cribchronicles.com

four years ago today, at the rolltop desk in the upstairs den, i opened my old laptop – long since gone to Jesus, as has its replacement – and wrote my very first blog post.

welcome to the crib, i warbled tentatively, voice new-born and flippantly uncertain. i’d grabbed the first name for the blog that had come to mind, not wanting to spend too much time agonizing over it for fear i’d talk myself out of the enterprise altogether. i thought the handle was a bit twee, but then, i thought the whole idea of a blog was a bit twee, too.

and yet i so very much hoped that someone might be out there listening. i unspooled the first post half-breathless, feeling as if the keys were a microphone i was tapping: is this thing on?

if you’d asked me then, i couldn’t have made an honest bet whether i’d keep it going two weeks or two years. four was beyond my capacity to imagine.

i was in that late, waddling point in pregnancy when you’re wide open, all possibility, living with the swollen, sciatic awareness that even four days may alter your life irrevocably, let alone four years.

but it was more than that. i’d simply forgotten the long, streaming flow of time when things are normal and decent and mundane.

the only thing i ever took out of high school physics class was the idea, only half-understood and possibly half-garbled, was that Einstein said time is not the same for everyone, nor for any person over different periods.

i get it now. because when i look back at then, i avert my eyes.

i’d just come out of two months on hospital bedrest. in the same hospital where less than a year before, i’d delivered another baby. his ashes were in my bedroom. and we’d only been back in the country fifteen months, and had carried multiple part-time jobs – those i didn’t lose to hospitalization – the entire time, with periods for both of us where no work was forthcoming. unlike most Canadians, we had medical bills, for the airlift almost exactly one year before. we had a house to pay for, bought the day our son was born: perhaps the biggest booby prize in the history of first homes.

time and the world were heavy on me, then.

four years was a useless measure to me, from the vantage point of that rolltop desk. i was Lot’s wife, looking backwards, but in far shorter increments. at any point during the 11 and a half months before i wrote that first post here, i could’ve told you precisely how long it’d been since i’d held Finn in my arms.

grief seems to be like that, at least unless you are particularly gifted at ignoring it. it measures itself incessantly, gapes like the wound it is. you know time is supposed to be its only anaesthetic, but time crawls, refuses you the mercy of oblivion. and as it crawls, it obliterates what shreds you have to cling to: the crispness of a memory, the smell of a blanket. i had lived lifetimes some days, that year before.

four years was also irrelevant simply because it was far too large a measure. at any point in 34 or so weeks before i wrote that first post here, too, i could have told you exactly how far along i was in my second pregnancy and how long it would be again until this baby would pass the 26 week, 1 day mark at which Finn had been born, and the 28 week mark at which s/he’d ostensibly reach lung maturity. my life was measured in weeks, then. i had been boiled down to gestational time.

and even still, even at the nearly 35 week mark where i sat down and wrote the blog into being, i didn’t truly, fully believe that everything would go right and the baby would be okay, would come home with us. i didn’t care, really, what a charming little boy he’d be at four: that was no more real to me then than the sort of 50 year old he may turn out yet to be, when i am old and gray. i only cared, that April four years ago, that maybe he might cry when he was born, and breathe.

pregnancies after loss seem to be like that, no matter what.

that baby was Oscar. and he has grown to be more than i ever dared imagine him to be: my small companion, my heart on legs. but so has the little blog with the slightly embarrassing name that has given me a place to write my world slowly back to a place where time is joyfully, mundanely, normal.

i look back at that first post now and my heart goes out to a woman i no longer identify with: brittle and braver than i hope i ever have to be again.

the blog is four. four years olds are energetic and imaginative and boisterous and silly. i think my voice could use more silly. it’s matured over the past year, developed an internal compass that feels, for the first time, like skin. but three is a watching age, a pleaser’s age, the point at which change and consistency are primary focii. four year olds are ready to adventure. and perhaps my voice is too.

back when polyester was still a glorious gift to humankind, i started kindergarten at the ripe old age of four-and-a-half. this coming September, when this blog is four-and-a-half, i will start school all over again. a Ph.D program, in education, here at UPEI.

i am thrilled that i got accepted. i am still recovering from that year of everything going wrong. when things go right – when i wake up and realize i have two kids, and a job, that the faithful partner and friend i feared i’d lose in the chasm of 2005 is not only still here but has learned to do laundry…and that now, finally, for once, i didn’t get rejected for something i really, really wanted – i flop back on the pillows, flattened by gratitude.

i’ll be researching social media, so i suppose it’s possible i may put the blog to another four years of service. maybe i’ll write more about Einstein. i hope i’ll write less about loss. i hope these next four years fly, with the busy-ness of normalcy and mundanity and the joy of growth.

thank you for being here, for keeping me company no matter what. when i sat down four years ago hoping somebody out there would hear me, receive…i couldn’t really have imagined.

feel free to send cake. or just eat it, in copious amounts.

…they say goldfish have no memory
i guess their lives are much like mine
and the little plastic castle
is a surprise every time

– Little Plastic Castle, Ani diFranco, 1998

it takes about ten years for hindsight to focus, for the dirty judgement we call clarity to settle on a bygone era.

before that, it’s just yesterday. then suddenly, you wake up and note that everything’s incontrovertibly different. that most of the clothing refugees your closet harbours from that era look suspiciously dated. that you had bad hair then. the photos prove it. you blush.

the times, it occurs to you, with a slight queasy nod to mortality, they have a-changed.

this past week, with all the kerfuffle and brouhaha pinging back and forth between the blogosphere and mainstream media on the subject of mothers and bloggers and bears, oh my, i’ve realized that a part of me pines for that suddenly historic epoch: the 1990s.
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the 90s were an ugly decade, i thought while they were happening. perms and big hair and the square, boxy shapes left over from the 80s hung on far too long into the decade. i wore a lot of army boots with flowy skirts then, plus thrift-shop shirts with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders and those giant, scratchy sweaters from Guatemala. my hair was by turns geometrically puffy and super short, except for 1999 when i grew it long and parted it straight down the middle, my ironic homage to Pocahontas. or Crystal Gayle.

i didn’t know what i was doing much, in those years. i was in my first year of university when we rang the decade in, and at the tail end of a short and not-so-stabilizing-as-i’d-hoped marriage when it all rang out ten years later. i was a student most of those years; a teacher in between. i lost my virginity in the first days of the 90s. i took up smoking somewhere in those strange seasons of eternal, cynical youth, and learned to play guitar. i hiked mountains, slept on trains, backpacked my way coast to coast. i was bulimic, then recovering, then vegetarian. between 1989 and 2000, the 90s plus a shoulder on each side, i experimented with whatever remnants of drug culture landed in my lap. before and since, clean as snow.

i thought i was extraordinary, a unique marvel waiting to be discovered. but i was a fucking caricature, just a child of my times trying to muddle my way through to adulthood with a whole generation of others like me.

in the rearview mirror, it’s clear as day. i grew up in a bygone era.

i spent whole chunks of the 90s – in my early 20s, my peak pick-up years, here, people – without shaving my legs. i catch sight of young women today with their flat-ironed hair and their ubiquitous spray tans and their waxed eyebrows and suspect their legs and nethers are equally primped and smooth, to a one. they make me feel vaguely Neanderthal, those nubile hairless wonders, and yet merciful free. to my eyes, their uniforms of mandatory perfect flesh look as confining as corsets, as pointy 50s Maidenforms.

in the 90s, girls got to be angry. our boobs were mostly our own business, as far as fashion went. our words, though, were pointy. especially the ones accompanied by music.

Ani diFranco and Liz Phair were sister-goddesses in heavy boots, with big words and loud chords, and every time i gave the finger to The Man i was cool as Kim Deal, baby. the Indigo Girls sang me into an un-selfconscious social consciousness, and for all the problems of the world, it was just plain powerful to be a young woman with a voice.

even the papers said so.

and i thought this was normal, even a bit trite. the mid-decade platinum-selling angst of Alanis Morrisette embarrassed me. i took the privilege of disdain for granted. i still believed, then, in the modern myth of progress…that we were inching ever closer to a world where equality and complexity would be prized; where anger would make way for better things.

i was so fucking cute i make my teeth ache.

it took me well into the next decade to find a venue for my voice. i knew, even as i fumbled painstakingly over my F chord and my Janis Joplin renditions back in my first days with my very own guitar, that nobody was ever gonna pay to hear me sing. and i had a journal, all those long transient winters of finding my way into adulthood, but the concept of a public journal via the Internets was years ahead of me, back then.

still, the voice i eventually wrote into being here was a voice shaped more by the 1990s than by this era i’m living through, in many ways. and i think an awful lot of the so-called mommyblogs are similar, just by virtue of their writers’ demographics.

we are the girls of the 90s grown into women, writing our lives with the expectation that it is right and proper to use the voices we have.
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times change, though, and with them, the bounds of propriety, most especially for women. today we live in a world of Hannah Montana and her young, sleek, interchangeable ilk, each of them more hairless and bland than the last. the angry girls are gone, for the most part, and if the media fixes its gaze on them now it’s because they’ve pulled an Amy Winehouse and self-destructed. again.

we live in a world of blogs and social media, but many mainstream media stories still make women’s use of these out to be frivoulous, or marginal: relegated to the domain of the domestic alone.  anything else is gold-digging; any run on capital and perks by a female can still be positioned as inherently suspect and unjustified.

we live in a time when being labelled overtly feminist is, for many, more cringe-inducing than Facebook photos of our early-90s snowplow bangs.

given these foundations, the furor over mommybloggers – whatever particular furor it may be, and whatever particular outrage of the week it may engender – shouldn’t be such a surprise. look back through the rearview mirrors of history: these are old stories, elderly tropes and narratives, rendered powerful again by uncertainty. they make me nostalgic for the good old days of my day when the bad girls were media darlings.

the belittling stories and the omissions are worth taking on, challenging, absolutely. that’s part of the point of having a voice.

but in the long run, having a whole generation of us out here writing our own stories has the potential to be far more subversive to those narratives of how dismissable we all are than our protests against them.

we get to write our rebuttals every day.

because the pendulum will swing, sooner or later. the hairless beauties will give way to the natural glory of the furry crotch once again, and girls will don boots instead of heels for awhile. and maybe that next generation will get somewhere with it all, or maybe they won’t, but maybe somewhere along the line some of them will find our words out here and realize that womanhood in this decade, whatever the heck it ends up looking like in hindsight, wasn’t entirely sleekness and sippy cups.

that we were more. that we hadn’t entirely forgotten that we grew up in the 90s, even if we did eventually get better hair. and learn to wax.

so. confess. do you miss your Guatemalan sweaters? do you depillate in a 90s or contemporary fashion? and do you care what people in the New York Times or Globe and Mail say about blogging by women and mothers?

classes start tomorrow.

the campus is all preened, gussied up in Institutional Fresh, with just a hint of aspirational ivy.  the air is crisp and sunny yellow in a way it only seems to be in September. and the little Lisa Simpson who’s lived in me all my life is chomping at the bit, ready to go Back to School.

it’s been four years since i last taught a class of my own, and longer than i care to remember since the first time i stood up in front of a group of curious, wary faces and said, i’ll be your teacher this year.  i remember pausing that first time, half-expecting a camera crew to pop out of a bookshelf with kazoos in hand, shouting ha ha! just kidding! puh-leeze.

when they didn’t materialize, i was only half-relieved. if nobody was going to show up to send me back to the gutter, that meant i actually had to teach that rabble in front of me.

i’m less afraid, now, than i was then. i wonder if old standup comedians get like this, punch-drunk with been there, done that? it’s not like the crowds change, after all. this September, there will likely be the same few frowns behind the desks, the two or three Very Serious Folk there on suffrage of some sort, who need to put the teacher on notice straight off the bat. the difference is that i enjoy those people, now. they may challenge me, in either sense of the word…but i no longer mind. i smile and bide my time.  i am a mountain. the final exam will come.

i glance in the mirror and see Monty Burns staring back, rubbing his fingers together with glee, whispering Excellent, Smithers.  i grin.

(sure, i can be all Simpsons’ characters at once. i am legion.)

most students, though, no matter the culture or age group, bring an earnestness to the classroom that always surprises me, humbles me.  i teach English academic writing this year, to foreign students. and i am excited.

i realized yesterday, staring in bewilderment at the glut of eighteen-year-olds suddenly filling up the city in their little Shinerama frosh tshirts, that it has been twenty years since i started university. twenty years since my mom and i took a ferry over to the small university town just a couple of hours away on a sunny September morning, and she left me there – mostly happily, i think, on both sides of that equation – to start what has become, in effect, my life.

i didn’t know it, then. i stood in front of the mirror, that first day of class, peering at myself, wondering if i looked like a college student. my shirt was a button-down, a stained-glass coat of many colours.  i tucked it in, then pulled it out.  i tied my hair back with a bandana, then tried a barrette. it was 1989. hair needed pouf.  my jeans were old, just perfectly so, pegged at the bottom.  i cringe to admit i wore boat shoes. i cringe to admit i even remember all these things.

but i do, because that morning twenty years ago is burned into my mind, and it feels like yesterday.

going away to university at seventeen was in a sense a stupid thing to do.  i’d spent my adolescence chafing under the motherlove of a parent who believed in authority with a capital A, and so the minute i was esconced in the freedom of my concrete bunker dorm, i dispensed of any recognition of convention or authority whatsoever. i eschewed the bovine festivities of frosh week, for the most part, but took up Drinking 101 with an enthusiasm only matched for my English lit intro and the shabby-bearded political science prof who slouched cavalierly and spoke like David Bowie. i kept my scholarship, but skipped all 8:30 classes, and wasted learning opportunities that would have done me far better had they come a few years later when i’d learned to actually think for myself, not just posture as if i did.  in my first years at university, i was more Bart Simpson than Lisa.

god help me if my children ever turn into such impossible, impertinent little ingrates.

and yet, those years were invaluable to me, too. because standing in front of that dorm room mirror that morning in 1989, i was truly on my own for the first time in my life. i was paying, with loans and scholarships and money socked away from a $4.50 an hour job. i had no curfew.  the people i met i could meet on my own terms, and the things i fucked up i fucked up on my own terms. consequences of my actions were my own.  i have never – even in moving countries, marrying, divorcing, losing my child – known a divide quite so great between before and after.

that September morning in front of my dorm room mirror i didn’t understand that the person i’d been in high school would fade for me so quickly, become a blur i cannot yet, twenty years out, quite bring into focus, while the girl who stared back at me would become my first memory of myself.

i wish she’d known then that her skin was dewy and that shirts three sizes too big should never be tucked in, and that morning classes were not necessarily the handiwork of the devil, after all.  i wish she’d understood that she was smart and worthy, and stood straighter and learned earlier to ask questions. i wish she’d known how quickly twenty years fly by.

tomorrow morning, when i stand in front of the faces of my students, most of them just flown in from around the world and on their own for the first time, there will be a part of me that yearns to gather them in close, show them the girl in that mirror with her dated hair and her silly shoes, and exhort them to gather ye rosebuds while ye may, carpe diem and live deliberately and all those things that ring silently in the September air.

i won’t do it. they’d laugh. they’re business students, most of them. they’d be more inspired by a pie chart of earnings corresponding to time invested. and yet, as the term rolls on, they’ll struggle and stumble over the same heady temptations of independence and consequence that i did, lo those many years ago. and i will watch, and nod, and reach out a hand and try to teach what i know, very little of which has to do with English academic writing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

suddenly, it is cold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and i also wanted a girl.

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

it has healed something, this summer of silly frocks.

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

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

razors pain you
rivers are damp
acids stain you
and drugs cause cramp
guns aren’t lawful
nooses give
gas smells awful
you might as well live
– Dorothy Parker

i have always thought myself a cat person. and by some alchemical trick of metaphysics and assumption, my medieval mind has occasionally, therefore, convinced me that i am thus – metaphorically, of course – a cat.

it is only when things change drastically that i am forced to notice one significant problem with this little identification of the heart: penchants for napping and sloth and shedding notwithstanding, i am no feline. felines, thrown through the air, make graceful arcs and solid landings, all twenty-plus paw pads absorbing shock.

pretend felines, thrown through the air, claw and shriek and flail, spinning paws in mid-air like old LooneyTunes characters discovering the earth has given way beneath them. then they go splat.

both kinds of felines, the real and the ones with pretensions to cat-ness, then retire to corners to lick their wounds in private.  when one is not a cat, this can take awhile.

all this to say, i have been quiet, learning yet again that i am not a cat. and that landing on one’s feet is not a graceful process, when one is not a cat. seismic shifts disrupt my comforting routines and leave me anxious, unstable, vulnerable.

uh, yeh.  who, me? a tissue? don’t mind if i do.

but then this strange new world begins to take shape and its reflection in the mirror grows less foreign and i begin to understand the ways i can be competent with this, the ways not all is different, the gifts and possibilities of what this new will be. and my equilibrium recalibrates and i find my balance and stop kicking in midair, stop licking my raw spots.

when one is not a cat, one sometimes realizes one is an old dog, struggling yet again with these damn new tricks.
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Friday, 3:56 pm
with a little wincing grimace that means, “i’m really sorry i’m leaving with a pile of painfully tedious data entry left to do so students can register Monday especially since i already left early Wednesday but Dave’s in Vancouver so i HAVE to go get the kids ’cause the sitter’s on summer hours” i wave happy weekend at my poor, patient, beleaguered boss – left sitting in the disorganized pile of new Soviet prison furniture dumped in my office earlier that day – and race out the door.

starting work has been easy, really.  the office is both familiar and welcoming, the culture there affirming and social and all i’d hoped and remembered it would be when i took the job. i’m taking over from a person who is tidy of mind, and working for a person who’s been the closest thing to a mentor i’ve found since i moved back here four-and-a-half years ago. my bestest friend, lifelong, is in the office next door. the data entry part of things literally nearly blew my brain wide open for a couple of hours until i pried it open and personally lobotomized a few errant and unnecessary bits i wasn’t using much anyway, but other than the fact that they have no couch for me to recline upon and Gulags R Us designed the gray aesthetic anaesthetic that passes for new desks there, i’m happy.

the rest has been harder. Dave was away. kids weren’t sleeping, either at the new sitter’s or at home. time was suddenly chewed up like an all-day pizza and come 9pm i’d find myself at the end of a long, long road of supper/tidying/bedtime/laundry/prep for tomorrow and staring down the prospect of watering my poor sunbeaten pansies and tomatoes and wanting to wilt myself for want of sweet downtime.  Oscar grew dawdly and i found myself frog-marching him through our hours together, trying desperately to get me and two kids dressed and fed and out of the house with all we needed for the day by the hour that two weeks ago meant we’d be sitting down to breakfast. Posey cried whenever she saw me, and my heart ached and fretted and pined for her, for the impossible assurance of a good decision made.

Friday 4:09 pm
i wedge the children and their daycare bags and the dirty-diaper bag and my own work bag (which is, ahem, actually still my regular diaper bag/purse/chasm of magical disappearance) into the sun-stroked, stifling car. four years ago, when we bought the cheapest car on the market, paying $1000 extra for A/C sounded like the most ridiculous idea i’d ever heard. now, of course, the most ridiculous thing i’ve ever heard is the whimpering of my sweaty baby slowly cooking in the back of a non-air-conditioned car because her mother is a cheap sow, but i digress.

the baby’s dress, i notice as i strap her in, is covered in a sticky brown substance that is unmistakably either Fudgsicle or chocolate ice cream. Oscar cheerily informs me that he didn’t nap today because a movie was on during quiet time.

my brain conflates these two pieces of information and comes to the logical conclusion that my children spend their days drinking Coke and watching soft porn and will grow up to skin kittens with their teeth. my spirits slump on the steaming, filthy car mat.  i wallow in the certainty of my own failure.

Friday 4:25 pm
the hot little car of misery and chocolate stains arrives at my grandfather’s cottage, because PEI actually is only three apples wide.

the cottage – and i use the term loosely, as “rustic plywood shack” might cover it better in some estimations – is a living testament to my late grandmother’s foray into creative needle art of the 60s and 70s. the curtains are faded brown and orange op art specials, the walls plastered with crewel work depicting owls, turtles, boats, and various other flora & fauna. souvenir ashtrays abound, relics of guests long since forgotten. the faded patchwork couch, a Coat of Many Colours for the furniture set, was replaced two summers ago by well-meaning family friends who meant to surprise my grandfather, but i think he misses the zany, threadbare thing. i do.

Rusty greets us at the door, from a prone position in front of the fan, towel laid over his hind end. in German Shepherd years, Rusty is about 107. he’s my father’s dog, though my grandfather’s soft spot for him is notorious and deep. they are the patriarchs, my grandfather and Rusty. he calls Rusty noble, and i sometimes wonder if he isn’t fishing for the compliment to be returned.

i met Rusty first as a pup in the Yellowknife airport in the summer of 1996. it was early August, tail end of the midnight sun, and i was flying back north for a second year of teaching. i crossed paths with my father’s clan on their way back from PEI to the town they’d called home for ten years. my half-sister had sweet-talked them into a puppy, and he sat bouncing in his cage, smiling at me.  when he licked me, i laughed, and was surprised.

Rusty still has the same open gaze, the same trusting brown eyes.  i’m not a dog person, have never been a dog person, but Rusty’s sweetness charms me. and even splayed on the orange shag rug in my grandfather’s cottage, his bounce long since gone, he charms my kids. Posey puts her hand on his nose and he bats his eyes at her like a scene out of Disney.  Oscar, upon discovering that Rusty can no longer swat flies away with his tail, fans them for him dutifully.

Rusty is a dog on borrowed time. his left back leg stopped working awhile back, and on Wednesday my father and stepmother had planned to make that last sad trip to the vet to put him down. there is a point after which sustaining life is no mark of love. but mercy is a tricky thing. when Rusty perked up and started enjoying his food, stopped showing pain, they decided a last week at the shore might be nice for all concerned.

at 89, my grandfather has to pick his way down the crooked steps to the beach with a cane. my father brings the old sky-blue motorboat in from its mooring, readies it, helps his father in. but once in the driver’s seat, my grandfather drops thirty years. he is still the best waterski driver i’ve ever seen – patient, smooth, able to read the pull on a rope and adjust accordingly.

Friday, 4:45 pm
Rusty can no longer go down the steps to the beach. when the crew make their way down the sandy red cliff – Oscar included, life-jacket-clad, in my stepmother’s arms for his very first boat ride ever – Posey and i stay behind with the old dog. he whimpers at them leaving. he is a water dog, a people dog, part lab, part shepherd.  this being left behind alarms him, say his big brown eyes.

i look at him and feel as if i’m looking in a mirror. i feel grizzled with exhaustion, with heat, with the anxiety of inexorable change and my own inability to keep up, to land easily on my feet anymore.  i reach out and rub Rusty behind the ears, where he’s still soft. i coo a little song of “we’re here, buddy, it’s okay,” though he is long since deaf. and we are companionable, two old dogs; one who thinks she’s a cat, one who’s sure he’s a person.

then i hear the boat grumble to life down in the water and i forget Rusty because it is Oscar’s first boat ride and i want to know that he is okay, want to mark with my eyes that he once rode in the boat with my grandfather at the helm so i can tell him someday. i step out the old screen door with the baby in my arms and it slaps shut behind me and i am peering, craning out to see the small form in the seat beside my grandfather when i hear the door creak again and it is Rusty nosing it open, unwilling to be alone.  he pauses at the small threshold between cottage and porch and then leaps, old strong front legs carrying his bulk despite the dead hind end and he crashes down beside me apparently unfazed and my jaw hangs open and i turn my head in strange respect so he will not see my tears.

Posey claps in delight.  and my grandfather’s boat speeds away over the water like it has done every summer since i can remember but this time with my son in front, so small and riding away from me, wind in his hair. and i sit with Rusty in his reprieve, in his last days, and ruffle his fur.

when one is not a cat, all you can really do is get through today and keep leaping, no matter how graceless your landing.

he came up as a suggested Facebook friend.

that application baffles me, i admit.  it repeatedly pimps my brother’s dead dog’s memorial account, along with the guy who groped me most awkwardly – and somewhat traumatically – on that camping trip in college.  erm, no.  thank you.  and then there’s the gaggle of people i swear i’ve never heard of even if FB is convinced they were in my high school graduating class. i come from a town with ten last names, Facebook. i know these folks are strangers.  lovely strangers, i’m sure. friends i haven’t met yet.  but seriously, there are a ton of people i’ve lost touch with that i did actually know and like, once upon a time. couldn’t you throw me a bone?

but his name came up and i did a double take, and clicked through, and there he was, in limited profile.

he would be nearly nineteen.  the shock of recognition that came at seeing him was visceral, instant, even though it was not in fact recognition but a trick of genes and time.  he is the spitting image of his father, same jutting chin and curve to the nose, same post-adolescent pocked cheeks, same searching eyes. i looked for his mother in the planes of that face and found no trace of her, my long-ago friend.

and yet the summers before and after he was born came back to me like yesterday, so present i had to shake my head and do the math and blink in wonder.  one gets so old so fast.

she got married the summer i was eighteen and she was nineteen.  we were both a year out of high school – i’d gone off to university to learn to drink out of funnels and shot glasses; she’d gone to college and met a fast-talking boy with angry, hungry eyes. she’d dropped out by Christmas.  they had an apartment downtown, plastered with vintage posters of The Wall that i coveted dearly.  he and i got along, in our way, intensity drawn to intensity around the calming, gentle oasis that was my friend.  he and i talked music, politics. she and i talked pregnancy tests, that summer.

when she asked me to be her maid of honour, i’d never even been to a wedding. the pomp and circumstance bewildered me, and i thought getting married at nineteen to a man whose interest in his impending fatherhood was vague at best was a ridiculous prospect.  but i stood with her at the front of that church when he gave her a showy kiss and they were pronounced man and wife, and i clapped, and caught the bouquet, and tripped over my taffeta frock.

Jesse was born in February.  i had just turned nineteen, she was a month shy of twenty. i had never held a newborn until i came home that weekend, hitchhiked into town special just to see him, not realizing that barging in on a mother who’d just given birth might be anything but thoughtful. i cradled him, tiny squashed face still bruised from a rough birth, and wondered at his perfect nails and brought him a hardcover Richard Scarry book and handed him back with relief to return to my life of books and things that seemed so much bigger than that tiny, dark apartment with the bassinet perched by the futon.

i spent that summer with them, baby Jesse and his mother, working shiftwork not far from where they lived. she and i took him to the playground at the school i’d gone to as a child, and spread out blankets and watched him sink sink sink, buddha belly to the ground as he struggled to learn to sit up.  he had fat cheeks and laughing blue eyes and i thought him impossibly beautiful.  and i looked at him there and tried to imagine one of my own, casting tea leaves against a future i could not see.

that summer, outside in the grass, my friend talked of her days and i watched her with troubled eyes, this sunny girl with the boy-husband who did not really want to be a husband at all, and i swallowed all the sorrow that welled up on my tongue, the sorrow that comes with being a child left behind by a father who never really became a daddy, and i hoped for different for them both.

it did not unfold that way. the boy-husband left, eventually, found someone new, started a life that at last notice barely included Jesse and the younger brother who came into their lives just before it all dissolved. my friend struggled, went back to school, started again, found a life i think and hope makes her happy.  we ended up in the same town together briefly, ten years ago now, one of the few times i’ve seen Jesse since that summer i was nineteen.  he was still a little boy ten years ago, but long-legged, all motion, and i was flummoxed, wondering where the baby on the blanket had gone.

today, i looked into the face of a young man.  my eyes combed his, searching for the blue-eyed baby of nearly twenty years ago until i realized, finally, that that baby is lost to all but memory.  he is grown.  in a blink.

this time the tea leaves spread themselves out like trollops in the sun, crystal clear.  this is the future, they sang to me.  this is how fast it goes.

and so today i will spread a blanket on the grass in my backyard and watch my baby tumble and try to stand, and taste grass and other delicacies, so that tomorrow when i blink and find her grown i will have this baby face still burned on my memory, open and tiny and laughing in the sun.

who was the first baby to ever make you imagine yourself maybe a mother, someday?

my mother tells me i walked at nine months old.

she has been telling me that for as long as i can remember. she’s also prone to mentioning that i spoke in clear sentences by two, and stayed dry through the nights shortly after.  

oh, i was a starbaby, clearly. and my mother’s pride in the accomplishments of my infant self has been a reliable camp stove for the cockles of my heart for, um, ever.

sure, i’ve done other things in my life. i have a good eight or nine years of post-secondary education under my belt, been around the world a few times, have written a few things i’m proud of.  but ask my mother, and you’ll get the distinct impression i peaked in 1973.

it took me a good 35 years to figure out the sad truth about my child prodigy status. 

being the first among my little friendlets to walk never actually made a better walker than they were.  i spoke early, yes, and admittedly i haven’t stopped…but once you hit grade three or so, being a monolingual, publicly verbal creature ceases to be so impressive. and i seldom wet myself, true, but so far as i’m aware, neither do many other thirty-somethings.  (well, except for those unfortunate post-partum bladder indiscretions…HUSH. for years i was continent, people. totally, reliably continent.)

my mother has spent my entire life exuding beatific pride in perfectly normal milestones that almost all typically-developing children meet somewhere within a twelve-month period.  i was no freakin’ Mozart, composing symphonies in Pampers, for crying out loud. i walked early. i stopped pissing myself a few months before some of my friends. 

i spoke in sentences probably a full year before my son did. but now that he’s reached what the charts call age-appropriate fluency…whaddaya know? he says stuff just as smart as the kid who started talking a year earlier.

my handy-dandy parental primers, mostly used as helpful doorstops since the early days of Oscar’s infancy, all have the same message: the  delicate self-esteem of a child has its first roots in the reflections cast back to said child by his or her caregivers. you are good, you are special, we communicate to the little folk, and THIS is why.  

i made them doorstops because they all communicated to ME one troubling message: my self-esteem is rooted in the very same old sacred cows that i’ve been railing against since i turned thirteen.  dammit. 

my mother, bless her good and earnest heart, wasn’t trying to set me up for a middle-age of nagging insecurity. she is, to her core, a believer in Authority. she appeals to it, honours it, makes an occasional shrine of it.  and left alone young, with an infant to raise, she turned to Authority to bolster and validate her efforts.  enter Dr. Spock, with his normative charts.

if i walked early, she must be doing a good job. spoke early, and without that pesky island accent? she was offering rich language development resources in the home environment. toilet trained before two? clearly, despite the pinched disapproval of single parenting amongst the Good Families of the city in that time, she must be morally upright enough to earn some stamp of approval and seal of quality, else i’d have been soiling myself all over town until well past three.

you see where all this goes wrong, right?  i grew up with the idea that doing things early was not only a marker of my great, if vague, potential…but that it was a good in itself.  i was good because Authority declared me good. and prompt. that is all. thanks for playing.

my mother’s Dr. Spock book – i read the damn thing myself in adolescence whilst plowing indiscriminately through her bookshelf – stopped at age three.  and so did any discussion of my skill set, my qualities as an individual.

the school system eventually took up where Dr. Spock had left off, as Validating Authority for my mother’s efforts to raise an acceptable (and preferably slightly above average) child.  the school system was generally kind to me, because i had been raised with literacies it appreciated.  and when the school system was done with me and had convocated my Honours-achieving hind end out its doors – early, yet again, as i graduated high school at 17 and had completed two separate bachelor’s degrees at 22 – i assume my mother believed some other benign system of authority, some Dr. Spock of the professional world, closed to her but in her mind a meritocracy clearly waiting to welcome me with open arms, would step in to take me up on my promise, my potential.

for a brief period, she even stopped talking about my potty training achievements and instead offered up my degrees as social appetizers at every occasion, even having them framed at her own expense and hung in her apartment.

but i did not arrive.  i worked hard, but had no idea how to leverage the skills i had into opportunity.  i didn’t even understand the concept. 

when i finished school, i knew i’d walked early and toilet-trained early, but other than that my personal canvas of self-description was filled only with my own adolescent graffiti.  “i like to imagine myself as David Bowie’s personal concubine” is not a self-description one could go far with in the depressed Canadian economy of the early-90’s recession.  and so i floated, town-to-town, up and down the dial, always working, trying every path. and  i came to find myself in my late-ish thirties, writing about tutus and wondering what i want to do with the rest of my life. 

and my mother, who loves me and whose ambitions for me only ever extended so far as me being acceptable to Authority – a line i’ve been falling on and off of like a wagon since junior high – has gradually settled into an apparently contented relationship with my achievements, wherein her acquaintances relate stories of their adult childrens’ law practices and government pensions and sojourns with Doctors without Borders, and mom chirps “Bonnie’s always been gifted with words. Do you know she could speak in full sentences by the time she was twenty-two months?  Of course, she walked at nine months…she was always bright…and she was dry through the night by the time she turned two. Children these days seem to be in diapers right until kindergarten…have you noticed…?”

…and then all the maters cluck in unison, and magically, any discussion of my current skill set disappears entirely from view.

which i’m starting to see the benefit in.

 if my mother wants to bask in the glow of my prodigious tippy-toeing across a carpet during the Trudeau heyday (or Nixon’s China visit, for you south-of-the-border readers)…well, that’s her prerogative.  it keeps my potential open. and i’m beginning to think maybe there’s potential in being a late-bloomer, after all.

so as Josephine closes in on nine months happily flat on her puffy diapered ass, i say dandy. pass the cookies. take your time, kiddo.  

what was your sense of your own potential, growing up? where did it come from? and do you think you’ve fulfilled it, in any way?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posey eating shoe. she's worth 16 months.

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

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