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before Posey was born, i wouldn’t have bet that i’d still be nursing her four weeks in. i would’ve hoped for it, rather like i hope for world peace and a flat stomach and the magical rebound of my ever-more-paltry retirement investments, but i’d given myself The Permission this time around. formula is not rat poison, i had repeated like a mantra over the last weeks of pregnancy. nobody else gives two shits what you feed your child, went my litany, and it ain’t their business if they do. i coached myself, prepped myself, stomped down the sanctimonious little voices inside my head. i’m all about the goodness of breastmilk, i intoned, but a little mental health is good too. i really was game to try breastfeeding again – i even bought me a big ol’ rocking glider to try to make it all delightful and comfy and such – but in my darkest heart, my expectations were low.

turns out nothing creates satisfaction like looooow expectations, friends.

Oscar and i had a slow, hard start to nursing, compounded by prematurity and colic and my inexperience. at six weeks old he was still on the breast for an hour out of every two, around the clock, and if he wasn’t sleeping (rare) or crying (frequent), he was nursing. despite reflux meds and the elimination of dairy (sniff!) and wheat from my diet, he suffered from diarrhea and was just generally miserable for the first few months of his life. and so was i. and i was too ashamed to admit it, especially after i spilled my sweet merciful jesus he eats twelve hours a day and i’m frayed and exhausted and overwhelmed Book of Job to an enthusiastic lactation consultant and got a bland “oh, that’s normal” and the sound of chirping crickets for my troubles. i thought, i’m weak and plugged on, until he was hospitalized for the diarrhea and he got a taste for their fancy formula and i never quite re-established my supply and so we started giving a few bottles a day and glory be, suddenly i could actually shower! and fold laundry! but the guilt was hot and heavy because i was a Natural Kind of Girl and so i nursed and bottle-fed in a strange tango until over time it all became easy and normal and colic left the building and i stopped feeling like a stressed-out failure. in the end i nursed him until he was fourteen months, but only first thing in the morning and last thing before bed. that, i loved.

i may enjoy a little self-indulgent self-flagellation as much as the next blogger, but i wasn’t gonna go through all that again. hence The Permission. my baby would get breastmilk for exactly as long as procuring said breastmilk was a sane experience, and no longer. no guilt. happy mama, happy baby, blah blah blah. and i tried, i really did. i gave express permission for Posey to be topped up with formula a few times in the hospital, when jaundice hit and my milk still wasn’t in, and when she came home barely able to wake to nurse, we tried a few bottles to get her through. but she wasn’t hugely interested. this little girl wants boobies…and she’s a more efficient nurser than Oscar was even at four months old, so the experience isn’t such an endurance run each time. therefore, i’m readjusting my expectations, and occasionally fighting off the odd sensation that i’ve failed at giving myself permission to fail.

the only real problem with breastfeeding – raw nipples and gloriously alluring nursing bras aside – is that my mind wanders when my hands can’t. i’d forgotten the stasis of it all. i’ve never mastered nursing lying down, or hands-free, and until Josephine can hold her head up, it’s pretty much a hands-full job for me. and i’m not a tv person…so i sit, withering on the vine, thinking. it’s dangerous, especially in a state of sleep-deprivation. my brain flits, making grocery lists, trying to ignore dustbunnies, composing posts that i know will never be written because i’ll have forgotten them by the time i actually can free up two fingers to poke at a keyboard. i mostly pass the time by gazing at my newborn, but even if this breastfeeding relationship is thus far pretty successful and sane, the gazing itself feeds neuroses. i obsess while gazing, engage in flagrant flights of fancy…imagining what the tiny squashed-tomato face in front of me will morph into with age, whether her eyebrows will darken, if her snub nose will grow pointy like my own, whether that double chin is for real or just hiding what will someday be a perfectly reasonable neck. stick legs, bald spots, ear fuzz, gummy grin, monkey toes…in the dark hours of the night, when her sweet little maw gapes insatiably, my tired brain fixates on the surreal dysmorphias of infancy and worries that my child will grow up to be a circus geek.

i know better. when Oscar was born, he had no eyelashes – his newborn peepers were bald as little eggs. i fretted. i like eyelashes, have a definite aesthetic bias in that direction. i feared my child had lost the genetic lottery and would have to suffer through life with a gaze unfringed, like a plucked chicken. this bothered me more than i let on, and every nursing session – twelve eternal, mind-numbing hours a day – i sat pinned and half-unhinged, inspected the infant Oscar minutely for signs of impending eye fluff. eventually they came, his lashes. eventually it settled, my mind.

but all these hours of feeding spent peering at this tiny face, these funny wee toes? they’re a lot for a fertile imagination to bear. perhaps this time around i ought to pony up for cable tv.
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would cable actually help? those of you who’ve spent hours feeding babies through the years…how did you pass the time in your own head? is my fixation with my offsprings’ aesthetics during periods of prolonged exposure just a weird little tic unique to me?

the last day of September already.

this month brought her to us, and its close makes me sentimental, wary, resistant…as if the turn of the calendar might make her vanish, too, ephemeral, something only dreamed.

perhaps it is because she is my last baby, and i know this smallness will never be granted me again. perhaps it is because she looks a little like her eldest brother, fuzzy brown head, one eye half-cocked and peeking, and i am still and forever raw and fearful, over-protective. perhaps it is simply because it is autumn and the leaves are falling, melancholy and woodsmoke in the air. perhaps i am a mess of hormones, is all.

before she was born, i’d say quite happily to anyone who would listen that i’m not really a baby person. i love the age that Oscar’s at, love the interaction and the playfulness and the language and the give-and-take of learning limits. what i remembered of O’s infancy was mostly the months of colic and my own exhaustion, my sense of helplessness and bewilderment.

i forgot, though, that in those moments i still felt the magic of his newborn-ness, still mourned the passing of his two-week and four-week and six-week milestones, because i knew they would never come again.

my daughter will be three weeks old tomorrow. i think we have thrush, and the fatalist in me is poised to welcome colic like a bad party guest once her due date rolls around. and yet, if i could freeze these days, stay here in this weary, blurry, blessed baby state where her head smells milky and sweet and her small body curls into me at all hours, hot and soft and mewling…oh, today i would.

i didn’t realize he’d suddenly seem so HUGE.

i didn’t realize how ambivalent i’d feel about that, about his seemingly shocking catapult leap from my baby to this…boy. this boy, this big, solid, willful boy with a sweet streak who’s coping with the arrival of his sibling relatively gracefully, really, but also bringing out the big guns of no and i can’t hear you mama and i’m not going to sleep past 5:45 am nyah nyah nyah thank you very much, ma’am so that my exhausted brain sometimes clamps down on him more sharply than it ought, labelling new behaviors manipulative where really, i can see how they make sense, how they’re a reasonable use of the tools in his arsenal given the upheaval around this place in the last two weeks.

i just didn’t know that, looming over the frail stick limbs of his newborn sister, my boy could seem foreign, could trigger my mama bear protective response against him. ouch. he was here first, says my heart. she’s so breakable, it counters in the same breath, a house divided.

and still he trots over in the morning cooing “my baby!” and even if the proffered kiss is not for me and this decentering has us both a little shaken my heart warms to see him take it all in stride as best he can, facing the world with his chin out like he does, my sunny kid with the hands like meathooks. i marvel at how those paws got so big without me even noticing, each day an increment until the whole escaped me and i wonder if he isn’t secretly sixteen already and i’ve just failed to keep up?

then i stand back and look and am shocked to realize, he’s still little too.

both of us are wandering a strange and tilting path these days, negotiating a family structure in which our roles have shifted, been altered forever. and a part of me longs for space alone with him, not my firstborn but still my first in so many ways, my little boy, my O, my Other. something about the change leaves me with a nagging feeling of anxiety, like in this new completeness and contentment i’d overlooked or undersold the whole that was Oscar and i, bargained it off permanently, irrevocably. in a sense, maybe i have. but then i remember that he has always shared that space of the whole with shadow siblings, his elder brother gone but so present in Oscar’s early days, this always-wanted second – third – child hoped for from the beginning. my guilty heart breathes a sigh of relief, and reads from the Second-Time-Around Parents’ Handbook, Standard Version…what Oscar is to me has not been changed by Josephine…only the lens through which i can focus on him, see him. and it will take time for that to feel balanced again. repeat. catch self. blink back tears at sight of elder child running across lawn like young gazelle, pointing out how fleeting all this is.

we have time, it seems. it seems they will keep growing, these miraculous creatures, the two of them.

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i never really had a brother, though. i have two half-brothers, both younger, one so much so that i was his babysitter and doted on him when they visited in summertimes…but distance made them more like cousins than siblings. i remember some twinges of jealousy when the younger was born…but they were the jealousy of a child who does not have a father feeling replaced by a sibling who will. i do not think i know what it is to be Oscar right now. nor do i have any real expectations of his relationship with Posey. all my female friends growing up – almost without exception – were eldest daughters. all my significant long-term relationships with men – which, admittedly, can be counted on one hand – have been with onlies or with the babies of the family. so i’ve got no model from which to imagine a relationship between a brother and sister, especially one where there’s only a couple of years between the two. and i wonder…is this like having a cat and a dog, or two birds of a feather? will they play together? like each other? drive each other crazy? be there for each other when Dave & i (knock wood) grow old?

i know only the two of them, as individuals, will work out the answers. and yet brothers are such foreign country for me that i cannot imagine anything beyond today, beyond the curly blond head bending to kiss the tiny dark one, and the endless refrain of “is she big enough yet, mama?”

tell me. tell me of brothers and sisters.

my Posey girl.

you came home yesterday, four days old.

we were greedy, all a-clamour for early release, but by late Friday we had to admit that you had the orangey glow of an aging Beach Boy. you wore it with grace, kiddo, but had to spend 36 hours on the little tanning bed in the NICU. jaundice is an exhausting ordeal for a small body, and you stopped eating so well…started dropping off before you’d even begun to feed, became impossible to waken no matter how we tortured your wee toes. your pixie face stayed still, lips crenellated in a pucker like an old smoker. i missed your bright bird eyes, Posey.

and so we detoured into the bsheeeez-bhump rhythm of the breast pump and the measuring of tiny gains and losses – in milk production, in your less-than-six-pounds body weight, in rare moments of hospital sleep unbroken by call bells and feeding schedules and new roommates wheeled in at 4 am. it is an old story for us, your dad & i, true…but you are not your brothers, little girl. i dared hope, with you. you seemed so solidly, snugglily healthy at the root of it all that i found myself daydreaming of just running you out the door of the place. the great escape, with my pint-sized Sundance Kid.

i was too cocky, Posey.

we brought you home still lethargic, but free. you dozed through yesterday afternoon, though you woke to feed and suddenly, magically, were nursing like a champ. your brother welcomed you with pride and delight, kept bouncing back into the room to check on you, to kiss you, to tell you to wake up. the cat ignored you, except for one good smelling. i read you and Oscar a bedtime story beside his crib, my arms full, heart full. and then i took the time to bathe my stitches and put away gifts and oh, i was a fool, thinking this ain’t so hard, two kids.

you woke at midnight. screaming. you screamed whenever your mouth didn’t have some kind of nipple in it, and sometimes when it did. we fed for three hours straight, my milk just in…when i gave out, your father tried a bottle. and still you screamed, tiny girl. i was wrong in my early assessments of you as a quiet soul: when pressed, you put Yoko Ono to shame. but i hated seeing you pressed, Posey. you are so small, so new, for pain. holding you last night, unable to comfort or cure, i realized us as truly separate beings for the first time. and i dreamed fitfully in the rocking chair, spinning dragons to slay, heart broken with the truth that you are only nominally mine to guard, that at the core of things, i am helpless. like your brothers, daughter, your skin is your own, not mine.

i worry, though. about both of us, about the months to come. it has seemed so easy with you, ’til now. and i am wary, suddenly, of the prospect of colic, again, of the memory of my own despair in that long four months of crying and exhaustion. i know one night does not make things fore-ordained. i know too, very well, that there are far worse things than a colicky baby. i am shamed by my own dread, Posey. i am sorry, too. because holding you, warm and soft and feather-light, through the nights for a few months? all those long days i wanted you and hoped for you, i would have taken that. i will do my best to remember.

today we went back to the hospital for more blood tests, for a weight check…and the jaundice is creeping back as you lose weight from all that pain and crying. we got a prescription against the reflux i suspect is causing your misery; we’ve tried desperately to wake you all day, to feed you, to tire you. we’ve failed. but we are ready for another night, Posey.

welcome home, love.

she will be Posey, at least here and for as long as Oscar struggles with the letter J.

her name is Josephine Eleanor Maud…the Josephine for Dave’s brother who died 19 years ago this September, the Eleanor and Maud for my grandmothers…with Maud also, smilingly, a nod to Maud Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables, the child’s birthright as an Islander whether she likes it or not.  ;)

she is tiny for such a big, serious name…6 lbs, 4 oz, 18 inches long.  she is fierce, bright-eyed, not yet 37 weeks but looking around, seeking, sticking her tongue out.  she has her father’s pointy chin, Finn’s fuzzy dark hair, Oscar’s platinum eyebrows.  my mother swears she has my hands, and that mine once fluttered as hers do, little sparrows, when i fed.  she latches hungrily, doing her best.  i gaze at her with wonder, with disbelief.

she came at 4:12 this afternoon, crowned her way into the world after a long night and a stitch that took a trip to the OR with me tits up, two doctors crammed between my open legs, tugging, to remove.  we almost went for a c-section then, at only 7am.  i am glad we didn’t.  this was the birth i’d hoped for…humane, unrushed.  second-degree tear, no biggie: overall, the experience was healing.  i am grateful and relieved…and proud, quietly proud.  i faced down a lot of fear today, felt the edges of the panic when the epidural wore off in transition, fought through.  i remembered the things many of you had offered, held them tight.  i crushed Dave’s hands and remembered why i was there.  my doctor was there with me, and good, good nurses.  i was safe.  i didn’t even care that it was a Wednesday.

my last baby, this girl.  tonight, i lay down my spent, sore body and know that i am lucky.

welcome, Josephine, wee Josephine.

um, i am heading to the hospital.  nine hours before scheduled cerclage removal.

my water broke.

thanks for all the love that has brought us safe thus far…will keep you posted.

September has come, it is hers
whose vitality leaps in the autumn
Whose nature prefers
trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.

– Louis MacNeice

oh September, you’re a tease.

you’re there, just behind the curtain, waiting.  there’s a crispness to the air, suddenly, and it promises sweaters and lined pages all new and clean and the smell of apples and the sour beer of homecoming weekends.  for a moment today i felt it, the call of fall, and it stirred me and something sang out and my step was light and purposeful in beliance of the body i lug around these days mashed into too-small clothes, belly jutting, hips giving way to gravity.  for a moment, i felt at home in myself and in the time-space continuum, because it was autumn and i could smell it on the wind and it was good.

then i loaded myself into the car without air-conditioning, the car that had been sitting basking in the sunshine, and even before i got to the doctor’s appointment all the autumn was gone from my world and i was sweaty and lumpen again and it was me i was smelling.

but you reminded me, September, you reminded me of the season on the wing and the short, bright days coming and for all i may have said about September birthdays suddenly i feel just right about it all.

i am sharp with hope, glassy and jagged, trying to be patient.  so much uncertainty, still.  so much hubris to believe it will all unfold as seasons do, expected and then brought to fruition, natural as the leaves falling.  but this season ahead, i know.  it is mine, has been since i can remember, the one in which i am most myself.  and that old intimacy gives me the oddest comfort in all this anticipation and lurching hope and excitement and trepidation.  fall, i lie to myself.  i am simply preparing for fall.

if i could knit, i would make her a little hat, to wear when we walk in the yellow leaves together.

yesterday morning, about 4:15, i woke up with a start.

heartburn.  pee break.  adrenaline.  chomped down a few Tums, had some water, tried to quiet my mind, to plump the pillow and slide back into sleep.  no chance.  got up and watered all my plants instead.

nesting?  nah.  first day of a week-long writers’ conference.  Ann-Marie MacDonald, live and in the lovely,  sardonic, talented, like-to-go-drinking-with-her flesh.  Carol Bruneau and Anne Simpson leading faculty workshops, in intimate groups; real live agents and publishers sharing advice.  peers – or rather, People Who Are Not Really My Peers as They’ve Already Written Novels – to share work and consort with.  all at a gorgeous resort, twenty minutes from my house, with fantastic food.   basically, candyland for anyone who aspires to be a wordsmith.  or who likes chocolate cake and good vocabularies.  since i found out in late July that i’d been granted a bursary to attend this shindig, i’ve been drooling…and intimidated, but mostly drooling.  looking forward to this has given me a focus other than the coming baby to set my sights on, to fantasize about.  and so yesterday morning, i was just all atwitter with anticipation.  i figured.

the first day of the conference saw me away from my house from 8 am to 10 pm, a first since long before the whole bedrest epoch began.  i came home exhausted but delighted, full of ideas and stories and a dessert so rich and high in my gorge i considered writing it its own poem.  i did jot out a few scenes on my actual topic, and fell into bed weary and richly pleased, grateful for this opportunity.  proud of myself for pushing myself to actually try such a bold thing as running in these heady circles.

about 4:30 am, i woke up with a start.

heartburn.  pee break.  adrenalin.  and a weird, non-rhythmic dull ache in my lower belly.  swallowed the usual suspects, tried the whole sleep thing again, gave up.  got up, did a couple of loads of laundry, folded all the baby sleepers, organized our finances.  no longer all atwitter with the first-day jitters, i forced myself to actually take stock of my state of being.

nesting?  um, i think so.  i am not a morning person.

i was hanging curtains – quietly – in our bedroom at 5:55 when Dave turned a bleary eye on me and muttered, “that’s a sign of labour, you know.”

yep.

33 weeks, 4 days.  still too early, but not so early that there’s significant long-term risk to her if she comes…just a rough start, wee thing, and possible complicated weeks in the NICU.  they will no longer stop labour if it starts in earnest.

the dull ache subsided about 9:30 am, in the midst of the writing workshop’s group feedback session.  i had to skip a session of the conference later in the day for this week’s appointment with my OB; cervix short, soft, thinning.  it appears ye olde cerclage stitch is letting go…or at least a loop of it has already.  and if i have any contractions or further aches at all, from here, i’m to go in and we’ll take just take it out.  i may be fishing-line-free sooner than i’d imagined.

or not.  the way my body’s been cleaning itself out, the way it feels like it’s gearing up without me, i’d guess yes.  except i’m usually wrong.

oh world, you clever little trickster.  sure, this is the only week out of the past six months when i’ve actually got other plans that don’t revolve around gestating.  is it really necessary to remind me of my small, snivelling place in the universe by threatening my still rather itsy-baby baby with imminent arrival when we’ve come this far?  is it truly that entertaining to deprive me of sleep right when ye olde brain is actually on call for regular all-day usage for the first time since, um, March?  must we play this little maybe-we’ll-go-to-the-NICU game when Oscar’s sitter is actually on holiday all next week and Dave’s dad’s in the hospital, rendering Grandmaman unable to come to babysit?  seriously?  you’re funny, world.  i get it.  i don’t run the circus ’round here.  you’re the boss, and i salaam to your charming sense of humour.

but could we just wait ten more days, or so?  September is such a lovely month for birthdays, i hear.  and Ann-Marie MacDonald has a reading Thursday night at the library.  it’s gauche to break your water at the library, world.  got it?

please. let her stay safely put.  or at least let me sleep, while i practice trusting my body to do what it needs to.

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this whole nesting thing – which goes waaaay beyond my usual OCD issues regarding tidiness – still appears to be having its wanton way with me.  i just sorted a bunch of outdated files.  my recycling?  you could eat off it.

i’ve never had this before, not really.  for those of you who have been similarly possessed by forces of frantic evil…is there any truth to the rumour that this is a harbinger of things to come soon?  what was the time lapse for you between the onset of Stepford Wife symptoms and the arrival of bebe?

somebody tell me a month, ‘kay?

(and then shoot me when six weeks from now i’m still pregnant and eating my words AND my screen, and the world is cackling bwah ha ha ha ha.)

just before bed, every night, with Oscar all cozy under his blanket and his baby doll and stuffed rabbit in his arms, we read Guess How Much I Love You or Goodnight Moon or some other board book with little animals heading to bed. the Boynton one if he’s particularly giggly, the “goodnight little mouse” one if he’s been sad and needs a little extra last bit of sweetness to carry him off to sleep.

tonight, though, i left the animals behind, went for a slightly bigger book, thinking we’d change it up a bit, read something we’d never read before.

this moment of parenting genius didn’t precisely result in a bedtime story, per se, but in Oscar’s mother’s total breakdown into a hulking, gasping, weeping mass of snivelling snot.

i tried to read him The Giving Tree. aloud.

there was snorting and nose-wiping, then whole pages read in hoarse whispers with long pauses between sentences as i attempted to collect myself. then outright sobbing and honking. night night, honey. mummy’s just going to go bawl/collapse/slit her wrists now. a comforting picture, i think. just what the toddler set needs before sleepytime.

i knew better. the very first time i read The Giving Tree was to a class of kindergarten kids. i was a green young childcare worker who’d never seen the book before, but thought the line drawing of the tree on the cover compelling. i picked it off a shelf, perched in the middle of a semicircle of four year olds and proceeded…and then collapsed into a sobbing heap halfway through, gulping “and the tree…blubber…heave…loved the BOY!!!” until little hands were reaching out to pat me and mercifully, the damn story was over.

apparently the fifteen years in the interim haven’t toughened me up any.

it’s a confusing book. it troubles me. the tree in its welcoming vulnerability breaks my heart, and the presentation of the boy – who is “the boy” throughout, though he becomes an old man before the story is ended – seems intentionally pitiless, leaving room for one to wonder if perhaps if the tree hadn’t been so goddam selfless if the boy might have treated her better in the first place. i have never figured out if Silverstein meant it as a paean to the love that marks parenthood at its best, or a cautionary tale about sparing the rod…or even if it might not be about parenthood at all, but about love and forgiveness and human-ness in general. the story is flawed, i think, but i cannot figure out exactly where. and yet, in the way it encapsulates what it is to love and the need to love, the satisfaction and sorrow in loving for its own sake, it is also one of the most melancholically beautiful books i have ever read. i bought it for Oscar for his first Christmas and inscribed it so, though i knew we were years from reading it together.

we are, apparently, still years from reading it together, unless i want to spring for therapy for post-traumatic-bedtime-syndrome.

what i want to know is, if you’re familiar with the book, what do you make of it? can you actually read it aloud without melting into a puddle?  if so, are you simply made of stone or are there other books you can’t get through without boohooing like a faucet?

i think tomorrow we’ll return to the Boynton books. or maybe Long Day’s Journey into Night, or something cheery.

we leave early tomorrow morning for Halifax, for the next installment in the Miss Cervix Universe 2008 pageant, the continuing saga.

this time we’re aiming for a daytrip…a zoom there, zoom back operation, wherein Oscar will remain with his sitter for the day and be picked up by Nannie for supper if we’re not back yet.  simple.  concise.  no worries of vomit in the backseat, no eight hours strapped in a carseat for the little monkey, no naps to time with the ultrasound appointment.  all good, we think.  easier on everyone.

and we should be home by bedtime at the latest, to tuck him in.

but i have this packed suitcase that i’m bringing with me just in case.  just in case they keep me, hospital bedrest, because we are rounding on the dates where that becomes a possibility and it has happened twice before and both times, somehow, it was still a shock.  my mind reels to think that suddenly, like fingers snapping, i might not be here for months, in this house.  i might not be here to see that the laundry currently in the dryer gets folded, ever, that the paper towel gets replaced, that my plants don’t wither and keel over dead.  i might not be here to sing O to sleep at night, to snuggle him close in the mornings, to stuff his daycare bag and put away the winter clothes when summer finally comes and make sure we have that oatbran cereal because he looooves it.  nothing life or death, these things i’d miss, these things i do.  and it’s only just in case, i have this suitcase…it’s only just in case.

still, i think he knows.  or suspects.