cribchronicles.com

this is it.

it’s Friday afternoon, sunny and warm again, finally, after a week of unseasonal temperatures and misery. Oscar is napping in the room next to me, breathing heavily because of the cold and ear infection that continue to dog him. i know this for sure, this diagnosis, because we went to the doctor this morning, and got a whole new prescription which i hope works better than the last one…don’t even get me started on my neuroses about antibiotic resistance. he had a rough night last night, and he’s clingy today, inexplicable bouts of sadness and pouty lip overcoming him at random. but he’s snuggly, too, and still willing to giggle whenever grass tickles him or Mommy plays drums on the doctor’s stepping stool or the cat graces him with her mere presence: for these highlights, he is game. so i think he’s okay. when he wakes, we’ll get him changed, put the laundry in the dryer (okay, that part’ll be mostly me, as O’s laundry training is still in a sorry state of infancy), go outside, maybe walk up to the pharmacy and fill that prescription, maybe stop at the park and check out the swings. we will have a snack. we will read some books, and O will turn the pages far faster than i can actually get the words out, even though i am a proud speed-reader. we will return home, play with Daddy, have a bath, all with much kissing and naming and “no”ing and small hands poking and petting me, holding my own. it is a regular day here in the crib, a day like all the other days that have come and gone around the calendar for the past fourteen months.

and it is the last of these days, of this life where “at home” is the norm, for now. Monday i go to work.

i don’t think i really believe it.

i know that it’s true, but i have no concept, really of what it will be like. what the differences will be, and whether some of them will be losses that i’m unprepared for, that might have swayed my decision had i seen them coming. my breath is baited. and eager, at the same time, looking forward, looking back. i wonder if i will feel as close to him, or closer, being apart all day, most days. i wonder if i will ever see enough of him again. i wonder when i will blog, if not during naptime? and i know that there will be a new normal emerge from this, eventually, and that it will be busy but probably still alright and quite happy and not scar O for life or any such thing. or me, even….or Dave…i know this. i chose this path, this going back to work. with a huge part of myself, i want it. but i am responsible for it, too. and here, on the cusp of the new normal that is about to subsume the rhythm of living that has been Oscar’s “normal” since birth, i am scared as shit. it’s not guilt. it’s part of who i am – and have been since childhood. i grieve change, even whilst i throw myself headlong into it. and since Finn’s death, it’s been harder. all irrevocable change, no matter how small, how not a matter of life and death, still strips me naked and raw.  because i know that there is never any going back.

if you told me i could stop time right now and keep this afternoon forever, maybe minus the ear infection, i think i would.

but i know i can’t. time’s tricky, and will not be stopped, not ever quite as one wishes. and besides, this little dude will have none of it.

he is growing up.  and Monday is coming soon.  and i will probably always hope i chose well, and never know for sure.

Dave’s parents have a shaky, scratchy old taped-to-VHS home movie of him as a toddler, bumbling across a rolling lawn in polyester pants. in it, he does an uncanny impersonation of a round, giggling, bouncing, silly-putty drunkard – up, and down, and wheeee! up, and down, and hahahaha!

then he bangs his head smack into a concrete step.

and gets up and laughs into the camera, tears streaming from his eyes.

Oscar apparently inherited more than prehensile toes and those blue, upslanted, smiling eyes from daddy. now that he’s walking, he too is a wild, silly-putty-esque rover, toddling and tumbling headlong into as much of the world as he can get his eager, grubby little hands on, squealing with glee. he’s down as much as he’s up, and he’s had a recurring black eye now for over a month, but he will not be held back. there is too much out there to be explored, tasted, giggled at. he totters across our lawn on chubby legs, arms waving like a football fan, laughing at the way the grass tickles. he is wonder incarnate…intoxicated by movement, by living. he is beautiful.

and he scares the living shit out of me.

this month, in Achtung Baby, Her Bad Mother wrote about the bittersweet ache of this path of discovery and exhilaration that our children are on, about the thrill and the terror of watching them take flight, knowing – as they do not – that they are fragile, mortal…that they cannot fly. and yet knowing, remembering, with an act of courage adults are not always willing to engage in, how important it can be to believe that one can.

i had almost forgotten what it felt like to be small, and dangerous, and immortal, until i read her post…and then it came flooding back, all the power of fearlessness…all the joy.

“I know that beneath her wings there is flesh and bone and blood; I know that no matter how immortal she seems or feels, no matter how removed from the exigencies of time and space is her experience of life, no matter how freely she flies… I know that she is as bound to earth and body as am I.

But I also know this: that being bound and feeling bound are two very, very different things, and that once upon a time, a long time ago, I felt unbound. I flew. And the memories of this flight are among the sweetest that I carry.

So. I want for her to fly, as much as she can, while she still believes that she has wings. I want her to be dangerous, to tilt into the wind, to aim at the sun. I want her childhood to filled with speed and light and the delicious tang of fear.”

unbound. i had almost forgotten.

but i can see it, the seeds of it, in Oscar’s freewheeling curiosity, his blithe exuberance. i want to pin my own fearful hands to my sides when they reach out to hold him back, stifle my voice in my throat as it calls out “danger! danger!” achtung, baby, indeed. my hands will catch. my voice will comfort. but i do not want them to take from him the wonder of the world. i want him to feel unbound, for as long as he can…and unbound by my fears for him, most of all.

for reminding me, i want to award Bad a most grateful for May. Bad is good. and has a heart that soars, and the courage to let her daughter have one too. you heard it here.

to check out the other Perfect Posts for this past month, visit Petroville and Suburban Turmoil and see who else is out there making us remember what we’re doing and what a darn good time we’re having in the process. :)

…why doesn’t somebody fix it?

i know. i’m hilarious.

but all my life, i’ve suspected that morning was a cruel plot dreamed up by sadists in order to rob me of the pleasure of my warm, sleepy nest…no other purpose for it than that. one of the reasons i think i hesitated about parenthood until i passed thirty was that i couldn’t imagine consistently getting up before nine am…or better, noon. the fact that i worked an erratic schedule (read: slept my lazy ass in half the time) did little to assure me that i would actually survive without fairly regular morning naps.

and thus far, i have…i have! (takes bow). but i have a dirty little secret, internet. i’ve been cheating. i haven’t really been doing much of the morning parenting.

in the early days, when O had what-might-as-well-have-been-colic and alternately screamed and nursed through the nights, Dave & i settled into a routine. i got up at night, and he got up in the morning. fair trade, worked for both of us, kept me moderately sane and unembittered at three am, because i knew that come seven, no matter what, i could go back to bed until Dave went to work. praise Jeebus.

and we just kept doing that. even though Oscar has actually been sleeping through the night pretty consistently for…oh…about seven months now. i kinda thought maybe Dave hadn’t noticed. :)

apparently he had. he was just biding his time.

most mornings, if Oscar peeps at god-forsaken hours, (which is anything before six-thirty, in my current estimation of time) i’m the one who pops up and goes to him and tries to soothe him and usually fails – because my child is a Morning Person, oh cruel fates – and then eventually lifts him from the crib. but we don’t stay up. we go to the big bed, curl up against the sleeping lump that is daddy, and nurse. and snuggle a bit, and are purred on by the cat, and doze. or i doze, which is really what i’m looking for from a morning, after all. Oscar flails and sucks and plays with my bracelet and occasionally turns around and gives a squeak of delight about the fact that the cat is perched nearly atop his head, and we all get about twenty minutes of this, and i love it. love it. then if it’s seven o’clock already and a work day, daddy gets up with Oscar and mommy goes back to sleep for another forty-five minutes or an hour.

i am a spoiled, spoiled woman.

and it’s all about to change. because now that we’re back from The Big Trip and O has settled into his twice-weekly days at the sitters and daddy’s not doing anymore business trips for awhile and we’re still likely a good few weeks from me starting any kind of full-time job thingy, it seems like a reasonable time to wean, finally. no other major adjustments going on this week, and doing it now’ll give us a chance to get into a bit of a routine in terms of the New Morning Order before i actually go out to work…it makes sense. i know it makes sense.

but (cue violins)….i don’ waaaannaaaaa!!!!! (end violins).

i never really believed that O and i would make it past a few months breastfeeding, once we started juggling bottles and formula in the mix when he was eight weeks old. a few times, i was sure we were done. yet, on we’ve trucked, haphazardly. for months now, our nursing has been only a first-thing-in-the-morning and last-thing-at-night operation, a bit of a cuddle to open and close the day. it was supposed to miraculously quiet him on our flight to Europe…which definitely did NOT happen…but the prospect of The Big Trip was what kept me nursing to his one-year birthday, nonetheless. at least ostensibly. in truth, i couldn’t really figure out what we’d do in the mornings if i stopped. i mean, this child often wakes somewhere in the vicinity of six am. was i supposed to just…gasp…GET UP?!?

surely you jest.

but when i broached this conversation with the cold-hearted bastard Oscar’s patient, loving father last evening, he suggested that getting up was, indeed, what i really ought to consider doing. what we actually ought to consider doing. both of us, out of bed. on the same morning. downstairs with Oscar. drinking coffee and presumably conversing, around about the time we used to go to bed. i looked at him blankly. he apparently wasn’t kidding. he’s even looking forward to this. Dave has, it seems, been hiding a secret fondness for mornings from me, all these years, out of respect for my aversion to them. he was just waiting ’til i was ready to wean to break it to me.

now i know who to blame for Oscar’s early rising.

so this is it, internet. my last day nursing my boy who is no longer a baby. my last day as a lie-abed slag. my last day before the New Morning Order turns me into one of those people who make snide comments about other people sleeping in. i am awash in nervousness, and a little sliver of sentimentality about all my years spent spurning the morning…this will, if it actually works, be a significant identity change for someone who’s been hibernatory all her life.  it’s scary, to commit to mornings.  it’s scary, to wean this little boy. i’m grateful to have been able to hold on as long as i have, to my bed, to nursing O, to the morning pile of two adults and baby and cat in a bed, all purring dozily. i’m going to miss that nest, that snuggling.

tell me there are better things to come. tell me Oscar & i will still find places in our days for cuddling, even though he’s like a bouncing ball whenever he’s not eating.  tell me i can sleep in again when he’s twelve.  please.  Dave needs backup on this plan, methinks.

the twenty-fourth of May is the Queen’s birthday
and if we don’t get a holiday
we’ll all run away

when i was a little girl, my dear, beloved, older-than-God grandmother used to recite that little ditty every May, just in time for the May 24th long weekend to roll around…a rhyme from her own childhood, she said, when the Queen in question (Victoria, that stout, dour paragon of empire) was only recently dead and the whole concept of a holiday in her honour slightly less anachronistic. the rhyme still gives me fantastical visions of lobbyist urchins and miniature agitators from the turn of the last century, bloomers aflap and braids waving, threatening mass civil unrest and parental abandonment. we have some weird vestigial holidays here in the colonies.

now, holidays are nice, whatever their source…though Victoria Day being our ‘beginning of summer’ long weekend, three degree temperatures and a pissload of rain for three days solid aren’t really what i imagine the Victorian-era junior Jimmy Hoffas had in mind for the holiday they clamoured for. Oscar didn’t think much of the weather, either, and after an entire weekend of it on top of last week’s snow, he was ready to head outside, even if a seaside vacation wasn’t really an option.

we went to the swings, instead, jolly good times.

and tried going high, high…okay, medium

and made mommy get some exercise

and then, all tuckered out, went to the pub and tried his very first stout with Daddy. Victoria Day weekend is, after all, one of the biggest drinking holidays in the Canadian calendar. :)

and then, just for extra fun, O went home and tortured the kitty cat by trapping her in her hidey hole for, like, ever.

good times, good times.

hopefully your ‘first weekend of summer’ had (or will have, next weekend methinks?) better weather…what did (or will) you do?

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.

roses are red, violets are blue…
Mother’s Day has me tongue-tied
…and how about you?

i have been struggling to write some kind of Mother’s Day post for three days now, but you all keep beating me to it. and not by blowing posies and sunbeams at my posterior, bless you for your dignity and refusal to pander to what ends up being, unavoidably, a Hallmark-y kind of holiday. there are words going around out there that rise well above the packaged sentiments – and the genuine but single-layered sticky-sweetness – of the Mother’s Day cards i remember being vaguely repulsed by even in childhood.

to my dearest wife, for being so selfless and hysterical emotional…

to Mother, a gentle gift from God…

to Mommy, because now that i got you this card i can be a nasty little hellion for the rest of the day…(or the new tween version, call me anytime Mom, just as long as you pay my cell phone bill)

ack. thpppht. i has a hairball.

perhaps Hallmark needs some mommy bloggers working for them, rather than the Neanderthals of gender performance they’ve apparently hired. ’cause they ain’t doing this holiday justice. but you are.

Mother’s Day can be a bit like an iceberg in the calendar, all shiny, just waiting to sink those without mothers, those without children, those for whom the words on cards ring hollow, for whom some mother-child relationship in their catalogue is strained, disappointing, painful, or just impossible to sum up in the discourse of pleasantries circumscribed by Hallmark. if i ever have a worse Mother’s Day than the rainy one two years ago, spent planting trees in the backyard in memory of our dead newborn son, you can – please – just shoot me. there isn’t a card in the world for those kinda days, that kind of naked despair, that ache. and i cannot write one. i’ve been trying…but the words make me turn away, look away, clam up.

not you guys. between Bad‘s brave, exposed tribute to her mother’s fierce love, Julia‘s grace in straddling the inbetween of mothering the living and the dead, Kate‘s unfolding saga of two little boys born too early last week in the very same hospital where i delivered Finn and her fear and ambivalence and love and hope, all of which make my breath catch in my throat, and Jen bearing witness to the mothers and the moments that seldom get much press, there’s a thread of complexity and shadow in the Mother’s Day chorus that you’ve offered up…there is a stretch-marked, tear-stained, real love kinda chorus out there. and i am moved by it, caught up in it in a way i never expected to be by Mother’s Day. and grateful, to all of you, for finding the kind of words i wanted to but couldn’t.

it’s not that i categorically dislike Mother’s Day. i like mothers. i like my own mother, which is a gift i am more and more grateful for all the time …even if it creeps me out how she can occasionally up and walk right out of my mouth, like some uninvited ventriloquist genie. i am lucky to have a mother, at this place in my life. i am lucky to be a mother, and i find much in motherhood to celebrate.

but i’m not good at Mother’s Day. never was. when i was seven or eight, i resolved to make my mom a Mother’s Day breakfast in bed…i got up early that morn, intent and excited, and – despite a very passing acquaintance with the finer points of anything fancier than toast – made eggs and bacon and Kool-Aid and carried them into my mom’s bedroom on a cookie sheet. i was quite proud. of course, the Kool-Aid had no sugar, the eggs – which i thought were poached, except i hadn’t exactly added any water to the pan – were a burnt, stuck, half-raw delight, and the bacon had been hiding in the back of the fridge since Christmas. my mom was very gracious…just, oddly, not very hungry that morning.

i thought i’d be calling on a little of the same gracious reserve this morning, since things were not shaping up to be overly celebratory chez crib for Mother’s Day. Dave had to leave for a business trip at ten am this morning, and as of yesterday afternoon, when i asked – playfully, but with some vestiges of romantic entitlement – how exactly he was planning to pamper me before his Mother’s Day abandonment, he responded with “well, we have some Pampers somewhere in the baby’s room…”

har har, funny little man. i know where you sleep.

but i underestimated this partner i’ve chosen. Dave went to unusual lengths to get me a decent Mother’s Day card this year. it was waiting for me, with dark chocolate and coffee, when i came downstairs this morning.

it has a rather stuffy, formal etching on the front of some stereotypical hallowed hall of learning, and it says, floridly;

For the College Graduate…after which he scrawled, in his own personal chickenscratch, who has become a mother.

it’s a graduation card, acclaiming success. it’s the kind i would have laughed and felt silly about back when i actually graduated in exactly the same way i feel silly about Mother’s Day cards now. but as a Mother’s Day card, saying “hey, i know you’re a smart woman who changes diapers all day, and i know we’ve had a lot of sorrow on the road to get here and it’s bittersweet sometimes and and there’s anger and disconnect and fear and it’s not always intellectually fascinating but i know you believe it’s the most important thing you’ll ever do and i just want to tell you that you’re really, actually doing a good job, that you’re a good mom to this little soul who seems to have come to stay with us and to the memory of the other one that follows us around and has in part made us who we are, that you’ve genuinely succeeded in a way that our culture doesn’t actually offer cards for…and i thank you, for both our boys and for being my friend” – as that, it was just about perfect.

plus, he didn’t even eat any of my chocolate before he left.

i am blessed.

and i hope that you all feel some level of that real kind of blessing, no matter how ill-at-ease or thrilled you may be with the pomp and circumstance of an arbitrary holiday. happy Mother’s Day, blogosphere.  you out there have made my experience of motherhood richer, and better, and less lonely.

Oscar and i – and probably Dave, who notices things – thank you.

so i’m noticing a change ’round these parts.

somewhere around the occasion of his first birthday, Oscar seems to have undergone some mysterious updates. a few of them i was prepared for – the first steps, the faintly comprehensible peeps and utterances which make him sound like a cheery drunk. these i hoped were coming, and they warm my cockles with their glorious, mundane normalcy…because i no longer automatically expect such simple blessings. but the rest of the changes are a bit of a surprise. as sometimes happen to my computer when i’m not really paying attention, my offspring seems to have gotten a whole new system upgrade. his drivers have been re-installed, his bells and whistles are all tweaked, and he now has features he didn’t have before, none of which i seem to know what to do with. Oscar 2.0 is here, folks. and apparently i have to write my own owner’s manual.

i think there’s a reason that babies generally come in the non-mobile variety, at first. it takes time to learn to see the world as a parent, to note the sharp corners and high drop-offs and pinching hinges that populate one’s environment; to realize that an open compost bin is a wonderland just waiting to thrill – and/or slime – your baby, and that cat litter is way more fun than toys. i’m down with this stuff now. i can spot glassware at floor level like a programmed robot. but what i wasn’t prepared for was the range of motion and mobility the fruit of my loins would suddenly sprout with this new upgrade. not only does O want to go here and there, and occasionally pick something up or throw something down, and put things in his mouth…oh no. those were Oscar 1.0 features. those are sooo last season.

the Oscar 2.0 model is new and improved, and apparently thinks it’s made of space-age plastic. it likes to open and close, to take out and put in, to climb, and to tug, drag, and pull. it also likes to insert the things that would formerly have gone in the mouth into other orifices, like its nose and ears. preferably all at once. and fast. every cabinet and shutter and drawer in our house that is not tied down is being regularly slammed open and shut with gusto. crevices? crawled in. closets? breached. steps? climbed. socks? an offense to the 2.0 model’s manhood, and to be pulled off at every available opportunity.

i’m sure this is all very developmentally healthy, but it’s a little much at once, folks. and i’m starting to fall down on maintenance, and appearances.

Dave comes home, greets me, looks for the baby. no baby in sight. slight, muffled, metallic sound coming from under the oven.

“honey, where’s the baby?”

Oscar 2.0 pops its head out from the drawer under the stove, pots sticking out of its nose. it smiles, pulls a squealing cat out of one of the pots, stuffs cat back in, and disappears again. drawer bangs shut.

“oh, um, he’s playing, dear.”

Oscar 2.0 is eventually retrieved from under the stove. Dave notices the duct tape attaching its socks to its sturdy little lower appendages.

“honey, what’s with the duct tape?”

Oscar 2.0 does a cartwheel dismount from its father’s lap, removes fathers’ socks, scuttles to the fridge, and promptly inserts them in the lettuce crisper, beaming. Dave, bewildered, stares after it, looking unusually daunted.

“oh, it’s a developmental phase, dear.”

the Oscar 2.0 model is not only faster, fiercer, and completely fearless….it now comes with more caprice than the previous incarnation. Oscar 2.0 can laugh, cry, whistle, whinge, and express existential outrage all at once, frequently in response to the same stimulus. pick it up? it snuggles, and howls. put it down? it clings to your leg, and kicks it. all at once. it is an emotional kaleidoscope, a veritable encyclopaedia of human feeling unadulterated by such false constructs as consistency, or control, or even, say, memory. it is pure, this Oscar 2.0…pure will, pure delight, pure fun and pure madness.

i really like it, to be honest. i have no buyer’s regret…this Oscar 2.0 is worth every penny of my initial investment, even if the systems upgrade did sneak up on me without warning.

i do have one concern, though…

i seem to have gotten the German model by accident. the only truly coherent thing it says is “nein.” every time it’s unhappy, it’s “nein, nein, nein, nein”…and i could have sworn it spit “verboten” at me the other day when i went to steal its animal cracker.

does anyone know the German for “leave your socks on, sweetheart”?

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.

a year. a whole year.

Oscar, baby boy, you are one year old.

it feels dreamily like yesterday or maybe last week that i went into labour, mama Cheshire Cat sitting smugly through the evening’s book club, timing my contractions, breathing most cleansingly. all my earth mother zen flew out the window in the car on the way to the hospital, when i suddenly lost the capacity to sit without being ripped in two with excruciating immediacy. i was six centimetres dilated when we arrived. the rest – two hours, you were in a hurry, son – belongs to that other country that is labour, wherein i crawled outside myself, almost, beyond any capacity to ground or gather myself and i remember mostly your father’s eyes and your grandmother, my mother, trying to pray inconspicuously behind his shoulder.

then you.

you, Oscar, warm and crying and cheese-coatedly new…and breathing, breathing all on your own and i think it’s taken me a full year to really let out my own breath and believe that you are here and safe but there you were, wrapped and peering, a foreign creature older than time and more innocent than kittens, all in one. yourself. my own. nothing like me, little visible trace of me even yet in your blond, solid boy-ness, nothing like your brother yet so clearly your father’s child.

you are Other to me, a mysterious surprise who grows more and more enchanting all the time. i get to open you every day. i am amazed by your unfolding into a person, by your developing sense of humour, your sturdy implacability, your gentleness, your fierce, stubborn determination. and your trust. your trust, which has been there from the first moment they laid you in my arms. you looked at me, as if to say “qua?”…and then you relaxed, acceded, gave over. as did i, to the blue-eyed blond boy i’d never imagined, and have not since that moment been able to imagine myself without.

i love watching you learn. i love holding you snug against me as we read But Not the Hippopotamus for the seventy-third time, love hearing you hiss “sssss” when you are deeply pleased with yourself, love the smack of your fat little hand on my skin as you explore the terrain of my face without compunction. i love nursing you down into fluttering sleep, this almost-gone shadow of what already feels like your long-distant babyhood, the suck of your open mouth. i love the steps you are taking away from me, and the ones that bring you hurling yourself back into my arms.

i cannot think of anything better to celebrate than your birth, Oscar. you have brought us joy, your father and i, and a strange, disrupted peace that i would choose over all the free time in the world. you are loved, and you are good.

i wish you a lifetime of happy birthdays.

S over at Bull in a China Shop tagged me last night for the “real moms” meme.

Kristen started it, and has a great gallery of contributions up for perusal…among them, S holding her son close and tight in spite of puke, and Kelly‘s musings on the scars that mark her childrens’ births on her body. it’s a lovely, funny, sardonic and sweet collection.

and because real moms turn their kids into camera whores, you betcha, i thought maybe Oscar and i could take a whole crapload of photos today, see what came up interesting, and add our two bits to the collage.

but when O got up from his nap, and i dragged him into the big bedroom so i could put on pants for the photoshoot (never say i don’t get all glamourous just for you), he scuttled straight to the window. and for the very first time, he singled out his brother’s white urn from its quiet little resting place by our bedside.

so this is the photo i offer.

real moms sometimes have children you can’t see.

this meme goes out to all the mothers who don’t get tagged for things like this. the ones who’ve given birth but had no baby to take home. who sit on the sidelines of conversations about mucous plugs and back labour, with stories to tell but no room to participate. who have a little gravestone or an urn or just a memory in the place of a child. who have adoption papers saying “relinquish all rights…” or ultrasound photos but nothing more. or who have two smiling school photos on their desk, but really, inside, count to three when you ask “how many kids do you have?”

this is for all the real moms with children invisible to the eye.

Redneck Mommy and Catherine, i tag you.