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some things come easy.

it is fall again and the light is yellow and crisp and i swear i only brought her home yesterday but there she is, Josephine walking, tottering like a blithe drunk about the house, careening into everything faster than my hands can catch her.

she took her first formal steps, the first real replicable confident stutter from here to there, exactly on her first birthday. a true Virgo, fastidious and precise and on time. two weeks later, she is unstoppable, a whirlwind. she is delighted with herself. i am delighted in her.

it’s easy when thing line up tidy-like. smugness rises like cream, unbidden, unintentional. i have to slap myself.

i suspect that some poor lost Virgo – perhaps the part of me from which Josephine’s timeliness sprang – lurks under my Aquarian skin, trying to run a Prussian train line through the soup that is life. my inner Virgo wants to believe that someday all the books will not only be shelved but alphabetized, that the dishwasher will empty itself, that everything will go on schedule, that there will be an Answer.  all the things i just never made sense of in this big ol’ game of Go Fish, she’s been tallying, saving up, waiting for me to put in order.

this Virgo, she gets louder and more anxious every year. virgins are like that, i retort. she glares, haughty, above me.

but she forgets too easily, this Virgo. she lets herself believe that order=safety, that norms=virtue. she lets herself believe in the medieval laws of hermetics and falls prey to the mugs’ game of pride in random milestones, mistaking them for a promise that all will continue.

normal only means the bus hasn’t hit you yet.

normal is a trick of the mind, one that lets you believe yourself cossetted from the awfulness you glimpse now and then at the periphery of things. yet it is normal to have suffering come for you eventually, not only in the thud of mortality but in the hundred shocking ways a world can be swept from under you.

when you know this, and make yourself remember, nothing comes so easy. first steps – on a first birthday or months before or later – are a marvel, a quiet, private symphony unto themselves.

my Virgo, trapped eyeless under my skin, cannot see this. her lens turns only inward, tallying these small blessings gifted me by my children, and nodding yes, yes.  she believes she is due.
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each September for the past few years we’ve gone apple picking in the same orchard not far from the city; a wide, sloping place that veers down towards water, all small, twisty trees abundant with fruit.

there are few things in my adulthood i’ve done five years in a row…i have not stayed still long enough for that kind of consistency, ’til now.  but this local teacher-turned-farmer and his earnest operation of organic apples keep us coming.

Oscar’s first year in the orchard he slept against his father’s chest, cheeks like apples peeking out above the carrier. two years ago he was just big enough to ride on the little apple basket trolley without toppling. last year, he batted at the trees and filled the basket mostly with half-eaten remains of all the apples he tried, while i carried eleven-day old Josephine in her sling and tried to pick one-handed. this year, even my baby girl took a chomp at temptation, her cheeks shuddering when the tartness hit.

the first year, though, we went without children. a friend dragged us out in our crappy old station wagon, her energy buoyant enough to break through the cloister we’d imposed on ourselves those months after Finn died.  i was newly pregnant with Oscar, as fragile and closed as an eggshell, emotionally, but the apple-picking pleased me, comforted. the small trees and the low-hanging fruit were easy, the first thing in that long season of drastic change and adjustment that seemed to come without undue effort. we filled baskets, the sun shone, i smiled. and then we paid and drove away and our friend said i know the prettiest country road.

isn’t that how Deliverance starts?

we were playing Lucinda Williams on the stereo. raw, reckless, rollicking Lucinda, wailing I think I lost it, lemme know if you come acrost it, lemme know if i let it fall along a back road somewhere… the only song i seem to remember from the haze of bewilderment and grief that had been that summer of ’05.  our friend Christina, with pipes like a church choir, competed with Lucinda from the back seat. i droned happily in my three-note warble.

and then a bang and a metallic ripping sound. the car bumped gracelessly to a halt. the scenic red-dirt lane had torn the ass-end straight out of our vehicular lemon and we were a good few miles from nowhere without even cows to gaze upon our distress.  Christina sacrificed a belt to try to tie the necessary underbelly back onto the car, to no avail, and Dave plucked at a barbwire fence for the same purpose. i did nothing. i had, with the very first bang, gone under.

normal may be an illusion, but there are times the human brain can only sustain so much of its absence. i just moved continents, been airlifted and lost my hard-scrounged job all in the same breath, had a child and had that child die in my arms. but it was our poor old fugly station wagon – bought for a baby who never rode in it – that sent me off the rails.

i didn’t do much. you wouldn’t have known, to see me. i sat by a ditch, patting my bag of apples, still singing Lucinda Williams. but inside something had snapped, gone rogue.

the Virgo had been telling me all my life that if i just worked harder, tried harder, was better, things would work out. the universe, though, was seemingly expending all its energy thwarting my need for any sort of positive outcome or expectation of normalcy whatsoever. or that’s how it felt, then, at the side of that dirt road.

and so for a minute, i gave up. i dropped my head to my knees and breathed deep and jagged and stared into the red mud puddle between my feet and forgot, briefly, that i was verklempt and bereaved and hopeless and apparently cursed of god and Hyundai, both.  i picked up a shiny, crisp apple, fresh from the tree, and bit it.

my brain said, this is nice.

the Virgo heaved and gnashed her teeth. i heard her, vaguely, through my chewing. you are sitting in a mud puddle! lost in the backwoods! your baby died and you’re broke and your ridiculous life makes no sense at the moment! and you had such POTENTIAL! did i mention that tow truck is going to cost a fortune? and that you’re IN a mud puddle?

i looked at Dave, ten feet away, trying to clean the barb wire rust off his hands. i looked at Christina, fearless in the face of our sadness, who had befriended us when we had nothing to offer except need. i looked at my apples and decided i could walk back to civilization on apple power if i had to.

i thought, these will possibly be the darkest days of my life.  i felt almost eager, thinking it, delusional and free, like a glimpse into some other time usually veiled from my eyes. i watched the sun play on my hands and realized i was going to live through these rotten, ludicrous days, even if they didn’t come easy.
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states of grace never last, at least not for me. i told the Virgo to fuck off, and it was good. but she was back the very next day.

the places in me where she is woven deepest i still rise, indignant, at any sign of my own bad luck, any sign that i am again cast beyond the bounds of what i deem normal for folks to have to bear. i know better, and still i fall for it, the old line that i have somehow paid my dues and am exempt from future suffering.

someday, if we are lucky, we will all be old. and we will suffer. to be old is to ache, to lose one’s loves, one’s friends, one’s independence. i sometimes wonder if we have our goals straight.

but for right now, in this gift of my neglected functional body, and the healthy maelstrom of short legs that is my children’s sweet solidity and simple, easy development, i am replete. the Virgo be damned. i see blessings.

a year ago tonight, late in the dark last hour of the clock, i stepped out of my house and shut the door on a chapter of my life.

i had meant to stop there, on the threshold, and breathe deep. i had meant to note, in the night air, this is the last time i will ever be pregnant.  i’d meant to mark the momentous occasion, honour it, compose myself whilst glowing gracefully in the anticipation of my coming baby.

i don’t even remember leaving. i think i blew out that door like a lumbering, lumpen White Rabbit, mutters of I’m late, I’m late, for a Very Important Date interspersed with merciful Jesus, Dave, move yer ass! my water had broken with my cerclage still in, and as i’d delivered Oscar not long after arrival at the hospital, i was convinced this poor babe was poised to tear my cervix to shreds right in the car. never mind that the hospital is only five minutes from our house. i remember nothing of my last exit from my home as an expectant mother.

what i remember, instead, is the surprise of a long, steady, unhurried labour, marked by kindnesses and support and mercifully little one could call an emergency. i remember the cot brought for Dave so he could snore beside me through the quiet night, and capable hands and encouragement and the triangle of dark chocolate Toblerone i was allowed to sneak, fourteen hours in. i remember the OR lights above me and two doctors fighting between my splayed legs with the recessed stitch that had kept my baby in for months and didn’t want, in the end, to let go. i remember the thick, fibrous pages of the novel that kept me company in the wee, cramping hours, and the surprising solidity of the rocking chair’s varnished arm when suddenly, finally, in the early afternoon of the next day, labour finally announced itself familiar and clear.

i remember the last moments when i pushed her from me, the moments where the pain and fear and memory threatened to take me over but i surfaced and held and just for a moment i understood the beauty of a body bringing another body into the world. it took me three births to taste that, to glimpse the animal power and glory of those last fierce reserves from which babies slide, bloody and blinking.

mostly i remember her, the little squished face and shock of wet, black, waving hair, body red as a cherry popsicle. Josephine, daughter. born 10/09/08. my little countdown.

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last night, 363 days later, i nursed her before i fell asleep. i keep meaning to stop this nursing, this night nursing in particular.  she goes all day without me now, takes a bottle or a sippy cup happily, and at 20+ pounds has probably not needed a dream feed for months. and yet each night before i lay me down i find myself at her door, and i heft her away to the big bed and hold her close and nurse her quietly, just a few minutes more.

her first birthday – even before it happens – has ended up being a comedy of errors and happenstance, a milestone that will likely be no more marked by solemnity and reflection than the night i stepped out the door and into the first day of her life. it is the busiest week of the year for me at work, so we hijacked her cousin’s birthday party last weekend so as not to have to throw one of our own. klassy. and the battery charger for the fancy camera we bought so that the second child wouldn’t feel less photographed than the first? lost. camera’s dead as a doornail.  the homemade cupcakes i made last week when her grandparents were visiting, for the early semi-birthday celebration we actually made an effort with? looked like a pink poodle had shat on them, no exaggeration. i bought a cake today to bring to her daycare party tomorrow, and because of a restriction on chocolate at the day home and the limited selection the grocery store happened to have, it’s a blue cake, three days old, with Happy Birthday Posey scrawled on it in hideous red by an apparent illiterate, colour-blind house elf. Cake Wrecks is coming knocking. and possibly Child Services.

and yet, i know it doesn’t matter.  she won’t remember. and i will teach myself to forget. the things you think you should remember are never the ones that matter.

in the dark last night, her hands fluttered and came to rest against my collarbone, skin to skin. they are delicate hands, soft, with long, tapering fingers that she laces together just so. the night she was born, at six hours old, she lay in my arms with her tiny hands fluttering, and then wove the tips of her fingers together under her chin. last night, in the half-light of the nightlight, i watched her make the same sleepy, drowsy cathedral of fingertips. and i pulled her tight and whispered her name like a little song and marvelled that she has only been in my life a year.

happy birthday, Posey.  a lifetime of happy birthdays to you. one of these years, i’ll get it right.

suddenly, it is cold.

there is an old adage here that after Old Home Week, the mid-August local exhibition/horserace/parade extravaganza, summer’s over.  my mother likes to repeat these little kernels of local lore, intoning them like scripture, benedictions of wisdom our infidel ears might need to hear as we march round the calendar. i like to scoff in response, the taint of living away so many years bleeding through in my scorn for her small town liturgies.

but my mother must’ve paid off the weatherman this year, because after three weeks of unusually sweltering humidity the weather dropped ten degrees overnight the very day that Old Home Week ended. wham, bam, and goodbye and good luck, Madam Summer. the temperature’s continued to slide, until we’re left whiplashed and shivering in our suddenly unseasonal sandals.

i put away the kids’ summer clothes today, to make room for the woolies and long-sleeved things i’ve foraged for across town this week. Oscar was okay, mostly – he still has long-sleeved tshirts from last year, and sweaters that i bought a size too big, and his size 2 jeans are only just beginning to show signs of growing short. but Posey, my wee Posey, was suddenly looking distinctly urchin-like in her scanty little cotton frocks, chubby legs chilly and bare as the leaves hurry to turn.

she’s spent the summer in dresses. gingham and smocked and ruffled, all carrot-dribbled sweetness and light. they were mostly gifts and hand-me-downs, dainty things with puffed sleeves and tiny buttons down the back.  i remember looking at them lined up in the wardrobe last fall, bafflingly voluminous for the six-pound baby bird in my arms, and wondering how i’d ever find enough occasions to dress up one little girl in so many fancy things.

Posey solved that problem for me by having the fattest little baby thigh known to humankind. with her stumpy dumpling legs and the mushroom bubble of her cloth diapers, she hasn’t fit into any of the pants she owns since, oh, April. so dresses it was, day after day. for the park or the beach or nowhere at all, they became, simply, her clothes. they were easy and cool, and my fierce, smiley girl was adorable in her rumpled finery.

this change of seasons has caught me off guard. a baby’s outgrown clothes are not so hard to leave behind; the baby him or herself makes it clear that these soft little things once washed and folded and exclaimed over with such anticipation are now done, finished. they have had their day. their time is past, and straining snaps and too-short sleeves and too-tight legs announce it unequivocally, no matter how mama may sniff and sigh.

but with these wee dresses, it is only time and the season getting away on us. they still fit. her body has not yet left them behind. their soft folds and eyelet trim speak of this summer, my daughter’s toddling, cruising, bruising first summer, and i am bereft, have to leave that behind so suddenly, with only a folk proverb for warning. i hung them fresh from the line in the closet last week, pleasantly oblivious to the fact that they will never again flounce around the dimples of her knees.  i tried them with leotards, just to be sure; they looked like diaphonous hankies hanging above the wooly tights.

and next summer, when the weather finally warms again, they will be relics, too small, ridiculously so.  i will hold them up and marvel that she was ever this tiny.  and so today, i stroked them gently as i folded them away.

i have never been a fancy girl. i recently took to wearing mascara for the first time in my life; the black raccoon smudges it leaves are a novelty that makes me feel all womanly.  but mostly i’m a no-makeup & jeans soul, the sort who always imagined her longed-for daughter not in dresses, but overalls.

still, i longed for that girl. there is another old adage, not so local this time, that once haunted me. one crow sorrow, it rhymes, two crow joy. three crow girl, four crow boy.

the first year we moved home, the city was maggoty with crows, like a neverending episode of Hitchcock’s The Birds. and three days before my water broke with Finn, too early, already leaking, Dave drove me to the hospital for an extra cautionary ultrasound. on the way, i caught sight of a crow alone on the stark April branches by the water. my brain remarked on it, on the oddity of seeing one of the legion all by his lonesome, and the old rhyme began to play in my head. then two more crows swooped up and landed next to him. three, i told myself, three.

at the hospital, my OB found nothing wrong, no sign of fluid loss. and she told me my baby was a girl.

i thought about that one crow after. adrift in grief’s magical thinking, i looked to the trees for portents of what another pregnancy might bring. to this day, i hate the sight of a single crow.

the day we drove to another hospital in another city for the ultrasound that eventually revealed Josephine’s gender was also a spring day. there were buds on the May trees, and as we pulled into the hospital i saw a dark flapping out of the corner of my eye, and turned my head. two crows, birds on a wire by the big tree at the front of the instition, the one i could see out my window during the long months i waited there for Oscar to be born.

i looked for a third. then, horrified by my greed, my stupid hubris, my silliness, my brain clamped down on my eyes like a vise and shut them, literally. two. joy. two. joy. i repeated the mantra all the way up to the seventh floor. one should not be cavalier with the luck one gets. joy meant a baby still kicking, a heart still beating, an amniotic sac still sound. i told myself i did not care about gender.  i definitely did not care about dresses.  i wanted the joy of continued hope, of a cervix that showed signs of holding.

and i also wanted a girl.

for once, i did not have to adjust my expectations; i got my three crow girl. wish fulfillment, random luck.  i would’ve loved a boy, too, and deeply, but i got my heart’s desire. and with her a crateload of dresses, never looked for yet utterly perfect, girl-ness embodied. this summer, in the daily rotation of Posey’s little frocks, i lived my two crow joy in the tactile delight of tiny blue gingham dresses with apples embroidered on them, in pink confections with grosgrain ribbon. those days after days of little dresses were the physical embodiment of an old, deep dream, one that, after Finn, seemed too petty to even acknowledge.

it has healed something, this summer of silly frocks.

she has new striped leggings and little sweaters for fall, and hand-me-down long-sleeved onesies of her brother’s that i am happy to greet again, old friends from seasons long since committed to Rubbermaid storage. she will be a pint-sized tornado no matter she wears. but she looks taller in the little pants than she did in her dresses; she reminds me that these last vestiges of babyhood are slipping away from our house.  Posey’s clothes will not go into storage, to be saved for the possibility of another child someday. she is my last baby.

so today, as i smoothed each dress, a mascara-riddled tear snaked blackly down my face, with the bittersweetness that is the flip side of two crow joy. but i am smiling.

i hear it everywhere, popping out from headlines, referenced casually until it begins to smell of truth. and stink a little with the impotence and collective rot it creates.

a whiff of faint bewilderment, the fear of mortality and obsolescence. the thrill of feeling one has eaten from the prescient tree of knowledge, even if the tree is plastic, planted in sand.

our children will not be like us, it whispers. they are wired, and thus wired differently. they are beyond us, aliens of the future. sit back and watch the reckoning. wash your hands.

it is no Kahlil Gibran, this voice, cautioning acceptance and unconditionality. it is more Bradbury, laced with the pleasures and promise of the macabre. it tells us these children we’re raising are blasphemous offspring of the cultural collision of the human and the technological – beings whose integrated circuits are inherently foreign to our own, digital natives whose minds we will never entirely fathom.

in all this repeated discussion and dissection and fretting, there is one note missing.

yes, they will grow up in a digitized world. they play their games on screens, in many cases. they conduct entire relationships on Facebook. their cognitive synapses may fire slightly differently from those of us who grew up with only Candy Land. but if they are cyborg, oh my friends, do not fear.

they are no more so than we ourselves.
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if i invited you over for a playdate, if i sat you down on my couch with a coffee or a glass of water or a mimosa  -whatever your poison – and looked into your eyes and said, so, hey, i’m a cyborg…i suspect you might be taken aback.

cyborg. huh, your head might shrill, as you’d politely flatten yourself against my door, eyes wide and darting, looking to grab your precious babies and run for the hills.

she seemed so pleasant on her blog. barely batty at all… and she never even talked about Star Trek, let alone cyborgs. jesus. this is worse than an Amway party. is there an eject button here?!?

i know.

but if i say it here in this ether space where we are accustomed to interacting and performing our rites of friendship and social grooming…maybe the words will not seem so alien.

i am cyborg. and so are you. precisely because of this space.  we have evolved in our own lifetimes, into creatures of 20th century myth.
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the cyborg was never truly about technology.  we may not yet have our screens embedded into our retinae or curliqueue wiring connecting flesh to metal and plastic, and we’re still – inexplicably – bound to the keyboard and print text…but we all of us who live out parts of our identities in front of our screens, whose lives are rich with people we know and bare our hearts to and exchange ideas with daily in many cases yet have never, ever laid eyes upon? cyborgs, all of us, creatures of the integrated circuit.  and so is our parenthood.

our lives are couplings between organism and machine. our internal worlds are not circumscribed by the mere physical, and our external worlds – even and perhaps especially our days spent hands-on with the children we cherish – are not an existence solely of or in the body.  this world, wherein we write and speak and interface and connect, is always present or available on the internal screen of our minds. it is a room of one’s own, even if our houses overflow with toys and dishes and no space that is ours alone.

Donna Haraway wrote The Cyborg Manifesto more than twenty years ago, now.  her cyborg was, as she wrote it, a creature without origin and without innocence, resolutely committed to “partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity.” its existence breaks down the old dualisms of nature and culture, of public and private – it exists between, a hybrid.

as we do out here, in this ether. we write representations of ourselves that are partial, constructed…simply by the very nature of time constraints and audience, we cannot write ourselves whole. thus the “us” we speak through out here is an avatar, without innocence, aware of its origin as a narrative, a story told in once upon a time fashion.  we exist between the public and the private, all of us negotiating the boundaries of how these avatars interact and integrate with our flesh selves and the others in our lives. we connect. we interface. some of us pay a high price domestically for the space for self we carve out here, this intimate space where we are so often ironic and perverse.  the patriarchy, Haraway cautions, is threatened by the cyborg, its bastard child, unwanted issue. illegitimate offspring, she notes, are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.
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the cyborg mother, of course, ought to be a contradiction in terms. the mother image is organic, the original origin story. but the cyborg is contradiction embodied. and the cyborg mother lives firmly in the postdigital age that the voices of doom and essentialistic difference do  not realize has reached us. the digital age is as much a part of us as the technology of the telephone or the pencil. we have incorporated it into ourselves – our baby monitors, our Dr. Google, our youtube videos of our children or for our children, our networks of identity and friendship and expression and marketing. who we make of ourselves as a result will be different from the mothers we grew up with, indeed, as will our children be different from the 70s and 80s versions of self we once were.

but our children as aliens, morphing inexorably into creatures of a vaguely foreboding future we cannot conceive? nay. not to those of us out here already, living on the integrated circuit, connecting, living beyond the boundaries of our flesh and in it, holding those selfsame children by the hand.

now if only the cyborg as mother could just break down the pointless polarization of good mother and bad.
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what does it mean to you, the space to be connected, ironic, intimate, perverse? if it all collapsed tomorrow, this online world, what of yourself would you find amputated?

she’s been out now longer than she was ever in.

yesterday marked sixteen months since the day i found out i was pregnant with Posey. it was an eight-month pregnancy that felt like eighty. and eight and a half months later, i think i’m finally recovered-ish. send flowers.

they say we humans have a fourth trimester to pregnancy, the final one spent outside the womb thanks to the engineering clusterfuck of large brains and tender perinea.  i say four-schmore.

i’m more of a six-trimester mammal, myself.

both times i’ve come home from the hospital with a baby, it’s taken an entire pregnancy-length again for me and the offspring to begin to show signs of being human. the colicky infant and the feeding machine who doesn’t sleep more than three hours in a row are not functioning people, people.  they are still gestating, albeit perhaps in separate beds. they are creatures of the body, days dictated by routines of demanding bellies and sheer exhaustion and a lot of mindless wiping.  of everything.

the taller of the pair may occasionally engage in conversation and give the impression of being a thinking adult, but do not be fooled.  that is not thinking. that is just the habit of talking in complete sentences, which is hard to break even when one actually has nothing to say other than “i wiped vomit off my shirt seven times today.”

it gets easier after that fourth trimester, sure. but only after the full mirror pregnancy has been ticked off the calendar do i actually feel as if my body or my life are in any way my own.  slowly, my self creep back, at first distorted, hard to recognize. slowly, between six and eight months after the baby arrives, my sense of being utterly consumed, of being with child in a way even more total than during pregnancy itself, trails off…not with the bang of birth, but with a whimper.

one morning i wake up and notice that i’ve actually slept. all week. ’til an almost-civilized hour. and i go in to find my little baby laughing at her brother, who’s peering into her crib, and she’s watching him knowingly as if she’s more than cognisant of exactly what’s going to come next and i realize that our rhythms have shifted from pure bodily function to social patterns – that i no longer have an infant, but a very small, very sweet, watchful, fierce little girl.  in a baby body, but a baby body that rocks and crawls and explores and feeds itself whatever it finds on the floor, indiscriminately, and gets closer to independence every day.  she loves the cat. she has a sense of humour. she high-fives, and dislikes lentils.  her lip quivers when i tell her “no.”

and i congratulate myself and say, “hey! you! you had a baby!” and then i look around and know that it is done, survived, that long, brain-numbing road of extended gestation that seems to be my lazy, elderly arse’s response to infancy and colic and sleep-deprivation and nursing.  it is done, except for the nursing, and even that begins to wane, takes less precedence, demands little except a happy cuddle.

we are two now, almost fully. semi-civilized both, my baby girl and i each brought safely to ourselves.

the whimper that escapes comes from me.  and i do not know if it is relief or longing, for that strange half-life for two that will never come again.

Posey eating shoe. she's worth 16 months.

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i know not everyone seems to have these pitifully long elephantine gestations, in the sense that some of you bounce back into your jeans and your actual senses of self miraculous weeks after birth. i consider you robots amazing specimens. ;)

did you have that sense of being still utterly baby-consumed after birth? what was your mirror gestation length? and how did you feel coming out the other side?

on Sunday afternoon, at the park with the kids, my bracelet broke.

online friends made the bracelet for me shortly after Posey was born last fall. an ornate art deco clasp, and three strands of silver beading, each with the name and birthstone of one of my children. Oscar & Finn, April, crystals. Josephine, September, sapphire. it was gorgeous. and i cried when i opened the little package, because this bracelet made and sent by semi-strangers had all three of my babies’ names on it, the only thing in my possession linking the three so visibly.

it made me smile.

the strand that broke last Sunday was Finn’s. i scrabbled in the early spring grass, trying to contain the beads as they rolled brightly away and at the same time keep Posey from swallowing the ones i retrieved.  i found a few of the crystals, found the F, the two Ns. but the little square bead with the I escaped me. i got down on my hands and knees, traced the dirt with my fingertips. gone.

the strand of my broken child, always so elusive, broken. the wind blew my hair into my smarting eyes.

then i caught myself. i raised my head to the sharp gust and the dry leftover leaves skittering. he is not in a bracelet, i told myself. he cannot be lost again. he is everywhere, dust, in these leaves, in his brother and sister. he is written on you.  i stood up, spun my head around almost as if i expected to see him there, some little colt-legged shadow with a brown bowl cut.

hello, you.

i left that bead somewhere in that playground, lost like the child himself, relinquished to the world, the universe. it is there, somewhere, in that grass. i just cannot see it.

it is fitting, the bracelet perhaps more honest with its broken strand than it was before.  this is my family picture, three children, one floating free, without an I.  and on his birthday this year, i do not sorrow any more. where once there was a hole where he had been, a gaping wound, now time has left mostly love, indelible, stronger than death.

happy fourth birthday, my Finn…my wee one, my shadow baby, my son. i smile at you.

she jumps, our bouncing Josephine, all grins and glee and baby cackles.  it’s contagious, that laugh.  she’s a bouncing demon.

we held off on the Jolly Jumper until the up-down of her stout legs every time we grasped her hands made it clear that she was more than ready and would run off with a trampoline soon if we didn’t get her into something bouncy already.  now she gazes longingly at the apparatus from across the kitchen, trying desperately to scoot towards it.

she only crawls backwards. she is not deterred. yesterday she spun around, then slid across the floor until she was directly under the Jumper. she rolled over and beamed up at it, like a lover.

i had a Jolly Jumper too, one of the originals. i did not jump. there is a picture of me circa 1972 slumped over in the little seat, hanging from my mother’s doorframe. i look for all the world like i’d prefer to slit my wrists.

i mastered the withering stare early, it appears. the fact that i spent junior high banished to the hall, leaning against lockers with an eyebrow raised? destiny.

Oscar was like me, if less morose.

in his babyhood, he tolerated the Jumper as a place to sit, briefly, whilst mummy bustled about the hot stove or chopped things. luckily for him, my culinary ambitions are limited. the fact that he never used the Jumper for jumping didn’t seem terribly strange to me given the lore of my own disinclination; he occasionally gave a heart-hearted bounce but mostly saw the contraption as i did – a Baby Jail designed to keep him from interesting things like inspecting the inside of the cat dish or the laundry cupboard.

he’ll jump, i figured, when he’s ready.

ummm….he’s still not ready.

the poor kid is three, and he can’t jump. or won’t, i’m not sure which. he does this cute little half-hop wherein he shuffles his weight from one foot to the other, but even my mother-vision will not allow me to construe that particular action – adorable as it is, my mother-vision wants you to know – as a jump.  looks more like he has to pee, if anything.

we’ve been pretty chill on the jump front at home. about six months ago, we went through a momentary fit of laying things on the floor to jump over and hopping about the house, but that got old when we realized that Oscar was leaning back against the wall looking at us with exactly the same contemptuous eyebrow arch that got me sent out in the hall all those times in junior high. we were doing the bunny hop, he was listening to the Smiths in the corner. no go. we canned the jumpstravaganza.  we didn’t want to embarrass ourselves him.

lately though, Oscar’s started gymnastics, his very first organized class of anything, ever.  he loves it. it’s a toddler class, led by a fabulous British woman in her fifties who makes me think of Mary Poppins, and the little darlings run amok and sit on mats and learn to stretch and point their toes and climb and walk on a beam and, uh, jump off things. and on things.  and over things. jumping is big in gymnastics. it’s a basic skill, expected and foundational, on which they are intended to build.

we’re having a little trouble.  or rather, Oscar avoids the jumping stuff where he can or does his little i need to pee! hop off the trampoline without any of the other kids appearing to notice.  it’s no biggie to him, so far as i can tell. it’s me.  i’m having a little trouble.  i’m having to confront all kinds of childhood insecurities for which i have no coping mechanism other than the afore-mentioned eyebrow arch. gymnastics is stressing me out.

i figured one of the good things about having kids with an ex-athlete was that they’d have an even chance of being moderately coordinated, seeing as they weren’t going to get such bounty from my gene pool.  i figured these mythical, agile kids would surpass me in grace right about the time they started walking, if not before. so far, Josephine’s right on target, bouncing her way happily along the curve of averages to a toddlerhood of gymnastics prowess and a bright future as Tigger in the Ice Capades.

but Oscar’s looking more and more like me every day.

watching my kid struggle with things i struggled with, watching him flail and avoid and go circling off to climb through the rolly tube again rather than try to focus his physicality and do what just doesn’t seem to come naturally? shit, this is hard, people.  i don’t mind that he can’t jump.  i mind that watching him not jump, and trying gently to help him learn to jump, makes me feel like a sweaty-palmed bewildered gym class failure who could never even use the damn Jolly Jumper properly.

i don’t want him to feel that way, don’t want to indicate in any way that he should feel anything but mild interest in learning a new and useful skill.  a large part of me knows that he’ll jump eventually and probably just fine, thank you very much, and that me continuing to be chill on the outside and offer chances for him to practice are likely the best thing i can do to help.

so why do i want to lean against that toddler gym wall and raise my eyebrow and my collar and light up a smoke?  oh yeh, your kid jumps. mine? too cool. nothin’ to see here. (blows smoke ring).

sigh. maybe i’ll get Josephine to teach him to jump.

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have you watched your kids struggle through something that pushed your own buttons?  did you respond like an adolescent, too, or do you have, erm, actual helpful strategies i can try?

(and no drinking before gymnastics…that doesn’t count. i have to drive.)

a year ago, the only word combination he could utter was “no, mama” and its paternal equivalent. “bah” stood for ball, bear, book.

yesterday, we perched at the table and he piped up, “…so. this morning i wouldn’t let Daddy and Grandpapa play with my castle. i only wanted to play with Grandmaman. i took the helmet off the castle man and put it on backwards! haha. wasn’t that funny?!?!”

tomorrow, he is three. he inhabits a body that leaps and wiggles and reminds me of the cherubs of stone cathedrals come fresh into the world, round belly and perfect bum and dancing feet.  he is not tall for his age, yet to me somehow stretched beyond comprehension, this boy now. the baby is almost gone from his face.  in its place, eyes sweet with wonder and fierce in the sulk, an open, curious, willful, playful boy…an imp.

and i am consistently amazed and driven crazy and delighted and moved by him. he is a force, now, and reckoning with him sometimes takes all i have and i run dry on endurance and urge and push and snap at him to hurry up! or to be quiet! and i long to just lie down limp on the floor and rest for a moment from this barrage of need and demand, always changing, morphing and oh my god he will eat me alive, i swear, but then, sometimes there is grace and the patience his lovely, learning little soul deserves and i look into his eyes and see that he is still whole, unbroken by my petty flaws, and my heart crumbles with relief and terror and a love that would destroy worlds to keep him just as he is except i know his job is to ripen and become and oh, how i hope for him a life rich and rewarding.

he has a joker’s heart, a showman’s sense of audience, of timing.  on Saturday, we took him and his little cousins to the local annual Pinch Penny Fair for his birthday “party”, for face painting and a magic show. the magician took him up onstage, and Oscar gaped at the man, compliant but slackjawed, almost in trance, suddenly smaller than i’d seen him in ages.  until the applause started and he turned to the audience, awestruck by the sound. in his eyes, a light came on, a recognition, and for a second i saw him ageless and beyond me, soul exposed. and i thought, i see you, my son.

and i beamed up at him, reaching out my hand to steady him as he tottered off the stage in his little rubber boots.

then he turned into a tiger for the day and we had cake and i gave thanks for him, for the thousandth time these last three years.

happy birthday, big  boy.  my god, how i love you.