cribchronicles.com

a new year.

we pass on the highway, separate units in our similar orbits, packed lock, stock, and barrels of monkeys into the little worlds that are our vehicles. a thousand holiday travellers, all hurtling past. we are invisible to each other, each on our own personal trajectories.

voices chatter and sing, slightly off-key. the baby, still riding backwards, intones “ba ba lee lee tiki tiki daaa” to the doll she flails back and forth into the car door like a weapon. her brother leads his father and i in an indulgently pious version of Away in the Manger, our voices all cracking on the high notes, the mentions of heaven. the road hums beneath us, salt spraying.

we roll into tomorrow, into a year clean as snow.

freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, i sing under my breath as i drift in the passenger seat, contented. my voice is well-suited to the acoustics of a Kia Rio, to an audience afflicted with the benevolent ears of family. i feel replete, pleasantly unmoored. most of what i love in the world is with me. we could go anywhere. the weight of a hundred loads of laundry slips from me.

i imagine in the new year i will live more freely. for a moment, i forget the two-hour frenzied dance of baby wrangling and organization that led to this stuffed small car.  i do not yet know that we have forgotten the bags of carefully wrapped presents for the cousins we are going to meet. i ignore the sunglasses left behind, in spite of blinding snow glare, and the fact that i did not put out the compost bin.

i imagine us a covered wagon, lurching overland in search of the mythical land of the free.

for a moment i’m all gingham and Little House on the Prairie. then i remember the Donner Party. i laugh unprettily, startling my travelling companions.

but the sense of going somewhere, anywhere, bound all together, still tempts.

we are doing it, of course. we do it everyday, waking to the lives we’ve made, in the midst of changing bums and making suppers and running to pediatric clinics. we are already there, in a life of comfort, of work and reward. the pioneers with their pestilence and their hunger and their lofty goal of eventual tar-paper roofs would’ve traded in an instant.

still, the simple act of moving tastes like possibility.

in a life with small children and duties and responsibilities and goals i haven’t gotten to yet, remaining open to possibility is the very hardest job. i chafe for time that is not already filled, demanded, eaten. i stress. i remember the taste of surprises, of days that simply evolved, conversations that meandered on into the night and lit me like the hundred cigarettes that burnt down around us.  i seldom remember how to be that person. i am wound tighter now, a Prussian officer humping along on schedule, trying to drag a checklist of completed items with me. the bohemian life looks dirtier, from here, than i could ever have imagined.

but three hours in a moving car where all i have to do is sit and dole out sippy cups and sing? glorious. packed away from it all in a tiny metal box, i coast on the fumes of gasoline and Diet Coke and imagine that ahead there are open doors and time to play, to think.

it gets me every time. it is my siren’s song, always just ahead. and damn the torpodoes, and the rocks.
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it is snowing, hard, when we return. the wipers swish ineffectively across the windshield, leaving little ice arcs in their wake. the road alternates black to white, where drift has laid three inches of slippery snow down.

we move slower now. we know about precious cargo.

we are in the hills, where the roads slalom gently back and forth and the drops from the shoulder grow steeper. a white cube van perches precariously on the side, and my eyes try to trace the track of his wheels and fail. my head cocks, and Dave answers.

he came from the other side of the road.

i see it then. we are abreast of the tilting van and his slide is evident. sharp turn just ahead. he careened through it, hit the snow, spun backwards across the lanes, was caught by sheer luck and gravity just before the tumble. phew. i am about to nod when Dave inhales.

another van hitting the same patch of snow at the same ill-advised speed just after the turn. he lurches out into our lane. we are collision-bound. i cannot tear my eyes away; my body spreads and flattens against the seat, futile protective instinct. my babies.

his wheels catch the road. he corrects. we pass.

i blink.

and suddenly, reminded of how enamored i am of the wholeness of my own skin, i get it.

we are always moving, in time, into the new and the uncharted, even when it looks like the same old pile of to-dos and busy-ness. there is always possibility and surprise ahead. surprise is not always benign.

so i will stay put and learn to carve out space and moments for ditching the Prussian Officer uniform. i will give thanks for the bounty of job and family and crap to be done, even as it bears down on me. and i will try to stop trying to do it all, for the egotistical sake of doing it all. i will keep learning to let go of what nobody needs.

i will even post my new year’s post a day late. take that, schedule.

happy 2010 to you and yours. may the surprises be mostly good. may you find strength and grace and peace where they are not. and may you all find time for possibility, whatever it means to you.

what does it mean to you? what do you hope for, from this still new-ish year?

…My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

***

…These woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep.

- Robert Frost, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening

the earth turns and i eat whipping cream.

this morning, at 4:59 am, that dread hour from which parents rarely wring any further sleep once wakened, a cry went forth from the little green room that is our children’s. i padded from bed and soothed and hushed until there was silence again.

they heaved and sighed and rolled over and were gone, back to slumber land.  too small to know the fear of not getting back to sleep again.  too small to know that their clockwork little bodies would be waking them – and me – again within the godforsaken hour.

i knew.

still, i tiptoed back to my bed in the blackness and burrowed into the warmth of duvets and the dark that blankets the long dawn of the shortest day of the year. and i lay quiet and bleary and consoled myself with the promise of pineapple cream for breakfast.

you may have to get up, the voice inside my head whispered gently, but you don’t have to work today. you and the kids can stay in your pajamas. and eat glorious Christmasy concoctions of whipping cream and, uh,  gelatin and crushed pineapple. sweet joy on a spoon. you can eat it ’til it’s ALL gone.

i cooed, and exposed my belly so the voice could rub it. then i remembered. i’d finished all the pineapple cream the night before.

i cried myself back to sleep and Dave got up with the kids
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when you are the only child of an only child, you inherit strange things. habits, insularities, responses to human behaviour that you eventually discover, launched from the nest, are not the ways of people accustomed to broader interactions or to jockeying for position within families.  but treasures, too. capacity for intense one-on-one conversation. all the family photo albums, from when god was young. a glass lemon juicer from your great-grandmother’s 1901 wedding, because your mother already got one for hers so to you comes the handmedown. your grandmother’s Art Deco engagement ring and wedding bands, worn on the third finger of your left hand in marriage and out, just as they were worn by her.

recipe books.

my junior high did not have a cafeteria. it was also only three blocks up the hill from my grandmother’s house. she was pushing 80 that year i started seventh grade and my mother had caught her eating a spoonful of ancient jam from the fridge and calling it “dinner” the summer before, thus it was decided i would have my lunches at my grandmother’s at least three days a week. my mother worked. my grandmother was lonely. and sandwiches? meh.

she promised my mother she would make me a hot lunch. this which she would not do for herself, she did gladly for me. i promised my mother i would go, faithfully. this which i’d otherwise have shunned for the cool autonomy of a brown paper bag, i did for my Nannie. or so i thought. my mother’s bargain was wise, a great gift.

we were always close, my Nannie and i. but this ritual of eating together, adolescent and octogenarian, brought me into an awareness of her world and the times she’d lived in a way that all the younger afterschool days at her house never had.

she was a contradiction in eras, my grandmother.  some days, i would arrive to old recipes, puddings from the old country she’d never seen or biscuits just out of the oven, the tiny ancient biscuit cutter made of iron, her mother’s. other days, the 50s reigned, and i would arrive to casseroles of tomato soup or cream of mushroom soup, served with bright green pistachio Jello pudding, her miracles of modern convenience.  she served me Tang until the last, believing it a treat. she bought pop only at Christmastime.

and at Christmastime, the pineapple cream.

it was a hybrid, relic of her Victorian roots yet reinvented in shiny 50s to incorporate handily imported canned goods. it is a miracle it was not reinvented to include Jello.

every year she served it in the same bowl, a thick glass objet d’art with deeply scalloped edges, so its gelatinized sides shaped the indulgence within. it was only made at Christmas. there was always a little left…carefully saved, slightly dried out…for me on the first day back to school.

it was rich and mild and creamy and just barely sweet. it tasted better than anything i have ever eaten since.
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in the last years, when my grandmother had to give up first the house she’d been born in and then the apartment a block away, the one my mother lives above right now, i inherited her recipe books. they were old things, crumbling, their pages stained brown with butter and time, larded with newspaper cutouts of recipes paper-clipped to the pages, and rich with her commentary scrawled on the entries.

“from Muriel R,” reads one, “keep oven low or a little tough.”

another, for dumplings, “sift flour carefully. Get lumpy fast.”

i have never made a dumpling in my life. but these books sing to me. and the one i love the most, despite its prosaic surface, is a coil-bound scribbler i bought myself just before i made the big move West.

you promise me you’ll eat, she’d said in passing, wet eyes acknowledging that i was already gone.

i promise you i’ll COOK, if you help me, i said in return a few days later. and i handed her the scribbler and a list of all my favourite childhood recipes.

i have it still, tucked into the island where we eat everyday. the pages are beginning to yellow, fifteen years later, and even brown in places where butter has smudged them. every time i open it, her handwriting stares up at me, her slanting tidy script from before it got away on her.

i was here, it says to me.  i loved you.

i have made it every Christmas, excepting that one year in Thailand. this year Oscar and i went to my mother’s apartment with the scribbler, and we made it in the heavy scalloped bowl which my mother has not seen fit to bestow into my possession just yet. i polished it off last night and woke thinking of it. i keep my promises.

PINEAPPLE CREAM (also called Bavarian Cream, can be made with fresh strawberries if in season – so sayeth the original notes)
2 level tbsp gelatin
1/2 cup cold water
1 can crushed pineapple (do not drain)
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp lemon juice
3 cups whipping cream (too much, say the notes. the first few years i raised my eyebrows at this, as i come from the there’s-no-such-thing-as-too-much school of whipped cream appreciation, but damn, she was right. 2 and a half? about perfect.)

Soak gelatin in cold water 10 minutes. Heat pineapple, add sugar, lemon juice & gelatin. Chill – when slightly thick, fold in (pre-whipped) whipping cream. Chill until set (preferably in pretty bowl).

It does not say devour. enjoy. but it should. Merry Christmas.
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i sent the card to Evelyn, replete with last year’s Christmas photo of the kids, since we didn’t quite get around to doing one this year. she won’t know, i figure.

i also discovered that the dude who works at the desk next to Dave’s knows the former owners of the house, so her card found its intended home with them, as well.

and…thanks to all of you and the faithful – and possibly illegal – frequent voting of my lovely and enthusiastic mother-in-law i came first, somehow, in the Best Personal Blog section of the Canadian Blog Awards! the raw data Saturday showed me in second, but i apparently squeaked ahead of the oh-merciful- heavens-why-wasn’t-i-reading-her Better Now not because of overall votes but because i was more people’s backup choice. yay for second-best! apparently close does count. http://cdnba.wordpress.com/finalists/finalists-and-winners-2009/

i also came second in the Best Overall Blog category, and third in Best Family Blog. a perfect trifecta, i think?i’m not much of a betting woman, though: i’d never have bet on this kind of result.  but i’m happy. and proud. and grateful, to all of you who took the time to help make me feel this good on a Monday when i’ve been mostly awake since 5 am.

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

a Christmas card.

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

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

it is not for us.

yet i recognize the sender’s name.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i’d say,

Hello, Mrs. F__________.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours sincerely,

B. Stewart
Summer Street, Charlottetown, PE

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

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

i have this suspicion i don’t talk about in polite company. i don’t say it aloud.

i don’t say it aloud because i hear you lurking in the cloakroom, you cackling voices of tweenage doom & gloom.  these are the easy days! you caution, glorying in your foreknowledge of the horrors awaiting us, we who clearly lack the sense god gave chickens. i see your eyebrows arch, your voice drop gravely as you detail the backtalk, the rejection, the Hannah Montana concerts. and i shudder, and nod to your sage foreboding.

but i still think this parenting gig gets easier over time.

i know, i know. you scoff. you think me naive, a babe in the woods oblivious to the summer’s day that is soft baby bums and toddler trials. i’m not, not really. already, i see how quickly it speeds by, what gets lost.

i just keeping that having time to breathe is a decent tradeoff. and the heartbreak? that i’ll get inured eventually.

okay. NOW you can cackle.
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it is late at night, a December storm.  i get Oscar up to pee before i head to the sanctuary of my own sheets and the whistle of the wind on the other side of the cold wall.

he’s fully trained, has been for months, except for the teensy fact that neither his body nor an earthquake will raise him from slumber in the wee hours, unless he has a nightmare. and dry mornings come later than wet mornings, so his father and i are pleased to deliver him to the potty in the late evening so as to assure a little lie-in for all concerned. say, til 6:20.

i lift him, warm from the cocoon of his quilt, and heft him from the room, floorboards creaking. his sister stirs in the crib. his legs curl up like a small, solid frog, vestige of our human heritage as nomadic beings. we are still made to make carrying easier, even in our sleep.

if i am honest with myself, i like these nighttime potty excursions. this child is growing like a weed. before my eyes, he morphs weekly into something ever less toddlerlike, ever more boy.  he spends half his days pretending to be a machine, the other half a dinosaur. he shouts commands like a drill sergeant, despite the fact that his parents obstinately refuse to comply. he is still when building tinkertoy wonders, when lost in a story or talking back to an episode of Blues Clues, but he is seldom touchable in repose. even in his infancy, there was little stillness to this child, little patience for the passive comfort of skin. he either snuggles like a roto-rooter or keeps to himself.

so the nightly marches to the bathroom, his arms around my neck, are sweet for me. i pet his back, breathe in his sweaty little head. i understand, in those moments, the mother in the oft-derided Love You Forever, who skeeves everybody out by crawling in her man-child’s window long after he’s moved out to rock him in his slumber. it’s a story of the heart, people. i won’t stalk him in his adulthood. but it is a human thing, the simple, heavy joy of holding your child, no matter how big. and it is a window closing fast, for me.

because this night, suddenly, he comes awake as i take him from his room. his head snaps back and his eyes focus, and instantly his body tightens, squirms from my arms with a No. I can WALK.

he is out of my arms and marching to the potty without further adieu. i follow, sit in front him as he slumps again almost into oblivion. then up, pulling his pants with both hands like a Beverly Hillbilly, small arm held out against my interference.

Snap.

in the night light, i stand in the hall and watch him make his way back to bed. i blow him a kiss, then, when he’s knocked out again, sneak in and pull the quilts tight around him, one hand brushing his brow. i stop at the crib, where Posey coos and snuffles in her sleep.

i feel strangely useless, suddenly redundant. and i get it. this is how it’s going to be, for a hundred moments, a thousand, until the day i stop breathing.
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i am not entirely sorry.

a day comes when the child no longer considers every object in his sightline a candidate in the choking hazard Olympics. eventually they learn to go downstairs on their feet, not their heads. and some morning will come, i promise myself each day whilst i try to apply mascara with neither eye focused on the mirror, when i can perform my rituals of personal grooming without anyone attached to my leg.

i do think sometimes the people who hearken back to the golden days of their children’s youngest years either had very slow-moving children, or are forgetting a lot.  there’s simply no downtime with little ones, especially in the 12-30 month range. if they’re awake, you’re awake. if they’re moving, you’re moving, usually in three different directions. the ceaselessness of bodily needs, of mess, of sweetly inquiring hands stuck up your pants or in your hair.

when i try to imagine what apocalyptic turn of events could lead people to reminisce on these days as easy, i get nervous.

but then Oscar rejects me in the middle of the night, and i think i understand.

in a sense, parenting is about boundaries. or their absence. your infant wants to grizzle on your nipple twelve hours a day and keep you awake at two-hour intervals around the clock? you cope, blearily. and you become more useful to another human being than you’ve likely ever been in your life. heady stuff, that. you grow used to it, the intimacy, the interdependence.

and then they begin to outgrow it, somewhere around 11 pm on a Wednesday night when they are three-and-a-half. or, you know, every week from thereon in until they ultimately fly the nest. they develop their own boundaries against you, when you have so few against them.

and you sniffle a little and take to your bed and think, ouch. followed immediately by, does this mean soon we get to sleep in?
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i know, i’m probably delusional. maybe this is the easiest age. maybe thirteen has been an absolute joy in your house. what do you think? is there any golden era where the balance mostly works out, where they fall somewhere between utter need and independence?  or is this mostly a matter of how different personalities experience the reality of being needed and/or rejected?

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

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

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

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

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

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

erm, MYself.

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

i’d love that.  and thank you.

darkness in late November comes at 5 o’clock.

we four emerge into the damp gloom, make our way to the end of the block where the street is cordoned off. we are bundled within an inch of our lives, ridiculously so given the unseasonal warmth, the threatening rain. little family throngs are gathered already, waiting, clustered on lawnchairs and under blankets.

the annual town Santa Claus parade.

Oscar has a blinking red nose, a party favour sent long ago by WhyMommy. it is his prized possession: during the long wait, all ants in his pants, he runs up to neighbouring children and adults with upturned face,  imploring them to admire his Rudolphesque visage. most comply. if you’re willing to sit through an hour of flatbed trucks and farm machinery strung with lights to ring in the Christmas season, a three-year-old with a blinking nose is an obligatory smile.

a little boy behind us, perhaps a year or two older than O, wears a red velour hat with white trim. he nods to the nose, then announces his own festive adornment. i compliment him, ask him if he’s excited. he explodes with fervour.

it’s SANTA! he nearly shouts, beaming into Oscar’s face. SANTA’s gonna come!!!

Oscar pulls himself up conspiratorily, so he is as near to eye-to-eye with his new friend as he can get.

Santa’s not REAL, he declares.

i die inside.

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i still remember, vividly, the day i found out about Santa. i was in kindergarten, not quite yet five, in the back of somebody’s big ol’ seventies car stuffed with children. before car seats, car pools were huge.

from the bench seat ahead of me, Robbie Trainor’s freckled face popped up. Robbie had older brothers; he knew things.

he dropped the bomb.

all four little girls in the back seat were eldest children, each of us cloistered darlings who until that moment had presumably never questioned the verity of the jolly fat elf. mouths hung open. not one of us said anything; rather, an embarrassed kind of silence spread over the car.

i don’t remember anything else: not debate or tears or whether the adult driving said a word. in my memory, the moment is utterly internal, an invisible tectonic shift.

a child’s first cognitive dissonance.

from that day on, i thought of Santa as a story, not a man. but i was an only child, a private kid who felt things deeply. i did not know how to speak the things that made me uncomfortable. and so when my mother cheerfully made reference to Santa that Christmas, and the Christmas after, i performed; i went along pretending i knew nothing about the grim reality, the void that was St. Nick.

i thought my mother believed. and i did not want to ruin that for her.

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the moment the words leave Oscar’s mouth, my lips are in his ear, stage-whispering, it’s not POLITE to tell people that someone they believe in isn’t real.

i realize i’m hoping the other kid’s parents can hear me. i realize i’m hoping the other KID can hear me, and i consider tacking on something like, Santa is the spirit of Christmas! in my chirpiest voice.

mostly i realize i’m wondering how the hell my kid became THAT kid, destroyer of worlds, the one who goes around flatly bursting the most cherished notions of others.

oh right. that was us.

i don’t think we’ve ever said outright to Oscar that Santa isn’t real. but we’ve never said he was, either. and we likely won’t. we’ll play along, to an extent…but Christmas for us is all about a constant negotiation of stories. if i had my druthers – and we lived in either a bucket or a truly multicultural big city – i might get away with the sixties secularized version of a warm fuzzy Christmas, where we’d celebrate with candlelight and food and The Grinch and maybe some Alvin & the Chipmunks. except we’d all gather ’round our non-existent piano and i’d raise the roof with my glorious contralto version of O Holy Night, my grandmother’s favourite carol.

instead, Oscar plays a lamb in the Sunday school play this year. and his parents, the agnostic and the atheist, will likely tag along to kneel in adoration at the livestock by the creche, while his faithful grandmother praises god at the sight of all of us in church. he’ll get a daily dose of Santa every day at preschool, just as he has for the past two weeks anyway, and we’ll open an advent calendar with Playmobil knights hidden behind it, a purely materialist construction if ever there was one. for the holidays themselves, we’ll hang out with his Jewish cousins and exchange gifts for what they call International Present Day.

he’s never asked about Santa. i’ve asked him what he knows, and told him the legend of Saint Nicholas. i’ve sung him Away in a Manger and Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. i’ve told him Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Jesus, but also a holiday where a lot of people like to get together and have special times with their families. i’ve told him that in the darkest months of the year, most people like to celebrate one way or the other, and share gifts with the people they love.  he has a stocking and a dreidel and a blinking red nose.

and apparently a complete and total disbelief in Santa Claus.

a part of me feels that as failure, and another part as success. and the rest just wonders how i can get him to respectfully hold his tongue on the subject so that we don’t get run out of town by December 24th?

it is nearly the end of term.

the skies grow gray, the days grow short. the exam looms.

and for students – hell, for me – dragging one’s carcass  out of bed to come to class gets harder and harder.

teachers are a vast repository of entertaining if specious excuses for missed classes. we hear it all: the grandmothers who die three times a term, the mysterious “appointments” that seem to occur at the same time every second week, the belly aches that magically disappear just in time for the afflicted learner to be located lounging in a coffee shop.

i’m a bit of a hard-nose about attendance. i expect an email and a decent reason, just as if school were a job. and i notice. i have small classes, where an empty seat yawns like a missing tooth. i know everyone’s names the second week of class.  there’s no hiding from me.

but they are adults, my students, at least legally, university kids far from home for the first time. some of them straggle in at noon, late, flustered, clearly having just rolled out of bed. i gaze upon them with vicious, bare-fanged envy.

some miss too many classes. the exam for our course is a repeat of the placement exam they wrote back in September; a single timed essay, its purpose to determine whether or not they can meet the demands of full-time credit courses without additional English support. if they don’t attend, they have to wait an extra couple of weeks to write it.  no traditional grading scheme, not much to hold over their heads. their only real punishment is that they miss out on my delightful company and my wisdom, of course. and i miss theirs.

still, most buy in. it is an amazing fact of human nature that when treated reasonably, most people respond reasonably. i teach things they need. i make that explicit, strategic. and i am clear about my expectations without getting terribly het up when they do not meet them, particularly in the realm of attendance. oh, i give them The Look. and The Grave Talking To. I explain consequences in terms of things they actually give two shits about, like ultimately getting the heck out of our mandatory program. but i have been fifteen years a teacher. i do not get excited about their white lies, the emails that clock in three minutes after the start of class saying - again - dear Bonnie, i sick. tomorrow i will not sick.

i do not bite.

i edit these notes, sometimes, send back refined versions explaining how to craft an appropriately professional excuse for absence, but i do not get excited. i will know when they are truly slipping, endangering their term, beginning to shred under the strange, unspeakable pressure of navigating my world and their own internal lives and priorities and burdens. then i will flurry into action and do everything i can to whip & bolster & comfort them back into line, because then and only then will they allow me any real part in the process at all.

as it should be.

the fact that i expect them to come to class at all is an act of stunning hypocrisy. if my undergraduate profs had kept attendance records, i’d have had to apply to get them expunged in order to land a teaching position at any self-respecting institution.

i was once the Queen of Excuses. it started early, along about eleventh grade, when i simultaneously learned to mimic my mother’s handwriting and noticed that she left for work before i walked to school in the mornings. this happy coincidence, combined with the fact that i had English class first thing every second morning and my English teacher had a significant if unfortunate Valium habit, meant that i went back to bed a lot that year. i still like nothing better than to crawl back into bed an hour or two after rising. i do my best sleeping at about 7:53 in the morning.

i embarked on this first of my creative writing projects with enthusiasm, crafting regular notes detailing dramatic yet seemly reasons for not being in class. i made sure to keep most of them painfully normal: eye appointments, dental troubles, vague feminine complaints, flu. but i also let the purple prose of adolescence run away with me a few times: had my teacher been fully aware of who i was, i suspect he might have wondered why my mother occasionally wrote notes worded as if she’d recently escaped from Wuthering Heights. but he said nothing, poor lost man, even when i broke my own rule of no-more-than-twice-a-month and dozed through an entire week of Catcher in the Rye safe at home in my own bed, handing in notes that hinted, with the delicacy of bricks, that i’d been at exotic locales named in the book but utterly unheard of near our provincial capital: a prep school, the zoo. i stopped short of the mental institution that frames the story: i didn’t want to make my teacher feel embarrassed. still, i felt Holden Caulfield would’ve been proud.

over the years, as i gradually learned the art of intrinsic motivation, i stopped making excuses and learned to haul myself out of bed. and that was good.

but as i began collecting excuses from students instead, i realized you can tell a lot about a person by the kind of excuses they make.  in delving into our psyches to validate ourselves – however speciously – to authority, we expose a lot about what we’ve been raised to think of as worthy of excuse, of forgiveness, of coddling.

all liars, after all, ultimately want to believe themselves.

the students who present with a hushed, eyebrow-raised disclosure of “stomach problems” – or better, in twenty-somethings, “tummy problems”: oh, how they blush when i ask about their diarrhea.  and suddenly fifteen years falls from their faces and they are little children again, learning to keep their bodies the ultimate secret, the That Which Shall Not Be Named.

the ones who send vague notes like “i have a headache”? i call them to the mat, later, and ask, with great, head-bobbing interest, big headache? little headache? did the lights bother you? generally they blush and avoid eye contact, caught out in the act of having not bothered enough to write a decent excuse. i then teach them the word “migraine” and hopefully a lesson in being organized, intentional, and specific in all acts of writing.

i particularly enjoy the ones who describe their afflictions in detail, digging out dictionaries or Dr. Google to look up medical words. these are conscientious class-skippers, this lot, the kind of kids who generally work hard and feel guilty about their trangressions and are clearly accustomed to having someone take more than a passing interest in their health. they tend to equate severity with validity, even if they are most often found missing early morning consultations but assuring me heartily in their notes that they’ll visit the clinic and make it to class at 3pm.  i once had a student recover fully from what he described as acute pancreatitis by 3 pm. i asked the class to join me in offering praise for the miracle, particularly since i’d noted their stricken classmate downing a pizza in the Student Centre only an hour past the missed appointment.  alas, sarcasm is somewhat lost on intro-level ESL-speakers.

yesterday, however, i came face-to-face with an entirely new breed of excuse, one i wish i’d had the creativity to dream up all by myself.  i call it Medical Excuse by Obfuscation. the email which delivered it ran like this:

Bonnie, after I ate my lunch, I feel bad with my bingy, I have to go to the washingroom every ten minues.

bingy. huh. what in the nameagod is a bingy?

do YOU know? me neither. and for once, i was afraid to ask. and so this very lovely, generally hardworking student returned to class today utterly unmolested except for a vague “you okay?” from me.  and i bit my tongue, and thought, well done, dude. you got me. you foiled the Queen of Excuses.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
what kind of excuses do you make?

and please assuage my guilt and tell me i’m not the only one who perfected her mother’s handwriting? (if you’re reading, Ma, forgive me. it’s all made-up, total fabrication. Munchausen’s syndrome, i’m sure. i’ll be better by 3 pm).

they were shorter than i remembered.

coming home to a three-year-old and a one-year-old is a like entering a fun-house mirror. in your mind, these tiny creatures who whip your sorry ass out of bed at ungodly hours and spend half their waking moments trying to boss you into oblivion just seem…taller, somehow. they are large in spirit.

until you burst through the gate at the airport and the impossibly tiny boy who is your big kid hurtles in your arms laughing and you realize his little body is barely heavier than a suitcase.

and then, home finally, you come through the door and tiny legs run thump thump thump to meet you and your body sweeps up its baby like a missing piece and there are tears in your eyes.

you don’t know whether it’s going to be good to get home until you get there.

it was. and i was relieved to find it so.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

seventeen years ago, i sat on a back fire escape in Montreal on an October night, weeping into a boyfriend’s arms. we were scheduled to leave the next morning, head back to the tiny college town that had been our stage and our womb for 3+ years. Magic Johnson had just announced he had AIDS. the boyfriend’s father had just announced he had diabetes.

neither were the source of my misery, only the flavours that separate that trip from the others in the cloudy, grotty puddle of memory.

i just didn’t want to go back.

i don’t think it was the seedy charm of the big city, or even the pressures of the daily grind as a senior honours bulimic with a manic-depressive roommate and no clue of what to do with myself after college.

it was me. i just didn’t want to go back to the confusion of being me at nearly 21. a Thanksgiving weekend in somebody else’s parents’ apartment was a vast relief. i ate pumpkin pie made with Splenda and said thank you and washed up the dishes and everything was nice and externalized and tidy and i felt validated and safe.

the kid i was that fall hadn’t felt particularly safe in a long time. and the year that was about to follow would knock everything out at the knees – my first real breakup, my first betrayal, a reckoning, the scattering of my circle to the wind post-graduation. and in the midst of it all, my grandmother’s house, the one she’d been born in, the one that’d been my only constant home in a childhood of apartments, sold and lost as the slow decay began.  i didn’t know any of  that out on that fire escape, watching the city, but i think maybe i sensed it, smelled the shift on the air. or maybe i simply knew i didn’t have a clue how to handle the inevitable closures that accompany one’s last year of anything.

i was scared shitless. i grew up risk averse and yet reckless, a combination not so uncommon among those who have little to lose in status and material goods. i had no long-term planning skills, no sense of agency to choose next steps or any belief that the choices i made would actually impact anything much. i felt like i was supposed to be figuring something out, but i couldn’t, for the life of me, sort out what it was.

i remember thinking, if we could just stay here, skip all the next steps, the part i don’t know how to do. get to the next chapter, whatever that is.

i found myself thinking the exact same thing last week.  different fall evening in Montreal.  no fire escape, no tears this time.  and the illusions of safety centered around leaving the city rather than staying. homecoming as escape from having to get to the next chapter somehow.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

i spent our five days in Montreal last week wondering if we could live there, if  i could drag a whole family of four to the city and have us stay afloat, financially and emotionally.

while we were there, i met with a woman who analyses writing and discourse and rhetoric for a living. she’s kind, funny, disarming. open. and she stated flat-out that she’s willing to work with me on my long-neglected Ph.D, be a mentor and supervisor for my dissertation. i’d need to commit to two years in the city.

they have little Portuguese pastries there, and a Czech bar. they also have rents three times our mortgage. there are museums, places other than MacDonald’s to take kids to play on a rainy Saturday. there are waiting lists a mile long for childcare, and apparently you have to know where you’re going to be living to even get on them. there would be no Nannie there…my mom gets traveller’s cheques just to leave PEI. which is an occasion reported on the local news.

i meet tomorrow with a representative from the fledgling Ph.D program here.  two faculty members here, whom i respect and am deeply fond of and whom i’ve worked with for a few years now have also said yes, they’d take me on.  if the program will accept me, because they’re only taking four students next year. four is a teensy little number. a number so small it hurts the ego to attempt it, because Everyone Will Know. (that and the blogging about it. that always helps with the privacy).

not much funding for first year in either program, so far as i can tell. my mouth gets dry as cotton when i look at the proposals, the grant applications.

it’s heady and daunting both, an eight-ball of self-doubt and projected glory.  part of me tells myself it makes sense, either way – that investing in my education, after my childbearing hiatus, is the kind of long-term planning i’m still struggling to master.  part of me wants to flatten myself to the ground like a hedgehog and stay stock-still until i can just wake up in the next chapter.

i need to do something about that instinct.

but i have these little kids. they were born in the aftermath of upheaval and sorrow like i hope never to know again. and since they came along, grounding me, making me happy to come home even from the glamour of a hotel room with cable, change scares the shit out of me even more than before.

halp. what would Jesus do? what would you do? i know people move to big cities all the time, even without much capital and with kids. but lord above, this all has me nervous, people. even staying. just the risk of putting it out there, applying, courting the possible no. and the possible yes.

talk me down off the fire escape after all these years, friends. tell me how to think about it all in a way that doesn’t hurt my head quite so much?

i lean against a toyshelf that was once a changing table in a playroom that still contains within it an office. a child clambers over me and a sippy cup drips rice milk into the suit i never bothered to change after work, while the other child beats my head cheerfully with a hairbrush. brush mommy’s hair gently, i chirp. she pauses, cocks her head to peer at me, then swats.

jenNEE? she inquires solicitously. i beam. gently, i say.

we talk, now, she & i. we talk.

my brain flits for a moment on a memory of eighth-grade science class and a mustachioed teacher labouring over arcane powders and the mystery of States of Change. in the scene, thirteen-year-old me  sits slackjawed, nonplussed, an empty thought bubble half-deflated above her.

thirty-seven-year-old me ponders the conversion from gas to liquid and dismisses it.  rather ostentatiously showy, really.  hell, we’re all in a constant science experiment of State Change: life would’ve been simpler if they’d just laid THAT out in junior high rather than bothering us with all that garble about kinetics and theories of matter, whatever those were.

i am matter. my children are kinetic. never the one shall catch the others, nor keep them still and static. memorize that, kids.

world’s Slowest Ever Esprit d’Escalier. so there, Mr. Plaid Pants and Moustache.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Dave is at his desk two feet away, lord of itunes. he is at home this month, washing my delicates and harnessing GoogleWave as a home project management tool, meaning i can sit at work and pile pearls of  inspiration like “buy baby wipes!” onto his list rather than my own sad little daytimer. we’re four days in and he is rising to the occasion with grace. i gaze at him and imagine he sits in his chair slightly differently, more aware of the house around him, of the overflowing trash can sulking at his feet.

i hum a little Rocky Horror, slightly altered to suit:

in just seven days i can make you…a wi-i-i-ife.

i thrill, and wonder if he’ll start meeting me at the door dressed in fishnets, casseroles in his oven-mitted hands.  then i realize he needn’t bother with the fishnets. i am so goddamned tired i have the libido of a wet, dead mackerel.

time change is a cruel instrument of torture dreamed up by sadists. since Sunday morning, my children have not slept past the new 5:45. at night, they’re wired, exhausted, a once-peaceful bedtime degenerating into a drawn-out circus.

dear powers that be: i’m already coping with a chronic case of State of Change. nobody needs to fuck with my clock, too.

it’s a good thing i have a wife, even temporarily. it would be better if anybody was getting anything resembling a decent night’s sleep.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Dave reaches out an arm and scoops Oscar up to the computer, brown head and blondish one close together. Josephine beetles away from me, off to thwack her hairbrush on some unsuspecting inanimate object.

the music catches me off guard – the opening chords of the first pop song i ever loved. Annie Lennox’s voice thrums up through the synthesizers.

i want to walk in the open wind
i want to talk like lovers do

like lovers. ah, lovers.

i remember being perhaps twelve, in my bathtub, still ignorant of chemistry and States of Change but shaving my legs for the very first time, Eurythmics my soundtrack for this rite of passage.  i ran a finger up the expanse of one wet, newly shorn calf, trying to inhabit the song, to imagine – from a vantage point of utter innocence, pure tabula rasa – the exotica of whatever it might be that lovers really did do. then i looked over my shoulder, mortified, and broke down in giggles in my bubble bath.

“lovers” meant sex. whatever that was.  but…they talked? like in sweet nothings? what would i say to a lover? another empty thought bubble hung limp above my adolescent head. so much is unimaginable when the mind is young.

sitting on the floor, though, soft and tired and sticky with sippy cup spillage, i understand the lyrics for the first time.

i remember waking languidly and looking for his eyes. i remember being two, just two. i remember that once upon a time, i saw nothing in a room but him. the memory is so vivid i almost glance over my shoulder as i did at twelve, embarrassed to be caught out naked with my own thoughts.

i could spit across the room and dirty his shirt. but i barely see him. and the lovers we once were feel as far away from me as that bathtub where i first shaved my legs twenty-five years ago.

i would not trade. but oh, god, i would like to visit.

next week, we escape to Montréal for five days. just us. in a city, gray and anonymous and magical to me, sleeping late in hotels and buying baguette for breakfast.  cafés.  wine.  nowhere to be.

and maybe we will talk like lovers do, up late, lost again in a world of our own creation. maybe. maybe the constant State of Change can circle round.

i would rather that than a wife, even. and that’s saying something.

Wednesday. i am on my knees under the high chair wiping up sludge that was once food for what feels like the twelfth time today even though i’ve only been IN my home awake for perhaps three hours of an already long day.

it feels like a yoke, this constant cycle of menial drudge stuff.  it is the thing that weighs me down, frustrates me, leaves me sharp and shrill and dreading the transition from work to home everyday.  in through the door we hustle, dragging shouting children and bags and dirty diapers, to be greeted not with sanctuary but the breakfast dishes.

garbage and compost and cat litter to be emptied. laundry to be folded or put away or retrieved from behind the washer where it fell, neglected, while waiting to be returned to its rightful drawer. everywhere i look, there is something that needs to be put away. every corner and cranny is full. and i am a pack animal, stumbling under the burden of this strange slavery to what ought to be a refuge.

it is not a mess, nor squalour, i understand that. we stay on top of it, just barely. but the omnipresence of it is slowly squeezing me until there is no time, no room left just to breathe. to be freed.

i should let it go. i do not know how.

to be a grownup is to have sanctuary become a day job. the sanctuary of the home swells, grotesque, until it is only a to-do list with no place to hide.

i want to live in a Japanese zen garden. i want two bamboo mats and a thick cotton futon and the illusion of space. i want minimalism and parallel lines and an artful flower, just-so, adorning the austerity.

i want to walk into this garden and fall down and sleep for a week.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Friday.  the children in bed after a day that began too early and ended too ornery. i pull the tray of caramel apples from the fridge.  failures, prematurely dipped, candy coating now pooled thinly on the bottom of the tray.  i contemplate a second box, second try. i contemplate the party in the morning, the brownies to be made, the junk food to be bagged. my mind skips and reels, uncertain even how to fit ten or twelve or fifteen children and their parents in this little house without a basement.

i contemplate the after.  i wonder what in gawd’s name i’m doing, having a Hallowe’en party when i’m mess-averse and stretched thin and brittle. i know Dave wonders. neither of us have slept more than a few hours straight all week; old colds coughing their way out of our systems, deadlines driving us without respite.  we are horses pulling against each other, each of us headstrong and easily wounded. there has been no time to regroup, take stock, heal the scratches. i sink in my own sadness and it spills into hopelessness and rage and i say aloud, i cannot live like this.

i keep hoping someone will hear and magically make it all different.

there are tears in the second batch of caramel. it suffers from my distraction and a phone call and the fact that a meat thermometer is not, in fact, a candy thermometer. i miss the soft ball stage this time and go straight to hard crack, though of the candy rather than the drug persuasion. the first apple mires in the wicked goo until the stick breaks. i end up tossing the entire batch into the compost bin. it hits the cold plastic with a thwack like glass threatening to break.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Saturday. our house overflows with people, most of them short and costumed and sweltering. i note that costumes are plush these days, no longer the paper-thin flammable plastic of my childhood. in the same breath i recall the quick-chilling beads of my sweat inside the white-backed masks with clown faces, Snow White, whatever other selves i became briefly in those Octobers of long ago. masquerading, i think, has always been hot work.

my mother, without being asked, herds Posey the wee caterpillar through the throng of three-year-olds and a few stray elder siblings. i gather the taller group on stools around the kitchen island and hand out weapons of mass destruction – globs of homemade icing, sprinkles, gummi worms, candied pumpkins – for them to amuse themselves with. things of beauty are born, sampled, discarded. my child licks his plate. Dave disentangles himself from the role of greeter & coffee provider and leads children and more than a few parents upstairs, a Pied Piper with a glow-in-the-dark Dr. Suess book and a maglite. they jam themselves into Oscar & Josephine’s tiny, darkened room.  i hear him through the baby monitor, clearing his throat, announcing A Spooky Story. the thrill of little giggles, scaring themselves. later we throw them all out in the leaves, bob for apples in wild defiance of H1N1 protocol. my doctor’s kid’s booger floats in the water.

the whole thing goes off seamlessly, a team effort that leaves me standing in my kitchen after, wondering at the relative lack of mess, at how dismissable those stray candy wrappers that remain can be.

i still want to sleep for a week. i still want a slim bamboo & paper screen that i can raise at will between me and the hurly-burly of this life that is by turns both rich, homey pageant and zero-sum grind.

i wonder which is the masquerade.

i look to Monday and try to breathe deep.