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it was the clinic doctor last Christmas when both the kids had ear infections. he looked up from the white-draped table where Posey reclined obligingly. i was wrestling Oscar’s turtleneck back over his head now that it was his sister’s turn. i thought i’d misheard.

what?

it came out more snappish than i’d intended. i am not snappish with doctors. i have occasionally wished in hindsight for more snap, but when it is Christmas Eve and you are the physician kindly humouring my family through the investigation of ear pus and “mommy, it hurts” mere minutes before the pharmacies close for three days, any snap you get from me is just weariness. i promise.

you know she has a heart murmur, right?

my head tilted, as if to accommodate the weight of that tidbit. its meaning registered in stages, internal standup comedy. heart. those are important. but MY children have lung issues, not heart problems. don’t be silly. Finn’s lungs, underdeveloped. Oscar’s asthma. all those visits to pediatric recussitation. i don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ no heart murmurs. Posey is my healthy one, my never-once-admitted-to-the-hospital baby. fuck off, heart murmur. what the hell does that MEAN, anyway?

i remember feeling profoundly stupid in that moment, neglectful in my ignorance, as if i’d failed to read the fine print on the instruction manual that had come with my daughter.

is that a big deal? i asked, hesitant.  no, he said. and so i nodded and more or less promptly forgot about it.

when you experience a major medical catastrophe with a child, the kind where doctors start speaking in hushed voices and you feel like you’re probably being superdramatic to ask if it’s bad but they say yes and then the bottom sinks out of your world and everything changes, there are two ways you can go, after.  you can live scared for a very long time. you can fret over coughs and lather with Purell and generally treat the world like a bus waiting to hit the precious ones left to you. which, with all due respect, it kinda is.

or you can build a wall behind which you hide, where so long as nobody ever speaks the words “he probably won’t recover” ever again, you’re golden. untroubled. pretty much everything else sounds petty next to that, after all.

so when you rush an eight-month-old to the hospital in the dead of winter gasping for air and they speed you through to the oxygen tents and then say, oh, probably asthma, you exhale with an almost palpable relief. you have to catch yourself, actually, and stand up straight and ask all the right questions and try not to look so bizarrely grateful. and your brain does take a circuitous loop through the swamps of guilt where you wonder how this prognosis will impact the life of the once-again pink and happy baby in your arms…but your brain does not remain there. it is too busy hightailing it back behind its wall, where inhalers look pretty damn pasty and thin compared to the shopvac wail of the NICU ventilator you still hear in your sleep, sometimes.

obviously, i chose the wall. or it chose me.

Oscar was a relatively sickly baby, by most standards. by the time he was fifteen months old, he’d been hospitalized on six different occasions, in two different countries, and had spent almost a month of nights in neonatal and pediatric wards. he had respiratory issues and colic and a variety of possible allergies. and it exhausted me and worried me, in the sense that i worried whether i was doing right by him with every choice we made about milk and reflux meds and steroids, ad nauseum. but never did i actually, seriously, worry about him. compared to his 2.2 pound brother with the tube forced through his chest wall, Oscar was hearty and breathing pretty fine.

and with her brothers as a baseline, Josephine was the Gerber baby. sure, she had jaundice for a few days at birth, and the cursed colic, and from the time she could roll over showed a terrifying predilection for banging headfirst into anything that could possibly get in her way, but this one, she was healthy. roly-poly. fiesty. sweet as pie and tough as nails.

so the heart murmur news caught me off-guard. but when the clinic doctor and Dr. Google both concurred that it was no big deal, i shrugged and booked the ECG and went along my merry way, behind my Wall of I’ve Heard Worse.

i stayed there through the ECG, which was prompt and painless, and straight through the followup appointment with the pediatric clinic a few months later, because i was so damn chill i forgot to actually take the child to her appointment. as did her father. yes, we got coupons with our Parents of the Year awards.

but i think my wall is crumbling.

we had the followup to the followup today. Posey beetled around the doc’s office in a diaper and socks and pigtails, admonishing the toy blocks to stay put and then shouting, look Mama! i RIDIN’! as she scooted across the linoleum floor on an eight-inch-long plastic schoolbus. she sat, watchful but patient in my lap as this new specialist listened to the mysteries inside of her little chest. he took a long family history, listened some more, checked her pulse at various points throughout her body. and he then lifted his head and i asked, what do you hear? and he said, well, i think we should do more tests.

it’s not a big deal, not in any serious sense: just not the innocent murmur i’d hoped. a thickened muscle, possibly, perhaps with a hole or ventricular septal defect. no immediate risk. possible surgery down the road, if it doesn’t close on its own.

we got to go straight down to xray, then for another ECG. there will be an echocardiogram at some point, later. followups. pediatric cardiologists. not a big deal.

but still a bit of a deal. an uncertain deal.

by virtue of lack of exposure, my armour is slipping. i spent all my pregnancies in and out of the doctor’s office and the big regional specialist hospital, constantly subject to poking and prodding and ultrasounds and blood tests. between Finn’s calamitous birth and two months of hospitalization before Oscar was born and then his many admissions, i was hospital-proofed, inured. not only had i heard the worst, but i never got far from the sharp alcohol tang of the hospital handwash. until Posey. since Posey was born, my only trips to the hospital have been for Oscar’s ear tube surgeries.

i was not ready. when i called my boss to say i’d be late for our lunch meeting, juggling Josephine and a sippy cup and a sheaf of requisitions in my hands, i felt it for the first time in years, that metallic taste of fear.

because here we leap, naked and vulnerable, back into the world of medical machines and systems i am glad for, grateful for, but would far prefer to never see again as long as i live.

***

the doctor asked today, is she fragile? timid? does she get overexerted easily? i laughed.

i do not know much about heart murmurs, would appreciate anything you can tell. so i can bolster up my wall with knowledge, and keep exhorting her to bounce higher.

i lick my finger and stick it into the wind. i smell money.

i stick up a butterfly net to see if i can catch any, but it floats on by. i raise my eyebrow, stick out my lip. a twenty slaps me in the eye. it’s sticky, a little oily. on a long string, it trails a thousand tiny obligations and ties. i let it pass.

i turn the eye to the sun, looking for a bigger bill, one trailing things i already want to say.

there’s been cash in the oxygen out here in the ether for a long time, since before my time.  but the ecosystem has shifted in the past couple of years. make no mistake, social media is now a business environment.

sure, plenty of folk out here still have active and rewarding and even successful social media lives on many different terms without engaging in any sort of commercial transactions. there’s much beauty out here that’s not selling anything.

except itself.

be it beauty or ideas or humour, it matters not. if you put it out there and it works, it builds reputation. reputation can be leveraged, sometimes into capital, sometimes into opportunity, sometimes simply  into connection. we all have our eyes on a prize; we are none of us pure, without want.

likewise, those here to do business are still entities within a social environment. we are here, all us Whos; identities performed here as friends and caregivers and consumers and braggarts and afficionados. we may be tycoons, or mothers: the walls between leak and merge. this changes everything for everybody, creates new ground rules.

and the first is this: the word brand does not mean what you think it means.
***

i tried to write about this a month or so ago. i meandered my way through a big messy post trying to posit that branding – a word many consider vulgar beyond redemption – is a key in understanding how to educate 21st century kids, who exist within this relational economy and expect to be able to interact with information and with people in ways that schooling structures seldom allow. i made it part way towards articulating my own research interests and ideas. but as my wise friend Sue pointed out to me on twitter, to bring anybody else along with me i need to explain what i mean by branding.

i say branding is the sum total of the choices you make about how you get presented and understood through social media…and also, how those choices get taken up by others.

branding is what is read on to you, how you are perceived, what you signify in the eyes of everybody else. it is not you, but a version of you. it is an act, and a group act, one that does not exist without a network of some sort to reflect and amplify it. it is ephemeral, a wisp on the wind. it is not about content or truth. it is about image and perceived capacity.

your brand is whatever version of your best self you happen to be selling out here. even if it isn’t you at all.

branding, for all its polluted inheritance of capitalism and cows, actually allows for the complexity that one’s reputational identity or brand can be both contrived and uncontrolled. you can try all you like to look cool, but unless somebody takes you up on it and shares your cool with their peeps in turn, little happens. you do not amplify.

(branding is much like reputation, but as reputation is an equally sullied word laden with strictures about how women should act, i find brand less confining. plus branding better captures the fact that one’s online identity exists within an economy of monetization. whether you capitalize or not – or how high up the ladder you wait to capitalize – is up to you.)

you can ignore your brand all you want. but it won’t stop others from perceiving it, and perceiving you through its lens.
***

years ago, when Dave and i were first together, we had a conversation about clothes.

his wardrobe had always puzzled me, and since our friendship preceded the relationship by many years, i’d had the opportunity to observe it up close for quite some time. it consisted of a pile of disparate items that all seemed to have been bought by different people. it was not so much eclectic as just…odd, like anchovies on a hamburger. he wore polo shirts or funky Malaysian handwoven pullovers, apparently without distinction. he tended to look like he’d been dressed by well-intentioned missionaries.

i’d said nothing. we were still – clearly – in that first blush of love.

and then we went shopping.

i held stuff up, asked for reactions. i just wanted to know what he liked, what his impression was of different things, whether he thought they suited him. he refused to engage the conversation. he tried to step outside it.

my clothes aren’t ME, he said. and i understood.  he saw clothes as extras, add-ons. he saw the thousands of implicit judgements we base on clothing as false, masks for the genuine human beneath.

i know, i said. clothes do not make the man.

but you DO get, right, that you not wanting to be interpreted by others based on your clothing choices doesn’t mean you AREN’T?

yes, he was a unique snowflake. yes, he was more than just a jock, or a geek, or a post-grunge hippie expat and wanted to be understood as such. but there is no way to put clothing on the human body that does not open you to the interpretation of other people, however shallow or misguided they may be. you still dress like something, i was trying to explain to my dear one. unless “dressed by missionaries” is the image you’re dying to project, you might as well make choices that impact that interpretation along lines you actually, y’know, like.

so that’s what i mean by branding. we signify, everytime we interact with others, through our clothing or our tweets or our blog headers (and thankyou, kind and clever Kate, for eventually staging the intervention on my out-of-the-box theme template). we signify whether we want to or not. it is part of the price of admission.

there is no neutral. you cannot escape making some kind of statement. you might as well decide which one interests you and make it.

in every arena of life, it takes time to become literate in making judgements even for yourself. Dave’s found a style of clothing that he’s comfortable with, but it took time and years of watching and paying attention to understand what social significance different choices carried, and what he wanted to convey of himself with those options. me, i’m not so sure Hawaiian shirts go with corduroy blazers. but it’s his call to make. it took me a long time to even see that my old blog theme said much of anything, because reading social media images was a skill i hadn’t cultivated. i was aiming for neutral.  Kate took me gently by the hand and said, in effect, there is no neutral. and i said, oh merciful gawd, thank you. can i have typewriters? art deco typewriters?

if you are out here, you are being read: your words, your style, your interactions, all you carry with you. this is brand. own yours.

i was in college when The Golden Girls wrapped in 1992. to give the swan song of such a pop culture opus its due, my roommates and i held a most magnificent drinking game around the final episode.

when it came down to deciding which among us was which character from the Golden Girls, i ended up as Betty White.

Betty White. not the sexy one. not the smart one. not even the wiseass mother hen. the ditz. Betty White. Rose. Rose fucking Nyland.

for lo these eighteen years, friends, i have puzzled and stewed about being tagged as the Betty White of the co-ed set. i was flabbergasted. i thought i was smart, possibly a dry wit. i was aiming for sexy, however awkwardly. and i definitely wanted to be funny. but instead, at least to a gang of drunken undergraduate rugby players, i was Betty White.

today, with the death of Rue McLanahan, who taught me sexy doesn’t end at thirty, bless her tawdry little heart, Betty White became the last Golden Girl standing.

and i thought, this is my hour.

then i spent the day with the Golden Girls theme song stuck in my head. yes. you are welcome.
***

the good thing about being Betty White, besides her recent SNL glory and the fact that she’s, you know, alive, is that she’s nice. as Rose, she was vapid, sure, a little slow on the uptake. but good people.

and more than anything of the other Golden Girls, she was fearless. Rose Nylund wasn’t afraid to be kind. or to say she was hurt. or to look like a fool.

i want to be more like that.

that is all.

i can see myself as an old lady. my grandmother, whom was perhaps my unwitting model for my more feminine attributes, looked a lot like a much older Betty White, with the same little cold wave perm and the lipstick that came from Woolworths. she was almost 70 when i was born, and it is around 70 that i imagine myself truly growing into my skin, fully and completely, just as it softens for good and begins to collect in little pockets all over me, like pompoms.

i will learn to make tea properly, and to have the patience to drink it. i will sit with my lady friends and be silly and make them feel smart, and i will not care one whit about my own damn vanity and ego. i will laugh. i will be a friend in a way i don’t find much time for, these busy days.

and i’ll be fearless. except maybe of cockroaches. but i’ll be so damn sweet you’ll all get rid of them for me.

i’ll be Betty White, finally.

who do you want to be, when the days grow short? what kind of old lady (or old gentleman, or dude) do you see on your horizon, your someday?

i dreamed last night that she was all grown up.

i wasn’t any older. or i don’t think i was: i never caught sight of myself. the only reflective surfaces were her eyes. her exact blue almond eyes, only bigger, like anime. i could not see myself.

my imagination balks at the conjecture of my own becoming, of looming middle age. but this was Josephine, no other. just the two of us, in women’s bodies, in some timeless place.

they were beautiful eyes. i told her so. she glared back at me, baleful and adolescent, wary of being made out to be something other than she was. i met her gaze and for a moment i was confused, bewildered, bereft. how had we gotten here, to this squared-off stance, to these opposite sides in a conversation i couldn’t even remember? hadn’t she only that morning propelled herself small and round and  into my arms, tiny hands flapping, all glee and shouts and prime directives?

i reached out for her. there was glass between us, suddenly, primary colours washing her skin. and i was afraid.

some part of me knew i was dreaming. some other part of me knew better.
***

i didn’t think i was afraid of the teenage years.

i work with late adolescents, just starting out at university. i used to teach high school. i remember, still, vividly, the angry, caged, abandoned howl that choked the words off in my throat at fourteen, when the teacher slammed me up against the cinderblocks of the school gym and i knew there was no recourse.

i entered parenthood afraid. the first time i laid eyes on Finn, he was being whisked away from me in a shower of blood and alarms. fifteen yellow-suited specialists ran into the room in a neonatal code ballet. they took him away, to the NICU. one came back to say he would not make it through the night.

we had our hour, where i held him. i sang. mama’s gonna buy you a billy goat…and if that billy goat don’t…

i didn’t know what came next.

i didn’t know what a child would want with a billy goat, or a diamond ring, for that matter. my child needed lungs better than those he had. i had only stupid billy goats to offer, and my arms.

i held him until the machines said he was gone, until the nurses said go to bed. it’s nearly morning.

the one bargain i have with the gods and the fates is this: please let that morning be the hardest i ever know as a parent.
***

when Oscar came, and Posey after, there was colic. long nights i revisited my own blind helplessness. i was desperate to salve and soothe and ease. i could not. the billy goats and looking glasses could not. even my arms made no appreciable difference.

i was afraid.

but these two i kept, they grew. they began to laugh and speak and interact, and i did not feel so helpless, so afraid. i know them, now. their curiosity, their sweetness. they are ying and yang all mixed up, risk-aversion and fearlessness, stubbornness and patience, each a wonder and a challenge. Josephine tests the scope of her small voice, gleeful and shouty. she slaps her thighs, kicks at the world. she knows exactly where she wants to go, repeats every word i say. i call her my mockingbird, and the sting of the song eases just a little.

i have been thinking it will get easier, this gig. i have been thinking that i will rock at parenting teenagers, because i know how to sit alongside them when their shoulders hunch and they lash out or turn away. i am better with a crying teenager, i tell myself, than a crying baby.

i begin to believe that the dumb luck that got them here will hold, that my days of fear are done. that my hardest morning as a parent is behind me.

then i read about Henry Granju, nineteen and beautiful and brilliant and drug-addicted in spite of all his mother’s love and help and hope, and i see. you do not get to pay your dues and just walk off into the sunset.

i dream of Josephine, grown and unreachable. and i wake and think of Katie Granju on this hardest morning of her parenthood, waking to the realization that it is true and Henry is gone.  and i whisper to the ether, mercy.

go hold her up, give her your billy goats and your arms. make no mistake, there but for the grace of god or fates or sheer dumb luck go we all.

it ought to be perfect.

there are steel rails installed, by the toilet and the shower. the LaZBoy throne has been replaced by a marvel which – at the touch of a button – deposits him from its egg-carton-cushy-foam seat onto his feet, and gently. there is a hospital bed in the master bedroom. nurses come daily, to take his blood pressure, check for bedsores, make sure he is nourished and cleaned and supported.

my grandfather is home. after almost four months of hospitalization and convalescent wards, he has come home well enough to stay.

he ensconced himself on the fancy new recliner and with an ancient Zippo, lid aflame like an Olympic torch, lit up the cigar that he kept in his bedside drawer the entire time he was gone.

and then he asked for the keys to the truck.
***

during the long days of January and February, when he lay in bed, one arm swollen to the size of a football, and his skin and circulation breaking down faster even than his heart appeared to be, he was confused a lot of the time.

i would visit, and he’d ask how my father was, even though my father was there every day. he asked his own room number over and over again.  he seemed unable, a great deal of the time, to hold his moorings: the day-to-day that had been his life for years appeared to slip from him. we did not talk about his house or his job.

what we talked about was the Lysander.

my grandfather, a farm boy from PEI, was a British agent from 1939-1949.  he spent WWII and the early years of the Cold War between Camp X and Bletchley Park and occupied Europe, with homebase in NYC.

he spent half his war in planes.

in lumbering matte-black Lysanders, unmarked, navigating by moonlight, they flew perched on trunks of plastic explosive. they smoked as they flew. they made their way over enemy territory, readying themselves to parachute behind lines to Tito’s resistance, to the Free French.

the Lysander was an ungainly thing, but it could take off on ten feet of runway or less, a hulk of engines and fabric rising into the sky like a fat bird. during WWII, its main role was with intelligence, dropping agents and doing photo reconnaissance. it was no good for bombs, too slow for fighting. but it was steady, reliable. it could be flown by any agent who made it alive to the pre-agreed point of takeoff. and a Lysander brought my grandfather home safely.

in June, an airshow on PEI will feature a reconstructed Lysander, air-ready. before the heart attack in January, my grandfather was contacted by the organizers. would he like to fly in the plane? he would.

he thought, i think, that he’d like to fly the plane again.

and so all through the confused days of the winter it was the Lysander we returned to. he did not worry – aloud – that he would not make it to see the plane, but rather that he would not be able to climb in. that he would not be well enough to go up in her.

mostly, though, he told me that he could fly her.

he last flew a plane only three years ago, with his equally octegenarian buddy. the event made me wonder if i ought to warn the whole of Prince Edward Island to take to their basements while the cast of Grumpy Old Men ruled the skies.

but it is different now. for the first time in his life, his body has failed him, showed its vulnerability. he knows he will not fly the Lysander, ever again. and he curses being old.
***

there is a service that brings meals, as do i, and my stepmother. but the restaurant he ate at daily for 21 years – the one that burnt last spring – has reopened. my father brought him back the first time, while he was still on the convalescent ward, frail but triumphal. he was welcomed like a prodigal.

the diner is down the road from his house. and he drives. when we arranged last week to meet there for supper, he said, “i’ll meet you there!”

i balked. we can pick you up! i chirped. we have extra seats in the new car!

“oh, i’m good.” his tone brooked no argument. “i drive down most nights.”

he is perhaps no more dangerous a driver than i. i do not know. i know the idea of him behind the wheel still makes me terribly nervous, Cassandra attuned to all the doom the horizon can hold. it is not him i fear for. it is the someone else the candy apple truck could run into: the lives – theirs, his, all of ours – that such a tragedy would eat away at. if he is no longer independent, then we are all complicit.

this week, he will take his provincial driving test again, for the first time in seven decades. they have endowed family doctors with the capacity to order driving tests for seniors, finally. after having watched the fierce struggle between my mother and my grandmother fifteen years ago, when it became clear that at eighty-nine, the latter was no longer safe to commandeer her Datsun through the streets of Charlottetown, i am grateful that my father does not have to fight the same battle with his father.

but i fight it in myself.

i fear he will ace the test, come home with a bright, shiny license and no place for any of us to stand and caution. and i fear what will happen to him if he does not. i grieve the idea of him trapped in his house, waiting for others to wait on him.

he is ninety. he will never fly his Lysander again.

i know there is no such thing as perfect. and still, i feel cold and cruel for wanting to take his truck too.

as my Mother’s Day present to my long-suffering mother, i went with her to church last weekend.

church is the centre of my mother’s orbit in this life. her social whirl, her weekly schedule, her sense of what matters are all directly and primarily shaped by the faith community in which she grew up. the church is having a clothing sale? the kids must have something they’ve outgrown. a fundraising dinner? she’ll mash potatoes by the bucket, even if her swallowing disorder means she hasn’t eaten pork roast herself in a quarter century. sponsoring a refugee family? she’s suddenly on Wikipedia for the first time ever, learning everything she can about Somalia.

i could, on the other hand, spend weeks in Somalia, and my mother might eventually look up what side of Africa it was on. she is generous with her time, loves her grandchildren, loves me. but despite the fact that the age difference between us is small and that i have friends her own age, my mother has not even a foot in my world, or even in her own generational world. David Bowie, whom i’ve been set since the age of twelve on marrying someday, is a year older than she. yet only if David Bowie came to sing at her church would she ever suddenly develop any interest in being able to identify his music. i suspect she’ll recognize him at the wedding, but only just.

so i’m a little jealous. i’m an only child. it’s hard to share your mother with God, okay? look what happened to Jesus.

ba dum bump.

my mother’s church, and my grandmother’s before her, and her grandmother’s before that, is housed in a big, old, austerely grand building with wooden vaulted ceilings. it has deep, dour Protestant Reformation roots: it does not draw attention to itself. there is no showy witnessing in its circle, no language of prayer and The Lord permeating everyday conversation. as i cringe when people attribute daily actions and outcomes to deities – unless they’re swearing – the circumspection and minimalism of the place suits me. i like sitting there, my back against the pew, stained-glass-light dappling the old people’s hair in front of me. if i squint, i can imagine that i’ve time-travelled, that one of the bluer rinses a few pews ahead is my Nannie, gently croaking out an old staunch hymn the congregation hasn’t sung in forty years. i love that.

but i don’t go.

i have this private hubris that i’m a Personal BadAss. now, Personal BadAsses eschew church and all its middle-class bourgeois self-satisfaction. rows of women in fur stoles, passing the peace of Christ? earnestly updated hymns laden with sentimental theology? Personal BadAsses are deeply uncomfortable with all that…comfortableness. they like Mapplethorpe exhibits and whatever makes other people squirm. they only wear fur they killed with their own teeth. why, they’d smoke, still, just to blow it in somebody’s face, if the habit hadn’t gotten so gosh-darn expensive and wouldn’t land them in an emphysema ward.

the problem with being a Personal BadAss is that it does not wear particularly well after the age of 35. unless one is PJ O’Rourke, i suppose. or Mickey Rourke. or Mr. Roarke from Fantasy Island, but he was more suave than bad.

God did not make me suave. i should ask my mother to speak with him/her about that.

anyhow, one day you look around and you’ve been carrying your diaper bag to work as a purse for six months and your car is a glorified mini-van and even the haircut you thought had edge makes you look – at best – like an aging Depeche Mode fan and you may as well haul granny’s fur outta storage and go sit in a pew.

so last week i went to church with my mother.

we stood in the pew where i sat as a child. no one stared. no shouts of “blasPHEEEMer!” went up in the sanctuary. i smiled nervously.

and then the heavens parted.

i am not a believer, plain and simple. which is the main reason simply being in a church makes me feel like a wretched hypocrite. but it was Mother’s Day, which i figure is forgivable by any standards.

and by Jesus, God went all out fer me, people.

my daughter, the hurricane, sat quietly in her grandmother’s lap for half an hour, then went to sleep on my shoulder for the first time since she weaned six months ago. Oscar led the procession from Sunday school with Mother’s Day carnations and a beatific little smile. i sang beside my mother and the words to the old hymns were quick on my lips. a tear leaked down my face.

i thought JESUS, Jesus. you trying to do me in?

there were no furs, no self-congratulations. in the prayer, they spoke to mothers who grieve, mothers with AIDS, mothers who wait for babies that never come. the sermon was as radical a piece of public discourse as i’ve heard out loud in years, replete with visuals of gay adoptive parents interspersed with biblical stained-glass allegory.

i was ready to shout Amen. which would have embarrassed my mother almost enough to qualify me as a BadAss all over again.

the last shot that went up on the screens projected at the front of the old church was Michelangelo’s Pieta. the mother cradles her broken adult child, her body braced to hold his weight. he is gone; she is utterly alone.

i looked down at Posey in my arms, eyelashes fluttering. my lip trembled as i smiled on her. i made sure she was breathing.

over her head, my eyes met my mother’s. we both nodded at the miracle between us, the slumbering child. my mother raised her eyebrows in bemusement, i shrugged my shoulders in response.

we laughed. aloud, right in that moment of perfect silence before the offertory.

the Very Model of a Modern BadAss Family, i told myself, raising my chin with great pride.

***

i didn’t go back to church with my mother this morning. if i were a good daughter, i might’ve. maybe. there’s still that little hiccup of belief standing between me and the way i was raised.

my mother began bringing Oscar to Sunday school last September. he loves going, she loves bringing him, and we figure it’s a fine education in community and literacies plus an hour with one less child every weekend. but for the first time this morning as the two of them walked out the door hand in hand, i felt grown up. because for all my respectful mother has never once asked me to come – even last week, i volunteered – every week the part of me that remained petulant Personal BadAss sulked with self-consciousness at the very idea of church. even though no one was asking me.

until today, i really couldn’t quite have told you whether i stayed home out of personal ethics or because i am secretly Twelve. it felt nice, finally, to figure out the difference.

today, i just smiled at my mom when we met her at the door.  Posey reached for her shoes, and i said, no honey, no church for us today.

nap! she chirped, protesting, and my mother and i both broke out laughing. again. clearly, we all have our own ideas about what church is for.

so i stayed behind, content in my lack of belief. and my mother and Oscar went off to the bosom of her Other Family and i waved from the window.

and it was good.

sometimes, if i hold my head right, i like to pretend i can see through time.

i’ve been taking an open, online course in Education Futures these past few weeks. Dave’s one of the instructors, along with the luminous George Siemens. it’s a heady ride. there are 700+ participants, though the majority mostly lurk – but still, the experience is slippery, decentered, enormous and fascinating. it’s free. there are no grades, which is probably good, as i suspect Dave would enjoy nothing more than to give my Lisa Simpson ass a nice flat D for once. what you take out of it is not only what you put in, but what roads you choose to navigate, what conversations you choose to be in, which fellow classmates you choose to engage with. it reminds me of the blogosphere, and this blogging “experience” that is really thousands of separate experiences contextualized by a few common parameters.

education futures isn’t about predictions. it’s about perceiving trends and shifts, conceiving of how they intersect and influence each other to impact humans and behaviour and norms. it’s a semi-informed guessing game, a Gladwellian enterprise based on perceiving what is and reconfiguring the way it’s interpreted, until possibilities open and – maybe – everything looks radically different.

our social media personae are made up of the perspectives we bring to these online skins, these avatars by which we negotiate identities and connections out here, in the virtual.

you know me as a mommyblogger. however awkward that skin is, i cannot say it does not fit. my voice inhabits it, has grown to fill it, has used its maternal contours to speak into being a child whom those who know me only in my physical skin seldom get to see. my motherhood in all its complexities is the platform on which i’m grounded, both in my online and day-to-day lives.

i am also an educator, whose work and thought are predominantly shaped by the contexts of higher education and the online communities centering around educational technologies and theory. i think of education as a social and societal experiment. generally, i think of blogging the same way.

it’s where these two perspectives come together that i catch a teensy whiff of what smells like the future.

in my grand decline, when i look back over mint juleps and maribou slippers to dissect the ‘blogging revolution’ of my long-faded 30s, i think two things will stand out vividly.

first, Virginia Woolf was right.

a room of one’s own matters, and is a condition necessary to creation. what Virginia missed was that the room doesn’t need to be an actual office or garret or physical space, nor does it matter if the would-be writer’s physical space and life are crowded with small bodies. these are fodder, rich and full of marrow.

the chance to narrate said fodder into a room of one’s very own, a virtual shelter for one’s words & stories & a persona beyond the bounds of Barney and chewable books? has mattered. and freed from the gatekeeping and market pressures of traditional publishing systems, the opportunity for parents to build these little birdhouses for their souls has created an explosion. said explosion – and the nature of its particular technologies, which permit an etiquette of commenting and linking and personal advocacy & promotions – have resulted both in an unprecedented meld of brand & identity, and a brave new world in which communities and networks are able to truly transcend space and time.

in the educational futures conversation it’s easy to miss the branding and identities part of the picture, whereas in the parental corner of the blogosphere, sometimes one is left wondering whether there’s really anything else going on at all. as blogs have become increasingly business-focused and the concept of self as brand has become ubiquitous, many of us have learned enough to confidently blather on about SEO optimization and concepts like earned media and how to promote small businesses through social media.

but what particularly interests me is that as our children grow up in families and communities permeated by these concepts of identity and interaction, they’ll bring these implicit understandings of what it means to be a self into their classrooms. and if we are to shape our archaic, industrial-era education system into something relevant to their perspectives on the world and on their futures, we ought to be ensuring that our classrooms enable students to build rooms of their own, and share them, and through them interrogate the assumptions of market, knowledge, and identity that our culture reflects and reifies.

the other thing that i think will leap to the foreground of the picture when we look back at this first decade of blogging through the mists of time: our concepts of privacy are about to be blown wide open.

i love cities. i love to walk in cities. the bigger and more anonymous the better. i pound the pavement and imagine i could be anybody, because all the other anybodies slipping by me could be anybody too, and maybe the most fascinating interaction in the world is about to take place in a glance. cities, for me, are near-infinite networks of possibility, without the glare and responsibility of being known.

anyone who grew up in a small town knows what it is to be known. “cherish your reputation,” my dear mother always told me, by which i – probably unfairly – assumed she meant for me to keep HER reputation intact and unsullied by whispers. when you focus on reputation, you sometimes assume people care more than they actually do. but in a small town, you also know that people can be cruel, and judgements made on the whim of the moment. so you guard yourself…and sometimes, if the weight of public castigation grows too heavy, you become what they already say you are. in a small town, it can be death to be different.

in branding, on the other hand, differentiation is key to success.

i see online identity as a small-town self, acutely aware of the possibility and the consequences of being recognized, meandering about in a truly infinite city of networked relationships. this branded self is at least semi-consciously aware of its goals and its optics; of how it appears to the anybodies passing by the artifacts and traces of itself it shares out here in the ether. the branded self may view connections as personal or instrumental, or both, and is probably inclined to see attention as positive so long as its network doesn’t ostracize it as a result.

in other words, to a branded self, there is no purpose in privacy. all the world’s a stage.

in the four years or so i’ve been reading blogs, one of the most common refrains i’ve heard is “i’m taking down photos/names/poop stories because i don’t want the record i’ve created here to follow my child through life.” wisely, i think, we recognize that in writing of our children, we risk writing them into roles that they themselves may not want to embody.  we don’t want them to feel they have to become what we’ve said they are. or at least, we don’t want to appear that way.

but in the post-blogging world of tomorrow, it is almost unthinkable that our kids won’t have online identities far beyond what we’ve written for them. what’s more, i don’t think our concepts of negative attention will have a great deal of meaning to our kids’ generation as they grow into adults, except in those awful, inevitable, pan-human moments where the network – be it the football team or cranky bloggers or politicians and half of twitter – blows up against a particular self in moments of bullying and ostracism and brand-backlash writ large. it’s not likely to happen over potty tales; they’re too universal.

the dance of successful branding is about balancing the creative capacity for difference with the critical capacities for self-judgement and prudent projection of consequences.

our children’s online selves will fluctuate and change as they grow, but teaching them early to leave trails they won’t be dogged by or ashamed of later – because nothing online is truly private, or really goes away – has to be one of the challenges of raising this generation of children for which we’re least prepared. as a culture, i think we’d all benefit from work on critical projection, since more and more of us seem to have no intention of going back under the dome of domestic privacy. and as an educator within this culture, i wonder if one of the greatest conceptual tools we could give kids today would be that sense of big-city network navigation in a small-town, self-aware skin?

then they could build rooms of their own within which to capture their own realities and perspectives, and there hopefully weather storms if/as they arose, all the while understanding in a way our generation is only beginning to taste that no network – no matter how powerful the popular girls seem when one is in junior high, or a mommyblogger – is ever finite, be-all and end-all.

what do YOU see when you look through time? and how do YOU see your online persona? are you a small-town brand or a citified network person by nature? or am i missing something beyond/between that polarization?

when i started working at an intersection of the fields of education and technology about twelve years back, my then-boss taught me the phrase early adopter. she was a proud, flag-waving version of the breed, a proselytizer of The New. she had a PalmPilot, with that little stylus i could never figure out how people managed not to lose. i disdained the thing, thought of it as conspicuous consumption. i could barely keep track of my $8 daytimer with the vinyl cover.

i’ll never be an early adopter. even if i try.

it takes time for me to learn to love a thing, an object: my appreciation is the kind that builds only over time. historical time, glacial time, no matter – when i hold a thing in my hands, it becomes for me a portal to its personal history. if it has none, i have nothing to attach to; it has no context for me. the patina of age is full of stories: the hows and whys of a particular place and time. i like the cultural trajectory of use-value, the sense of how hands touched objects and what they used them for. fingerprints are romance.

is there a cultural opposite to the early adopter? can i be the maudlin clinger?

my real soft spot is for the utterly obsolete.

i am a rest home for dead technologies. my blog header sports the image of an art deco-era typewriter: i own one. it is my grandmother’s vintage finger-chewer, and it sits proudly in a closet, waiting for some mythical me to unspool a bottle of absinthe and write my great novel. less grandly, we have a VCR. and a Discman, which i can still be seen using. you should see the looks them young whippersnappers get when they clap eyes on that baby. in my freezer, until only last year, sat a carton of Kodak 35 mm film. i bought it at a Costco in South Korea – cheap, but not quite cheap enough to throw out – sometime in 2003. who doesn’t need film? erm, yeh. i hand-imported the box back to Canada when i moved in January 2005. those rolls of film were better-travelled than most people.

when i finally let them go to their great kodachrome reward, it wasn’t out of any rational recognition that film had jumped the shark. rather it was out of avoidance, because every time i opened the freezer i felt guilty staring the box in the eye. i didn’t want the film to know it was dead.

i didn’t want to admit, for some reason, that i would likely never again wind a roll of cellulose into the back of a camera, or that my children would grow up finding the process as foreign as hitching up a buggy. whoa, Nelly. the world really does change in a blink.

and then all these fascinating artifacts clutter up our space, obsolescent but marked all over with fingerprints.
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in the four years i’ve spent out here in the blogosphere, i’ve seen a lot of models and trends in social media boom and bust. remember memes?  lolcats? the tender etiquette of blogrolls? ah yes. weren’t we cute?

(yes, i am likely the very last person on Teh Interwebs to have a blogroll. and it is sadly out of date. hush. i like to think of it as vintage.)

in gazing back through time at my VCR and my typewriter and my defunct Pentax K-1000, i don’t see Sodom & Gomorrah, a charnel-mess of sin and misery receding in the distance. nor do i see us striding inexorably forward into progress. sure, i like my digital SLR very much, and this fancy-pants MacBookPro and iTunes and all the other privileges that are my particular riches of time and place and class and living with an Educational Technologies Professional. i appreciate the affordances of these current technologies. but i appreciate in them the very same things that i love in my boneyard of the dead and cast-off: the fingerprints they make possible.

blogging’s fingerprint has changed, dramatically, over the past 3 or 4 years. sure, we’ve been told since at least Christmas 2008 that blogging is dead as a doornail. still, plenty of us do it. and there are people who started only when the death knell was proclaimed who still seem to be making a damn fine time of it. some, perhaps even a living.

when i first ventured out into wild social world of blogging, the parenting corner of the blogosphere – which was then still a relatively coherent entity – was like a hopping mixer dance on the first weekend of summer camp. connections were personal, often intense, and frequently had a tinge of wonder about them. i found you! we exhaled, collectively, and it was glorious. the playing field wasn’t flat – some people were obviously well-established and incredibly popular by late 2006 – but it all still seemed to be mostly about self-expression, rooms of one own. and for those who valued that kind of voice & space, this world seemed to be a democratizing agent beyond wildest dreams; a community of relative peers performing identity and parenthood in the 21st century.

then, subtly, the game changed. the model moved from summer camp to conference. one’s blog became a business, whether one happened to notice or not. and if one didn’t, one was – without doing anything differently – suddenly missing out.

months ago, on twitter, i proposed that maybe the term “blogging” has run its course. we don’t call all writers by the same handle: we have novelists and tech writers and humourists and PR people. increasingly, i suspect bloggers might be a less fraught community – or rather, group of communities, overlapping – if we had different names for the things people do in their online spaces, some for recompense, some for reputation, some for craft, some for the sheer hell of it.

the conversation around blogging – and particularly around mommyblogs – has monetized. and with that, the relatively egalitarian conversational field that existed into 2007 has fractured into a multiplicity of communities who lack any coherent centre other than the fact that their writers make up what advertisers tend to believe is a coherent market. we still make connections, often deep and personal ones. but they begin in networking, now, as much as in any enthusiastic recognition of self. those are not necessarily opposites – but they serve different ends. and i wonder about that.

i know i’m a dinosaur: i’ve clung to my narrative, non-commercial model for the blog just as i cling to the idea that my grandmother’s typewriter is funkalicious. for me, it works, mostly because i always figured i could capitalize more reputationally than monetarily from the kinds of writing i’m good at. i build my body of work here, and someday…who knows? i am not so proud or dumb or rich as to be averse to money. but i don’t relate to this blog primarily as an entrepreneur, and as such, i am still a relic of a former era, an artifact of blogging’s history. most writers who start out on the internet today have no desire whatsoever to be like me: they’ll either build their own site painstakingly as a business success through advertising and sponsorships and giveaways and carefully cultivated network relations, or they’ll write their hearts out – but with an eye to being picked up by a commercial site with SEO potentiality and paid for their words through the visibility of their name and the development of their cred.

the room of one’s own is supposed to turn a profit, these days.

i want to know what gets lost, in that shift, and what it means. i want to know if there’s a tradeoff, and what it says about our culture. i want to know if it’s good, and how…and for whom.

over the next three years, i’ll research social media and study technologies and trends and futures and what they all might mean for education and culture in the 21st century. for a dyed-in-the-wool Lot’s wife, wistful and salty, forever looking back, it’s a funny choice. but it’s what gets left behind that interests me.

i want your input on this little corner of that conversation. pretty please. tell me what’s changed about blogging in however long you’ve been doing it, or reading. tell me what’s changed in the community compared to your original expectations and hopes. tell me i’m wrong, or crazy, or hopelessly outdated. tell me why i should advertise, or write that review about feminine crotch spray i got pitched a few months back. tell me about writing giveaways, and if it’s hard or easy. tell me why you read, and what you think you’ll see from the internet and the blogosphere (if such a thing exists) a decade from now. tell me what difference this whole evolving world has made in your life.

tell me what fingerprints you think you’re leaving.

i may just do a dissertation on it all…my own little artifact.

five years ago tonight i’d been in the same hospital room without leaving for more than two weeks. friends brought Lebanese in for supper, we laughed, one commented lovingly on my little belly, which was finally blossoming past the pudge stage to a belatedly discernable bump. i talked to Dave on the phone: he was staying at my father’s, ready to rise and shine early and go get the keys to our new house, our first home.

i watched a Law & Order-style show of some indistinguishable flavour on the tiny hospital tv. i was restless. i spread earphones over my middle, played a little EmmyLou Harris for Runt. Red Dirt Girl.  the baby i thought was my daughter kicked, and i patted back in time with the music. i still believed the first ultrasound was right, that he was a she. i still believed it mattered, just a bit.

i still believed a lot of things. i believed, with all my cynical heart, that everything would be okay. we were 26 weeks. 75% of babies born at 26 weeks survive without significant complications, i’d read just that morning. there were no signs of labour, no signs of infection. i was adjusting to the institutionalization of bedrest, had recently had the quarantine imposed by my just-out-of-Korea status lifted, and was as prepared as i could be to sit on my enlarging ass right through April and May and well into Gemini and straight on til morning.

i went to sleep earlyish that night. i wish i hadn’t.

five years seems incomprehensible, as if now-me must be some time traveller from the future. it can’t be five years. it’s like yesterday. i’m no different.

that’s a lie. i’ve been different ever since. the girl-woman who fell asleep that night has been gone ever since, as gone as Runt, who became Finn, who made me a mother and changed me once and then twice with his own metamorphosis.

i am wary of wishes. from the day Oscar was born healthy and breathing, and his sister after him, i made myself stop wishing. playing Sophie’s Choice with the living and the dead scares me. from the day Oscar was born, i did not dare wish for Finn.

but tonight, here on my couch, i sit baffled at the affront of time. five years is too long. too strange, that it can be true. and i wish, just for a moment, that i could time travel; that i could lift the veil between me and that creaky hospital bed i’m so sure i see clearly. the stark spring light, sun late in setting. the navy velour hoodie that stretched over my belly. how connected i felt to those little kicks.

i would not erase this life i live now, this half-decade that has passed since that last night before i became a mother. my wish is not to change the outcome. that seems too big, somehow, beyond the scope of my altered capacity for belief. just a night, just a few minutes of an ordinary Thursday night in April.

i’d change only one thing: i’d stay awake.

i’d sit vigil with my son on the eve of his birth, because i’d know that instead of a beginning, we were at an end of sorts. i’d know that we were parting, and i’d sing to my belly, rub gently, drink some juice just to wake him up. he liked cupcakes: i’d scrounge some, somehow. cupcakes are small change compared to rips in the space-time continuum. i’d finish the little Runt Runt story i started in my hospital notebook, the one that still sits upstairs in the drawer, by the memory box. i’d tell it aloud, so he could hear my voice. he would know i loved him. and just his presence would comfort me.

it was the last time that he was with me, not hurt and broken. neither of us hurt and broken.

i sit vigil anyway, here on this other side of five years, remembering. the veil flutters. i squint, close my eyes, try to feel the memory of that first-time belly under my hands. i fail, mostly. but not entirely.

five years later, my eyes squeezed shut, i almost feel it. him. us. i smile through time. wish granted.

happy birthday, littlest.

four years ago, right about now, we left for the hospital.

a little late, as it turned out. i’d been stretched out on the futon upstairs, practicing my breathing, hope a thing with feathers in my throat. i’d sat at the island in the kitchen, perched on a stool, writing in my journal. i’d broadcast the fact of labour to my three faithful readers, even though two of them were my inlaws and we’d already called them. the title of that post is still my very favourite, to this day.

we only live five minutes from the hospital. it was nearly midnight: the roads were empty. but suddenly, at a red light about halfway across the city, my body ramped from 0 to 60 and my seatbelt became a cruel instrument of torture. i writhed in my seat and tried to stand up,w hich is difficult to do inside a Kia when you are a reasonably tall woman with a watermelon belly. i became quite certain i was about to break in two from the inside out.

that’s Oscar. he’ll sneak up on you, beguile you with his gentleness. then he’ll blow you out of the water.

but he came out at 1:47 am, safely at the hospital. he breathed. he cried. i did too. and they placed him in my arms, swaddled in his blue blanket, and i blinked and thought, well, that’s who you are then. hello. and he blinked back at me, and i felt the first faint rustle of it, this love that still swallows me whole.

he was blond and scrawny and peaceful, somehow, with an enormous head and hands like baby meathooks. all i knew about him was that he shared a birthday with Iggy Pop and with the Queen. i figured that had promise.

i didn’t know, then, that he would grow into a dinosaur expert, a puzzle-master, a daily rescuer of heroic proportions. i didn’t know he’d be sweet and funny, that he’d wrap his arms around his younger sister to comfort her, that he’d remember whole verses of poems by heart. i didn’t know that he’d live in a world of magic and imagination, where towels become dragons. i didn’t know he’d drag me in by sheer force of will and delight.

i’m glad i do now. he has brought us laughter and sweetness. he has made my life infinitely more, just by being in it.

happy four, little dragon, with your very fierce claws.  use them wisely, and with joy.