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a milestone for me…blogging under the heady influence of morphine.  wheeee…zzzz.

it is almost 11 pm, and we just got home from the hospital.  i went at 7 this morning, saw my doctor, had a bunch of bloodwork done, and discovered that the weekend doctor hadn’t actually managed to get me on the surgery schedule after all.  was sent home, told not to eat or drink anything (hadn’t had anything since suppertime yesterday, poor starveling) since they might be able to squeeze me in sometime later in the morning, but if not to come back at 3.  come 3 o’clock they had me strip down to the indignity of a johnny shirt, got an IV started, and holed Dave & i up in a little room in Labour & Delivery for the next four hours where we listened to the sounds of brand new babies coming into the world while playing word association.  i fantasized aloud about all the holiday baking i wished to eat once the surgery was over and my parched maw was once more allowed nourishment.  and i tried to quiet the startlingly vivid images in my head of myself in that very same room on a spring morning two-and-a-half years ago, covered in blood, my water broken at 24 weeks, waiting for the medivac to airlift me to Halifax.

there was less blood this time, more tidiness, less panic.

the surgery, when it finally came, went smoothly, without apparent complications.  i came to shaky and confused and crampy, but Sister Morphine was at the ready, and i calmed.  it is over, i chanted in my head, and was glad.  i am still glad.  i am relieved.

Dave snuck Chinese chicken balls in for a feast when they brought me back from recovery…i could think of nothing i wanted more.  six chicken balls, six little cups of water with ice, drunk through a bendy straw.   the nurses were kind.  the unnatural red of the chicken ball sauce startled one when she saw our used napkins in the garbage afterward.

now, home, floating high and fuzzy in the arms of the blood-red poppy, i will rest.

i’ve never said it aloud, so it comes out halting, lurching from me the way old ketchup blobbed from the glass bottles of my childhood.

i don’t know where i think they are, our sons, their souls. i look for Finn, now, but i can sometimes barely feel him, like the connection is weak or i just don’t know how and i feel so…so…discombobulated. like if all i ever get of him is his spirit, some sense of him, that’s okay, it’s okay with me, i can accept that, now…but i don’t. i don’t feel him. and i worry that he’s alone, a baby needing his mother, and i can’t find him.

blurp. or maybe it didn’t come out like that; the words were different, but the shame and the emptiness squeaked out all the same, the wall that unbelief and grief and healing built exposed, me naked for a moment.

she lifted her blond head in the dark room and said whenever i think of him i assume it’s him speaking to me.

and the wall crumpled.

i’ve spent a lot of my life constructing and cobbling together my own coping mechanisms, my own metaphysic, my own personal Jesus or lack thereof. i’m okay with cherry picking a particular piece of comfort to steep with my cynicism, have no qualms actively trying to construct a view of death that involves no angels nor meant-to-bes, but does not entirely cut me off, either, from the child who was my firstborn. i want to believe…but i’m fussy.

and while i’m not sure i will ever be wholly sure in the conviction that every time Finn crosses my mind some part of him stronger than his body has reached out to me…the notion itself will help me nonetheless. allow me to continue to heal without clinging to the immediacy of grief in favour of that bleak nothingness that threatens to swallow all the love i still have for my child. the notion gives me a way to offer tenderness to the idea of him, to reach back. if there truly is nothing there, then i will spend long moments of my life in a dance with myself, i suppose, smiling into the ether, blinking full at heart at unfeeling molecules of air. and when the end comes, i’ll smile ruefully, staring at the worms. but without regret. because that fostering of love will have made me better.

thank you, Kate…for planting that seed. i don’t know if anyone else could have.
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she blew in on a Remembrance Day rainstorm, with a sleeping bundle in his carseat and a flurry of brightly coloured cottons, all stripes and patterns and imprints and smiles…graceful, she is; poised and frank at the same time, at ease and funny and generous and searching. sweet, and with the tears still fresh on her. aptly named.

i couldn’t believe she actually came.

i couldn’t believe she hadn’t been here all along.

she came bearing presents for Oscar, generous with funky leggings and a metal Neville engine that marks the beginnings of The Train Age, and he was appropriately taken with her but smitten, i think, totally and wholeheartedly with wee Ben. beautiful Ben, who smiles more directly and with more joy than any baby i’ve ever seen. bright Ben, who started life even smaller than Finn did…who has come so far. twelve pound Ben, who slept snuffling in my arms for hours on the couch while his mother and i sat up talking, reminding my numb forearms of all that i hope is ahead for us again and making me think how lovely it’ll be. Oscar thought Ben was a doll come to life, and even though my boy spent the morning cranky and enamoured of his new high-pitched scream, he still touched the baby ever so gently with his big toddler mitts, still looked for him long after they’d left, wandering the house with a plaintive “baybay? baybay?”

they were beautiful together, our boys.

and somewhere in the long trail of conversation that got started at a comfortable, solicitous pace and tumbled out of us late into the night, the happy and the sorrowful and the bloggy and the gossipy and the motherly, all easy, i realized why this very first meeting with someone whose gift as a wordsmith awes me was so oddly natural: there was nothing we had to say that frightened each other. no space either had to back away from as too sad, or as shocking, or too weighty for the fragility of a conversation between tentative new friends. i do not know anyone else, in real life, who has lost a child, held him while he died, leastways not in the same hospital, both boys born months before a shared due date two years apart. that in itself…that would probably be enough for communion, for the sense of sisterhood that crept over me like an old forgotten remnant, a familiar garment left behind after college nights spent cultivating closenesses and bonds that time and living have not entirely frayed, but mostly.

but it was also that the stories were already unfolded. that i knew the outlines of them from posts i clicked through to frantically in May and June, sometimes with tears in my eyes, that i read now for pleasure or a laugh or just the taste of good writing when the work day grows dull and blurry. i knew this person already. i have never met a fellow blogger, either, before now. and i think our plans for these constructs of ours, these private public spaces for our own souls to get worked into words and therefore some kind of reality, took up nearly as much of our conversation as did our children, and our griefs, and our partners, and our lives.

i forgot to ask her a lot of things i wanted to know, though. she will have to come back. or we will go to her.

soon, i hope.

i have been silent
in more ways than one lately
i have a secret

fluttery, frightened
and wiped like a dishrag, i’m
seven weeks pregnant

or almost. we dare
to hope for a long, quiet
ride, and then we laugh.

silly fools, showing
ourselves to the gods. it will
be a long winter

and yet, we are blessed
how lucky to get a shot
at this one last child

and how strange that the
belly is already plump…
please send bigger pants.

so despite my Biblical level of whining and all the righteous lamentations (your contributions and commiserations greatly appreciated)…yesterday turned out not really so terrible.

apparently if we let the little crying creature peep it out a bit during this weekend nap transition, he will manage to put himself back down for another forty-five minute sleep cycle. which weird though it is to be back to those punctuated naps of infancy, is still another forty-five minutes for his mother to rest her lazy carcass on the couch and eat bonbons.  or actually work, since my bonbon supply was really and truly worn down to the peanuts this weekend, alas.  but still, there was couch-sitting to be had.

so, huh.  my child does not have the sense of humour of a cranky jackal, after all.

the time change didn’t go too terribly badly, either. O slept until 5:30 am new time this morning, which would have been 6:30 am old time and really quite impressively late for him (sigh). and hell, it was his father’s morning to get up with him anyway. :)

hurricane Noel seems to have passed through our region without major mayhem…except for the swaths of Nova Scotia who expect to be without power ’til Tuesday, of course.  but moi?  fully lighted, safe and warm, thank you very much.

and i found a new detergent that may keep my Fuzzi Bunz absorbent and effective in future.  will keep you posted.

ultimate conclusion?  apparently i’m actually NOT being punished by the universe.

this is always slightly embarrassing to realize.  i puff up in indignance, recognizing the inflatedness of my complaints, the reality of my good fortune.  why am i NOT being punished by the universe, anyway?  i had a FINE litany of grievances!  i’m worthy of being singled out for the trials of Job (new, lite version)…i have it rough, really i do.  see these bags under my eyes?  just you DARE tell me i’m lucky!

but i am.

i feel ashamed of myself, you see, with these posts of vitriol and complaint that leak out of me now and then. oh, my child wakes up too early! oh, my offspring gets sick and spoils all my vacation plans! oh, there might be chickenpox/measles/bubonic plague at daycare!  oh, this porridge is too hot!  and i wonder if you mutter to yourselves, suck it up, Buttercup. i wonder, with more concern, if you think i’m a shallow, whiny, twit…and if i’m acting like one.  because my laments are petty, i know that. i know that no matter how much i may feel i’ve woken up on the unjust side of the bed, millions would give their teeth to have it as bad as me, with my pile of nibbled, rejected chocolate-covered peanuts.

and yet every now and then i’m reminded that it’s actually a good sign – relatively – that i can get all caught up again in the tragedia minutiae of my life.  because it means, overall, that i’m mostly managing to feel not very persecuted at all.

for a long time, i did.  for months really, after Finn died, when i was lost on the sea of looking for work when i should have been home with my baby, of fighting a bill for an medical airlift i’d been assured would be covered, of having to go into the stores we’d ordered paint and flooring from for our new house, our first house, and wince my way through the “congratulations! the baby must be here!” conversations and then the shocked silence and that feeling like i must have left my skin at home, of walking past pregnant women whose big, round bellies were sharp as tacks…all those months, i felt quite persecuted.  the burden of grief weighed more than i knew how to carry, especially socially.  i did not know anyone else to whom anything like this had ever happened – my friends were either childless or in the midst of a joyous, uncomplicated baby boom.  and any time i tried to talk my way through it, to begin to unload even a little of the bafflement and rawness i felt, the wounds became doubly sharp.  because people told me about angels.  told me life doesn’t give us more than we can handle.  told me it was probably for the best, and he might have been seriously handicapped. told me all sorts of crap that i assumed was meant to make them feel better, ’cause it seriously did fuck-all for me.  except make me feel like most of them just wished the conversation would go away, because it was so damn painful, and awkward.  we’d hit the wall of platitudes before i’d said  much of anything, at all.  so i said as little as possible.

but alone, or with Dave, late at night, smoking furiously in our shed, trying desperately to act on my appetite for destruction and fury whilst causing as little actual harm as i could get away with, i wailed.  i lamented our persecution.  and i wished it were them, those sunny people with their cliches who seemingly never had to adjust their expectations for anything.  i didn’t really want it to be anyone, in truth, not really, not much…i just wanted it not to be me.  i wanted not to be living a constant, months-long moment of “let this cup pass from me.”  i wanted it not to be real.

what i didn’t realize was that i was as impossible as they were, then.  and that even those brave few who had the courage to ask about Finn and really try to listen, who waded through our self-censored narratives and pushed for more, really couldn’t have done anything right.  because there was nothing anyone could have said that would have helped me outrun that pain, that grief.  it was mine, for no reason except that it landed on me by an accident of Finn’s birth.  it was no great judgement on me, either of fault or strength.  but nearly every single thing another person said about it, beyond the simple comfort of “i’m so sorry,” felt like a rebuke.

i remembered all this when i happened upon a post by Whymommy, today.  Whymommy has cancer, inflammatory breast cancer (which you do not need a lump to have!), and she’s 34 years old and she’s smart and generous and bald at the moment and thus wearing her own personal pain and struggle out there for all to read, as it were.  and as with all particularly terrible things that people don’t like to imagine can happen to them, there’s a shock and awkwardness that permeates some of her conversations these days.  well-intentioned people are taken aback and sympathetic, and their disbelief that something so grave really can happen to someone so vital comes out in innocent phrases like “but, you’re so young and healthy!”  and thus, Whymommy has to socially negotiate other people’s struggles with the unfairness of her situation, with the universe and her failure to fit their comfortable assumptions about her place in it, at this moment.  and that feels like a rebuke, to her, sometimes.  keeping it together in the face of your own assumptions of safety and “it won’t happen to me” disintegrating is hard.  keeping it together when people’s innocuous words jar you with the reminder that it is happening to you?  some days, not possible.  some days, Sartre was right…hell really is other people.

so my mundane complaints, and my pose of stricken woe?  in a way, for me, it’s a merciful, blissful performance of my own happy normality, undeserved but damn welcome.  and appreciated.  a day when the quality of your candy is what you’ve got to complain about is a day you’re safe and warm and fed and unbroken, and a day when you’ll be sure to find company to share your trials and bolster you up with camraderie and humour.  and being able to trust that the company will help?  that in itself is a great gift.

i am grateful.  to all of you.  and to the universe, for benevolences bestowed.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ in more gratitude, our little trees in the backyard are still standing, post-hurricane. stripped nearly bare now of the last leaves that were clinging to them, they were the only things i really worried about…we planted them for Finn, that first Mother’s Day after his birth and death.  one of the three, in particular, is small and sickly, and i watch it helplessly, afraid it too will die and i will have failed it, somehow.  but i watched it, in the wind, buffeting and bending, this little clump birch…and for the first time, it seemed strong enough.

and speaking of strength, belated but heartfelt thanks to both Flutter and Whymommy for the Perfect Post for the leaves and the song.  in typing both your names just now, i was struck by…well, by who you are. if there were such as thing as the Pain Olympics, you two, in your past and present struggles, have gold-medal narratives…and the blog personas that represent our individual seasons of sorrow could all go limping down the track together, one big pile of things that shouldn’t have to happen to anyone. and yet this post that you both felt spoke to you is a love song, just a regular old love song – it addressed nothing of any of our personal obvious crosses to bear. which makes me smile, and reminds me that we are all more than the worst things that happen to us.  so thanks, on both counts.  please do come on over for Bridge Mix and petty whinging anytime you need some.

i am elephant, hear me roar…

erm, well…this littlest elephant’s roaring was really quite cheery. we had a lovely Hallowe’en. since our house, being situated across from the liquor store, doesn’t exactly draw a lot of the kiddie set, we trekked off to Oscar’s Nannie’s to indulge in my family tradition of storebought cupcakes for every holiday under the sun. this brought me back (cue violins) to all the Hallowe’ens i spent licking garish orange icing off chocolate cupcakes with my Nannie, lo these many years past, which was all very nice…and it just made me smile to watch all the little ghouls and goblins trotting about with their loot, kicking at leaves. Oscar didn’t care so much about loot, but was pretty taken with Nannie’s jack-o-lantern.

once we were replete with cupcakey goodness (and some actual supper), we waddled off before bed for just one trick-or-treating stop at the witch lady’s house, a famous local staple of all things Hallowe’enie. the witch lady has been decorating her place within an inch of its life and dressing up and handing out homemade fudge for forty years now, more or less. when i was a kid, she scared the living bejeebus out of me…and did the same for O this year, though i think he was more overwhelmed than scared.  witches are still new, y’know, in his worldview.  i felt about nine years old again marching up to her door, threading our way up the pumpkin-lit lane, grinning at the very same ghost in her tree that haunted me back when i was small. and the witch lady, a great kid herself, doing all this all these years just for joy, cackled and cooed over Oscar.  he refused her offers of a warty hug, so no pictures were captured, alas. but her fudge? amazing. and she throws an extra packet in the treat bag for the parents of the little ones, bless her heart.

just for this – for being able to take Oscar out for his first real trick-or-treating Hallowe’en and actually eat the homemade fudge that someone’s gone to the trouble to make – this was worth moving back home for.

happy Hallowe’en to you. and boo!

just in case you’ve been thinking, like i have been, that you need a weekend away from the same old vistas or you’re going to tear your own eyes out from the eternal hamster-wheelness of it all, and you’re burning to hit the road and see leaves and visit cousins and meet blog friends in the flesh and drink Belgian beers and possibly even shop where they stock clothes for women under sixty yet years-past-ingenue-enough for the inventory at Le Chateau, well, i have a recommendation for you.

(this is good advice…wisdom i’ve been repeatedly if unwillingly collecting over the past number of months. learn from my mistakes, oh ye who crave a pinch of novelty and have been pining for your getaway.)

do not, i repeat not, be tricked into trading in your weekend away for what may appear at first to be a reasonable facsimile. oh no. do not fall for this terrible bait and switch that i have, alas, been prey to. yet again.

a trip to the hospital does not a vacation hankering satisfy, friends.

contrary to beliefs you may have held dear, the mere fact that a destination is not your workplace or your house does not automatically make it a gay old time.

just because exam rooms in hospitals are like the House of Possible Horrors for parents meant to contain their very small children in there where everything at a small person’s eye level is sharp, metal, tippy, and contains moving parts – and the damn door can’t be shut to keep said small people from running out into the hallway and colliding with gurneys, lab carts, and other patients. all. the. time – that does not mean that they are worth the price of admission.  even if admission is paid for by your tax dollars at work.

just because you too are feeling a little under the weather does not mean you will be offered any soothing medications, as you are merely there – in the eyes of the institution – as a herder for the small patient you have brought them.

and just because it’s bread pudding day in the cafeteria won’t make up for the Belgian beer, you know. but you should have two bowls of pudding anyway.

ultimately, just because today is the 18 month anniversary of the night you waddled – at ten minutes to midnight, and about half an hour later than was really wise – to the door of the local hospital to drop your young labour your unhealthy if beloved offspring into the world, it does not mean that you are therefore actually obliged to return to said hospital today for a sentimental visit. in fact, it will not actually occur to you, in the haze that marks pre-dawn darkness in your caffeine- and sleep-deprived brain, that this is the anniversary of that auspicious evening.

no, what will occur to you as you sit for hours in a small room with a one-day-short-of-eighteen-month-old with breathing difficulties but a nonetheless highly energetic disposition is rather as follows (sung to the tune of The Gambler in very cheery and i’m-really-not-a-sulky-mommy-who-just-wanted-one-weekend-away-as-a-family-without-plague tones…with apologies to Kenny Rogers and any of the poor hospital staff who may have had to endure my caterwauling):

on a warm autumn morning
in a family bound for nowhere
(at least this weekend) – the backup singers kinda add that effect, you really have to hear it in my head to fully appreciate it
i hung out with an Oscar
we were both too tired to sleep
so we took turns a coughin’ and a weepin’ wheezin’ in the darkness
’til boredom overtook him
and he began to speak.

he said “mama babbee dada
bab buh doh nana muk
ga vvvooo aaa! mamama
wah wah wah wah”**

it kind of went on like that for a bit, delineating all of Oscar’s increasingly impressive if still not very enunciatory vocabulary, until we got to the rousing chorus:

you gotta know when to go in
yeh, know when to throw in
give up your holiday
because you done got sick
you gotta hang out in the hospital
and then go home feeling pitiful
yes indeed this is your weekend
and it surely does suck…erm…donkeys.

yes, David Bowie will be calling me for lyrics any day now. i got skillz. that more than comforts me as i face yet another wild Saturday evening in Charlottetown, sick, with my poor little Herr Cough Cough.

at least the vacation was free, bread pudding aside. thank you jeebus, for Medicare.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
in all seriousness…do any of you out there have little ones who’ve been diagnosed with asthma? this hasn’t happened for Oscar yet, but as every single time he gets a cold he ends up having to be brought to the hospital for masks (the home Ventalin wasn’t cutting it this morning, though we do have two puffer souvenirs from our exciting hospital visits on previous non-cancelled vacations) and as during the four weeks between hospital visits this last stretch he never really managed to shake his cough at all, the doctors are suggesting we may be heading in that direction. what did the road to asthma look like, for you? what kinds of minimization strategies have you been given, if any? any thoughts about taking him to a naturopath or someone on that end of the medical spectrum to at least try to find out why his immune system’s been so vulnerable of late? advice welcome. we’d like to stop seeing O miserable.

…and Dave suggests he’d like to see me stop sulking about my lost vacations.

fat chance, buster. it’s my art.

**translation of the Oscar-speak**
mama baby daddy
ball book door banana milk
car blue cat! mask more
wah wah wah wah
(yes, “mask” – as in what delivers the Ventalin – is not only one of his first twenty or so words, but i swear to god he asked for more mask while we were playing with it during our rather extended attempts at entertaining ourselves in the exam room.)

Oscar is almost eighteen months old.

just as thirty-five demarks, for pregnant women, a status shift into “advanced maternal age”, eighteen months demarks, in my mind, an inviolable Mason-Dixon line behind which babyhood lies, lost and unrecoverable.

i see them all over him, the marks of childhood, of his “advanced infancy” teetering into something far more boyish than baby-like. he surprises me with his independence, his ability to wander into the sitter’s house and wave “bye bye” with equanimity, moving on from daddy’s arms to the lure of the blue wagon without a backward glance. there is growing evidence of his internal life, in his capacity to communicate it. he still says “yep” more than “no,” but toddlerhood looms in the caprice of his outrage: offended at the closing of a dangerous shower door, at the texture of oatmeal, he is then utterly mollified by the appearance of the cat or the prospect of going out for a walk. he throws his poor Baby – his doll, his lovey, a perfect match – to the floor in a fit of temper, then glowers at the world for the offense and picks Baby up and hugs him tight. he makes me laugh. we sit, these days, for whole lengths of books, laughing at rhymes and pictures and recurring characters. this week his favourite, his one true love, is the little green bug in the Richard Scarry books. last week it was Sandra Boynton’s hippo. he moves from one fascination to another with the whole force of his being, casting all his delight into the process of seeking and finding that little green bug, hippos now discarded by the wayside, no longer of any interest. i imagine that these enchantments fall on him out of nowhere, as if last week he lived in a world without endearing little green bugs in four-armed t-shirts, and this week, well! there they are! how enthralling! and his high little voice calls “buh! buh!” almost plaintively to them, as if he himself has called them into being, as if they are fragile and may disappear again.

i suppose i feel the same way about him. each stage he has passed through since his birth, he has still been my baby first and foremost. now, he straddles the threshold of personhood. he will always be my baby, in a part of my heart. and equally true, he will never be my baby again.

this has been coming, clear in its advance, since he first pulled himself upright late last December. it has been coming, really, i suppose since the day he was conceived. we are all on the path of the lifecycle. if we are lucky, we grow tall and old and wise before decay. when i am stern with myself, when i rein myself in, i know this is really all i can wish for him. that he live and outlive me.

but the step over the line, this wild charge into the place where babyhood is no more…i stand, Lot’s wife, at the threshhold of O’s becoming, ready to celebrate but unable to keep from looking back, wistful at the inexorable, intangible loss, sorrowful for what will never be again.

Oscar said “bye bye” today, for the first time. and the second, and the twenty-second. suddenly, clear as a bell, he is all about farewells.

and September is in the air, here, lurking in the crisp chill that comes with the dew, and the drop of the sky into darkness earlier, earlier…and i have that delicious feeling of fall melancholy…like everything is just a little sharper from not having the sun bear directly down on it…so i am casting forward to Septembers to come and goodbyes that will be more solemn than the laughing delight of “bye bye bye bye” that was today.

because September is school season. in four years, i will take Oscar to kindgarten…and presumably every September after that for…well…a long time, if all the weighty tomes lying around this house don’t make him run screaming for a full-time McJob the minute he turns sixteen. his parents have never really entirely left school, after all…we work on a campus that this week is gearing up, filling up, bringing all of us on board the Good Ship University back to the rhythms of school life. last year, in September, home with the baby and disconnected from the September-as-start-of-a-whole-new-year calendar for only the second time since 1976, i felt thoroughly adrift. this year, i am anchored again by registration deadlines and orientations and the smell of new books, even if they are not mine.

Julie‘s Hump Day Hmmm this week is about schools. and i’ve longed to participate in the Hmmm for awhile now, but i never make it, never quite seem to get the days straight or get myself organized in time. i am late even to this conversation, but i still want to throw my two cents in. or one cent, really, one coin with two sides. because i am a teacher…and yet i’m ambivalent about school. or rather, about sending my kid to school. because school, sometimes, teaches the exact opposite of what we think it’s there to teach: years in school, just like years in any other institution, can harden a mind and soul just as easily as they open it.

i loved school when i was small. i was a teacher-pleasing, overly chirpy little creature who got great pleasure out of waving her hand in the air and did absolutely cringe-worthy things to try to cultivate teachers’ affections, like drawing them little pictures with hearts on them all over my spelling tests. i was smart and naive and innocent and earnest and a little desperate for approval, but overall a happy kid in elementary school. i understood very little of what happened once we got past basic multiplication in math class, true, but other than that i was keen to learn, and i felt capable and supported and a part of my school community.

then i hit junior high like a tank hits a wall, rather literally. thanks to the late cutoff date for starting school in this province, i was only eleven until late January of grade 7, among the youngest two or three kids in my class. socially, the climate changed overnight, and that was hard. painful. i was an only child, growing up with an isolated, fiercely conventional mother and a very elderly grandmother. sarcasm wasn’t a big commodity in my home, and i was confused and wounded by the barbs that were lobbed and bandied about as currency all of a sudden, and by the obvious jockeying for position and power and cool. but this wasn’t the change that caused damage.

it was the teachers, the learning climate. my junior high ran firmly and strictly on the rails of the old military model that is the foundation for most schooling in the western world today, no matter how we talk about child-centered education. my school was particularly removed from the child-centered model and functioned instead as an institution of power, where threatened teachers perceived students as much as potential disruptors as learners, where the lowest common denominator was the goal for everyone and heaven forbid one get saucy and read ahead in the textbook and show the teacher up.

we had, for homeroom and science and math, one particularly Draconian young woman who had no business being a junior high teacher in the first place and would have been far happier with kindergarteners or grade 12s or anyone other than the hormonal, confused adolescents who’d been dumped from a nurturing elementary school environment into a regurgitation mill and really didn’t know what to do with ourselves. she ruled by intimidation, by illogical threats, by sheer force of size. once, in the halls on the way to lunch break, she caught me chewing gum, which wasn’t allowed in class but had never actually been discussed – at least with us – in terms of non-classroom usage.

immediately she barked, “spit it out.”

just as immediately i, in a moment of cocky but genuine puzzlement, sure that there must be some mistake as to her purview in this situation, said “why should i?”

she grabbed me by the shoulders and slammed me up against the cement wall, knocking the gum right out of my mouth. my feet – i was still only eleven, and she was a two-hundred pound full-grown woman – kicked the air.

i know now that she just didn’t know what to do with me, with almost any of us. even the keenest, nicest kids eventually crossed her, stepped out of line unwittingly, accidentally. she had little empathy for us, so far as i can tell, little mercy. she must have believed we were really just there to be molded, not taught…merely beaten into proper behavioural shape by her sit down and shut up methodology, from which learning would naturally spring if we simply focused more diligently on our books. or maybe she didn’t know any other methodology. or maybe she was just mean.

i know she made me mean. i spent most of my two years in her classes sitting out in the hallway, which did little to improve my already limited math skills. but i learned from her. i learned that power can be horribly misused. that people aren’t always actually interested in what you know, or even in your good intentions, but in having you not make them look bad. i learned from her that every teacher teaches, but not always the things s/he thinks s/he is teaching. and i learned that school was no longer a just, nurturing place to bring my secret heart and my desire for approval and my enthusiasm, so i began leaving that behind. i still did well in school, more or less, and still enjoyed it for a multitude of reasons. but having that teacher for two years taught me to disdain earnest effort, to hide my struggles and my original ideas, and to mock myself and others whenever norms were transgressed.

i don’t want, when i send Oscar off to school however many Septembers from now, when the morning comes for a real goodbye, to send him into a place like that.

and i know most schools aren’t. i’ve worked in them for years. i see good things, for the most part. a lot of effort. a lot of caring. but still…it’s a normative system that requires a level of crowd control to function. and learning to function within a system like that can be really, really important. or really, really damaging. just depends on who’s at the helm. and we do not choose our children’s teachers.

i think schools are one of the strangest social experiments we, as a society, are involved in. they fascinate me, pulling and repelling with not-quite equal force. the draw has always been stronger than the desire to flee, for me, overall. but when it is not me, but my child, when it’s his earnestness and enthusiasm for learning and life and other people that’s riding on the experience….oy.

yeh, i’d like my child to love school, because i did, junior high aside. but more, i want him to learn to work hard, to learn to think and discipline himself and make choices and learn from others and shine his own personal light, to the best of his abilities. and i’m not sure that schools really teach that, or even can teach that, certainly not for twelve years solid.

Septembers are going to get harder in a few years, i think.

Oscar tried corn for the first time the other night. fresh corn, local, sweet and tender…manna from heaven, this stuff. it’s been a poor growing season here this summer, with a cold, cold spring and a dry, brief summer, but the corn – unlike last month’s pitiful strawberry crop – seems to have emerged unscathed and hardy. so we had corn on Friday, and some corn on Saturday, and some leftover corn again at lunch today. because in another week or two it will all be gone, and the only corn left in the grocery store will again be those bright, supersweet, woody cobs that come all the way from California in what must be flavour-leaching containers. those, and the cans, and the dessicated niblets sold as a toddler snack…plenty of options, really…but none of them bearing much resemblance to the crisp, fresh corn straight from the field.

these vestiges of seasonal food are rare in today’s world, this sense of what lands on my table having any connection to my calendar, to the turning of seasons, to the weather outside my window. i like anticipating corn season, waiting for it patiently, resisting the lure of imported cobs, the temptation to jump the gun. only in this small window of my life do i have any understanding of what those who advocate saving sex for marriage may be on about…what sense of satisfaction they get from their choice, from their abstinence. what titillation prolonging pleasure brings. with corn, i am a born-again virgin.

my son, though? no virginal delicacy for him. within minutes giving him his first taste of, we’d graduated from shearing the sweet, wet niblets off the cob for him to handing him the whole damn thing to devour whole. and he’s taken the experience in an entirely different metaphorical direction. my boy loves his corn like it’s a drug.

(please refrain from showing these pictures to Children’s Aid)
first hit on the corncob pipe

the after-corn giggles

too much corn, dude

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in other, non-vegetable-enthusiast news, i have finally begun to reconstruct my nice collection of buttons that lamentably disappeared last month when i updated my WordPress installation. i am still digging for some in the bowels of my email account…but i’m trying. and, thanks to the estimable Mrs. Chicken, i have a new one to add…the Power of Schmooze award.

i am delighted, and honoured, but bemused.

in real life i completely lack what i think of as schmoozing instincts, despite being a friendly soul. in face-to-face conversations, i will ask a lot about you, and tell too many rambling and often self-deprecating stories about myself, but i will not ‘schmooze’ you, not so much. i lack the instinct for sales, or for furthering my own agenda with any grace. i’m sensitive to the jockeying for content and control that shapes social discourse, and while i’m quite happy being acclaimed as centre of attention (oh, stop now, don’t…stop…:)), i’m uncomfortable pushing for my piece of the pie. schmoozing usually feels painfully inappropriate to me. it’s not that i specially mind being inappropriate (anyone who enjoys publicly discussing corn in comparison to sex or her child’s initiation into the corn-eating set as a parallel to smoking up can’t in any honesty pretend to respect all social niceties), but i like social exchange best when it’s reciprocal, not one-sided. i’m a better liaison and facilitator of conversations than i am an initiator.

but schmoozing in the blogosphere works differently. this unbounded world of connections functions, in a sense, like a giant dinner party, except where we can all have our space in the conversation without impinging on anyone else’s. if you don’t want to read my ruminations on corn, i’m not pinning you to the wall yakking your ear off against your will…you get to click on by and i don’t even get my feelings hurt. but if you’re saying something over in your little space in the conversation that i want to support or encourage or giggle at, i can. and others will too…thus facilitating conversations and explorations that many of us may never have in our real lives, in the exposed world of face-to-face conversation where we fear taking up too much space in a conversation. i see commenting, out here, as facilitating conversations…and thus i’m proud to be a schmoozer, thrilled even. especially because i’ve been a bit of an (unwilling) skinflint with my comments this summer, stretched thin as i’ve been feeling…i’m grateful to Mrs. Chicken for seeing what i’m wanting to do with the few words i’ve spread around lately, rather than what i’m necessarily succeeding in. because i do want to be involved in this community, passionately.

my little real-life corner of the world is known, at least to itself, for polite hospitality and webbing together of tales and tellers into rich mythologies…in many ways, for the same emphasis on drawing together communities around locii of need that the Power of Schmooze award is honouring. and out here on the eastern shores of Canada, poor and proud, we have a rich if small community of bloggers who foster deep, heartfelt attachments and connections and support for the larger community, who both lay themselves bare with beautiful words and raise up others who need words too. so, i pass along the love to Mad Hatter, Sweetsalty Kate, and Thordora, my triumverate of Maritime schmoozers, all of whom have held me up with generosity and wit and warmth, and do the same for so many others…plus new coastal blog buddy Hannah, who i’m so happy found me.

don’t we make y’all want to come to a downhome BlogHer East festival next year? with fiddles?

ponyboy

we interrupt your regularly scheduled stream of silence from the crib to announce that we are still alive. the houseguests left this morning. tomorrow is a local holiday.

praise be.

so we went to the fair.

more accurately, we went to the annual midway – locally referred to as “The Exhibition” – which comes to town for two weeks every August, lighting up the skyline with neon and the thrilling screams of human beings flying through the air in shaky, garish metal cages thrown together in mere hours.  the place is loud, hopped up, full of hawkers and discarded candy apples and cigarette smoke and a disembodied voice from the Bingo tent calling O-seventy-nine even above the peals of tinned music emanating from the omnipresent speakers.

when i was a little girl, my mother and i lived only blocks from the fairground, and for these two weeks in summer i lay awake beside my open window, at dusk, listening for the magical sounds that signalled the fair was on, the season was magical, the horses were racing, and other kids were staying up later than i was.  never having known Disney World or Canada’s Wonderland, i lusted for The Exhibition.  in the sheltered innocence of my one-horse-town childhood, it was a thing of beauty, all lights and whirling fantasy.  i lived for the day when i was old enough to go on the Big Rides.  i had not yet discovered that my stomach has all the fortitude of a pansy, nor that the guy who dropped out of school in grade 7 to drink for a living and let all his teeth fall out would grow up to be the guy who screws all the Big Rides together every year.

pushing Oscar’s stroller up to the gates of that same fairground these many years later, i felt like that kid again, racing to The Exhibition with my eyes wide.  anticipation surged when the Big Rides came in sight, like a map reading “Here Be Thrills”, and i quickened my step and then laughed at myself, because i know that the fairground is really only one block square, and that i actually loathe cotton candy, and that i am no more interested in going on the Zipper at this point in my existence than i am in taking up amateur tracheotomy as a hobby.

we circled the tiny fairground, drinking in the smells of sugar and grease and dirt and vomit, watching the lights begin to blink awake as the suppertime sky darkened with the threat of rain.  we navigated hordes of teenagers straddling the chasm between euphoria and apathy, out for the night at a site they are only just beginning to discover is small and provincial and seedy.  we waved to the men selling games of chance.  i declined a few offers to win Oscar a variety of stuffed animals sporting beer or cupid hearts…Dave declined the opportunity to show his manliness shooting duckies and banging the strongman scale with a hammer.

it is a sad place, The Exhibition, stripped of its glamour by my adult eyes.  naked, it is shrivelled and dirty, skanky even..expensive, for this local economy, but cheap and hard and crass in its lure and its delivery.  it made me feel old and sorrowful, Jackie Paper gone looking again for the lost Puff the Dragon only to find him a carnie, sucking smoke and calling Bingo numbers for the rubes who pass through looking for magic.

but a thing of beauty is a joy forever, i once read.  and magic is in the capacity for wonder, not the source of it. there was some magic still to be found on the fairground, in Oscar’s face, and in his imagination. we only went on one ride, he and i, because even the little circling boats and cars that i remember from a lifetime ago are gone now, replaced by faster cheap thrills machines that draw an older bracelet-buying crowd…but there is still a carousel, a merry-go-round.  and from the moment we chose our pink pony, his eyes were bright and full of wonder and possibility and amazement and the oppressive feel of the place lifted for me and i could hear the delight in the screams of whirling children and see the flashing lights as beautiful and strange and the scabby gold paint of our steed as gilded and perfect.

i think O enjoyed his first ride, his first trip to The Exhibition.

i had, for three minutes, more magic than i’ve allowed myself in years.