not anymore.

about the end of seventh grade, i got my first pair of glasses. i’d been having headaches for awhile, a couple of years. my mom took me to an opthamologist, who snapped lenses in front of my eyes and made letters magically blur and reappear.

i was seduced by the subject position, by the strange, sheer power of being tested. sitting in that Star Trek chair, i felt like a mystery waiting to be solved: a terribly interesting problem waiting to be identified. i liked feeling terribly interesting. was the red side of the square the machines projected clearer, or the green?  for me, one was brighter, the other crisper: i couldn’t figure out what “clearer” meant. so i made it up as i went along. i felt obliged to be somehow worthy of the visit.

my logic in that moment told me loud and clear that to come out without needing glasses – hell, to come out without needing eye SURGERY – was to somehow fail.

i am a pleaser. even today, if you are examining me for breast lumps, i feel vaguely apologetic and disappointed in myself if you cannot find any. not because i want breast lumps, or all they imply. but because it makes me deeply and profoundly uncomfortable to waste your time, and if your job is to find breast lumps, i wanna help. in the moment, at least.

when my mother and i were informed i needed glasses, i suffered a pang of guilt. i had succeeded in helping the opthamologist do her job of finding me defective. but now other neuroses took over. i want to please, yes. i also had, even by twelve, the pleaser’s history of falsified medical complaints, and thus a complete lack of faith in diagnoses.  i feared being outed as a faker. i envisioned some clear-thinking individual seizing upon my newly-prescribed glasses – not even yet chosen – and flinging them from my face, grinding them under heel in a public act of shaming. YOU CAN SEE!!!, this truth-teller would shout, not as faith-healer but prophet, returning me to my sorry state of anonymity, unworthy of all the attention i’d commandeered in the Star Trek chair.

and the world would look upon my lenses and know that they were fake.

(no, i’ve never had therapy. why do you ask?)

imagine my shock when a week or so later my first pair of glasses – giant, round pinkish things, the height of 1984 cool – were ready, and i snugged them over my ears for the first time.

i looked in the mirror first – insecurity is oft mistook for vanity, ye who judge – though it is impossible to remember how i thought i looked in those rose-coloured monstrosities. they probably set the braces off nicely.

what i do remember is glancing around the small room with its walls of frames and catching sight of a tree outside a window, a good thirty feet from me.

with my new glasses on, that tree was a revelation. it had leaves. bright, individualized, perfectly visible leaves.

my mouth must’ve hung open. because each of those perfect, far-away leaves, in all its glorious detail, negated my secret certainty that i’d faked the whole thing. i’d been half-blind and not known it. and now i could see.

amazing. grace.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

over the past few months, my eyes have been bothering me. it was a background hum at first, a faint annoyance. it took awhile to notice it was getting worse, and by the time i did i noticed mostly that my eyes were red. all the time. and tired.

i began to play little games with my eyes, trying to figure out what was straining them.

and that’s when i noticed i couldn’t focus anymore.

if i tried to direct both eyes to a single focal point, they refused to cooperate. one or the other would take over, so i could still see, but the balance was off. it was as if the lifelong pair that had been my eyes had suddenly unyoked themselves, become free agents. i felt like a child whose parents suddenly and silently divorce, without warning.

when i realized i’d started tilting my head like an aardvark to compensate for this weird lack of focus, i’d had enough. i asked Dr. Google.

Dr. Google suggested i might have a detached retina. or be a physics experiment, that was about it. no matter how i tried to find the right words for my symptoms, i came back to deeply scientific descriptions of how lenses work, or the occasional dire prognosis for my own.

so i did what any self-respecting neurotic would do. i asked twitter.

sometimes crowdsourcing doesn’t work, even if the attention did make me feel rather comforted. nobody had a clue. and i developed the feeling i ought to have some sort of dread disease to make myself worthy of the brainpower tweeps kindly spent trying to sort me out.

i find it hard to take myself seriously in the absence of external confirmation.

so i went to my eye doctor.

and there it was. astigmatism. nothing strange, nothing scary. but something. real. i’ll get a new lens for my right eye this coming week. and i am harbouring a secret hope that when the optometrist pops it in, and i put my glasses back on, i’ll experience a revelation of sight and perspective as dramatic as the first one all those years ago.

because an astigmatism is a refractive error of the eye, caused by a change in shape, creating the inability to focus.

my life is ever changing shape. the last eight months or so have been stable, for the first time in a long, long time. same job, solid sitter for the kids, no huge curve balls.

for five years, my life was centered around the quest for a family. Finn. Oscar. colic. contract work. the day Oscar turned eighteen months old, i found out i was pregnant. a month or so later, a d&c. then the possibility of Josephine, and 24 weeks of bedrest.

Posey will be 18 months old on Monday, and there will be no positive pregnancy test: that much is sure. but the rest is all in flux again. i am waiting on news of my Ph.D: if i’m accepted, that’s the next four or more years of my life, and a path. if i’m not? cry and then regroup, i suppose. but in what direction? a taxi stand moved in next door last month: we’re considering moving, but that decision has to stay on hold until i know what my professional options are. my contract at work has only four months left on it.

i feel as if i cannot bring my choices into focus.

and Friday afternoon, at five to five, we showed up at the sitter’s and were met with tears. hers, not the kids’. as of next Friday, she can no longer keep them. licensing regulations, cutting numbers. we’ve known the shift was coming, but we were assured we’d keep our spaces. the numbers the province has ultimately allotted preclude our two – the last sibset she took on – staying.

one of the women who’s worked for her for the past two months or so is willing to take them at her house instead, which i’m grateful for. she seems nice enough; the kids like her. but i don’t even know her last name. and with the province moving kindergarten finally into the schools this coming September, daycare centres are being stripped of the funding that came with the kindergartens, and are closing left right centre ’round here. we have been on three waiting lists forever, but spaces for both kids in a licensed learning environment will be September at the earliest. prices are rising, and the mood’s getting desperate.

i used to imagine myself making thoughtful, informed choices about my children’s preschool caregivers. i pictured long conversations, careful interviews regarding philosophies and healthy food and stimulating activities. instead, knowing that parents two streets over have nobody, i find myself nodding passively. you breathe? you’re kind? you’re on the way to work? dandy.

as if this shift is something simply to be accepted. as if the concept of choice is an illusion.

it’s felt like a long, gray, blurry winter.

i need my astigmatism corrected. and soon, so i can come to terms with the shape of my life and begin to focus on it. so i can see its leaves, each one, in all their vivid green.

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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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.

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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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 have all the balls and forthrightness of Piglet when it comes to cutting conversations short. my mother raised me polite to a fault, especially with people who make me uncomfortable. but this conversation got ugly fast. by the time i managed to pull my parachute and eject, he’d already covered at least three or four mutual friends and acquaintances.

the gist?  he’d apparently like to hit them. and not in the vernacular sense.  twenty minutes of who owes him money and who he’d like to beat up.

what a charming way to reconnect, i thought.

i never knew him well. he wasn’t a lover, not even really a friend. in any other life, we’d probably never even have spoken to each other. but one year, in an expat bar far from home, he and i wiled away many a smoky hour at proximal tables. we knew each other surprisingly well for people with almost nothing in common but Canadian passports and a year of birth.  we knew all the same people.  i knew who he went home with, those three and four am pickups, and was baffled by his popularity.

some girls must like to listen to litanies of people a guy wants to beat the shit outta. or maybe he found different things to say to those girls: i was never sure. he called me Bonaventure, the biggest word i ever heard him use.

he bummed more cigarettes than anyone i’ve ever met.

he was the Don Cherry of our circle.  he wore snakeskin shoes with a hockey jersey, usually. he had a mullet. in 2001. i don’t know if he still has it: his facebook profile is a picture of a monkey.

fitting…sure. cheap jokes are easy, though.  i always thought he was limited, or…conversely…at least that my understanding of him was.

i begin to wonder.

which one of us spent twenty minutes on FB chat entertaining himself? and which one spent twenty minutes trying not to offend someone who’s built an entire identity out of being mildly offensive?

i ask you: which one of us is the fool? ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

i am drained and tired these days, choking on my words. these are all i have, in lieu of a hundred things that really matter. all i know is when i put my son to bed half an hour after escaping that ridiculous chat – that chat that ate the luxurious few minutes of me-time Dave granted by taking both kids upstairs for a bath – Oscar lashed up at me, both fists swinging. uncharacteristic, for him. one of his stories had been rescinded. but each little punch was a question more than an expression of anger.

his eyes watched me, sage and distant, learning. what will happen if i do this?

i took his hands. i said, we don’t hit. we talk. it’s a better way to express your feelings. it helps other people understand you, rather than just feel hurt by what you DO.

and then i prayed a faithless little prayer that i am right.

anybody know where i might get him some miniature snakeskin shoes, if i’m not?

i didn’t know i needed reinvention. but turns out those beer ads from college were correct: what does not kill you makes you strong.

or at least, less of a bigot.

i blame SuperBowl XXVI for some of my former wayward and biased assumptions. in 1992,  my birthday was the same weekend as the SuperBowl. i spent most of my supposed “party” perched on the corner of my boyfriend’s dumpster-dived couch choking on the acrid fumes of weed and spicy chicken wings for eight straight hours of joyous pregame- and game-centric celebration with a pack of 200 lb boys and ten 2-4s of beer. nobody – boyfriend included – said two words to me other than, “chips?”

what’s wrong with that, you ask? even in college, i didn’t like beer. or football. not even a little. and chips are nice and all, but they are not birthday cake.

somehow, i have been bitter about “manly” pursuits ever since.

on twitter last week, there was a brief flurry of discussion on moms of girls only vs. moms of boys only. it raised the question of whether boy moms and girl moms end up being different from each other, in spite of being otherwise similar in age, tastes, class, career, education, etc.

and the consensus seemed to be yeh, a little, overall.

and i can see it. or at least, i could see it in ME, had things gone a little differently.

(aside: those of us with children of both sexes were cruelly ostracized from this conversation. please note that we need enlightenment too, people! a little “are you a bi-mom?” quiz would help me know myself, please and thankyou. stage direction: end self-mockery of stereotype i am actually trying to explore.)

when i was a little girl, and lived in a mindscape constructed mostly of cast-off and stolen characters & scenarios from Victorian children’s literature, all hard-knock lives and depths of despair and pretty pinafores, the so-called world of boys seemed like a foreign land.

i tried, occasionally, to venture there. not so much in person: the boys i knew were relegated, in my egocentric universe, to occasional supporting roles of annoying little brother or know-it-all classmate. i did not know enough about dinosaurs or Star Wars to talk to them past first grade.

i thought of their world as a strange exotica populated by Spiderman cartoons, boring little metal cars that never went anywhere and Dukes of Hazzard pyjamas.

i created families in my doodle pads, large multi-generational family trees populated by imaginary people with extraordinary names. i killed off the parents ruthlessly, dull folk named George and Sandra and Ervin and Eunice, gave them dates of death and tidy tombstones. but their children, whom i frequently sent to orphanages dressed in middies and awkward lederhosen sewn from curtains a la Sound of Music? well, some of those children had to be boys. so i drew Jasons and Norberts and Antonys, and relegated them to the rat-infested basements of the asylums inhabited by their far more interesting sisters.

i didn’t really them see them, as a whole, as characters, worthy of empathy or inner lives.  i mistook the stuff that didn’t interest me – the superheroes, the sports, the whole discourse of boyhood – as a sign that the entire gender were dismissable.

yeh, i liked a few of ‘em. but i treated boyfriends – particularly after that unfortunate SuperBowl birthday – as rare fossilized humans trapped in the amber of maleness, that most regrettable rock.

and i never imagined myself the mother of a boy. i wanted girls, absolutely. but beyond that, far more importantly, i thought that to be the mother of a boy was to be forever stuck at that SuperBowl party with nobody to say three words to and my nose permanently crinkled in bewildered distaste.

and that, i venture, is exactly how i’d feel today if i’d never had a boy.

mothers are, uh, female. meaning that that most of them were once female children. and a lot of the female children i knew back when i was myself a female child shared exactly the same opinion of boys that i did: ewww. admittedly, a lot of us later changed our tunes, at least regarding individual exceptions to the rule, but i suspect that for many the prejudice against male things and manly pursuits and so-called “boy stuff” remains. fair enough. i still don’t like football.

but i don’t get to perform my parenthood as a bastion against it, draw simple lines that exclude it and keep me and my offspring safely spared, relegated to our “girl things” and smugly superior in our remove. i don’t have to encourage my son to like it, but i do have to reign in my contempt, consider it, try to offer him literacies and considered views as he begins to negotiate the world of what boys are “supposed” to like.

i don’t know if it’ll ever do my kid any favours. but i think it may have actually made me a bigger person.

that, and the nachos i’ve just eaten writing this post through the SuperBowl.

Theodore is seven weeks old. he’s a jetsetting babe, born in Korea just before Christmas, now circling the globe meeting his grandparents. he has the cutest passport picture in the world.

his parents are good old friends, of ours and of each other. we knew them before they were a couple. they knew us before we were a couple. we go back. and this first baby of theirs was awaited and loved even before i got to put my arms around him Friday and marvel at his tiny feet and froglegs, his fuzzy head.

Josephine delighted in him, bouncing beside his car seat pointing and squealing baby! baby! Oscar made him a special – if possibly slightly dangerous – mobile of Tinkertoys. Dave picked him up in a fussy moment and swung him gently side to side, chuckling at how light he is.

from the corner of my eye, i caught them. it is an unmistakable thing, the posture of your partner – your person – with a newborn cuddled close. my head snapped around to meet them. my heart caught.

the first time i saw Dave hold a baby, Finn was in his arms. tenderly, fearlessly, he cradled him. two pounds and two ounces can take great strength. and big hands can hold the tiniest ones with a gentleness you never thought possible.

he held Oscar the same way, all the long colicky nights we walked the floor, and Posey in her turn. but she leaps in and out of his arms, now, laughing, begging to be spun upside down. her baby days are gone. our baby days are gone.  we’ve been sleeping through the night for a year, now, more or less. so holding Theo, Dave looked utterly different and entirely familiar all at once.

i held my breath, waited for the wistfulness to rock through me and my lungs to fill with longing.

nothing.

i breathed, but it was a sigh of relief. no want. no nothing, except bemusement. well, there you go, i thought. THAT’s what done feels like.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

i went for my annual exam – in other words, ahem, PAP TEST – last week, just after my birthday. the doc who saw me smiled and asked, so what are you using for contraception?

and i had a teensy little panic attack.

for twenty+ years i’ve been answering that question. for twenty+ years i’ve been answering reliably, perkily even. i am deeply eager to appear responsible. i am the Lisa Simpson of pap tests.

given that, the fact that the question caught me off-guard was odd, really. but what happened next nearly convinced me i’d fallen straight down a rabbit hole of 38-year-old dementia. my mind skittered around in my brainpan like a terrier, unable to latch onto anything salient whatsoever. contraception? it said to itself, nervously. it knew there should be an answer, but each time it wandered down the lurid paths where memories of contraception lurk, it came up empty.

sex, yes. protection? oh sweet merciful crap.

terrier brain screamed at me, o mah gods! you’re not protected! and i hyperventilated, spun round in circles, and tried to hide under the itty bitty johnny shirt i was sporting.

CAUGHT, finally, after all these years. i flailed and slumped like i do when Dave notices that the Nibs bags are all empty. i turned the colour of a tomato.

just as i was about to leap off the edge of the exam table and flagellate myself with the speculum, click. i remembered. vasectomy.

oh right. jaysus. permanent contraception i don’t even have to think about is NERVE-wracking.

but even in the moments when i couldn’t remember, i noticed there was no brief candle of hope  for another baby.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Dave rocked Theodore, and the baby fussed and peeped. i smiled, and Dave caught my eye. don’t go getting any ideas, he warned.

nothing is further from my mind, i replied, and i held his eye. it has been a long road, 5+ years of pregnancies and babies and sorrow and colic and hope. it ended, really, a few months back. but Friday, i noticed. and it was good.

then we nodded at each other, and handed that sweet little baby back to his parents. we breathed a big ol’ sigh of satisfaction, and maybe relief, and stepped over an invisible threshold into whatever the hell comes next, together.

did you ever know, suddenly? how did it come about?

or are you still waiting for that feeling? hoping? even without the actual expectation – or even possibility – of fulfillment?

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.

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.

except my mother and i, who sat vigil at her bedside as her entire world narrowed to those two iron rails. but there was only so much we could do to stem the tide of what slipped from her, day in, day out.

first, the house, the house she’d been born in nearly a century before. the driver’s license she’d gotten only at 68.  her card nights. bowling.  a few years later, the apartment, independence itself. her marriage bed, her pots and pans, a lifetime of odds and ends collected over 90 years. no more fridge of her own, only a tray brought to a room in a “home”; a tray like all the other trays, a room like all the other rooms. then the health to go for drives and complete her crossword puzzles and enjoy All My Children in the afternoons. the pain began; it wasted her.

through all of it, seven interminable years of relentless, incremental loss, she struggled with despair and shame at her increasing inability to do. when you are ninety and have outlived your spouse by decades and watched your friends weaken and drop around you, your independence and strength become fierce components of who you believe yourself to be.

i suspect the rest, the whoever you might have been in the long life before, has to be left behind in order to survive the foisted cruelties and indignities of old age. nobody alive remembers that person anyway. and eventually, neither do you.

and if you are a relative of mine, it appears that at the centre of your fierce independence is the belief that you are tough enough to simply die in your sleep when you’re good and ready.

my grandmother didn’t get to do that. in the last year of her life, she lay confined to a series of nursing home and hospital beds, little bird bones poking through her skin. i watched her pull herself present through hazes of morphine to meet my gaze. she had blue eyes. in their reflection, i was always beautiful.

let me die, she would whisper. i’m done.

i love you, i would say in response, irrelevant and yet all i had to give. i refused to look away. i’m so sorry.

she was ashamed of being what she thought was a burden. i was ashamed at my powerlessness, my lack of courage to do for her what she could not do for herself.

seven years, it took.

my grandfather, from the other side of my family, turned ninety last month. his wife died nearly 22 years ago; he has lived since in the house they built together in the 1960s. every corner of it remains a testament to the glorious sleekness of the Bungalow Era. moss-green shag blends living room and family room. the space-age proto-microwave in the kitchen wall sits lonely, waiting for an opportunity to unleash the wrath of its radiation. he has not cooked since she died. not using that microwave may be the secret of his longevity.

he was a spy in WWII, a British Secret Intelligence Service agent who worked out of New York and Camp X, the commando training centre in Ontario from which Ian Fleming would later cobble together the mythology of Agent 007.  in the middle of the war, he married an 18 year old girl from the farm down the road. she had barely been to the metropolis that is Charlottetown;  three weeks after their wedding she found herself in an apartment in New York City. he was called away on a mission – Top Secret – the morning after she arrived. he could not tell her a thing about where he was going – she stayed on alone, in the city that never sleeps. it was six full weeks before he returned.

there has never been anyone else for him.

the war ended. my father was born at Camp X in 1947, while the Cold War took shape. in 1949, the British closed Camp X and burned all the records, and my grandfather turned down the offer to join the fledgling CIA . his wife was done roaming and wanted to go home. he and my grandmother moved back to PEI, bought a little brick house for $6000, raised four kids. he worked as a mechanic from that day until last week. yep, last week. at ninety, he was still going into the mechanic shop a few mornings a week. he likes his routine, my grandfather. he likes to be useful. he has no coping mechanisms for any other state of being.

my grandfather had a heart attack on Friday.

it was a reasonable-sized Cardiac Event, as evidenced by the levels of troponin in his blood yesterday indicating muscle death. he wasn’t in much pain, but his breath short and fast, and his colour gray.  he spent the night in hospital. i was there when the doctor came the next day at noon, saying “Lovenox and a few days and we’ll see and you can probably go home then.”

my grandfather heard only the “probably”. and by the time i returned after supper he was high-tailing it down the hall, hell-bent for leather on going home. NOW. against medical advice. with no chance of continuing the Lovenox once he rendered himself an outpatient.

my father arrived. a close family friend, who’s also a nurse. the three of us tried for an hour, together and separately. i made him look me in the eye, said, i love you. i’m worried about you. i know you’re afraid that this is your only way to control the situation. but i’m afraid this may mean you don’t heal enough to STAY independent.

he looked at me like a hunted animal.

we brought him home. and kept him home last night. he couldn’t breathe, he was panicky, having to struggle his way out to the cold air to catch his breath five times in the first hour. in his socks, in the snow. he wouldn’t let me put his boots on. he wouldn’t let me bring him a blanket. he was agitated, shocky, a clear candidate for oxygen and hospitalization and possibly some form of sedation.

i did not let him see the tears in my eyes.

i don’t know if the choice he made, in his own mind, was the choice to go home to die, or the flight reaction of a terrified human being who wants things desperately to revert to normal.  his face told me that either way, for him, it was a zero-sum game. there would be no argument. none of us have power of attorney, and i doubt one of us who loves him would begrudge him the end of his own choosing, would that we could only grant it.

he picked his hill to die on, and we brought him home.

but i learned, with my grandmother. life is not always so benevolent, nor ends so final. they can trail out, cutting you down body and soul with a thousand bloody, cruel little scratches. that is what i fear for this man who cannot stand to sit idle, whose heart – damage or not – is big and free, loyal as a labrador retriever.

he is home tonight, breathing a little better. the cigars sit, rejected. he had a little food. he is trying. and i sat beside him today and believed, for a few minutes, that this is not the end, maybe only the beginning of the end.  i hope it’s true.  i am not ready, never ready.

but whenever that good night does come, i hope it falls swiftly for him.  the losses all at once, clean and silent.

ours, not his.

tonight, Old Christmas, the twelfth day in the ancient festival, is the end of it all.  the orange glow of electric pillar candles will disappear from the windows of the city tomorrow; the neighbour’s spruce will no longer cast a pall of sparkling blue on the snow by our driveway. the strings of outdoor lights, unplugged, will mostly hang around ’til spring, increasingly unseasonal decorative accents waiting patiently for their owners to drag them from the meltwater and retire them in favour of lawnmowers. but after tonight, few will shine.

it is Epiphany, the revelation of god become man. or the commemoration of the wise men’s visit, or the baptism of Christ, according to what sources and what heresy you go for. or the day my true love’s supposed to pony up for a whole truckload of lords a leaping, for the girl who has everything, you know.

i am a modern breed, me. no Old Christmas at our house; i stripped the tree and the decorations last weekend, before i went back to work. the outside lights are still up, admittedly, half-frozen to the rain gutters, but i have forgotten them already.

which is why, had you seen me earlier this evening in the cold, crusty wet slush of my backyard, scrabbling around under bare birch trees for a small wooden ornament shaped like a moose – and, separately and with some cursing, for the missing wooden leg of said moose – you would’ve been excused for not recognizing the passion play at hand as a Christmas celebration.

we had a storm last week. snow and rain, a mixed bag. but mostly wind. the highest winds in years, so wild the house shook and air seeped in, squealing. i loved it. until tonight, in a sudden panic, i remembered what might have been lost in that storm last Saturday and went leaping, not at all lordlike, into the snow in hopes of rescue before Christmas was officially over and i could be said to have just forgot.

every year for the past five Christmases, we’ve hung the moose on the trees in the backyard. for Finn.

i have no idea why it’s a moose.  the ornament came from Dave’s side of the combined family collection, that much i remember. he comes from moose country. and perhaps there’s something dark and ridiculous enough about the big, loping creatures, deadly yet not predatory, that seemed like a fit back that first Christmas Eve when i worked up the voice to ask him, sidelong and on impulse, if he wanted to come outside with me to Finn’s trees. his parents, visiting, had gone to sleep. i was pregnant again, tired. and so desperately sad i could barely breathe.

our first Christmas in our first house. our first Christmas after the birth of our son. and he was ashes in our bedroom, and under those trees.

the moose made Dave smile. we hung it on the maple between the birches. we each spoke our Merry Christmases, aloud.

we came inside, went up to bed. i drifted to sleep, Finn’s name quiet in my mouth, the little moose swinging from the tree. the act of including him was the most important thing i did for myself in that bleak midwinter of magical thinking.

the following Christmas was Oscar’s first. and we made the same pilgrimage with the moose, out to the trees late at night after the house had fallen to sleep.  that year i’d planned it, looked forward to it in the way of those who believe they’ve come to terms with what they can and cannot have.

the house was decked and warm, the tree laden with more “Baby’s First Christmas” ornaments – all gifts – than any plastic conifer with any dignity would bear. toys in shiny paper awaited the morning, the fat baby hands, the joy.

and then we trekked out in the snow to hang an ornament for our dead child. a single wooden moose, left out in the sleet.

i wondered and worried, before Oscar was born, if i would love him enough…if i would love him as i did his brother. after Oscar was born, i wondered and worried if i would keep loving Finn.

that Christmas Eve, i came inside and sat upstairs by the little urn i hadn’t touched in months,  rocking like a child. howls came out of me, raw and ragged. i can not believe Dave’s parents slept through. but they know what it is to be bereft.

i had a baby sleeping warm and safe in the little room down the hall. and a baby whose spirit i was still close enough to my own grief then to feel, viscerally, who had no place in that house we’d once bought for his coming. i was his mother. and for Christmas, i brought him a moose, and left him in the cold and the snow.

the cruelty of grief is in the helplessness.

i have never been comfortable with the external role of the bereaved.  letting Finn slip entirely into silence and memory would have been, socially, the far simpler choice for me. even with Dave, who loved him too, i always choked a little, wary – with no reason, no justification – of being judged for my weakness, my altered status.  i feared being dramatic. i feared being maudlin.

but he was my child.  even now, when it no longer hurts to think of him, and his absence is only a normalcy to me, the spirit i once felt mostly a closed door, he was my child. my love for him still is. it never got to grow, to deepen and delight in his idiosyncracies, his selfhood, in the way it does each day with his brother and sister. but nor does it end.

that awful wonderful Christmas of one sweet boy and one frozen moose, i decided – however empty, however pointless it felt, even to me – that i wanted to hang the moose outside each Christmas, with Oscar and whatever other siblings Finn might someday have. so that his name would be said. so that his absence had a space, all its own, no matter how stupid and shy i felt carving it out.

so like a child laying out shoes for Saint Nicholas or a stocking for Santa, i trot out the moose every Christmas Eve. we round up the small ones, and we trudge to the yard and we say, quietly, Merry Christmas Finn.  and there we all are for a second in time, our little family, the ones who breathe and the one with a moose and some trees for a stand-in.

(i found the moose. and his leg. they were under the snow, damp but none the worse for wear. some glue and a dry cloth, and i will wrap them in tissue and lay them away now, for another year.)

i am his mother. it is what i can do.