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i spent the morning today home with Oscar, a rare treat for us, his sitter off travelling, we two in the morning sunshine wandering to the thrift store for a serious pants-hunt (one pair of elastic-waist chinos, size 2T, check!) and to the coffee shop for some mother-son lollygagging and discussion of world events and trucks going by outside the window. O took to this grown-up social milestone like he’d been to the cafe born, and sat up on the chair as if he were about to expound on post-modernism or call for a revolution. he waved to every single person in the place and my heart puffed up dangerously and left me blinking back tears.

and then we visited the kittens at the pet store and walked home and i did exotic, housewifely things like vacuum and add soil to my long-suffering houseplants, and we tried exploring the wonders of Play-Doh for the very first time and all the while all i was trying desperately to keep my brain turned off, my internal monologue at a low thrum.

i do not have what, for want of a better term, one would call a maternal instinct. not that i am not maternal towards Oscar, licking his cowlicks back with spit and ever-nimble fingers…or even towards Finn, in the paltry ways available to me…but i lack a pregnancy maternal instinct, the one that enables people to just “have a feeling” that their baby is a boy or a girl or a turnip or what-have-you, the one that keeps them serene and calm and certain in their sense that everything is alright there inside the mystery of the uterus.

this is not entirely a side-effect of my history, either. even the first go-round, when all was innocent and fresh and i was shocked and delighted to find myself easily pregnant, i still had no sense about what was going on with the miracle of life inside me. bleeding bad, heartbeat good. in between evidence of either i existed mostly in the surreal in the early days of that pregnancy, a suspended state of hyper-awareness to what – when nausea was not having her way with me – felt mostly like not much at all, or at least nothing i knew how to interpret.

when one assumes that all this surreal nothing is likely to end okay, it’s still weird. my second go-round, with Oscar, i assumed only that pregnancy was a cruel, brutal joke bound to backfire on me at any minute, so it was weirder. i had no morning sickness to boot, so instead spent the first trimester grieving both Finn and what i continually assumed was the imminent loss of the clearly-nonviable second child i so longed for. only when i began to feel him kick did i begin to believe that he was even alive, no matter what the ultrasounds said. only when i brought him home did i truly, fully believe he was more than a figment i’d conjured from the proverbial broken heart.

with my third pregnancy, two years later, i’d done a lot of work to try to overcome that raw fear, that despair. i thought positively. i felt crappy, and rejoiced in what i assumed were signs that all was well. i was utter hubris; never saw it coming til it hit me square. i had a missed miscarriage.

so this time, freshly raw all over again, i am chastened, hapless. i trust neither my body nor my instincts to tell me if something is wrong. i know i am pregnant, i’m well aware of the myriad of symptoms riding bareback on my hormones, acutely conscious of each twinge, each surge of my gorge. but i have no faith that these symptoms mean anything. and hope? my hope is like this precious, skinless thing that cowers in the crook of me, shivering, waiting for the other shoe to drop and flatten it. some days i am brave enough to dress it in feathers…other days, i cannot even look at it, though i keep it close and warm and pretend i do not feel it shudder.

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they called me back to OB’s office Tuesday to re-do some swabs and talk about last week’s ultrasound. there are some things, they said, but they’re probably not a problem, they’re probably nothing to worry about…the techs here don’t do first-trimester ultrasounds as a rule, so they wrote these up as markers for early loss, as additional risk factors…but we talked to your perinatal in Halifax and she says they’re really quite common, no big deal likely, and you see her in only three weeks so, so long as you get that far we may find that both have resolved themselves by then in any case. you know, that or Dr. Google says they’re signs of chromosomal abnormality if they don’t resolve and they do increase your chances of just having that strong little heartbeat simply stop out of nowhere sometime over the next couple of weeks…but they’re pure flukes either way, unrelated to any of the other problems you’ve had so, um, all we can do is hope.

in the three days between then and now, when my bless-her-heart OB stayed after her shift at L&D so i could come out for another one of those under-the-table ultrasounds because my tilted uterus renders mere dopplers useless, all i wanted was to be living in another part of my life, a time when things are quiet and i have come to terms with whatever happens to me and this fool dream, when the brutality of acceptance is done and this thing with feathers does not hold so much of me vulnerable in its tiny hands.

the heartbeat was still there.

heartbeat good. no bleeding good. tealeaves foretell stress ahead.

i am thirty-six years old.

i have been now, actually, for almost two weeks.  the birthday was ushered in at the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds, art deco palace extraordinaire, with the queer early-morning wakefulness of jet lag.

off kilter and groggy, but curious about hotel lobbies and the  wet shadows of English streetscapes at 5:30 am, i went downstairs and had porridge.

oatmeal.  before dawn.  i am so totally ready for middle age.
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i was always the youngest in my group of friends, just a bit younger in times when age was measured in quarter-years rather than decades, a January baby in a province where the cut-off date for starting school demanded you be 5 by January 31st of your kindergarten year.  i was 5 on January 24th.  i was 17 when i graduated and moved away.

i always felt like i was running double fast just to get old enough to count, to do something interesting, to be heard.  to be worthy of being heard, to have enough life under my belt to stop being treated like an ingenue.  i never felt like an ingenue, not inside.  under the chipmunk cheeks that got me carded until i was 25, i was an old soul afraid i’d miss some corner of the human experience, trying to suck out all the marrow of life…right now.

funny, but after a couple of decades of marrow and human experience, some self-inflicted and some totally random, like train wrecks, i’m full up.  i am weary.  more raw than i like to admit.  sitting there on the morning of my birthday, sedately spooning up my porridge and looking back over my neglected but beloved journal as i dribbled cream all over the fancy linen tablecloth, i realized that if i could look ahead and see no more loss, no more despair, or grief, or desparation…only quiet, domestic pleasures and a unglamourous, undramatic life ahead of me for the rest of my days until i fade gently into that good night with my affairs all in place (and preferably a few grandchildren), oh my god i would be so fucking grateful.

i used to want to be a rock star.   i used to want to be older and more experienced.  i was young and stupid.

now, i’m thirty-six years old and terrified.  that there’s more.  i just want to hide under that linen tablecloth, with my live baby boy and my other blessings, and pray to all that’s holy and unholy for Passover.

we leave tomorrow for five days, off to Blighty for work, both of us. without Oscar.

i am excited – any chance to travel is cool by me, especially to historic parts of Britain previously unvisited by my Anglophilish self. even if they do make me work while i’m there.

while we took Oscar with us when we went to England last spring, i’m not entirely sorry he won’t be accompanying us this time around. the flying wasn’t a gay old time, to say the least. i also wasn’t working on that sojourn, just tagging along on long-saved airmiles so O and i could wander the streets of London with our transplanted friend Elise, which was grand. that first trip, though, planted seeds that have recently blossomed into this work trip, and since i’m officially part of the work bit this time around, the whole deal would probably be somewhat less effective and productive with the charming ankle-biter along. i’m still a little amazed (um, read, frantically ill-prepared) about this journey really happening…certainly two trips in a year to England is the sort of thing i fantasized about throughout a childhood when i very literally never went anywhere.

but i have these monsters that live deep in the cellars of my heart. i keep them muzzled most of the time, but the upcoming trip has unleashed their voices. weak voices, but shrill, insistent. they’re nothing special, i assume, these monsters, nothing that any of you who aren’t parents or even just children of parents yourself wouldn’t recognize. and they’re tamer than many…but they scare me. i don’t worry about my boy in the loving, generous care of his grandparents while we’re gone…in that i am blessed. but i fear planes falling out of the sky. i fear terrible, random horrors.

i fear not coming back.

i cringe in shame at the half-finished will kit in our desk drawer, given up because the complications of trying to sort out the proper language for bestowing custodial rights to others on our own. i kick myself for not having made that lawyer’s appointment to clarify precisely those things, now that it is too late to do so. mostly i stick my head in the sand and mutter the quiet litany of “we’ll be back soon, love” over and over in my semi-conscious, willing it to be true because really, the stark truth is that Dave & i want to be here to love and raise our child and we’ve been too chicken to contemplate any other possibility in all its naked, monstrous ugliness.

and yet, you can’t hide from living because there are monsters under your bed, or in your heart. it is as true now as it was when i was six.

in her less touristy and far more courageous way, Whymommy has been staring down those same monsters over the last seven months, since her diagnosis of inflammatory breast cancer in June. she’s been fierce with them and their terrible whispers of weakness and statistics. she’s looked them straight in the eye through months of chemo and nausea and pain, and refused to look away. she’s been fierce because she too is unwilling to contemplate any other possibility than being here to see her two little boys grow up.

tomorrow, while we drag our bags to the airport, Whymommy goes to the hospital for a double mastectomy. she has spent nearly the last three weeks counting down to this surgery…day by day, staring the monsters straight in the eye and telling us all why she’s looking forward to an event that in itself would scare the living bejesus out of most of us…and many, many of her reasons come down to two primary, precious things: her boys.

i wish you godspeed in healing, Whymommy, friend, and the continued strength to keep fighting. with each day, you not only beat cancer, but doubt and fear.  and i thank you, for your fierce hope, your reminders these last many days of all the things that make a life rich and joyful and worth living.  for the grace and honesty you’ve shown us all as you face the monsters down.

may Sunday bring us both safely home to the boys we love.

it’s been three years.

three years since we got up at 5 am on a frosty morning and rushed by cab to the bus station and then across the street to the other bus station, dragging luggage like a wedding train, because we could never remember which place sold the Express Bus tickets. and then i found out that the Express Bus was sold out and was flabbergasted because it was 5 in the bloody morning and i’d never seen an Express Bus sold out but hey, there was a tour group and all my righteous indignation wasn’t going nowhere. so we caught another cab to the train station, Plan B…you lugging the bags and stuffing them in and out, bless you, and then you put me on the train bound for Seoul and by transfer to Incheon airport and i made it in time and changed plans at Narita outside Tokyo and then Vancouver, i think, or Toronto, and diverted to Montreal in a snowstorm and all the while i had an ultrasound photo stuffed in my passport just in case the opportunity arose to show it off and maybe get myself bumped up to a seat that reclined – hey, i’m pregnant, you know, and isn’t that special and just out of my first trimester, this trip is 36 hours door-to-door and getting longer all the time, any chance of an extra blanket and getting my pillow plumped? – and i was moving home, coming home, prodigal returns and kill the fatted calf.

my mother came out in that snowstorm by cab at 1 in the morning just to make sure i had someone to meet me. i had been gone almost sixteen years.

but i was coming home to make good and i had sent so many resumes on ahead and you would follow two weeks later when your contract got tied up and we were going to have a baby, a baby, a baby finally, and for the first time in my life i felt like i’d made choices rather than just being buoyed about by opportunity or lack thereof and i was so goddam happy and filled with possibility and grateful that you were willing to risk this small, insular place, this place where you’ll always be “from away” even though “away” is a four hour drive, in your case, and not really so foreign. and i woke up that first morning on the hide-a-bed in my mother’s apartment to a world that was snow white and blanketed three feet deep and i felt young again, surrounded by the childhood things of home, and safe.

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it has been three years, and you made it but so much else didn’t that i thought for a long time we’d drown in the water under the bridge. and yet here we are, still here, with this house and that blond boy upstairs sleeping and tonight it is snowing again. and i am happy and filled with possibility again and grateful just to have you with me, the two of you…father and son.

but the memory of that morning is like a snapshot i revisit every year, when its anniversary comes up…when i remember all that hope, that fleeting glimpse of a simple, steady life, for a second, for a season. and i wonder who the girl in that picture was and why i feel so dead inside when i try to look at her, to imagine being her again, on that first morning. it is her naivete that i find so incomprehensible, an affront to my eyes. i can see her glee and her relief and her tentative sense that surely if we just put our minds to it and work and endure, from here, it will come together, because we’ve got the important things in place, you see.

and i do not know if it is her that i feel so sorry for, knowing how the pages of that story unfold…her or me…who will never feel safe like that again.

we have stayed longer than i ever thought we would. we are peaceful here, i think, for now. nothing has been as i’d thought it would be…and yet, i am glad we came. and i would not go back to that morning for anything. i cannot imagine what it would be like to live in that time, anymore, everything open and possible still.

i’m always surprised, startled even, by the occasional intersection of my own small part of the planet with The Big World, with fame or notoriety or the evening news. i remember struggling, as a kid, to truly grasp the idea that people far, far away read Anne of Green Gables and actually took it seriously, thought of it as a good book. not because i didn’t – at that age the only judgement i had for Anne was sycophantic, heart-singing adoration – but because it’s set on little old PEI, the mundane backwater setting for my own, erm, slightly less poignantly uplifting story. i knew i thought the world of Anne and her impish, earnest shenanigans. i just couldn’t believe anybody else – out there, you know, in the real world – had actually heard of her.

i’ve been in a bit of the same state of shock this past couple of days, as every time i turn on the radio CBC news tells me again, on national broadcasts, about the tragedy in Bathurst, New Brunswick this past weekend. those of you outside Canadian borders may not have heard…late Friday night, on the way back home from a basketball game, a van of high school basketball players and their coach and family hit some ice on the highway and slid straight into the path of an oncoming tractor trailer. seven of the players are dead. so is the coach’s wife, who was a teacher at the school. the coach, who was driving, survived, along with his daughter and two players, so far as i can make out. they were nearly home, minutes from the exit that would have seen them safely off the highway.

it is a terrible story, and of pretty epic proportions, though i’m still shocked to see it at the top of Newsworld every hour. this is a part of the country that tends to get rather minimal news coverage outside of our own insular regional broadcasting, and doesn’t factor much in the national picture other Canadians seem to carry in their heads. when i lived in Vancouver, briefly, at twenty-two, desperately homesick, i took up daytime smoking mostly to have reason to congregate outside with the other smokers at the market where i worked, and at least twice heard people say they were from “out east” only to have my pitiful crows of “oh my god, really!?! i’m from PEI!” met with raised eyebrows and the blase comeback, “i’m from Guelph.”

Guelph is two hours from Toronto. in the middle of the country. but people seem to forget we’re out here.

i first heard about the accident early Saturday morning, before the details had even come in about where it had occurred, only that a van of high school athletes had crashed on the way back from some game and there had been multiple deaths. and i was struck, teacher as i once was, with what a shock wave this would send over the school, whatever school it might be. i had visions of adolescent grief and mourning that made me cringe against the rawness, the open wound of it all. one of the schools i work with here on the Island just went through its own heartbreaking accident a week ago, with one student killed and others hurt, still in recovery, and i know that entire community is still struggling to assimilate the reality. having the fabric of things torn open by death is a weird kind of shock at any age, but in adolescence there’s a particular vulnerability and confusion and instinct for the grandiose that makes it especially cruel. high school is bad enough without death.

i am not an adolescent anymore, at least on my better days. i’ve been up close to death and having the fabric of things torn open a few times now, and though the shock always takes me out at the knees, i like to think i’ve gotten beyond my base, juvenile instinct for making more of it than i have right to…and particularly for connecting myself, maudlin-like, to sorrow that is not my own.

yet the sorrow of the Bathurst High School boys’ basketball team has been living in my house the past few days. tears well in my eyes whenever i hear yet another story about it, and along with the disbelief that this has really made the national news and that the Prime Minister may attend the funerals on Wednesday, is something else there…something very personal, though ephemeral. i am not grieving those boys exactly, or the teacher who died, much as i have seen their names and faces now and looked, hard. i am in grief over proximity. i am grieving, for once, having been passed over…the exultant, fearful sorrow of those who, if destruction comes close, expect that something will smite them over the head, and are left shaken when it doesn’t. i am grieving the twenty-years-hence that will never happen for those boys.

because Dave went to Bathurst High School. he graduated as Male Athlete of the Year. he spent his high school years in those vans, on those roads, with that same poor surviving soul for a coach. there’s a Bathurst Phantoms rugby tshirt, almost a rag, still in our bureau. he still has his red and black hockey jacket, though it lives down at his parents’ cottage, a castoff brought out only on cold summer nights. the glory of the high school athlete was something he didn’t find hard to leave behind, i don’t think, and yet it is a part of him i barely know, hardly recognize, because i was so not an athlete and so not an athlete’s kind of girl that it isn’t a topic of conversation that, erm, comes up often.

but he wrote a post yesterday, trying to clear out some of the weight, to bear witness. Dave’s older brother, Stephen, died suddenly at 22 the week after Dave started high school at BHS. Dave wasn’t quite 15. he’d just made the hockey team, been given Stephen’s old number. he never got to tell him. and it was in those team vans, crowded, with tunes playing, pinging everywhere across the province late at night no matter the road conditions, that Dave found his way through the loss of his brother, found his feet despite that gaping hole. i think the vans were a kind of sanctuary for him, in those high school years that are hard enough in the first place.

and i think in my tears each time i hear about the Bathurst Phantoms are guilt and thanks, in the shock of proximity, that he made it through safe and largely unharmed, to me, this man now so far removed from the boy he was.

and my tears are sorrow, too, for those boys who will never get to find their way past high school to the maybe someones who might have loved them, chosen them, raised children with them, and looked at their old treasures in the closet and said, “oh yeh? did you use to play basketball?”

i am shocked, you see, that you might have heard of them, these boys from the little town of Bathurst, population 16,000ish. because to me they are all just Daves, in other incarnations.

stop pushing me.

remember what i said awhile back about mudita? about not being a callow, vindictive snark embittered by the poison of schadenfreude? that i wouldn’t bristle with childish “why can’t that be me?” whinging the next time some talentless, hard-living celebridee twit popped out a perfectly healthy baby in the glare of every grocery store aisle in North America? that i wouldn’t allow myself to wonder why i can’t get dealt fame, fortune, or a plain old healthy pregnancy? that i’d take the high road, be a better person, release good karma and fluffy bunnies into the world out my bum, and all that?

i did my best, world. i tried hard. even after the miscarriage, i kept trucking, kept my head up, kept trying to be decent.

even in the midst of all the Britney Spears new baby rumours, i went blithely along, gritting my teeth shouting “lalala i can’t hear you!” inside my head very loudly. this was the best i could summon for Ms. Trainwreck, whom i’ve despised ever since that “I’m not a Girl, Not yet a Woman” tripe descended upon all that was holy and tasteful and remotely empowered about womanhood.  my contempt – at first merely artistic – became heightened and more personal when i exited the maternity ward with my dead firstborn right around the time Brit announced her documented-Starbucks-by-every-freaking-Starbucks first pregnancy.

i’ve bitten my tongue on all the snide remarks that’ve tried to escape my head.  i won’t try to explain what it’s like to be literally bombarded with images of the uber-klassy Brit visibly procreating like a gerbil (and parenting like one, for that matter) when you yourself are awash in the shock and grief of losing a child.  or two.  or not being able to have one in the first place.  if you get it, well…you get it.  if you don’t, just thank your lucky stars and, um, go carolling or something.

but now all bets are off.

Britney Spears may or may not be pregnant again…only her stylist knows for sure, apparently. or her manager.  or whoever it is that’s this week’s Flavour of the Month.  and i’ve managed not to care, not to feel persecuted by the fact that she can apparently have perfectly healthy pregnancies while i can’t.  i’m winning that battle with myself.  but her sixteen year old sister, the one with the, ahem, Nickelodeon show? yep. up ye olde spout.

with, apparently, the due date i would’ve had.

universe, that’s just cold.

such a magical time of year, this.   perhaps i could send the Spears family a little holiday card?  reading “dear Spears sisters.  fuck mudita.  please stop procreating?”

fa la la la la, blah blah blah blah.

i had to drive today, for work, an hour westward and back in the sparkling cold of a sunny December morning.

i forget that i live on a beautiful piece of earth. i live my life these days between my house and the sitter’s house and the campus i work on, with occasional forays to the grocery store and other such exotica. i stay within the city bounds, quaint little slush-bound urbanite that i like to imagine myself, and forget that on a crisp winter morning there are snow-covered fields only twenty minutes away, and stands of pine with pillows of white blown onto them, rail fences breaking the winter sweep of rolling hills into perfect, shining patchwork.

i forget that i live in a frigging Christmas card.

the change of scenery made me draw my breath in, hard, and open up my eyes despite the glare from the snow.

i have been antsy the past few days, unsettled at my core in a way i haven’t felt in years, the familiar ache of wanderlust and anywhere but here washing over me, taking me out at the knees. i sat at work yesterday afternoon, the mail server down and thus me temporarily semi-incapacitated, and langourously browsed the facebook photos of friends in other places, full of longing for elsewhere, for the other lives that i could be living right now. that longing was once my status quo but it scared the living shit out of me to find it again, just under my breastbone, alive and well, singing its siren song of discontent and disdain and pain that can be outrun.

and yet it was freeing, like a fleeting full circle, to find the ghost of that longing, too. because it was once so much a part of who i was that i thought it would never stop dogging me, that it was as much a part of me as my scars, my tattoo, my laugh. maybe it is, in the sense that it seems to be my default setting. but i have moved beyond it, since i chose this place to come back to almost three years ago, this pretty, secretive, insular place i finally accepted as my home. i learned, years after i left and tramped around forever looking for the Place that would Make Me Happy, that discontent can find you anywhere and every place is worthy of its own special brand of disdain, and most important, pain can never be outdistanced… but can be survived, if one abides. i have not tried to run away in a long, long time. i had forgotten, almost, what it felt like to be in constant readiness for flight…and i didn’t enjoy the reminder, though it brought its own adrenalin to the party, and that was kinda fun, for a minute. it is not elsewhere i was seeking, really….not all those years, not yesterday.

i am learning, always anew, that it is that sense of coming through the other side that i am longing for.

so i abide, tempting though it may be in moments of December slush and the crush of seasonal ridiculousness to run off to Thailand and start a whole new career as a lounge singer.

i am lying fallow, these days, like the land beneath the snow in those fields. i move towards the darkest evening of the year and watch the woods fill up with snow, and am quiet and still, abiding.

but not oblivious to the beauty, even of this place that is not elsewhere and this sadness i cannot yet escape.

right on cue, straight from December’s central casting, we had snow today, making the leftover pumpkin in my back porch look suddenly very out of place indeed. winter has begun.

it is the beginning of the dark season, of the advent creep through the darkness – through the wonderful, bare-bones nadir of solstice – back to light. it is a season of hibernation and turning inward…and, old carry over from a semi-religious childhood, of counting the December days off, one by one, enduring the wait ’til Christmas, ’til all the candles can be lit again.

lying awake in bed last night, unable to sleep for hormonal nosedive of sudden post-pregnancy, i smiled, wryly. i realized that – for once – i’ve got impeccable timing. the symbolism of the Christian advent – the hope of a child, a second coming – does not escape me. because this coming month will be cold-molasses slow…i can see that already, one day in. i am all aflurry, urgent, heart unwilling to accept the do not pass Go – return to start card crumpled in my hand. when i sleep i dream of babies floating by, slipping from my grasp. i waken, stricken, compelled. i fantasize about twins, like a crazy woman. waiting this month out, aching to start again, to leap back on the hamster wheel of hope, will be almost as agonizing as waiting for Christmas that year i was six and had my whole heart set on the magical wonderland of the Weeble Haunted House. almost.

and i know this is normal. i am resigned to a little crazy with my fruitcake over the next few weeks, in the eternity of waiting for things to settle, for a cycle to establish itself, for my body to do what it needs to in order to heal. and i hope in the process there will be some letting go, some lessening of the urgency. but in the meantime i will count out the days of December, like a child with an advent calendar of chocolate, walking out the long wait with good company and the comfort of treats. because treats, in our house, are a big deal…as you can see.

it seems only fitting to finish this on a Friday, but i do not have the heart for haiku.

there is no good news, my friends.  the sac is still too small, and shows little growth over the past eight days.  there is no fetal pole, no heartbeat…which given that the positive pregnancy test came nearly five weeks ago, is conclusive.

there will be no June baby.

after work tonight, after dinner and cake, i will take a bunch of pills that sit on my sideboard taped to a sticky note, and see if i can’t avoid surgery.  because my history labels me as having an incompetent cervix – which is completed unrelated to the current state of affairs but particularly unfortunate given the fact that missed miscarriages have the lowest likelihood of passing effectively on their own – a d&c is to be avoided if  possible.

if possible feels like just another shoe, waiting to drop.

it is Dave’s birthday.  i bought him Blood on the Tracks, prescient enough…but don’t quite know how to wrap this particular bitter gift, this ending.
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thank you, to all of you, who’ve waited with us and sent love through the tiny eternity of this past week.  i know there is never anything to say.  and yet, so you know, it is heartening to hear your voices, nonetheless.

so, anybody ’round these parts friends with, um, Tom Cruise & Katie & their fun Scientology crew?

’cause if you’d like to theft their much-reported personal ultrasound machine and bring it on over to my house, that would be really, like, cool.

i saw my doctor today. my blood hcg levels are rising appropriately, apparently, so that means that either there’s a baby in there that last week’s ultrasound missed, or that nobody’s filled my poor body in on what’s really going on. totally inconclusive. and because we live in a city (or rather, a glorified hamlet) where the six OBs all share one clinic but have absolutely zero ultrasound equipment at said clinic, i have to wait until the overloaded, overstressed diagnostic imaging department at the local hospital – who do every x-ray, CATscan, MRI, and ultrasound for every medical condition within a fifty-mile radius – get around to fitting me back in. maybe tomorrow.  maybe two weeks from now.  sweet merciful jesus, the waiting. i don’t know who has the mental stability this waiting demands. i don’t…i’m eroded and drained and cycling through the stages of despair in ever shorter circles, like a poodle chasing its tail.

and yet, i couldn’t title this post “the sixth circle of hell”…i tried, and changed it. because there’s still this shred of hope. and it’s excruciating even to contemplate, and feels mostly like a nasty trick i’m trying to keep juggled up in the air along with all the lead weights just waiting – aching – to fall on my head. but it’s there, waving its eager hand in the air while i try desperately to master the mysterious art of non-attachment. and i’m trying to look at it as good, that hope.  i remember realizing with surprise, after Finn died, that the not knowing that had been so torturous during the long weeks of bedrest with that failing pregnancy was not nearly so terrible as having to confront the finality of knowing, in the end.

i do not think it would be quite that way again, this time. but still, i’m trying to let hope linger around and not kick it to the curb prematurely. trying.

but if anybody wants to FedEx me that Tomkitten ultrasound machine thingy, only slightly used…that would be most kind.