuminate the human condition in some way or another, truths and illuminations from other people’s plans and projects start start to look a lot more jury-rigged themselves. it’s not exactly that they appear less true than they might have before; rather that true itself starts to seem like a conditional state, a window in time and perspective rather than any stamp of mythical absolute authenticity.

still, when i read the other day that 50% of children born in this decade may live to be 100 years old, my head swivelled.

sure, it swivelled in part because i’ve been reading Consumption, by Kevin Patterson. it’s a story of tuberculosis and famine and the Hudson’s Bay Company & mines that all eventually combined to wrangle the Inuit in off the land less than fifty years ago, and the diseases of affluence that have since ravaged that population on a scale that even the most forbidding landscape on earth never touched. diseases of affluence we all suffer from and carry the seeds of deep in our bodies the way that previous generations and many of the world’s poor still today carry TB…diseases like cancer, vascular impairment, diabetes.

we die today mostly because of how we eat.  how we choose to eat. as i type this i’m wiping crumbs from homemade pumpkin tarts off my keyboard. hey, they’re seasonal. they’re homemade. they have only 2/3 cup of sugar in, like, the eleven of them i just inhaled. whee. but i wasn’t actually hungry.

if this is how i have to suffer from my own affluence, it’s no wonder people are getting on board this train. even if it is bound for the boneyard.

still, however naively, however in denial of the effects of what i feed them, i like the idea of my kids living to be 100.  i usually live in abiding fear of the planet up and belching us all off its weary back long before either of them get their threescore and ten in, and so the possibility that this generation may have longer lives rather than shorter, more brutish ones is deeply comforting.

still, that wasn’t why the news made my head swivel.

it swivelled, dear friends, because i first came across the info as tweeted by film director Duncan Jones, object of my first stalking experiment in social media.  poor Duncan. i’m sure it would crush him to know that of his 6000+ followers, the chirpy mom with the slightly twee username who chats him up now and then is actually, uh, strategically and shamelessly using him.

it’s probably not his first time ’round this block. because Duncan Jones, whom you may know better as Zowie, is the 38 year old son of David Bowie, with whom i’ve been conducting an, erm, faithful if one-sided twenty-five year love affair. in my head.

imagine if twitter had existed in my angsty adolescence. i always knew Bowie had a son my age, but seeing as my parents weren’t interested in sending me to a dour and pricy Scottish boarding school, and Zowie cum Joe cum Duncan never once put up a penpal ad in Rolling Stone, i had little access to this otherwise obvious avenue of ingratiating myself into the Bowie clan. pity. dude was probably as estranged from his father at that age as i was – we coulda been buds. and then, you know, i would’ve finagled myself an invite to Christmas dinner and my charming insights woulda brought son to a renewed appreciation of father and father to a recognition of the marvel of a human being lying undiscovered in my old soul – in a manner most un-Polanski-esque, of course – and he’d have married me and that pesky Iman woulda just had to find herself another rock god. i’d have been Bonnie Bowie and the director of Moon my stepson and we’d all have lived happily ever after.  ahem.

oh dear god, i cringe in anticipation of my children’s adolescence, if they have imaginations and wills anything like mine.

anyhoo, i follow Duncan Jones on twitter. it entertains me. and the other day he mentioned the study reporting that children today have a 50/50 chance of living until the age of 100. to which i tweeted back some crack about needing to invest in their retirement now, before they’re outta diapers. to which he responded. and then he RE-TWEETED ME.

(because – all kidding aside – i’m damn right. if the poor kids are going to live to be 100, somebody better be planning to pay for the cancer-causing morsels of mush that will sustain them into that long-delayed good night.)

but i digress. research smesearch. the nifty study was merely the catalyst, the subject matter upon which i belatedly and somewhat circuitously launched my lifelong dream. i had a Real Live Online Conversation with the son of David Bowie. direct descendant. fruit of loins. the thirteen-year-old still lurking inside me swooned and fainted dead away.

twenty-five years is a long time to carry a torch.  my engraved invitation to the Bowie Christmas dinner? on its way, people.  Duncan & i, we’re getting tight. we chatted again, with me at my obsequious best, on Tuesday. we’ll be BFFs in no time. at my current rate of progress, i’m guessing on actually graduating from son to father and finally making personal Bowie contact about 2038. The Thin White Duke’ll be a mere 91. maybe i can spoon-feed him.

then we’ll get married and i can die a happy woman, of whatever disease of my affluence would like to have its way with me.

sigh. if only Bowie’d been born in this decade, i could be half-certain he’d live that long.

when i was a kid, i spent a lot of time alone.

i was not lonely, not particularly. i remember myself as social, eager, a child not overly burdened by shyness. yet i spent the majority of my time, it occurs to me, in solitary pursuits.  books, Lego, Barbies. i remember spending a lot of time lying on my stomach. hey, it was the 70s. gimme a shag rug to sprawl on and i bet i could still while away a Saturday like nobody’s business.

mostly, i drew. i was good at drawing, or so the adults around me told me. and i liked that. so i drew more. and whether it happened because i wanted to be good at it or because i was naturally inclined towards it, drawing became my oeuvre. i got lost in it, created worlds with pencils and blue Bic pens. i was never into colouring. all the little boys in my colouring books, i diligently turned into long-haired girls; beyond that, colouring held little interest. i liked the lines i followed to be my own.

over my elementary school years my busy hands must’ve filled a hundred doodle pads, those newsprinty sheafs of absorbent pastel paper. each would’ve been chock-full and bursting,  every one an almost-picture-book with wordless narratives and imaginary worlds now lost to history. landfills today are still shifting and digesting my childhood fancies.

i am impatient, these days, with Oscar. he is not yet three-and-a-half, and the fact that he does not like to be alone, sleep alone, or play alone is perhaps no terrible oddity on his part.

it is, however, driving me crazy.

true, i’m an extravert, a social creature who gets energy from interactions with others. but i am the kind of extravert who binges, who will go all out for a given occasion if opportunity arises, who can stay up til sunrise having just the right conversation. and who is then sated for, oh, months. or at least a few hours, y’know? i’m an extravert who needs a few minutes of silence to catch up with my own head every couple of hours, at least.

so the Mommy Mommy Mommy of a three year old who wants my attention and participation in everything he does? combined with the sweet chirpings of a one year old just learning to say Mama? my heart hears the crescendo and reminds me these little voices will only be small once, and swells, wearily. my ears hear the crescendo and want to run and hide themselves under a pillow until i can hear myself think.

i found the infancy of both children hard. it was partly colic, partly leftover grief, largely my own personality. a few months into Oscar’s life i found myself crying at the kitchen table late one night, worn to shreds not only from the incessant crying but just the need that came with a high-intensity infant. he needed me around the clock, took an hour to feed, fed every two hours. there was no time to regroup, to collect myself, to be anything other than a stumbling purveyor of milk and clean diapers and kisses. and though i loved him deeply and dearly and fiercely, i had to admit to myself that being needed to that extent was not a need of mine.

maybe there are women out there – people out there – who fall into parenthood as into a vat of butterscotch pudding, an all-consuming satisfaction of everything they’ve ever dreamed of, even if it is a bit hard to breathe. me, i never liked butterscotch pudding. i’m a compartmentalizer. and Mommy is not a role that compartmentalizes particularly well.

i marvel at people who accomplish things when their children are small. baking, writing, decorating, exercising…you name it, i marvel at it. because just in order to keep the house functionally clean & tidy and keep us all fed and clothed, Dave & i seem to be busting an awful lot of ass. and doling out a lot of hush, honey, just a minutes.  it’s not pretty, the number of times i seem to say that to my kids in the course of a day, or even a supperhour. it’s even less pretty, the cacophony that still permeates our house despite my gentle entreaties for just another bleeping second to finish chopping your carrots so you don’t CHOKE to death, thank you very much!! ahem. i can barely chop carrots in that headspace. if you can decorate your house or write your magnum opus under the same conditions, you are an ubermensch.

please don’t tell me otherwise. i’ll just feel worse.

in the meantime, i’m just hanging on, hoping they learn to draw – or knit or dance or quietly hatch diabolical plans for world takeover, whatever their little hearts desire – soon.
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mind you, if they do begin to draw like fiends, i’ll just have a  new time-succubus on my hands. what do YOU do with all the art projects your little Picassos generate? is your living room wall, like that of my college friend Susie’s family, a giant colourful varnished collage of your children’s most beautiful creations? or, uh, do you send ‘em to the trash?

inquiring minds need to know. the box on the freezer in the back porch? she’s gettin’ full.

every year on the 30th of April, Dave’s parents set the lobster traps.  out to sea, to open the season.

some part of me finds this fitting, that this day is also the date of Finn’s death. blood inheritance and heritage and salt water all swirl around incoherently in my imagination, making me wish i could cobble an Alistair MacLeod story out of it all, set the bones of the frame, tidal and unforgiving, around what is not there.

this year, we went to New Brunswick for the opening of the season.  Dave went out with his father, the small boat loaded down with traps and bouncing in the whitecaps. the kids and i watched on the beach; i buttered toast for the return to shore.  i am useful that way.

Dave and i met on that beach behind his house, almost thirteen years ago.  we thought we’d like bring some of Finn’s ashes to the beach…and scatter them on the first day of the season, four years to the day of his death.

except i, uh, forgot them.

huh. one gets used to things…to a white ceramic urn that sits at the back of the dresser top, to packing the car with suitcases and diapers and snacks and videos and wet weather clothing and asthma meds and plastic in case of puking.  one does not normally trot about on family vacations with an urn.  the two do not relate.

and so Finn got left behind. i realized my mistake about two hours into the drive, halfway there. and i felt simultaneously ill – wracked with guilt – and wryly bemused – wracked with laughter.  what kind of mother forgets her child? i whispered over and over in my head, first in lament, then with the increasing mania of a dawning joke, until the contorted expression on my face caused Dave to turn his head and stare.  we forgot one of the kids, i nearly quipped, but caught myself.  our skins have thickened, mine and his, over the metaphorical holes in our hearts, but there are places where there are still thin patches. one does not want to stick a foot through.

i wrote his name, instead, in the sand on that gravelly beach, that night when the other two were safe in bed and watched over by grandparents. Dave & i took some wine down to the beach, our bodies bundled up against the bone chill of the night, and we sat and watched the sun go down over the Gaspé Peninsula and there was driftwood and the smell of the tides in the air and we were peaceful.

and the dead child, he did not mind. that is the thing about the dead, the gift they give in the end when the life’s blood of sorrowing is finally bled out and you realize that they are still there with you, in their way. what remains is steeped in forgiveness.

so the little urn still sits upstairs, some of its contents under the trees in the backyard, the rest waiting until we are ready – or just, erm, smart enough – to remember to bring them with us some lobster season. maybe next year.

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in other news, i – lifelong disdainer of seafood, and shame to my Maritime roots – was the one who managed to convince Oscar to try some lobster the next day at lunch.

Oscar has been an adorer of lobster – in their living, tank-swimming form at the local Superstore – for some time. i don’t know how it started…but every time we’ve gone grocery shopping together for months now, he’s clamoured to go see the “los-bter.”  he waves, and they sit there prehistoric and piled up on each other pitifully, and i cringe even if their brains are the size of peas and he calls out joyously “bye bye los-bter!” and we roll away.  i tell him it’s Seaworld.  it’s as close as he’s getting.

but Shamu is unlikely to magically show up on his plate, fished by his beloved grandparents. so when he turned up his nose at the morsel in front of him that lunchtime, we all hesitated a little, unsure whether his rejection was just the usual toddler turndown of anything new and non-cupcake-related, or a far more complex emotional quandary surrounding the eating of his fun marine friends.

i told him lobster was good with butter.

he downed most of a claw, dipped in hot gold goodness, and wanted more. so much for the fun marine friends. though we have yet to return to Seaworld the grocery store since our homecoming…i wonder if the los-bter will retain their in-tank crustacean charms?

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while we were in NB, an old friend and colleague from our Korea days dug up a video of Dave and i rehearsing a two- person play we later performed at one of the local expat poetry slams.  i’d never seen the footage, had forgotten it had even been taken. me, platinum blonde, spiky-haired, smoking, Dave without sideburns, both of us lighter. perched awkwardly in the big wooden chairs of the bar i liked to call my “living room” in that strange, liver-rotting year…familiar chairs, obviously, but ill-suited to the frenetic body shifts blocked by our director.  i resemble wooly-headed insect, all limbs and corners and bravado and unladylike postures; Dave a comic study in intensities. we play out scenes of courtship and bawdy humour, alternatingly awful and amazingly connected, we who had been friends almost five years and had started sleeping with each other only weeks before in that far-away land where we were both so unmoored.  time capsule, June 2001.

the video confirmed two things. one, that Academy Award acceptance speech of my dreams?  i don’t think i need to worry too much about polishing it. i am the twitchiest, most physically unnatural creature ever to grace a stage. i need confine future acting aspirations to voiceovers. two, i was not that much better-looking when i was thinner. so there, muffin-top.  take that.

it’s been eight years for he and i, now. our anniversary the other night coincided with the unfortunate splash of my IWK “news” all over the local media in a manner that pandered to the cheap stereotypes of “grieving mother complains” and brought the best of the trolls out from under their rocks. it was ugly, and distinctly unromantic.  the fact that my radio interview even got picked up by the news cycle was a shock to my naive ass, o lesson learned, and the shoddy and inflammatory way in which the story was misrepresented disappointed me immensely.  but Dave, chivalrous internet knight, had my back with tweets and emails to the troops…and with support from many of you and me repeatedly stating my actual position in the comments section, by yesterday afternoon i had a direct apology from one of the trolliest trolls and the tide had utterly turned. a small victory, i think, of social media over mass.

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the issue of how the story was taken up in the first place is something i’m addressing with CBC.  in the interview broadcast i made it clear that i was actually in a good place, giving me the strength to address the issue and risk exposing myself as a bereaved person, which is always draining because there is no comfortable cultural place for the narrative of child loss. but the story pulled from the interview immediately recast me, and then used the headline term “complains” to represent what i had hoped was a constructive and respectful point.  such is the discourse around motherhood, unfortunately, and so go headlines. but, as i said to CBC,  if anything related to a supposedly grieving mother making a point consistently gets reduced to a story that sounds like someone playing victim, then comments will be vicious, the discourse about language being important will never get anywhere, and people will clam up for fear of being attacked at their most vulnerable.

i do not want a public apology or anything, though. i’m too afraid of the trolls that would drag out of the pond bottom.

in terms of the story that should have been told if indeed the interview even warranted clipping into a newsbyte, the IWK Foundation has been admirable and prompt and open in their response to me, and ultimately we’ll be sitting down together next month to try to work towards a positive fundraising strategy that respects all the families served by the IWK.  the CEO of the Foundation, the Mr. Shaw to whom my letter was directed, also lost an infant daughter at birth. her dates almost coincide with Finn’s. i am grateful to him and his staff for being willing to give the issue of language and wording their attention, and for being gracious enough to include me in the process.

now i just need to keep thickening that skin of mine.

and then sometimes it just all builds up and the urge to run, to outdistance, unfetter, leaves me shaking.

i live in the nexus of family and old friends, in the town where i grew up, the town where, sometimes, i feel smallest. the sidewalks testify to memories three decades old and to go out in public is to shoulder the burden of all the selves i once was, those big pink 1984 coke-bottle lenses and the gym suit with the bow around the waist and those times i didn’t know what to say so i got too loud and tittered at That Boy like a shrill macaw, all these Bonnies dragging around behind me like tin cans off a wedding jalopy. clang, they jar into my present, blurry shadows when i turn to look at them yet heavy still, time having layered them with the cement of self-consciousness and discomfort in my own skin. my tin can necklace, encrusted with pearls of shit.

elsewhere this accoutrement dissolves, worn away by years of learning to laugh at myself, to walk tall, but here the past sometimes is too much with me. here there is no distance from which to shed myself, those skins long outgrown and constricting.

i’ve been watching CBC online while nursing, watching Erica Strange wander through her own past to learn lessons missed along the way. i’m compelled by the show on one level. Erica’s ‘failed potential’ schtick resonates, though not quite so much as seeing my own wardrobe on tv for the first time ever…so what if its in all the 90s flashbacks? ahem. but on another level the premise frustrates, as stories of time travel so often do…if the Erica who goes back to the prom makes different choices than she did the first time ’round, wouldn’t the cumulative effects of the experience carry over into the intervening years, thus changing the person she ends up being at 32? or at least making different lessons necessary?

what keeps me glued to the screen is the hypnotic sense of homesickness that creeps over me every time Erica flashes back to an era i hadn’t ’til now fully realized was so long gone.

i would like, for an afternoon, to shed the years between now and 1992 just to go back and walk through that life, to revisit its minutiae. sure, it would be good to take a long, kind look in the mirror and see the beauty in that twenty-year-old face and twenty-year-old body and convince my twenty-year old self of both those things once and for all. and if i could walk once more into the high, cool foyer of my grandmother’s house and find her waiting, see her eyes glint blue for smiling at me…my joy would be without bounds. but that is too much to ask. i would settle for far less.

for one afternoon, i’d like to walk down the road that runs by my street and see it as it was seventeen years ago. not because i expect it was so terribly different, or better, or worse…rather because i’d like the luxury, now, of simply being present to it. i’d note whether the cars were bigger than i remember, the hair bigger, the peg-leg jeans as funny as i remember. i’d walk drugstore aisles and say, hallo there hair gel and salutations, photography film and yo, Snapple, did you change your packaging somewhere along the way? i would drink in all these once-familiar mundanities, walk through the old grocery store like a museum-goer, all enamoured by what was once just life.

i would say, this is 1992, and i would know that those were magical words.

the day-to-day is impossible to recall in detail once the backdrop changes. the dramas and hurts that get lived out over that background sometimes linger far too long. i wish i could shed the past and cradle it to me all at once, visit in doses like a favourite seaside rather than find myself drowning and sputtering in tides too strong only to be cast up on the shores of the unfamiliar future, unready to let go wholesale of worlds that once were mine.

i went to bed last night with a conversation i couldn’t speak aloud running through my head.

my OB – or rather, my former OB, as Dave, my mother, and various medical professionals have begged me to swear that i am never, ever putting anyone through another of my “special” pregnancies – has become something of a friend. which is great and weird at the same time, likely on both sides. she was here last night with my book club, and when the conversation turned to twitter i flipped open the laptop and showed off the shiny silly wonder of social software and explained how i feel like i “know” most of the people i follow because we’ve been reading each other for years through my blog. oh yeh, i have a blog, sez me. nearly three years. and then my eyes caught on her face and i wondered if she were wondering like i’d be wondering about trust and the strange double-edge sword of professional intimacy and being a character in others’ stories, and whether there was anything in here that in a town this small she’d rather not have broadcast and the words came chirping up in my throat oh! i said nice things about you! but i swallowed them because they seemed so trite and obsequious and sometimes the elephant in the room is perhaps better left alone with the cake crumbs than spoken of, or to.

but what i wanted to say, what i went to bed still trying to give voice to in my head an hour later, was
i only started this two weeks before Oscar was born. after the bedrest was over, and almost exactly a year after that day in Room 2 when you said “i’m sorry, it IS amniotic fluid after all” and you called for the airlift and i still somehow thought everything would be okay but it wasn’t.

i started it because i’d been a mother since that day but not in a way i could speak of and i was facing down another birth and apparent, hopeful normalcy and “real” motherhood and it frightened me because i had no idea how to reconcile those selves and all the subjectivities relating to motherhood that i’d ever seen reflected in culture didn’t resonate with where i was and i figured if i could write, maybe i could reconcile the mess in my own head.

but we don’t talk that way at book club.

i don’t talk that way out loud much at all. unless i’m teaching, and even then, i stumble. verbal me and written me have different fluencies, different contexts. written me is comfortable with the language of the subject, the myriad of selves we humans portray and embody and understand ourselves to be. written me could negotiate motherhood with all its fierce love and exhaustion and bewilderment and grief and mundanity in a way that verbal me still trips over, feeling exposed and guilty if i articulate the ambivalence of parenting aloud.

the kids? oh, they’re good. baby has colic. ummm…but she’s a joy. cue smile.
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i woke up this morning to the news that John Updike died yesterday, and i thought, yes. that’s it.

i feel like i’ve been watching the blogosphere – or at least this corner of it – run out of steam lately. i suspect we’ve collectively hit a place where our revelations feel like deja vu…like i could write this but so-and-so wrote in the same vein last week and hell, why bother? so many of us don’t, self-silencing because the sheer volume of what we’ve put out here has made us aware both that we’re not alone in our experiences of parenting but also that we’re, well, maybe not particularly special in our experiences of parenting. saturation.

but i also see an overall sea change in the ecosystem we release our posts to, when we do write them.

what blew me away when i belatedly discovered that i wasn’t blogging in a vacuum out here was the richness of the subjectivities mothers were exploring in their writing. like the seething mid-century suburbs of Updike’s Rabbit series, the public veneer of motherhood hid complex inner lives and a multitude of aspirations and secrets and feelings and validations. i didn’t see this version of mothering on tv, or in most of the ads and products aimed at my burgeoning belly…at best i found commodified hipster defiance without other content, at worst the same vapid recycling of mother-as-tender-selfless-fulfillment image that’d been hanging around Tide commercials since my childhood. but in blogs, i found conversation and exploration, stretching of these images, poking fun at them and at ourselves. i found moments of honesty and disillusionment and connection. i found a place to speak truths that verbal me could never say aloud…and people who would say, “i hear.”

it was no sheltered idyll, detached from a crass real…by the time i wandered into it, the blogosphere was actively trying to figure out how to make money, and new aggregator sites popped up all the time. but it was an economy that hadn’t yet figured itself out and narrowed its options. many fine writers found recompense for their words; many more found the recompense slim. pros and cons and implications of ads were discussed. comment whoring was owned up to. the subject as mother/writer/marketer became a common one, an overt one…and we were all marketing, even those of us who never ran an ad.

we still are, except the market has flattened out and the meta-conversations are no longer so fresh. lately, i feel like the mass, stereotypical mainstream mommy images have re-emerged to suck up too much of the conversation, subjectivities once imposed on us taken up as self-fulfilling prophecy, especially on the commercial side of things. snide tones that once seemed refreshing or ironic now resonate with weary, petty bitchiness. the aggregator sites drip with celebrity gossip and cheap wit and outrage and clearly they succeed so this must be what we’re buying with our clicks, our comments, but the tireless self-promotion of it all feels brittle to me. our little ecosystem of multiple possibilities is more toxic, the subjectivities narrower.

and yet i’m still here, blathering on. and reading, just from a smaller pool. and still happy with blogging, for what it is. because twitter’s 140 characters don’t quite allow me the scope to say more than the kids? oh, they’re good. baby has colic. ummm…but she’s a joy. cue smile.

and if you’re still here…i’m glad. and if you’re my former OB, i promise not to write about you anymore.
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if you have a blog, how would you describe its subjects, the yous that populate it?

the shortest day of the year. morning crept up late but bright, everything reflected in the mirror ball of fresh snow.

i was awake. i lay quiet, feeding one child and listening for the call of the other, wondering at the marvel of him sleeping ’til first light on this latest sunrise on the calendar, he who woke before dawn all summer long.

only stillness.

there is something in the cyclical nature of our existence, this seasonal turning of a beleaguered planet, that brings me comfort. solstice, the sun standing still. for a moment, the movement of it all is invisible to the eye, the music of the spheres silent. hibernation. all suspended. in the stillness, for me, lurks warmth and respite and the imaginary cave of wintertime that i suspect the ur-human in most of us still hearkens to, a pre-electric feast of treats and firelit shadows and long winter’s nap.

visions of sugarplums and of woods dark and deep, outside of time.

the only sound a baby suckling, a baby who may someday be an old woman, who will someday be dust while this earth keeps spinning and i felt the blink of it all, the crazy speed at which we run out our course and the dizzying smallness of us all, riding on a planet circling in the dark.

and then on dasher! on dancer! and a little voice calls from the other room and tired feet hit the ground running because the spell is broken and we are off again on the carousel of living, with promises to keep.

Originally uploaded by o&poecormier

last year he called him “Yaya.”

this year, the words trip from his mouth with more ease, and he notes the red hat and beard with an enthusiasm that takes me aback, makes me wary. “Santa!” he squealed in the grocery store last week, when we happened across a blow-up display of the jolly old elf. i wonder where this delight sprang from and for the hundredth time i simultaneously blame and thank his sitter for doing the normative work of acculturating my child whilst his father and i shrink and critique and dither. and then my brain skates off, wondering about this Santa fetish encouraged in the preschool set, this strange semi-magical, semi-materialist construction of Christmas, this incessant “what will Santa bring you?”

last time he was asked, he said he wanted a Christmas hat. he’d just taken the one in the photo off minutes before. i don’t think he gets it, what this fat man in red is supposed to represent. i don’t know if i get it either.

i was not quite five yet when i found out about Santa. a boy in my kindergarten carpool had an older brother and thus, i guess, a mainline to truth. i don’t remember any longer why i knew he was right, why i believed him and not the elaborate fabric of myth. he was a redhead, that little boy, a freckled face that popped up from the bench seat at the front of a car whose other inhabitants and details escape my memory…a spitefully gleeful freckled face that shouted “Santa’s not real! Grownups buy the presents and eat all the cookies!”

i believed him, but i thought my mother truly believed in Santa, and so to spare her feelings i said nothing, not a word, and dutifully dictated my letter to the North Pole anyway.

two Christmases later she sat me down to explain, very gently, that Santa was only the spirit of Christmas, of giving, of the gift of Jesus to the world or however those two are supposed to relate and i said, “i know” and i think we both looked at each other a little oddly and that was the year i woke up Christmas morning to the longed-for Hugo, Man of a Thousand Faces courtesy of the Sears’ Christmas Wishbook and a mother who’d been unsure if my father’s cheque would show up in time, and the ruse of Santa Claus fell into disuse in our house after that.

my childrens’ parents are faithless, their closest cousins Jewish.  they will never experience full immersion in Christmas a religious holiday.  Oscar goes to the church nursery most Sundays with his Nannie, and the lesson of “different people believe different things,” is what i hope he takes out of it all in the long run…because i have nothing more certain to offer, for myself. we have an advent calendar, but mostly for the chocolate and to try to help him understand that holidays change with the seasons and Hallowe’en is, alas, over until next year.

and yet we decorate our tree and we will celebrate Christmas in our own way, where what is holy is the quiet of the dark season and the time with family and maybe all the bounty of food and treats and holiday baking, and Santa will elbow his jolly way in there no matter what we do and maybe the baby Jesus too and all i can hope is that some of it is magic for the children somewhere along the way and that, at least, we give them to believe in.
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whatever your belief system, if you are in the English-speaking world, how do you explain this inescapable, hegemonic holiday to your kids? what do you think they make of it?

i woke up this morning to a deafening crash and crunching sound.

it was not, actually, the cry of my beloved country falling down around my ears, though times are mad up here and unprecedented parliamentary nuttiness is most definitely afoot.  the clamour was, rather, the house across the street being flattened – chewed up and shredded by an enormous claw.  big chunks of roof and wall were being torn to pieces…family entertainment right at our window!  we pressed ourselves to the glass to watch.

Oscar peered out at the destruction and exclaimed, oooh!  a big mess!

(the parallels to our national political state are, admittedly, irresistable.)

i’ve never had a ringside seat for demolition before.  it’s violent, a little sickening.  fascinating, because the private is so suddenly exposed, made visible…but sad too.  the little house was a postwar relic.  when we moved in three+ years ago, the inhabitants had frequent ‘guests’ who stayed all of about five minutes and used the back door.  either dealers, we figured, or very popular people…but they never brought a casserole by so we never really got to know.  for the past year or more the place has been abandoned.  watching the linoleum layers clinging like rainbow skin to the detritus of the walls, i wondered about the hands that built the house, about the hopes that once must have been housed under its roof.

and i began to sing Tom Waits’ The House Where Nobody Lives, aloud, to Oscar.  i wanted to be very clear with him that the little house was somehow different from ours, that the big claw wasn’t coming for our walls anytime soon.

good thing he doesn’t follow politics.

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side note: the fact that i began above with the words “i woke up” means, in case you missed it, that i slept.  as did the bambino.  and the rest of the household.  thanks to you all for the hardcore love…i’m not sure if any of you managed to put a hex on colic or what’s going on, but i am in a better mental state today than i have been in awhile and i think a lot of it (beyond the blessed, blessed sleep) was the release of getting out that toxic stuff, knowing i’d been heard.

just for today – to steal outrageously from Mad and the other clever tweets out there – i’m okay if the Governor General doesn’t prorogue my life ’til January.  (and if you’re not in Canada and thus the word “prorogue” means no more to you than it did to me last week, see how edifying blog reading can be?)