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my boy hugged me this morning.

it wasn’t the first time…somewhere during the past week he’s begun throwing his arms around my neck whenever i scoop him up. but, as that has usually been just a front for some energetic hair-pulling on his part, i haven’t taken it too much to heart. until today.

O woke from his nap early, howling. i listened outside his room in hopeful denial, imagining he might magically soothe himself back to sleep. wishful thinking.

i opened his door, and the cries stopped, for a second. the little body wrenched itself around in the crib, trying to see who’d come to rescue him from himself. he hiccuped, gazing up at me with gravest of expressions…scrutinizing my face. once he appeared sure that it was, indeed, me who had materialized from the mysterious vacuum outside his napping space, he beamed. he lifted his arms. i picked him up, and those fat little arms lurched around my neck and stayed. glomming on to me like a suckerfish, he said, contentedly, “guuugh.” i told him, “i love you too, Oscar.” not a hair on my head was even tugged on…at least for ten seconds or so.

i felt like i’d just been crowned Mommy of the Year.

now, truth be told, the hug may not have been personal. had the milkman happened to enter Oscar’s room during that post-nap panic, maybe he too would have been offered that gift of sweet affection. maybe. but i secretly think not. i think my boy is learning to distinguish…and to love.

he gives a fine hug, i do say so myself.

but, me being me, it’s not enough just to get all a-twitter at this development. Oscar’s hug hit me hard, in a weird way, and from everywhere at once. as O and i danced in our little embrace around his bedroom, tears filled my eyes.

for him, because now he can be hurt, wounded by the vulnerability that affection creates.

for me, because the responsibility of raising him to be able to deal with whatever life throws at him will probably break my heart – and his – a hundred times over.

and for Finn. the tears that came to my eyes as Oscar hugged me were definitely partly for his brother. because that first hug will never happen. because there will be no lifetime of joy and heartbreak for Finn…it’s done, all packed into eleven hours.

i feel uncomfortable thinking about Finn, in these moments of celebrating Oscar. i have a beautiful, healthy child in O. i am blessed, and happy, and most of the time i’m fully immersed in the wonder and tedium of having a seven-month-old. but i also had another boy, who would be nineteen months old now, nineteen months tomorrow. i remember. and with every milestone O meets, i realize “i will never see Finn do that.” and his absence breaks my heart fresh open every time.

i have a split mother consciousness…i feel guilty for feeling sad about Finn, and guilty for feeling happy about Oscar. i worry about not honouring Finn as i experience all these “firsts” with my second child. i worry about Oscar having to share his mother with a brother he can never know. over time, the Oscar part of the consciousness grows larger and larger, takes up more space. but i worry about that, too. i don’t want it to entirely take over. i don’t want to forget Finn. i don’t want Oscar and any other siblings he may someday have to somehow learn that my love for them, as their mother, is confined to their lifetime. scoff. how limited.

i don’t have a lot of models for this path i have to walk. but in my struggle to find that path, Finn’s little shadow is with me, every day. and even though his company brings sadness, it also brings the comfort that comes from loving…and having your loved one close, in whatever way you can.

loving is hard. it’s one of the greatest gifts given to us as human beings…but it’s also the most bittersweet. i hope it treats Oscar kindly, as he grows.

i hope he keeps on hugging.

lioninpunkins

Originally uploaded by oscarcormier.

i think Hallowe’en is my favourite holiday.

now that the curtain is dropping down on October, all the stores can start the mad sparkly dash towards decorating for Christmas, or the holiday season, or whatever we’re calling it in polite company this year so as to avoid excluding or offending anyone…but i personally shall miss the spiderwebs and pumpkins. don’t get me wrong. i like Christmas. but my little Grinch heart doesn’t thrill to the shopping mall crowds, or the weird mix of religion and consumerism that swirls about in the eggnog along with the tinned Bing Crosby carols…in fact, i don’t even like the eggnog. these adult Christmases are always a little bittersweet for me, because – in all their prosaic reality of trying to get things bought and baked and beribboned – they remind me that i am no longer a kid.

whereas Hallowe’en is simple, spooky, tooth-rottingly full of candy, and doesn’t even make me comb my hair. it’s a magical straight line back through sensory memory to childhood. the smell of a candle slowly burning away the inside of a pumpkin makes me feel giddy.

of course, i’d be more giddy if we’d had more than seven trick-or-treaters come to our door…insert many lamentations about how sad i was sitting outside in our porch in the dark hoping small children would happen by. only on Hallowe’en is one allowed to admit to these types of secrets.

but we had our own built in trick-or-treater this year – Oscar the lion. a very overtired, fussy, teething little lion, admittedly, who whimpered more than he roared.

but he was quite lionhearted, nonetheless, and bravely went next door to trick or treat his mama some candy. unfortunately, the clueless neighbours cooing at him apparently saw through the shameless candy-grab ploy on his mother’s part, and we came away empty handed. Oscar has promised to trick them whenever he gets big enough.

Oscar cut his first tooth yesterday. i was so proud, you would have thought he’d sculpted the Pieta or achieved world peace. he seemed less tickled, himself. apparently having a hard, sharp object come bursting through one’s gums isn’t much fun. and the thing really is rather sharp, i can testify. :)

the milestones suddenly seem to be coming in a big clot all of a sudden, leaving me breathless. the tooth cut through the very morning after he spent his first night in his big crib, and i would have thought those two firsts were enough for a mama…er, baby…to adjust to in one week. but hot on the heels of the tooth has come his first cold, replete with his first runny nose: he’s none too thrilled about this development, so far as i can see.

but he is quite fascinated with his left foot, which suddenly entered his consciousness this afternoon. we were in the midst of our third round of “Doe, a Deer,” which has an astoundingly calming effect on O when he’s cranky: i suspect my Julie Andrews impressions are so incomprehensibly off-key that they stun him into silence. somewhere about “la, a note to follow so,” (the weak link in the lyrics, in my own personal opinion) i noticed he was no longer paying attention. he was, instead, grasping his stripey sock, mouth agape and cooing. he’s spent a lot of the week chewing away on his hands to ease the trauma of his swollen mouth, but i imagine the fat little foot looked far more promising and tasty, once he noticed its presence. the sock got a good gumming henceforth.

it’s funny that all this is happening at once, and this week. as the 9/11 anniversary commemorations were invading our airwaves and consciousness yesterday, i was marking a more private anniversary for O and i; a gentler one, less in line with the infamy the day’s become synonymous with. it was exactly a year yesterday that i got the BFP (that’s big fat positive, for those of you who aren’t babycenter.com addicts) on the pregnancy test; since the awareness and anticipation of Oscar began for me. it’s a happy anniversary, for us, and one of wonder, for me…only a year, and he already has teeth? amazing.
but listening to the broadcasts from NYC yesterday didn’t seem so out of place as O and i celebrated his tooth and our own anniversary. with the anticipation of Oscar – the realization that i really was carrying a second potential child – came the bleakest, scariest fear i’ve ever known. it slithered up under my skin and twisted itself around me, chilling me. it wasn’t just the fear that comes with parenting, the kind that makes you leap out of bed to check and make sure the baby’s still breathing. it was the kind that comes after. after they stop breathing, after the unimaginable loss…after the unthinkable has happened and you can no longer just ramble along assuming that the heartbreak of the world will not visit itself on you. it was a fear of hoping…and a fear of forgetting, too. i heard a lot of that fear in the voices of people interviewed yesterday. their voices were like mirrors for me, except that their stories trailed back five years, and mine only one.

i spent the first weeks and months of carrying Oscar almost paralysed by my fear. i counted off days like rosary beads; in thrall to the superstitious, obsessive tallying of semi-random numbers that Joan Didion calls magical thinking. only forty-three more days until we were safely out of the first trimester, only twenty/twelve/two more weeks until the baby reached viability. only however many weeks until we passed the 26 plus one mark at which Finn was delivered…and only however many weeks backward since i’d held him in my arms, where he’d died. last September, those two sets of numbers – forward to the new baby surviving, back to the lost one slipping away on us – were almost even. every time they shifted in the favour of a living child, i tried to mend myself, pull little shreds of belief and hope back together. i never entirely succeeded.

now, when i look back on that torturous round of calendar watching, it feels as though it were a part of another life. because it is. time has healed me, in a sense…just as the passage of five years has offered some peace and distance to the wounds of 9/11. but time isn’t enough on its own, as the voices in yesterday’s coverage pointed out. for me, it has taken Oscar, and the practicality and purpose of caring for him. and the wonder of watching each milestone line up, too – seeing him bloom into a beautiful little person, and taking comfort in his being in the world. i’d like to say more about that, but he’s crying the husky, throaty cry of the teething, and he needs me.

so i’ll just say i’m grateful, for him and for the year gone by.

Oscar moved into his big crib tonight. my big boy. sniff.

the mini co-sleeper that he came home from the hospital to, and which has migrated from our bedside to his own bright green room over the past month, has been retired. we spent the weekend in Halifax, and since travelling means it’ll take a night or two for O to readjust to his usual routine anyway, we figured he might as well make the leap to the big crib at the same time. i don’t really know what kind of milestone the move to the crib is, or how to categorize it – congratulations, you’re officially a full-grown baby now?

whatever he is, he’s sleeping soundly, curled up with his bunny in the seemingly vast expanse of his full size sleeping quarters.

and i guess it’s fitting. we realized this weekend, seeing him next to his new cousin Angus, that Oscar’s well past the newborn stage. not only does he dwarf Angus in size, but the two of them are almost different species in terms of interaction. Oscar can laugh now. Oscar can coo, and sit up in a borrowed bumbo seat. and Angus’ older brother Isaac, the two-year-old who benevolently allowed Oscar to use his bumbo seat (briefly), was so much fun to play with and talk to and read with that i realized how much i’m looking forward to Oscar’s continued development: to watching him discover the world, and himself.

bring it on, big baby boy. sleep soundly, and congrats on your graduation.

Oscar is four months old today.

he hasn’t had the easiest four months of it – rather a rough welcome to the world, really. but just this past week or so, he seems to have turned a corner and left much of his gas pain and the accompanying screaming sessions in the dust. suddenly, he’s sleeping until at least 5 am every morning, bless his little soul. and he cries, but not in that heart-wrenching, ear-splitting, hours on end marathon fashion that’s been his hallmark since he turned four weeks old.

i used to sing him John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery,” when he’d wake up in the morning already howling, seemingly just plain outraged by the world. after all, if someone’s wailing at the top of his lungs, what further harm can my singing do? and the line “to believe in this livin’ is just a hard way to go” seemed poignantly fitting for a new little life riddled with pain and discomfort. and for his sainted mother, but of course.

i haven’t sung it all week this week…no need. Oscar seems happy, so long as he’s fed and has someone or something to gaze at. he’s smiling and laughing up a storm. and i am too…though with a slightly shell-shocked look on my face, like i can’t believe my good fortune. the sweet-tempered boy we had for those first four weeks is back in my arms, fatter and funnier and with a bit of a routine under his belt. this time, i mean it – nobody pinch me. :)

or rather, nobody pinch him…or any of his nerves. two friends, one a chiropractor and one an osteopath, both took a little time with Oscar last weekend and gave him a treatment or two – to the naked eye, nothing more than a gentle massage. both asked interesting and salient questions about his birth and his habits…was he born quickly? how does he hold his head? from touching his neck and belly and spine, both were able to offer accurate insights into some of his pain patterns and behaviors, even though neither has ever seen him in full wail. really, neither had ever even seen him before at all, since both of them live in Halifax and were only here on PEI for short visits. neither of them knows the other, nor has either of them talked to me about him since the gas onslaught began at the end of May. yet, within forty-eight hours of each other, they independently offered very similar assessments of what might be bothering him. and within forty-eight hours of their treatments and his digestive nerves getting de-constricted, the boy had tooted out an entire gas tank’s worth of offending air, and was burbling with delight. amazing. yay alternative medicine. both of them are getting Christmas presents this year.

i’ll get shopping for those just as soon as i get the rest of the baby-gift thankyou cards sent. it’s funny…having Oscar suddenly turn into a “normal” baby has jolted into perspective how many things have just slipped by the wayside over these past long months. too many of the aforementioned thankyou cards, dutifully written when he was only weeks old, are still sitting on my desk, half-addressed and gradually forgotten. most of the people they’re written to have been to the house and gone again in the duration…oopsie. this morning i noticed how filthy my shower really is, showing all the grimy, scummy signs of serious neglect over the summer. it was only this past weekend that i finally printed pictures of Oscar, and got a few hung around the house. i meant to ages ago…i feel more real when i can see my life reflected back at me in photos, truth be told, but there seemed to be no time.

now, with him taking quite reasonable naps, there are bits of time for me to steal throughout the day. this midday post is a luxury..when i finish, i shall shower. then, he’ll wake and we’ll smile at each other and struggle through another nursing session…the milk is still inching its way back in pretty stingy quantities. but that’s okay. he’s okay. he feels good. my god, the difference…in both of us.

thank you, world, for the reprieve. please excuse the absent thankyou cards…and stay out of my shower.

happy four-month birthday, little one. i hope this living isn’t such a hard way to go from here on in.

babies don’t seem to like hot weather.

at least not thirty-degree-plus hot weather, with the kind of humidity that makes fruitflies propagate with reckless abandon in my kitchen, and plasters my hair to my head in soft, wet strings. poor O spent most of the past week stripped down to diapers and onesies, and still he was sweaty – sweatier than i’d really imagined babies could get. apparently, he takes after his pa.

he was fussy in the heat, and obviously uncomfortable, and we spent a lot of time cooling him down in the tub. Oscar loves the tub. or doesn’t hate it, at least. until recently, it was hard to tell the difference between indifference and pleasure on his part – if a thing or activity didn’t cause him to pout or scream, we assumed he adored it. he wasn’t really smiling, except with gas, so we were left to attribute his happier emotions haphazardly.

but in the last couple of weeks, the smiles have been coming on. a little late, by the development charts, but he was an early arrival…and now that he is smiling, he’s making up for lost time. throughout the humid weekend, whenever he was cool enough, he beamed. he beamed at me, at his dad, at the cat, at his tub toys. a few times, when he was busy smiling and cooing and i was busy beetling around the room near him, i caught him staring off into space, beaming at the wall. then he seemed to realize that there was nothing there to smile back, and that he was hot, and he broke out in a wail. but as soon as my face reappeared in front of his, there was the smile again.

he has this giant, toothless grin that lights up his whole face, and mine. it makes me feel like the sun in the sky, and even makes the humidity tolerable.

this was worth waiting for. :)

the honeymoon…er, babymoon…is now officially over.

Dave went back to work last week, after taking Oscar’s first two weeks at home off so we could figure some of this parenting stuff out together. this practice period, which was apparently not thunk up by us, is officially known in cutesy parenting magazines and msn articles as a babymoon. and our two weeks was a babymoon to beat all babymoons – the Fiji resort vacation of babymoons, i daresay.

we had unseasonally beautiful weather, a happy, sleepy baby, and two weeks to hang out and clean out all that scary shit in the shed between naps. heck, we got to nap! and i had a willing volunteer for the diaper changes, even the 3am ones…it was dreamy. we even took the boy on his first road trip – to his grandparents home in new brunswick – and heard barely a peep out of him the whole way. he even slept through the night once. i started to feel as if i’d landed in pleasantville…and while half of me was looking over my shoulder waiting for the other shoe to drop, the other half of me got comfortable, cocky even, in this happy routine of sweetness and light.

then Dave went back to work and all hell broke lose. literally. some nasty stomach bug must have wormed its way into Oscar’s little digestive tract during one of those truckstop diaper changes on the trip back home, and about an hour after Dave departed for the office, Oscar woke up screaming bloody murder and leaking explosive green stuff all over. nice timing, my son. i swear your father paid you off.

he kept this up for six straight hours, only working himself into an exhausted sleep about half an hour before Dave returned home. that night and the next day…same thing. the doctor’s office assured me by phone that he wouldn’t die and that since he had no fever and wasn’t dehydrated i should just keep him home and keep an eye on him.

in truth i pretty much had an eye and a hand on him at all times, trying to soothe him, to rock and pet out the gases making his little face wrinkle up in sudden squealing grimaces. but patting and holding and carrying a baby takes up an amazing amount of hand time – the time, in other words, that one used to have to do things one never even thought about, like surfing blogs or buttoning one’s pants after peeing. or entertaining/disciplining the cat, who’d seemed quite okay with her new furless brother during the babymoon but became inconsolably jealous once he began howling and demanding my constant attention, thus leading her to bite my ankles and add her own lamentations to the general wail. plus eat the plants, unless she too was being petted. hand time, i now realize, has a price above rubies.

five days after the end of the babymoon, though, i feel vaguely relieved. Oscar’s misery has abated, and he’s gone back to sleeping, at least some of the time. the cat has stopped acting like a spurned lover, and i’ve gotten both my hands back long enough to sit down and type for a few minutes. i’m still exhausted…but i’m starting to accept that as a state of being. and i’ve stopped looking over my shoulder, waiting for the pretty, brittle facade of the babymoon to crack.

it rained all week. i changed all the diarrhea diapers. my cat appears to resent me deeply. and my poor baby cried and cried and cried, and i couldn’t do a damn thing except hold him…which meant my kitchen turned into a pigsty and my biggest accomplishment all week was a load of laundry. but i did it. and i didn’t completely lose my mind.

now i feel like a real mom.

today was supposed to be Oscar’s birthday…but the early bird is almost four weeks old.

and he’s becoming more and more a little person every day. he’s awake more, and he peers about blearily, taking in the world. he’s a content, watchful little creature, round, downy-fuzz head on a sausage roll of swaddling. when he breaks free from his blankets, he flaps his arms like a wild thing, but always seems surprised when the appendages whack him in the face. he peeps when he first wakes up, and he snorts a little when he feeds. he weighs almost seven-and-a-half pounds, and has the beginnings of little baby fat rolls – already i can see his newborn face disappearing, giving way to the round babyface visage he’ll have in the coming months. i grieve and delight in this growth, this changing Oscar. i keep meaning to footprint him now, before his tiny baby feet outgrow the preemie-sized sleepers that get smaller every day. now, i understand all those people who said “it goes by so fast.”

in Antoine St. Exupery’s “The Little Prince,” a fox entreats the little prince to tame him. he instructs him to come at the same time each afternoon, and sit a little closer every day. “to me you are just a little boy, like all other little boys,” says the fox. “but if you tame me, you will be unique in all the world.” my boy has been taming me for four weeks now, batting his little blond eyelashes, distinguishing himself from all the other babies he might have been – teaching me to love him for who he is and is becoming.

but there are other, less Hallmark-worthy revelations in this wonder of new parenthood. the baby’s growing fast and charming me with his small self, but the 3am vigils still seem to last like timeless torture some nights, as i slump in the chair by the bed, struggling to keep the gnawing little mouth latched properly on an aching nipple and the small squirmy body balanced on the breastfeeding pillow. i look at my child, in these moments, and i don’t always see the individual Oscar, but just a baby, a needy baby like a thousand other babies. and i wonder at the survival of the human race.

in the middle of the night, it becomes blatantly, overwhelmingly apparent that this squalling hungry infant is entirely dependent on the adult who happens to be awake with him…which is usually me, though his father is a star at middle-of-the-night diaper changes. but we could ignore him, if we chose. i could sleep (maybe with earplugs). i could leave him lying in his own waste. i could scream at him to shut up already. or, at the end of a rope i hope i never run out of, i could do worse. and he, small mewling thing, could do nothing at all. he is totally, entirely vulnerable to the whims of the adults he’s been entrusted to. this realization – that we are those adults for Oscar – is bald and frightening, and amazing. i have never, ever had such power. or such responsibility.

“The Little Prince” closes the chapter on the fox and the prince with the caution, “you are responsible forever, for what you have tamed.” as a parent, i think the reverse is also true. you are responsible, forever, for the little life that tames you. and sometimes, that responsibility is immense, and exhausting. but Oscar, he of the pointy chin and grasping hands, has become unique to me in all the world. and that – only that – will keep me semi-conscious at 3 in the morning, feeding my little prince.

it has been an amazing four weeks.

Oscar is coming home. tonight. :)

being sprung from chez hospital has come as a bit of a surprise, since no noises about homecoming had even been made at all until last evening. the boy, however, has been coming along like a house afire, eating with gusto (he has discovered his inner Cormier, i believe) and leaving his birth weight in the dust as of yesterday. so early this afternoon i tracked his doctor down, and when she agreed that he’d be good to go by tomorrow, i figured why not ask for more?

“how about today?” says me. “why not?” says she. “but you know, once you take him home, there’s no return policy. final sale.”

i think, for all the sleepness nights and messy diapers and pacing the floor ahead of us, i can live with that.

happy Midwifery Day, world (one learns about such interesting holidays when one has time to read the hospital bulletin boards)

happy homecoming, little Oscar. we’ve been waiting for you. :)