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Father’s Day has always been my least favourite holiday on the Hallmark calendar.  my father spent my childhood thousands of miles away, a voice on a phone, a series of semi-regular notes and letters in a cursive script round and beautiful.   he was, always, my father.  he was not a dad, though, never a daddy - neither rulesetter nor guide of my heart nor anything else the painfully gendered and whitewashed selection of Father’s Day cards at the gift shop have ever suggested he might have been, had he wanted to.  i have called him by his first name since i could speak.  every year for the past twenty-five or so, i have gone looking for a Father’s Day card for this man with whom civilities have always been observed with some pleasantness, and have struggled to scrounge up something that does not use the words “Dad” or “Daddy”, that does not refer to the great wisdom he imparted or patience he showed or money he doled out at my every whim, and yet that neither diminishes him to some couch potato stereotype ineptly blowing up a bbq, nor makes fart jokes.  every year, i am baffled to discover that such a card does not exist, except occasionally when The Far Side saves my ass.  this year, i had to resort to a card that ran along the lines of “i didn’t get you a bad tie, i just got you this card.”   i was rather shamed.  i love my father, for all…well, for all.  i think he deserves a better card than that.  but there was nothing else there that did not ring ridiculous, that did not cue the tumbleweeds to come blowing through the holes in the scenery, making them obvious, even cruel.

so i didn’t try to get Dave a card.  if our local supplier doesn’t carry much for the post-divorce family, finding something touchingly appropriate for “my not-quite husband on one of those fake holidays we hate anyway and have loathed particularly since we spent our first versions thereof as parents without a living child and thus realized just how wretched and contrived and surreal the whole shebang is” seemed, well, unlikely.  but i did let him sleep in, and made him an omelet and coffee.  and i hope somewhere in there i said thank you to him, because Oscar is too young to say it yet, too young to know that life doesn’t always come this way, with a dad who is willing to love you up close and everyday and with patience and joy in your accomplishments, who is able to be present and steady, who is able to teach you to laugh at yourself and at him, too, and who will love you without reservation.  but i am grateful on O’s behalf that he has this kind of dad, more grateful than i can say.

and as i watched the two of them play today, daddy and boy, i realized i never fully knew how much i was missing all those years, growing up for all cultural intents and purposes without a father.  i am grateful for that too, because the twinge of comprehension does not cut nearly so deeply as it would have had i not come to the recognition here and now, as a part of something beautiful and strangely healing, this partnership and gift that parenting is, for us, when we are paying attention.

no angst today.  we’re all out.  i made 24 weeks today, safely past yesterday’s milestone of having had my water break at 23w6d the first time around, necessitating airlift and uncovering all sorts of previously unanticipated complications…

so today i’m just breathing, grateful, good.

and in celebration, i’m doing laundry.  because i really AM that much of a party animal, yep. and because it’s a sunny, windy day, and Dave put up a clothesline a few weeks ago, and the ten foot walk to the back deck from the washing machine is a fine form of exercise for those who have no musculature left.  and because this bedrest thing has meant there’s been a slight, erm, build-up of laundry in our home of late and now that i’m allowed to do a little, i feel it’s incumbent upon me to save the hamper from utterly self-destructing under its own weight.

but also because i want to do a little public service announcement.  i think there’s probably little so misunderstood in the entire parent-sphere (blog or real-life) as cloth diapers. and having just laundered some, i’d like to counter some of the rumours.

i keep hearing about how they’re hard, how they create a lot of work.  i can see the reasons behind those assumptions - my own mother, who owned a total  of twelve cloth prefolds during my entire pre-potty-trained existence and used ‘em, day in and day out, with a wringer washer, believes Pampers are some kind of miracle of Jesus.  i get that.  i’m not above disposables - we use them sometimes when we’re travelling, and they have their place in my canon of Reasons i’m Happy it’s Not 1970.  but what i want to lay out here, just in case there’s anybody out there waffling on the fence about diapering options…cloth is actually no big deal.  not a lot of work, not a lot of gross, not a lot of waste water.  seriously.  it does seem to end up sounding like a lot of work nearly every single time i hear about it in media or on discussion boards or at baby showers, unless the person speaking is some kind of earth mother goddess type…but i call bullshit babyshit on that.  it’s a myth that keeps us comfortable, societally, keeps us consuming, keeps us thinking we’ve got it good.  but it’s a myth that makes a mountain out of the molehill of work actually involved in cloth diapering, and a myth that ends up perpetuating a fair amount of, um…waste.

this week, as public radio helped me while away the tedium of collating the final report for the project i’ve worked on all year, there was a show on about some Canadian dude who’s gone to England to recycle that nation’s disposable diapers, because a) Canadians aren’t nearly so interested in the whole recycling thing and b) England only has nine years max of landfill available for nappies before, well, babies are just going to have to stop pooping or people are going to have to change their practices.  sometimes i suspect all this space we have around us here in North America doesn’t exactly channel our better angels.  in any case, the companion piece to Mr. Diaper Recycler was a panel of three moms from across this country discussing the diapering choices they’d made.  and while all were making efforts to be greenish in various aspects of their lives, the discourse around diapers was pretty familiar.  the mom using cloth was a serious eco-hippie, kudos to her, who’s also used elimination communication with her kids and had them totally trained and probably growing patchouli and playing guitar by the age of two.  the mom who used disposables had intended otherwise during pregnancy but got overwhelmed by a colicky baby and now “just doesn’t think about it and doesn’t feel guilty about it.”  and the mom using compostable g-diapers mentioned the waste of water resources that go into cloth in any case.

of all of them, the one i identified most with personally was b…the overwhelmed one.  i’m not the natural mama sort, not by nature.  when it became clear that i had a child intent on crying and not sleeping for the first three and a half months of his little life, i struggled.  i was not a pretty sight.  and we’d been sent home from the NICU with a crapload of preemie and newborn Pampers, so i used ‘em and into the landfill they went, and i felt a wee bit nasty about that but seriously, when you’re not sleeping, eco-footprints can go screw themselves, especially if you don’t see an equally simple option at hand.  when the Pampers ran out, O was about two months old and coming on ten pounds and starting to look like he might not swim in the prefolds and wraps i’d bought…so i tried them.  and they leaked, and it was a bit of a disaster and i very gravely contemplated throwing the whole venture into the landfill just out of spite.

it was mostly the fact that i had a friend who’d used cloth successfully that kept me going.  this wasn’t just some crazy thing that nobody i knew actually did.   i had someone to ask, to learn from.  and so just in case any of you might need that person in order to give cloth a try, assuming you even you want to, here’s me uh…being that person?  or volunteering to try, at least.

there are a few things i needed in order to be able to use cloth as much as i have and as long.  most important was a washer (and preferably a dryer too, though i try to line/drip dry a few loads a week to save energy).  had that washer not been conveniently located between my kitchen and my back deck, it would have been a more daunting workload, for sure.  the second most important, particularly once i went back to work, was a sitter willing to try cloth.  i’ve been lucky on both counts.  but mostly what i needed was just to work out a system that i could keep simple.

here’s what we use:

1) we used prefolds and wraps for the first six months or so because i’d been given a bunch of prefolds and i’m cheapish.  i never did find great wraps but all of them starting working better and leaking less once i started washing with Arm & Hammer green, because we have hard water here and “free”-type detergents just add to the build-up on diapers.

2) around six months, i retired the prefolds and ordered pocket diapers: eight Fuzzibunz mediums and six Happy Heinies from an online Canadian company.  pocket diapers are brightly coloured covers which you stuff an insert into - we got some terry “Thirsties” inserts and some hemp.  Thirsties have been better inserts for us (O is a heavy wetter), though a double-stuff with one of each work great at night.  all of them work best if they go in the dryer at least every second or third wash.  Oscar is still wearing the Fuzzibunz mediums - when he turned a year i ordered twelve size larges as well, as he was beginning to outgrow the the Happy Heinies.  all but one of our stash of twenty Fuzzibunz have held up beautifully, despite hard and constant use.  they’re a little bulky, kind of like having two disposables on at once, but are cut slim between the legs unlike some cloth options i’ve seen, so they’ve never impacted his walking or comfort, just give him a cute little bubble butt that is occasionally hard to get those pesky toddler skinny-jeans over.

3) Kushies makes biodegradable liners, which i put in most of Oscar’s diapers (especially if a poop is due).  when i change him, the liner and its contents just flush away.  if there’s anything runny that’s gone beyond the liner’s borders, i swish the whole diaper in the toilet while flushing.  two flushes max per poopy diaper, if that.  my hands seldomly get poop on them, but if they do it’s no more than they would in an infant blow-out.  i wash them after, or use Purell.

4) i have a green $5 plastic bucket with a snap-on lid in my bathroom.   wet and dirty diapers go in there.  i do not soak them.  i just rinse the bucket every second wash or so with water and a bit of baby shampoo, in the tub.  if i remember.

5)  we also have a purple “wet bag” (also ordered online, about $12) which goes to the sitter with Oscar everyday, along with 4 or 5 pre-stuffed diapers.  the stuffing and packing in his daycare bag takes max 4 minutes - his sitter sends home the wet bag (which is fabulous and holds all smell in despite having been washed nearly daily for the past 14 months) in his daycare bag, and it gets opened and the contents dumped directly in the washer or in the diaper bucket, if we’re not washing that night.

the system that works for us, basically, is that most nights all the day’s diapers (4-6, depending) and O’s pajamas from the night before and any underwear or socks or tshirts lying around the house, plus any sheets or towels or baby facecloths that need washing, all get dumped in the washer with the wet bag.  all together.  i do one single large load of wash on hot, with a cold rinse, a small amount of detergent, and (at least once a week) a shot of vinegar.  when Oscar was smaller his clothes got washed in there too, as they were frequently rather bodily-fluid-stained themselves.  mine too.  clothes and diapers come out clean and sweet-smelling.  they go in the dryer or get hung to dry.  the wet bag hangs out for the night and goes back in the daycare bag in the morning.  we do this wash four or five times a week, and end up with clean socks and underwear and whatever else in the process.   particularly when Oscar was smaller and making a mess of clothes all the time, it was literally no more wash than i would otherwise have been doing anyway.  and there’s never a stink build-up, because we don’t leave them lying around for more than 36 hours or so.

i dunno.  it’s taken me four times longer to write it all down than it would to do it.  and maybe it’s not very convincing…or maybe it’s just not for you in any case, and that’s your business.  but just, please…don’t believe it the next time you hear cloth diapers are so hard, or that they’re just as bad as disposables because of the water usage (unless, perhaps, you live in drought-stricken Australia and never actually do laundry).  the truth is, our society just hasn’t done a very good job of supporting people in learning to use them.  even with me on bedrest, they’ve added up to perhaps a half-hour of work per week for Dave & i over the last few months.  we don’t spend money on diapers (or haven’t since i got the last twelve on Ebay for $160 thirteen months ago).  we never run out.  we’re not even doing a lot of wash that we wouldn’t otherwise be doing.

just sayin’.  there’s a learning curve, for sure.  but if anybody wants some assvice or some support trying to get there, you are welcome to pick my brain until the cows come home.  because i do think that financially and ecologically they’re a worthwhile option, and one i’d love to see more families trying rather than being intimidated out of it before they ever even get started.

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

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

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

i’m home.

made it just before bedtime…met our freshly-bathed, pajama and rubber-boot clad boy coming in the door from his Nannie’s house.  he didn’t even know we’d been gone…just thought he’d been on a dinner date.  we all beamed at each other.  i tucked him in and petted his unruly curls and whispered it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay…for my own ears, my still-shaken heart that had ached at the possibility of leaving him.

but i don’t have to.  i am home, tonight.

because while the Miss Cervix Universe 2008 pageant is, of course, not yet over…i think mine just got voted Miss Congeniality.  it’s trucking along cheerily, long and strong and with the blue fishing twine holding tight, every centimetre of it advocating world peace with a big sparkling smile.  it looks good, basically, and bebe looks good…still measuring on target, still a girl, still floating in a happy fluid pool.  i’m still on bedrest, but i’m home.  and i may - two or three more ultrasound trips aside - get to remain home until this baby is born if all continues status quo.  ten weeks ago, i was flat out told that was NOT going to happen.

so now, i’m going to have to adjust my expectations and self-image again, figure out how to be gracious if everything goes right.

if anyone has any experience with this, i have rather a lot of time and a rather large couch from which to contemplate your wisdom.  seriously.

we leave early tomorrow morning for Halifax, for the next installment in the Miss Cervix Universe 2008 pageant, the continuing saga.

this time we’re aiming for a daytrip…a zoom there, zoom back operation, wherein Oscar will remain with his sitter for the day and be picked up by Nannie for supper if we’re not back yet.  simple.  concise.  no worries of vomit in the backseat, no eight hours strapped in a carseat for the little monkey, no naps to time with the ultrasound appointment.  all good, we think.  easier on everyone.

and we should be home by bedtime at the latest, to tuck him in.

but i have this packed suitcase that i’m bringing with me just in case.  just in case they keep me, hospital bedrest, because we are rounding on the dates where that becomes a possibility and it has happened twice before and both times, somehow, it was still a shock.  my mind reels to think that suddenly, like fingers snapping, i might not be here for months, in this house.  i might not be here to see that the laundry currently in the dryer gets folded, ever, that the paper towel gets replaced, that my plants don’t wither and keel over dead.  i might not be here to sing O to sleep at night, to snuggle him close in the mornings, to stuff his daycare bag and put away the winter clothes when summer finally comes and make sure we have that oatbran cereal because he looooves it.  nothing life or death, these things i’d miss, these things i do.  and it’s only just in case, i have this suitcase…it’s only just in case.

still, i think he knows.  or suspects.

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

ten years ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

time does crazy things to a person.

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

my mother and i went to a funeral this morning.  for a family friend, a big, warm bear of a man whose daughters i was close to when we were children, a man who then left that family and started another and whom i hadn’t seen in nearly twenty years when i wandered into his antique store in December of 2005.

it was just before Christmas, but i was the only one in the shop.  i recognized him and introduced myself, asked how he was, innocuously.  and i watched him, suddenly, without warning, crumble in front of me.  it was his first day back at work.  his wife, his second wife, had died just weeks before, on the operating table where they’d expected to save her life.  instead she was gone.  oh.  how was i?  oh.  we were seven or so months out from losing Finn, and i’d gotten used to saying, “fine,” to putting on the mask, but i didn’t then, didn’t need to…couldn’t.  it would have shamed us both, somehow.  so i told him, and he listened, and we stood there amongst the dusty wooden rockers and the phonographs with tears on both our faces and it was the most honest random conversation i think i’ve ever had in my life.  with a man i barely knew and yet had known for as long as i can remember.  it was the only real conversation we ever had.  i was grateful for it, then and now.

and they piped him out today, Donnie who always wore his kilt for occasions, the Skye Boat Song and roses for everyone to take home with them because Donnie loved to give flowers.

we couldn’t go to the cemetery because they don’t provide wheelchairs or chaise lounges for the bedresting,  so my mother brought me home.   and told me, on the drive, that she doesn’t expect to see me in heaven after she goes.

this came out deadpan, a total non-sequitur.  i laughed a little nervously, uncertain if a lecture on my moral failings was about to follow.  it did not…which was a relief of an almost palpable nature…rather, my mother wanted to inform me of her own theological predilections so that i could instruct whomever takes command of her funeral when the time comes that mention of “hanging around up there, waiting for you all” is not to happen.  my little black heart could not have swelled bigger.  my mother and i have our differences of faith - she has one, i do not, a rather significant difference - but it appears in this we are almost…alike.  the afterlife is mysterious to both of us, veiled.  and i find bizarre comfort in this unusual synchronicity.  i told her if it turns out we’re wrong and heaven really is all gowns and harps and reunifications, i’ll understand it if i get there and she’s sulking in the corner, refusing to talk to me just because she doesn’t want to admit having made a mistake.  she retorted that if heaven really turns out all that conventional, she doesn’t expect i’ll be showing up at all.  and we both laughed.

she also told me she’d like a piper for her funeral, like Donnie had.  i nodded at this, tears suddenly in my eyes.  we live in a part of the world where nearly half the population is still pure-blood highland Scots, two hundred years removed from clan and the auld country but fiercely attached to what remnants remain of that dour legacy of clearances and imperial machinations.  i would like to take her to Scotland, someday…but i don’t think she actually wants to see the real place.  the Scotland in her mind is hers, her own.  if we went , she’d risk feeling less connected to the reality than she does here, at a remove, where its romance and sentiment are keystones of her birthright, her identity, the community to which she belongs.  none more Scots than the Scots abroad, och aye.  so she will have a piper, i promised.  i asked for one myself, just in case.

speed bonnie boat, like a bird on a wing
onward the sailors cry
carrying the lad who’s born to be king
over the sea to Skye

i didn’t tell her that the other songs on my secret personal funeral list are “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead and Sinatra’s “My Way”…and that really, if we have to have a funeral, why not make it all-music, an all-night hootenannie, with plenty of liquor?

i’d like to keep her around for awhile if i can, not kill her off with horror.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

have you ever thought about your own funeral…what you’d want said, or read?  played?  any suggestions for my ever-revolving list of (secular) life-affirming classics?  though i do have a soft spot for old staunch hymns, i must admit…but i doubt Dave would allow them any play, if he outlived me.

there is this song of mothers and daughters, one i have been rehearsing my whole life. i have been trying to lay down its lyrics over the past few days, sounding out the verses, testing what is honest. it is hardly work, this writing…it lurches out of me in spurts and clots, memory and wish and history all webbed together, the fabric of identity.

i am playing Scheherezade, counting down the days to this baby’s viability with stories, hoping to lure us past the danger zone. it is a fiction, of course, this deliberate narrative convention: i know that stories do not knit tissue or keep blood flowing, seal vulnerable sacs of fluid, hold cervixes tight. i know that the 24-week threshhold of viability is itself a fiction: this baby had a brother born fifteen days past that point, and the odds failed him utterly. yet there is nothing else i have to give.

it is not that i will love her more, this girl child. she will be her own surprise, whatever she is, no more or less mythic than her brothers once she leaves my body. but i did not know there were mythologies of mothers and sons - i grew up the only daughter of an only daughter, no men left standing in the family - and so in this liminal before-time, the idea of a her signifies a continuity i have been immersed and engaged in since my earliest consciousness, a song i have anticipated singing since i was four years old. it has nothing to do with ribbons and bows, sugar and spice. its ties cut deeper, and cut sharp, sometimes.

the caul of my protective shell has been torn away, the one that held some part of me numb and disconnected and able to believe that none of this was real. this baby moves, kicks, somersaults inside me, a sudden presence, an Other demanding recognition. in acknowledging her, opening myself to the possibility of her, i am made all the more vulnerable. i feel the prickling of my skin, the terror that this may be all the time we have. but it is enough for stories. i like to believe she can hear my voice.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

i come from a long line of women, i used to tell myself…as if the family tree from which i’d sprung were solely female, made up of vines extending across generations on the x chromosome, the men present only as pollinators. i imagined the mystery of my own murky fertility as a logical extension of the pattern: someday, under some suitably Bohemian circumstances, some fine, decent man-friend of mine would make it possible for me to bring forth a daughter and go on about my destiny. she, in her turn, might eventually manage to free herself entirely from the extraneous male half of the population and spontaneously self-fertilize.

this mythology was born, of course, of wounds, of an effort to turn absences and holes into strengths, into some special twist of fortune. it was also born of the pleasure i took, in my peevish, fraught adolescence, in shocking those women i came from, those unintentionally unconventional women who in spite of themselves had taught me that men were not needed in a family. they are not iconoclasts, these women we come from, daughter…not most of them. i once thought i was, and the memory makes me smile. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

we all of us women are daughters, at least once over, at least for a time. perhaps that is why some of us hope and long for girls, because it is what we understand of parenting and childhood. perhaps that is why some want nothing to do with such a mess.

all these things i am scribbling these days, grafitti and narrative, a song i hope her voice will add its own verses to, someday…some time far from now when how it all ends in this verse is clear and inviolable.

counting

he picks them with a zeal bordering on obsession, with a “wow-oo” of admiration for those most ripe, most worthy. those that come free of the ground with long stems he deems “biii-iiig”…those whose heads he pulls off, still unsure of the physics of this whole plucking art, are “babies.” he gives me the babies, sweetly, reserving the more impressive long ones for his own esoteric collections, scattered through the backyard like random floral shrines, Victorian and faintly eerie. and then he is off again, careening full-tilt on short, sturdy legs across our expanse of yellow-dotted lawn, hunting.

he has been so thorough we are beginning to run out of dandeliion cover. he’s better than a goat. we could rent him out to landscaping companies.

tonight the light was golden before bedtime and we found our first ghost dandelion of the season, wispy and white. i taught him how to blow. he inhaled most of it, but we laughed and tickled our noses with the remnants and dropped the stem into the mulch.  he looked back then, picked up the stem with its clinging half-cloud still intact, and picked another yellow bloom and introduced the two, touching their heads together, intoning words i do not understand.

and soon they will be gone, all these yellow weeds my son finds so beautiful, so magical…blowin’ in the wind, seed for another year.

and i look at him and his solid little body suddenly seems so fragile, ephemeral…this childhood so impossibly short.

i have this list.  it involves things i like to fantasize that i will do in order to make myself more sane, more human, more humane…just more.  it evolves, changes daily sometimes.  more frequently, it gets shoved to the back of my mental clutter drawer, ignored until some trigger calls it forward, calls it back to my attention.  often, in regular life, i get too busy and consumed to pay much attention to it.

one of the gifts and cruelties of bedrest is that i am not too busy to pay attention to it.  it worms its way to the front of my subconscious and perches there, accusing me in the lulls between work phone calls and doctor’s appointments.  it shouts, you could be writing the great Canadian novel!  you could be learning tax law/saving children in Botswana/improving your French/organizing the back porch recycling pile!  you could be doing something useful!

it’s not wrong.

and the longer i turn a deaf ear on it, the worse i end up feeling.  so last night, with work winding down in a couple of weeks, and another three months of bedrest to go if all goes well, i sat myself down and let the list reel out, loose and wild.  i came up with a couple of things, all of which were salient reminders right now - as i bob helpless and prostrate on the waves of whatever shores destiny has in mind for me, feeling more like an aimless couch lump with every swell - that i am still making choices, even if i don’t control everything i’d like to.

1. i need to stop eating corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup.  i have insulin resistance, for chrissake…mild insulin resistance, but hell, mild diabetes doesn’t really sound nearly as good as no diabetes.  i have eaten three entire bags of red licorice in the last week…i’ve gone on a Nibs kick, and have been eating them like they’re a drug.  which, given their contents, they kind of are.  it’s not just the gestational diabetes heebies on my mind, either; it’s the whole subsidized corn industry in North America, my discomfort with the ubiquity of all this over-sugared, processed corn in every bloody thing.  we protect corporate giants whose products infiltrate our grocery carts like secret spores, even when we try to make finer choices.  i do not want to be a part of it.  i do not want the poison.  erm, except, of course, it is so silky and sweet in my mouth…but i will stop.

2.  i need to start cooking in general.  pregnancy does weird things to my appetite, makes me ravenous and finicky all at the same time.  vegetables molder in the fridge while bananas get consumed as if Curious George lived here.  Dave cooks, and i wrinkle my nose and crave corn syrup, impossible to please.  the work of food - the sheer labour of it - makes me feel defeated and paralyzed and like there are no decent easy options and then comes the whole poison lure again.  but cooking makes me feel creative, and even frugal and virtuous if i approach it as challenge rather than chore.  i can chop sitting down, and choose recipes that don’t take a lot of physical exertion or standing to cook.  i can.  i’ll feel better.

3. i need to get out and interact with other human beings not interested in taking my medical history at each encounter.  i called one of my oldest friends last night and asked her to take me out on a dinner date next week.  i called the local food bank and asked if i can volunteer to make sandwiches there and serve them (whilst sitting) one lunch hour a week, so long as i’m not in the hospital.  i need a place to be that is not here.  i need to feel useful, part of something outside this house.  i need random encounters with people…little conversations, snippets of other lives to intersect with, concrete things to do.

4.  i want a wife.  Dave and i are taking applications, actually, for a mutual wife of the Betty Crocker variety, if anyone has any candidates they’d like to volunteer.  there’s a sweet-faced farm girl at the local market who’d be perfect…she makes the best lemon squares, and is hearty and capable, like she could whip the place into shape in no time flat, making our home more organized and economical and wholesome and preferably installing solar panels on our porch in her spare time too.  she’d weed the garden, which is choking to death already, before the window boxes are even planted, and would have a dustbuster concealed under her apron to suck up all the cat fur congealing in the corners.  she would bring me cold water every hour, whilst i write on the couch.  she would be all the caretaker - cooking and childcare aside, we can handle that - that Dave and i want to be but are unable to achieve in these strange, imbalanced days…me invalid and him overloaded, flotsam piling up around us.

5.  i need to create something, engage in making something tangible, more permanent and protectable than consumable meals and mortal offspring.  not the great Canadian novel, probably, but something.  four summers ago, i spent a week in the Swiss alps with filmmaker Peter Greenaway, as part of the Ph.D that languishes unfinished and largely unmissed behind the letters in my name.  Greenaway, famous for “The Pillow Book” and “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover,” is a piece of work, a charmingly fierce and self-replete personality…and inspiring in ways i never expected.  what i took away from that week of mornings sitting around boardroom tables watching short films and doodling in my notebook is mostly encapsulated in this four word note: dude is obsessed with lists.  his work, from the earliest days, is all about cataloguing, layering narrative with signs, permutations of order, rosters.  i groove on this.  my imagination was fired by this.  fiction and history with trivia and minutiae…squee. so i am making a private list for my daughter, this long-imagined daughter whom i still cannot believe my own fortune in getting, whom i still cannot believe will cross safely into my arms.  we are fifteen days before the threshold of viability, this daughter and i…and this list will be fifteen stories of mothers and daughters, my lineage, what i know.  i figure i’ll finish it sometime before she learns to read.  or will have something to prove to myself she was here in the now, squirming as i type, no matter what.

6. i cannot be a lover right now, on strict pelvic rest, but i need to find ways - beyond desserts - to inhabit this swelling body that i’ve been ignoring now for months on end, eyes averted not from the externality but from the inner secret of this divided house, afraid to be madonna, not allowed to be whore.  i spent years of my early sexual life disconnected from myself, caught then in cycles of self-loathing i did not believe i’d ever heal.  fear is more disembodying than self-hatred, i discover.  and yet i long to relax into myself, loosen myself, stop living closed away like a prim, crisp bakery box that might spring open if even looked upon too lushly.  milkshakes are not cutting it.  i miss the loving, the release.  but what i need is to find ways of being present in my body without those, for now.  preferably without involving the young farm wife.  advice welcome.

i am still here, still abiding.  i am trying as hard as i can.