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i haven’t said anything about the Virginia Tech shootings on Monday, until now, because i haven’t known what to say.

there is the obvious…it is a horrible tragedy. again. there is something grievously wrong with our North American society that young men keep shooting up their classmates and then themselves. my heart breaks for all the families who have lost beloved ones. breaks, and sighs, fearing for them in the lonely dark ahead. my heart bleeds for the Chos, South Korean parents of the resident alien shooter. i wonder what they expected for him, when he was O’s age…baby boy, apple of the Korean family eye. i wonder what kind of immigration backlash will result from what he chose to become. i wonder why he chose as he did. i fail. i boggle at the idea of a Korean student doing the same at home, but cannot wrap my mind around the possibility. it doesn’t fit, culturally. i am horrified each time it happens here, but i am not shocked. in Korea, i would have been floored. the Montreal massacre in 1989 floored me…i was a frosh then, still seventeen, blown away by the violence and the targeting…but i do not seem to get floored now. not here. i work – when i work – in universities, where guns do not belong, in my mind…but i am not shocked. i wish i could feel shock. i wish i could feel shock each time i hear of more people dying in Iraq, too, and Afghanistan, and Darfur, and all the places i cannot even name on the map where people die by violence every day and i lend nothing, no silent prayer, no solidarity, no sanctimonious ruminations. i wish the world could floor me. i wish there were more outcry about the news every day, not just when violent death comes close to home, or in the supposed sacred halls of learning. i am afraid of the society i am raising my child in. i am afraid of the hopelessness and frozenness i feel. i am afraid of my suspicion at those who can still feel shock. i am afraid of saying too much and cheapening this fury and this sadness which has no outlet because i cannot see the beginning nor the end of this cycle of tragedy we keep living out, decrying deaths whilst propogating them, and acting surprised each time terror lands in our own backyards.

when i was in the eleventh grade, before i’d ever heard that one could be gunned down in the hallways of one’s school in the culture i was busy growing up in, i did an English essay on the poetry of Dylan Thomas. i got out all the books on Thomas from the library, and read him voraciously, delighting – with little comprehension, but great pleasure – in his rambunctious use of language and rhythm and imagery. many of his lines are with me yet, almost twenty years later. my English teacher – who was on Lithium that year and thus failed to note how little i’d understood of what i’d read – gave me a perfect mark on the essay, the only one i’ve ever received.

the poem of Thomas’ that i struggled most with, during this brief underage affair with his words, wasn’t the one that i comprehended the least. there were poems among the collections whose topics and allusions escaped me completely, poems i’ve had to go back to again and again in the intervening years to build up some understanding of. but there was one that i chose specifically not to write on, in my essay, because it angered me. because i thought i understood it, and it left me cold, confused, almost wounded…betrayed by the apparent callousness of the poet whom i otherwise found overflowing with feeling. it is called “A Refusal to Mourn,” or, in full, “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.” it tells only the story encapsulated in its title, of WWII London and a little girl dead in the Blitz, and the poet’s refusal to mourn as expected, in words writ large with Tragedy and Abomination. i thought, at fifteen, that it refused sadness about the death of the child, that it refused – in denying the public game of outcry, of rending of garments and galvanizing with blame – the feeling of grief, the honouring of life cut short.

i did not understand. i did not understand how bodies, after the fact, are still vulnerable to our lionizing of them, prey to our politics and our public mourning. i did not know what it would feel like, grown now and with words at my disposal, to be afraid to use them, to be afraid to cheapen death by making too much of it.  to walk this line, wanting to honour, but avoid rhetoric.

…i shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

the poem ends, “…After the first death, there is no other.”

all i can find to say is, i wish that were true of the school shootings that haunt us, year after year.

i heard once that it takes seven years for a body to completely regenerate its cells…that every seven years, we become – on the physical, cellular level – an entirely new person.

i also heard, more recently, that each child a woman has carried leaves a cellular trace within her body forever, altering her own cells permanently…marking its path through her, as it were.

clearly, these two accounts of cell biology are a tad incompatible.

and while it may surprise you to learn that i once had a brief but bright flirtation with the field of biology, a twenty-year-old high school transcript – particularly one with physics marks as bad as mine – does not a discerning scientist make. i checked with Wikipedia in the interests of calling the bluff of these cellular mythologies, but my pitiful little search of “cell regeneration theories” reaped a harvest too confusing to be helpful…unless “muller glia” and “satellite cells” mean more to you than they do to me? when it comes to the urban legends of cellular identity, i cannot say if either tale is true.

i can say that today marks seven years since my grandmother died. and if i have indeed regenerated, wholly, then there is nothing left of the physical me whose hand held hers…we are both of us, as we were then, gone. how strange.

i can also say it is two years yesterday since i was airlifted to the regional neonatal hospital, twenty-four weeks pregnant, awash in blood and amniotic fluid. two years ago today i lay on strict bedrest in an isolated room where everyone but Dave had to wear masks and i steeled myself for stillness and waiting and hope, and i spoke to my Nannie out there in the ether and i said “call in some favours, Nan” and i spoke to my wee Runt – pet-named because the first early ultrasound months before in Korea had measured small, and we were tender toward this little vulnerable life – still blithely and bravely kicking away and i said “rest, little one, hunker down there, don’t rush” and for the very first time in my life i consciously let go of all the control and fear and minutiae that consume my anal self on a regular basis and focused myself down to that one small being and my own positivity. and i did it. for two weeks and a day or two, i existed in a world hardly bigger than my bed and my baby-to-be and the conversations in my own head.

and it was a blessing. because i still have records, hidden away, of 3am songs i tried to write down for that baby when i could not sleep. i have the visceral memory of earphones stretched over my belly to play EmmyLou Harris’ “Red Dirt Girl” for Runt, and Runt kicking in time…my hands tapping back the same rhythm to the little feet inside. i was freed, in that couple of weeks, to be fully and wholly the expectant mother that i’d barely had time to be in the crush of moving continents that had been my life up until the airlift. and in those few weeks i burned my wee Runt into me…and then he was here, and gone. and yet for months afterwards, even long after i’d railed and keened and finally swallowed the bitter fact of Finn’s death, i felt for Runt when i first woke up in the morning…i still slept curled around my belly. and that too is strange.

i don’t know if there are traces of him still in my cells, my Runt who became Finn, firstborn. i’d like to believe it. i had so little of him that every scrap of memory and physicality that attests to his having been here is precious to me, even specious ones that may only exist in narrative, in my sense of myself and my cellular existence.

i do know that this time of year my body and my self sing out for the both of them, my grandmother and my baby boy. i hope they each took a little of me with them wherever they went, whether rubbed off in cells or saturated into spirit with the force of love. i hope. because even if my cells actually bear no witness, i have them both with me. and i feel their absence.

i am standing on a crossroads, it seems…and i don’t know which way to go.

my maternity leave ends tomorrow.

and i have been grieving. not overtly, but rather in a quiet, self-pitying, forlorn, why-the-bleep-does-the-world-hate-me kind of way. you know. subtly and maturely. none of my choices seem clear or simple from here, and the fact that i need to keep walking anyway, straight into the cloudy blur in front of me with O on my hip, gives me very real heartburn. both literal, and figurative.

the thing is, i’m spoiled…and i know it. i’m Canadian. in the year before O was born, i worked my way past the minimum 600 hours needed to qualify for the Canadian government’s employment-insurance-based maternity and parental benefits, and thus, from the time i went on bedrest at 25 weeks pregnant, i’ve been receiving approximately $1400 a month in benefits from Ottawa. plus this other $100 a month taxable bonus that they threw at us to avoid having to create new daycare spaces, but that’s another story. all in all, while i have not been getting rich sitting here on my childbirth enhanced arse caring for my offspring, the income has been nice. very much appreciated. not only has it enhanced our moderate but reasonable family income as earned by Dave, but it has made me feel like a contributing member of our partnership…because for all i value what i’m doing here at home with O – i read all the feminist manuals and hell, so did Dave – i do not feel particularly good about myself when i am not paying at least some of my own way.

(unless, of course, a potential sugar daddy happens to be reading this and would like to reward me for cavorting in lingerie whilst carrying a lavender-dyed poodle in my Gucci purse and slurping up champagne. if that’s you, and you’re dashing and have one of those turn-my-knees-weak Scottish brogues or something, forget i said anything about paying my own way. just understand that you are a sideline, good sir, and not my real life. and then, call me. Dave is a supporter of small-business enterprises, and would i’m sure appreciate my efforts to contribute to the family coffers. with maribou slippers on.)

in my real life, though, i don’t have a job to go back to when this mat leave ends. in my real life, i do have some money coming in for April, from editing and p/t teaching that i’ve been lucky enough to round up, but in my real life i know that very soon i have to make a decision between trying to juggle the feast or famine of freelance contract work or whoring myself out accepting something full-time but not necessarily rewarding or even reflective of my skills and experience. in my real life, i need to find a good, responsible, loving human being to care for O when i’m bringing in money, and i need to find her before i can actually give her a, say, starting date for my imaginary job-to-be, or tell her whether i’ll need part-time or full-time care. in my real life, i don’t know if p/t work will even bring enough in to pay a babysitter. in my real life, i have minor panic attacks late at night about the secret, hurtful things that might happen to my little boy if he spends all his days in some other house with a bunch of other kids and a frazzled caretaker, before he is big enough to even tell me what’s happening.

these are petty things, in the big picture, maybe. i have a roof over my head, and food for my loved ones. we can pay our heating bill, probably even if no job is forthcoming for me. i have the luxury of choosing – from a small pool, but still choosing – who will care for my child if i am away from him for work. my situation is not a social justice cause, i know. i know. but still…i am angry…confused. because there are so few jobs out there, here. because almost everyone in town whom i’ve told i’m looking has said, “oh, do you waitress?” or “oh, do you tutor?” and all my life, until now, i’ve jumped at whatever’s come up, to pay the bills. i’ve never been proud, or particularly ambitious. but suddenly, i’m furious. i’m thirty-five years old. i have an MA, part of a Ph.D, and more than a decade of teaching and administrative experience. i want secure, rewarding work that makes leaving O worthwhile, and an income more than i could have made straight out of high school if i were a labouring male in this stupid economy. i want clear choices, dammit, not this amorphous limbo that makes me feel passive and powerless. if i stay at home, even some of the time, i want it to be because i’ve chosen that, not because i have some mysterious suck-gene that makes people seem to want to under-employ me on an ongoing, forever kinda basis.

i have discovered my sense of entitlement. thank you, no, i do not want to waitress this summer. not anymore. i’m sorry. fuck off.

if anyone has some nice cheese for my whine, please share.

i don’t understand where all this fury is coming from…nor my confusion, my paralysis. maybe it’s this unfamiliar “let’s wait and maybe the options will look better” kind of flavour in my mouth.

i mentioned last week that i used to make decisions pretty easily. my pre-parenthood self was a wanderer…looking for home and worth and experience, trying to trace the line of greatest reward between responsibility and recklessness. the act of choice was something i thrived on…assessing the paths different opportunities presented, weighing my options, and committing. and usually, at sucking up the inevitable limitations or hardships or responsibilities that came with the paths i’d selected…or, at the very least, at changing paths. i have been living with the consequences of choosing for a very long time.

but now, the consequences are not just mine to bear. there is O. there is O. he changes everything.

and so i waffle, at this crossroads, unsure whether even focusing on trying to start a decent career here is silly at this point. wondering if i don’t, will i ever? will i miss that boat permanently, having waited this long? should i commit to the small, piecemeal things available that i could do in my sleep, despite the crazy schedule and juggling and stress they’d bring with them, or bring out the big guns of my job application skills for the handful of fulltime jobs that are likely to crop up over the next few months, and hope it all works out for O?

i do not know. i do not know what’s best. i do not even know possible, or what’s good, here…for Oscar, for me, for Dave. i’m just stumbling along, from here…no longer trying to balance between recklessness and responsibility, but between various responsibilities: to my child, to my sense of self, to my family. i have finally become exactly what my mother aspired for me my entire life – painfully middle class. oy. now if i could get a nice middle-class job and buy her a nice little house to retire in…
sweet lips of Jesus, help me walk.

you guys are great…and i thank you.

grace in times of sorrow is one of the hardest things for us humans to learn…how to just be, with someone else’s sadness. i know this, but still trip over myself trying to find silver linings in other people’s misery, whenever random sadness sideswipes me in casual conversation. i sputter, and platitudes squeak from my averted face, and then i go home and beat myself about the head for having been so freaking stupid and bovine and nervous. but…hell, i’m human. social conditioning is hard to undo. learning takes time.

being on the other side of grief and sadness takes time to learn to negotiate gracefully, too. as i said in the preface to the post which unleashed the very humbling and appreciated outpouring of kindness from you all, my own sad is familiar to me now, and not entirely unwelcome…but it’s isolating. i’m only slowly learning to talk about it, and through it, because i am afraid of clamming others up, of scaring people away. i’m scared of the awkwardness, and the silences, and my own tears intruding on otherwise pleasant public interactions.

thank you for not running away.

i’m afraid of being labelled by sorrow, too. when my grief was fresh and raw, it was like a raging drunk hanging over my life, always poised to go on a rampage. it was so powerful that i sat in awe of it, afraid to acknowledge it publicly for fear of it rearing up and taking over, causing scenes and destruction i couldn’t undo. i didn’t want to be whispered about as “the crazy lady who lost her baby.” hell, i didn’t want to become the crazy lady who lost her baby. i didn’t trust my sorrow, not did i trust anyone else with it, outside Dave and a few rare, precious friends. but, as the rawness fades, hiding gets in the way of real healing. every time i hide the sadness i feel it doubly…and i feel like i dishonour Finn.

so thank you for letting me honour him, instead…with my sadness and my remembering, and my telling. thank you for listening, and offering the comfort of just saying “i hear you. i see the absence. i’m sorry.”

i needed that, and you all gave.
and…so very sadly…if you have any more of that grace to give, little Doss‘s parents and twin sister could probably use it too.

“… joy and sorrow are inseparable. . . together they come.
when one sits alone with you . . . remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.”

– Kahlil Gibran

maybe it’s the lack of sugar in my system, or a February thing that’s held on like a bad cold, but i have a lot of sad these days.

i don’t especially mind it…it’s not unfamiliar, or unwelcome, even…it’s just not very social, this sad i have. sorrow takes up space. it has lodged itself under my skin, like sweat…and i am contained within it, afloat on my own private sea. it is almost all the companionship i can handle.

i think O can feel it, and that makes me feel bad. but sad has always made me feel bad, i realize. i fear to disappoint. i fear i might cause some discomfort, or unleash some judgement, if i acknowledge my pain or my confusion. it sounds funny – laughable – when i write it out like that. but i do. i was raised to pull myself together, to put on a happy face, to exorcise demons and win. anything less would be vaguely shameful. sadness is an affront to propriety.

but i am sick to fucking death of propriety.

it was only when Finn died that i realized what a desperately uncomfortable weight sadness is in our society. i came home from three weeks in the narrow confines of a hospital ward to a house we’d never slept in, a house we’d only gained possession of the morning i’d gone into too-early labour, a house we’d bought for our new family, for our baby. we came home without that baby. i’d lost my job, because of the indeterminate nature of the bedrest i’d been on to try to keep him in. it all seemed like a bad, bleak joke. it was the week before Mother’s Day. i was unmoored, and very nearly unhinged. the sea of my sadness had no shores…and i very much just wanted to drown.

Finn had held our fingers in his tiny hands, and squeezed. i’d held him for the last hour of his life, touching him, trying to comfort him, memorize him. he’d filled me with wonder, and joy, and a defiant pride.

the evening after he died, my first day out of a hospital bed in nineteen days, i stood in the brambles on the bank of the Halifax Arm at the old Dingle tower, and said into the wind, “i had a son. his name was Finn.” i needed to say it aloud. i was afraid of anyone, even Dave ten feet away, hearing me. but i needed to speak that child’s existence, to sing his birth, to call him my son. so i spoke to the rain and to the water because i did not know how to say it to anyone else. i didn’t know how to lay that sadness at anybody’s feet.

i am not so raw, anymore. almost two years have passed, and the wound of Finn’s death no longer gapes between me and the rest of the world, paralyzing me in the simplest of conversations. “do you have any children?” asked the lady at the paint store that first week home from Halifax in May 2005, three days before Mother’s Day, six days after i’d given birth. i stared at her, choking on the “no” and the “yes” with any answer threatening to expose me and skin me. milk streamed, useless, secret, underneath my shirt. i don’t remember what i said, but i know i hid my suffering as best i could…because i’d already blundered on enough platitudes and awkwardness and outright stupidity even at that early point in the grieving process to understand that freshly dead babies were too much for casual conversation. too much for others to handle. too sad to be simply accepted by those not grieving them, and too sad to be comforted away by the uncomfortable, nervous offerings meant to make those who’d happened upon my sorrow feel better.

it isn’t easy to just live with someone else’s sadness…to accept it, and honour it, and not try to rush it out the door so you can get back to the pleasantries of living. hell, it isn’t easy to live with one’s own. trying to learn to has been the longest journey of my life, and it is early yet.

i don’t know what place i want sadness to live in our house. i know that from the day we moved in, it has been here. i know that O will grow up with it around him, perhaps more than he should…and that makes me sad, too.

but i wonder if that worry isn’t misplaced. because in O’s innocence, his ignorance of that which is proper and socially acceptable, he has greater grace in dealing with another’s sadness than i’ve ever seen in an adult. if he sees tears on my face, he looks at me hard and reaches a hand out. he’ll lay his small fingers along my cheek for a second or two, very gravely. he says nothing…nor does he need to. he just marks the sadness. he doesn’t diminish it, or dismiss it, or trip over it, or turn away in fear of it. and then he smiles and a little of it evaporates, usually. the sea of tears grows smaller.

if Oscar can keep some of this gentle ease with sorrow as he grows…if he can learn that joy and sadness are two sides of the same coin, and not to fear his own or others’, he will be a better human being. and a rare one. perhaps this is a legacy his brother can bequeath him. if Dave and i have the courage not to hide from him. if we allow the sadness and healing to take their sweet time.

oy. is it possible for a not-quite-ten-month-old to morph into a wild, wilfull toddler overnight?

is it normal that now that O’s noticing the world around him, he wants to touch/taste/bite ALL of it, NOW? is it weird that suddenly he’s waking up at bloody 5:15 am every morning and screaming his little head off to get up, already? is it selfish that i don’t want my day to start that early? ever? particularly when it’s a saturday morning and i’ve been up until 1:30 am with old friends who are in town briefly, and mack trucks are playing bumper cars inside my tender skull?

and is it wrong to consider selling the child to gypsies, at least for a weekend, just to get some sleep?

and does anyone know any nice, nurturing gypsies who might be interested?

i think if i’d had the wherewithal to operate a computer on saturday morning, my beloved Oscar would have gone up on ebay with a “free to a good home” sign around his sweet little neck. then i would have come to my senses (with the aid of coffee…much coffee) and kept him, of course.

of course.

i know i’m pushing people’s buttons all over the place, just saying things like this. they’re parental blasphemy…the kind of casual slagging that causes pain and incurs wrath among people who’ve struggled to have children, or are who have themselves been relinquished by parents…or who wish to defend the good name of perfectly pleasant gypsy folk. i know. i know well, actually. i’ve been those people…baffled and wounded by others’ callous attitudes toward their precious kids…and i’ve been the kid left behind, too. Dave & i went through numerous circles of hell to have this boy. we love him. we want him to grow up to have good self-esteem, and while positive relationships with imaginary travelling gyspy bands might help develop this quality in him, i’m thinking that threatening to give him away probably isn’t our best strategy for supporting his self-confidence and security.

i know. and i don’t mean it, anyway.

but wow, is he a grumpy baby these days. and wow, is 5:15 early. i think, when my mental circuitry has had rest enough to function logically, that he’s simply excited by all that he’s almost able to do, and frustrated because he can neither communicate nor locomote well enough to accomplish those fascinating tasks. plus he’s tired, because he’s too excited to sleep properly. he just wants, and wants, and wants. and i know that’s his job. but i want, too. i want to sleep, and i want to be a good mother, and i want to help him learn to deal with his wants in a reasonable way. now, i’m reading my “Baby Whisperer” diligently, and working on sleep solutions and trying to offer both stimuli and calm to Oscar throughout his day. and i keep telling myself “this too shall pass.”

the sarcasm works better, though. my own flip comments make me smile, and then i keep going, smiling at the shouting little bundle of grump that my offspring has become. this is probably one of those self-sabotaging coping mechanisms that get passed down in families, dysfunction infecting multiple generations, insidiously turning Oscar into a snide, sardonic, twisted human being.

like his mother.

at least then he’d be smiling, though, however bitchily, and not just howling at the world in frustration. poor little grumpopotamus. time to get to work on that baby sign stuff with him, i think….and then we’ll both take a nap. :)

it’s cold outside, and i’ve been hibernating under the blankets of my own mind, trying to catch up with myself. or hide. this time of year i’m never sure which is the better plan.

two years ago this morning, i woke up in my mother’s apartment as a Canadian resident for the first time in almost five years. i’d flown in at midnight the night before, in the aftermath of a massive snowstorm, to a city buried in white. with my freewheeling snowcab ride home from the airport included, the trip had taken thirty-six hours, door to door. i’d just moved home from Korea. i’d come alone, three weeks in advance of Dave’s return…i was trying to get a headstart on a job, and a house: on settling us into our new life here in the motherland. i was eleven weeks pregnant with Finn. and i thought, when i woke up that morning to a bright white street that i’d known since childhood, that the worst of my journey was behind me.

instead, two years later, i barely recognize the person i was on that morning. i remember her excitement, her rush to get going. i remember the tender, easy connection she had to the baby she was carrying, and her confidence that if something had gone wrong on the long flight, she’d know. i remember her anxiety, which was mostly about repatriation taxes and Revenue Canada, not about the pregnancy or looming parenthood. i remember that she tried to convince her mother that she could shovel the car out, no problem.

i cannot even write that paragraph in the first person, the disconnect is so strong.

i am no longer that person, nor will i ever be again. the breakdown of that first pregnancy a few months later changed forever my deep-seated secret belief that i was charmed, that all would ultimately be okay. the experience of Finn’s little hand squeezing my finger permanently altered my other deep-seated belief in myself as the star of my own life, the centre of my universe. and his death in spite of that, and the emptiness he left, nearly destroyed my belief that i could survive anything.

but i am here, two years later. Dave and i and Oscar, a family.

it’s snowy this morning, too. but i’m not in a rush. i don’t give a fuck about the taxman. and i seldom, any longer, assume that my instincts about things being okay – or not – are particularly good. but i pay attention to the people i love in a way i never knew how to before.

i’m still learning acceptance…this change has been the hardest, and has come most slowly. i asked myself this morning if i’d go back, if i could, to that day two years ago. if i could lay a clean blanket of snow over all the tracks of grief and change the intervening months have made on me, on us….would i do it? and i knew even as i asked myself the question that i couldn’t answer.

i would not trade Oscar to have Finn back, and had Finn lived the chance that O would have been born when he was, as who he is, are slim. even in my fantasies, i know i cannot have both. and so there really is no choice to make. perhaps that’s all acceptance is – coming to terms with how profoundly out of one’s control some parts of life can be.

to come to terms with something, you have to face it.  so every now and then, i stop along the path and look back…i cannot help myself. and for a moment or two, i turn into a pillar of salt, a frozen pile of tears, gazing at what might have been.

then i look at what is, and give thanks, and keep going.  this blog is my tracks.

okay, i’ve been cheerful long enough. done now. :)

i tried to bring my most positive, reflective self to what posts i eked out over the holidays. now that the house has been purged of chocolate, though, and daddy and the multiple grandparents have all departed for those outside-the-house things they normally do all day, i am not feeling quite so bloody sunny about the gleefully biting little terror that is my eight-month-old. today, i’m with Linda over at Purple is a Fruit. today, i would like permission to mention that sometimes this “being home with the baby” thing sucks some serious, whiny, dirty little ass. amen, sister Purple. sometimes i just don’t feel like being patient and entertaining all day.

does Disney do house calls?

i thought not.

how about Captain Morgan, then?

bah. i suspect that the glamourous allure of drinking in the afternoon wears off pretty quickly, leaving one feeling even more like a haggard Joan Crawford-esque mommy dearest…but i’m still tempted. i’m grumpy, and frustrated. i feel housebound. heck, i AM housebound. literally. and it’s kinda my own fault, which only makes me grumpier.

Dave went to work with the stroller in the trunk of the car this morning. like i said, my bad. i could have retrieved it from the trunk just as easily as he could have, but never thought of it…though in my defense i was NOT the one who popped out to the car at ten pm last night and dug the bottle of absinthe we bought on our New Year’s trip to Halifax out from under the stroller without a care in the world, admittedly. (insert glare in Dave’s general direction, here. very impressive, withering glare). i also did not drink any absinthe, for the record, lest you all begin to suspect me of being a closet drunk. i just like to imagine myself in altered states…the reality takes too much recovery when one has to wake up and be mommy at six in the morning.

i’m the one who insists that we be a one-vehicle family because i can’t see the sense in paying for craploads of car and insurance when we live in a town that one can walk across in forty minutes, so i accept that i’m not always as mobile as i’d like. sometimes O & i get housebound, particularly in bad weather, and that’s usually okay.

but today is sunny and warm and picture-perfect, at least for strolling. and my fussy boy and i had a much-looked-forward-to “playdate” with our mommy coffee friends, who help keep me sane by getting me out of the house midweek every week and commiserating with me about how mommyhood isn’t all sunshine and Gerber babies. but, as Oscar now weighs a rather strapping twenty pounds even before his snowsuit is forced onto his unwilling body, i require the stroller if we’re going more than, say, thirty feet…and the coffee date is a twenty-minute walk away. you see my problem here.

so, while my lack of mobility may lie largely on my shoulders, i still believe that certain circles of hell are reserved for fathers who accidentally abscond with the family stroller on the sunniest day of the winter, and then turn out to be “in a meeting” all afternoon while the mothers of their children frantically call/skype/curse them. particularly when said children have already been bundled, flailing, into the cruel horror of their Evil Snowsuit before the stroller has been discovered to be missing.

i also believe that the Baby Mum-mum cracker bribe (note attached photo, titled “A Boy’s Best Friend is His Cracker”) is a perfectly acceptable way of coping with a fussy, stroller-less baby on a sunny afternoon when all you wanted to do was get the hell out of the house and see grown-ups and are bitterly tired and disappointed and wondering where all those nice, comforting Christmas chocolates got to, anyway.

the Baby Mum-mum cracker bribe also buys time to write a rant, and publish it…particularly if you have a large backup supply of crackers.

thank the lord for small mercies. and don’t report me to Children’s Aid.

just send Dave home with that damn stroller, already.  and maybe send me on another vacation? :)

my boy hugged me this morning.

it wasn’t the first time…somewhere during the past week he’s begun throwing his arms around my neck whenever i scoop him up. but, as that has usually been just a front for some energetic hair-pulling on his part, i haven’t taken it too much to heart. until today.

O woke from his nap early, howling. i listened outside his room in hopeful denial, imagining he might magically soothe himself back to sleep. wishful thinking.

i opened his door, and the cries stopped, for a second. the little body wrenched itself around in the crib, trying to see who’d come to rescue him from himself. he hiccuped, gazing up at me with gravest of expressions…scrutinizing my face. once he appeared sure that it was, indeed, me who had materialized from the mysterious vacuum outside his napping space, he beamed. he lifted his arms. i picked him up, and those fat little arms lurched around my neck and stayed. glomming on to me like a suckerfish, he said, contentedly, “guuugh.” i told him, “i love you too, Oscar.” not a hair on my head was even tugged on…at least for ten seconds or so.

i felt like i’d just been crowned Mommy of the Year.

now, truth be told, the hug may not have been personal. had the milkman happened to enter Oscar’s room during that post-nap panic, maybe he too would have been offered that gift of sweet affection. maybe. but i secretly think not. i think my boy is learning to distinguish…and to love.

he gives a fine hug, i do say so myself.

but, me being me, it’s not enough just to get all a-twitter at this development. Oscar’s hug hit me hard, in a weird way, and from everywhere at once. as O and i danced in our little embrace around his bedroom, tears filled my eyes.

for him, because now he can be hurt, wounded by the vulnerability that affection creates.

for me, because the responsibility of raising him to be able to deal with whatever life throws at him will probably break my heart – and his – a hundred times over.

and for Finn. the tears that came to my eyes as Oscar hugged me were definitely partly for his brother. because that first hug will never happen. because there will be no lifetime of joy and heartbreak for Finn…it’s done, all packed into eleven hours.

i feel uncomfortable thinking about Finn, in these moments of celebrating Oscar. i have a beautiful, healthy child in O. i am blessed, and happy, and most of the time i’m fully immersed in the wonder and tedium of having a seven-month-old. but i also had another boy, who would be nineteen months old now, nineteen months tomorrow. i remember. and with every milestone O meets, i realize “i will never see Finn do that.” and his absence breaks my heart fresh open every time.

i have a split mother consciousness…i feel guilty for feeling sad about Finn, and guilty for feeling happy about Oscar. i worry about not honouring Finn as i experience all these “firsts” with my second child. i worry about Oscar having to share his mother with a brother he can never know. over time, the Oscar part of the consciousness grows larger and larger, takes up more space. but i worry about that, too. i don’t want it to entirely take over. i don’t want to forget Finn. i don’t want Oscar and any other siblings he may someday have to somehow learn that my love for them, as their mother, is confined to their lifetime. scoff. how limited.

i don’t have a lot of models for this path i have to walk. but in my struggle to find that path, Finn’s little shadow is with me, every day. and even though his company brings sadness, it also brings the comfort that comes from loving…and having your loved one close, in whatever way you can.

loving is hard. it’s one of the greatest gifts given to us as human beings…but it’s also the most bittersweet. i hope it treats Oscar kindly, as he grows.

i hope he keeps on hugging.

but i am not so much ready to go.

tomorrow morning, at about a quarter to crocus (also known as an hour too ungodly to be named in polite company) i shall be creeping out of the house and heading to the airport, en route for New York City.

New York City.

to a small-town girl from PEI, this is a Very Big Deal. i’ve flown around the world and seen a passport full of countries, true, but i have never been to the Big Apple. (well, unless you count a twilight bus trip from LaGuardia to JFK one freezing February evening in the middle of a fifty-six-hour trip back to Korea…but i don’t. i really really don’t.) when i was growing up, i didn’t even believe that one could just up and go to New York for a weekend…any more than i believed one could visit Fantasy Island. New York to me is the City of Cities, and i feel like Cinderella before the ball.
but i’m also torn. because we’re not bringing O.

Dave has been in upstate NY since Monday, at a conference. Oscar and i have been on our own for the week…hanging out with the cat and the blessed tube of Baby Orajel, because my six-month old apparently needs six teeth and is thus cutting four of them right now. we’ve had a long week, and i am ready for a vacation.

but…we’ve also had a special week. i liked being alone with O, for a bit. once i figured out i could handle it, hellish teething and all, then i felt amazingly buoyed. i liked the feeling that i was rising to the occasion when i stumbled out of bed for the seventh time, barely vertical. i liked the irrevocability of it, the primariness of the responsibility – i am his mother, this is what i do. and i liked the fact that there was no one but Oscar around to notice if i didn’t exactly do it all shiningly. i liked it for three days…and i liked it because i know damn well i’m lucky not to have to like it on a fulltime, forever basis, like my mother did with me.

mostly, being alone with O made me notice how much i like him. this morning, when he woke from his nap and was burrowing blearily against me, still drowsy, i coughed. and one little hand reached up tentatively, as if he’d just really noticed i was there and wanted to confirm. his five fingers spread across my cheek, gentle and warm, and he craned his head around to meet my gaze. and we smiled at each other, and i thought “i’m mad to be leaving this boy behind.”

of course, his grandparents will pack me on the plane whether i change my mind or not, because they too want him all to themselves for a bit.

so…ready or not, here i come. or rather, here i go.