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in the midst of a bustling, disorganized, busted flat kinda week, i’ve been given something lovely.
Little Monkies gave me this for this.

be still my heart.

in prefacing her nomination, Fran wrote about the sorrows of April, and the strange coincidences and convergences of birth and death that are April to me too.  i’ve been ruminating on my own version of the grim and beautiful Eliot line about April being the cruellest month as it looms full of anniversaries for me…joyful ones, and ones of unspeakable loss.  but Fran has said most of what i was trying to weave words around, and with great grace.

and i am not quite ready to say more, except thank you to her…and to all of you…for listening.  here, i write what i cannot say anywhere else.  and in doing so, there is healing.

in blogging, comes spring.

when i was a little girl, my elderly grandmother and i spent a lot of time together…just she and i and a series of star-crossed cats she had whose names i – the name-obsessed – can never quite recall.

my grandmother was born in 1904. she married late, at the spinsterish age of thirty-four, a thin, solid-legged woman in a cap of black hair that became a blue-gray coldwave perm long before i came on the scene. she and her husband raised my mother – only child of the younger brother of this woman i called Nannie – from the time my mother was about seven…but my grandmother never had children of her own, really, until me. her husband died two years before my birth. my father left in my infancy. somewhere in the mess of those abruptly altered lives, she and my mom and i became an odd but complete family. we mostly lived in separate houses, across town from each other, but i spent my lunch hours and my after-schools and my summers with her, in her world of little old ladies, while my mother worked.

i got the best of her, this woman launched into widowhood and independence unwillingly, this timid, proper pillar of her own narrow world…dry and provincial and shy in public. in the house she’d been born in, alone with me, she laughed and played dress-up, and told jokes, and listened to lies and stories tumbling from my imagination for hours on end. she let me love her with my whole heart.

and my Nannie, who was not one to reflect deeply on change, gave me more of an Edwardian childhood than anyone born in the 1970s had any right to have. i am a fount of ancient Scottish pudding recipes and proverbs regarding appropriate behaviour, a vessel of hymns no church has sung for generations, and a sentimental repository of quaint sayings and folk rhymes that decorate the calendar of my mind, announcing themselves every time the month changes or a holiday of the British Empire rolls around.

March was always my favourite. every year, on the first and last day of the month, my grandmother and i pontificated on the weather like the chorus in a Greek tragedy. “If March comes in like a lion, it’ll go out like a lamb,” we’d intone in unison. “If it comes in like a lamb, it’ll go out like a lion.” then we’d drag back the (sheer) curtains with high drama, already knowing full well what the weather was outside, and squeal “lion!” or “lamb!” and dissolve in fits of laughter. if you have never seen a good Protestant lady in her eighties mimic the curling hooves and “baaa” of a lamb, or watched an otherwise too-cool-for-school preteen roar like a lion for her grandmother’s amusement, you truly have not lived.

my grandmother has been gone for almost seven years. the seven years before she spent struggling fiercely against death and the loss of the independence she’d never wanted foisted on her in the first place. it has been fifteen years or longer since we played our game. but i think of her, always, on the first and thirty-first of every March, and i miss her like i cannot say.

so today Oscar and i made March go out like a lion.

it’s fitting. he started the month on hands and knees, still my baby lamb. now he’s fully upright, roaring his own independence more everyday. i told him today that he was March, going out like a lion. and we pulled back the curtains to watch the snow, and i laughed until he joined in. and i smiled and gave thanks for him, and for my Nannie, who taught me.

i will do my best to pass on bits and scraps of an anachronous, coddled Edwardian childhood to him. it is the legacy i have to give.

Oscar, boy.

in a book that your eager father will probably read to you sometime…oh…next year, there is a short little, old little person named Bilbo Baggins, who is having a birthday party. Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit, which is a furry, hungry, pleasant sort of little creature that you quite resemble, actually, except for the furry part. but give that time, my son. i regret to inform you that genetics indicate that fur is your destiny.

in any case, the book that your father loves and to which i am referring opens with a birthday party that Mr. Bilbo Baggins, hobbit, is throwing for himself. he is eleventy-one on this particular birthday, which is a hobbit way of saying one-hundred-and-eleven, but much more fun. and a ripe old age, no matter which way you count it.

i have always thought there was something a little magical – fey, even – about the number eleven.

i have been sure, for quite some time, that there is definitely something magical about you.

you are eleven months old today, Oscar. still a baby, but barely…on the verge of a kind of selfhood that must be what the word ‘toddler’ is meant to signify. and you are different every day, which is probably part of why you seem enchanted…in my world, normal everyday folk are not nearly so changeable. but you are busy discovering the world, and i suppose that changes one. you are doing a good job.

your discoveries are mostly, at this point, still mostly made by mouth…your grandmother worries terribly about your teeth snapping in half, you know, but i suspect you have good sense about you…but recently you’ve begun using your hands for more than slapping at the world and are grasping things, pulling at things, using your snazzy pincer grip to select small, forgotten items of interest off of our floor and bring them to your mouth for further analysis. you have not yet discovered one single thing in the entire world that you will not accept in your mouth. i like this about you. i suppose fussiness will come – in truth i used to see fussiness as a sign of personality development, but now i wonder if it was merely a substitute – but thus far, you are open. you will try anything.

this wide-openness about you is more beautiful than i can say.

at this juncture in your life, Oscar, you are one of the most sociable people i have ever met, of any size. you have a habit of playing coy, sometimes, and ducking your round head into my shoulder when greeted by a smile from somebody else, but then you turn your head back and your mouth opens in a gap-toothed smile and you bat your eyelashes…which to my great delight did finally come in a few months ago. they are beautiful. you are beautiful. you are also a flirt. you learned to wave just this month and have been gracing grocery shoppers and street signs around the city with your bountiful gestures…fat little hand turned up at the wrist, demanding and friendly, graceful in its insistence. you made a friend the other day while we waited in a lineup – a lovely young woman of about twenty – and from your perch in the shopping cart you must have waved at this girl a hundred times, glee on your face, all the time making eye contact with her and squeaking your presence and your pleasure. she was quite charmed, if a little embarrassed when you did not stop after the first three minutes or so and she had run out of things to say to you. you were not deterred. you are not easily deterred, in anything.

the cat is your friend too…though you take more overt delight in her than she does in you these days, since “gentle” is still a word we’re working on, Oscar. but you light up when she comes into the room, and make a high “hee hee” sound that you reserve specially for her. i think, deep inside, she’s honoured. she follows you on your speed-crawling journeys from room to room, just out of reach. i call you Butch and Sundance, the two of you, one humping away from me madly, giggling in his diaper, the other picking her way alongside.

soon you will be walking away from me, baby O, my bunny. you stand now, for seconds, unsupported, before your legs v out and you flop down on your bumtail. soon, the steps will come. and the words too, singling themselves out from the babble and hisses that punctuate our conversations. i am waiting for “mama,” still…mama for me. and i wonder when it will come and even if…the fear of autism and language delay and disconnect that worms its way around the back of my head…and then you smile at me when i come into the room and i know that i am special to you no matter what you say, ever in this life, and you are only eleven months old anyway and for me, you are the sun in the sky.

you are eleven months old, Oscar. it is a special birthday.

it is an amazing thing, watching your child learn to stand on his own two feet. it is also drama of high proportion…especially when it gets bloody.

for the past couple of days, Oscar has been standing all by himself. if there’s a surface anywhere that will hold his weight, up he gets, tottering on still-wobbly legs. then he lets go. with a flourish. and he looks around, beaming with pride, and then bounces down flat on his bum.

usually.

but at least once a day, there’s a crash. a face-first, bruising, scratching, mama-wincing, baby-howling kind of crash. and yesterday, there was blood. in his mouth. he and his bookshelf had a face-to-face encounter, and when his little face scrunched up to cry, his mouth opened, and wet, watery blood came drooling out. and i thought i was going to throw up. it wasn’t the blood…i don’t mind the sight of blood, if it’s mine, or yours. but his…wow. it took everything i had just to make myself look inside that little mouth, to see how bad it was. it terrified me. i don’t know if i’m up for this growing up thing.

turns out it was just a fat lip, which matches nicely with the scratch on his forehead, the rug burn on his chin, and the bruise on his cheek. my baby is starting to resemble Rocky.

i try not to cling. not to have my hands hovering somewhere three inches from his eager, excited, independent little self. i catch him when i can, and try to make the environment around him as safe as it can be, but i want to let him learn to fall. i want him to be able to pick himself up without too much wailing and gnashing of teeth (on my part, that is), and dust himself off, and get a hug, and go on with his day. i do not want to bubble-wrap him. much.

but damn…it’s harder than i thought.

he’s like a blur, friends and neighbours…a flitting thing, a bee or fly or hummingbird. my boy cannot be still.

i put him one place and find him in another. i walk across the room…he’s there, beaming up at me. an unidentified object falls to the floor…small hands swoop over and eat it up before i can even classify it as cheerio, pen cap, or cat litter pellet. Oscar is fully and truly on the move. and the tools at his disposal for this little hobby seem to be legion, and growing everyday.

he’s mastered crawling – or dragging, rather, since he seems to enjoy pulling himself around the floor with his arms, legs trailing behind like little flippers. i figure he’ll have great pecs and arms if he keeps this up, so i encourage it…there’s no harm in being stacked in kindergarten, is there? i’ve been so impressed by his efficiency with the drag that i’ve tried it myself, actually…but the poor twig-like appendages attached to my upper body don’t take me very far for all the panting involved. plus, Oscar looked at me funny when i was down on the floor humping away…apparently it’s a more dignified means of locomotion for those who aren’t dragging a hundred and plenty pounds or so behind them.

now he’s starting to get upright any chance he gets. oooh! a pantleg to hang on to? a plant pot to pull oneself up on? a teetering, delicate antique bookstand at Nannie’s house? O’s there, using those meaty baby biceps (and his teeth, all eight of them, fiercely clamped) to drag himself upward onto tottering feet. he goes down? he claws his way back up. he is fierce, my baby boy. he wants to touch everything, taste everything, see everything, and single-handedly cover every square inch of our house with his drool, right now.

it is marvellous to watch, and terrifying. he’s loving it…the independence, the accomplishment, the view from two feet up. his glee and his pride at being mobile and upright are beautiful to see, and make me proud of him, of his efforts, of the sheer force of his little will. but oh my god. he’s everywhere. and he’s not even walking yet.

sweet merciful crap, it’s wondrous scary, this growing up stuff. i wonder if the metal tang of fear i keep trying to choke down at the back of my throat will fade when he finally drives away from our house some eighteen or twenty years from now? probably not.

here he goes. gotta go try to catch up.

so yesterday i turned thirty-five.

just in case you were wondering, that means that the age of this Aquarius has now likely exceeded that of anyone in the original cast of Hair, back when “Age of Aquarius” was hip.

i am getting old. i am halfway to my Biblical allotment of threescore and ten. i am no more hip, alas, than hippies. and worst of all, i now have to change the little box i click when i fill out online surveys! (what? you don’t have hobbies? :) )

but, despite the number, it was a good birthday. an amazingly good birthday. my mom took the day off work and came over in the morning bearing cupcakes for breakfast. i spent the afternoon with Oscar and nine other little ones at a mummy-coffee extravaganza…the loudest birthday party i’ve ever had in my life, let me assure you…and when i got home i found that Dave had taken the afternoon off and snuck home to make dinner and his first ever cake. (apparently, no one bought that boy an easy-bake oven in childhood). friends & family called and sent emails. i felt loved.

my best present, any year.

the end of the mummy-coffee party…these three were howling and glaring, and so were most of the rest…it was a festive zoo.

my beautiful cake, replete with thirty-five (err, thirty-four) strawberries and some drink umbrellas, for good measure.

but next year, i think i’ll turn twenty-nine again. start planning the festivities. :)

Originally uploaded by oscarcormier.

okay. mark this day, friends. i have officially turned into that blue-haired biddy i warned myself about six months or so ago.

it’s all going by too fast. waaaaay too fast. and i’m starting to say it out loud, to everyone i meet. let me say it to you, officially…and you can repeat after me. it all goes by so fast! insert maternal wailing and gnashing of teeth here, for good measure.

Oscar is nine months old today. he’s been around, a breathing, feeding, squalling little bundle, for a whole month longer than i was even pregnant with him (he came at 36 weeks). it shouldn’t surprise me, then, that he’s made some progress in these nine months…in merely eight he went from being an egg and sperm on a blind date to a six pound infant, after all. but still. i woke up this morning and realized that my baby has turned into a boy. a full-fledged, mobile, kinda communicating, cute-as-all-hell little boy.

this shouldn’t be such a shock, i suppose…this boy epiphany. it’s not that i was suffering from any kind of gender dysphoria on his behalf…he’s always been a boy, straight from the sixteen-week u/s at which he flaunted himself like a Chippendale’s auditionee, and he has the requisite blue Pooh sleepers and manly brown baby blankies to prove it.

but he has been a baby boy.

and i wasn’t ready to see the “baby” part of the description fade so fast…but already i can see it pulling away from us, riding off into the sunset. now, suddenly, astoundingly fast, Oscar’s turning into a little person. every day he does something new, discovers something new, delights in something new. i look across the room at him and my jaw drops, because a little boy is sitting there, astride his ride-on car, laughing and trying to pull the cat’s tail. he blows me away…all this, already?

my own shock has led me to hatch a new theory about why mothers tend to think their children are geniuses. we’re not ready to let go. so when our little ones begin to launch themselves away from us, and creep and crawl pell-mell towards the big wide world, we’re sure it must be them who are advanced, not us who are chickenshits.

i am a big chickenshit, indubitably. i love watching him flower, this beautiful boy child whom my baby is becoming…but it strikes terror into me too. some part of my heart that wants to hold him like this, safe and innocent and snuggly, just a little longer.  a lot longer.

world, be kind.

and you mothers of newborns and mothers-to-be, consider yourself warned: the biddies are right. it goes by way too fast. :)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

strategyOriginally uploaded by oscarcormier.

Oscar wanted to help me wish a very happy birthday to my favourite Celebrity Boyfriend (and thus O’s, um…well…favourite rock star). the photo at left shows that Oscar obviously isn’t quite ready to take over the blog world just yet, as he hasn’t fully separated typing from biting…but perhaps he thought the laptop was a delicious cake for Mr. Bowie. the Thin White Duke and all his other personas turn sixty today.
when your idols become senior citizens, does that make you old?

funny. when i first started my faithful if one-sided relationship with The Other David, he was just a little older than i am now…and i was twelve. and while fabulous and ethereally cool, he also seemed ancient. now…i’m not sure if he’s just a fresh mind or i’m secretly the world’s oldest almost-thirty-five year old, but hell, that twenty-five year age spread now seems but a season, a mere moment. perhaps because the man is still one step ahead of pop culture. or me. :)

i doff my hat (errr, should that be “bat my eyelashes”?) in his direction. happy birthday, David Bowie. and i’m, um…still out here, whenever you’re ready…not terribly busy…free tonight, in fact…

oh well. can’t hurt to try.

ahem. bat bat.

(ps – this little obsession of mine is gently endorsed by the Dave i actually live with. do you think this is because a) he’s a tolerant soul who loves my free spirit, or b) because a woman with a fantasy life is HOTT, even if she lusts after semi-androgynous elders, or c) because he’s hoping Bowie will finally get his act together and come for me one of these days? hmmm.)

no i have not taken to stuffing the child under the tub…he got there all by himself. :)

batten the hatches, lock the cupboards! Oscar is crawling. backwards only, just yet…but crawling. sweet merciful gods.

the cat is in hiding.