i’ve been hit enough times to know what’s happening, but by the time i figure it out, i’m already flat on my back, dazed.

grief sneaks up on you long after you think you’re done.

the sadness is quieter now than before, harder to recognize. the steel cleats that shredded me have been traded in for ballet shoes, blunt and hard yet graceful, somehow. still, it feels like being trodden on, ground under. i try to acquiesce, go limp, play dead…long for twenty-four hours to simply lie on my couch and breathe, to come to terms with this ever-morphing, gruelling visitation. but there is no sanctuary, no retreat…either from grieving or from living. and so, quietly wretched, stretched between despair and normalcy, my fuse grows short…even the simplest things overwhelm me. can you not see i’m busy here? i want to shout to my sinkful of dishes, my dirty sock pile, my beautiful, living, demanding, non-sleeping children. can you not see this weight perched on my chest? can’t you see that i am not okay?!?

but i am pinned under, and my voice does not carry. grief beats out a merry rhythm about my head, brutalizing and relentless. all is grey.

a year since the ultrasound said blighted ovum. a son whose traces i can no longer feel, connect to. an emptiness i am still bewildered by, after all this time. November again. so much promise lost, so many expectations adjusted. and yet, and yet…so many blessings, so much busy-ness. i believe myself healed. almost always, i feel it. but oh, when i don’t, when old grief sidles up by surprise and takes me out at the knees, i lose my bearings. i get scared, fear she’s brought friends, and luggage. i panic.

in my very first-ever rugby game, the only team sport i ever played, the ball made it out to me at wing only once. and i caught it, an impressive feat considering that i have the hand-eye coordination of a hippo and was actually in motion at the time. pride and delight swelled up in my chest - i was high on accomplishment. and then the steel-cleated she-behemoth was right there, out of nowhere, about to flatten me, and i turned and fled. in the other direction. ahem, you know, towards the other team’s line. my fight or flight instincts are damn clear, and i know when something’s bigger than me. except the she-beast caught me anyway and ran right over me, taking the ball with her. WHUMPH. and my coach pretty much made me the waterboy after that.

i’d like to run, right now…to flee. especially since i know i can’t just lie here until grief passes on to elsewhere again. but if i tried to outrun her, she’d only catch me. somewhere or other she catches us all.

so instead i will pick myself up and go feed the baby and say a quiet thankyou for all that i have that i do not deserve and i will try to keep my mouth otherwise shut so i do not snap, so the grey does not escape. and i will be quiet, quiet with this old companion i never invited, until again she takes her things and leaves me in her wake to find my peace.

we tried full-on potty boot camp last weekend, since Dave had a few extra days off and nothing says vacation like wiping piss off the floor. in hindsight, we should’ve just flown to Thailand for the full moon party, or something. our plan failed utterly. he was ready on paper: had successfully pooped in the potty with pride just a few days before, was learning to pull down his own pants, was keen on flushing, could stay dry for hours at a time. he wears cloth, so he knows full well when he’s wet. what we forgot to account for was will. his potty-readiness is coinciding with the realization that he is an entity unto himself, and this dictator-readiness is made of stronger stuff than his urge to pee in plastic.

when he was left to roam the house in underpants Sunday morning, he announced his need to pee precisely as he finished soaking through the first pair. with the second two, he got up off the potty after a prescheduled try and promptly pissed right through their Thomas the Tank Engine decals, gleeful grin on his face. oh, he said, both times. that’s MEIN pee!

it’s interesting, watching this sense of selfhood emerge. interesting, that is, if one can detach emotionally from the shouting and the whining and the refusals of all things that have formerly pleased Little Herr Happypants. a self-identifying toddler is a rather abusive creature, not overly concerned with the feelings of others, nor a mother’s attachment to little habits of affection or personal care. dose is MEIN toes! he howls, when i bend to kiss them. NO-OH! that’s MEIN hairs! he laments, when i try to run a brush near his tangly mane. i don’ WANNA pee in the potty! he announces, suddenly, when enticed to the throne at his usual longstanding times.

he wants control, this kid. control of his self, above all else…though control over everyone else in the house and vicinity wouldn’t be bad, either, if you’re offering. he’s suddenly caught on to the diabolical fact that until this point his father and i have made all significant decisions regarding his life and well being, and those “would you like to brush your teeth or wash your face first?” forays into agency are, in fact, decoys masking the horrible, awful truth that we force cleanliness onto his person, just as we force regular nutrition and sleep and make all the real decisions about where he goes and when. he is outraged, mad as hell, and he’s not gonna take it anymore.

so he’s peeing on my floor, people. i don’t think we’ll be training him any time soon.

what i do wonder is if, once engaged, this struggle for control will ever lessen. looking ahead, to sixteen or eighteen or - thinking of my own relationship with my mom, ahem - thirty-some more years of that’s MEIN thingamajiggit (insert any object of desire or personal attribute here), i get so very, very tired.

at first i was sure he was innocent. i mean, look at that face…those curls…that sweet expression. what could bring more joy to a mama’s heart than to see her boy snuggling her baby, both of them smiling?

then i looked a little more closely at the photographic evidence. more specifically, i looked at her.

that was no smile. he was definitely goosing her.

whew.

this morning feels historic, even way up here north of the border. i fell asleep before the race was called last night, but i watched Obama’s acceptance speech on youtube this morning, and damned if there wasn’t a whole lot of sand in my eyes. i wept like a baby before i even got my morning coffee.

because Obama does represent hope and change, even to this white Canadian chick/woman. it’s not just the audacious, breathtaking fact that a man of colour is President-Elect of the most powerful nation in the world. it’s not just that he speaks eloquently and intelligently, and that he conducts himself with decency and calls for dialogue and cooperation between the partisan factions that have increasingly divided the continent over the past decade. those things are big, and they set an immediately and significantly different tone from what i’ve seen from south of the border before.

but for me, the tears came when he thanked his family. his patchwork family, with his grandmother at the centre.

Obama didn’t just overcome racial prejudice to rise to the pinnacle of visible power. he overcame his own - and my - generation’s antipathy towards “the broken home” and its products, us children of divorce in a time when divorce still carried stigma. he doesn’t have an American apple pie family, tidy and iconic. he has had to learn to love and forgive and accept people’s limitations in coming to terms with the word “family.” he has had to make his way without his father’s name and connections paving his path. he has had to work to exceed people’s expectations of what he appears to be, on paper. a small part of me sang in pride and vindication watching Obama this morning, because his family structure looks more like mine than i’m accustomed to seeing in the halls of power, on either side of the border.

i’ve heard him called elitist, during this campaign. and i howled with laughter, because to me he looks like the very model of a modern meritocracy in action…finally. he is not a scion, not the son of a dynasty. he’s achieved what he’s achieved based on intelligence and hard work and ambition and the love of an unconventional family, particularly a grandmother who taught him to believe in himself. he’s the American dream.

and this morning, just as millions of African-Americans looked at him and felt their horizons of possibility expand, just as people across the world looked at him and felt hope for leadership and healing, i looked at Barack Obama and felt all the whispers and pitying looks that dogged my childhood and my perceptions of myself go poof, invalidated finally and completely by a man who stands tall and proud and humble all at once and says “we can.”

sniff.
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how are YOU this morning? what are your hopes for Obama and his presidency? do you believe this is the beginning of a sea change…how?

…they abound.

her whole face lights up. i’d forgotten how nothing is quite so heart-melting as a baby’s first smiles.

someday, if the world is kind, she’ll flash this same cock-eyed grin - with teeth, we’re hoping teeth come with the package in good time - to some kindred soul, and maybe the earth will shift a little for one or both of them and that somebody, somewhere - maybe someone not even yet born - will taste a bit of this smitten silliness, this joy, that i feel when her eyes lock with mine and shine. i hope that for her. i really do.

but for the record, let it be known…mama was first.

when i was twelve and suffering the exquisite torture that is eighth grade, i wanted to be Boy George for Hallowe’en. i had never wanted anything so badly, with such angst and investment.

i found a baggy men’s shirt at the thrift store and safety-pinned patches to it. i had flowy pants and poorboy gloves. i hoarded all the bandanas in the house, and found a plastic porkpie hat somewhere that i convinced someone to lend me. i knew all the words to every Culture Club song ever written. i could taste it, that costume, the cool. i saw myself triumphant, transformed into someone larger than life, someone other than ordinary, weird little me. but i had one problem.

my hair was a whole inch long. and wigs were not something sold at the dollar store in 1984…at least not where i lived. wigs were expensive, blue-tinged old-lady hair replicas sold at upstanding proprietors. Boy George’s be-ribboned braids could not be copied by any wig i could get my hands on.

we lived with my grandmother that year, my mother and i, in an old, tall yellow house with slanted ceilings and sharp corners. we had cupcakes every Hallowe’en, the three of us, in that Formica kitchen…whether we were living there or not, it was my grandmother’s neighbourhood i trick or treated in. when i came down the stairs that year, all made up and swishy and awash in colour, long black-brown braids twisted with yarn poking out of my bandanas and swinging ’round my shoulders, my mother clapped and my grandmother beamed and when my mother asked, bewildered, “where did you get the hair?” my grandmother and i smiled at each other.

because it was her hair, my grandmother’s, a glossy braid that had hung to her waist when she was twelve. cut while WWI was still raging in Europe, it had lain coiled in a cedar chest for almost seven decades, peeked at but undisturbed.

and then i’d raped it. with her express permission, her blessing, i’d plundered that thick plait, torn it to pieces, tarted it up with rags and elastics and ribbons to make a Hallowe’en costume. a costume of Boy freaking George. a costume of which no pictures even exist, because the camera was broken most of that year. and the hair - that beautiful braid - when untangled at the end of the evening was ruined, brittle as it was after all those years, impossible to return to its coil. i tried. my grandmother said, gently, “don’t worry.”

i felt beautiful, and interesting, and magical in that costume. i doubt half the people who saw me had any clue who i was. i doubt my grandmother would have recognized the real Boy George if he’d waltzed into her living room that night. but i felt like royalty, inheritance tumbling over one eye in the signature kiss curl as i winked floridly to every candy-giver and minced my way off into the October night.

a part of me still feels shame about what i did to that braid…that artifact, that piece of history. and a part of me thinks my grandmother was wise as shit, and sends up a “thank you” and a smile every Hallowe’en, as i eat my ritual cupcake.
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Oscar wanted to wear the same Hallowe’en costume - an elephant - that he wore last year.

i figured, great. it’s cute, it’s warm, it still sorta fits him, it saves me buying (erm…or making, but really, we’re talking buying here) a new one. what does he know the difference?

dandy. until i went to take him to the same sitter’s as last year…in the same costume. and i went to put up his photo here on the site…in the same costume. and a little voice at the back of my head shrills, what kind of mother puts her kid in the same costume two years in a row?!?!

damn. more costume guilt. how about the fact that i borrowed a costume for Posey, failed to take her anywhere much at all in it, and didn’t even get a decent picture.

fail.

but we had fun. and Posey smiled today, even if no photographic evidence exists outside my memory. happy Halllowe’en, everyone. may the candy be plentiful and the spooking be sweet…and may i suggest a cupcake or two?

nah, i’m not time-travelling. up here in the Great White North, we cast our ballots two weeks ago. our conservative minority spent millions on an election…that resulted in another conservative minority. whee. curb my enthusiasm.

i’m a bit saturated with election talk this fall, from both sides of the border…though at least the races have been lively. (well, the American race is lively…and historic…and mind-boggling. a right smart honours degree in political science and i’m apparently still too thick to comprehend the true meaning of the word “socialist”. duh me.) up here the election proved largely a testament to the inherent clusterfuck of a five-party first-past-the-post electoral system.

to recap, for the non-Canucks, we have one national conservative party (relatively centrist by American standards), one separatist party (vive la Quebec libre), one traditional party called The Liberals (centrist, campaigned in part on an environmentalist carbon tax platform this time round), one traditional third party called the New Democrats (the closest we come to actual socialists, but still social democrats), and a more recently emergent Green Party (who failed to get any federal seats but did snag a chunk of the popular vote).

all parties had an environmental plan or strategy as part of their platform. for the Liberals and the Greens, it was particularly high-profile. together with the NDP, they captured 51% of the popular vote…compared to nearly 38% for the now-ruling minority government. we don’t do coalitions here much…rather a pity. but the line i’m suddenly hearing from major news outlets is…the environment failed as a political strategy. with all these crazy economic times befalling us, green is dead.

yikes.

the implication here is that because half of Canadians voted for a centrist or left-of-centre party with an environmental platform that was key to their campaign and would entail major changes to current policy (and we’re not even talking here about the Quebecois whose vote went to the separatist party, whose environmental policy aligns reasonably closely to the three aforementioned), Canadians don’t give two shits about the environment. nope, our politics are now solely about keeping money in our pocketses.

certainly, the fact that our national delegates just managed to keep lucrative Canadian asbestos off an international list of hazardous chemicals might suggest that that’s the tone our government plans to run with.

i’m angry about this little turn of the spin. because spin and rhetoric affect discourse…the ways people are able to think and talk about issues, about citizenship, about their lives. and a discourse that green is dead seems to me to handicap a groundswell that’s possibly too little, too late but still all we’ve got to build with in terms of, um, you know, maybe saving the planet. from ourselves. for our kids.

i think the media is doing us a disservice here, simplifying a complex electoral decision down to a “green is out, belt-tightening in” kind of message. particularly because it suggests that green initiatives are inherently more costly at the consumer/voter level…which is not true, as buying less imported crap and purchasing both less overall and locally where possible would be environmentally friendly and cheaper for many of us, if we cut the chaff and really did tighten our belts. the idea that we’re entitled to our current levels of consumption, despite the fact that across many sectors we’ve known for years they’re unsustainable, is at the root of the whole financial bust in the first place.

bah.

Canada will likely see another election within three years. when it comes, i hope that green platforms remain a visible part of the various campaigns…and i hope that even more citizens are willing to accept the notion of a little belt-tightening in order to make those platforms a viable reality. if we haven’t been spun back into complacency about the important things by all this stock market drama by then.

but hell, see…i really am a socialist.**

**okay, not really. i don’t even like pink. but compared to the US presidential candidates - either of them - i’m bleeding red. and bemused and aghast all at the same time by the McCarthyite parody the word seems to unleash south of the border. can anybody explain this to a poor brainwashed victim of socialized medicine?

for six straight hours last night, she either nursed or screamed. i bounced her. her father burped her. we rocked her and i nursed her more and more and again more, pinned under my cheery giant pillow like a museum display of Motherhood. my spine eventually curled, nerves raw from the prolonged hormonal torture that is Your Newborn Crying, but her father got me a glass of Wolfblass and took her upstairs for a fresh diaper and generally quite redeemed himself from all that thankyou card nonsense, really.

we had friends in, and eating and drinking and talking went on despite the maelstrom at the centre of the house. we raised our voices to be heard. i swayed like Stevie Wonder through the conversations, lolling my head with the rise and fall of her protests, clucking and cooing while asking adult questions with the other half of my mouth. i heard nobody fully, maybe…but i was mostly there. enough to enjoy myself, despite the fact that she was having her worst evening to date.

and then it ended in a fit of poop and the cocoon of the sling. curled close to me, she suddenly quieted. we waved our friends off. we slept…never long enough, but deeply.

i tell people it’s easier - for us, at least - the second time around. it’s partly Posey herself…while last night was rare for her, it was the way Oscar’s evenings ran without fail until he was nearly four months old. but i know, too, this time, that it’ll end. i know that i’ll sleep again someday. and i know that hiding upstairs trying to settle the baby before i engage with my friends is a pointless, losing battle, one that will only ensure that i miss out on all the wine and most of the good gossip. i know, even in the moment, that these are not nights to wish away.

i got half of one written. it’s hard to write thank you cards when you’re it seems like you’re holding a nursing baby all the time. and i thought, in passing, how the hell did i get all these written so promptly when Oscar was born?

Oscar was colicky. i was overwhelmed and exhausted, and still reeling, blah blah blah. but i wrote the damn thank yous, put a photo of Oscar in each one, labelled and addressed them and divied them up, some to the mailbox, some for Dave to drop off at the university to the many people there who gave us gifts at his birth. because i try to do that kind of thing, and it’s still relatively de rigeur around here, in this last bastion of the fifties. and because those social niceties matter to me when people have gone to the trouble to do something kind…it is a point of pride for me to make the effort in return. yes, i was raised by Emily Post. but i busted my ass on those thank you cards, that time around. when i had very, very little reserve to draw on for that busting.

imagine, then, my face when i happened upon six or seven of those two-and-a-half-year-old thank you cards tonight, still sealed, never delivered, in the bottom of Dave’s filing cabinet where he sent me to dig for folder tabs.

Dave has a very bad habit of forgetting things.

part of me is mortified. the good people from the university who never got properly thanked for the fine and lovely gifts you gave Oscar? um…uh…yeh. guess it’s a little late.

the bigger part of me is furious. foot-stomping, arm-flapping, indignantly righteously ragingly furiously mad, teeth pulled back from my lips like a hyena. comical, i suppose, given that the statute of limitations on thank you cards is likely past. but i’m all…besmirched. i never went out of my way to thank most of these people in person, because i thought they’d received a pleasant card, replete with photo memento, so for two+ years i’ve been blithely interacting with these colleagues without so much as a “hey, that was nice”. that’s rude. and i hate being rude. and i’d spent hours of my sleep-deprived time and energy to prepare those cards and photo mementoes, and all Dave had to do was take them to work and toss them in the internal mailbox. that’s it. and he TOLD me he’d done it.

i am entertaining sweet fantasies of me slaying him with my bare hands and teeth, after a hearty smiting and some loud recriminations.

except then…um…who would help with the baby?

so, crucifixion being an unfortunately unreasonable option, i resort to public shaming. bad Dave. bad, bad Dave. mad, mad Bonnie. stamps foot. sulks. begs you all to wag your fingers at him gloweringly.

perhaps i will just make him write all the Posey thank you cards himself.

or rather, i feel like my house is drowning…to the outside observer, it more likely looks a little cluttered, overstuffed. and dusty, definitely dusty. but i can live with the dustbunnies…we reached a detente years ago, where they keep to their corners and i keep to mine. it’s the clutter, the sense of being crowded in on by stuff, stuff everywhere, that makes me batshit crazy, turns my voice shrill and my eyes all deer in headlights. i have more tolerance for dental drilling than i do for clutter, especially clutter of the sort where there’s really nowhere left to put any frigging thing and you can no longer keep track of what half of it is for or where it would go.

i blame the children.

Josephine, it appears, was born with six suitcases worth of stuff to her name. i swear i didn’t buy it, much…it just materialized with celebrations and kindnesses, donations and gifts and hand-me-downs and my occasional breakdown in the face of wee smocked dresses on sale. Oscar, too, owns more clothes than i do, and seems to sing toys from the sky like birds.

or bird droppings. scattershot, they adorn our den helter-skelter, while i flap about the house trodding on Thomas the Tank Engine and squawking “confusion and delay!” in my best - if unintentional - Sir Topham Hatt imitation. Thomas at least has spent a solid year enthralling my offspring…the charms of others have not been so enduring. i didn’t realize how quickly kids outgrow their toys…that the Little People farm will not do him until he’s twelve, no matter whether i spent fifty bucks on it or not. in any case, old toys are banished to the shed to lie in wait for Posey or for loan to little cousins, and new ones arrive to take their place. the task of trying to squeeze them back into the house when Poe is ready looms like a date with my own personal idea of hell.

yesterday my half-sister, bless her, brought her rainforest swing for Josephine. it’s a gorgeous swing, almost new. the baby loves it. and it has a footprint the size of a small zeppelin…i’ve slept in rooms smaller than the floorspace that swing eats up. i’ve been hyperventilating since it arrived, trying to figure out which wall to knock out in order to make room for the bloody thing. i want it, don’t get me wrong. but i don’t want to give up the room for it. and when your house is twelve hundred square feet, room is not in infinite supply…thus clutter happens.

so much has come so easy. fifty years ago, families of four and five and six children were regularly raised in houses precisely this size, likely with fewer lamentations and a lot less clutter. my mother, who has not hesitated to inform me more than a few times that she got me through to toilet training with only a dozen thin old diapers and a wringer washer, stares in thinly veiled horror at the largesse of toys and outfits that her grandchildren possess. i shrug lamely and swear i didn’t buy it all, and she and i both recognize how lucky i am to be freed from the worry and want that haunted her all through my childhood.

but it’s too much, people. it is a joy and privilege to be able to give my kids some nice things…creature comforts, imaginative toys, cute clothes. i am in no way above the materialism of my world and my time…this age of indulgence that’s crept over all of us - or at least all of us who can lay our hands on credit - has left me thinking little of dropping dollars on things that please me. and things for my children please me. but when we live more simply than most people we know and i still have nightmares wherein colonizing, primary-coloured plastic toys eat me alive whilst playing tinny nursery rhyme tunes, there’s a problem somewhere. and maybe it’s not just that i’m disturbed.

recession scares me, sure. the shitkicking my savings have taken over the past month or so leaves a little tang of fear in my mouth so sour that my brain prefers not to consider the subject at all. but, at the same time, the Scots pioneer deep down in my soul feels freed by the prospect of reckoning, of forced frugality, of a retreat from a culture of such excess that my not-quite-six-week-old owns more stuff than whole families not so far from here whom fortune has not treated so generously. parenting as a consumer pastime is not what i want to be. i need less, folks, less than what i have.

we may all have to make do on less, and i don’t want to paint that as falsely rosy. for some, there is genuinely no wiggle room. but for many of us, less is a very relative term at this juncture…our less still more than any generation before us ever considered having, and much of it unnecessary. i hope our culture can use this downturn to do a little needed paring of our bloat, our clutter. i do not want my children to mistake all this for entitlement, or for happiness. and - for the sake of my sanity - i do not want to step on another godforsaken toy train.

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are you drowning? in stuff, or fear of what a downturn will mean?