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her cord fell off today
the dry stump a husk, just a thing to shed
its final thread hung sticky, stretched and shining in the morning light
alien, untouchable Other

for a heartbeat i watched it, enthralled
unable to bring myself to pull away that last tangible proof
that we once had a lifeline, she and me
that i was her first home, that we were more than Other, not quite two
even so soon it seems impossible

when i unwrapped her the next time the thread had broken
quietly, unheralded.
garbage now. she does not need it anymore.

and the maudlin sniff reverberates around my head
oh christ, they grow so fast
Josephine, my love, your mother is a sap.

**i swear Oscar didn’t lose his cord until he was nearly three weeks old. i’m sure she’s very advanced.

what did YOU do with your kids’ cord stumps? i felt vaguely guilty tossing it…like it ought to be saved like loose teeth or something…but…let’s face it, it’s a leftover body bit. and i am acculturated to think that’s kinda icky.**

a little late, but our first snuggle, with somebody checking out the view.

Daddy’s got a few more pics on flickr if you click through…mama and baby are stuck in the hospital (where there is one sad little ancient non-SD-card processing public computer in the basement) for at least another day while Posey learns to feed without slurping somebody’s nipples off. she’s coming along beautifully…we would have made 37 weeks today.

i am so delighted in her, so glad she’s here. you will be subjected to further photo adventures galore upon our arrival home. :)

ps. the wishes have overwhelmed us. the part of me that imagines i’m Martha Stewart’s illegitimate progeny thinks i’ll work them artfully into her baby scrapbook somehow. i promise i’ll at least print them, make sure there’s a record of her wonderful, warm welcome to the world. thank you, all.

ah perspective.  when i was in junior high, the only English teacher i ever really disliked taught me an invaluable lesson…ostensibly about fiction and short stories, but really about living, about the art of narrativizing and understanding one’s own life.  Perspective, he intoned, in a faux Oxford accent, is all in where you’re looking from.  To be able to tell a thing means you’re looking at it from somewhere.

we took a whirlwind trip over to Halifax and back between Saturday evening and noon today – whirlwind because now that my doctor here has agreed to try to be there for the impending-ish birth, being away from her and back to square one in terms of attending physicians feels like i’m Linus in Peanuts and my security blanket got left behind and i need to get back to it.  now.  but it was a fine whirlwind nonetheless…Oscar got to attend his cousin’s second birthday party, replete with trip to local farm, plus cake, Dave got eat Limburger with his brother-in-law, who is the only person in his circle of cheese philistines who can stand the wondrous stink, and i got to visit the IWK.  whee.  the IWK, for those of you who have not been memorizing my life’s story as we’ve gone along here at ye olde crib, is the maternity/children’s/neonatal hospital where Finn was born, where i spent weeks on bedrest, where i was seen once or twice a month through this pregnancy.

but i wasn’t there for me.

a friend from here, a friend due a month behind me, got airlifted over on Friday.  and so Sunday night, once O was nestled all snug in his, uh, travel cot, while visions of farm animals danced in his head and his poor pancreas tried to process more sugar than it had ever been overloaded with in his short life, i found myself riding up the elevator to the seventh oh-so-familiar floor, bearing chocolate and licorice.  a visitor.  a total role reversal.  the smells of the place chewed at my memory like termites, and i found myself looking over my shoulder as if someone was going to order me to hop into a wheelchair at any moment.  but they didn’t.  i was free to come and go as i pleased.  i blinked, all wistful and joyful and strange.  because it is now and not then.  because from the perspective of someone who didn’t have to be there, my eyes could see all that i escaped this summer by getting to stay home, by not having to take up residence on this bedrest floor again.  and i was grateful.

her room looked bleaker than i remembered them being, the four or five i’ve been in over my three stays over the three-plus years it’s taken us to get to this point in our attempts to have a family.  the walls are the coldest blue.  i talked too much.  i oohed and aahed over the new tvs, little tiny flatscreens, replacing the Atari-era versions that hung on the wall even in March when i stayed there last. i kept looking at her in the bed and thinking, that’s not me.

i wanted to negate the place, take her up in my arms and brush away the fear and the monotony and the frustration and isolation like cobwebs and whisk her to another time when it will all be past.  but she will have to find her own way there, and i know no two paths are alike.  i hope hers – and her baby’s – is smooth.  i am glad mine has come full circle, so that this place is no longer within my circle of possibility.  i like where i get to look at it from, these days…the privilege of distance, far from cold blue institutional walls, for now.  i like that i can walk out, walk away, as i wish.

i was glad i’d gone.  and i nearly jogged to the car.
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perspective, of course, is also key to telling a story you make up.  and telling a story from the perspective of a character you don’t much like is a fascinating exercise, i discovered last week.  to those of you who took the time to muddle through draft one of my first foray into fiction, may the lord bless you and keep you, especially Awake and her clever husband, and Anta and her mad googling skillz.

and just in case y’all really meant it when you said you’d like to read the more polished – um, read finished – version…and because i’m kinda proud of myself for actually completing the piece and reading it out loud to real live people and all, i give you version 2 of the Yep it was Poison but Don’t Believe Everything the Newspapers Tell You Because It’s All Perspective, Folks story.  you may of course please tell me if you think it makes no sense.  i will only cry a little.  and the perspective?  hell, in the long view, it’ll be most helpful.

He couldn’t say he hadn’t been warned.

Gordon normally ate oat bran for breakfast. Seven days a week, whether the girls were there or not. Oat bran – no sugar – soy milk, coffee. After his run, before his shower. At nearly fifty, it is work to stay trim, regular, ship-shape.

Gordon generally paid little attention to whether the girls ate breakfast – he refused to keep crap cereals in the house, though they were welcome to oat bran or toast or fruit as they desired, and he suspected the elder of throwing up most of what she ate anyway – so when the school counsellor had caught him in the midst of a meeting Friday afternoon – an important meeting, a single-malt meeting – and mentioned pancakes, it had thrown him off, led him to assume that the conversation was a prank, a charade.

“I don’t eat pancakes,” he’d said, flatly, into the phone, grimacing towards his Scotch partner with a look he’d hoped was both authoritative and blameless.

“Sir…Mr. Herbert…” The voice on the other end of the line had sounded awfully young. Gordon had grown irritated. Some stupid joke. Maybe his youngest had pissed off some of the in-crowd at school? Fourteen year-old girls can be such a mess. Gordon has little tolerance for mess.

“Thank you for your time.” His voice had been curt, final, all Father-Knows-Best as he’d hung up, making it clear that he did not appreciate the interruption, the incursion of drama. School counsellor, his ass. But when he’d flipped the phone over just to check the number, the display had read “Wilmington Charter School.”

Gordon’s run at 06:00 hours Saturday had taken him down towards the stream in the park. He’d noticed the faint tinge of yellow in the foliage, there, amongst the stately old trees that dappled the path with leafy light. “Odd,” he’d thought. “That’s early.” The leaves seldom fall until well into November.

When he’d gotten back to the house and found both girls up and in the kitchen, his thoughts were identical. This was odd. This was early, for a Saturday. He was irked, alarmed by the change in his routine. Julia, sprawled on the couch by the breakfast bar using his laptop, waved sleepily. He opened his mouth to bark about That Damn Myspace but then noticed movement by the stove and, on instinct, smiled instead, vague and solicitous. Gordon smiles when he is nervous.

Tess, curls askew, had her back to him. She was…making pancakes.

“Hey, dad.”

“Hey…hon.” Gordon was aware, for a moment, that he sounded unusually hearty. He approached her, suddenly tense, like an animal wary of a trap. A part of his brain reeled, scrambled to recall yesterday’s phone conversation with the alleged counsellor. Another part nonchalantly scanned the countertop for his coffee.

Pancakes.

“I don’t eat pancakes,” Gordon said, for the second time in less than twenty-four hours. He picked up his coffee cup and stared at his youngest child. She stood casually at her griddle, the picture of sleepy adolescent innocence…if such a thing existed. He willed her to look him in the eye.

Tess raised her gaze to his. Flecks of gold that mirrored his own caught the morning light. She looked younger without all the usual makeup. She laughed.

“Who said they were for you, piggie?” she teased. She poked him where his belly had been, before all the running. For a second, her father remembered her, small and round and still in diapers, the two of them playing piggies with her tiny, stubby toes, oinking in abandonment.

Gordon looked back at her, this specimen of near-womanhood, coy and unpredictable, and wondered how the hell he’d lost so much control. Piggy indeed. Was she trying to goad him? Was he just being paranoid? Why the hell had someone called him about pancakes yesterday when here she stood in front of him cooking the damn things? Was this a fucking joke?

He leaned on the counter across from Tess as she flipped the little circles in the pan, sipping his coffee and wondering who’d taught her that trick of the wrist. Another marquee announcing his little girl’s all-grown status, he mused, maudlin. Her mother had never been able to make a civilized pancake, let alone flip one. His jaw twitched. Her mother. If someone had called to tell him his ex-wife was planning to poison him, he might have believed it…except he felt confident she’d have skipped the pancakes and gone straight to rat poison. Pity. It would have given him the chance to have the bitch locked up…which would, everyone would have to admit if they were honest, make life easier for the whole family. Gordon has lawyer friends. Lost to reverie, Gordon fantasized revenge, again.

“Want some, dad?”

She caught him with the spittle of his fantasy fury dangling between his lip and his coffee cup. He straightened. No daughter of his would be so stupid or so uncontrolled as to advertise a poisoning.

Tess was his kid. It wasn’t that he trusted her, precisely; rather that he did not fear her. He wouldn’t hurt her. That meant there was no reason she’d hurt him. She was closer to her mother, sure…girls were soft that way. But she was fine. They were fine.

Gordon decided pancakes were fine, too…if Tess was toying with him, making oblique threats through her friends, he’d show her he would not be intimidated. He’d sprinkle some oat bran on his, though – in the end, what counts is that one’s bowels are fine.

His smiling nod was precise as steel.

Behind the curtain of her tangled bedhead, he did not see his daughter smile in return; a private, crocodile grin.

They sat to the table with the stack of pancakes, far too early on a Saturday morning, all three of them present. Each seemed out of place, discomfited. The family gathering ’round the breakfast table serves nothing so well as to point out what is missing, like a cheery family picture with the faces scribbled over in Sharpie. Tess ate steadily, her pancakes plain as usual. Julia poured syrup liberally on hers, helped herself to seconds. Gordon took a pancake, made an elaborate show of loading it with oatbran and sliced berries, gave into his old weakness, the maple syrup. They ate in silence. That was normal. Then Julia disappeared into the bathroom. That, too, was normal.

While Julia’s car careened into the hospital parking lot an hour later, Tess sat curled beside the vomit in the kitchen, replaying the scene. Her father’s disbelief, fury, panic as the nausea overtook him. He hadn’t believed she’d do it. She hadn’t really expected him to. She couldn’t decide which of them had failed.

She gnawed on a pancake. Beside her, in a garbage bag, were the remains of her father’s half-eaten breakfast, the one pancake littered with chunks of oat bran, traces of syrup. The jug of sugary maple was there too, nestled against the ipecac bottle, clean as a whistle. Her sister had used that stuff to throw up, back at the beginning, but had moved on to more sophisticated methods. The ipecac, nearly two full ounces of it, had sat, unnoticed, at the other house for a year or more now. No one would miss it. No harm done.

Gordon woke in the hospital, throat raw from the stomach pump, IV dripping into his left arm. He sat up too quickly, eyes darting left to right and back. There was nobody there. It was 0:900 hours and change.

A nurse entered, looked at his chart, raised her eyebrows. “You thought you were poisoned, huh?” Her voice was pleasant, slightly forced. His eyes lit on the restraints, the locked door. This was not the emergency room.

“I don’t eat pancakes,” said Gordon, flatly.

your comments shine through my screen like benedictions.  the overflow of truth and thoughtfulness and humour, raw and warm, calms me, strengthens.  i bask.  i eat up ideas, cross-referencing, googling hungrily.  call answered.

i sit humbled, grateful.  you took me by surprise.  i did not know, not like this, that the well ran so deep and generous, that the collective wisdom of a mythological sisterhood could be tapped like this.  i feel as if i’ve wandered into a Little House on the Prairie stageset, into a quilting bee community of yore where i am mothered, friended, surrounded and held up.   my birth coaches, sixty strong.  your stories widen my horizons, my sense of the possible.  your stories make me less afraid.
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i have never known how to ask for help, before.

Mad wrote a powerful post the other night about fear and walking at night and the Take Back the Night phenomenon that swept college campuses in the late 80s and early 90s.  that was my coming of age, that era, and i sang that song for years.

my mother’s spent her life more than usually mistrustful of the unknown, and she tried desperately to inculcate in me caution, wariness of all that the newspapers said i should fear as a young and vulnerable woman in a predatory age.  but, like so many, it was not the unknown that hurt me, that damaged my sense of my own worth and my right to inviolate status.  i did not even have words, at eighteen, for what happened.  but i had anger, at the misdirected fear that smothered without protecting, and shame, in buckets.  the shame kept me tongue-tied, unable to ask for help or support.  the anger made me defiant.  and in the mess of my fumbling attempts to find healing, i began to walk, at night, alone, alert…head high, keys spiked.  i walked and walked, for nearly two years, compulsively.  it was a way of refusing to wrap myself in the shroud of victimization and dependence that society held out as a false promise of safety.  it was a way of taking back my own body, as well as the night.  but mostly it was a way to quiet the deep, crippling sense of vulnerability and fear that ate away at me in those years, the panic that threatened each time someone came close.

it took, in the end, years and years and ultimately a conscious letting go.  but i walked my way out of that trauma, that damage…literally walked away from it, each step a blind, grasping effort to surmount fear.

i think i have been trying to do the same with the trauma of my children’s births.  except a waddle is not a confidence-inducing stride, and i have been unable to outpace myself, my fear, my history.  so i have had to face my shame this time, own it and voice it and say aloud, “i have been hurt.  i am frightened.  i do not know how to go forward by myself.”

the warmth of response has taken so much of the power from the shame and the fear that i wonder, sadly, what might have happened had i been brave enough to try this tack half a lifetime ago.
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i waited two hours to see my OB today, because half the practice is on summer vacation.  my fear and shame sat with me through the wait, despite all your words…i felt like a kid waiting to be called into the principal’s office, dreading humiliation and misunderstanding.  it’s not being my own medical advocate that intimidates me, but admitting my vulnerability, admitting how badly Oscar’s birth shook me despite his survival.  being supplicant and helpless is not my strong suit.  i was afraid i’d find myself tongue-tied, once again, unable to stand up for my need for agency and dignity with this impending birth…unable to admit how much i fear the panic that swallowed me last time, the panic i failed utterly to master.

i really like my OB.  she’s been with me through all four pregnancies, though never – by circumstance – for delivery or d&c.  i trust her.  she has looked me in the eye and said, “i’m sorry.  i made a mistake.”  she has always treated me like a human being.

and still i could barely meet her eyes as i unfurled the litany of facts and complications that have left me so afraid.  i hunched on the crinkly paper of the exam table, picked at the flannel blanket.  i didn’t want to overstate, be dramatic, have her write me off.  i trailed to a halt, handed over the list of questions i’d posted here the other night with all their what-ifs and maybes and stretches of what’s commonly done.  i looked at her and choked the obvious out.  i’m just…so scared.

she didn’t patronize me, or pat me on the arm and tell me not to worry my pretty little head.  she listened, and looked at me, and said, “i will come in with you, if i can.  i’ll put that on your file, right here.  i’d like to be with you through this birth, if that might help?”

they don’t do that here.  my mum has worked at the hospital for years, and i know they don’t.  there’s an agreement between the OBs that on-call status is respected, because the on-call docs have to be on site, away from their kids or their sick spouses or their beer or what have you, so having subs come in is frowned upon.  i looked at her warily, said “i’d feel guilty.”

she said, “don’t.”

and then tears welled up and streamed down my face and she handed me Kleenex and i felt six years old and like i’d just been rescued from the Kmart Lost and Found desk.

we talked.  plans for induction or c-section are tabled until i reach 37 weeks still pregnant.  we will try the delayed cord clamping, and a few other things both from her repetoire and your suggestions to try to minimize the likelihood of retained placenta and surgery.  we will aim for skin-to-skin and nursing right after birth.  she will work with Dave and the delivery nurses to try to do as much perineal support, lubrication, and stretching as possible.  we may try to break up any cervical adhesions upon cerclage removal at 36 weeks…or wait until labour depending on how imminent that appears at that point.  she’s checking on anti-anxiety options, and depending on how things present we may try an early epidural if that’s possible instead.  slowing things down a little, for me, might not be bad.  she approved of the advice i’d been given here to try to minimize prolapse.

and most important, she’s going to talk with the entire OB team about me, in case she can’t be there when i ultimately land at L&D.  and if at any point, with her or another doc, i panic and feel i just can’t confront another possible gong show, it’ll be on my file that i can ask for a c-section without any argument from the medical team.  not my first choice, but a choice i’m grateful to know is there.  i see her again next week, and we’ll talk some more.

tears are still close to the surface, tonight.  relief, gratitude, astonishment.  i haven’t given birth yet, obviously…the actual event is still ahead of us.  but the birth i feared, the panic i could not walk away from…i think its spectre has been largely deflated, weakened.  by you, with all your stories and your virtual hands in mine.  by one doctor stepping up to my side.

trust.  antidote to fear.

flipping through old photo albums while ostensibly tidying the den, i come across a collection of photos entitled “June 1998.”

ten years ago.

the span of time is not so shocking as the irrefutable visual evidence that i was not, as my internal clock testifies, a mere child a decade ago.  apparently i am not actually eternally twenty-four after all. in fact, i was not even twenty-four then…i was twenty-six, a year married, living in Halifax and working on my M.A. and holding down three part time jobs and utterly, totally confused about my place in the world and how to make my way in it.

to top off all that angst i had bad hair, the result of an unfortunate first encounter with highlights and the effort to grow out years of a pixie cut into something longer.  two brassy walrus tusks swooped down from my brow, framing me in yellow.  i refused to cut them because they were, well, long-ish.  note to self: yellow is not your colour.

there is an end-of-year-celebration shot of me and my students, a G.E.D class that i taught through the local community college, for whom i’d dragged my carcass into my car and out of town at 7:30 every morning for half the year, out to a free elementary school classroom in a fishing village on the coast, where we’d all tucked our knees up under our chins on the tiny chairs and tried to figure out high school math together.  i look at them and wonder where they are now, the stevedore who’d come back to school because his union would no longer keep him on unless he got the qualification, the girl who smoked so much she literally set her alarm through the night so that she wouldn’t wake up nicotine deprived, the local drug dealer, the couple with the three little kids, the woman who brought me her hand-me-downs through the year because she thought i might like some new clothes.

there is a random shot of me taken at the other teaching job i held that year, the one i hated in principle: tutor for one of those “we’ll fix your children” farms learning centres that pay their (fully trained, experienced, qualified) teachers ten dollars an hour and charge you twenty for the honour.  it was the first job i got when we’d landed in the city the September before, and i’d gradually dropped my hours down and down until i only had one client left…the little girl who appears in the picture with me, beaming into the camera.  Mercedes.  i stayed with Mercedes through the school year because i liked her too much to leave.  she was eight, a roly-poly, bespectacled imp with severe learning disabilities but a higher emotional IQ than almost anyone else i’ve ever met.  i adored her.  urchin-like, frumpy little fussbudget daughter of a slender, made-up mom who always seemed bewildered by the child she’d produced, Mercedes had me at hello.  she had more sophisticated work avoidance tactics than federal bureaucrats do – we’d open up our books, and i’d offer her a choice of what to start with when suddenly, with perfect guile, she’d peer up into my face through her coke-bottle lenses and inquire, just like the local biddy at a church supper, “now, how’s your Nannie?  my Nannie’s been sick, you know.”   and sucker that i am for Nannies, we’d end up in a ten minute conversation that had absolutely nothing to do with symbol recognition or basic multiplication but was often one of the nicest i’d had all week.  i secretly wanted to take Mercedes out for coffee and a smoke.

there is a photo in that collection of me on a back deck with a guitar in one hand and a bottle of Southern Comfort in the other.  the bottle is largely empty.  i appear largely smashed.

there is another photo of me singing my heart out over same guitar on same deck the night the cops showed up to ask us to cease the caterwauling.  most politely, they actually waited ’til our chorus of “Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz” had dribbled to a halt before interrupting.  they were complementary about the singing, but the neighbours…well, you know.  besides, isn’t that song supposed to be sung a cappella?  our friends from Toronto were visiting that night and went home and regaled their friends with tales of the weird, friendly cops in the Maritimes.

there are a lot of pictures of me and my first husband.  we look pleasant.

there is a shot, smoke-obscured, of my friend Antony and i leaning back into an old, sagging velvet couch in the office where we produced two issues of a national arts and literature magazine, all uber-cool and sharp, clean b&w lines.  there were five of us who spent that spring and summer toiling in that smoky office before the whole venture went defunct, taking the third of my part-time jobs with it.  i was the editor.  i loved the work, the words, the creativity, the deadlines and the late-night meetings and the sheer freedom of it after four years spent as a teacher.  i disliked having to remind either of the cocky little upstart writers who’d started the whole deal that they would, y’know, eventually have to pay me.  one eventually did, right before he wisely bailed out of the sinking ship and moved to South Korea.  his name was Dave.

now, ten years later, i live with that cocky little twerp…who a few years and half a world hence, i noticed might be the love of my life.

time does crazy things to a person.

i suspect and kinda hope that the trajectory between now and ten years from now is a little more linear than the one that brought me here from June 1998.   my twenty-four-year-old soul will grow a little more aged on the outside, i suppose, and there will be the inevitable surprises and sorrows that mark one along the way.  but at thirty-six, i know – and accept – who i am in a way that would have been incomprehensible to the girl/woman searching back at me from that June 1998 collection.  and i looked at those pictures, and at her unlined brow framed by garish highlights, and thought, thank god i do not have to go back.

…Bon enters stage left, peers around with puzzlement, as if expecting something to fall from the sky…

then lies down.

she smiles tentatively, then looks up again sharply, suspiciously, and scans overhead.   she bundles herself into a small ball, looking very content…but most uncertain about this odd state of affairs. 

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after my u/s appointment, at which all Down’s Syndrome markers were totally written off, baby was active and measured a healthy happy normal percentile, no uterine septum was detectable, and fluid was plentiful, my doctor came out and announced to the receptionist – and the entire waiting room – “Bonnie has a beautiful big long cervix!”

it’s not a compliment i’m accustomed to receiving in public, i will admit, but i tried to smile and preen graciously, the very picture of a Miss Cervix Universe contestant.  i begin to believe we may make it after all.

and baby looks mysteriously and amazingly like the little girl i was sure i’d never have.  consider me knocked over with a feather.  :)

i married Isis on the fifth day of May
but i could not hold on to her very long
so i cut off my hair and i rode straight away
for the wild unknown country
where i could not go wrong
…

she was there in the meadow where the creek used to rise
blinded by sleep and in need of a bed
i came in from the east with the sun in my eyes
i cursed her one time, then i rode on ahead

Isis, oh Isis, you mystical child
what drives me to you is what drives me insane
i still can remember the way that you smiled
on the fifth day of May, in the drizzlin’ rain

– Bob Dylan

we do not have the usual kind of anniversary.  there is no ceremony to commemorate, barely an event that marked one day from the next to anyone around us.  we began almost in secret, taboo, old friends evolving from one life to another in a window crowded with empty bottles and full ashtrays and late, late nights that became early mornings crouched at sunrise on damp concrete stoops together, still talking, whilst a foreign country woke up around us.  and i had known you too long not to know that a part of you belonged to me, beyond faithlessness, and yet was sure the boundaries on the rest were tied in chains.  and how heady, how terrifying, to watch the chains slide, to hold the Pandora’s Box of you & i in our hands and risk opening it, risk losing it all.

we slipped in eyes wide open, staring at each other, afraid to look away.  it has been seven years.  i still remember the feeling of relief, the recognition of now, i have lived.

we have lived more than i’d bargained for, and survived.  you have remained my friend, the one who knows me, the one i trust.  you have held me up through days and years i couldn’t see my way forward. you have had the grace to let me hold you up, in my different way.  we have each become something we were not before, and there is balance in it, better.

i look for the itch.  i know it well, have lived its dissatisfaction, its loneliness, its regret and wonder and longing for elsewhere…in another life, eight, nine years gone.  but i cannot remember its contours, anymore, cannot see its shadow.  we chose well, i think, in this gravely embarked upon and most serious fling.  this life’s work.

and too i remember the way that you smiled, that very first morning.  i made oatmeal, served up in plastic bowls.  it was the fifth day of May, in the drizzlin’ rain.

all i have…and love.

three years ago.

it was three years ago today i left the hospital for the first time after nearly three weeks of bedrest. i’d been airlifted in during winter’s last April gasp, but in my hermetic isolation in ye olde Craftmatic, the ground had transformed into a mushy carpet, spongy with sprigs of green poking through it. i felt like Rip Van Winkle, utterly out of time.

we drove out of the city, to the old tower on its outskirts, the one i’d climbed as a child every time we visited. my legs were weak and i walked gingerly. i was not in pain, per se…just timid, afraid i would break. the tower was closed, too old, too dangerous to be left open for tourists any longer. i stood in front of it, staring, as if i looked long and hard enough i might catch a glimpse of a younger me, might disappear with her into a different time, any other time than this.

she did not materialize, that former self. and i realized, viscerally, that she never would again…that there was no going back. i had stepped off the side of my own flat earth.

i turned in the rain, then, and tested my footing on the slippery bank of overgrowth there that leads up and then down, eventually, to the harbour. i climbed a little, until i was alone on a low ridge, looking down through the brush on tiny sailboats, seabirds. and when i was sure i was far enough away that no one could hear me, i spoke into the wind, and spoke his name for the first time in the thirty-six hours since he’d died.

i had a son. his name was Finn.

it was only a whisper, spoken to raindrops. but i knew it might be a very long time before i had the courage to say those words aloud again, to risk exposing the gaping wound i had suddenly become, to risk being that crazy lady talking about her dead baby. i knew too that i needed, desperately, to mark him on the world, to tell someone of my joy and my pride in him, of my sorrow, to tell that he had been here.

my tears mixed with the rain and those eight words echoed.
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it was only in the year and more after his death that those echoes found expression anywhere, for me. it was here, where i could speak without having to meet anyone’s eyes, that i began to be able to write my way through the grief and love and anger that had left me unmoored, cut off at the knees. here, for the first time, i could own the whole of my story, find a balance within it – be the mother of a dead child without only being the mother of a dead child. and here, for the first time, i found people like me, mothers mourning and keening and raging and weeping, mothers bearing witness to lives too short.

i wrote to Finn on his birthday, i am okay now. i didn’t add that this blog has had a great deal to do with that healing – not just as a space to speak, but also because you have heard me, have taken in my darkest bleatings and said in return, received, here, listening. you have offered love. and more, you have offered that love to a child you never met, a child whom only a couple of people ever got to meet, to touch. my child. i feared him being forgotten, erased; feared never being able to sing him into existence, somewhere. thank you for being my somewhere. you have given me grace i had not imagined existed.

blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

the first few paragraphs of this post have two homes, today.

i am celebrating…it is May, the end of cruel April. i am still pregnant. i am beginning to hope.  but with the same words, i am also celebrating the start of a different kind of new beginning. six of us, all of us Medusas, deadbabymamas, are collaborating on a new blog called glow in the woods…what we hope will be a warm fire amidst the bleak cold of grief, a community for families struggling to get through infant loss, stillbirth, and sorrow. it would be in bad taste, i suppose, to call it our new baby…but it is May, people, and i am feeling more cocky and flippant than i have in a long time. ;) please click over, come see us, and if you know someone who might find some solace in our company, please send ’em our way, and our welcome. our doors are open.

…did i mention it was May? may it bring real spring, finally, and blessings to all.

it is your birthday, little one, and you are not here.

i made cupcakes last night anyway, and when your father and your little brother come home later we will go out into the back yard where your trees are budding, just barely, and have a little picnic and talk about you and celebrate you.  because it is your birthday, and you would be three today.

but you are not here.

i know the cupcakes are not for you.   these cupcakes are for the living.  they are an offering, i guess, a ritual, a way of honouring what we do not know how to touch.  they are a way for your father and i to tell your brother about you, now that he is getting old enough.  i do not really expect him to understand…i’m still not sure i understand, myself.  but he likes cupcakes, knows they are only for special occasions.   you liked cupcakes, too, back when you and i were a world unto ourselves: i will tell him, someday, that you two had that in common.  your little feet used to dance inside me, tapping out your sugar rush, making me laugh.  i used to tap my fingers back, in response, the two of us symbiotic and easy in our cupcake afterglow.

there is another little one there inside now, Finn, in that same fragile sanctuary, another brother or sister.  s/he too will have cupcakes tonight.  for you, for this special occasion, even though you are not here.  and s/he may dance or kick, just like you did.  and those cupcakes will be bittersweet.

there was so much i wanted to show you.  when you first died, i couldn’t look at things without showing them to you in my mind…these are clouds, little one, that’s a kitty and they’re soft, these are berries i don’t know the name of…aren’t they pretty?  i don’t know if i thought you could hear me, see through me somehow…i just…needed to tell you.  i still want to.  i want to show you the tulips that are coming up in the front yard, and the worms in the earth, and tell you how your mother loves you and just…be your parent, Finn.  because you are my child, you were my firstborn, my baby.  but you are not here.

what i can tell you is that we are not so broken, anymore, by your going.  that we are healing.  i didn’t want sheer bitterness to be your legacy, i didn’t want to honour you by becoming something less.  and yet it feels like such betrayal, for me to let go…to accept and say, it’s okay.  it was time when you went; i told you that then and i meant it, with my whole soul.  you were hurt, and hurting, and i could not help you.  you did nothing wrong.  i do not know if it will ever be quite okay that you’re gone…i doubt it…but it is easier, now.  do you understand?  and if i say, i am okay now, will you forgive me?  because even after three years, i am still afraid of losing you…wherever you may be.  i am still afraid of failing you.

i am still your mama, and proud of you.

i  love you, little one.  and down here with the tulips and the trees, we’re having cupcakes and remembering.  happy birthday.

…or how a three-day, two-party, four-cake,  triplicate-dinner bonanza of second birthday celebrations ensured that Oscar will now expect pure sugar with every meal for at least the next month.

every little boy should have a mother on bedrest for his birthday, apparently.  parties materialize from all corners.  mamas gain ten pounds and like it.  teeth hurt.  good times are had by all.

the first cake was gelato and sorbeto, at Auntie Cindy’s, with cousins and friends and Grandmaman & Grandpapa.  all cakes are now greeted with the gleeful cry of “ice!”

the second cake, upon return to Charlottetown, sported homemade boiled icing by Grandpa Tom.

in the full swing of the party spirit by day 3 of the party circuit, Oscar welcomed guests to party number 2, hosted by his babysitter.

and downed a cupcake to boot…

to cap the festivity round-robin, Nannie dressed as a clown to surprise Oscar at her house.

but the Elmo cake was the crumb – or ze waffer-thin mint – that broke the camel’s belly…and sweet Oscar blew up like Mister Creosote in that Monty Python sketch.  i swear, he said fug off, i’m full.  then he asked for more.

he is two, and wild and beautiful, and has consumed more sugar in the past three days than in the entire rest of his life to date.  he is my joy.

happy birthday, little one.  may every year be so sweet.