cribchronicles.com

WordPress, why u steal all mah buttonz when i updates u?

i has nice sidebar buttonz. lots. dey shiny. i likes dem. where u puts all mah buttonz? why u takes bling?

blog so nekked now. i is sad.

halp?!? okay byez.

um…has anyone seen my brain?

i swear it was here just a minute ago, minding its own meandering business and picking its nose trying to look vaguely competent. it had just come home from eight hours of meetings and project ‘familiarization’ and was trying to juggle the dirty diapers and figure out whether babies like frozen pizza, when i lost sight of it. and now…nowhere. all gone. whooosh! vamoose! skedaddled.

(apparently when i’m left all alone to write with no supervision from my brain, my little closet fetish for funny-sounding words comes out to fill the void.)

i will admit ye olde brain looked a little shell-shocked and overstuffed at last sight, like one of those unfortunate foie gras geese right before they…oh goodness, there it is! was! went! oh dear. oh my stars. oh, the humanity!!!! the howwor!!!

my brain has exploded.

and now there are tribbles all over my house. bugger. who’s going to clean all that up while i’m at work?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ okay, kidding. but seriously. the surreality of suddenly sitting at a desk for long, unbroken stretches but with no proper freedom to blog aside, this working stuff really isn’t so bad.

it’s just kicking my ass. or more accurately, my head.

so. much. new. stuff.

with all. same. old. stuff still needing to be done. it’s busy. and weird. i keep wondering if my coworkers need a diaper changed, or something. not that they smell. more just…i’m not quite sure how to sit still and focus for that long anymore. and i’m really not used to being accountable to anyone who weighs more than twenty-five pounds, except, erm, myself.

i hadn’t noticed, over the sixteen months or so that have passed since i last spent eight or nine hours at work in one stretch, how much i’ve changed in the interim. being at home with Oscar, i’ve become a more flexible person than i’ve ever been before in my life. i’m in the middle of something and have to drop it and run before my child eats cat food/discovers gravity/smears shit on the refrigerator/self-destructs? i’m gone. i can multi-task, and remember all seventeen things O needs before we leave the house…and i can also slow right down and spend ten minutes staring at grass if the mood so strikes him, even if there are twelve other things burning a hole in my to-do list. but in doing for O, and with O, i am still doing for a big picture that’s very integral to me. and there are nap times, bless their little restful windows of peacefulness for my soul.

i kinda forgot that at work there are no nap times. i kinda forgot that it’s not all about my big picture, my judgement calls, my need to find self-expression and validation in writing to all of you, dear readers.

instead, it’s about stuffing my brain very full of interesting new project plans and strategies, until it blows up and tribbles leak out. eventually, i think i’ll find my stride with this, i really do…once i get past the vacuous, stunned phase and get my brain, kicking and screaming though it may go, back to a mode where it remembers how to really value things that happen outside my house.

it better. because the inside of the house gets a little scarier every day that i’m not here, ministering to my OCDs its tidying needs.

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

in all the kind, generous, supportive comments to my previous post, many of you mentioned that i might want to, say…try blogging at work. yes. mmm. there’s a little problem with that. see, i’m very lucky. and spoiled. i’m not working for The Man. i’m, ummm, kinda working back at the local university…and i’m working alongside…ahem…Dave. my Dave. who reads my blog. as does our boss, sometimes. so, um…gee whillikers! am i workin’ hard!!!

you might wonder why my fine, supportive partner would care whether or not i fuck the dog at work by blogging, rather than focusing diligently on my nice duties? vested interest, friends. and pride, on my part. i’m now the project manager for a grant Dave…um…wrote. (insert blush here and plug ears while the walls ring with shouts of “nepotism!” um, yeh. then…hold head high and recount with dignity my staggering qualifications for job. then…spit. it’s PEI, people. everyone ends up being related to their coworkers/bosses/brother-cousins at some point or other).

i can’t have Dave think i’m not working harder than him at work, folks. how then will i get him to do everything when we get home?!? ;)

i now go to re-assemble brain. happy hump day.

Come away, human child, to the water
and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

– William Butler Yeats, 1886

little Liam died yesterday morning.

Liam Stewart Inglis, six weeks old, son of Kate & Justin, brother to Evan, twin to Ben. he died in his mother’s arms, against her skin, over her heart, in a hospital he never got to leave. the same hospital where Finn died two years ago, in my arms, in a little blue blanket. small, frail bodies…gone, we hope, to be whole somewhere else.

i need to say something, and i’m not sure what. nobody ever knows what to say when a baby dies.

i once had words. in the moment, in the grace and visceral adrenalin and profound surrealness of having touched death, been party to that crossing over, the heart speaks. i committed some of those words to paper…a few to Dave. a few have leaked out here, long after the fact. but my words were mostly for Finn, most spoken to the air.

in Kate’s case, the heart is speaking with a terrible beauty the likes of which i’ve seldom read. the tribute she wrote for Liam yesterday – just after they let him go – is elegy, and celebration, and release. it sings and sorrows, and honours Liam. with her words, as ever, she’s done good by her boy. she has written him out of his life with the same fierce love and courage that has written him and Ben into so many people’s hearts these past six weeks.

the words i had two years ago still leave me with nothing to offer her. i cannot add to her song for Liam, not really. he was not mine.

but i still need to keep saying something. because nobody knows what to say when a baby dies, and that – in its own way – is one of the worst parts of losing a child. after the outpouring of sympathy and sorrow and kindness…silence. not just the absence of laughter and babbling, of the child him or herself, but the silence of others, the hole where that part of your life was. because nobody knows what to say. because nobody wants to hurt you. because we are all – even those of us who’ve walked the same awful road in our own way – terribly, terribly afraid of saying the wrong thing.

so most say nothing, or fall back on platitudes about angels that usually serve to make the speaker feel perhaps a little better about the order of the universe.

i didn’t know, when Finn died, that there was a whole, small, sad corner of the blogosphere out here written by mothers whose children have died. even if i’d known, i think i’d have slunk to that corner timidly, desperately seeking the communion of grief, of freedom from feeling like the freak show who had to clearly show she was not going crazy because her baby had died. but i would have done it in secret, looking over my shoulder, afraid – and i cannot believe this now, though i know it is true – that someone would see my sorrow and judge me for it. i was, outside my own journal and the tiny, private circle of Dave and myself, almost entirely tongue-tied about Finn for months after his birth and death. not because i didn’t want to talk about him…i did. desperately. i wanted nothing more than to say his name, to sate myself with it, to mark it on the world…before memory erased it all. rather i was afraid i’d start and not stop, not be able to shut up. i was afraid i’d cross the boundaries of normal conversation, that i’d come undone in the middle of one of those conversations and never be able to find my way back.

now, i kinda wish i had. people tried…a few dear friends who didn’t just stare at their shoes in respectful silence, trying not to say the wrong thing. a few even asked about Finn, directly. and i told them about him, and lit up inside…but then faltered. the conversation would founder, and i would fear that my friend was uncomfortable, and i would clam up, close myself off again. because there is not much to say, in the normal language of everyday, about a newborn, no matter how healthy or unremarkable. an eleven hour life does not make for much to say…nor even a six week one. not unless you ask that child’s mother about how she felt about him.

i’m not sure entirely where i’m going, here. i feel sad, and powerless. and touched, by the life of a little boy i never met, who ran his tiny fingers across his twin’s face and stunned his doctors. i wish i could sit with Kate, whom i’ve never met, and hold her hand and maybe drink a bottle down, and just listen. and find out all about more about Liam, how he felt in her arms, how exactly he slipped away…find out how he changed her, what his life meant. i wish she could the same for me, to be honest.

so…if you don’t know what to say when a baby dies, here’s my assvice, for what it’s worth. go tell Kate that you will remember Liam. that you will remember that he was here. that there will not be total silence, and then a hole, gaping. that three months from now, six…no one will make her feel she should be over it. that you will still ask her, two years from now, about him, about this journey of letting him go. that he will not slip from their lives, from the Inglis family picture that people carry in their minds. that he will not be the reason you all avert your eyes and look at her in hushed tones for the rest of her life.

now is the time for the great outpouring, yes.  but she’s not going to forget.  as time goes on, you don’t have to pretend you have, either.

i don’t know if that’s the right thing to say. but i think it might be a start. and hell, if i’m wrong, i’ve already told her she can tell me to eff off.

peace, little Liam. i’m glad you were here.  i hold a little of you in my heart, with another wee boy you share far more with than i’d ever hoped.

do you ever get the sense that i get just a little too much pleasure out of being, erm, disappointed by life?

that too much happiness might make me blotchy and damp…and if the world really coughed up sunbeams and roses all over my lawn, i’d move?

yeh, me too.

but maybe not right away. ’cause apparently, not getting rabies was just the start of a neat new turn of luck here in the crib. they called. yep, called. after days of the phone sitting limply in its cradle, taunting my tender, puny, shrivelled sense of usefulness to the outside world, they called. bless their crooked little hearts, they called.

i have a job. :)

of course, now i have to go to work. perhaps i shoulda thought this all through a little better?

nah.  i am grateful. very grateful. i feel validated. i feel relieved. i feel a pleasant, odd, unfamiliar sense of material security. this will be the very first time in the thirty months since we came back to Canada that Dave & i will both have full-time employment, at the same time. it’s been a long, hard slog, this past two-and-a-half years…and the respite from blatant uncertainty is something i think we need, for awhile. it’s only a term contract, my job, but it’s an interesting contract. and they called.

so we celebrated the turning of the worm in our apparent favour, our little family, by playing with some worms in the yard after dinner. with the sun dappling down, in the grass with my healthy, laughing child on an almost-warm, almost-summer evening, i too felt healthy. ‘normal’. unembittered, unwounded. like someone not weighed down by damage and loss and self-doubt, not crouched, warily, cynically, waiting for hurt and disappointment even in the midst of joy. for the first time in more than two years, i just felt…safe. and pleasantly, banally, hopeful.

now hell, it could all be an illusion. i know i could be hit by a bus on my way to my first day at work. more important, i know that Oscar and Dave, so precious to me, are mortal, and vulnerable. i know. but for a few minutes last evening, i remembered how to forget. and regaining that footing – just that simple sense of balance, the absence of agitation and fear – brought a peace i hadn’t remembered at all.

i have exhaled, finally.

okay, i exaggerate. more like a plague of snot and coughing and excrement.

and sticky little hands reaching up for comfort, leaving trails of bodily fluids to mark where loving’s been. we’re sick, here. bebe is sick. mama is getting sick. mama is stressed, and stretched, and confused. you ever have one of those days weeks where you feel like you’re sinking deeper and deeper in a hopeless mire of stuff you’ll never get on top of, or even comprehend? and like, all of a sudden, you’re failing?

sometimes i feel like i’m failing. in those moments, i’m not even sure what i’m failing at. i’m just going along, living my life, singing my heart out, and then…i go flat. i lose the tune. i can’t seem to put the stray bits back together.

i find myself lost…in the middle of a day, in the middle of my song, sure the locusts are descending and powerless to move.

********************************************************************************

while i’m busy gluing my head back together, go see Mad and jen about a real plague that they’re rallying us to take on for their six-month anniversary, just in time for the Just Posts. AIDS in Africa, the six-month gift. a pestilence and tragedy of a scale that makes me want to scurry away in shame and delete all my petty whinging. beats those cheap paper and tin anniversaries, friends.  join in.

i don’t really have a gardening soul.

i grew up in apartments, with a healthy fear of the wormy, soily outdoors. a significant part of me still thinks of dirt as dirty, and in my secret heart i like my baby carrots pleasantly pre-packaged and washed off. i own seed packets which swear they’ll grow me some yellow beans, but i’ve had those packets on top o’ the microwave for two years now, i swear, and not one single bean has emerged from them. Dave did plant tomatoes in a box on the deck last summer, and i admired them, and felt virtuous just basking in their presence, but i did very little to contribute to their survival. even houseplants do not thrive under my ministrations – i’m more of a hardship post that tests their mettle, forces them to be all they can be in a harsh, forgetful environment…even if i do occasionally sing them cheering, tuneless songs while spraying them haphazardly with water. i mean well. but with plants and growing things, i am always in a foreign country.

the woman who owned this house before us, though…she had a way with plantlife. when we viewed the house, and later came in to check measurements and get it inspected and secretly plot the changes we would make when it was ours (all ours!), the indoors thrummed with vibrant green. the planter she’d built between the hallway and living room overflowed with ivys and ferns and other pretty things – now long since eaten by our cat – and even though it was March and snowy, she showed us around the yard, pointing out all the bushes by name, explaining what grew where beneath the snowcover. she shared all this as if we spoke her language…as if we were worthy to take care of this garden she’d laid in. and i bought in. i was five months pregnant with Finn, and happy, and i imagined myself come summer, waddling about my yard – my yard! my first ever yard! – with garden clogs and random tool-like items, mysteriously making things live.

i think you know how that part of the story goes. the day we took possession of the house, i’d already been in Halifax on bedrest for sixteen days, water broken, lying still, on eggshells. and that day we’d been waiting for, had circled in green marker on the calendar months before, was the morning i woke up in labour. funny one, gods. i had to call Dave away from the house before he’d even gotten the keys in hand, and while i laboured, in that strange, animal otherworld that is pain and metallic fear, he drove. he made it. but Finn did not. by the end of the day, we knew he would not. and so we never did celebrate the milestone of our first home – it got swallowed, along with my visions of myself as capable of making things live.

the plants were not high on my priority list when we eventually came back from Halifax to this house that we’d never slept in, without the child we’d bought it to be a home for. the house itself wasn’t high on my priority list…it offered sanctuary from the unpredictability of the outside world, which skinned me raw every time i ventured out into its neon signs advertising Mother’s Day specials, and it offered the mixed blessing of mindless work to be done, to expend myself into, but beyond those things i would have been happy to see it burn. i wanted my baby, not the stupid, empty house. i went through the motions of learning to paint and sand, because i needed something to occupy me, but never once did i step out to look at the side garden as it burgeoned into spring weeds. living things, other than the trees we planted in Finn’s memory, which i watered every night, were an affront to me. and i feared them, feared to fail them.

i didn’t explain any of this to my middle-aged neighbour the first time i met her. i’d stepped out with the watering can, heading for the trees, when a solid woman five feet away at the fence between our properties accosted me. no “hi” or “hello,” or “you’re the new owner…welcome to the neighbourhood.” nope. Brenda just laid it out, fast and rough and matter-of-fact, “you’re gonna lose them plants if you don’t start weeding them.” you can tell we live in a posh spot, non? i think i stared at her. i don’t know what i said, just goggled at her, frozen, afraid of bursting out into tears, fantasizing about pushing her pinched face into the weeds and forcing her to eat them. i refrained. i’m neighbourly that way, raised polite and constrained by social niceties even when i don’t want to be. but since that moment, i’ve never once weeded that side garden (and i do weed it, about three times every summer, or about a hundred times less than the damn thing needs) without tasting bitterness, without feeling that same violated, wounded, inept fury that i did the day i met Brenda and imagined turning her into my own personal goat. until this week.

this week, for the first time, it got warm enough for Oscar and i to really play outside, and to check out the garden. it did me good. at the front of the house, he tried to eat one of the tulips that survive as a legacy to the good gardener who lived here before us. and he fell and got frightened by the strangeness of the soil, and i got down beside him and got my hands dirty trying to show him worms and that really, dirt ain’t so bad. and i started to believe myself.

later, on the side of the house, he revelled in the weed cover and its raging greenness, and for the first time, all those weeds looked less like a Sisyphian chore and a reminder of pain and inadequacy than just like, well…weeds. kinda pretty weeds. weeds that will likely choke out all the other plants that that poor lady took such care with, true…but she doesn’t live here anymore. we do. with Oscar. who warily checked out the new leaves on Finn’s trees in the backyard, and decided Japanese maple didn’t please his palate.

but it pleased my heart.  each new spring, a little healing.

that, i can get dirty for.

Oscar went to the sitter’s for the first time today.

all day.  all day.

i had the whole day, from nine-thirtyish until four, to myself.  at home.  around town.  i was a single white female just catching up on things, making calls, dropping off job applications, running out to pick up milk, weeding a small corner of the disaster that is my garden, even – no shit – shopping for clothing that doesn’t look like it should have spit-up on it somewhere.  doing stuff that takes two hands and is messy.  going places that aren’t stroller friendly.

i had no schedule but my own.  it was glorious.

it was the first time in nearly thirteen months…not counting the trip to New York, which was also glorious but in a different, less mundane way.

it was better than i’d expected.

and it was long, at the same time.  filling the time was not a problem…i still have a list of twelve petty but necessary and thus to my sad, stodgy brain satisfying little future accomplishments that i didn’t even have time to get to, but as some of them i haven’t gotten to for months now i shall not fret.  it was the nature of the time.  the all-to-myselfness.  it was like toffee, all warm and stretchy and pulled out to wild lengths of buttery indulgence and every now and then i wondered if i was having too much of it to be good for me.  because i am no longer used to commanding my time, and i felt sinful.

and i worried, absently, a little refrain of anxiety just under my skin, under my heel, all day, trying to assert itself.  it wondered whether O was napping peacefully or crying himself into a frenzy in a strange place, all alone.  it fretted about the big screen tv that was blaring away at his sitter’s house when we arrived this morning.  it reminded me, several times, that there is a dog at the sitter’s house, too, and that dogs bite children.  it wasn’t an unreasonable voice, but rather a statistical type of one, incarnating all my fears and all the rational, informative panic behind them into a little song i carried around with me all day, in my diaper bag.  (yeh, i still carry the diaper bag when i don’t have the baby with me.  it’s hott.  and i’m afraid to unpack it or switch for fear of what might be hiding in there).

i had to keep stifling that little voice in order to keep myself from taking off at a run, and hurtling – okay, sprint-waddling – the whole six blocks to the sitter’s to rescue my son from…

from me.

from my terror that he will be hurt someday.  from my knowledge that he will be hurt someday.  from all the things that bring hot tears to my eyes and make me gag on my own utter helplessness to stop them, to see the right ones coming, to throw myself in their path and protect him.  they’re things that i never let myself think about and don’t acknowledge at the conscious level, almost ever, because i am afraid that if i start i will never stop and then poor Oscar will grow up in some kind of fear-ridden hothouse and be damaged more by me than he ever would have been by the world.

i usually do okay quashing the fear. but today, with O in the care of strangers for more than a couple of hours, for the first time, i couldn’t silence the little voice completely.  so i sang it.  i let it play across my tone-deaf ear, like a bad Liberace, and turned the litany of barely articulated fears into a little song, a hum that buzzed around with me all day at a dull roar.  the singing kept it from escalating, from gaining ground on me, from paralyzing me.

and somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, while i was noticing how irksome it is that all this year’s ‘stylish’ tops seem to make me look like i’m still pregnant, i also noticed exactly what it was that was going around in my head to the tune of “The Lonely Goatherd”.

for a second, the panic stood up and grabbed my attention again, and i wondered if i should listen to it.  if a Good Mother would listen to it.

then i shook my head.  i know, from my long career as a daughter, that part of being a Good Mother is letting your children go, little by little, step by step.  this was our first big one, O & i, the first leap beyond the protection of family, the first foray into the scary, wonderful world of “out there” in all its diversity and fascination and sometimes callousness.  turns out Oscar had a grand day.  when i showed up ten minutes early to pick him up, he was happy and snuggly and content and his caregiver seemed delighted with him and he wasn’t even all that thrilled to see me, and he didn’t want to leave the dog behind.

and i realized, this is what it’s going to be like for the rest of my life. this is the song that will buzz in my head every time he steps away from me to go further out into the world on his own.  it is how i will keep from running after him and smothering him, to keep myself from choking on my fear.

it’s the first love song i’ve ever written.

i am, alas, not an ideal travel companion.

i’d like to be. i have a bit of an idolatrous relationship with the concept of travel, and – if i am honest – with my vision of myself as an intrepid, worldly soul. i had this particular affectation of identity long before i ever went anywhere…books taught it to me young. damn books, making kids all uppity.

but this specific form of vanity makes me, generally, quite a reasonable traveller – i’d rather shoot myself than appear gauche and colonial, and i try very hard not to wander through halls of history and culture squeaking “don’t look, Ethel!” between the hayseeds in my teeth. true, i am ever-willing to mortify Dave by forcing him to pose, teeth bared, in front of statuary of the ancient world, but everybody has weaknesses, right? other than a minor fetish for cheesy photos and a terror of insect life that made a month in Malaysia back in 2002 perhaps not the best choice Dave & i ever made together, i’m a pretty savvy, culturally sensitive, adaptable traveller type, even with kidlet in tow.

until you get me in an airport or other official/officious-type environment. then, no matter how many maple leafs i might staple to my backpack and how many Canadian passports and formal documents i wave, i become the quintessential Ugly American, expecting the order of the universe to align just for moi, just like home, and right the fuck now, thank you very much. (and i say this with no offense intended to all you lovely Americans who aren’t like this whatsoever and bear no responsibility for this unfortunate stereotype which i, with all apologies, have perpetuated not just here but at airports and customs offices and such around the world. though i do try to say “eh” at the end of my sentences when i get outraged, honest.)

i hadn’t entirely acknowledged this little, erm, predilection of mine until this trip. Dave certainly had, over years. i’d remained in denial, even after i actually tried to claw my way through a plexiglass wall to the little cage where skanky Czech Easyjet drone sat smirking at me and demanding money for the very same piece of baggage the London Easyjet agents had passed through with no problem three days before, as per their stated policy which i’d called from freaking North America to check on…because i thought my reaction to said smug living Bratz doll was perfectly reasonable. i felt that my urgent, primal desire to make her feel as randomly powerless and screwed over as i did was a rational one, friends, even if she’d likely have shredded my face with her Lee press-ons had i actually been able to get through the plexiglass dumb enough to resort to physical violence.

i thought this right up to the point at which i found myself giving the finger to a customs officer in Montreal. this is bad form, i know. this is not smart. this is particularly not cool to do in front of your child, even if his back is turned. this is not especially cool for one’s travelling companion either, apparently, particularly if he does not relish the idea of spending the night in a holding cell with a sick baby and a crazy woman at the behest of an offended official.

mind you, the official never saw me flip him off. which i knew he wouldn’t – his turning away summarily, dismissively, was what had precipitated my reaction. there was no offense registered, only released. but Dave saw. and when he (quite politely, i credit him) drew attention to it, i realized…perhaps i have rage issues.

they’re not general rage issues…though there is a strain of deep fury running through me, angry at the world for its injustices and slights, still wounded in the places i have tried to make whole through a lifetime of writing it out, self-salvation or at least survival through words. but i can usually contain the rage. only those closest ever see it, and only those – i am very careful, and have been for a long time – who are not easy prey. only once, more than a decade ago, have i ever lost my temper with a child, or a person in my care. long before Dave & i ever had children we had this conversation. i trust myself with Oscar. i know better. i will not wound him with my own damage.

but those people who do the business of official paperwork and rubber-stamping, who hold the huge power of people’s comings and goings in their hands and who are often free to use or abuse that power randomly and without apparent logic or consistency, them i sometimes wish to wound. it isn’t personal, this rage. it is, rather, the depersonalization of this aspect of travel that sets me off. if an airline or customs official is remotely civil, or offers moderately humane explanations for the Kafka-esque policies and regulations that sometimes crop up in the course of changing countries and continents, particularly with baggage in tow, i am – in return – a perfect lady.

but apparently, my view of the whole transaction is a little skewed. the onus isn’t on them to be civil, though many certainly choose to be. the onus isn’t on their countries or airlines or policy-makers to be transparent, or to communicate their policies clearly, or even for those policies to be fair – in some cases – to people who come from outside their particular political zones or cultures or what have you. intellectually, i know this. intellectually, i know that my saga of what Dave laughingly calls “poor white girl fights ridiculously cheap airline” is silly in the grand scheme of human injustice, and perhaps even offensive. but it’s not the moral rightness of my position that i’m interested in defending, or even exploring (at the moment). when i rage, i rage like a moralist, my vocabulary full of implicit “shoulds” that the offending official has failed to deliver. but i think i take the moral position as a last ditch before the abyss.

my rage is a cover for horror. not at lack of civility itself, but at the absolute nothingness that seems to be left when civility is stripped away. at the way power allows human beings to take advantage of each others’ vulnerability, even in petty official ways. at my own nakedness and complete incapacity in the face of another’s choice to be officious and self-interested, no matter how i prepare myself, no matter how right i may be on paper, no matter how much i scream…because i am far from home, far from recourse and redress in that moment. or worse, because no matter how hard i tried to find out everything i needed to know, that i failed. and now i am subject to the whim of someone who gives not the fuck what i do next. that very realization, at some instinctive pre-verbal level, makes me want to scream. and so goes the vicious circle.

some people, less privileged than i in their accidents of birth or their reasons for international border crossing, live their whole lives in these Kafka-esque moments of subjectivity to the uncaring, unhearing, officious world.

i shudder.

i wonder what kind of rage that kind of impotence creates.

and i realize i have no clue how to deal with any of it, theirs or my own, except by being a little kinder every time i have power. i wish i thought it were enough.

i want to figure out a more grown up way to teach Oscar to deal with the world, else we’re going to have to stop this travelling thing damn soon. ‘how i spent my summer vacation in a Thai prison because mommy had a tantrum’…yeh, that would go over well.

i want to be above the fury and the abyss of powerlessness. i do not know how to get there.

when i was a little girl, a black and white hippie poster with the silhouette image of two little children hung, oddly, in my mother’s living room closet. it was a leftover from her life with my father, but though it wasn’t really her style, she never quite threw it out. written on it was an excerpt of what i later learned was Khalil Gibran’s meditation “On Children,” which began – in the condensed poster version we had – with the words “your children are not your children.”

tell me that didn’t confuse the hell out of me when i was a kid.

but i liked the poster…was fascinated with it, even. and as my capacity to read grew beyond the literal, i found beauty in its words. when it eventually got relegated to a poster tube in the back of a different closet, i rescued it, tattered and dog-eared though it had grown. i dragged it off to college with me, its flower-child cache irrestistible, and eventually had it pasted on a backing to preserve it from crumbling. it hangs in our den, now…one of the only things that has always followed me, wherever i have lived.

Finn, my firstborn, died two years ago today. wonder and joy, and then a gaping, keening physical absence that left me battered and raw, aching blindly for the child who should have been in my arms. and raging. but the most powerful element of all the grief and shock of coming ‘home’ to the emptiness of the house we’d just bought, our first home, the home we’d imagined ourselves as a family in and had filled, in our mind’s eye, with the laughter of a child who was suddenly vanished from all the futures we had woven for him and for ourselves, the very worst part for me was the powerlessness. i felt shaken to my core, by the world…and it left me feeling vulnerable, wrong. i had narrowed my life down to the coming child, through the pregnancy and then certainly in the weeks of bedrest previous. i’d lost my job for that bedrest. i had prepared myself for motherhood: i was ripe, ready, overflowing with milk and the tenderness that his small face had made bloom in me. but i had been unable to protect my child. i had not kept him safe. he was gone, and there wasn’t a goddam thing that i could do except wade through the pain and try to fashion some new use for myself in the world, turn myself inside out from the skin. had it not been for the fact that it seemed too cruel to leave Dave alone and cause my mother the same pain i found nearly unbearable, i would been relieved to kill myself, some days. the suicide rate of grieving mothers is surprisingly high.

i think of this every time there is tragedy, now, in the news. soldiers dead, students at Virginia Tech senselessly murdered, kids starving in countries not so privileged as to be shocked, these days, by infant mortality. i wonder about their mothers. i wonder what dark places their grief takes them, and i fear for them, faceless and far away but still, in a small way, sisters.

the blogosphere will be awash today in both silent and verbal memoriams for the dead at Virginia Tech, and for “victims of violence everywhere,” i think the dictate finally settled on. i respect this, but i cannot write that way today. because this is Finn’s anniversary. the other dead should have voice, certainly…but i am Finn’s mother, and my voice is for him. to memorialize him. he was not a victim of violence. the holes that punctured his small chest were for tubes that tried to save him. and i know that he did not die alone, and i don’t think he felt fear, in that short life. and i thank all the gods for that small but boundless mercy, because the mothers who grieve children dead in different circumstances do not have that comfort. their powerlessness is more than my own, and i know i found my own nearly too much to bear.

we cannot always save our children…this is the truth of it. i don’t think it’s said enough in our culture, where arrogance and habit have led us to believe that we should have some kind of free pass on this particular tragedy…where we’ve gotten so used to successful childbirth and healthy childhoods that we expect them, and where we shy away, willfully, from the spectre of death. i think we have come to believe, in a sense, en masse, that our children are our children, fully in our hands…and hence our shock and horror is magnified when we find ourselves powerless to save them. i do not think our grief is less than those in other times or places for whom the vulnerability of parenthood is not so roundly, culturally denied…only our capacity to deal with our grief.

we planted trees in our backyard, for Finn, on Mother’s Day afternoon that year, eight days after he died in my arms. to the small gathering of family who came to join us in the rain that day, i gave cards that i’d handmade, with Finn’s little footprints inside, and his name, and his dates. on the front of the cards, i printed the words from Gibran that had been with me since childhood. in them i found what was really the only peace and solace that i found during those dark, frightening days, because they allowed me to forgive myself my own powerlessness. they freed me to grieve Finn, fully, and to find beauty, eventually, in the continuity of life in spite of death. and they allowed me to give one last thing to my child, from my own childhood…and that was good.

Your children are not your children
They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself
They come through you but not from you
and though they are with you
they belong not to you.
You may give them your love
but not your thoughts
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow
which you may not visit
not even in your dreams.

in loving memory of Finn David MacNevin Cormier
April 29th – April 30th, 2005

and for all the other mothers, who sorrow today and all the other days.

he would have been two today.

you can barely see him, i know, in this photo. he was small, just a bit over two pounds…and the lights were glaring, and the tubes got in the way of the camera. but his little hand was curled around my finger. he squeezed. i sang to him. we told him he was wanted, and we told him he was loved.  he opened one eye, just once, just a flicker.  i like to believe he knew we were there, that there was comfort for him, in our arms.  i like to believe.

he had his father’s hands. and when i close my eyes, i can still feel those tiny fingers on my own.

i am grateful. for every second.

happy birthday, little Finn. your mama and daddy love you, forever.