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on Sunday afternoon, at the park with the kids, my bracelet broke.

online friends made the bracelet for me shortly after Posey was born last fall. an ornate art deco clasp, and three strands of silver beading, each with the name and birthstone of one of my children. Oscar & Finn, April, crystals. Josephine, September, sapphire. it was gorgeous. and i cried when i opened the little package, because this bracelet made and sent by semi-strangers had all three of my babies’ names on it, the only thing in my possession linking the three so visibly.

it made me smile.

the strand that broke last Sunday was Finn’s. i scrabbled in the early spring grass, trying to contain the beads as they rolled brightly away and at the same time keep Posey from swallowing the ones i retrieved.  i found a few of the crystals, found the F, the two Ns. but the little square bead with the I escaped me. i got down on my hands and knees, traced the dirt with my fingertips. gone.

the strand of my broken child, always so elusive, broken. the wind blew my hair into my smarting eyes.

then i caught myself. i raised my head to the sharp gust and the dry leftover leaves skittering. he is not in a bracelet, i told myself. he cannot be lost again. he is everywhere, dust, in these leaves, in his brother and sister. he is written on you.  i stood up, spun my head around almost as if i expected to see him there, some little colt-legged shadow with a brown bowl cut.

hello, you.

i left that bead somewhere in that playground, lost like the child himself, relinquished to the world, the universe. it is there, somewhere, in that grass. i just cannot see it.

it is fitting, the bracelet perhaps more honest with its broken strand than it was before.  this is my family picture, three children, one floating free, without an I.  and on his birthday this year, i do not sorrow any more. where once there was a hole where he had been, a gaping wound, now time has left mostly love, indelible, stronger than death.

happy fourth birthday, my Finn…my wee one, my shadow baby, my son. i smile at you.

a year ago, the only word combination he could utter was “no, mama” and its paternal equivalent. “bah” stood for ball, bear, book.

yesterday, we perched at the table and he piped up, “…so. this morning i wouldn’t let Daddy and Grandpapa play with my castle. i only wanted to play with Grandmaman. i took the helmet off the castle man and put it on backwards! haha. wasn’t that funny?!?!”

tomorrow, he is three. he inhabits a body that leaps and wiggles and reminds me of the cherubs of stone cathedrals come fresh into the world, round belly and perfect bum and dancing feet.  he is not tall for his age, yet to me somehow stretched beyond comprehension, this boy now. the baby is almost gone from his face.  in its place, eyes sweet with wonder and fierce in the sulk, an open, curious, willful, playful boy…an imp.

and i am consistently amazed and driven crazy and delighted and moved by him. he is a force, now, and reckoning with him sometimes takes all i have and i run dry on endurance and urge and push and snap at him to hurry up! or to be quiet! and i long to just lie down limp on the floor and rest for a moment from this barrage of need and demand, always changing, morphing and oh my god he will eat me alive, i swear, but then, sometimes there is grace and the patience his lovely, learning little soul deserves and i look into his eyes and see that he is still whole, unbroken by my petty flaws, and my heart crumbles with relief and terror and a love that would destroy worlds to keep him just as he is except i know his job is to ripen and become and oh, how i hope for him a life rich and rewarding.

he has a joker’s heart, a showman’s sense of audience, of timing.  on Saturday, we took him and his little cousins to the local annual Pinch Penny Fair for his birthday “party”, for face painting and a magic show. the magician took him up onstage, and Oscar gaped at the man, compliant but slackjawed, almost in trance, suddenly smaller than i’d seen him in ages.  until the applause started and he turned to the audience, awestruck by the sound. in his eyes, a light came on, a recognition, and for a second i saw him ageless and beyond me, soul exposed. and i thought, i see you, my son.

and i beamed up at him, reaching out my hand to steady him as he tottered off the stage in his little rubber boots.

then he turned into a tiger for the day and we had cake and i gave thanks for him, for the thousandth time these last three years.

happy birthday, big  boy.  my god, how i love you.

baby, you’re much too fast.

Posey scoots now, small arms propelling her backwards over the hardwood like a slippery, self-denying seal.  it makes her happy, this autonomy, this discovery of the world. ooh, another dust bunny! i think i heard her coo.

shoulda bought one of those sleepers with the mop attachment on ’em. happy baby, clean floors.

i have a job interview tomorrow.

it’s a big one, a federal job, a job with pension and all those exotic things that i haven’t had in the almost twelve years since i left the K-12 classroom. i spent a whole weekend last month compiling my twelve-page application, and most of the trip to Halifax having Dave quiz me on policies and mandates and the 73 other things i’m trying to stuff into my brain so i have a chance of not being blown out of the water by the internal candidates.  March is going out like a lion, a foot of snow here last night, and so school is closed and i’m trying to prepare a strategic plan for the presentation part of the THREE-HOUR interview while two sets of small snotty hands paw at me.

Dave is home, bless him. he has my back. and my babies.

it feels heady to draft communications strategy, to luxuriate in concepts like innovation and coherence. the notion of this job sings siren songs of salary and semi-security and skills development, of arriving.  i am all ears, a silly adolescent eager to put out for the big letter sweater who makes her feel she’s good enough.

but the prospect of shoehorning my stretched, milk-swollen bosom into my good jacket like a trussed chicken makes me feel exposed, faintly grotesque…Betty Boop playing professional.

and every time i try to imagine opening my mouth to say something articulate about my qualifications, i choke, feel brittle and strange and false, like a child caught believing in imaginary friends.  i want this. it scares me.

i have grown accustomed to being home. i catch Josephine’s eye as she gnaws fiercely on a stuffed rabbit, and her eyes crackle with light.  Oscar dons his Miffy apron and pulls his stool up to the kitchen counter to help me cook; wanders the house in underpants. my daughter will sit up soon, then walk, speak her first words. and if i get this job, i will not be there for nearly so much of that.

part of me wants to freeze this moment, the weight of this babe in my arms, the laugh of my boy as he shouts hoo-way! that part of me would stay here forever.  it is afraid i will fail at anything else.

i will not know unless i try.
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… some help, if you will.  i’m rusty at this interview stuff, struggling to remember the cadence of work, how people sound when their conversations aren’t mostly about poop. what’s the best job interview question you’ve ever been asked?  what do you wish you’d answered?

you can be my practice team.

wish me luck.

an old friend came into town last week on her way to a conference not far away. she was a friend in our expat days, someone we spent late nights and hangovers with, someone whose apartment floor we crashed on, whose ashtrays and rare collection of actual decent English books we made free with.

she arrived as my brain was waddling knee-deep, delayed but engaged, through the soupy fascination of online point and counterpoint about what it means to be a woman, whether motherhood is a dividing line more definitive than the others that mark us.

my friend moved back to Canada around when we did, to study obscure bits of Russian history and politics.  she’s currently doing a Ph.D, and is spending her mid-thirties immersed in student life in a communal house littered with Doc Martens. she has an indie music show on the campus radio station, and her fiancé, who arrived with her, is eight years younger than she. both have hair to their waists.

they arrived at our house right exactly in the midst of the chaotic ballet of suppertime. it was potty-training week for one child and teething and first-foods week for the other.  tofu and baby cereal and Thomas cups half-full of milk were strewn around the kitchen along with the ingredients for the curry i’d make later for the adults, and the baby was fussing in her high chair whilst Dave and i improvised “pooping is so fun” songs to the half-naked boy perched on his throne in the middle of the kitchen floor. the boy who hadn’t pooped in two days, because the power of withholding was a mad concoction he’d discovered two nights before when we got ourselves all het up about imminent potty success and a poop party and pretty much terrorized him into constipation. so there we were, all nonchalant-like.

oh hi! hugs. you brought champagne? wonderful. i’m shouting over the howling baby, who has developed an occasional but vehement stranger aversion. i unrolled a breast sloppily from the armour of my nursing bra, rocking rhythmically.

our friend had knit Oscar a hat, a fabulous fish creature which i mistook for a dinosaur. it itches, he complained, without guile. she looked crushed. he saw this and kept it on. he liked her on sight.

our guests perched on stools in the midst of the chaos, trying gamely to keep a so how’ve you been? conversation going betwixt the dance of chopping and feeding and creating a poop-positive environment and Oscar retrieving most of his toys from the playroom for them to admire.  she told of a trip to St. Petersburg – the Russian one, not Florida – and a summer in Spain and he showed off the amazing silver jewellry he creates and i interjected inanely with salient comments like wow! and where? and omygodDaveithinkhe’spooping!

like our noses couldn’t tell.

so the offending prize was duly carried away and celebrated in absentia with chocolate chip cookies and high fives and then it was bedtime and our entire family disappeared upstairs for the usual ablutions of tooth-brushing and bathing and medication-doling and stories and the very fussy Josephine settled only to let loose with a torrent of howlage that recalled me upstairs only minutes after i’d made it down, and kept me up there for what felt like the entire night but was actually only 20 minutes or so. i was afraid they’d drink all the champagne without me.

finally, we ate. and my friend asked, so what do you do here, for fun? is there much of a music scene? you doing any theatre? and i looked at her like she was speaking Swahili and chirped, uh, i have book club tomorrow night! like a birthday-party magician who’s been asked to conjure a pony but can only come up with a lame and slightly off-topic rabbit.  i didn’t admit that i couldn’t actually remember what we were reading for book club and went on that yes, there is a decent arts community here but we don’t go OUT really and i caught my friend’s head tilt and the chasm between us gaped and i realized that it was pointless for me to assert that i’m happy in spite of how it sounds because that would just be protesting too much. and i felt like i might as well just lie down and die in my apron, and stick a sign over me saying here lies Bonnie, the caricature of motherhood, fit only to be pitied and judged…unless you Get It.

but here’s the thing.

my friend has kids.

two of them. she had them young and she was the primary caregiver to a girl and a boy thirteen months apart for years while their dad drove a truck until when they hit school she hit a wall and went out and found herself and shares custody of these almost-teens while she studies and makes for herself a life that has to be very different from the one she lived for five years while they were small.

and still, much as she has a heart the size of Texas and charmed Oscar and cooed over Josephine, she doesn’t Get It anymore. it was as plain as day, written all over her face…she has simply forgotten that there could be a life so circumscribed by bodily functions and one’s own lack of sleep.  maybe it shocked her to discover that it wasn’t just her and her circumstances that made those early years so crazy, that two little kids blows most of us out of way out of the hipness pond for awhile, if not forever…but it shocked her, that much was clear.  i was not entirely the person she came to see, even if she was as gracious as could be about it.

we are both girls and both women, my friend and i, depending on whether the topic of conversation is silly or serious. we are also both mothers. but one of us is in a place where the energy for outside stimuli is sucked out of me on a regular basis by tears and poop and guiding and comforting and all those things that my children will only come to me for overtly for a few more years, really. she gives me hope that someday my conversations will NOT be about poop…and in the interim, i hope she – and you – will bear with me.

happy International Women’s Day, chicas.
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how have your friendships been impacted by children?  did your friends have kids earlier or later than you, or at all?  does how you perceive other women – or interact with them – shift according to their parenting status?

Originally uploaded by o&poecormier

her first solids, if a thin rice-oatmeal gruel can really be considered solids.

and there i am, pimping the mush, coaxing her little bird mouth to open, beaming with pride when she reaches out for more. smiling, watching, as i push her off the ledge.

into whatever her life’s relationship with food will be.

until today, it’s been subsumed in her relationship with me. she lights up when she sees me, this girl, but her love is that of the gourmand for a good meal. i am her walking cheeseburger, her magically reappearing smorgasbord. but lately, she’s been watching suspiciously as the rest of us bite and munch our way through our days, realization clearly dawning that she’s been missing something. yesterday she took a swipe at my ginger cookie as she lolled in my arms, and nearly wrested it clear out of my hand.

time, obviously, to break out the gruel.

her reaction telegraphed across her face like a storm squawl that ended at the pot of gold, all what in the sam hill is THAT and oh oh oh lord have mercy where can i get more?!? only gruel and thin gruel at that but she comes from a long line of canny Scots on my side and the gruel we call porridge is haute cuisine for our kind so she had no complaints. at least until an hour later when she vomited all over the kitchen and then spent three hours fussing and crying out in her sleep.

uh, i’m going to blame the teething for that one. i’m hoping food is kinder to her than that.

what i’m hoping is that she and food have a long and happy life together. i’m hoping that the dairy sensitivities fade as she grows, so that she can someday enjoy the melting sensation of a soft brie – or Velveeta – or her tongue. i’m hoping no real allergies develop, the scary kind, the anaphylactic kind that will leave us scrambling to shield her from foods as from traffic or dread disease.

i hope she will find pleasure in food, in trying things…at least as an adult. i hope she will be more like her father, the culinary adventurer, and not like me. for me it’s mind over matter, food. i’ve never even tried a clam because the idea of eating its WHOLE BODY freaks me out. i’ve passed up caribou eyeballs, silkworm larvae, wok-fried cockroaches. i’m not sorry. but i am kind of sorry that i’m the sort of person more likely to starve than adapt. i hope she can come to see food as less fraught with strictures of culture and comfort than i do.

and i hope the pleasures she finds in eating are not false promises, substitutes for love that is never enough, empty fill for aches she cannot face.  i hope that i can give her what she needs to grow strong and self-confident, so that the inverse of our current nursing relationship does not come to pass and find her seeking ME in a cheeseburger, or ten.

i hope she can love herself with food, respect her body in the ways she feeds it. i hope she never looks in the mirror with loathing, or spends seasons with her head down a toilet or her mouth barred shut in a desperate feint to control the mess of living.

i hope there is enough food. i hope i can feed her well and healthily, without too much fear for the grocery pennies or for empty silos, drought, famine.  she is born to plenty, this one, all double chin and thigh rolls, no trace of preemie limbs left. yet so many starve in other places while food rots here. and her generation may know more of that than i can imagine, if we keep driving the planet beyond capacity, using resources in ways that maximize profits and not human dignity, decency. every tuna can in the local grocery store here is labelled product of Thailand. there is no sustainable tuna fishery anywhere near Thailand, according to any sources i can find. will such a shortsighted system survive her lifetime? we are precariously imbalanced. and selfishly, because she is my child, i hope the collapse is not so drastic that she must scrabble in the dirt for sustenance as so many must already.

what i wish for her is food to feed her…food as blessing, without the curse of too much or too little. with tears in my eyes, because i find it hard to believe that such a thing could be possible.

all this i offer up, smiling at her as fat hands reach for the bowl. today, daughter. today, you started.

this past Saturday morning i woke up to a washing machine that had given up the ghost and gone to appliance heaven in the middle of a load of dirty diapers. very dirty diapers. apparently the washing machine rapture was unable to wait for my childrens’ poop to complete the rinse cycle.

this coming Saturday morning, on the occasion of my thirty-seventh birthday, i am getting a brand-new washing machine -the first i will have ever owned – delivered to mah house. on my birthday. and i think this is fabulous.

cue the girdles and the curlers, middle age is in da house.
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the summer i was nineteen, i saw Thelma and Louise in the theatre. twice. shelling out more than once was a wild indulgence….but i had to go back. there was this one scene – sunup in the badlands, a vintage Impala replete with Southern Comfort, and The Ballad of Lucy Jordan – that made me catch my breath, disappear into the story, into that car, into the song playing in the background. Marianne Faithfull’s broken voice and a housewife losing her mind, her self.

she could clean the house for hours
or rearrange the flowers
or run naked through the shady streets
screaming all the way
…
at the age of thirty-seven, she realized
she’d never ride through Paris in a sports car
with the warm wind in her hair

there was, of course, no Youtube then, to trace the lyrics that had grabbed onto me like grappling hooks and screamed you must not make this mistake, child. no Wikipedia to promptly inform me that children’s author and poet Shel Silverstein had written the words croaked out by Faithfull. it took two viewings of the credits for me to even figure out the song’s name, and a long afternoon in the bowels of an old radio station’s archives for me to find a copy. but the very first time i heard the words, i understood.

You will be old someday. Get out and live. Make sure you have no regrets for things undone.

thirty-seven was beyond old to me then. thirty-seven, as best i could figure, must surely mean wrinkliness in places i was loathe to contemplate. thirty-seven was last chance, the age after which nothing would ever happen again.

probably only a nineteen year old could believe so fervently in the possibility of living without regret. not all doors can be opened, after all. and in the end i am rounding on thirty-seven still without having ever ONCE ridden through Paris in a sports car, my head high, Thelma and Louise-style headscarf and giant sunglasses and warm wind in my hair. (Dave, please note…you have two days left…get crackin’. passport ready.)

but from the cusp of a threshold after which nothing will ever happen again…i am surprised. because i’m happy.

on Saturday i will be thirty-seven years old and i am getting a freaking washing machine for my birthday. and when the baby naps, i can clean the house for hours, or could rearrange the flowers if i could remember to, erm, water them. my days of streaking down suburban streets are long gone. i don’t sleep for more than three hours at a time anymore, and on the rare occasion we have friends over, i spend half the evening trying to keep my baby from yelling over the conversation. yet…i don’t feel stifled or oppressed. or not in the way that matters in the long run.

by my own terms, i’ve lived well. i’ve learned, i’ve experimented, i’ve sung and spoken and created. i’ve stood naked on a balcony looking out over Bangkok at sunrise. i’ve laughed until i cried. i’ve held three babies, freshly born. i’ve grieved. i’ve loved. i’ve grown old enough to be able, finally, to say “i’m sorry.” and i’ve survived my long and reckless searching to circle back home, to a place where two small faces smile at me each morning. and the cat bites my ankles.

at nineteen i was afraid i’d wake up one morning and find that life had passed me by, hemmed me in in such a way that i’d never get out and figure out all that i could be. in the end, i’m still looking for all i can be, even at thirty-seven. and i’m looking in places i wasn’t sure i ever would…in the drudgery of this day to day hard-won domesticity, and its little pleasures, and the sense of agency that i find in my modest goals for the year: learn French, get a longterm job, play more trivia, spend time alone with Dave, teach my kids and myself that sometimes you don’t have to get mad even when you feel mad. these things excite me the way goals like “visit Amsterdam” and “become a rock star” once did.

my only regret is that i didn’t know sooner that this quiet middle-age is not at all so small as i thought.
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how do you feel about where you’re at in your life? and what’s on your list of “must do before i die”? have these things morphed as you’ve grown older?

they are getting bigger.

nothing odd in this and really, it shouldn’t come as news. they’re children. the job of children appears to be to grow (or to clutter one’s household, interrupt one’s sleep, and use up one’s extra income that one otherwise wasn’t sure what to do with. either way). but it feels as if since Josephine came along, the two of them have ganged up together and are riding time like a carnival pony, spanking its ass to go faster! and faster! until i expect to turn my head one day and catch them making off with my car keys.

Posey was four months old Saturday, all intense and rosy-cheeked and enamoured with her fingers. Oscar got his first big boy salon haircut that same morning, courtesy of a stylist friend of my sister’s he’d met last month and liked enough that the idea of going to see her outweighed his otherwise paroxysmal fear of haircuts, which i think he inherited from his father.

i took his picture in the lobby of the salon, while we waited, and i got this face.

then the magical hairdresser propped him up on a padded board stretched over the arms of the barber’s chair and draped the cape around his neck and suddenly, there scratching at the back of my brain was a beauty parlour and a big plank across a seafoam vinyl chair and the acetone smell of hairspray in a big gilt can. memory tickled the nape of my neck and i was the little kid with my legs sticking straight out under my cape. i had forgotten…but when it all came back it felt like yesterday and i was shocked to count what must be thirty-odd years between then and now. i scoured the traces of that memory for specifics…who brought me? where were we? what polyester confection was i wearing? but those are gone, just as Saturday is already mostly gone for O except for the pictures. the battle that was haircuts is over, for him, and now we are on to whether naps are really necessary and a hundred other big boy things and is Josephine big enough yet to have a cookie and shouldn’t he have hers instead and really, won’t he always get more cookies anyway?

when he was a baby i’d gaze dotingly upon him, memorizing the fleeting infant face, the curve of chubby cheek, the down of what i desperately hoped would someday become eyebrows. and in moments, sometimes, i’d be sure i’d seen through time, caught a glimpse of the adult face that would someday emerge from the bundle i cradled.

watching the curve of his head emerge, though, from his clipped curls on Saturday, i realized that i was wrong, then. in the baby face i hadn’t seen the man inside the boy, only my own daydreaming and playacting and projecting, like when he gets jealous over a cookie his sister cannot even eat yet, learning what it is to be a sibling as i was learning to be a mother. but the babyface still evident even in the lengthening bones of his big boy frown? like a tickle on the nape of my neck and a beauty parlour probably long since torn down, it sits, tucked away in the vault of memory, called up by the twist of a grin or a particular raise of an eyebrow……it will be my babies i catch sight of in the faces of my children, no matter how big they get. and i will be shocked, every time, i think, to count how far away yesterday has gotten, how fast.

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

– Mark Twain

the longer i’m a mother, the better my own mother begins to look.

i always knew she was a good mother, that i was lucky to have her. but we spent a lot of years with horns locked, she and i. never in a vicious way…rather fundamentally, inescapably, despite efforts on both sides to smooth the ragged edges of the bond. i lived away for fifteen years, always thinking that someday i’d come home and find that we’d become sympatico, the love between us finally morphing into companionability. instead, i’d arrive…and undergo a miraculous and instantaneous transformation back to scowling adolescence. i’ll never need a facelift, i joked with friends. if i want to drop twenty years, i just visit my mom. it’s instant.

my world was not hers. i called from university – my hard-drinking, eating-disordered university years, awash in ideas about High Modernism and international nuclear accords – and our conversation was about home, about what so-and-so had done in church on Sunday last. i called from Vancouver, from the Arctic, from Cambodia, from Hungary – seeing the world, sending money home – and our conversation was about whether i was hurting my back with that backpack/suitcase/big teacher satchel. are you brushing your teeth? uh, yes. and i’m seeing this! learning this! crickets. the sniff of disapproval and disinterest always lurked in the wings, ready for its grand entrance. and my indignance lurked too, hair- triggered, ready to sulk and feel misunderstood and pubescent at but a moment’s notice.

still, my mom was great for the big stuff. move away to Asia and decide to get divorced? from half a world away, i got motherlove and unintrusive but genuine support. while in Asia, getting gawked at on the streets by a culture not quite yet used to white folk, decide to dye hair platinum blond? still half a world away, i got nattering and tears and outrage and oh, what will people think? i was TWENTY-NINE years old…a little elderly for maternal panic over hair colour. but my mother, resolutely gray since her thirtieth birthday, disapproves of hair dye. stretching across contexts to imagine a world different than her own has never been her strong suit…suffering other people’s opinions with grace has never been mine. so on we went, like two small dogs with an invisible yoke between, yapping in tandem at the ankles of the other.

it didn’t miraculously change when i moved back here, nor when i had kids. the bickering about hair colour morphed into bickering about Children’s Tylenol and whether i should get my tubes tied, the nattering about brushing my teeth (my teeth, for the record, are quite well-cared-for) became don’t hesitate to take Oscar to the dentist/doctor/speech therapist. i took him, quite liberally. but the running commentary continued to rankle. until lately.

i’ve noticed a strange detente creeping over us.

only yesterday, i realized why. Oscar and i were playing pretend on the floor, Josephine curled against me, asleep in her sling. we were eating imaginary cookies at an imaginary restaurant, Oscar treating himself to the baby’s share too, since she only eats milk. we were a picture of happy pretend domesticity when, out of the blue, this suddenly so-big boy of mine leapt up and zoomed around the baby and i and announced, i’m going to space! i’m in space, mama! and i looked at him and understood, this is the trajectory of it all. our shared world giving way to realms unknown, all of a sudden. he has ideas now, that did not come from our shared experience. and i do not know so well how to play along. this is how it will go, how rapid it will be.

and i looked at him, and i said, space, honey? oh. do you want to bring a cookie? don’t forget your toothbrush!

never have i understood so clearly what it is like to stand in my mother’s shoes, relentlessly offering the known, the familiar, in hopes that it will somehow tether the one who has so suddenly soared away.  when i called her a little later, i mentioned, in passing, how i’d just bought new toothpaste.

Oscar is learning that his body is his own, these days. in corollary news, my house smells like urine.

we tried full-on potty boot camp last weekend, since Dave had a few extra days off and nothing says vacation like wiping piss off the floor. in hindsight, we should’ve just flown to Thailand for the full moon party, or something. our plan failed utterly. he was ready on paper: had successfully pooped in the potty with pride just a few days before, was learning to pull down his own pants, was keen on flushing, could stay dry for hours at a time. he wears cloth, so he knows full well when he’s wet. what we forgot to account for was will. his potty-readiness is coinciding with the realization that he is an entity unto himself, and this dictator-readiness is made of stronger stuff than his urge to pee in plastic.

when he was left to roam the house in underpants Sunday morning, he announced his need to pee precisely as he finished soaking through the first pair. with the second two, he got up off the potty after a prescheduled try and promptly pissed right through their Thomas the Tank Engine decals, gleeful grin on his face. oh, he said, both times. that’s MEIN pee!

it’s interesting, watching this sense of selfhood emerge. interesting, that is, if one can detach emotionally from the shouting and the whining and the refusals of all things that have formerly pleased Little Herr Happypants. a self-identifying toddler is a rather abusive creature, not overly concerned with the feelings of others, nor a mother’s attachment to little habits of affection or personal care. dose is MEIN toes! he howls, when i bend to kiss them. NO-OH! that’s MEIN hairs! he laments, when i try to run a brush near his tangly mane. i don’ WANNA pee in the potty! he announces, suddenly, when enticed to the throne at his usual longstanding times.

he wants control, this kid. control of his self, above all else…though control over everyone else in the house and vicinity wouldn’t be bad, either, if you’re offering. he’s suddenly caught on to the diabolical fact that until this point his father and i have made all significant decisions regarding his life and well being, and those “would you like to brush your teeth or wash your face first?” forays into agency are, in fact, decoys masking the horrible, awful truth that we force cleanliness onto his person, just as we force regular nutrition and sleep and make all the real decisions about where he goes and when. he is outraged, mad as hell, and he’s not gonna take it anymore.

so he’s peeing on my floor, people. i don’t think we’ll be training him any time soon.

what i do wonder is if, once engaged, this struggle for control will ever lessen. looking ahead, to sixteen or eighteen or – thinking of my own relationship with my mom, ahem – thirty-some more years of that’s MEIN thingamajiggit (insert any object of desire or personal attribute here), i get so very, very tired.

Originally uploaded by o&poecormier

…they abound.

her whole face lights up. i’d forgotten how nothing is quite so heart-melting as a baby’s first smiles.

someday, if the world is kind, she’ll flash this same cock-eyed grin – with teeth, we’re hoping teeth come with the package in good time – to some kindred soul, and maybe the earth will shift a little for one or both of them and that somebody, somewhere – maybe someone not even yet born – will taste a bit of this smitten silliness, this joy, that i feel when her eyes lock with mine and shine. i hope that for her. i really do.

but for the record, let it be known…mama was first.