almost as surreal, because no matter how flattering, 38 year old women do not normally stay in the pediatrics ward, in rooms festooned with Cinderella stickers and Mickey mouse. the pediatric nurses all waved a kind goodbye as i tried not to wobble on my way to the door. i rubbed my head. four or five days of serious fever and two hospital visits all kind of blurred together, and i counted the days as we wandered through the corridors: Thursday. September 2nd. i nodded internally, steady now. i love September: the crisp air, the boots, the socks, the sweaters, the new pens. okay.

we walked out of the hospital into the hottest day we’ve seen here all summer.

and then, oh right, there’s a hurricane coming? funny, nobody talks about that on pediatrics. it was all just how much did you pee? and here’s your tray of chicken fingers and fries dear…uh…ma’am. you know. small talk. of course, i was in isolation. maybe all the kiddies in the playroom were chattin’ it up about the weather non-stop.

i rubbed my head again, Rumplestiltskin who seemed to have slumbered in the wireless-free confinement of my little quarantine room for long seasons. or simply woken up in another latitude entirely, one where hurricanes are actually expected to make landfall. see, i live in Canada. we have cold. that’s OUR extreme weather. the rest of you get all the scary shit.

can a spinal tap make latitudes shift?

for a moment, that thought spiraled out like a kite on a breeze, and i wondered if that golden liquid treasure that runs down all our backbones is actually what centres us in the time and place we happen to belong to; if spinal taps are not the portal to time travel, to instant tropical vacations.

then my brain clamped down on itself like an iron door.

you are to make sense, it said sternly. not making sense has been absolutely NO FUN.
***

when i was fourteen, you know, i missed my first week of high school. so none of this should really have been a surprise.

i had been shopping with my best friend Jill with money earned at a little summer babysitting job and i had these strange hiccups that wouldn’t go away and i kept embarrassing her, hiccuping my way around the fancy store until she finally turned around like a little pouf-banged martinet and said, STOP! exactly the way i speak to Posey now when she insists on hitter her elder brother and i remember raising my eyebrow at her like WTF? it’s the HICCUPS, i CAN’T stop, that’s the POINT and then turning a cold shoulder so she would not know i felt betrayed.

but when i got into the dressing room with those awful 1986 high-waisted monstrosities of jeans i was dying to spend hard-earned money on, i noticed my belly was sore and bloated and tender, and i couldn’t button anything where i thought i ought to button anything. and so that was when i left Jill there and walked home carrying new pants i hoped would fit better in the morning, thrilling to the terror and uncertainty of the brave new world of high school waiting right there on the other side of this awkward, not-quite-as-i’d-hoped-for day.

i hadn’t seen nothing.

by six pm my belly was sore enough that i mentioned it to my mom. by seven she was worried. by eight we were at the hospital. by ten pm i was in an ER room with a nice young doctor explaining that my appendix needed to come out.

i remember nodding at him, most obligingly, and suggesting that anytime after about the second week of October would be good for me. we’d be getting into midterms by then. i wouldn’t mind the rest.

no, he’d said, most soothingly, in chorus with my mother. tonight, dear. it needs to come out tonight.

i had stared at the two of them, blinking, twice betrayed in the course of a single day. then, indignant. were they stupid? i had HIGH SCHOOL tomorrow, i reminded them. i start grade ten at Colonel Gray, i chirped, patiently, as if to children.

not tomorrow, sweetheart, i remember my mother saying, with extraordinary gentleness. and then the student nurse who couldn’t start an IV to save her life came in to torture me for awhile and that was that; out like a light.

in the end, it was okay. i limped back into school the following week and saw old friends and met new friends and my life took a new shape not so different from the old and until a couple of days ago i had long since forgotten that i’d even spent those first few days in the hospital and not at school.

this week, i remembered, all too vividly. i started high school a week late. and i will do the same with my Ph.D.

and in the process of being late for school this go ’round, i may have learned – or remembered? – one of the most important things the world has to teach me, Ph.D or no Ph.D. now, i need desperately to rest. but i will tell you the rest of the story.

tomorrow. or as soon as the headache is gone?

the likeness is blatant, uncanny: in all the lines of their faces, the bones, the spacing of their eyes. it makes me prone to cracking snide remarks that i don’t have genes at all. or better, that i’m too stingy to share what god gave me, that i’ve hoarded my genetics all to myself. it is okay, my laugh will respond to yours. only my heart is in these children. that is all.

it’s a lie, though.

my children do look like little carbon copies of Dave and his extended family. Posey is a pint-sized Dave in a dress. Oscar and his father in open-mouthed laughter, heads together, remind me of mirrors reflecting into infinity. yes, in certain light, with my eyes squeezed nearly shut, i can project glimpses of my own ancestral clans over their laughing faces…a tilt of a nose that reminds me of my mother, a chin that seems squarely familiar. but overall, they’re Cormiers, Doucets, Guitards; Acadians through and through.

still. the older they get, the more i see myself reflected in them. not in their appearance, but their actions, inclinations, personalities and strengths and…oh especially…weaknesses.

children are a mirror for the flawed soul. and when you watch them struggle with the same self-defeating tendencies that have plagued you as far back as you can remember, you will sigh, and wish that it was true; that you really had hoarded your genes all to yourself.
***
personality isn’t inborn, i remember her saying, my first year psychology prof in the Child Development course, in some kind of disjointed prelude to Piaget. i was slouched in my seat, seventeen years old and away from home for the first time. something in the words perked up my bad-ass ears and i flew away for a moment, across the strait to my proper, earnest mother and i snorted.

a head turned and i blushed and ducked my own.

for years i had discarded, unassessed, most of the things my mother had told me. we were like magnets, the two of us in my adolescence, poles mostly turned apart and pushing. i felt caged and contemptuous: i denied her authority, rejected her range of knowledge and experience out of hand. too small, too fearful, too parochial.

even things neither of us understood, new things, processes, systems – i picked up faster and so shut her out. if the learning went awry and she dared try to step in, i was a study in impossibility. once, when my electric typewriter refused to load its correction ribbon properly the night before a high school essay was due, my mother had reached over the kitchen table to help and i’d shouted I’m doing it RIGHT! It’s just WRONG! until her hand snapped the dislocated piece into place and i seethed in humiliation.

all this, except in relation to one thing: the absent presence she unquestionably knew – or had once known – better than i. my father.

she didn’t say it often: she was careful not to label with negativity. but in moments of exasperation it slipped from her tongue, half-accusation, half-wonderment. You’re just like your father. and i’d peer into those words like they were tea leaves, scrying for belonging, for some meaningful reflection of the elusive inner self i longed to have identified for me, the one i wasn’t sure anybody could see.

my father had been gone since i was six months old. i had his chin, his smile, his nose, his temper, and apparently most of his undesirable qualities, the kind that make poor, beleaguered mamas want to rend their garments and gnash their teeth.

personality isn’t inborn, my ass, i muttered to that psych prof, slouched over my doodles and notes. you talk to my mother.
***
he is four, my son, my second-born and eldest all at once. and he reminds me daily he is his own self.

the old white laptop from 2005 has been handed down to him in the past year, windfall privilege of growing up in an over-technologized family. he is learning to use a paint program, doing his “work” onscreen like mommy and daddy. ouch, i say, to the chorus of silent condemnation in my head, the one that wonders if he shouldn’t be outside learning to catch. but he is fascinated. the beauty he creates fascinates me.

(his father built him a blog for these paintings; a small gallery, a room of his own. the artist happily fields comments.)

but the artist does not happily field the notion of being wrong.

i could pretend i do not know where he gets this. i could pretend i believe only in nurture, not nature; that my chipper soliloquies of mommy’s learning French and it’s SO FUN; mommy’s practicing her (wobbly-arsed) bike-riding and WOW! i like learning new things and mommy made a mistake and has to start all over and (grit teeth) GEE! i sure am learning a lot doing this a third time! make some ripple on the cosmic pool of his small self. maybe they will. maybe he will learn to recognize frustration far younger than i ever did, and name it and own it and master it with patience and self-regard.

in the meantime, on a Saturday afternoon while his sister naps he explores the new paint program. there is glee, mommy, hey! look at this! and the satisfying splat-splat-splat of squares of yellow landing on a red background. then growling. growling i’d never heard before, except maybe in the recesses of my own mind. growling like a furious, feral animal enraged beyond containment.

my son. four years old.

he must have inadvertently clicked on something he didn’t intend to. the program had shifted modes, so that backtracking was impossible. i said, looks like you have a little problem, huh? and then my hand – my stupid, stupid hand – reached out for the mouse. while my mouth – my stupid, stupid mouth – said maybe you clicked the wrong thing?

i rendered him, in one fell swoop, not just wrong but beyond capacity to solve his own problem.

his own hand swatted at mine like i was a mortal danger and he began to scream – SCREAM – that he had done it RIGHT and it was WRONG but he had done it RIGHT and ouch on the old ears, little man.

perfectionist much? need control much? need the world to make sense and make you feel you know everything much?

ouch, mirror mirror.

i picked up the laptop and shut it. we do not shout in our house, i said quietly. we do not hit. the computer is a privilege, and you will not be allowed to use it if you cannot learn to make mistakes and learn from your mistakes without screaming. what i wanted to do was to pull his small body into my arms and somehow scrub him free of all those heartbreaking tendencies to be his own worst enemy, to be so achingly, willfully blind to his own mistakes that all learning that doesn’t come easy is a torture better skipped.

i cannot.

but i can scrub myself. i am trying, in the late years before i turn forty and bloom into my middle years, to become someone better than nature and nurture happened to cobble together through happenstance and genes, someone who doesn’t make her mama want to rend her garments and gnash her teeth.
***
whether genes or learned behaviour, how do you see your own challenges reflected in your children?

instead, suddenly i find myself  in the Business section of the bookstore, just an aisle over from Philosophy.

i hunker down, intent, studying the titles on the shelves with the rabid eyes of a shark looking to game the casino. i am giving myself a personal, experiential education in How To Maybe Write a Bestseller About Ideas and Social Media. go hard or go home, they say where i’m from.

i has me a literary agent.

i pinch myself.

all these years of dreaming of being discovered for my sizzling cool. instead, i stoop in the Business aisle, plotting the story of self as brand in the world of social media. a dissertation and a trade book. book first. with capital letters, cold hard ambition you can lay out on a table like a cadaver and dissect.

it is the story of how people with my artsy-fartsy prejudices and my humanities degrees and my bohemian posturings are – thanks to the way social media works – ending up in the Business section of the bookstore. it is also the story of how business itself is – for the same reasons inverted – becoming more literary and humanities-focused in its discourse and processes. the unholy marriage of never the twain shall meet, indeed.

it is, in the end, the story of the reputational and relational economy of the digital.

it is the story of brand as a personal rather than a corporate attribute; as a brave new world of identity. brand is not the sell, nor is it without soul. i LOVE this shit.

Allen Ginsberg, i think, would wink at me. or maybe hoist himself up on a soapbox and rail, soliloquize, erase me with the scope of his supermarket excursions. i bow to his shadow in either case, and smile.

i feel like Alice down the rabbit hole. you see that vial labelled Drink Me? hand it over.
***
i want help, though.

it’s a shameless kind of want, the same kind of shameless i always imagined would see me perched with my folk guitar outside some far-flung library strumming Dylan songs, the really long ones, with my guitar case with the embroidered Grateful Dead bears open for donations and a handwritten sign, If you Fear Change, leave it here. life takes you funny places.

instead i sit here in my hometown hoping you’ll tell me stories…yours. or those you think might resonate. i need a few case studies, poster children whose selves and brands i can explore and dissect.

i want to know, in these stories, about how the so-called real and the online self.  about how you and your virtual identity get along. i want to know if the lines between them have changed for you, over the time you’ve spent engaging online.

you don’t need to be a Big Deal to tell me about your “brand” and yourself. you don’t need to like the idea of brand at all. in fact, i might like it a lot if you didn’t.

you can email me, if you want, or leave as many comments here as you want. i may pry further. i may come and park myself on your floor and read your virtual Tarot cards like some social media fortune teller, promising the inevitable dark, handsome stranger and a future of millions of Twitter followers. i may offer my effusive thanks in the acknowledgements of something printed on paper, someday, knock wood. that something may be a Ph.D thesis or a tome you can buy on Amazon and in the Business aisles of better bookstores, or both.

either way. i am sitting, waiting for the story hour to begin.

all those years i dragged myself through Korean and Slovak and Turkish streets at dawn not looking for an angry fix but another drink, a smoke, a conversation to be in, arms or words there was something transcendental out there burning for the ancient heavenly connection, i knew it, i saw it in tatters and hollowed eyes and tenement roofs illuminated. but in the end, i came home and found it here, in the ether.

and so i laugh and burn my beret, and ask what you think it means to be a self in the world of social media?
***
edited to add: if not your story, whose? who should i be tracking down to explore success in social media and ways it intersects with personal identity? who’s your idea of an exceptional, or reluctant, or conflicted, or interesting “brand”? even if they’d never use the word themselves? and who or what (feel free to email rather than comment, as you wish) make up the benighted practices reinforcing the concept of personal branding as some kind of Amway Cult of Personality? all recommendations gratefully received.

i might even buy you a beer to keep you talking.

the summer i was ten, my father took me fishing.

i was far from home and nearly sick to my stomach with the heady out of place-ness of it all. a six week odyssey with a family who were my kin yet nearly strangers, summertime visitors i only clapped eyes on every second July. the day-to-day father i’d longed for all year, present and material but more complicated than my fantasies had prepared me for. plane rides west, then north, way north, on what seemed a tin-wrapped hot dog with a bathroom and a stewardess. on the tundra in the land of the midnight sun.

i played baseball that summer at two in the morning. i had never stayed up past nine in my life. i had never played baseball before.

change is a heady thing, discombobulating and lonesome and free. that summer laid the groundwork for my experience of every major shift period in my life thereafter: i swallowed all those giant empty feelings of being cast adrift in a sea without shape until late in the night, in my bed, they all welled up in a panic like a balloon and i heaved a little.

i was ten. i cried for my mother.

i threw up my stepmother’s pea soup through my nose that summer, and refused to let Ernie Lyall feel me up in the canned goods aisle of the Co-op even though he was a strapping thirteen and said the word “fuck” like it was a good thing. i dragged my youngest half-brother – smaller than Josephine is now – around the prefab northern bungalow on his duck blankie, and drove my other half-brother’s mini-dirtbike into garbage cans until i finally learned to do a wheelie. i learned that the map of Canada wasn’t paper but a vast span of emptiness and tiny square subdivisions all amazingly replicate from the air, like a land of tiny model houses. i saw a field of Alberta canola like neon against the sky and my father called it rape and i was mortified, puzzled, curious. i ate a Yellowknife eggroll the size of my plate. i sang The Rose until my patient stepmother threatened to make me walk the four thousand miles home to PEI.

and i went fishing with my father, on the tundra, north of the Arctic Circle, in the black-fly-infested height of midnight-sun summer. my almost-eight-year-old half-brother and i in a tent that never quite got dark. we watched a herd of muskox thunder by miles in the distance, a swarm of speeding pinpricks that made the earth shake.

we caught char, fresh Arctic char: i know this from the photographic evidence, two children in rubber boots smiling into a camera with bright, silvery fish hanging gilled and gutted from our fingers. i remember the impossibly thick fleshy weight of them, their slippery bodies trying to escape even in death. my smile, gap-toothed, wavers between pride, obligation, and utter revulsion.

for as long as i can remember, i have hated fish. i would as soon eat bugs.

and yet, that night, i bit into the salmony flesh of the char, tender and raw, because it was my duty as a daughter.

my father told us stories of the Tundra Monster in the twilit tent that night, the three of us perched at the top of the world. i remember thrilling with my terror, with laughter, with the light of my father fixed on me like Christmas in July.
+++

in the present, a weekend with old friends from our expat days. between us, five preschoolers. there is smiling, staring at each other in wonder at this bounty of children and wholesomeness and chaos from lives that just yesterday seemed so gin-soaked and littered with ashtrays.

we took the kids into the woods, on a little trail on the back of Dave’s ancestral lands. and we spun our heads back, three of us at once to see Posey in her tutu and her grandmother’s fake plastic pearls chomping heartily away on…something.

three parental mouths opened in unison to say what’s she eating? and then Dave crossed the three steps between him and her in only one and he pried the berry from her mouth. ew, she said.

he grabbed the culprit to ask the internet, once we were back at the house.

baneberry, it said, and his eyes met mine, because nothing that starts with “bane” can really be good. white actaea, a cardiac poison, and then she started to throw up as if on cue, her little body heaving and her blue eyes so much like his boring into mine and i made my gaze as calm and easy and comforting as i could, like the safest place in the world, even if i lied.

we were in the car and then there was an ambulance and for a second i thought i might start to cry and then it was okay, all okay, and the hospital pronounced her free and clear and she got a bear with a paramedic tshirt for her troubles and i realized i miss those days of gin and ashtrays. my fingers twitched.

lucky. lucky.

then, news of my father, from back home on PEI. his motorcycle, smashed.

a driver made a left turn with his head bent away, talking to his son in the passenger seat, and the bike was totalled and the car wrecked and my father, my complicated father, somersaulted over his handlebars to take out the car windshield with his back and then…bounced. he landed on his feet in the grass, a cat.

i caught my breath and felt as if i, for once, had landed myself in the safest space in the world. guilty careless mother, absent daughter, but no matter. absolved, mine house passed over. lucky. lucky.

i am wary of too much luck and i crossed myself and spat and threw salt, all in the temple of my solitary mind, because everybody knows bad things happen in threes.
+++

on our last day of vacation, Oscar goes fishing with his father and grandfather, his father’s father, for mackerel. his first time. the phone rings at the house. his high sweet voice pierces the line even though the wind takes most of his words. i understand he has caught a fish. his first fish.

i understand i will be eating mackerel for supper and i curse, because this, then, is my perfect third for the triad of luck. fear and catharsis, love.

i would as soon eat bugs as fish, even now. but the proud mother of the young fisherman will not let on.

i meet them on the shore, and Dave cuts the shining head from the last of the catch. i watch my son, four and innocent, observe the bloodshed and i think, this boat is your birthright and i wonder at what happens inside a little boy when he watches an animal die for the first time. i wonder at how close we all live to the old law of kill or be killed and i think of sociopaths in barns and attics torturing the four-footed and the eight-footed and i heave a little.

it is not fear. it is the letting go.

until now, i have made for my children as coherent a world as i can, one where the shapes make sense and what they encounter is scaffolded and processed aloud: where people are mostly decent and the lie of safety emanates from my arms, my eyes. they do not lie awake in panic, scrabbling for comfort, for a port that will hold them until the world makes sense again.

i still do.

i know the world is big and cold and strange and luck is a finicky friend, and every time we cast the dice we risk everything we have. i know the path of life will teach my children this eventually, and i shudder with the knowledge, because they will inevitably hurt for it.

i know too, though, that life is full of reprieve and second chances; that we are never as alone as we feel at three in the morning.

and that last night of vacation, i stare at the mackerel, barbecued in its skin, on my plate, and i bite because it is my duty as a mother, and i smile and give thanks for fish.

Oscar with his father and his father’s father, fishermen all, and his first fish

i wake up and remember that i am in no rush. i remain prone a little longer, half-adrift, one eye pried open to smile at the small child thisclose to my face. today is the first day of the rest of my life, i intone, under my breath. morning dragon fumes escape my mouth, like bandits fleeing a crime. they knock small child over. small child rights self, peers back into the unholy vortex from whence the evil came, and chirps at me up, mommy! go get me some milk, mommy!

small children are resilient in the face of their goals.

i, on the other hand, am having a helluva time weathering the dragon’s breath of change.
+++

i finished my full-time job on Friday. there was dinner and wine. kind things were written in cards. and i thought, good. phew. now onward ho.

i got a research grant and an academic paper and presentation accepted all in the same week, a coupla weeks back. then BlogHer’s Voice of the Week, and news that a social media consultancy gig came through: a surfeit of good things. this week, i present to a writers’ conference about blogs and social platforms, then stand up in the hallowed local Public Library and read. my own stuff. like a writer.

in the blink of an eye, i am all the things i ever wanted to be.

Monday i woke up and snuggled the kids and went back to sleep for an hour. i leapt from the bed to the shower and hustled myself downtown for a coffee shop meeting. an Arctic educational research contract that centres around a documentary film and me conducting social media research and writing papers; good gorgeous interesting stuff. i stayed parked at the coffee shop with my laptop for half the day, walked home, hung out some laundry, read 101 Disgusting Facts about the Human Body to a rapt Oscar and a whirlwind Josephine, played trucks for awhile, then drove out to the beautiful north shore of PEI to have dinner with a group of writers and a literary agent. which involved the best creme brulee i have ever had the pleasure of getting to know, and also some lovely people.

where, you ask, is the problem?

the problem is today. today, i looked at myself in the mirror and the dragon breathed and i cowered.

because i’m on the verge of all these new, intimidating things. they are things that will challenge and push me, force me to juggle three different kinds of writing and exploration all at the same time. they are things that will eat my days with deadlines and yet give me the opportunity to spend my days doing things i love. they are things that will pay poorly, for now; things that trade on the relentlessness of reputational economy and promise a longterm payoff, or two, if i am good. if i can keep up. suddenly, there are no more sick days.

today, i did not know how to value that. today, i feel like a pretender.

in my high school yearbook, amidst the poufy perms and the ghastly high-waisted jeans that scarred the self-images of most of us unfortunate enough to come of age during that era abandoned by all the gods of good taste, you will find my awkward and contrived graduation photo, the one that didn’t look like me even then. big of hair and cheek and beady of eye, i beam saccharinely down on posterity. somewhere next to the photo, by my name or the Simon & Garfunkel quote selected by my youthful hippie self, you will find that i was voted Most Artistic by my graduating class.

i was thrilled by that, for the record. it was amazing – in fact, startling and affirming – to be seen as i saw myself.

i didn’t say so then. i wish i had. i’d spent hundreds of hours doodling away all through my childhood. i did not know that i had worked for the skills i possessed, did not know they were even useful skills. i did not think of what i did as art. but for that one moment, i dared. then i gave my head a shake and called myself a pretender. who was i to think of myself as an artist?

i wish i’d known how to own that gift, attach goals to it, value it.

i did not. and so i put away childish things and i went off to college and i never drew again.
+++

i have been collecting links and stories for awhile now on writing and publishing in the age of social media. a dying trade, they mostly proclaim, and this heartens me. i’m good with decline. it takes the pressure off.

i am afraid to fail.

i have been juggling a full-time job with parenting and blogging and launching some kind of academic credentials so long i no longer remember what it’s like to just…stop. to have nothing i need to write, no deadlines, no stories burgeoning, ideas slipping through my fingers. and it’s only about to ramp up.

every time i stared that fact in the face today, i cursed myself. who do you think you are i hissed privately to think of yourself as a writer? who are YOU to try to play academic?

the writing taunts me. it stretches before me, Sisyphean, slow and sticky, forever unfinished. i have spent a year in a constantly interruptable job and live with two preschoolers. between all that and Twitter, my frayed brain has the attention span of a gnat.

but this time, with this opportunity, i want to value the work i’ve put into these skills i’ve developed. i want to stop being afraid. i want to be resilient in the face of my goals.

after all, my children have the attention span of gnats, too, and they’re not hiding their wants and dreams and lights under a bushel.

so Thursday night i will stand up and read my own words in public. and i will plug away at the synthesis and research and the grant writing of grad student life and i will try to find balance and i will hope against hope that maybe i can make a reasonable life out of these things i love to do when they aren’t scaring the shit outta me.

and i will keep going. because i don’t want to find myself in twenty years time saying, one time? i did all this cool writing and research stuff and then i didn’t know what to do with it or how to value it so i just…stopped.

i don’t want to say that ever again.

i eye it nervously.

last spring, when Dave’s father built these garden boxes for us and delivered them, Dave told Oscar we’d grow lettuce, and tomatoes, and wax beans. and cucumbers. oh, the cucumbers, he promised. visions of pickles danced in his head, all crunchy and tart. i saw them. i could almost taste them.

but i sensed a problem. i like to identify problems.

my inner Lisa Simpson leapt up and waved her hand. brightly, i said, are the boxes deep enough for cucumbers?

my inner Lisa Simpson, it seems, is a closet Chrissy Snow. Dave and his dad didn’t stop laughing for weeks. they are still prone to fits of braying at my expense.

apparently, cucumbers are not a root vegetable. well, ahem.
+++

i was not born to this harvest of bounty from land, not even from little backyard boxes.

the garden has grown rife with tomato plants. a pea shoot towers over me. cucumber leaves the size of my head are totally trying to block the poor carrots from the sun. the whole box oozes with lusty obscenity, an overflowing pile of procreation curling in over itself. tendrils reaching out to clasp and claim whatever comes near.

i call it Audrey. i do not get too close.

waiting for our harvest, i pull storebought peas and wax beans from my fridge and wonder at the fur on them. didn’t we buy those last week? from the Farmer’s Market? shouldn’t they still be good five days later?

i think i understand why people eat out of cans. real food is too wild for me.

i am aware that i am silly, feeling burdened by the luxury of excess. having enough food that i do not need to worry, enough that things can get lost in my fridge, ought to be something i celebrate. but instead, i happen upon the wilted spinach and smack! there i am, nursing a sore arse at the bottom of the depths of despair.

when my vegetables die unconsumed, i feel panicky, incompetent, and wracked with guilt.

i didn’t grow up like this. food was purchased, good food, and used. eaten. diligently. there was no room for the kind of casual rotting that takes place in my home. poverty sat on the doorstep. good stewardship of what we had was the highest source of pride.

waste was a sin on par with baby smuggling.

it occurs to me, looking out the back door, that the fact that we didn’t grow food is damn near criminal. my mother and i rented, yes, but through my high school years we had a duplex with a yard. why not? i don’t know. my grandmother grew tomatoes, and we tried one year, but just the one. literacies and time and perceptions of value: all the hundred other complex reasons the poor stay poor, and why urban poverty – even in a small town – is different from rural poverty.

but i suspect the primary reason why we never grew much more than an African violet was that my mother, like me, is secretly appalled at the sheer fecundity and tangle of garden-hood.

it’s not Puritanism, or prudishness, even if i did recently threaten to start an @ShitMyMomSays Twitter account and tell the world she irons her underwear. (and it looks very nice, mom).

it’s loss of control. i know this, because i am coming with age to realize that i am exactly like my mother. only worse. because her coping mechanisms have always made sense within the strictures of her life and reality.

they do not make sense in mine. they leave me overwhelmed by food. by the capacity for rot. by overgrowth. by others.

more than anything else, i did not grow up learning to live with, uh, others. as in other living things. no cats in the house. no dogs. no siblings. no garden. no father. one house plant and a short-lived fish named Ernie.

we were the model of zen minimalism, our lives a proud and carefully stacked Andy Warhol painting, all Campbell’s soup. which we ate to the last drop.

the most abiding legacy of this careful, measured childhood is that i do not scale well.  i am most comfortable with small measures. with just enough. with direct control. when i am the only one putting food in the fridge, and the one doling out the meals, no matter for how many, i can be the most virtuously economical person alive. it’s how i got through college. i lived on $100, maximum, a month, after rent and utilities. i lived fine.

but now i live with another adult, one who trails beer caps around the house like an overgrown Hansel, and who has the temerity to buy produce and stuff it at the back of the fridge sometimes. who plants gardens. who procreated these two lovely, messy children with me. and not one of them seems to care that there are seven peas at risk of rotting before we eat them.

i overlearned the lessons of my childhood.

what about the starving Armenians? the inside of my head shouts in alarm, wringing its metaphorical hands. then it realizes whether i eat the peas or not, they’re not making it to Armenia. and they’re certainly not time-traveling.

and so i give thanks – deep, genuine, soul-rocked thanks – for this harvest of bounty that i live on a daily basis. even if it is more than i can chew.

and then i close the door to the backyard and i line up all the produce in the fridge until i can breathe again.
+++

teach me, wise ones. do you have garden stories of your own? does food go bad in your fridge? tell me how to love the chaos and growth and fecundity and dirt. i’m getting there, but i could use a guide or two. otherwise, Jamie Oliver’s gonna come and beat me up.

i pulled up at the stoplight just a second too late to coast through the grace period left behind in the wake of a turn signal.  i was too busy cursing out the dawdler ahead who had damned me to a whole forty-five seconds of waiting to even notice her at first. i am not good at waiting. i harrumphed.

and then some motion, her posture, drew my attention.

she was to my right, in a boxy American sedan of a certain age, waiting for the green. there was a booster seat in the back of the car. she was alone.

she was weeping.

or rather, she was bawling, howling, self-immolating in the driver’s seat of her car. weeping sounds demure. her shoulders heaved and shuddered against the back of her seat and her hands fluttered against her face and there was clearly snot in with the tears and my heart leapt out of me in sympathy at the sight of her.

my hands, though, flapped against the steering wheel uncertainly. i felt frozen, as if i’d stumbled upon someone masturbating, or taking a dump: some animal activity we are civilized into pretending none of us engage in. verboten!! my eyes screamed at me, and averted themselves. then i looked back. i could not stop looking. her open mouth – soundless but for the background noise of my local morning radio show – reminded me of my children’s faces, slack and gaping in their sleep.

i did nothing. you do not get out of your car at a light and walk over to a perfect stranger and intrude upon her sorrow, whatever it may be. you do not.

but sometimes, when the strange hermetic veil that bestows order on us all lifts for a moment, you will want to. your breath will catch and your knees will shake in correspondence with the Other and you will know that there is no Other, only elaborate acts of Othering we all engage in in order to survive.

i mouthed words to her, though she did not see me. I am here, i said, kind of stupidly. then, whispering, You will get here. it was a prayer. then i added, i moved the bedroom furniture around last week.

the light changed and the car behind her honked and she lurched away. i watched her taillights and exhaled.
***

i moved the bedroom furniture. finally.

five years ago, i drove to the paint store a few days before Mother’s Day. the paint had been ordered weeks before. Dave had rushed in in the interim to try to ensure that the kitchen colour wasn’t too school-bus-yellow, and to choose a primer, but he was back at work that day. i had thought i should leave the house.

i’d never painted a room in my life. i’d never owned a house before. the girl behind the counter lined up four bright cans of paint and a can of primer and issued a barrage of how-tos into my gaping, blinking face and i nodded obligingly and took the brushes she proffered and the rolly thing. she asked if i had any plans for Mother’s Day and my mouth hung open further and i shook my head and felt my entire nervous system jangle, barbed wire tugging my spine. i fumbled for my bank card and punched in numbers i could not quite see.

then, behind me, somewhere in the store a baby cried and, like a valve, the pressure behind my swollen left breast let go and i stood there, a flower of milk expanding darkly on my tshirt.

i stood there holding a can of grass-green paint for the nursery. for one beautiful stark moment i saw the store as a Jackson Pollack canvas, spattered violently with green paint and droplets of milk. i wondered how hard i could throw the can, whether i could break glass. in my throat a dragon rose, ready to take wing.

i knew if i tried to speak him free, no words would come; only men in white coats.

and so i hefted the awkward paint cans and my bag of brushes and i hightailed it to my car. there, in the pretend sanctuary of that parking lot, in the cloister of an ugly blue Hyundai, i cried raw and hopeless and despairing, until the dragon was spent and my shoulders heaved back against the seat and i was alone.

i had given birth to a son six days before, the same day we took possession of the house. my firstborn. our first home. my first Mother’s Day.

but my child was gone, and i had only the uselessness of milk, and a house full of boxes, and nursery paint, and i did not give two shits whether i ever got out of that car again.

that first Mother’s Day came and went. i painted a lot of the house, those first weeks after Finn’s death. none of it was, contrary to what polite society might prefer to believe, particularly cathartic. grief itself is a learning curve, as is surviving it: having to attend to the house at that time and continually confront my own ineptitude was like insult to injury. but perhaps anything i did in those days would have felt like that.

then i finished, and things gradually found a place and we were moved in. we got on with living. and for five years, i have lived in this house like a truce.

grief eats energy. even long after you think you’re done with it, you go to lift a finger and find that one small act is just too much, a thread that unravels every effort you’ve made, and you collapse back again into whatever puddle you have managed to form yourself into and you begin again from the beginning.

for five years, Dave & i have slept in a bedroom that is neither especially inviting or comfortable, let alone restful. five years of collecting books and clothing and kid stuff gradually resulted in the room looking and feeling vaguely like a junk room, with the furniture haphazardly arranged and stuff piled precariously on top of other stuff. but every time he mentioned changing it, i bristled.

not because i liked it. not because i’m change-averse, though i am, in many ways. but i was once an inveterate re-arranger of rooms, a person who found joy in creating space, however humble.

instead, for five years, grief and its long fucking aftermath have made me slow and weary and unable to even contemplate how i want the damn bedroom, let alone able to actually drag the bed from the corner and confront the dust bunnies lurking there. i don’t want a different bedroom, my brain would lash out at me in the early days, i want my CHILD. even long after i accepted that he was gone and never coming back, i’d have cheerfully burned the house to the ground just for daring to remind me of its artifactual self. stupid world’s greatest consolation prize, i called it, in my heart. and so i taught myself, without even thinking, not to confront it. i cleaned it, tidied it, refused to engage with it. if Dave brought up making it more pleasurable to be in, i’d close the conversation and turn in on myself, exhausted by the mere idea.

until last week, alone with the four walls for the first time in what felt like far too long, i stood in my bedroom and dared to actually consider what the bed would look like on the other wall. then i stopped and waited for the exhaustion and the snark and the hurt to swim back in over me.

nothing.

i took a deep breath and i nodded to the strange land of my own psyche and the house itself and to whatever of Finn remains within these walls that should have been his first home. and i smiled and started pushing furniture and possibilities and myself, past the sorrow that claimed me in the car that day five years ago and into a world where bedside lamps on either side of the bed are no longer too big a deal to think about.

grief recognizes its own. sometimes, though, there is still nothing to say, or no space to speak within; sometimes you have nothing to offer to the suffering of somebody else except words that trail out into silence long before they hear them.

someday, lady at the red light, i hope you can rearrange your furniture too.

i blow kisses and, to stem the inevitable Mommy! i want to tell you one more thing! i begin to sing. the song is a direct result of the chapter book Oscar and i have started this week, his first ever. Anne of Green Gables. it is his Island birthright, i tell myself. or my own.

this song – the title track from the musical version of Anne that my mother and i will take Oscar to next weekend – has lain dormant, unsung and forgotten by me for twenty years. but i start in, full of sudden inspiration. the first notes are familiar like old shoes and my own voice pleases me, which is rare in itself. i gather steam and launch into the high notes and suddenly, i am crying.
***

my grandmother took me to Anne of Green Gables, The Musical, every summer from the time i was Oscar’s age. it was our special outing, the tickets carefully saved for. i remember the cool vastness of the theatre, and the slight scratch of the plush red folding seats that bounced under me. i’d lean back and gaze up at the huge triangular light fixtures, like giant taco chips across the ceiling, and thrill to the cacophony of the orchestra warm up. every year i wore my best old-fashioned dress, the most current in an ongoing series of ruffled wonders.

i admitted once that it was my heart’s secret hope that some year, some unspecified tragedy would overcome the lead actress and all action onstage would stop, until a finger pointed out into the audience straight into my eager, waiting face, seeing what no one else could. You, little girl. You. and i would step into the spotlight in my puffed sleeves, and a star would be born.

i admitted too that it was through the triad of Anne, Marilla, and Matthew that i understood my own family as a child: myself, my mother, and my grandmother, all in our preordained roles, in the still-familiar cloister of this clannish island culture a hundred years after the story was set.

i did not admit, though, that leaving my grandmother’s house for school as a kid, swinging my schoolbag along the old, pebbly sidewalks, i used to sing the slightly maudlin Anne of Green Gables theme song at the top of my lungs.

Anne of Green Gables, never change, I like you just this way
Anne of Green Gables, sweet and strange, stay as you are today
Though blossoms fade and friends must part
Old grow the songs we’ve sung…
Anne of Green Gables, in my heart, you are forever young
(Harron, Campbell, Campbell & Moore, 1965)

i’d get so caught up in my performance to nobody in particular that i could move myself to tears. the song is the one that Matthew sings to his Anne, in the play, as he sits dying in his rocking chair. i was a child with a primary caregiver and kindred spirit nearing 80. in that song, i came face to face with the concept – and the inevitability – of loss.

and in that song, i understood what my grandmother could never quite put into words: the way she loved me.

i had forgotten, until it spilled from my mouth and there she was, waving in the window of her sunporch.
***

i had forgotten because i worked as an usher at the theatre the summer after high school and glutted myself on the show. eight times a week is too much Anne, even for a lifelong enthusiast and sentimental sap. for the first week or so, i wept like a baby every night when Matthew died. after that, his passing stood as the measure for ten minutes til curtain, twenty til we hit the bars. for years after, the only version of the song i’d sing was the naughty parody teenage usherettes made up to wile away the lonely hours shifting from foot to foot in ugly cummerbunds and bow ties at the back of the darkened theatre: Anne of Green Gut, you filthy slut, i like you on your knees…

(may the Island Gods forgive me.)

hell, it’s hard out there for an usherette in an unflattering outfit and a job market saturated by the Anne-dustry. catharsis comes in many forms.

but suddenly, my children are freshly bathed under quilts and i am explaining Rachel Lynde and Avonlea and there it is, that old faithful friend, this song, and this time round i do not need the puffed sleeves and no one need beckon me onstage because i have this captive audience of two. this is the star i was born to be, the stage i was meant for: to make them laugh, and bring them to worlds where they will come face to face with all that it is to be human. and i am caterwauling and beneath the tears that prick i laugh, because this – this – is my time to shine and i look into their faces and understand finally, fully, exactly how my grandmother loved me.

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?

the younger of two little girls, she had gold-brown hair, big gold-brown eyes. she liked storybooks and swings and made me an initiate into the world of Dora the Explorer. when i visited, she and i and her older sister drove Barbie convertibles and painted toenails and drew pictures with our fingers on each others’ backs.  she was learning English, i, French. in the language of laughter, we sang songs of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and queens.

Posey, my imp, is uncannily like her, this child i remember from a lifetime ago.

she was my niece by marriage. the November night she was born, the call came in from the small town hours away from the college landscape her uncle and i inhabited. safe birth, great joy. i smiled, raised a beer bottle across the lumpy mattress in his rented attic room with the rainbow wallpaper, to welcome Emilie.

i had known him two months. i did not think, then, that i would marry him.

but months unfolded into years and we went, we two, hand in hand into the world like children clinging to each other. not all who wander are lost, we intoned, secretly uncertain. escape artists for lack of a better plan, we spent all we had on train tickets to the west coast. a week in the smoky bar car and we came into sight of the Rocky Mountains at five in the morning, sharp and majestic, inky black against a sky bigger than we’d ever seen.  our heads tilted together, Simon & Garfunkel on the headphones stretched between them, and there were tears in my eyes but i did not know why.

we lived in basements there, slept on floors, sold magazines to the Chinatown exchange. we ventured north of the Arctic Circle, rounded back again east to within the scent of the sea, exchanged rings. we were prodigals, forever coming home to the tiny town where his parents and his sister and her children were rooted. we brought back treasures from all over, trinkets, baubles, seashells. i bought them their first copies of Love You Forever and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Anne of Green Gables and The Little Prince. i wanted daughters, and loved Emilie and her sister like promises, practicing with an open heart.

but i loved their uncle like a brother, which is the world and not enough, all at once. he and i pulled at each other, stretched apart. Ani diFranco sang in each other’s shadow we grew less and less tall, and we waltzed our slow swan song in denial and sorrow, respectively, Hansel and Gretel run dry on breadcrumbs to find their way back. and when we left for the last time to go halfway round the globe, there were tears in my eyes then too as we waved goodbye to the little girls through the car window, and i pretended to myself that i did not know why.

you lose things in divorce, no matter how little you have or how amicable it’s all supposed to be. we had no property, no furniture, one ancient Volkswagen long sold and a cat who went to live with old folks and got better dental care than i’ve ever had. but in the cloister of the expatriate lives we made in the hermit kingdom amongst equally uprooted friends, we each lost more than we bargained for. he slept with my friend, but i chose his. the first was almost expected, the other, unforgiveable. i did not know why. i do now.

for a couple of years i still sent cards and tokens to the little girls on birthdays, Christmases. but airmail takes a long time, and dates crept up and address books got away in all my transience. when i asked him for his sister’s P.O Box address, i felt unworthy, awkward. i had chosen to be an outsider.

and so, cowardly, i stopped. Ma Tante Bonnie disappeared, kin and kind.
***

they found me two years ago, or so, on Facebook. first Emilie and then her sister. teenagers suddenly, all legs and curves and makeup, Dora and Barbies long left in the dust. they wrote and i wrote back, eager, trying not to be too effusive, too cloying. i had disappeared. disappearance is unfair to children, bottom line. but i was found, and i sent love and remembrances through the ether.

if it weren’t for Facebook i’m not sure i would have recognized her Saturday, in the hot dog line at the park. we are in New Brunswick, visiting grandparents in a small town not so far from the one i waved goodbye to ten summers ago. Oscar was with me, and his cousins, boys not much different in age than she and her sister were then.

it was the look on her face that caught my attention, rather than the face itself, at first. her eyes searched mine, for confirmation, recognition.

it took a beat for me to fully connect the dots. Emilie. as tall as i, with the long, sleek hair and angled cheekbones i know only from Facebook photos. i think i said her name, and opened my arms in the same moment she did. her English was perfect. i told her she was lovely. i asked banal questions about grade eleven, and her summer job, and her sister. and i grinned like a fool and bobbed my head up and down, heart happy.

but what do you say to a girl you last knew as a first-grader? we were intimate, you and i. i taught you all the words to Quarter Master Store, you taught me Christmas carols in French. i still think of you every time i hear Le Divin Enfant. i still note your birthday every year as it comes round on the calendar. but your Barbies are all put away now. i cannot pull you in my lap and trace your name on your back and say i’m sorry i left you. i didn’t mean to.

there are things you can’t say. you don’t get to take back ten years, whatever your paltry reasons.

her gaze was cautious, after the first blush of hello. in her eyes i felt as exposed as i have ever been. she smiled at Oscar, though, bent her head down to try to greet him where he hid behind my leg. something in the movement reminded me of the tiny girl she’d been, and i saw the image of her gold-brown bob juxtaposed against the way Josephine looks today, and i gasped again at how damn fast it all goes, how easily it slips away.

i’ve known people who moved into separate homes – for years – but still didn’t tell the children they were divorcing. i know families who manage – even after fracture – to gather the clans, cousins and ex-aunties and new partners and all – for holiday gatherings. i’ve raised my eyebrows, though with a tinge of jealousy. i grew up in a family where divorce meant my parents lived three thousand miles away from each other for twenty-eight years. when i was told by my ex that his nieces were no longer mine, i acceded.

but i knew. i knew i was wrong.

my eyes said, i’m sorry. my tongue said be well, Emilie. give my best to your family. and i took Oscar by the hand and walked away from the last memories of Ma Tante Bonnie, whom i will never be again.