cribchronicles.com

the conferences were a success, thank you muchly. we wrapped the last session by 1 pm this afternoon, hugged the world’s nicest webcast pioneer (and his lovely wife) goodbye, and made it downtown, O & i, for the start of the annual Run for the Cure, the Canadian run against breast cancer.

this is the third year that my mom and her friend Henry and i have walked the course together. Oscar’s been with us every time…the very first year, i was only a little pregnant with him. last year, he slept almost the whole way. this year, he was good company, fascinated, smiling and waving, toddling about beforehand trying to give all the dogs there a drink from his sippy cup.

i was happy that we finished up all the work stuff in time to go…i wanted to walk for Whymommy, as part of her team. and for my grandmother, my dad’s mother, who died in 1988. and like i said last year, for Oscar. in hopes that he will never walk alone in this run, this tradition of ours, in the throng of white and pink tshirts wearing a sign – like so many today that made my eyes blur, suddenly, with tears – that says “for my mom.”

and then, in the midst of a busy weekend in the midst of busy week, at a time of year which smells of schedules and three-ring binders and the promise of untold work to be done, there was an afternoon.

outdoors, in the fickle sun.

in the open air, crisp and salt from the incoming tide.

Oscar and three generations of his forefathers, as they brought my eighty-seven year old grandfather’s vintage 1974 jet boat to ground for the winter:

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i have been waterskiing behind my grandfather’s boat since i was eight years old…its vinyl snap-on cover is cracked now, and the sky blue hue has faded and yellowed a little. maybe there will be another summer, a gift, unwarranted, where i will gasp and submerge myself chest-deep in the chill water and sink back, catch my balance, and call “hit it!” across the forty feet of rope and the echo of the harbour, and my grandfather will gun the engine just so, just the right speed to drag me from the water on one ski like Atlantis rising, seaweed dragging from her ass, arms akimbo and taut with strain, and then i will be up and buoyant and fast, like flying, and we will weave across the water, that old man and i, together in this dance he taught me, this one athletic skill i possess. maybe there will be one more time. maybe.

but even if, my grandfather is eighty-seven. Oscar will not learn to waterski from him. and there were tears in my eyes as we watched from the cliff this afternoon, O and i waving, my grandfather chewing on his cigar as he and Dave towed the raft to shore for the end of the season.

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not far from my grandfather’s cottage is an apple orchard. we now have twenty pounds of apples sitting atop our freezer, looking for something sugary to belong to.

all little boys, i think, should have an afternoon in an apple orchard.

O rode in that wagon, and chased it, and chased his father, and patted the apples, and licked a few, and chased the wagon some more. then hitched another ride.

i was fascinated with what captured his attention. the apples on the trees, or the trees themselves? no time for them, even when i lifted him high into the branches. he was all about the wagon, all about the baskets, and putting apples in and taking them out. one tree over, at one point, was a family with a little girl of three or four…and unlike O, she was all about the apples and their colours, about the search for the perfect specimen of fruit. both of them were laughing, both sundappled, both delighted, each with their separate, age-appropriate enterprises. and i was thinking back to my grandfather’s boat and the weight of this maybe being the very last year, when i realized that even if we come back to the apple place next fall, it will be entirely different too. because Oscar, by next September, will be a wholly different child, and will perhaps have no time for the wagons, or for carefully emptying apple baskets. he will not remember today.

but i will, all of it.

with every season, pass things we will never do again. but this fall, this September, he is most indeed my honey…part baby, part boy, all sweet.

those of you who live in Canada probably have heard, unless you are currently hibernating under rocks that shelter you from all media input. those of you who don’t live in our fair former dominion may not be surprised by the news even if it is news to you, since we’re all kinda hippies up here in the socialized medicine Great White North, after all. or something like that. except Alberta.

Canada’s 2006 census results came out yesterday, and the nation – or at least its media – is abuzz. it’s just not sure over what, precisely. shall there be celebrations? wailing and gnashing of teeth? general Canadian awkward politeness and obsequious expressions of tolerance? probably all of the above, from strange bedfellows.

in Canada, the married folk over the age of 15 are, as of this year, for the first time outnumbered by single folk over the age of 15. and the “nuclear family is in dramatic decline,” according to the same stats…with married couples with children being the only family grouping to experience a drop in numbers during the five years since the last census. the Cleaver model is apparently on the wane, at least as compared to same-sex family groupings, commonlaw family groupings, DINKs, and lone-parent families.

i preen for a moment, feeling terribly avant-garde. thinking me & Dave oughtta get married so as to maintain our cool, our separation from the herd, since all these unmarrieds are clearly just tryin’ to copy us. ;)

in seriousness, though, i don’t know what to make of all this…of what marriage means today, of what the shift signifies, of what’s really happening behind all these demographic slices and categorizations. are we realizing Trudeau’s vision of a just society, that vague rhetorical vision of diversity and equality in pluralism, or morphing into Sodom and Gomorrah? tea leaves can be made to tell almost any story you want them to. and if you squint your eyes up right and peer into the future of the Canadian family, these stats can probably speak to and support every single pluralistic instinct you or i possess, and every single reactionary prejudice that exists within us, too.

i giggled a bit when i realized that i, tied by sweat and bond and love and hope and word to my partner and to our family, count as single by the statistical definition. fair enough, by the strictest interpretation of the term…but surely there’s a problem somewhere with that definition, with the binary of choices it implies? i giggled again, more nervously, when i realized that much as i’d be pleased if our particular version of family were common enough that O would not be stigmatized by the indifference Dave & i have towards formal marriage, the preponderance of common-law families and lone-parent families doesn’t necessarily reflect a society of Bon & Daves. it reflects a whole mishmash of people, at multiple waystations on that path of commitment and responsibility that Dave & i (and the official “married” party line) consider our family to represent. others, of course, are on their own, different paths, entirely.

and there’s the rub. because i didn’t giggle at all when i acknowledged that i wince with what can perhaps best be described as class distaste each time i discover that a cousin or a half-sibling, much younger than me, with no completed education and a minimum-wage job, is pregnant (as seems to be happening a lot lately and giving my old-school, elderly “where did i go wrong?” grandfather heart palpitations.)

having grown up an immediate family composed of my mother, my grandmother, and i, i’m inclined towards a non-traditional definition of family. yet despite the relative glass house of my own upbringing and chosen cohabitational arrangement, i cringe a little at all these whispered announcements within my own personal extended family. because even if we all fit into the “new configuration of families” rising in numbers on the StatsCan charts, and even if we’re all blood, their choices make me uncomfortable, faintly patronizing, and worried. and maybe…if i’m honest…just a little envious. because for all i cannot imagine having made the last three years of my life – dramatic and traumatic as they’ve been – work when i was 20, or with any of the treat-of-the-month guys i knew when i was 20…it would have been nice to have found the sense of purpose motherhood’s brought with it earlier in life.

the only real arbiter of whether a family “works” is time, and these young relatives of mine may rise to their occasions and create happy, productive lives for themselves and for their children. i hope they do. but it’s hard to accept that not everyone who shares my census box doesn’t actually want to copy me, doesn’t see my version of subversion (too much education, underpaid work, proud and stringent fiscal independence, and the choice of partner – and my children’s father – as the most important choice in life) as the be-all and end-all of how to live. who wouldn’t want to be sparklingly original like me, i think?

and then i laugh at myself, and wonder if Canada doesn’t do the census every five years just so we citizens can have a Rorshach test in which to view our reflections. it appears, married or not, that i’m as traditional and conservative as June Cleaver and buttered rolls. and my own little version of the nuclear family, whether StatsCan is quite ready to recognize us as such or not.

Oscar tried corn for the first time the other night. fresh corn, local, sweet and tender…manna from heaven, this stuff. it’s been a poor growing season here this summer, with a cold, cold spring and a dry, brief summer, but the corn – unlike last month’s pitiful strawberry crop – seems to have emerged unscathed and hardy. so we had corn on Friday, and some corn on Saturday, and some leftover corn again at lunch today. because in another week or two it will all be gone, and the only corn left in the grocery store will again be those bright, supersweet, woody cobs that come all the way from California in what must be flavour-leaching containers. those, and the cans, and the dessicated niblets sold as a toddler snack…plenty of options, really…but none of them bearing much resemblance to the crisp, fresh corn straight from the field.

these vestiges of seasonal food are rare in today’s world, this sense of what lands on my table having any connection to my calendar, to the turning of seasons, to the weather outside my window. i like anticipating corn season, waiting for it patiently, resisting the lure of imported cobs, the temptation to jump the gun. only in this small window of my life do i have any understanding of what those who advocate saving sex for marriage may be on about…what sense of satisfaction they get from their choice, from their abstinence. what titillation prolonging pleasure brings. with corn, i am a born-again virgin.

my son, though? no virginal delicacy for him. within minutes giving him his first taste of, we’d graduated from shearing the sweet, wet niblets off the cob for him to handing him the whole damn thing to devour whole. and he’s taken the experience in an entirely different metaphorical direction. my boy loves his corn like it’s a drug.

(please refrain from showing these pictures to Children’s Aid)
first hit on the corncob pipe

the after-corn giggles

too much corn, dude

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in other, non-vegetable-enthusiast news, i have finally begun to reconstruct my nice collection of buttons that lamentably disappeared last month when i updated my WordPress installation. i am still digging for some in the bowels of my email account…but i’m trying. and, thanks to the estimable Mrs. Chicken, i have a new one to add…the Power of Schmooze award.

i am delighted, and honoured, but bemused.

in real life i completely lack what i think of as schmoozing instincts, despite being a friendly soul. in face-to-face conversations, i will ask a lot about you, and tell too many rambling and often self-deprecating stories about myself, but i will not ‘schmooze’ you, not so much. i lack the instinct for sales, or for furthering my own agenda with any grace. i’m sensitive to the jockeying for content and control that shapes social discourse, and while i’m quite happy being acclaimed as centre of attention (oh, stop now, don’t…stop…:)), i’m uncomfortable pushing for my piece of the pie. schmoozing usually feels painfully inappropriate to me. it’s not that i specially mind being inappropriate (anyone who enjoys publicly discussing corn in comparison to sex or her child’s initiation into the corn-eating set as a parallel to smoking up can’t in any honesty pretend to respect all social niceties), but i like social exchange best when it’s reciprocal, not one-sided. i’m a better liaison and facilitator of conversations than i am an initiator.

but schmoozing in the blogosphere works differently. this unbounded world of connections functions, in a sense, like a giant dinner party, except where we can all have our space in the conversation without impinging on anyone else’s. if you don’t want to read my ruminations on corn, i’m not pinning you to the wall yakking your ear off against your will…you get to click on by and i don’t even get my feelings hurt. but if you’re saying something over in your little space in the conversation that i want to support or encourage or giggle at, i can. and others will too…thus facilitating conversations and explorations that many of us may never have in our real lives, in the exposed world of face-to-face conversation where we fear taking up too much space in a conversation. i see commenting, out here, as facilitating conversations…and thus i’m proud to be a schmoozer, thrilled even. especially because i’ve been a bit of an (unwilling) skinflint with my comments this summer, stretched thin as i’ve been feeling…i’m grateful to Mrs. Chicken for seeing what i’m wanting to do with the few words i’ve spread around lately, rather than what i’m necessarily succeeding in. because i do want to be involved in this community, passionately.

my little real-life corner of the world is known, at least to itself, for polite hospitality and webbing together of tales and tellers into rich mythologies…in many ways, for the same emphasis on drawing together communities around locii of need that the Power of Schmooze award is honouring. and out here on the eastern shores of Canada, poor and proud, we have a rich if small community of bloggers who foster deep, heartfelt attachments and connections and support for the larger community, who both lay themselves bare with beautiful words and raise up others who need words too. so, i pass along the love to Mad Hatter, Sweetsalty Kate, and Thordora, my triumverate of Maritime schmoozers, all of whom have held me up with generosity and wit and warmth, and do the same for so many others…plus new coastal blog buddy Hannah, who i’m so happy found me.

don’t we make y’all want to come to a downhome BlogHer East festival next year? with fiddles?

ponyboy

we interrupt your regularly scheduled stream of silence from the crib to announce that we are still alive. the houseguests left this morning. tomorrow is a local holiday.

praise be.

so we went to the fair.

more accurately, we went to the annual midway – locally referred to as “The Exhibition” – which comes to town for two weeks every August, lighting up the skyline with neon and the thrilling screams of human beings flying through the air in shaky, garish metal cages thrown together in mere hours.  the place is loud, hopped up, full of hawkers and discarded candy apples and cigarette smoke and a disembodied voice from the Bingo tent calling O-seventy-nine even above the peals of tinned music emanating from the omnipresent speakers.

when i was a little girl, my mother and i lived only blocks from the fairground, and for these two weeks in summer i lay awake beside my open window, at dusk, listening for the magical sounds that signalled the fair was on, the season was magical, the horses were racing, and other kids were staying up later than i was.  never having known Disney World or Canada’s Wonderland, i lusted for The Exhibition.  in the sheltered innocence of my one-horse-town childhood, it was a thing of beauty, all lights and whirling fantasy.  i lived for the day when i was old enough to go on the Big Rides.  i had not yet discovered that my stomach has all the fortitude of a pansy, nor that the guy who dropped out of school in grade 7 to drink for a living and let all his teeth fall out would grow up to be the guy who screws all the Big Rides together every year.

pushing Oscar’s stroller up to the gates of that same fairground these many years later, i felt like that kid again, racing to The Exhibition with my eyes wide.  anticipation surged when the Big Rides came in sight, like a map reading “Here Be Thrills”, and i quickened my step and then laughed at myself, because i know that the fairground is really only one block square, and that i actually loathe cotton candy, and that i am no more interested in going on the Zipper at this point in my existence than i am in taking up amateur tracheotomy as a hobby.

we circled the tiny fairground, drinking in the smells of sugar and grease and dirt and vomit, watching the lights begin to blink awake as the suppertime sky darkened with the threat of rain.  we navigated hordes of teenagers straddling the chasm between euphoria and apathy, out for the night at a site they are only just beginning to discover is small and provincial and seedy.  we waved to the men selling games of chance.  i declined a few offers to win Oscar a variety of stuffed animals sporting beer or cupid hearts…Dave declined the opportunity to show his manliness shooting duckies and banging the strongman scale with a hammer.

it is a sad place, The Exhibition, stripped of its glamour by my adult eyes.  naked, it is shrivelled and dirty, skanky even..expensive, for this local economy, but cheap and hard and crass in its lure and its delivery.  it made me feel old and sorrowful, Jackie Paper gone looking again for the lost Puff the Dragon only to find him a carnie, sucking smoke and calling Bingo numbers for the rubes who pass through looking for magic.

but a thing of beauty is a joy forever, i once read.  and magic is in the capacity for wonder, not the source of it. there was some magic still to be found on the fairground, in Oscar’s face, and in his imagination. we only went on one ride, he and i, because even the little circling boats and cars that i remember from a lifetime ago are gone now, replaced by faster cheap thrills machines that draw an older bracelet-buying crowd…but there is still a carousel, a merry-go-round.  and from the moment we chose our pink pony, his eyes were bright and full of wonder and possibility and amazement and the oppressive feel of the place lifted for me and i could hear the delight in the screams of whirling children and see the flashing lights as beautiful and strange and the scabby gold paint of our steed as gilded and perfect.

i think O enjoyed his first ride, his first trip to The Exhibition.

i had, for three minutes, more magic than i’ve allowed myself in years.

i have been watching Oscar play with little boys these past few weeks. the majority of the babies he’s known and interacted with on any regular basis since his birth – among friends, at the sitter’s – have been girls, and most are within a month or two of his own age. but the summer and all the visitors have brought boys. slightly older boys, born in late 2004 or 2005, most of them. just slimming out past the toddler stage, words beginning to tumble from their mouths in complexities my own boy watches with wonder, and puzzlement.

Oscar seems to like these older creatures, these running, laughing, jumping, talking boys. he tries to emulate them, ranging further afield across the lawn as they do…studying their toys and their movements, trying to take some for his own. he is open and friendly, if sometimes oblivious to their rights of possession, but he’s surprised me with how willing he’s been to share with them, to offer them his treasures, his favourite books and bath squishies, to court their favour.

he looks up, and sees them, and he lights up. like a little brother. like the second-born boy he really is.

yesterday afternoon i watched him galumph across the backyard in pursuit of our racing godson, who was born the month i got pregnant with Finn back in 2004, in Korea, when we were all expats and new to the parenting journey, wondering whether diverging paths would bring us all back together to see those babies grow…their newborn, our newly announced baby-to-be. i was due today, this date, August 4th of that coming summer.

but Finn came and went in April, instead. only the following April did we take the next step in the journey, take a baby home and watch him grow.

so these older boys fascinate me, with their long legs and their words, and i wonder in spite of myself what Finn would look like now, if he would run and jump like they do, how he and Oscar would interact…Irish twins, only 51 weeks apart, in the alternate universe in which they both get to exist. and if Oscar would look up to him, and beam, and then swat the toy from his hands.

and just for a second, though i know better, i wish that Oscar got to be a little brother.

i’ve been talking to Oscar since before he was born…nattering on, internally and out loud, telling him about the colour of the walls and the name of the kitty and what mummy would really like to be doing instead of laundry. much of which i would never dare repeat here, for fear of y’all’s virgin ears and such (and pesky local laws), but O keeps my secrets safe as houses.

’til now.

it’s started. he’s begun to communicate. and worse better (jury’s still out) not only communicate, but comprehend. the child clearly understands every frigging word i say. i say, “Oscar, where’s Oscar’s nose?” – he touches that fat little button. uh huh. i say, “Oscar, where’s mama’s ear?” – and fumbling little fingers try to tear my earring from its fleshy nest. i say, “Oscar, bring mama the bunny” – i gets me a bunny. (or he ignores me completely. but that’s inherited from his father, i think, and not a sign – at least in his progenitor’s case – that he doesn’t know the words i’m using.)

all of these are good things. exciting. but sometimes i don’t say, “Oscar, show mama the book” or “where are your toes?” or “give me a hug, lovey.” nope, those fine phrases are barely the cream off our one-sided chatter of habit here. under the cream, habit being what it is, are also the phrases of an, erm, slightly tempermental grown woman with a mouth like a sailor who hasn’t been allowed around speaking-aged children in over a decade. i, um, swear. a lot.

my ongoing prattle is full of interjections like “sweet merciful Jeebus, you goddam f$&*%^ing cat stop biting my ankles!” (in the house, when Clementine is feeling frisky) or “eat my ass, lady!” (in the car, when addled fellow driver cuts me off or forgets use of signal light) or simply “shite” (as adjective or expletive, most of the rest of the day). those and other colourful expressions not necessarily fit for the consumption of wee folk have been an all-too regular part of my daily discourse for a very long time. i think it started out of a combined love of language and desire to be very very unladylike. now, while i still love flavourful language and delight in the way a good curse rolls off my tongue, i think perhaps it’s time to rein myself back in a bit. because Oscar’s word for the cat, at the moment, sounds something like “ffffff.” and i’m thinking that’s not a lack of phonetic grasp on his part, but a reflection of what he may believe kitty’s name to actually be.

so, i’m probably unfit to be a parent and you’re all shaking your heads in shock right now, tsk-tsking and whispering “but she seemed almost nice!” yeh, well fuck off. i’m really very upstanding, and it’s just a sign of my great piety (snort) that the name of the lord is never far from my lips, okay?

but i’m not sure that speaking like me will get Oscar invited to any birthday parties.

so if any kind soul out there is nodding her head, thinking “i too have (or had!) a potty mouth, and have advice to offer this poor wayward soul before her son’s first clear word comes out as ‘cocksucker'”…please share. do i wash my own mouth out with soap, or what? do i just tape “good golly” and “my stars and whiskers” all over the walls until they start to sink in and infiltrate my deeper mind? do i say “blow this” and risk O sounding like a Tarantino film extra by the time he’s in kindergarten?

how does swearing happen or not happen in your house?

gimme some f^$*ing halp, here, people. :)

…or was that a pox on both houses? oh literate readership, weigh in. but Shakespeare can’t have meant me, in any case. i only have a rather modest little home. we don’t even have a cottage. surely my humble abode doesn’t deserve no nasty plaguepox…?

but it’s got it, dammit. a bug. a stomach bug has crept in with the summer weather, along with the requisite couple of seasonal earwigs who braved my soap-spray Berlin Wall along all the thresholds of entry. and compared to the stomach bug, the earwigs are pussies.

i don’t mind illness, in theory. i’ve learned not to wither inside when confronted by the urine/decay/detergent smell of hospitals, and while i feel bad for others when they’re sick, the helplessness of being completely useless at alleviating their misery – beyond provision of canned soup and the occasional cold compress and translation of whatever Latin name their symptoms may have been tagged with – doesn’t weigh on me much. they’re sick, i’m sympathetic…it’s what i have to offer. while a certain party who lives with me might swear that i whine inordinately when sick myself, i can assure you that that party is entirely unreliable as a source for these things and is, in fact, rather prone to embarrassing displays of lamentation about his own illnesses, coupled with a manly dose of stubbornness about actually taking anything to relieve my ears his suffering.

but when the child is sick? oh god. we’re all wretched.

and not just literally – because whatever Oscar catches seems to travel through the house, carried on fat, curious, little hands – but literarily, epically, consumingly. Dante’s nine (or is it ten? clearly, i don’t actually read, just pick up cheap quotes from Reader’s Digest) circles of hell have nothing on being parent to a sick baby. not only do i feel like A Very Bad Mother for having failed to protect my child from whatever vermin are having their way with his little body, but the helplessness that doesn’t bother me when sick adults are in my care sits much more heavily on me when it’s O who’s miserable. because he is still so small. because he doesn’t understand why it hurts. because it is my job, as best i can, to make it all okay. and because i want to, with an urgency that must be hardwired into the biology of the species somewhere, at the primal level, just because he is my child, in my care. for him, i would take the nasty little poxplagues all on myself, and gladly.

but the poxplagues do not ask. i do not get to spare my child’s pain. sometimes i don’t even know how to ease it. and that, for me, is the hardest thing about being a mother.

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and yet…and here i tread in waters deeper than i understand…i am not sure what we would be, all of us as people, if our mothers were able to take our pain for us, and would? would the extent of that protection deny us our own experiences, our own paths? leave us somehow like the foolish little boy-man from Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, who takes and takes and takes and cuts the nurturing tree down to a stump for a sailboat? (or something…something frivolous…i can too read, i swear. i just have a bad memory for narrative detail).

i don’t know. i have been blessed enough to have known, all my life, that my mother would do anything she could to protect me from pain, from illness, from hurt, from harm. and she & i have been fighting about that for more than twenty years now…me trying to surface and breathe under the weight of all those warnings, all that love.

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i never understood my mother’s fear for me until the first moment i held Finn in my arms. the NICU is an assaultive, adrenalin-ridden, alarming place, rife with loud noises and harsh …and it stinks of that fear. i was ten hours post-delivery and had been wheeled back up to my bedrest room because i’d been busily passing clots the size of cats…but they came for us, up there, because he was going to die. and because he was going to die – i think of those words as punctuated, each of them, like whole sentences unto themselves, though i can’t remember if anyone actually spoke them aloud or what they said, at the time – they removed him from the isolette where he’d been heartily squeezing our fingers the hour before with tiny, magical fingers, and disconnected one of the many clattering machines, and laid him in my arms, wee creature, still bloody from birth and all his trauma.

and in the hour that followed, while he slipped away from us, our skin in contact with his, whispered to, sung to, told he was loved and wanted, Finn made me a mother. because i stopped tasting the fear of the NICU, stopped hearing the machines, stopped wondering what the hell was happening to all of us and where in god’s name we’d found ourselves and how we’d cope with this. we just…were. we got to discover him, the curve of his brow and the unmistakable presence of his father’s nose, just as any new parents might. but i knew. i knew he was dying. and for one second, at the very beginning, the fear and the helplessness almost swallowed me. i am shamed, still, by that second, by the “you are going to die” horror that washed over me…but it was all i knew of motherhood before it happened to me. i had thought all my life that it is death itself that haunts mothers, keeps them up at night worrying about whether their offspring are chewing their cookies thoroughly…even long after those offspring have gone off to college. what i realized, in that moment, is that it is not our own pain, as parents, that we fear…but that of our kids. their suffering. our incapacity to comfort.

loss may haunt, yes, and grief run deep and long. but in the moment, with Finn in my arms, all i cared about in the world was that he felt my joy in holding him, somehow. and so it was that joy that i focused on. for that hour, easy and natural like i’ve seldom ever been, i beamed out love and comfort, because it was what i had to give. because he was my child. because i didn’t want him to be afraid. i would have given anything to spare him, and couldn’t…but the pain of that incapacity was my pain, not his. mine i could bear.

in getting to be there, to be the comforter of that small soul…i got a peace that few other mothers of children living or dead ever get.

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just before Oscar was born, i looked back at Finn’s birth and death and wondered whether this new baby would ever – god willing all go well, please go well, i don’t think i can do the aftermath a second time – get so much of me in a lifetime as Finn had in that hour. i worried a lot about those potential imbalances then, fearing, i think, that the second child might someday feel a queer shortchange in his prosaic, living place in the family…and totally inexperienced as i was in loving a child i got to raise, i was anxious about how a more normal entrance into the world might affect the intensity of feeling my still-grieving heart might be able to raise for this baby i carried.

i laugh now. every time O has a stomach bug, or a miserable cold, or cries out in pain, there it is…that same pang, no different…just as fierce. mother love. the primal need to comfort, and the helplessness of having to accept that that comfort is only ever partial.

i can not spare him. but i can love him through it. i hope that holds true for a long, long lifetime…and that the comfort he learns to find in it carries him through well beyond my days.

but i still hope he feels better tomorrow.

the days at work slip faster than days at home did
my deepest resources
of patience

mines of tunneling to sustain self

and small one too

less taxed now, if lonelier
for touch

but we are both content
so far as i can tell
so far as he can tell

my arms more patient

greedy now when he is in them

still time for playing blocks and touching noses

and i exhale
relieved

i can forgive that this skin fits

these work clothes please me, yes.

but the wheel of time spins by me

careening almost greasy

it has been four weeks already

i wonder will i come home tomorrow and find him grown into a rockstar overnight…?

so, um, there are three people living in our house. did you know? ’cause we really weren’t entirely prepared.

but lately it’s been pretty clear that we’ve not only got a baby, we’ve got a whole new roommate living here. (plus Clementine, of course. our cat. she’s good people, even if she does shed.)

the fact that we are trinity shouldn’t be a particularly shocking revelation, seeing as Oscar’s been resident in our home for fourteen months or so, now. but bringing home the baby was rather like getting a new kitten, or something…the world’s loudest kitten, yes, and most heart-expanding, and the slowest ever to learn to use the litterbox, but not entirely like adding a whole other complex, interactive human personality to the mix. (Clementine just shot me the haughtiest “i’m so complex you can’t even fathom me, bald-skin” glare for that line, and i suspect some ankle shredding is on the menu later pour moi, but…you know what i mean). for the first year or so, O’s needs and demands and contributions to the family have all been of the relatively tangible, clear-cut sort: he’s watered? fed? loved? stroked? soothed? cleaned? played with? exercised? all good. the colic? horrendous, and stuffed to the very corners of my memory so as to prevent me from trying a home-tube-tying, but still not personal.

apparently that handy checklist of babycare ain’t gonna cut it forever, though. because every day now, there is more and more personality in O’s blue eyes, more thought process and comprehension written across his face, more pique and will and give and take and laughter and gamesmanship and vocalization, every shrill screech and trilling “ba ba ba” saying “dudes, i’m here. it’s me. hey world!” a barbaric yawp, sounded from the rooftops and the crib. after all these months of it being us and baby, O a beloved appendage, Dave & i tired versions of our familiar twosome, we are now morphing into man, woman, and child…a true threesome. Oscar is blooming with the spring flowers, becoming himself.

he has a sense of humour, this boy, and an insatiable hunger for more of whatever is pleasing him in a given moment. he is fierce – which fact causes his father to puff up with pride – yet observant, curious about what’s around corners. he’s always going further, faster, but is sensitive to change, too: new environments quiet the maelstrom of motion, and he becomes still, alert, like a faun. he’s tactile, preferring to touch than merely watch, and both rough and tender by turns. his delight is a whole body experience, his sadness – as yet – fleeting. he loooves shoes (that comes from my side of the gene pool) and carries them from room to room, waving them about gleefully. he is marvellous to watch.

i loved him, fearfully and hopefully, long before he was born. but now…there’s more. i like him, too.

phewww.

sometimes it amazes me, this contract that parents enter into, blind. imagine an ad in the paper that said “hey! welcome a roommate into your home! time commitment – somewhere between 18 and 75 years. labour required – just the start! and lots of poop and vomit, too! expenses – more than a yacht. heartache – guaranteed, in some form or other. thanks – random. and the personality of said roommate – completely unknown, folks (see fine print for Lizzie Borden clause). sign up today!”

i know that whomever O turns out to be will be dramatically shaped by Dave & i (and Clementine, too, his prey and companion) and by all the unknowns that life has in store for him. but i am also pretty sure that – barring catastrophic damage – a significant part of who he will become, personality-wise, is already evident, shining through those ever-wiser not-quite-baby eyes. i suppose i probably would have been just as charmed by a completely different Oscar, had my sweet baby blossomed into an entirely other sort of personality. but this one? i’m sure. i can live with this new roommate, this kid who’s come to stay with us, this kid who makes our family so much richer.

i think the cat may have been hoping otherwise…but we’re keeping him, Clementine. deal.