cribchronicles.com

today is Posey’s due date. it’s also my mom’s 60th birthday.

in my first pregnancy, with Finn, my due date was a source of excitement and mystery. the 4th of August, proclaimed the calendar - or maybe the 3rd, but the 4th was Dave’s mom’s birthday and so we went with that, thinking how fortuitous, how cool - and it never so much as occurred to me that i might deliver anytime before August rolled around in all its grand and bloated swelter.

but when August did roll in that year, we were three months bereaved…shell-shocked still, hurting, trying to put together some semblance of a life. i don’t remember if we ever managed to send Dave’s mom a card for her birthday that year.

when i got pregnant with Oscar a short while later, i barely noted his due date. instead i counted the weeks until viability, the days until we passed the points at which leaking had begun or the airlift had happened…and the 26+1 mark at which Finn had been born. i burned into my brain the date at which we’d clear the 28w hurdle, after which so much goes so much better. that was all i was bold enough to ask for.

but then time had her sweet, merciful dulling way with me and when i got pregnant again last fall, due at the end of June, i was fool enough to imagine a baby born on my grandmother’s birthday, the 20th…a full-term, 39ish-week baby. instead, on a Friday in late November, the day Dave turned 33, the u/s technician turned her face away from us as she spun the empty screen in our direction.

so on the morning of my 36th birthday this past January, when i woke up jet-lagged and bleary and faintly nauseous at a bizarre and ungodly hour in a hotel in England, and quietly and with hammering hopeful, fearful heart peed on a plastic stick i’d brought with me because i am at all times prepared, i didn’t dare shout out to the sleeping Dave dude! i’m pregnant! due on my mom’s birthday! i didn’t want to think too much about due dates, then…just wanted to get through that day, and the next, without blood. i only casually mentioned the congruence of dates to my mother much later, but with the caveat we’re really just trying to get safely to August. and she nodded. she knew.

but today my mom is sixty and her granddaughter is 23 days old and a whopping 7 pounds, 2 ounces and there will be cake and i am grateful, humbled by this happy ending, this coda to my pregnancy and to the whole journey of pregnancy in general, for me. we end with cake, not tears. and my mom is celebrating her seventh decade by getting her first computer so i’m bringing the blog out of the closet as a way of introducing her to this fascinating network that is teh internets (note to mom: intentional spelling mistake) so…wish her a happy birthday if you have a minute.

and tell me…all of you, whether your pregnancies were full-term or cut short, whether you’ve lost or gone over and delivered beautiful, healthy babies…did you note your due dates as they passed? do you think of them? what’s your relationship to this semi-arbitrary spot on the calendar?

for the past nine days, Oscar & Dave & i have been home together, just the three of us.  the sitter’s on vacation, as is Dave, and i’m home anyway, so it’s a last gasp at summer for us as a family, and a last chance - knock wood - to do stuff as a threesome.

it’s been a bit on the rainy side, and mindless wandering around the local timewarp that is The Mall is morbidly depressing, so we haven’t necessarily filled our time with as many outings as we’d imagined.  but amidst the walks and the swims at the park, we checked out a couple of local attractions and brunched and had tea and took O for his inaugural bumper car ride with Daddy.  big fun.

everywhere we went there were kids’ menus.  and christ in a handbag, no wonder our culture has an epidemic of childhood obesity.

truth is, the amusement park probably hasn’t changed its menu in forty years: hotdog, hamburger, or deep-fried chicken bits, all with a side of fries or onion rings and pop.  not health food, but as an occasional treat, no biggie.  especially if a kid only gets out for a treat a few times in a summer.

but everywhere has menus like this, these days, at least where we are.  and when on holidays, one can be everywhere - eating out - more than a few times in a summer.  i have apparently been living in a bucket, happily oblivious to the contents of these craptastic wonders, because i haven’t had a child old enough to be interested in eating from them until now.  but suddenly Oscar has reached an age where he’s noticing that other kids aren’t eating the yogurt or dish of cottage cheese dragged from mommy’s bag; where pilfering dad’s toast & eggs at the diner is not entirely a sufficient meal unto itself.

and it seems that the rite of passage of having his own plate means he can now choose from a wide array of white-flour-based, deep-fried, nitrate- and preservative-saturated foods.  in quantities that would suffice for most adults. oh, independence.

i’m really not a sprout Nazi, or anything.  my kid likes Elmo crackers, and eats cupcakes now and then.  but for the most part we do try to make sure his diet has more nutrients in it than unpronounceable additives. we just don’t buy white bread or white pasta.  the store-brand organic breakfast cereals around here now cost less than the brand-name non-organic Raisin Bran or Shreddies, and we made fudgesicles this summer out of chocolate soy milk.  if Oscar liked hamburgers - he’s gone off meat, our little Smith’s fan - i’d happily serve them to him.  but seriously?  with fries and pop?  when he’s two?  even when he’s ten, i’d really like him to have a few more alternate options.  healthy choices shouldn’t be something that magically appear with puberty.

to me, when McDonald’s appears to have the healthiest kids’ menu in town - because you can at least get apple slices and juice with your white-bread-wrapped grilled cheese - there’s something kinda weird about that.

i know, first-time parent naiveté.  i do get that a few meals out is not going to destroy my child’s health or digestive tract, and that with some kids, getting them to eat anything at all is a huge success.  we’re lucky that way - O turns up his nose at a lot of things, especially vegetables, but would live on tomatoes and avocadoes if we let him.  that’s just how it turned out.  but he also had his very first non-soy hot dog only last week, so the options he’s been given do have something to do with the tastes he’s developed.  is it just where we happen to live - in one of Canada’s fattest provinces - that circumscribes the kids’ menu options to such blatantly and exclusively unhealthy fare?  is it just me who thinks this kinda sucks?  or do most kids between four and twelve in North America live on a steady diet of processed snacks and sugar and hotdogs?  seriously?

shine the light for me, people.  am i fighting a losing battle on this one?  when you eat out - if you eat out - what do your kids eat?  what’s your philosophy regarding kids and diet?

dear readers…

do you notice dates?  ascribe signficance to them?  see numbers dancing in front of your eyes like mad Rockettes?  subscribe, on some superstitious, instinctual level, to old adages about children born on particular days of the week?

i appear to.  particularly when childbirth is looming.  given my history this makes me shrink in shame, as i realize that the day and date of my child’s birth is, generally speaking, hardly of massive significance.  i’m sure i’ll come to like whatever date she comes on, because it will be hers, and all that marvellous rational truthiness.  sure.  but i have nonetheless come to the uncomfortable conclusion that i am a closet flake, and possibly some kind of subconscious but full-blown proverbial nut.  i have dates flit through my mind so many times a day that i am considering getting a turban and stitching paper stars to it, hiring myself out as a swami.  feel free to contact me if you would like my completely ungrounded but very heartfelt opinions about auspicious dates looming over the next, oh, three or four or five weeks or so…i will be happy to consult the litter box for signs in the turds, and whatnot.

see…much as i wanted to make it to September with this pregnancy, to try to get as close as possible to a healthy term infant…i’ve never been totally keen on a September baby.  late September, dandy, if i could get there…but the first part of the month?  mixed feelings.  this is not my good sense talking.  i know many fine people who were September babies…half the people in our families, quite literally, have early to mid-September birthdays.  that’s part of the problem.  we’re stuffed full of Virgos ’round these parts, and Virgos have many honourable qualities…among them tidiness, a virtue above all others.  also, i’m aware that just in the unlikely case astrology isn’t simply an interesting personality assessment tool but my child’s total future sewn up and written in her stars, moon sign and rising sign still mean more than the actual sun sign under which one is born.  see?  i’m almost an informed flake.  but for some reason i can’t quite put my finger on, i’m still not super thrilled about the idea of my child sharing a birthday with most of the noble Virgos to whom we are related or befriended.  i’m also not wild about her coming on any of the defunct wedding anniversaries and significant death anniversaries that occur in our small, immediate circle during early-mid September…nor do i especially like dates with a 5 in them…thus leaving about four separate days between the first of September and the twentieth on which i’d be happy to see her arrive.  or at least of which the inner crazy swami Bonnie - whom i cannot seem to shut up - would approve.

i just found out that for two of these dates, my OB will be off work, having surgery herself.  as i want her there for the delivery more than i actually want to assuage my bizarre obsessions, those dates are now added to the long list of Dates On Which I Will Keep Legs Crossed.

as of this afternoon, my OB’s scheduled my cerclage removal for one of the others…which just happened to bethe date she’s on hospital duty that week.  We’re doing the removal there, at L&D, in case the loss of the stitch sends me straight into labour.  removal has been set, folks, for September 10th.

which would be gorgeous, close to 37 weeks, even the 10/09/08 birthdate utterly cool if you follow the Canadian and European day/month/year system…but, um, it’s a Wednesday, folks.

and the old rhyme says, Wednesday’s child is full of woe.

seriously, full of woe?  how can i set my hopes on a birthdate that will doom my offspring to being full of woe?  i mean, Tuesday is “full of grace, Friday’s “loving and giving”…how the heck did poor Wednesday get stuck being full of woe?  i have been holding my breath all Wednesday long for months, now.  it would feel like bad parenthood, almost, to wish my child into the world on a Wednesday with that kind of prognosis.

damn, it’s not easy being crazy.

(and the 11th and 12th are already crossed off the calendar as taken…so, if Saturday the 13th doesn’t work, i may just have to try keeping that poor old cervix closed until well into Libra.)

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

what day of the week were you born?  your kids?  do any of these signification systems - be they planets, rhymes, or other superstitions - surrounding birth weigh on your mind?  are Wednesday’s children really full of more than their fair share of woe?  should i forget about the birth entirely and go check myself into a pink padded cell?

all quiet on the cervical front, friends.  this evening’s literary reading at ye local library was uninterrupted by the waters of Babylon.  i even laughed without peeing myself…banner day.

have i ever mentioned that i live two doors from the Dairy Queen?  and that i have something of an, erm, sugar fetish?  i came home from the reading with a fervent hankering for a chocolate-covered-cherry blizzard.  they’re my all-time favourite, my True Patriot Love…and the fact that DQ took them off the menu a couple of decades ago does not daunt me, people.  i know what i like: ice cream, cherry mix, cone dip.  lots of cone dip.  i have - with the help of slightly embarrassed minion Dave, who loathes ordering anything special or altered or ‘on the side’ but was nonetheless man enough to procure my fix when bedrest prevented me from doing so - been personally training the local DQ ice cream jockeys over the past few years to prepare this wondrous concoction of deliciousness.  tonight i got the boy who’s really good: he puts a little extra cone dip in there, oh fine pimply charmer, and never scoops the extra off the top.  some days, i think Dave & i should adopt him.

all that to say…this will be a short post.  i need to go make love to my ice cream.  and then write some more, because we have to read tomorrow night, at the closing dinner.  and in the company i’m keeping, my meandering little rambles i feel so proud of here suddenly sound like the braying of donkeys.

oh well.  one cannot learn if one does not shame oneself, i always say.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

i leave you with a challenge, or a favour, really, should you choose to accept it.   the story opener below is an exercise we did today, a one-off written from a brief news clipping.  i’d love feedback.  first person to guess the backstory or what the news story was actually about will be allowed to share my next Blizzard.  a little.  first person to tell me how to end the damn thing will win my undying affection and…um…uh…something nice.  i know!  DQ boy! he doesn’t look engaged, or anything…so, uh, as long as you promise to move here so i don’t have to let him go, a talented young mail-order ice cream boy can be yours for just a little bit of closure.

He couldn’t say he hadn’t been warned.

Gordon normally ate oat bran for breakfast. Seven days a week, whether the girls were there or not. Oat bran – no sugar – soy milk, coffee. After his run, before his shower. At nearly fifty, it is work to stay trim, regular, ship-shape.

He generally pays little attention to whether the girls eat breakfast – he refuses to keep crap cereals in the house, though they are welcome to oat bran or toast or fruit as they desire, and he suspects the elder of throwing up most of what she eats anyway – so when the school counsellor had caught him in the midst of a meeting Friday afternoon – an important meeting, a single-malt meeting – and mentioned pancakes, it had thrown him off, led him to assume that the conversation was a prank, a charade.

“I don’t eat pancakes,” he’d said, flatly, into the phone, grimacing towards his Scotch partner with a look he’d hoped was both authoritative and blameless.

“Sir…Mr. Herbert…” The voice on the other end of the line had sounded awfully young. Gordon  had grown irritated. Stupid joke. Maybe his youngest had pissed off some of the in-crowd at school? Fourteen year-old girls can be such bitches.

“Thank you for your time.” His voice had been curt, final, all Father-Knows-Best as he’d hung up, making it clear that he did not appreciate the interruption, the incursion of drama into the realm of his dignity. But when he’d flipped the phone over just to check the number, the display had read “Wilmington Charter School.”

Gordon’s run Saturday morning had taken him down towards the stream in the park. He’d noticed the faint tinge of yellow in the leaves, there, amongst the stately old trees that dappled the path with leaf-filtered light. “Odd,” he’d thought. “That’s early.” The leaves seldom fall until well into November.

When he’d gotten back to the house and found both girls up and in the kitchen, his thoughts were identical. This was odd. This was early, for a Saturday. He smiled at them, vague and solicitous. Julia, sprawled on the couch by the breakfast bar using his laptop, waved back sleepily. Tess had her back to him. She was…making pancakes.

“Hey, dad.”

“Hey, hon.” Gordon was aware, for a moment, that he sounded unusually hearty. He approached her, suddenly tense, like an animal wary of a trap. A part of his brain reeled, scrambled to recall yesterday’s phone conversation. Another part of it scanned the countertop for his coffee.

“I don’t eat pancakes,” Gordon said flatly, for the second time in less than twenty-four hours. He picked up his coffee cup and stared at his youngest child, willing her to look him in the eye.

Tess raised her eyes to his. The flecks of gold mirroring his own caught the morning light. She looked younger without all the usual makeup. She laughed.

“Who said they were for you, piggie?” she teased. She poked at him, digging where his belly used to be before all the running. For a second, her father remembered her, small and round and still in diapers, the two of them playing piggies with her tiny, stubby toes, oinking in abandonment.

“Make me a few,” he grinned at her, surprised by himself. But his smile was like steel, a challenge.

yesterday morning, about 4:15, i woke up with a start.

heartburn.  pee break.  adrenaline.  chomped down a few Tums, had some water, tried to quiet my mind, to plump the pillow and slide back into sleep.  no chance.  got up and watered all my plants instead.

nesting?  nah.  first day of a week-long writers’ conference.  Ann-Marie MacDonald, live and in the lovely,  sardonic, talented, like-to-go-drinking-with-her flesh.  Carol Bruneau and Anne Simpson leading faculty workshops, in intimate groups; real live agents and publishers sharing advice.  peers - or rather, People Who Are Not Really My Peers as They’ve Already Written Novels - to share work and consort with.  all at a gorgeous resort, twenty minutes from my house, with fantastic food.   basically, candyland for anyone who aspires to be a wordsmith.  or who likes chocolate cake and good vocabularies.  since i found out in late July that i’d been granted a bursary to attend this shindig, i’ve been drooling…and intimidated, but mostly drooling.  looking forward to this has given me a focus other than the coming baby to set my sights on, to fantasize about.  and so yesterday morning, i was just all atwitter with anticipation.  i figured.

the first day of the conference saw me away from my house from 8 am to 10 pm, a first since long before the whole bedrest epoch began.  i came home exhausted but delighted, full of ideas and stories and a dessert so rich and high in my gorge i considered writing it its own poem.  i did jot out a few scenes on my actual topic, and fell into bed weary and richly pleased, grateful for this opportunity.  proud of myself for pushing myself to actually try such a bold thing as running in these heady circles.

about 4:30 am, i woke up with a start.

heartburn.  pee break.  adrenalin.  and a weird, non-rhythmic dull ache in my lower belly.  swallowed the usual suspects, tried the whole sleep thing again, gave up.  got up, did a couple of loads of laundry, folded all the baby sleepers, organized our finances.  no longer all atwitter with the first-day jitters, i forced myself to actually take stock of my state of being.

nesting?  um, i think so.  i am not a morning person.

i was hanging curtains - quietly - in our bedroom at 5:55 when Dave turned a bleary eye on me and muttered, “that’s a sign of labour, you know.”

yep.

33 weeks, 4 days.  still too early, but not so early that there’s significant long-term risk to her if she comes…just a rough start, wee thing, and possible complicated weeks in the NICU.  they will no longer stop labour if it starts in earnest.

the dull ache subsided about 9:30 am, in the midst of the writing workshop’s group feedback session.  i had to skip a session of the conference later in the day for this week’s appointment with my OB; cervix short, soft, thinning.  it appears ye olde cerclage stitch is letting go…or at least a loop of it has already.  and if i have any contractions or further aches at all, from here, i’m to go in and we’ll take just take it out.  i may be fishing-line-free sooner than i’d imagined.

or not.  the way my body’s been cleaning itself out, the way it feels like it’s gearing up without me, i’d guess yes.  except i’m usually wrong.

oh world, you clever little trickster.  sure, this is the only week out of the past six months when i’ve actually got other plans that don’t revolve around gestating.  is it really necessary to remind me of my small, snivelling place in the universe by threatening my still rather itsy-baby baby with imminent arrival when we’ve come this far?  is it truly that entertaining to deprive me of sleep right when ye olde brain is actually on call for regular all-day usage for the first time since, um, March?  must we play this little maybe-we’ll-go-to-the-NICU game when Oscar’s sitter is actually on holiday all next week and Dave’s dad’s in the hospital, rendering Grandmaman unable to come to babysit?  seriously?  you’re funny, world.  i get it.  i don’t run the circus ’round here.  you’re the boss, and i salaam to your charming sense of humour.

but could we just wait ten more days, or so?  September is such a lovely month for birthdays, i hear.  and Ann-Marie MacDonald has a reading Thursday night at the library.  it’s gauche to break your water at the library, world.  got it?

please. let her stay safely put.  or at least let me sleep, while i practice trusting my body to do what it needs to.

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

this whole nesting thing - which goes waaaay beyond my usual OCD issues regarding tidiness - still appears to be having its wanton way with me.  i just sorted a bunch of outdated files.  my recycling?  you could eat off it.

i’ve never had this before, not really.  for those of you who have been similarly possessed by forces of frantic evil…is there any truth to the rumour that this is a harbinger of things to come soon?  what was the time lapse for you between the onset of Stepford Wife symptoms and the arrival of bebe?

somebody tell me a month, ‘kay?

(and then shoot me when six weeks from now i’m still pregnant and eating my words AND my screen, and the world is cackling bwah ha ha ha ha.)

pssst.  i have a secret.

i think i’m having a fabulous summer.

yeh, i’m more or less unemployed, with legs as weak as paper matchsticks and a belly the size of a Volkswagen.  yeh, laundry is frequently my most impressive daily accomplishment.  and stool softeners and Tums are my dearest, most beloved companions these days.  i am a glamour queen beyond measure.

but…with all this time off it’s been the first summer since we moved back here to this island vacation destination that i’ve actually had any time to spend with the myriad of people who descend on the place in late July and early August.  i had coffee with a girl i haven’t seen since high school, spent an entire afternoon taking up space in a restaurant with some fabulous women i don’t see often enough, discussed life, the universe, and everything with old friends from Korea, visited with aunties and a bunch of other people passing through in the seasonal glut of tourists and homecomers.  i’ve had time to pay attention, to linger, to collect myself between visits.  turns out working is hell on the social life.  i suspected as much.

tonight, Dave & Oscar & i are going out to a friend’s cottage for the night.  i’m not a lay-in-the-sun girl, but the beach at night?  some part of me was made for the beach at night.  dunes and cool night sand under my feet, stars, the crash of waves a few metres hence, a bonfire.  we’ll put O to sleep and then, with a few other parents, take turns minding the store while the rest abuse some old guitars down on the shore.  singing, maybe.  the mutter of side conversations and laughter.  but mostly just the licking, crackling flames and the ancient wonder of a fire…the first tv, the first happy hour bar, the first church of the human soul.

i’ll probably be the only one sober, and i’ll get tired first and lay my head down on Dave’s lap and worm myself into a little nest in the sand and become quiet, but my eyes will be open, rapt and locked on the glow of the little sparks dancing up into the blackness, until i waken cold and shivering when the party ends.

how is it that memory can feel more vivid, sometimes, than the present?

i am in Halifax, but not in the hospital…i am on a vacation of sorts. it feels more like time travel. i wander here in a soup of memories, bright and disconcerting and surreal, expecting to encounter former selves around every corner. these conjunctions of days and years all jumble together, knocking me off balance. the disequilibrium keeps catching me by surprise.

i am here alone. or not alone - my college roommate and i are crashing here together - but without O, without Dave, without responsibilities…just me and Susie, painting the town red. nineteen years i’ve known this girl, this woman, this friend i seldom see anymore. she’s a doctor now, which is promising if this now-31-week bebe gets any saucy ideas, but she still makes me feel seventeen again, goofy and light. and known. we pick up the common threads between us easily, gracefully, as if the time lapsed is only stories to tell. we are here for the wedding of another college roommate, entertainingly scheduled eleven years to the day after my own wedding, in this city i lived in during that marriage. i was packing to move from this city - packing up that marriage - when i first sat with Dave on my kitchen floor eight years ago yesterday and realized, hell, i am in trouble.

so i am seventeen and twenty-eight at once and yet very much the thirty-six-year-old mother and mother-to-be, as well, because the fact of this burgeoning body is not something i can leave behind for a weekend . and it is August now too and encroaching on what should have been Finn’s birthday three years ago had he not been born in this place and gone, all too soon, and so those shadows walk along the calendar with me this time of year, inescapably. and being on my own, sitting yesterday morning in the anywhere space of a Starbucks with no agenda but my journal to write in, called up all sorts of other echoes, other selves who’ve sat for hours with a black pen over an empty page, people-watching. lost in Vancouver, bewildered by the concrete and glass and the low, oppressive clouds, feeling alien and broke and hopeless. trying to make my way through weeks in Ireland on my own while i wished myself back in Korea with that troublesome Dave whom i looked for around every corner, no matter how many half-worlds separated us. Bangkok, Zurich, Istanbul. all places i’ve sat by myself in coffee shops and marked time and impressions on a page and tried to leave some trace for myself of a now i knew would never last.

i danced tonight, at the wedding, me who’s barely walked in months. When Doves Cry, Prince. because i could not stay in my seat. because when i was twelve this song was the first that gave me little flutters of what i’d someday understand as sexual awakening. because touch if you will my stomach, feel how it trembles inside brought different flutters now, as if that promise of twelve had come to full fruition and for the first time all weekend all those myriad, disconnected selves had consolidated into some, brief linear trajectory i could trace and own, and catch sight of myself in. it felt amazing to move, to rise. i was a sight, i’m sure. but i felt beautiful.

like Cinderella, i left just before midnight…to come back to an empty bed longing for the ghost of that boy who sat on my kitchen floor eight years ago to materialize, to make this vacation more than just a respite from the day-to-day our lives have become together and make the kaleidoscope whirl of all this memory less lonely, less strange.

last night i rambled through the neon streets of a nameless north Asian city, lost and utterly foreign and happy as a clam.

like any dream, it made no narrative sense. i was simply elsewhere, escaped, otherworlded. it was vivid, a montage of sense recollections and body memory, smells and sights and pace all propped up like rusty actors on a stage that seldom has much call for them. they fought for their star turn, elbowing in on each other in rapid succession, costumes dusty but still perfect in form, bizarrely familiar in their forgotten but once-intimate Otherness.

it was day and night both in this dream, and Seoul and Osaka and Beijing and Busan and Daejeon all together…a hundred human habitations of relentless urbanity merged, distilled…all these but never Shanghai, nothing so recognizable and coherent to the occidental eye as the grand old Whore of the Orient with her Art Deco facades. there were piss-ridden alleys and sterile fusion bars, ten-lane thoroughfares with whizzing cars and motorcycles and scooters, both sides of the street jammed with a cacophony of lit signs that disdain all notions of harmony and makes Times Square look tame. i do not know what they hawked, in my dream, but then i never knew what they said when i was there, either. the in-jokes of signage were lost on me just as the Engrish hilarity of neon proffering “pork catlet” - cutlet - was presumably lost to those who lovingly promoted such wares. in my dream were colours, so many colours cutting into the dark in bright clean lines, blurring into a haze, and the graceful arc of the few old buildings that remain against the cigarette-box-design of the new, thousands of them, disappearing into the horizon in a sea of unending ugliness made vibrant by the tang of sugar or garlic or vinegar or liquor from the street vendors and the fetid waft of garbage and sewage beneath the open grates of the alleyways. and always, for months, the fallen cherry blossoms lingering. in the dream they were underfoot and all the paving tiles were shaped like diamonds.

girls with kewpie-doll double eyelids, surgically created but so ubiquitous that the under-thirties appear utterly genetically different from their elders, bestowed stewardess smiles upon me as i plowed along, eating up ground in this imaginary Ur-city too big to be outwandered. people thronged, fifty thick on the streets. fish flopped in plastic basins, pigs’ heads and carcasses with paws grinned glassy-eyed at me from market hooks. the modesty of appropriate dress perched alongside the gaudy love hotels, grinning at me, sex unmentionable yet discreetly everywhere, vending machines with cock rings displaying their wares like cans of coffee or goggle-eyed stuffed animals. cartoons everywhere. i felt a little, on waking, like i’d been in a cartoon, some strange cigarette-smoke and plum wine-laced anime tableau designed for aesthetic impact…but then remember that i always felt that way, there.

ah, the sometimes beautiful invisibility of being Other, of being so hopelessly and irredeemably different that there will be no true belonging, no amalgamation. all is pardonable or ignorable, chalked up to the barbarity of skin rather than individual indiscretion. no history, no ties. my feet were shod in army boots, then in the plastic bathroom slippers one would never sully with dirt from outside one’s apartment. but i went marching, marching, flashing through corner stores and chicken stands and grand public edifices to historical events i do not really understand, all in hard pink plastic footwear bearing homonculous-shaped toy rabbits on it, and my legs were strong and did not ache.

i could have walked all night long through those kaleidoscope streets, dreaming. and when i woke too early to the sound of “mama” echoing through my bedroom in my house in a town i have known all my life, i felt suddenly, incongruously homesick.

the almost-in-laws are visiting this week, tackling long-moldering tasks like painting our living room and recycling Dave’s overgrown beer bottle collection and helping build a playhouse for Oscar in the backyard.

bless them…they are very welcome guests. no, i’m not sharing them. renting…? maybe.

yesterday’s tasks involved a long list of doctor’s visits. in the morning, Oscar and his grandmother and i trekked to the ear clinic for a three-minute viewing of O’s inner ears that culminated in the decision to get tubes put in. in the afternoon, he and i both had separate visits at the hospital - his at the pediatric clinic for a follow-up on the immunity deficiencies he’d been tested for six weeks ago, mine at Labour & Delivery so my doc here could actually use the existing u/s machine to check my cervix along with ye olde manual grope. the u/s was unofficial, of course…because our province won’t pay for an OB from here to take a four-week leave to train in Halifax under the perinatology experts, and though the perinatology team from there are willing to come here for short sessions to train our folks, neither province can agree on who will pay their flights. the joys.

anyhoo, the hospital is a sizable edifice, sprawling and vaguely Memories of Star Trek in its design. since i am generally restricted from walking further than thirty feet or so, and since i’d already trod triple that just getting in and out of the ear clinic in the morning, i asked Oscar’s grandmother to drop him and i off at the front door, where we’d appropriate one of the wheelchairs that are so thoughtfully made available. she’d park, and then the three of us would wheel down to the bowels of the building where the pediatric lair clinic lurks, then waaay back up to the opposite corner where L&D is located.

the hospital, it so happens, is under a major MRSA crackdown these days. neon-green bottles of anti-bacterial handwash everywhere, and only one visitor per patient, nobody under twelve. i’d already made arrangements for O and his Grandmaman to drop me at L&D after his appointment and then beetle on home without me, because the birth unit is currently closed to children already born.

so when Oscar and i strolled in the big front doors and up to the main desk to wash our paws, i wasn’t shocked when the candy-striper in charge of the Very Important Bottles of Handwash glanced in alarm at the two-year-old and inquired, with officious panic, where we planned on going. she didn’t seem quite as relieved as i would’ve expected when my answer of “pediatric clinic” thus saved her launching into her spiel about The Rules and No Small Visitors, but we went about our germ-killing business without further conversation. until i asked her about wipes for the wheelchair.

she looked at me. she had very large, watery blue eyes, ringed in a silvery liner. they reminded me of fish.

wheelchair?

i explained that O and i were just about to grab a wheelchair. it happens that my mother works at the hospital, and had assured me that they keep industrial-strength wipes there behind the desk, so that the chairs can be wiped down between uses. having just seen a poor sickly soul deposited at the door in one, and having noted that neither candy striper nor commissionnaire had leapt up to clean the departed conveyance upon that person’s exit, i figured it was on me to wipe down my intended chariot myself. and were there any wipes, please?

is it for you? her eyes goggled at me, wetly.

the wipe?  no i came in clean, thank you very much, retorted the little voice in my head, but i told it to shut up. “the chair? yes it is, i’m on maternity bedrest, not supposed to walk…and i just want to wipe down the chair as the little guy’s likely to touch every inch of it and with the MRSA alert…” i trailed off. insert sweet motherly smile. show teeth.

Miss Fish Gaze suddenly morphed from Keeper of the Handwash to Guardian of the Entire Domain. she looked over the row of ten empty wheelchairs spaced out across from her, then back at me. but you walked in, she said, half-accusingly, half-stunned

my mother likes to lament that she tried to raise me with manners. i don’t think she has any idea to what level she succeeded, or how much i resent her for it sometimes. because i did not reach across the desk and beat that poor teenaged girl’s head into her little green bottles of anti-bacterial handwash until her fishy-eyes splattered all over the desk, no i did not. pity. nor did i grab my child, fling us both into the wheelchair and proceed to do loud papa wheelies all over the lobby of the hospital, which was clearly what Miss Fish’s tone insinuated that someone as hale and mobile as myself must have in mind. yeh, those maternity bedrest patients, you know what they’re like. yet i refrained. instead i cocked my head and looked her straight in the eye and said, “wipes?”

the surly teenage girl high on the power of her candy stripes caved. she handed them over, with the same misplaced self-righteousness that she’ll display forty years from now when she’s a bossy, squat matron shooing kids away from the plates of squares at some local church supper. i wiped down the wheelchair, settled myself and Oscar, and waited for Grandmaman to materialize. when we whisked past Miss Fish’s desk on our way to the elevator, i was tempted to reach out and steal a bottle of handwash from under her nose, just because.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

the appointments turned out well. my cervix has its eyes on the prize once again, and my doctor is making noises now about not even taking the stitch out until 38 weeks. since i’ve never carried past 36 and am terrified about going into labour with the damn thing still in, i kind of hope we can come to some further accommodation on that matter. but the fact that she’s even talking about 38 weeks is pretty amazing. and Oscar’s chickenpox vax apparently didn’t take, but otherwise he shows no signs of an immuno-suppressed system and is as healthy as an asthmatic two-year-old with chronically infected ears can be. all dandy. praise be.

now i’m just going to stay peacefully in my house watching Dave and his parents spruce the place up and fantasizing about ways to inappropriately and flagrantly misuse hospital wheelchairs on my next visit.

Oscar after his nap…soft around the edges, little body still bleary and warm.

i love this photo. alas, i did not take this photo. Kate came over for an afternoon a few weeks ago, and the lens she pointed at us offered up faces of my son i’d never seen before. she has a wicked eye. she also has a wicked camera.

i once, in the last days of film, invested a few years training my own eye to frame and capture photojournalistic images of the lines and structures and stories that hid in plain sight in the exotic places i journeyed…i have a photo essay of the sectarian murals of Belfast, one of the rooftops of Busan, South Korea, and one of the cats of Istanbul. but i never did master the details of focus and aperture and lighting enough to get my old warhorse K-1000 to take great shots of people, particularly children…they’re twitchy little creatures.

i’d like to try. Dave & i have been talking, and the truth is there’s not much we plan on buying for this new baby. some kind of nursing rocker, oh yes o aching, withered core muscles, oh yes…but beyond that, we’re into hand-me-downs and intend for O and Bebe to share a room, at least for awhile. so we thought maybe we might spend on this child in the place that second-borns - or second-brought-homes - get notoriously shortchanged: photos. we’re in the market for a good camera.

what we have right now is a little hp Photosmart R817…fine for snapshots, but slow, and the light and focus are never great. i want something i can manually adjust. i want something quick, that can capture a first smile rather than the blur of a turning head three seconds later. it doesn’t have to be top of the line. it doesn’t have to be the deal of the century, either. i want advice.

what’s your camera?  what do you like about it?  what doesn’t it do well?  got any recommendations?