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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?

ever since it dawned on us the other night how dire the situation with the runt tree is, Dave’s taken to watering it in the evenings.  birches are thirsty creatures.  we know that our weeding/nitrate-enriching measures - however highly recommended by Tree Doctor Google - likely won’t save it, but trying feels better than sitting back and watching it wither.

on Saturday, before bedtime, Oscar “helped” Dave tote the big bucket from the tap on the side of the house back to the shady corner where the trees stand.  i watched them, Dave adjusting his pace to that of O’s stubby, eager little legs, the big hand and the small balancing the handle between them.

it was Canada Day yesterday…and it was hot.  stinkin’ hot.  after a jaunt to the petting zoo with Daddy and Nannie, Oscar spent the late afternoon lounging in his backyard blow-up pool.  because his is a glamourous life.

i was parked in a lawnchair beside said pool, cooling my feet in the three-inch depths of grassy, chilly water, being busily splashed by my son.  Dave was drinking a beer. the big bucket with which the pool had been filled lay upturned beside it on the lawn.

when Oscar picked up the bucket and dipped it into the pool, i looked at him.  quizzically.  i didn’t realize he had fully mastered the zen art of water transference, so when he hoisted the bucket and trotted off with it and its contents most determinedly, i was puzzled.  i asked him what he was doing.

wawa dee, said he.

i speak Oscar-ese pretty fluently, but this took me a second.  i cocked my head and peered at him, and he repeated himself, a hint of exasperation in his voice.  like, duh, mama…wawa dee.  poor beleaguered Oscar, his parents dumb as muffins.  he gave up on me and toddled off across the lawn, heaving the bucket fully half his size along with him.

and he watered the tree, the dying tree, of his own volition.  his brother’s tree.

and his father and i sat with our feet in the kiddie pool in the hot sun, tears in our eyes…but of pride, not sorrow.

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in non-tree-related news, the lovely and literate Mad nominated century for a Perfect Post this month.  Mad, thank you.  a post nominally about children’s literature, nominated by a children’s librarian who doesn’t even really like Anne of Green Gables?  dude, you made me feel like a writer.  

pondering how to actually deal with things going right got me thinking about a random encounter i had in the grocery store a couple of months ago, back when i, um, used to go out.

i got told i hadn’t changed a bit, with a big ol’ perky smile thrown on the end of those words for good measure.  and i hated it.  because i don’t want what’s gone wrong in my life - and specifically, or for me, most significantly, the loss(es) we’ve endured in our road to parenthood - negated.  i don’t want that journey of coping and healing dismissed, written out of my history, my identity.  and yet neither do i want the role of garment render and teeth gnasher to become a crutch, an excuse for fearfulness, a cloak worn past its expiry date.

i has a new post up at Glow in the Woods.  all welcome. 

flipping through old photo albums while ostensibly tidying the den, i come across a collection of photos entitled “June 1998.”

ten years ago.

the span of time is not so shocking as the irrefutable visual evidence that i was not, as my internal clock testifies, a mere child a decade ago.  apparently i am not actually eternally twenty-four after all. in fact, i was not even twenty-four then…i was twenty-six, a year married, living in Halifax and working on my M.A. and holding down three part time jobs and utterly, totally confused about my place in the world and how to make my way in it.

to top off all that angst i had bad hair, the result of an unfortunate first encounter with highlights and the effort to grow out years of a pixie cut into something longer.  two brassy walrus tusks swooped down from my brow, framing me in yellow.  i refused to cut them because they were, well, long-ish.  note to self: yellow is not your colour.

there is an end-of-year-celebration shot of me and my students, a G.E.D class that i taught through the local community college, for whom i’d dragged my carcass into my car and out of town at 7:30 every morning for half the year, out to a free elementary school classroom in a fishing village on the coast, where we’d all tucked our knees up under our chins on the tiny chairs and tried to figure out high school math together.  i look at them and wonder where they are now, the stevedore who’d come back to school because his union would no longer keep him on unless he got the qualification, the girl who smoked so much she literally set her alarm through the night so that she wouldn’t wake up nicotine deprived, the local drug dealer, the couple with the three little kids, the woman who brought me her hand-me-downs through the year because she thought i might like some new clothes.

there is a random shot of me taken at the other teaching job i held that year, the one i hated in principle: tutor for one of those “we’ll fix your children” farms learning centres that pay their (fully trained, experienced, qualified) teachers ten dollars an hour and charge you twenty for the honour.  it was the first job i got when we’d landed in the city the September before, and i’d gradually dropped my hours down and down until i only had one client left…the little girl who appears in the picture with me, beaming into the camera.  Mercedes.  i stayed with Mercedes through the school year because i liked her too much to leave.  she was eight, a roly-poly, bespectacled imp with severe learning disabilities but a higher emotional IQ than almost anyone else i’ve ever met.  i adored her.  urchin-like, frumpy little fussbudget daughter of a slender, made-up mom who always seemed bewildered by the child she’d produced, Mercedes had me at hello.  she had more sophisticated work avoidance tactics than federal bureaucrats do - we’d open up our books, and i’d offer her a choice of what to start with when suddenly, with perfect guile, she’d peer up into my face through her coke-bottle lenses and inquire, just like the local biddy at a church supper, “now, how’s your Nannie?  my Nannie’s been sick, you know.”   and sucker that i am for Nannies, we’d end up in a ten minute conversation that had absolutely nothing to do with symbol recognition or basic multiplication but was often one of the nicest i’d had all week.  i secretly wanted to take Mercedes out for coffee and a smoke.

there is a photo in that collection of me on a back deck with a guitar in one hand and a bottle of Southern Comfort in the other.  the bottle is largely empty.  i appear largely smashed.

there is another photo of me singing my heart out over same guitar on same deck the night the cops showed up to ask us to cease the caterwauling.  most politely, they actually waited ’til our chorus of “Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz” had dribbled to a halt before interrupting.  they were complementary about the singing, but the neighbours…well, you know.  besides, isn’t that song supposed to be sung a cappella?  our friends from Toronto were visiting that night and went home and regaled their friends with tales of the weird, friendly cops in the Maritimes.

there are a lot of pictures of me and my first husband.  we look pleasant.

there is a shot, smoke-obscured, of my friend Antony and i leaning back into an old, sagging velvet couch in the office where we produced two issues of a national arts and literature magazine, all uber-cool and sharp, clean b&w lines.  there were five of us who spent that spring and summer toiling in that smoky office before the whole venture went defunct, taking the third of my part-time jobs with it.  i was the editor.  i loved the work, the words, the creativity, the deadlines and the late-night meetings and the sheer freedom of it after four years spent as a teacher.  i disliked having to remind either of the cocky little upstart writers who’d started the whole deal that they would, y’know, eventually have to pay me.  one eventually did, right before he wisely bailed out of the sinking ship and moved to South Korea.  his name was Dave.

now, ten years later, i live with that cocky little twerp…who a few years and half a world hence, i noticed might be the love of my life.

time does crazy things to a person.

i suspect and kinda hope that the trajectory between now and ten years from now is a little more linear than the one that brought me here from June 1998.   my twenty-four-year-old soul will grow a little more aged on the outside, i suppose, and there will be the inevitable surprises and sorrows that mark one along the way.  but at thirty-six, i know - and accept - who i am in a way that would have been incomprehensible to the girl/woman searching back at me from that June 1998 collection.  and i looked at those pictures, and at her unlined brow framed by garish highlights, and thought, thank god i do not have to go back.

to the multitude who weighed in with ideas and experiences and just good wishes regarding milk and asthma and all that mad stuff…thank you.  so much.  we saw our family doctor (who’s not utterly opposed to the possibility of a dairy connection, btw, it’s just not his area of expertise in any way) on Thursday, and Oscar’s lungs are clear and good to go once again.  the doc too was strongly in support of putting O back on the rice milk for now and then trying cow’s milk again in a month or two once cold season is over and before allergy season begins, just to see if we can establish a pattern.  allergy tests will follow, but probably not until fall.

the rice milk O drinks is organic and fortified with vitamin D and calcium, so i feel pretty good about giving it to him.  while his diet isn’t heavily meat-reliant, he gets a lot of protein and actually gravitates more to protein foods than carbs, so i’m not over-worried about him having any protein deficiency.  we do give him soy milk occasionally too but don’t want to overload the soy in his diet as kids with dairy sensitivities often have the same reactions to soy.

and mostly, yep, i’m still just kinda hoping he’ll grow out of it.  so having all of you tell me stories of siblings and relatives and cousins’ pet dogs with terrible childhood asthma that magically went away in adulthood…that was like candy.  i love you.  i like to imagine myself a realist and i do prefer to see the details of what’s coming down the road at me, but clearly…when it comes to my kid, i’m all over the possibility of magical salvation, of having him snatched from the jaws of even very small, controllable, more irritant-than-life-threatening kinds of dragons.  and in the meantime, he gets tasty organics.  god, i am such a yuppie.

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and in the off chance that you spend your nights dreaming of rubbing elbows with my bourgeois self, some of us from eastern parts will be gathering May 16th-18th in bizarrely-picturesque Chester NS for our own highly-tongue-in-cheek version of BlogHer, since San Francisco is thousands of dollars away for us and July just…well…inconvenient for most.  Maritime BlogHer will involve absolutely no speeches, panels, or experts, but probably copious amounts of wine, beer, and chocolate.  i have first dibs on the chocolate, just so all are clear.  we’re numbering a cozy 8-10 strong, renting a B&B for the weekend, and…um…plan to hang out.  invitations are utterly open.

however, if you do plan to come and kiss fish (hey, it’s local custom, one has to be culturally sensitive) with us, we’ll need confirmation by the end of this month.  please join our facebook group (it’s the only one entitled Maritime BlogHer, easy to find) and let us know your travel plans so we can try to coordinate rooms and drives and all that good stuff.

and i can regale you with all the exciting things i learn about dairy and asthma in the interim.

days slip by and it’s like there’s nothing i can find to say…as if all the threads of narrative got wound up like dust bunnies and shoved behind the furniture, hidden by the bulk of everyday living.

but under my skin, my busy, moving skin, i am here. wanting to speak. wanting to be heard. wanting to find space in the riot of routine to make words.

i wrote poetry when i was a kid. never reams of it, but terse, crafted experiments with rhyme and free verse and the siren song of rhythm…odes to stormy weather with titles that mortify me now, and efforts to rework what i thought of as the sheer literary perfection of Duran Duran’s “Hungry like the Wolf.” there were early forays into themes of becoming, too, and a few pieces half-remembered that i wish i still had, that dart across my memory taunting me with the idea that my career as a poet peaked at fourteen. it was like alchemy for me, this writing, a spell cast with words and ideas, woven on scraps of paper but always intended, secretly, in my emo-kid heart, for the world.

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i grew up listening to the poetry of Bob Dylan on my mother’s Joan Baez albums. we were not a radio family, and the years of 8-track passed us by. we had a big old streamlined veneer turntable left behind by my father, and a collection of perhaps a dozen records that i figure he deemed too lame to bring with him when he went away to find free love: John Denver, Anne Murray, Roger Whittaker, The original Sound of Music Broadway recording, Simon & Garfunkel, some Salvation Army lady singing hymns, and the cream of the crop, Kristofferson and Baez, two albums each. the anti-establishment soundtrack of my oh-so-ironically-conservative single parent home, where middle-class respectability was the heighth of aspiration. yet i grew up singing along to “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word” and “Hard Rain” and my mother wondered later where i’d picked up my iconoclastic strain. she is not a person overly inclined to listen to the words.

i was well into my teens when i discovered that it was Bob Dylan who’d written half the songs that had held me rapt with their stories and their power on those scratchy Baez albums. i developed an acute case of hero-worship. i threw myself headlong into the canon of post-folk Bob, meandering through the intro-level cool of “Like a Rolling Stone” and the rest of Greatest Hits Volumes 1 & 2, progressing to Big Pink and “Isis” and “Brownsville Girl” and “Tangled up in Blue” over a period of years, different rambling tales enthralling me as reflections of my own love stories and wanderings and at the same time as universal, the only universal i ever really believed in.

the one thing i ever wanted to be when i grew up, all those years, well into my twenties, was Bob Dylan, bard. it is a sad, even silly thing to long for a voice that is already taken. i wrote derivative bits here and there, but was contemptuous of their obviousness, their sub-par Dylanesque parody. i ached to be wise, prescient, conduit of a generation. but while i could see, on an instinctive level, the rawness around me in that strange early-90s recession world on the cusp of grunge, i could not speak. i wanted to reap what i could not sow. my poems shrivelled and died. i turned my back.

i learned to play guitar, instead. badly. i sang folk songs, and i made a joyful noise of other’s words.

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i come now, with age accompanied by hairs on my chinny-chin-chin, to the realization that i am ill-suited to bard status in any case. even if i were able to shed all the extraneous responsibilities that eat my time and my internal narratives, i am not that type. i am no loner, no prophet. i like company, particularly in my misery. i hate being misunderstood. i fear offending. and i always fail whenever i try to frame things allegorically. but it isn’t just temperment and talent keeping me from my original life’s goal, oh no. it’s drive. i dabble. i am not courageous nor focused enough to master the craft of poetry and metaphor, to speak broad truths in permutations unending, to be the mirror of society that people quake to see themselves in. even if i could, i wouldn’t. i’d chicken out, over-analyze, get distracted by the laundry piles and fail to practise. i would assume that vocations come with no assembly required.

this doesn’t make me sad like it would have if i’d been able to see myself in this place some twelve or fifteen years ago. because i do speak, here, even if sporadically, even if sometimes only of diapers and songs i wish i’d written and themes that get repetitive after awhile. i speak as an editor at heart, the studied one who stints out her words and focuses on minutiae and details, small truths. but i keep making myself come back and speak, trying to learn my own words, to get back to that magic of alchemy that i tasted at fourteen, and keep the furniture from taking over completely.

but i marvel at those whose voices are bigger than they are. and i wonder if the opus unborn lives in all of us, somewhere under the clutter and the words we carve out from our days, or if these collections of the mundane are enough, are opus in themselves in these ether-bound rooms of our own?

we leave tomorrow for five days, off to Blighty for work, both of us. without Oscar.

i am excited - any chance to travel is cool by me, especially to historic parts of Britain previously unvisited by my Anglophilish self. even if they do make me work while i’m there.

while we took Oscar with us when we went to England last spring, i’m not entirely sorry he won’t be accompanying us this time around. the flying wasn’t a gay old time, to say the least. i also wasn’t working on that sojourn, just tagging along on long-saved airmiles so O and i could wander the streets of London with our transplanted friend Elise, which was grand. that first trip, though, planted seeds that have recently blossomed into this work trip, and since i’m officially part of the work bit this time around, the whole deal would probably be somewhat less effective and productive with the charming ankle-biter along. i’m still a little amazed (um, read, frantically ill-prepared) about this journey really happening…certainly two trips in a year to England is the sort of thing i fantasized about throughout a childhood when i very literally never went anywhere.

but i have these monsters that live deep in the cellars of my heart. i keep them muzzled most of the time, but the upcoming trip has unleashed their voices. weak voices, but shrill, insistent. they’re nothing special, i assume, these monsters, nothing that any of you who aren’t parents or even just children of parents yourself wouldn’t recognize. and they’re tamer than many…but they scare me. i don’t worry about my boy in the loving, generous care of his grandparents while we’re gone…in that i am blessed. but i fear planes falling out of the sky. i fear terrible, random horrors.

i fear not coming back.

i cringe in shame at the half-finished will kit in our desk drawer, given up because the complications of trying to sort out the proper language for bestowing custodial rights to others on our own. i kick myself for not having made that lawyer’s appointment to clarify precisely those things, now that it is too late to do so. mostly i stick my head in the sand and mutter the quiet litany of “we’ll be back soon, love” over and over in my semi-conscious, willing it to be true because really, the stark truth is that Dave & i want to be here to love and raise our child and we’ve been too chicken to contemplate any other possibility in all its naked, monstrous ugliness.

and yet, you can’t hide from living because there are monsters under your bed, or in your heart. it is as true now as it was when i was six.

in her less touristy and far more courageous way, Whymommy has been staring down those same monsters over the last seven months, since her diagnosis of inflammatory breast cancer in June. she’s been fierce with them and their terrible whispers of weakness and statistics. she’s looked them straight in the eye through months of chemo and nausea and pain, and refused to look away. she’s been fierce because she too is unwilling to contemplate any other possibility than being here to see her two little boys grow up.

tomorrow, while we drag our bags to the airport, Whymommy goes to the hospital for a double mastectomy. she has spent nearly the last three weeks counting down to this surgery…day by day, staring the monsters straight in the eye and telling us all why she’s looking forward to an event that in itself would scare the living bejesus out of most of us…and many, many of her reasons come down to two primary, precious things: her boys.

i wish you godspeed in healing, Whymommy, friend, and the continued strength to keep fighting. with each day, you not only beat cancer, but doubt and fear.  and i thank you, for your fierce hope, your reminders these last many days of all the things that make a life rich and joyful and worth living.  for the grace and honesty you’ve shown us all as you face the monsters down.

may Sunday bring us both safely home to the boys we love.

i used to live in the Arctic…north of the tree line, north of the Arctic Circle, on an island in the storied Northwest Passage.

if you look at a map and find Winnipeg, and then keep a finger tracing north until you hit the archipelago of ice and islands way near the top of the world, you will find the little Inuit settlement - a hamlet, formally, which caused my English-teacher self no end of amusement - which was the site of my first real, full-time teaching job, my own class, day in, day out.

i stayed only for two years, which in the Arctic marks me as one of those thousands of expendable white folk who come in and out of the landscape like the caribou, seasonal and interchangeable, running past in search of adventure or escape or just steady work, but not one who stayed long enough to be a colourful character the way so many of the longtimers are, memorialized in legend, at least by their own kind. i don’t know even if my students would know me now, more than ten years after i left…i don’t know if my name would ring bells for them, or if they know that they cross my mind, that i wonder about them, their kids, that i remember names and faces, that i still wish i’d done a few things differently. i was young.

and they, in some ways, were not. i taught high school, grades ten and eleven, English and social studies and computers and gym - laugh on, oh gods - and was the regular ‘chaperone’ for the youth drop-in centre and tried to run a drama club. i was twenty-three when i got there, and most of my class were only a few years younger, with a few who stripped me in years. Lucy was twenty-nine. almost all of them were parents, even the youngest ones, fifteen and sixteen, ripe with bellies i spent the first months trying to pretend weren’t there because i had no frame of reference for a people among whom teen pregnancy was just a fact of life, no frame of reference for a people for whom school was only a thirty-year-old intrusion - a colonial intrusion in which they saw little reflection of themselves, no matter how progressive I or the system tried to be - rather than a reason for being. i spent the first year angry, i think, half at them, half at me, deep in the grips of a culture shock more gutting and destabilizing than anything i experienced in Korea or anywhere i’ve globetrotted to since. in the second year, the anger faded and was replaced by something far more complex, but i realized - with some shame - that once my student loan was carefully repaid i had no interest in spending the rest of my twenties in a town that had only a hockey arena and two small grocery stores as public venues, even if that made me just another itinerant carpetbagger from the south. and so i bolted back homeward, back to the Atlantic coast i’d yearned for with its bars and fiddles and some small chance of occasional anonymity and belonging.

but it was stark, there, and beautiful, and just so fucking big…like the sky had stretched out because it was the top of the world. when the midnight sun faded into the slanting days of autumn and the early snows, the land shone, golden, for miles unending. i have never since seen light like that. photographers eat each other for light like that. and then, it goes. and for months, there are only stars. the town sits so far over the curve of the earth that even the northern lights were dim in the frozen sky, those winters, the town a little white curve of electric light nestled around a natural harbour, everything else inky blue-black out to infinity.

the first winter, when the dark came at Hallowe’en and the last threads of noonish dusk faded from the sky by the first week in December, i trudged confused and busy through my days in the unrelenting blackness, only to waken late every Saturday morning and cry myself back to sleep. i felt like Alice, toppled down the rabbit hole, on all fronts.

but the second winter was remarkably easy, when the dark came on. i was easier in my skin by then, and happier, and i hibernated without rancour and got engaged that Christmas to the one i’d dragged up to that godforsaken outpost of civilization, the one who nested in the dark with me and kept me warm and semi-civilized myself. in a place where they only cancel school at -65 degrees, warm matters. and civilized…i thought that mattered a lot. we left, eventually, because we thought it mattered so much.

but i remember the day i glimpsed it, that thing that the north has that makes people crazy and wild, that gets under their skin and makes them unable to ever be contented anywhere else on the planet. it was early January, and we were back at school, and it was an ordinary morning, maybe working on To Kill a Mockingbird or Midsummer Night’s Dream or one of the other ambitious things i tried to re-cast in light of Inuit culture that year, and only half-failed. and somebody was at a window, gazing out into the blackness, probably wondering when lunch would come, and then the hint of it crawled up over the heretofore invisible horizon and suddenly…there was light. a sliver, but light.

and my entire class crowded to the row of windows, me included, all of us pressing against the cold glass like paparazzi, our mouths open but silent, watching the oldest thing in the world: the sun, flirting with us, announcing.  it was one of the most beautiful things i have ever been part of, that minute or two, before we all went back about our business.  nothing much was said - not much was ever said up there, in the way of commenting upon the obvious.  and yet, with our gaze we bore witness together, me and those kids, those un-kids, enacting a ritual that i suddenly understood was as old as their culture and yet utterly spontaneous, unpredicted, unavoidable.  drawn like moths to flame, we were for that one moment in my teaching career all truly captivated,  mesmerized by the turning of the earth, by the promise of light.

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i noticed, today, in spite of the four foot (and still coming down!) snowfall, that the days are beginning to grow longer, to inch their way back to the light.  and i remembered.

it is Thanksgiving weekend up here in the cold lands on the Atlantic coast.  harvest season, frost touching the air, leaves beginning to change.  pumpkins - les citrouilles - are perched on door stoops and smashed outside grocery stores, thus providing entertainment across the generations.

Oscar discovered, this weekend, that pumpkins roll.  he also discovered that they make fine pie.

Dave painted our shed this weekend, and i painted the rusty and peeled bits on the trim of the house, so we’re all perked up around these parts.  we had waffles, this morning, that my dad made, with all my half-siblings around like a big, wild clan of coffee-drinking, waffle-dining pleasantness, and O played Lincoln logs with his older cousins, who were more patient with him than i knew six- and seven-year-old boys could be.  tonight, he and my mom danced in her kitchen to “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” and all was high theatrics and i couldn’t tell which one of them was having a better time.

i don’t have much to say, for once.  i’m in a quiet place, a lull of very little brain…i got some sleep this weekend, finally, after weeks of crazy work and crazier early mornings with little Herr Morning Person and his cough, and the luxury of rest seems to have left me soporific and slow.  or maybe that was the half a pie i ate.

either way.  we have shelter, and family, and food, and more than enough of all of it.

i am thankful.

happy Canadian Thanksgiving to you, wherever you may be.

the incomparable Slouching Mom offered interview questions. like a fish to bait, i bit. i’m a person who’s always found minds attractive, and Slouchy’s mind - from what i can piece together from the online personae she unmasks for us - is fascinating, and intuitive, and friggin’ brilliant. i wanted to know what she’d ask, so bad that i actually promised to answer. if i can’t sit down and have coffee with Slouchy and her generous, curious brain…then this virtual exploration will have to do.

but she does have an open invite to visit PEI.

1. Offer your high-school self a piece of advice you wish she’d taken.
oh lord. just one?

i reel a little when i try to get a sense of who i was twenty years ago: a part of me feels like that girl was older, in her certainties, than i’ll ever be again, and another part of me feels slightly mortified that she ever existed in the first place. i was so earnest then, and so confused - a total sponge for input and information, yet so completely abstract, without a compass. all i knew was that i didn’t want to be like anyone i knew, that i didn’t want the adult lives i saw in front of me. looking back, i feel a narrative connection to where i was then, in my life…ie. how i got here from there…but no more. like Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” that young me is a painting on a wall, which i can dissect in detail, even with warmth and sympathy…but ultimately, i killed that girl, traded her in for the new model(s) i’ve become in the interim.

however, for the sake of pain avoided on the road to here, i would happily sit down with that younger me - that much younger me - and say two things. first, for god’s sake, little girl, no one is expecting you to have your entire life together by the time you hit eighteen. it’s okay to be unsure. it’s even okay to start again if you find yourself on a bad path. time isn’t really wasted, especially if you learn from it. stop being such a perfectionist - you’ll only disappoint yourself.

two, you’re not fat. it’s hormones, and not worth hating yourself over. pluck your eyebrows and get out of those awful unflattering ’80s clothes and stand tall: there’s beauty in there, and someday, someone will come along to reflect that back to you, thank jeebus. for now, it would be good if you could believe it yourself.

2. Describe the most vivid memory you have from your early childhood.
i always struggle to come up with answers to “most favourite” or “most vivid” or “most whatever” questions, as they make me feel vaguely deficient for reasons i’ve never quite explored. like i’m excluding too much from the package, perhaps. but i do clearish-ly remember the first day of kindergarten, wherein i launched myself into the classroom and proceeded to show the teacher how i could count. to one hundred. i have no firm recollection of whether or not she actually let me go all the way…i really, really hope not.

3. What would we be most surprised to learn about you?
that depends, erm, on what image you’ve constructed of me from reading between the lines of this blog.

i imagine you’d all be shocked, for instance, to learn that i’m a little neurotic. oh no? you knew that. hmmm….

whiny? nope, that too.

tone deaf? ha. you can probably hear me humming from where you are, and it probably hurts your ears.

okay…how ’bout i have a paroxysmal fear of large dogs but send Oscar to a home with a bull dog in it, all day long every weekday. Bruiser is rather like a coffee table with a tail, really, but still…he has teeth. tell me what that tells you. please. ’cause i don’t know if it’s surprising, but i do know i don’t know what to make of it and could use the feedback.

4. Tell us what books are on your bedside table right now — the good, the bad, and the ugly.
by “bedside table,” do you mean strewn about the bed, under the pillows and stuffed down the side stuck up against the wall? good. we’re working on a collection that includes the most recent Harry Potter, which i believe Dave can now recite aloud, a Keegan history of World War II, Proust’s “Swann’s Way” (which i open at random, glory in about two pages of, and then promptly fall asleep. works like a charm. i have never finished the book and never hope to, but start it afresh every year), a biography of Mark Rothko, a Richard Scarry chewable book, and Nancy Friday’s “My Secret Garden.” sex fantasies of the seventies, oh yeh.

5. You were an only child. Oscar may end up without a younger sister or brother. Using your own experience as a frame of reference, what about being an only child do you not want for Oscar, and why?
ah…ah, great question. and carefully framed, which touched me. i don’t want O to grow up an only child in part simply because he was born a second son, and i feel bound, almost, to honour both him and his brother by having him grow up with a sibling. but i don’t know if that makes any sense or is just a vestige of grief, and therefore about me rather than O. but i wonder if he will have his own grief, someday, too…even just in the form of wonder and wistfulness, and i’d like him to have someone to share that with, someone to whom it belongs just as it belongs to him.

that sharing of memory and identity is really the key for me in wanting to raise two, even had Finn not been a part of our lives. it’s less about practicalities or even the supposed socialization benefits of siblings than about the weight of carrying an entire family legacy on one’s own shoulders.

there is, for me at least, an urgency to being an only child…and a loneliness, but i wasn’t lonely as a kid. it was in transitioning to adulthood that i realized i was leaving behind a whole world that had no existence outside of me, no narrative outside my own. there is no one but me who remembers my Nannie as a grandmother. no one but me who will remember the names of the dolls i loved, or recall the narrow hall of the apartment i lived in with my mom in elementary school through the eyes of a child.

i live in an odd and privileged limbo in the sibling department, as i do have half-siblings who live me near me now in our respective adulthoods, and while i don’t see them much i do like knowing they’re out there. there’s something comforting to me about them. and yet i know that so much of who i am and how i see myself is a near-direct result of having grown up as an only child, and i don’t think it’s a terrible thing, just not one i would choose for O if it turns out to be within my power.

we shall see.

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and on that effervescent note…if you haven’t fallen asleep or slit your wrists with the palpable maudlin angst, and would like to know what questions MY mind would blather out if we were at virtual coffee, you may, erm, beg in the comments. even though i’m late to this and you’ve probably answered fifteen people’s questions already.

’cause i really will ask odd ones, i promise.