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we went away for a week and i was mostly offline and i did not die.

yes, gather round, all ye internet hordes, and quiver at my testimony. i unplugged and lived to tell the tale.

here’s the shocking part: it was easy. hell, i didn’t even flop around on the ground like a dying carp, gasping for wireless. i expected to. i was ready. Dave was under strict instructions to carry me up the hill to civilization anytime i was noted typing notes into thin air. but no signs of withering or requiring plug-in were forthcoming.

instead, we both wandered up the hill and online from time to time to connect with our magical worlds and responsibilities out in the ether. but mostly, we hung out below. played cards. walked on the beach. had a bonfire. in the early mornings, normally reserved for mobilizations that small military juntas would envy, we lounged in jammies teaching Oscar how to play Junior Monopoly. Posey stacked the little property houses and the sun sparkled on the water. only the birds tweeted.

apparently Oscar has a knack for property acquisition and his father and i had better be good to that kid or we’ll find ourselves renting our own bed from the wee robber baron oh, say, next week.

but other than the shame of being soundly beaten in a competitive arena by a four-year-old and the mortification of having Dave actually notice me care that i was losing to a four year old, i remained hale and hearty throughout.

it was too easy. i am suspicious.
***

i don’t believe in the great divide our culture tends to build around that which is technological in its origin or medium and that which is not.

living in a much-hyped “digital age” means we inevitably also live in the midst of a discursive backlash against the digital, a sociocultural conversation positioning whatever is not digital on the side of the pure and the unchanged.  i don’t buy it. no, i did not put unplug and find myself suddenly living a life to make a Disney Princess eat her heart out, bluebirds perched on my shoulders and wholeness and wholesomeness magically within reach.

both versions of that not-quite-Cinderella story are lies. the prince is not an iPad. neither is it a world with only rotary phones and singing birds.

to me, the “digital age” is not about the technology at all, but about people. we fool ourselves in emphasizing the so-called digital nature of contemporary society: we are post-digital already. we have been for years.

post-digital is not “after digital,” but “after the digital becomes commonplace.” the technology has become so omnipresent that we need to start looking beyond its novelty and allure to the human practices it enables and limits and shapes.  we are not going back, barring cataclysm, to whatever pastoral analog version of society people’s selective memories like to cling to. but so long as we remain focused on the digital trappings that mark our society as visibly different from its predecessors, neither do we move towards any cultural maturity in this new form.

we are the equivalent of a 40 year old woman still enraptured by the oh-my-golly of her training bra. it ain’t cute anymore. and it’s getting limiting. if we actually want to mature into the possibilities of this new form we’ve taken, we need to focus past the sparkly bits on the surface and invite others to do more than snap our straps.

the part of post-digital life that seems hardest for some of us enthusiasts is boundaries. we have opened ourselves to community and connectivity and near 24/7 availability and presence and persona, and in the end, there are only so many hours in a day and so many followers and friends one can do anything meaningful with. yet going offline makes us sweaty. who are we without our appendages, our screens?

then we do it and it feels…perfectly normal. occasionally irksome, sometimes pleasant, momentarily – if we are lucky – extraordinary. like life. rather like i feel if i go braless for a morning: wouldn’t want to try to go to work that way, but it has its moments. most of which are about other things, particularly those things with small hands who clamour Mommy! Mommy! and make me long – lovingly – for the civility and distance of twitter interactions. until the laughing starts, and then i’m hook, line & sinker, never known anything in flesh or screen so beautiful as them.

i did hear more birds at the beach, and their songs made me breathe deep and slow in a way i’d forgotten to for far too long. and the radio silence meant there was more time and energy for internal things. social media is performative, and it never sleeps. nobody can entertain thousands of people a day without downtime, even in very tiny increments…not over the long haul.

still, had there been wireless at the cottage, i might have birdshit on my MacBookPro right now, people. and i suspect i’d still have found balm for my soul in the journey to the shore.

i’d like to test that theory again. soon.
***

how do you pace your relationship to the online world? do you go offline? does it make you anxious to be unplugged? or does being a cyborg make you feel a little dirty sometimes? what would a post-digital society look like, for you?

a Sunday afternoon. after a morning spent almost entirely in motion and frequently in peril of minor injury, the wild Josephine has been bagged – sleeping-bagged – and corralled in her crib with an entire safari of stuffed animals. there is silence.

except for her brother.

Oscar no longer naps, a fact against which my time-jealous mind still rails.  i am in the Denial stage of that particular grief. we moved past Anger, thank gawd, as fighting the inevitable in a loving yet despairing manner is a miserable experience that i firmly believe should be saved for one’s children’s teen years. we’ve also left Bargaining behind, when i realized that nothing short of tying the child to his bed was going to keep him in it. sigh.  Acceptance is still a long way off.

i like the trappings of kids: PlayDoh and toy villages and Lego and fingerpaints and books and jumping on the couch like Spiderman. my problem with naplessness is that playing PlayDoh and Lego and Spiderman with children is an experience rather akin to being low-totem maggot in Basic Training: you do what they tell you, or ain’t nobody having any fun. and that damn Spiderman always ends up leaping on me. ouch. and oh, my exhausted, cluttered head. so the respite of naptime remains a bygone golden era that i hearken to, most longingly.

when they both napped, i had guaranteed kid-free time twice a weekend. kid-free time means i get to slip interruption-free into the pipe and slippers of twitter, and ease myself from there into the writing, reading and research that is my perverse notion of relaxation.

in words, i make myself.  in crocheting my ass to the couch, i create the illusion of a room of my own inside my life.

my solution, since Oscar stopped napping, means even the couch is getting crowded. Dave sits on one side of the French doors between living room and our office-slash-playroom, at the desk, and i curl up, fetal and content, with my laptop. in the crook of my arm perches Oscar, with his laptop.

yep, we’re borg. looks on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Oscar is the inheritor of Dave’s old 2005 iMac, the little white workhorse that could. it’s been dropped twenty times, easy. its cord is held together with duct tape, and it sometimes freezes while loading games from sesamestreet.org, but mostly it works well enough to operate as the household Mother’s Little Helper that engages Oscar while Posey sleeps and mommy and daddy work.

he plays memory on the KidsCBC site, and watches old Cookie Monster clips from my childhood. he’s mastered dragging the mouse around the screen and clicking, and he can work the volume controls and start a DVD by himself. increasingly, he’s able to sound out the first letter of commands and guess what his options are.

today, i heard him muttering a little sing-song ditty at his computer, one that was half-ABCs and half-admonishments.  i asked him what he was saying. he looked at me as if i were unbearably slow. i’m having a compooooter probwem. it’s the ALPHAbet, mum. it’s a probwem.

he was putting his keyboard in Time Out for being all qwerty-like and out of order.

and i stared at my sworn enemy, the blank screen, and thought, it’s always the damn alphabet, son. if you’re ever gonna write, you may as well come to terms with that struggle early on.

see what leaps of cognition parental negligence can create? hell, i was in college before i realized the alphabet was at the root of all evil.
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in my professional life, i am an educator.  i teach. i research. i write strategic plans for academic programs. and i think about how social media are changing the world we’re raising our children to live in.

in other words, i tweet with my kid next to me on the couch.

and he sees me type, and laugh, and click on avatars of people he’s even – in some cases – met. he sees the pictures of your kids that you broadcast over twitter. he sees the articles and posts you share that i pore over and – with the articles – make notes on, even though he can’t read them. he understands that mommy and daddy’s work is based on a whole bunch of people – real people, with kids whose names he remembers – and that crazy alphabet. he knows all these things are somehow magically connected inside computers.

he is not yet four, and i’d venture he has a fair grasp on knowledge in the early 21st century.

he’ll start junior kindergarten in September.

and a lot of what he’s learning here on the couch – both in terms of skills and the modelling we do here in borg central – is likely to get drilled right out of him the minute he hits school.

schools are, by nature, antipathic to online networks and connections. it’s not just that our litiginous society suffers paranoid delusions about people being out to prey on our kids; it’s also that schools themselves have all the swift reinventive capacity of the dodo bird. plus pesky things like, y’know, limited budgets.

but it’s mostly that schools are structured to replicate a model of behaviour and authority where power is located in the central figure of the teacher, and students are valued for their compliance, not their knowledge.

lining up, listening quietly, waiting one’s turn…these CAN be useful skills in almost any life context. they are only inherently useful in an industrial society where the goal of schools is to turn out good nose-to-the-grindstone workers.

in our society, which rewards assertiveness, innovation, self-marketing, and an internal locus of authority for critical thinking, they can be detrimental to students if they end up being the main message kids take out of their schooling experience.

i’ve worked in and around schools now for fifteen years. i think most schools try hard, as do teachers and administrators.  and i value a great deal that schools do. i can’t imagine a field more frigging fraught and complicated and interesting than education, this great sociological experiment.

but neither can i reconcile this couch and the classroom as i know it, even when i stretch my brain. possibly it’s just another form of Denial.

but as both a researcher and a parent of children slated to hit the system running in another year and a bit, i’m curious. what does Acceptance look like, in terms of 21st century education? what does having your kids in school – or not, as it were – mean to you? how do you reconcile the ways of knowing, learning, and connecting that we do out here with what happens in classrooms? does it matter to you? and are we doing our kids a disservice by not only ignoring crowdsourcing and connected learning during the schooling years, but calling them plagiarism?

liven me up, here, people. ’cause i’m not getting a nap.

my grandfather is back in the hospital.

for two weeks, he was out. in a community care facility, a convalescent ward carved out of the old, cavernous, high-ceilinged Protestant hospital where i drew my first breaths.  decommissioned thirty years ago in the name of ecumenism, the place has been relegated to the old and the frail: we newly non-sectarian citizens gained a modern, Star Trek-style facility in the bargain. but i remember the old hospital from childhood, my grandmother and i trolling the rabbit-warren halls and narrow doorways with the Ladies Auxiliary snack cart, great workers for the cause. there is a big new plasma tv where the canteen used to be: i glance to that corner and see both, equally present, shadows competing.

he had a roommate named Chuck, a retired RCMP officer. they watched Jeopardy, and Chuck liked to pronounce on the failings of modern society. i snapped out answers on American lit before Alex Trebek had the questions out of his mouth, so Chuck approved of me, grudgingly. and my grandfather sat in his contraband LaZboy, shifting from side to side to ease his bedsores. he ate licorice, shared freely. Oscar liked to visit. Grandpa was walking to the common room for meals, getting speedy with his cane. they came very close to sending him home. we all held our breath, uncertain.

then, a week ago, a midnight run in an ambulance, back to the “new” thirty-year-old hospital, the one with actual nurses and meds and doctors. congestive heart failure again, and one arm swollen up like a football, red and hot and angry. cellulitis. antibiotics. catheter and IV and no appetite, once again. he lay in the bed, small and crooked, white waxy-ice feet poking out from the bottom of the sheet.

i asked. he nodded permission.

when you go back to the hospital, the pretense of being able to do it yourself drops away.  i picked up those waxy, frozen, narrow feet, the nails yellow as horn, and gently rubbed them, mindful of small sores and broken skin.

and just like that, we stepped beyond a veil that has separated us for nearly four decades, since i was last a bare-assed infant in his presence.

cream for his thin legs, his wide back, scabbed from skin degeneration. the arms, one big as Popeye’s.  my hands in his soft hair, only gone white these last few years, straight as a pin and cowlicked. i held his teeth in my hands and marvelled at the oddity of dentures, a whole generation plucked jaw-clean. for the first time in my life, i saw his face naked of glasses and teeth, and smiled to realize i still know him under all that i had not recognized as artifice.

he held himself with grace, accepting this breach, this intimacy.

the line around us all is invisible.  we construct it for our children as it was constructed for us, strengthening it with each step away from diapers. we make it sacrosanct and powerful, and if we do our jobs well it  holds their small but burgeoning bodies as we ourselves are held – unwitting within its iron boundary for decades. we pour energy and identity into protecting it, equating it with worth, making it a requisite of pride. we hide our waste, our blood, our wetnesses. this is what it means to be an adult.

we live in bodies and pretend they are private, machine-like. we prefer not to acknowledge we were ever cast from the Garden of Eden.

for most of us, only in childbirth, illness, old age, do we find ourselves naked and exposed in all our human vulnerability. if we are lucky, it is a fleeting thing. if we are not, we must shift, find a way to continue to live without the invisible garment of privacy protecting us.

to grow old and frail is to be stripped of the privilege of hiding from the unspeakable shame of…ourselves.

to be alongside someone facing their own decline is to be stripped of the comfort of that privacy. but also of the lie that independence is a necessary part of dignity.

that is the gift, if you can stay and not look away.
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my grandfather is a WWII vet. when i was a little girl, his stories of the war were still under oath, still secreted away, parceled out only in small, screened nibbles. i knew he had been a spy, knew a little about places he’d been, though Yugoslavia or Tehran or San Francisco were no more real to me then than Disneyland, and less interesting. what i did like, and he shared freely, to the eternal tightlipped disapproval of my dourly beloved grandmother Hilda, was Colonel Bogey.

if you have ever seen A Bridge on the River Kwai, you’ve heard Colonel Bogey.

whistled, it’s a jaunty tune, a wartime march. it was written in 1914, and was a million-seller, but somewhere between the two wars it took on a whole other life as a jolly, vulgar insult ditty, in the vein of “I Don’t Know but I Been Told” and rugby songs of all stripes.

the version my grandfather taught me goes like this:

Hitler has only got one ball
Goerring has two balls but they’re small
Himmler has something similar
and Doctor Goebbels has no balls at all
(la da da da da….)

no one can say my childhood was not rich in history.

the other night at the hospital, after my grandfather’s skin was creamed and his feet covered, i realized that i had no clue how to lift him safely and properly back toward towards the upper middle of his fancy Craftmatic, which, when lowered, had unceremoniously slumped him down towards its own left foot. with the IV and the catheter and the oxygen tubes all protruding, and his arm swollen and tender, he wasn’t able to maneuver far on his own. i called the nurse.

she came in, prompt and kind, and pointed out to me the blue pad underneath him. she and i positioned ourselves on either side of the bed and tugged upward. he came easily. he is not heavy now.

his johnny shirt, caught under him below the pad, came easily too. a little too easily. and though my brain shrieked don’t look Bonnie!, just like a personal Ray Stevens novelty-track in the back of my mind, my eyes were not so quick.

there are things a granddaughter ain’t supposed to see, in this life. we all know it. i still saw. and he knew, and i knew he knew.

the nurse covered him swiftly, all business-like. she walked away. i smiled at him, swallowing my own embarrassment. i asked if he was comfortable.

he met my eyes, grave and present. i looked back at him and decided if he can live without the veil, so can i.

i’m good, dear, he said. thank you. then he paused, sized me up, made the joke he couldn’t resist. and nope, i’m no German.

he winked at me and began to whistle Colonel Bogey, his good hand dancing, conducting the march.

i am 38 today.

i remember my mother’s 38th birthday. i was in grade 10. i have no recollection of what i bought her, what she might have liked at that stage in her life. i have even less sense of what i might have thought she liked at that stage in mine. it was only a few years past the birthday i bought her the Kids from Fame tape, with my own money. in hindsight, not an altruistic purchase.

38 seemed close to 100 to me, then.

it seems like last week and yet a lifetime ago. and my mother? seems oddly younger to me now.  a 23-year age difference between parent and child is so little, really. but at almost fifteen, any age or power differential is a chasm. when my kids are fifteen, i’ll seem old to them. hell, maybe i’ll be old. maybe there’s no difference between the two.

something about postponing having children – and, y’know, any kind of stable career arc – until, uh, “later in life” has created a surreal sort of plateau in my sense of my own age. the fact that i drag my carcass to bed by midnight even on Saturdays has far more to do with the shining faces that wake me at 6 am Sunday than it does with any sudden maturity or rejection of 3am raucousness. inside, i don’t feel terribly different than i did ten years ago. and beyond the extra softness that three babies and bedrest have wrought, i don’t live in my skin all that differently than i did twenty years back.

clearly, i am high on delusion. my own private fountain of youth.

but it is running out, slipping from me. 38 seems to be to youth as 14 is to childhood: the point at which you suddenly, irrevocably find yourself on the far side of the line. i catch myself in the mirror in woolen pants and high heeled boots and shiny jewelry, and i realize that i have, belatedly, grown up. my hair is sedately mid-length. my old, beloved army boots sit unworn at the back of the closet, gathering dust. i have entered my professional years. i am a few years late and my edges still need ironing, but here i am, securely and blatantly smack-dab in the middle-aged middle class, no matter how that makes me laugh at myself. i no longer live on the outside of much of anything at all.

i blink. i am Dorothy in Oz, bedazzled by her own shoes.

from the time i turned 14, or maybe even a few years longer, i’ve been peering forward, gazing ahead, trying to get to some indefinite point at which my life would actually, y’know, happen. i’ve spent my adolescence and entire “adult” life in a haze of vague, infinite possibility, afraid i’d miss something.

but when your field of vision is too wide, you can’t actually see.

apparently, for my birthday, i got bifocals. because for the first time in my life, i feel like the things i want – the goal things, the apply yourself and work towards it things – are in focus.  i see paths, where once i saw the whole damn mountain. it feels heady, this 38. it feels like i am just, finally, maybe, hitting my stride.

i have no model for this kind of aging.

if i showed you pictures of my mother at 38 and today, you would see little change. her hair was fully gray by 30; by 38 she’d found the style that has become her signature. she had a job that paid the rent and exhausted her; she has one now. her hobby is the community life of her church, alpha and omega.

when i went away to college she was a month short of 41. i am her only child, her one dependent. i pushed, then, for her to go back and finish her own degree, started a lifetime before and abandoned early in her marriage. but she could no more see her way clear to that kind of upheaval, that kind of change and debt and longterm planning than she could up and fly. she had she formed herself, and was, and thus remains, eternal.

she is no coward, do not misunderstand. she has the strength to endure and abide and stare down what would crush most people. she has lacked only luck, and family. those who risk are usually either headstrong or sure of someone to catch them. she was not made to be the first, and has never had the latter. wings are a privilege.

i have been headstrong since i turned 14. and once i left home my mother, without recriminations, gave me every inch of wingspan she could. i have believed, that entire time, that i am different from her.

it occurs to me only now that i’ve been full of shit; that i am only maybe beginning to differentiate now. my mother is the stablest foundation i could have asked for.  in relation to her, it has been easy to be the wild young thing lo these many years.

but in clinging to that sense of myself, i too have been unchanging, her younger opposite and doppelganger, all in one.

it occured to me, late last night, that i don’t want to be the wild young thing for the rest of my life.  it occurred to me that if, at 61, i am as able and as busy and as fulfilled as my mother seems to be, i will be happy. both these realizations came as a complete surprise.

it is in the years in the interim that maybe our paths will be truly different, my mother and i. as she would want. as i am beginning to be able to bring into focus.

damn, this wisdom with age stuff. bring on the prime. and the cake. i’m 38.

me, stunned to realize i have reached the age where people crowd your birthday cake with candles and then make jokes about seeing it from space. yeh. bring it.

i went to the woods because i wanted to live deliberately
to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life
to rout out all that was not life
and not, when i came to die, discover that i had not lived.
– Henry David Thoreau. (or Dead Poets’ Society. take yer pick.)

when a part of your life is over, the realization usually comes as a surprise, an after-effect.

i woke up Saturday morning with no deadlines hanging over me. the Ph.D application – or one of them, at least – is submitted. the last day for add/drops for the hundred-plus students who’ve inundated my office over the past two weeks? done.  i opened my eyes and mentally scanned the day ahead, blood pressure gearing up to jet speed.

then i paused, remembered. it’s done. my eyes fluttered wide, like an extra in Bambi.  i realized i had no clue what to do with myself.

then the kids woke up.

i beamed at them, all amends for my previous busy-ness. we lazed, cuddled. we considered breakfast, planned homemade cookies for the afternoon. it was at this point that i noted that my throat felt rather as though someone had pricked it all over with nails.

after further signs of impending plague, i woke Dave up and crawled back into my glorious warm bed to pass out, still thinking, so what if i’m sick? what a lovely, relaxing day to be sick.  i lounged for a brief moment on twitter, drinking coffee with milk i’d taken time to foam – a rare treat – and waxing philosophical about trying to live deliberately, now that my mad rush was behind me.

stupid Pollyanna.

by the time i woke up again, Dave had put his back out. at a gymnastics class for three-year-olds.

respite cancelled. the rest of the weekend was the sort of tragi-comic blur where you meet yourself coming and going all at the same time. in the dark before sleep i whimpered, bone-exhausted, run down. in the dark before dawn i came alert again, ready to hit the day running, to rise to what i needed to be.

and it occurred to me to wonder if my days of deliberate living were behind me, for the moment, or if being busy and maxed out were simply habit, the hardest in the world to break.
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the scion of the local autoelectric shop dropped my grandfather’s last cheque off yesterday afternoon. he came to the house shyly, only a couple of hours after his own father and uncle – who own the shop – left. he walked into a vacuum where words sat, invisible but still shockingly electric. i do not know if the room – the brown recliner, the old leather footstool, the tv reeling disasters beyond our ken – looked normal to him.

i don’t think it will look the same to me again.

i was the one who spoke the words. gently, i hope, but firmly, repeatedly. these are your choices. this or this. only these. your decision. now. i watched my grandfather’s eyes the whole time, drawing him back to me, seeking him. i said, time seems to be strange for you right now. sometimes i know you’re right here with me. other times i can’t tell whether you’re in a different space or just trying to change the subject. his eyes flashed at me, caught. a hint of a smile, perhaps? i smiled back. we are not so different, he & i.

i know. it’s not fair. i’m sorry. but this is what you get to decide. this or this.

the bath or the hospital. he had been in the same clothes for a week. he had been in his chair three days, bathroom trips spacing further and further apart to the point where we began to wonder if his kidneys were failing entirely. he would brook no help, no crossing of the boundaries of personal space. we made up his bed with clean sheets but he would not or could not go the twenty steps. he was soiled, skin breakdown imminent. he slipped out of his chair at 5 am. my cousin on the couch beside him, a geriatric nurse, helped him up. but that was all he would accept.

one by one, we expressed our concerns. he waved us all gently away with a flick of his hand.  the flash of white was comical, figurative. bared teeth, that flick told us. he had been holding his dentures in his hands for twelve hours.

my grandfather’s LaZ Boy – in different incarnations – has been in the very same spot for as long as i can remember and longer. it is his throne, almost an extension of him. and so it was that yesterday afternoon in a quiet spell i breathed deep and looked at my father and then, with intention, we took our places at the foot of the chair and laid out our ultimatum. we love you. we can’t leave you like this any longer.  we knew and he knew – and we made sure he knew – the consequences of the choice we laid out.

at the end of the dance, he chose the hospital. we emphasized the pretty nurses. and i felt as manipulative and as relieved and as brave as i have felt in my life. i squeezed my grandfather’s hand and met my father’s eye. and then i walked from the room so i could exhale, because i was shaking.

when my sister and then young Charles arrived moments later, my grandfather was still in the LaZBoy. we had turned the tv back on. all was normal.

but the room was different, and i knew it.  the lion had given up his throne.

when the ambulance came in, respectfully, quietly, sirens off, he went without protest. my sister rode with him. my father signed him into the hospital this time, so he can no longer sign himself out. he is in congestive heart failure. when i went out last night, he was distant, polite but withheld. at first i thought he was angry with me, and i nodded, understanding. but then i noticed that one pupil was blown, far bigger than the other, and i wondered if that conversation in his chair will be the last i ever really have with the grandfather i’ve known, been loved by.

i do not know. but if it is, i will own it. a sad, proud thing, a deliberate thing. life.
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i want to thank all of you for your love & support & comments & tweets. it feels strange sometimes to share it, because it is so personal and so present, and mine is only one lens on this man who belongs to many. and yet it is all too human, this ending stuff that none of us seem to ever quite come to terms with.

i learned, profoundly, with Finn, that there can be privilege in walking with someone towards their death. i fear loss, absolutely. but last night as i left the hospital i stopped on my way across town and drove through the dark, snowy cemetery where my grandmother is buried. i do not go often. i do not talk to my dead. but  i laughed as i drove through the ghostly stand of tall old trees glinting silvery, headstones stark against the snow, because the scene was like something straight out of Thriller, and yet…beautiful.  i felt peaceful. i do not fear my dead. i love them, hold them in memory. in the private spaces we all seem to drift in at the end of things, memory is all there is.

so for a ninety year old man who has lived a good life on his own terms, i will not fear. only walk beside, and offer him company, and share him while i can.

we come home to a mailbox straight from central casting – all holiday flyers and cheer, so full that the top is flipped open and the envelopes dusted with snow. i drag and pull and one letter sticks, too wide for the narrow passage meant only, apparently, for business-sized communications.

a Christmas card.

we did not send any this year, a fact about which i feel apologetically unapologetic. i am trying to learn boundaries, trying to lay fewer implicit shoulds on this shoulders of this small, sometimes overwhelmed family. matched socks and Christmas cards bit the dust this fall. bill-paying also snuck out the side door for a vacation before i dragged its pesky hide back in by the ear.  breaking one’s internal narratives of pressure is handy only if the habits one lets go of aren’t your bulwark against foreclosure and internet shutdown. body and mind need a home.

still, i like to get Christmas cards. i flip the envelope over, excited.

it is not for us.

yet i recognize the sender’s name.

every Christmas for the past four years, a Christmas card has shown up at our house for the former owners. the first year, there were a few, and i dug up the family’s new phone number early in the new year to let them know.

the next year, frayed by lack of sleep and the bleary joy of baby’s first Christmas, i didn’t quite make the phone call to the old owners when this one stray Christmas card arrived.  it sat, for a day or two, on my counter, and then got recycled. the next year, it came again. and so on.

the sender of this card is elderly. her name is Evelyn.

she is a widow, i know, because she addresses the card to Mr. and Mrs. John S_______, though her own return sticker reads Mrs. Evelyn F_______.  i grew up around widows; i am fluent in the old paternalisms of proper address.

the years have not been kind to Evelyn. her handwriting, five Christmases ago, was perfect MacLean script, straight out of the primers childen once copied from like faithful automatons, careful not to introduce any stray personality into their machinations. this year, our address meanders across the envelope, each letter painstaking yet random in its final formation. my heart wobbles, noticing. i remember how my grandmother’s handwriting slowly disappeared on her, the birthday card that arrived unrecognized until i saw her name on the return stamp.

i do not know Evelyn, nor she me. she is only a name, a script that announces the human frailty of old age.  but i know she is steady, unwavering in her yearly mailout of her cards, always on time. i wonder if she drives to the post office, or has a neighbourhood mailbox she can still walk to. i wonder, as i turn the card quietly in my hand, how much work goes into getting this card into the mail each year, especially in December. i wonder if she has anyone to help her.

the networks of old ladies are visible in their Christmas card lists just as ours are visible in blogrolls and twitter followers. our change more frequently. theirs usually only dwindle. i picture Evelyn’s stamps, lined up for the job against a list of names; the people to whom she sends these yearly salutations. i wonder how many she gets in return.

i assume she does not know the family that once lived here especially well. if they were family, news of the move should’ve gotten back to her somehow, five years on. perhaps they were acquaintances, one of them a child of someone who was once a friend of Evelyn’s.  they must not send her anything, or she’d have updated the address.

perhaps they, like me, gave up Christmas cards for being all too much one year and just never got back to it.

i have never opened one of Evelyn’s cards. they are not for me.  beyond being some kind of federal offense, it would be…an invasion, somehow.

but this year, i don’t want to just stick the card back in the mailbox, either, or turf it unacknowledged on the recycling pile.

i am tempted to write to Evelyn. just one Christmas card, the only one i send.

i’d say,

Hello, Mrs. F__________.

You don’t know me, but I live in the house where the John S______ family, John & Debbie, used to live.  I’m sorry, I don’t have their new address to send on to you.

I’m writing because I didn’t want the card you sent to them to go entirely unanswered. I hope you’ll forgive my presumption.

My grandmother sent Christmas cards every year when I was a little girl. I used to count the stamps for her, and lick them, and separate her cards into “PEI” and “off-Island” addresses, for the separate mailboxes we have here for local and exotic destinations.

Ten years ago was my grandmother’s last Christmas. she lived a wonderful life, nearly saw ninety-six. I loved her more than I can say. I miss her very much this time of year.

She never met my children. Their names are Oscar & Josephine. I enclose a picture of them here…silly, I know, but in hopes that maybe, as I have randomly received your card in lieu of the S__________ family, maybe you will be kind enough to receive this greeting for me? It would please me, strange though it sounds.

I want to thank you, for reminding me what a pleasure Christmas cards can be.

I hope you are well.  I wish you a very Merry Christmas.

Yours sincerely,

B. Stewart
Summer Street, Charlottetown, PE

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i might send it. i just might. it is the closest i can come to fulfilling the heart of those implicit shoulds i’ve tried to turn my back on. and perhaps it would be a random act of kindness, on both sides, hers and mine.

it is the closest i will come to being a believer in the Christmas miracle.

they say you can’t win if you don’t play.

i’m at the Canadian Blog Awards, this year: http://cdnba.wordpress.com/.

thanks to Neil & Mad & possibly some other complimentary soul, i’m nominated in three categories: Best Overall Blog, Best Personal Blog, & Best Family Blog. i’m in damn good company. and so i need some votes. like, uh, daily. vote early, vote often. exercise your democratic rights.

i was nominated last year. and the year before. and i thought, “oh, how nice!” and sat demurely around hoping to be noticed. i said nothing. no posts about the nomination, no tweets. no facebook. and i quietly lost. duh.

i wasn’t raised to be a self-promoter. i come from a long line of people who’d swallow their own tongues and all their teeth rather than be thought to crow about their accomplishments. swear til the sailors blush, goes the family motto, but anything that might appear as pride? avoid such vulgarity on pain of death.

sometimes the change in times turns the pearls of family wisdom to vinegar. in the era of social media, if you sit on the sidelines waiting politely to be noticed, you miss your chance. that’s the point of the whole shebang. blogs and twitter and facebook and all the rest of it are a chance to speak one’s piece, try out one’s voice – or, uh, voices – and connect with people. to do that, you gotta put yourself out there. risk judgement. court the danger of disapproval. be so vulgar as to draw attention to yourself.

erm, MYself.

so, should you have a free fifteen seconds, you can vote for me here: http://cdnba.wordpress.com/vote-2009/

i’d love that.  and thank you.

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.

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.

there is always a last day.

tomorrow, when i go back to work, i worry that my couch is going to miss me. for seventeen months now i’ve lain here in a troll-like mockery of fetal position, curled on my left hip and elbow, peck-peck-pecking at the computer.

well, not when the kids were AWAKE. much. but still. whenever baby wrangling duties subsided into the glorious quiet of naps, this left-hand corner of the corner of the couch has been my lair, my retreat, a spaceship that’s floated me far and wide in the midst of a tethered life; Major Tom in the ass-groovy comfort of my khaki corduroyed personal tin can.

tomorrow i blow back through the atmosphere to the professional world. i hope i don’t burn up trying to actually sit up all day. i haven’t spent eight hours in a chair since March of last year. i suspect by midday they’ll find me flopped over my desk like an overcooked noodle, legs helplessly flapping in their search for pillows to twine around.

i never quite recovered from bedrest. or rather, staring down this transition back to work, i see how i’ve failed to recover from the past four-and-a-half years.

August 4th was Finn’s due date.  it is his grandmother’s birthday. he would’ve been a Leo, a Rooster in the Chinese zodiac.  these futures i once invested in so unsuspectingly are still traced on the lens through which i see this month, casting shadows that never made it into the picture.  in the photo album marked ‘alternate universe’, there’s a boy four years old, a little brown haired kid with a summertime birthday party, hat cocked to one side and skipping.  he looks like his father.

i can neither not see that album – ignore it completely – nor ever fully bring it into focus.  it is not real, and i dare not pine for what could’ve been, only nod as the pictures float by. i am afraid to pine, for fear all i do have will be snatched away.

that fear is mostly normal, and the function it serves is likely healthy. but the shakiness it underscores is me, quivering here on the couch, afraid to get up and move forward.

i go back to work tomorrow.  for four-and-a-half years, thanks to the uncertainties of contract work and bedrest and four fraught pregnancies, envisioning my life more than a few weeks or months at a time has been a fantasy. my stints at home with the kids have been marked by job searches, by “maybe we could do this but i might be back at work by then,” by frantic contracting.  conversely, any work i’ve done has been yoked to – and sometimes dropped for – the internal clock of fertility and the push to create this family, hell or high water.

i am done with babies. there will be no more bedrest, no more colicky nights, no more plastic pee sticks, no more long months ruled by the nap schedule.  starting tomorrow, this period of my life is behind me. but i do not really know what’s ahead; have not forged much of a path in that regard. so going back to work – even only for another contract position – feels daunting, a sea change, because it marks the end of the only way of life i’ve known for so long i can’t remember how it felt to be different.

so on the last day before this last day, i cut off all my hair.

i’ve done it before. in university, a few times, and when i lived in the concrete winter grayness of Vancouver, and once in Malaysia when the stylist must’ve mistaken me for a Sinead O’Connor wannabe and shaved me nearly bald.  each time, i was lost in transition, feeling pulled along and pulled apart by conflicting tides and my own lack of direction.

when i used to teach young adults struggling with issues of powerlessness and lack of agency, i watched the girls, particularly, for sudden, shocking haircuts. something is going on under the surface there, i’d say to my fellow teachers. watch. she’s got change on her hands. this is what she can do to exert her power, exert her self. and i would get in beside whoever that girl was and probe, gently, trying to unearth the seismic shifts that led to the shearing. they were almost always there for the asking.

we mark ourselves, we humans. when things get too tangled, too overwhelming, we cut.  if we are lucky, it is only hair.

i am happy with yesterday’s haircut. i saved the ponytails, all ten inches of them, and will mail them off to Pantene’s Beautiful Lengths this afternoon. they make wigs for cancer patients, so my scrawny little tails, i hope, will help someone out there feel a bit better about a terrifying situation they have little control over.

but getting rid of them has already helped me. it marks this threshhold, this fresh start, on the outside, so that on the inside i can spend this last day canoodling mindlessly with my beloved couch, believing that it – and those two little kids i love and agonize over – will still be here when i get home from work tomorrow.