cribchronicles.com

when one is in the midst of a torturous limbo, it is very helpful to have a toddler around.

with a toddler around, it’s difficult to slip entirely into the doldrums. not only are there beams and giggles to buoy one up, but also the adrenalin of constant demands that threaten to escalate into disaster: one’s toddler may at any moment morph into a raging hippopotamus if one is not on one’s guard for signs of impending recalcitrance. this keeps one busy. as does the constant rampage of activity that doesn’t leave an excess of time for thought of any sort, let alone the melancholy kind. and the headbutts – a reliable and loving source of maniacal toddler laughter – that must be neatly dodged if one wishes to escape concussion…they’re good too.
basically, Oscar is a comfort to me. an exhausting comfort, but a comfort nonetheless.

however, he’s not a great listener.

i don’t mean in the “please put your shoes over there, Oscar” sort of way. he’s pretty entertained by the praise he gets for compliance with these little locational requests, so he listens, and beetles around, placing objects in their respective spots. and we clap. we’re either teaching orderliness or an unhealthy reliance on external motivations…yay for parenting by guesswork! at least the closets are tidy.

it’s in the deeper realm of heart-to-heart communications that O’s skills seem…off. i hold him tight before bed these nights, breathing in his downy head, and i tell him, low and soft, how much his mama loves him. and he kicks me, hard. or i pet him gently, rocking, while he shouts “baaaaaaa!” with the intensity of a rugby captain. i get the feeling we’re out of sync, my boy and i, in the give and take of our conversations. and it’s not just him. the other day, he gazed into my eyes with grave seriousness and pronounced, “ma ba guh weewa papap oooo.”

and i thought, erm, yes dear. was that “the cat is orange, mama”, or “i have existential angst about my place in the world”? ’cause, y’know, they maybe warrant a different response, just possibly. but me? clueless.

clearly, i do not speak toddler.

communicating with Oscar these days reminds me of my early days abroad, in whatever country i happened to be in at a given time, since i spoke the local language of, erm, not a single place i ever went. (except Scotland. but i didn’t understand them either). rather, i spent most of my life as an expat engaged in the exaggerated and poorly paid art of mime, at which i came to believe i excelled. whenever i wanted something whose name was not in my minimal vocabulary, why, i did not fear, oh no. i stepped boldly over the threshold of whatever nearby establishment seemed most likely to be related to my need, armed with a smile, and began to gesticulate wildly and frantically to the poor soul behind the counter. drinks and smokes and stationery? no problem. bus tickets? all good. toilet paper? sometimes a little more embarrassing to act out…especially for the third time in a row, when one’s confused – or bemused – charades partner keeps directing one off to the toilets (which, outside North America, seldom come with built-in wiping materials) rather than ponying up the paper goods to bring to said toilets. when i first found myself pregnant with Finn, in Korea, requesting “pregnancy test” from the lady at the local pharmacy turned out to be a passion play that involved half the neighbourhood and may have left one older gentleman scarred for life by that brazen foreign hussy and her penchant for peeing on babies.

these exchanges, always, were earnest and intense, peppered by basic words in two languages, but often completely at cross-purposes.

which is, i think, what’s happening with O and i. we don’t share the same language, right now. we share an understanding of simple nouns, in English, and if we keep our conversations confined to that subject matter then we can chat along like a house on fire. but whenever we get past basic requests for water or a kiss, observations of “a bird!” or “a plane!”, we struggle. we are like citizens of different countries, thrown together in the same house, each trying desperately to comprehend why the other acts so bizarrely, and figure out what s/he wants. and we flap our arms, or wheedle and cajole, or grin and babble and throw tantrums, all in the name, i think, of that very basic human desire: to be understood.

and even if he can’t fully understand me, he’s already doing exactly what i want and need…my small, funny, semi-foreign son, reminding me – no matter what – that not all is lost.

ultrasound today
inconclusive she said, but
her eyes spoke sorrow

two sacs, too small, one
just a dot; one a silent
mysterious well

the dates are certain
ides of November, mocking.
et tu, little wish?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
we wait now for blood tests, and a followup ultrasound.  but i saw that screen, and i know that better news is unlikely.

it feels a little cruel that i am still tender and swollen.  it feels a little cruel that this is the first pregnancy i’ve had no early bleeding in.  it feels a little cruel that there is still a tiny shred of hope that i can only sit with, neither nurturing it nor crushing it completely…just waiting.

a part of me wishes we’d told nobody, and i could hide myself away under blankets to lick my wounds, my bitter disappointment, my sadness, my impatience to just have things hurry up already…but then, we waited to tell, with Finn, and the guarantees of safety failed.  waited with Oscar, so sure i was that the sky would fall at any moment.  with my history, “safe” means seven months pregnant.  i console myself, had i gotten that far along, somebody would have guessed.

and i wonder, if this is really happening, when my body is likely to catch on?

i’ve never said it aloud, so it comes out halting, lurching from me the way old ketchup blobbed from the glass bottles of my childhood.

i don’t know where i think they are, our sons, their souls. i look for Finn, now, but i can sometimes barely feel him, like the connection is weak or i just don’t know how and i feel so…so…discombobulated. like if all i ever get of him is his spirit, some sense of him, that’s okay, it’s okay with me, i can accept that, now…but i don’t. i don’t feel him. and i worry that he’s alone, a baby needing his mother, and i can’t find him.

blurp. or maybe it didn’t come out like that; the words were different, but the shame and the emptiness squeaked out all the same, the wall that unbelief and grief and healing built exposed, me naked for a moment.

she lifted her blond head in the dark room and said whenever i think of him i assume it’s him speaking to me.

and the wall crumpled.

i’ve spent a lot of my life constructing and cobbling together my own coping mechanisms, my own metaphysic, my own personal Jesus or lack thereof. i’m okay with cherry picking a particular piece of comfort to steep with my cynicism, have no qualms actively trying to construct a view of death that involves no angels nor meant-to-bes, but does not entirely cut me off, either, from the child who was my firstborn. i want to believe…but i’m fussy.

and while i’m not sure i will ever be wholly sure in the conviction that every time Finn crosses my mind some part of him stronger than his body has reached out to me…the notion itself will help me nonetheless. allow me to continue to heal without clinging to the immediacy of grief in favour of that bleak nothingness that threatens to swallow all the love i still have for my child. the notion gives me a way to offer tenderness to the idea of him, to reach back. if there truly is nothing there, then i will spend long moments of my life in a dance with myself, i suppose, smiling into the ether, blinking full at heart at unfeeling molecules of air. and when the end comes, i’ll smile ruefully, staring at the worms. but without regret. because that fostering of love will have made me better.

thank you, Kate…for planting that seed. i don’t know if anyone else could have.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
she blew in on a Remembrance Day rainstorm, with a sleeping bundle in his carseat and a flurry of brightly coloured cottons, all stripes and patterns and imprints and smiles…graceful, she is; poised and frank at the same time, at ease and funny and generous and searching. sweet, and with the tears still fresh on her. aptly named.

i couldn’t believe she actually came.

i couldn’t believe she hadn’t been here all along.

she came bearing presents for Oscar, generous with funky leggings and a metal Neville engine that marks the beginnings of The Train Age, and he was appropriately taken with her but smitten, i think, totally and wholeheartedly with wee Ben. beautiful Ben, who smiles more directly and with more joy than any baby i’ve ever seen. bright Ben, who started life even smaller than Finn did…who has come so far. twelve pound Ben, who slept snuffling in my arms for hours on the couch while his mother and i sat up talking, reminding my numb forearms of all that i hope is ahead for us again and making me think how lovely it’ll be. Oscar thought Ben was a doll come to life, and even though my boy spent the morning cranky and enamoured of his new high-pitched scream, he still touched the baby ever so gently with his big toddler mitts, still looked for him long after they’d left, wandering the house with a plaintive “baybay? baybay?”

they were beautiful together, our boys.

and somewhere in the long trail of conversation that got started at a comfortable, solicitous pace and tumbled out of us late into the night, the happy and the sorrowful and the bloggy and the gossipy and the motherly, all easy, i realized why this very first meeting with someone whose gift as a wordsmith awes me was so oddly natural: there was nothing we had to say that frightened each other. no space either had to back away from as too sad, or as shocking, or too weighty for the fragility of a conversation between tentative new friends. i do not know anyone else, in real life, who has lost a child, held him while he died, leastways not in the same hospital, both boys born months before a shared due date two years apart. that in itself…that would probably be enough for communion, for the sense of sisterhood that crept over me like an old forgotten remnant, a familiar garment left behind after college nights spent cultivating closenesses and bonds that time and living have not entirely frayed, but mostly.

but it was also that the stories were already unfolded. that i knew the outlines of them from posts i clicked through to frantically in May and June, sometimes with tears in my eyes, that i read now for pleasure or a laugh or just the taste of good writing when the work day grows dull and blurry. i knew this person already. i have never met a fellow blogger, either, before now. and i think our plans for these constructs of ours, these private public spaces for our own souls to get worked into words and therefore some kind of reality, took up nearly as much of our conversation as did our children, and our griefs, and our partners, and our lives.

i forgot to ask her a lot of things i wanted to know, though. she will have to come back. or we will go to her.

soon, i hope.

so despite my Biblical level of whining and all the righteous lamentations (your contributions and commiserations greatly appreciated)…yesterday turned out not really so terrible.

apparently if we let the little crying creature peep it out a bit during this weekend nap transition, he will manage to put himself back down for another forty-five minute sleep cycle. which weird though it is to be back to those punctuated naps of infancy, is still another forty-five minutes for his mother to rest her lazy carcass on the couch and eat bonbons.  or actually work, since my bonbon supply was really and truly worn down to the peanuts this weekend, alas.  but still, there was couch-sitting to be had.

so, huh.  my child does not have the sense of humour of a cranky jackal, after all.

the time change didn’t go too terribly badly, either. O slept until 5:30 am new time this morning, which would have been 6:30 am old time and really quite impressively late for him (sigh). and hell, it was his father’s morning to get up with him anyway. :)

hurricane Noel seems to have passed through our region without major mayhem…except for the swaths of Nova Scotia who expect to be without power ’til Tuesday, of course.  but moi?  fully lighted, safe and warm, thank you very much.

and i found a new detergent that may keep my Fuzzi Bunz absorbent and effective in future.  will keep you posted.

ultimate conclusion?  apparently i’m actually NOT being punished by the universe.

this is always slightly embarrassing to realize.  i puff up in indignance, recognizing the inflatedness of my complaints, the reality of my good fortune.  why am i NOT being punished by the universe, anyway?  i had a FINE litany of grievances!  i’m worthy of being singled out for the trials of Job (new, lite version)…i have it rough, really i do.  see these bags under my eyes?  just you DARE tell me i’m lucky!

but i am.

i feel ashamed of myself, you see, with these posts of vitriol and complaint that leak out of me now and then. oh, my child wakes up too early! oh, my offspring gets sick and spoils all my vacation plans! oh, there might be chickenpox/measles/bubonic plague at daycare!  oh, this porridge is too hot!  and i wonder if you mutter to yourselves, suck it up, Buttercup. i wonder, with more concern, if you think i’m a shallow, whiny, twit…and if i’m acting like one.  because my laments are petty, i know that. i know that no matter how much i may feel i’ve woken up on the unjust side of the bed, millions would give their teeth to have it as bad as me, with my pile of nibbled, rejected chocolate-covered peanuts.

and yet every now and then i’m reminded that it’s actually a good sign – relatively – that i can get all caught up again in the tragedia minutiae of my life.  because it means, overall, that i’m mostly managing to feel not very persecuted at all.

for a long time, i did.  for months really, after Finn died, when i was lost on the sea of looking for work when i should have been home with my baby, of fighting a bill for an medical airlift i’d been assured would be covered, of having to go into the stores we’d ordered paint and flooring from for our new house, our first house, and wince my way through the “congratulations! the baby must be here!” conversations and then the shocked silence and that feeling like i must have left my skin at home, of walking past pregnant women whose big, round bellies were sharp as tacks…all those months, i felt quite persecuted.  the burden of grief weighed more than i knew how to carry, especially socially.  i did not know anyone else to whom anything like this had ever happened – my friends were either childless or in the midst of a joyous, uncomplicated baby boom.  and any time i tried to talk my way through it, to begin to unload even a little of the bafflement and rawness i felt, the wounds became doubly sharp.  because people told me about angels.  told me life doesn’t give us more than we can handle.  told me it was probably for the best, and he might have been seriously handicapped. told me all sorts of crap that i assumed was meant to make them feel better, ’cause it seriously did fuck-all for me.  except make me feel like most of them just wished the conversation would go away, because it was so damn painful, and awkward.  we’d hit the wall of platitudes before i’d said  much of anything, at all.  so i said as little as possible.

but alone, or with Dave, late at night, smoking furiously in our shed, trying desperately to act on my appetite for destruction and fury whilst causing as little actual harm as i could get away with, i wailed.  i lamented our persecution.  and i wished it were them, those sunny people with their cliches who seemingly never had to adjust their expectations for anything.  i didn’t really want it to be anyone, in truth, not really, not much…i just wanted it not to be me.  i wanted not to be living a constant, months-long moment of “let this cup pass from me.”  i wanted it not to be real.

what i didn’t realize was that i was as impossible as they were, then.  and that even those brave few who had the courage to ask about Finn and really try to listen, who waded through our self-censored narratives and pushed for more, really couldn’t have done anything right.  because there was nothing anyone could have said that would have helped me outrun that pain, that grief.  it was mine, for no reason except that it landed on me by an accident of Finn’s birth.  it was no great judgement on me, either of fault or strength.  but nearly every single thing another person said about it, beyond the simple comfort of “i’m so sorry,” felt like a rebuke.

i remembered all this when i happened upon a post by Whymommy, today.  Whymommy has cancer, inflammatory breast cancer (which you do not need a lump to have!), and she’s 34 years old and she’s smart and generous and bald at the moment and thus wearing her own personal pain and struggle out there for all to read, as it were.  and as with all particularly terrible things that people don’t like to imagine can happen to them, there’s a shock and awkwardness that permeates some of her conversations these days.  well-intentioned people are taken aback and sympathetic, and their disbelief that something so grave really can happen to someone so vital comes out in innocent phrases like “but, you’re so young and healthy!”  and thus, Whymommy has to socially negotiate other people’s struggles with the unfairness of her situation, with the universe and her failure to fit their comfortable assumptions about her place in it, at this moment.  and that feels like a rebuke, to her, sometimes.  keeping it together in the face of your own assumptions of safety and “it won’t happen to me” disintegrating is hard.  keeping it together when people’s innocuous words jar you with the reminder that it is happening to you?  some days, not possible.  some days, Sartre was right…hell really is other people.

so my mundane complaints, and my pose of stricken woe?  in a way, for me, it’s a merciful, blissful performance of my own happy normality, undeserved but damn welcome.  and appreciated.  a day when the quality of your candy is what you’ve got to complain about is a day you’re safe and warm and fed and unbroken, and a day when you’ll be sure to find company to share your trials and bolster you up with camraderie and humour.  and being able to trust that the company will help?  that in itself is a great gift.

i am grateful.  to all of you.  and to the universe, for benevolences bestowed.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ in more gratitude, our little trees in the backyard are still standing, post-hurricane. stripped nearly bare now of the last leaves that were clinging to them, they were the only things i really worried about…we planted them for Finn, that first Mother’s Day after his birth and death.  one of the three, in particular, is small and sickly, and i watch it helplessly, afraid it too will die and i will have failed it, somehow.  but i watched it, in the wind, buffeting and bending, this little clump birch…and for the first time, it seemed strong enough.

and speaking of strength, belated but heartfelt thanks to both Flutter and Whymommy for the Perfect Post for the leaves and the song.  in typing both your names just now, i was struck by…well, by who you are. if there were such as thing as the Pain Olympics, you two, in your past and present struggles, have gold-medal narratives…and the blog personas that represent our individual seasons of sorrow could all go limping down the track together, one big pile of things that shouldn’t have to happen to anyone. and yet this post that you both felt spoke to you is a love song, just a regular old love song – it addressed nothing of any of our personal obvious crosses to bear. which makes me smile, and reminds me that we are all more than the worst things that happen to us.  so thanks, on both counts.  please do come on over for Bridge Mix and petty whinging anytime you need some.

some of us woke up on the unjust side of the bed this morning.

riddle me this…

how is that my child – who has moved gradually to a single nap at the sitter’s over the past couple of months and happily naps there for two or three hour spells – cannot seem to nap at home on a weekend for more than forty-five bloody minutes?   even if we keep him up all morning long and make sure he’s fed and dry when he goes down?  why God?  why such a damned trickster?  don’t you notice we have blogging to do and hurricane preparations to, erm, prepare for?

how is it that my cat – who is a reasonably pleasant furry little creature who keeps the heck out of Oscar’s way and has never, to my knowledge, turned on him with an unearned swat or nip – bites the living daylights out of my ankles every time i have the temerity to so much as walk past her?  why me?  why so damned tasty?  doesn’t she notice that i actually have the boniest, pointiest lower extremities in the house?  (i mean, if she were biting the love handles, i’d get it…)

how is it that my cloth diapers (okay, they’re Oscar’s, formally, but i clean ’em) – which are meant to be a fancy-ass lifetime investment ready to diaper the next twelve children i produce (uh, don’t even think about it, God!) – leak constantly, despite the fact that they’ve been stripped of detergent residue and washed according to all the nice directions?  why, world?  why is my child the little Niagara who cannot be contained by environmentally-friendly hemp and microfleece fibres?  why is it that every time we leave the house the child’s pants end up looking and smelling like he’s been sleeping in an alley?  why am i the dumb-ass mother who can’t seem to figure out how to diaper/feed/nurture my child without the assistance of soul-sucking plastics, vinyls, and pthalates?

insert renting of garments and gnashing of teeth.

and the real kicker…how is it that my comfort food giant economy bag of Bridge Mixture turned out to only have seven of those big chocolate-covered gummies in it, and about seven thousand entirely boring chocolate-covered peanuts?  why, i ask? suppose you thought that was funny, Bridge Mixture people?!?  suppose you thought you’d have a bit of a giggle, take the piss on some poor, gummy-loving soul?!?  well, i’m glaring at you RIGHT NOW, you know.  glaring very hard.

i have some extra (slightly nibbled) chocolate-covered peanuts at my house if anyone wants to come over and tamp their feet in a small, minor tantrum of sulkiness with me this afternoon.   just sayin’.

bring your own injustices…and more Bridge Mixture.

light

i don’t do ritual very well. i do not know how seriously to take it, whether it requires of me a solemnity and focus i can seldom sustain. i long for it, for the way it imbues acts with meaning, with signification, but i skitter from it too…unable to trust myself to do it justice.

but at 7 pm tonight, while i was in the midst of running out for circuit training class (a passing fancy, i fear), and Dave was giving Oscar his bath, i lit a candle.

we stopped for a minute in the noise and the haste and the splashing, and lit a candle in the bathroom and turned out the lights. we watched the flame flicker across the porcelain and cast long shadows on the wall, and we watched Oscar’s eyes grow big and black and full of magic. and we told him about his brother, spoke him by name. and we laughed a bit, and tears spashed in O’s bathwater, and duck silhouettes were cast on the tub wall. it was…kinda nice. to not split myself, on any level. to be there in the most mundane of circumstances, present at bathtime to both my children, the living and the dead.

it is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day, today. and even if it was bathtime and run out the door time, i wanted to participate in the Wave of Light that goes ’round the world with these candles lit at 7 pm, across time zones. because life goes on. and because life is forever different, after. and the two, eventually, if one is very lucky, come to coexist.

it was not much of a ritual perhaps. but it was a first, groping gesture to try to honour the little one who came first, aloud and simply, as a part of the life we have now.

for Finn, who was our Runt from the very first days. for the others who had no names.

for Liam, too, and Natan, and Molly & Joseph, and Alex and Travis, and A, and Matilda who was survivorgirl and all her sisters, and the twins, and Shoelet, and Jordan, and Nicolas, and Thomas, and Joseph, and cousin Sarah, and Shalebug, even if he wasn’t an infant anymore. and for all the others whose names i do not know, those whose names are known only to their mothers, or not at all.

miss you. love you, still.

i used to think that i’d be famous.

when i was a kid, i had an almost overwhelming internal sense of profound singularity, of being impelled to star in some exalted and unfolding story that i didn’t really understand but found fascinating just the same. (mind you, i was also enthralled by my barrette collection. really, i was bathos incarnate.) but in my secret soul i was convinced: i was not like other people. i didn’t quite understand that others have their own story, nor had i yet figured out that my dramatic sense of destiny was probably just the accidental result of reading too many Victorian children’s novels. i ached with the vague thrust of vocation, with being called to great things. i longed for the future, for a stage big enough to hold all that was in me.

it was, for all its hubris, an innocent delusion. i wasn’t prideful, not really. it wasn’t the bucktoothed, brown haired, slightly pot-bellied kid with the mushroom haircut whom i thought was so unique and bound for glory – it was the internal me, the potential me, the mind and soul inside that awed me. maybe not because they were so special. coming to know one’s mind and soul, their myriad complexities and depths and poignancies and fears, is a wild ride – i think – for every human being. it’s what driven literature for millenia. and for me in those strange, lonely introspective years of adolescence and what’s now called tween-hood, my own self, unpeeled, was far richer than any book i knew, any pale glimpse i’d caught of a fellow human behind the mask of manners and social graces and distance. so i was sure, utterly certain, in the privacy of my own company, that someday all this wonder inside would simply have to shine through. i would be famous. i would rise to the promise within. i would matter.

i’m gonna live forever, i’m gonna learn how to fly high
i feel it comin’ together, people will see me and die
fame!
i’m gonna make it to heaven, light up the sky like a flame
fame!
i’m gonna live forever, baby remember my name
remember, remember, remember…

it was 1983 and my bathroom mirror knew all the words to that song, oh yeh.

to my bewilderment, though, the world has sped in fast-forward to 2007. and, nope, i ain’t famous. i haven’t been discovered in a soda shoppe, i haven’t cured cancer or written the great Canadian novel or become the next Bob Dylan. i have not saved kittens from a burning building, not once, nor made a million dollars.

i feel a quiet pang admitting and owning that fame has passed me by, as though i’ve perhaps betrayed what my childhood self saw of who i am, or could have been. some secret chord in me still cries out to be played, to be heard…to have David Bowie pluck me from a crowd and say “you. it’s you.” (and if that ever happens, my own Dave is on notice. i get twenty-four hours, no recriminations. i figure in twenty-four hours i can get me on the cover of the Rolling Stone, at least.)

but…but. my childhood self was naive, as well as innocent. the fame i dreamed of was a limitation of scope, of exposure, of understanding. had any of it actually miraculously landed at my clay-fashioned feet, i’d simply have ruined myself, i think, one way or the other, on a grand scale that my more humble real-life path hasn’t allowed for. like some piteous ‘Gift of the Magi’ twist, the excess of fame might have destroyed that spark within which led me to believe i was destined for it in the first place…that simple discovery of my own humanity in all its glory.

my real life has dulled that humanity, and battered it about. i’ve made choices that have cheapened it, time and again. but if i look deep and call up again the eyes of the child i once was, i can still see it.

because in prosaic, fragmented, unliterary ways, i have managed to matter. i am loved. i love in return. i work on patience and sometime succeed. i make eye contact, or try. the part of my soul that longs for voice has found this little crib, this stage in which i stand and stamp my feet and shout to be heard, kind of like Oscar in the morning, and it does me good. i recycle. i laugh. i try not to be unkind. i try to listen, especially to people with less power than i have. i have brought out the best in a few people, over the years. only a few. but there was such beauty in that best.

when i was a kid, i mistook the scale of fame as the scale on which one measures what matters. i didn’t know that impacting one life can matter more than broadcasting to millions. i didn’t know that instants worthy of chapters in a book, in some great tome on the human experience, can happen and never make the papers.

Julie asked us about how we matter, and i almost choked and didn’t answer, because some fragment of the child in me still waits for external validation, for fame.

but then i looked at the question again. and the secret heart that spoke to me at eleven of the promise of my humanity spoke me back to myself. matter. to matter…that agony of longing i’ve carried all my life. but once…once, i outdistanced it.

i’ve been in that moment of grace where life ends and passes into the unknown, into the vastness to which all secret souls eventually return. most go on unspent, i think, with the songs of their potential barely sung. but i held my dying son and sang to him. i sang as he moved from life, into matter. i sang because he mattered, to me, to us. and i have never mattered less to myself than i did then, though the moment will mark me and remain on me until the day i, too, slip away, my particular story closed. but i get – blessed am i, amongst women – to believe i mattered to him, in those moments…my smell and my voice familiar, his first and last window, saying “it’s okay, little one, it’s alright sweetie…you’re safe, you’re beautiful, you’re good, you can rest.”

it was not the stage i imagined, that stage set for an exit, harsh lit, with only three of us there, behind our curtain. but it is the stage on which i became a mother, and a whole world for one small lifetime. that mattered. and made all the rest, all the accolades that could ever have come my way, all the other songs that might have had a hundred listeners, so cheap in the comparison that i can barely hear them whisper to me any more.

and i will sing my same mama song to Oscar tonight, sick with a cold and waking almost every hour, plaintive and wailing. i will stumble from bed and rock him in the dark, his head on my shoulder, a rare quietness. a vocation.

we are insured, once again.

Excellent, Smithers.

rubs preternaturally long fingers together with smug satisfaction.  then remembers to thank you all for being a kick-ass wall of support, replete with good advice.  i didn’t yell once.  i was very, very pleasant…in a Christopher Walken kind of way.

miraculously, between my measured, date-laden, “i’m sure there’s been some sort of mistake” conversation with the person who answered the phone, and her three minute disappearance to “check my file more thoroughly,” an email *appeared* on said file from Guelph magically reinstating our insurance in full.  well, bless my soul.  and i always thought i had terrible timing.

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we walked into work, though, as we were unaware of our fortuitous and retroactive reinstatement until i terrorized their asses business hours opened for the day.  it was a beautiful end-of-summer morning here, golden and not quite hot, and the route between the sitter’s house and the university follows the local trail carved out by government when they tore up all the railway tracks fifteen years ago…a biking and hiking path lined with bullrushes and wildflowers.  it’s a vein of oasis through the middle of the city, and lovely.  we should walk to work all the time, and have decided that until the cold weather comes, we may try.  so we ought to thank The Cooperators for a fine wake-up call, really.

but if we do keep walking, i will need to lighten the load in the satchel i compulsively cart to and from work with me, the one that houses half my worldly belongings and a few small parasitic animals, likely.  because the damn thing was so heavy this morning that i couldn’t bear to leave the stroller at the sitter’s after we dropped Oscar off, and instead used the stroller to cart my bag to work.  effective, yes, if a little odd-looking.

joggers and bikers approaching us on the trail wore puzzled expressions as they gradually realized there was no baby in the buggy.  i was tempted to shout out, jovially, “oh whoops! did we lose someone?”

but every time, my tongue shut upon itself, hard.

i thought of Niobe’s empty stroller post from last month, and the shudder i felt as her story unfolded, my own expectations and assumptions and wounds lining up across and alongside hers.  i thought of the first night we spent in what is now our home, three days after Finn’s death.  we sat, for a bit, on the floor of the empty room we’d intended to be his, his urn in my hands.  i thought of that feeling, that shocked, stunned emptiness, that sense of having fallen down a rabbit hole that no one else could even see, because it was so terrible to behold.

i cannot joke about an absent baby, even now.  the panic still comes flooding back, makes me feel shaky and vulnerable and naked before god, as if i am taunting fate.  and perhaps turning some other grieving parent inside out at the sight of my empty stroller as i walk along looking for all the world oblivious, entitled, unbroken.

i will carry my bag the next time we walk.

i have been watching Oscar play with little boys these past few weeks. the majority of the babies he’s known and interacted with on any regular basis since his birth – among friends, at the sitter’s – have been girls, and most are within a month or two of his own age. but the summer and all the visitors have brought boys. slightly older boys, born in late 2004 or 2005, most of them. just slimming out past the toddler stage, words beginning to tumble from their mouths in complexities my own boy watches with wonder, and puzzlement.

Oscar seems to like these older creatures, these running, laughing, jumping, talking boys. he tries to emulate them, ranging further afield across the lawn as they do…studying their toys and their movements, trying to take some for his own. he is open and friendly, if sometimes oblivious to their rights of possession, but he’s surprised me with how willing he’s been to share with them, to offer them his treasures, his favourite books and bath squishies, to court their favour.

he looks up, and sees them, and he lights up. like a little brother. like the second-born boy he really is.

yesterday afternoon i watched him galumph across the backyard in pursuit of our racing godson, who was born the month i got pregnant with Finn back in 2004, in Korea, when we were all expats and new to the parenting journey, wondering whether diverging paths would bring us all back together to see those babies grow…their newborn, our newly announced baby-to-be. i was due today, this date, August 4th of that coming summer.

but Finn came and went in April, instead. only the following April did we take the next step in the journey, take a baby home and watch him grow.

so these older boys fascinate me, with their long legs and their words, and i wonder in spite of myself what Finn would look like now, if he would run and jump like they do, how he and Oscar would interact…Irish twins, only 51 weeks apart, in the alternate universe in which they both get to exist. and if Oscar would look up to him, and beam, and then swat the toy from his hands.

and just for a second, though i know better, i wish that Oscar got to be a little brother.

i don’t want to start any blasphemous rumours
but i think that god’s got a sick sense of humour…

(because every summer holiday needs a Depeche Mode soundtrack. so sunny.)

so, we departed Wednesday afternoon for Dave’s family reunion. Oscar’s pinkeye was clearing, and i’d gone into work to get caught up on what i’d missed the day before, and all was well and the car was loaded and we were looking forward to four days of catching up with Dave’s mom’s umpteen brothers and one sister and all their offspring and their offsprings’ offspring, and eating a lot and drinking some wine and Oscar playing with cousins by the beach. it was going to be a pastoral good time in the bosom of family, freed from our series of poxplagues and with grandparents around to help corral the little bundle of toddling delight that is our boy.

ha. chortle. snicker.

our boy woke up at an ungodly hour Thursday morning with his nose running like a faucet. sneezing ensued. then coughing. eventually, full-blown bronchiolitis and gasping for breath.

to make a long, tragic tale concise…holiday was spent sans internet, chasing snotty sick child to keep him from infecting cousins, walking with him through sleepless nights of misery like we haven’t experienced in a year, prattling on to people i’ve only met once before about Oscar’s illness like some sort of helicopter-parent hypochondriac, and hiding in family basement once i too caught the cold and began to feel as if my throat was full of glass shards.

we did see the sights, though. the local hospital, to be precise. ever try to keep a fifteen-month old in one small room (with a weird, archaic, prison-like crib) for twenty-four hours? when nurses only seem to come in while he’s sleeping and otherwise expect you to entertain and supervise child in room full of dangerous metal corners and fascinating medical objects? good times.

for Oscar’s photo album, a shot of him behind bars with his cell mate.

and him and Daddy snuggling on the parent bed, supplied so that you can put your wee darling ‘back to sleep’ repeatedly after they come in every two hours to drag him from his crib and fondle him with cold stethoscopes.

but…he’s better. breathing normally, back to just having a cold, poor kidlet. this was his fourth bout with bronchiolitis, which doesn’t bode well for the overall state of his lungs, given that almost any cold seems to settle there and rob him of oxygen in a matter of hours. his blood SATs were down to 88% by the time they got him measured, even though this didn’t seem nearly as dramatic an attack as the one that got him hospitalized in December, nor the one that took us to the emergency room in Prague. scary. not life and death, scary, no, so long as Dave & i continue to risk being thought neurotics who trot the boy to emerge whenever we see him pant – and i can live with that, particularly given that we’re batting 1000 on home diagnosis – but still scary to the mother in me who wants him to be some imaginary version of whole and not weighed down by a limitation like asthma, which looms on the horizon like a label just waiting for a home.

and to the petulant sot in me who just wants to lounge a vacation away without illness, eating bonbons and indulging in wine and company, too.

yeh, i know. let the snickerfest begin.

(and tune in next week when hopefully this blog will no longer read like a reject script from ‘General Hospital’ and we’ll all be hale and hearty and you’ll hear Nurse Bonnie say…well…something new).