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pssst. come in a little closer. i got a secret. or a confession. or something to shout from the rooftops, i’m not sure which.

i bought a bathing suit. first one in about four years.

and the experience did not send me into paroxysms of self-loathing. not when i bought it, not when i think about it, not at all. i’m stunned. confused, even. i’ve been awkward in my skin since puberty, alternating between cringing shame and brief bouts of defiant exhibitionism. i have lived with the excruciating self-criticism of a negative body image for so long that i hardly know what to do when i find myself…um…redeemed? saved? ransomed?

praise the Lord. i bought a swimsuit, and i think i might be able to wear it without major mental effort.

evangelizing metaphors are, erm, unusual for me. but this placid indifference to the prospect of public summer semi-nudity is rather precisely like being born again. rescued, and not by my own long battle for balance and self-acceptance, my slow surfacing over bulimia and anorexia, the mastery i wrung over those demons. rather, while i wasn’t looking, the demons seem to have finally slunk out of the building.

i may be the one woman in a thousand who can say this, but i think childbirth and mothering have deeply improved my relationship with my body.

now, granted, i haven’t actually worn this bathing suit for its god-given purpose yet, nor actually outside the Old Navy dressing room. even Dave hasn’t laid eyes on it, and i most certainly have not had to parade my pasty flesh up and down a poolside or beach sporting it, thanks to the unseasonally craptastic weather that’s marked the late spring and early summer so far here in sunny frigid eastern Canada. but, y’know, the day will eventually come when it will actually be nice enough to take O for his long belated first swim, and i’m thinking that the muumuu i’d prefer to wear for the occasion would perhaps risk getting both of us caught in an undertow. so the bathing suit is on notice, ready to be donned any day. and i am cool with this, for perhaps the first time in my life.

nothing particularly magical has happened, which is why the fact of my own indifference puzzles and interests me. i did not accidentally wake up in a supermodel’s body one morning, long though i prayed for that precise occurrence. i am, in fact, not much changed, at least not for what an objective party could call the better.

i am thirty-five years old, and getting a little veiny about the legs. my people are of underground stock, so white we glow blueish, and my skin either repels the sun entirely or burns beet red. i don’t exercise nearly enough, and i jiggle in parts. my girls are lopsided. my belly, which stretched out to accommodate two babies in less than a year, curls up next to me like a silvery-striped pet slug when i lie on my side, despite that two weeks of diligent situps i did last March. and you don’t even want to know what the horrors of a post-prolapsed bladder really look like.

but when it actually gets warm enough out to go swimming, inshallah, there i’ll be, rocking my tankini, probably even without proper depillation.

because for the first time in my life, i think i’m actually living in my body, fully and daily.  i’m not precisely sure how and when that happened…there was no single moment…but i suspect it was largely the immediacy and physicality and vulnerability of pregnancy and motherhood that triggered the shift. until i stopped nursing last month, i haven’t been able to ignore my damn body in the two-and-i-half years since i first got pregnant with Finn…every day, there it’s been, present and accounted for.  and doing something necessary, something i’ve depended on for the sake of my child(ren).  it has become, for the first time in my life outside of the blessed window of sexuality, an instrument for me. a demanding instrument, which has announced its efforts in ways that have forced me to eat far more fibre than any human being should really have to, true…and a very flawed one, which has failed profoundly.  gravely, even, Shakespeare would pun. my body failed Finn, in the most literal sense possible. and would perhaps have failed Oscar too, had it not been for those eleven weeks of bedrest that robbed it of any core muscles it may once have possessed. yet somewhere in the brutal grief and hormonal haze and sleeplessness of the past two years or so, i seem to have forgiven my self/body not only that greatest of failings, but all the other litany of petty failures and imperfections that once were the only lens i knew how to see it through.  i have pitied this body, my turning it inside out to try to become a mother, and made peace with it at long last. i think the Cartesian duality of mind/body that once nearly threatened to destroy both me and it, inescapable one as we are, is healed.

healed.  i never thought i’d ever feel safe saying that.

my body has brought me to motherhood, twice, made possible for me the wonder of positive pregnancy tests, the swelling of belly that freed me for the first time of trying to suck myself in, the joy of holding my newborns in my arms.  this in itself, even had there only been Finn, only for those hours, would have been more gift than i was owed from a body i’d given so little love to.  but the shift and healing go deeper than just what my body has wrought or allowed me…rather, in coming into motherhood, i have come into myself – in all senses of the word – in ways i couldn’t have even told you i was missing, before.  my body has become primary to me.  this body rises every morning when my child cries, despite the fact that it craves more sleep. my breasts fed that child for over a year.  these things matter.  but most important, i think, is that for the first time in my post-adolescent life i am in a relationship that is truly bounded by the body.  Oscar does not really know a me that can be distinguished from my physical self…ours is not a relationship that could grow long-distance, through words alone.  my hands are safety for him, my arms comfort, my voice…home. he doesn’t give two shits for the wit and intellect of my online communications.  and this daily intimacy, my need, ultimately, for what it has brought to my life, has made me unable to maintain the external position of judgement i rebuked and reviled myself from for so long.

so…bring on the summer, folks.  i am going to be that mom on the beach, in the bathing suit…the garish one, with the funny sunhat and the cottage-cheese thighs.  the one who doesn’t seem to notice what she looks like.  i will be oblivious, playing with my boy.

praise all the gods.  i am so ready.  i am so glad.

so, um, there are three people living in our house. did you know? ’cause we really weren’t entirely prepared.

but lately it’s been pretty clear that we’ve not only got a baby, we’ve got a whole new roommate living here. (plus Clementine, of course. our cat. she’s good people, even if she does shed.)

the fact that we are trinity shouldn’t be a particularly shocking revelation, seeing as Oscar’s been resident in our home for fourteen months or so, now. but bringing home the baby was rather like getting a new kitten, or something…the world’s loudest kitten, yes, and most heart-expanding, and the slowest ever to learn to use the litterbox, but not entirely like adding a whole other complex, interactive human personality to the mix. (Clementine just shot me the haughtiest “i’m so complex you can’t even fathom me, bald-skin” glare for that line, and i suspect some ankle shredding is on the menu later pour moi, but…you know what i mean). for the first year or so, O’s needs and demands and contributions to the family have all been of the relatively tangible, clear-cut sort: he’s watered? fed? loved? stroked? soothed? cleaned? played with? exercised? all good. the colic? horrendous, and stuffed to the very corners of my memory so as to prevent me from trying a home-tube-tying, but still not personal.

apparently that handy checklist of babycare ain’t gonna cut it forever, though. because every day now, there is more and more personality in O’s blue eyes, more thought process and comprehension written across his face, more pique and will and give and take and laughter and gamesmanship and vocalization, every shrill screech and trilling “ba ba ba” saying “dudes, i’m here. it’s me. hey world!” a barbaric yawp, sounded from the rooftops and the crib. after all these months of it being us and baby, O a beloved appendage, Dave & i tired versions of our familiar twosome, we are now morphing into man, woman, and child…a true threesome. Oscar is blooming with the spring flowers, becoming himself.

he has a sense of humour, this boy, and an insatiable hunger for more of whatever is pleasing him in a given moment. he is fierce – which fact causes his father to puff up with pride – yet observant, curious about what’s around corners. he’s always going further, faster, but is sensitive to change, too: new environments quiet the maelstrom of motion, and he becomes still, alert, like a faun. he’s tactile, preferring to touch than merely watch, and both rough and tender by turns. his delight is a whole body experience, his sadness – as yet – fleeting. he loooves shoes (that comes from my side of the gene pool) and carries them from room to room, waving them about gleefully. he is marvellous to watch.

i loved him, fearfully and hopefully, long before he was born. but now…there’s more. i like him, too.

phewww.

sometimes it amazes me, this contract that parents enter into, blind. imagine an ad in the paper that said “hey! welcome a roommate into your home! time commitment – somewhere between 18 and 75 years. labour required – just the start! and lots of poop and vomit, too! expenses – more than a yacht. heartache – guaranteed, in some form or other. thanks – random. and the personality of said roommate – completely unknown, folks (see fine print for Lizzie Borden clause). sign up today!”

i know that whomever O turns out to be will be dramatically shaped by Dave & i (and Clementine, too, his prey and companion) and by all the unknowns that life has in store for him. but i am also pretty sure that – barring catastrophic damage – a significant part of who he will become, personality-wise, is already evident, shining through those ever-wiser not-quite-baby eyes. i suppose i probably would have been just as charmed by a completely different Oscar, had my sweet baby blossomed into an entirely other sort of personality. but this one? i’m sure. i can live with this new roommate, this kid who’s come to stay with us, this kid who makes our family so much richer.

i think the cat may have been hoping otherwise…but we’re keeping him, Clementine. deal.

um…has anyone seen my brain?

i swear it was here just a minute ago, minding its own meandering business and picking its nose trying to look vaguely competent. it had just come home from eight hours of meetings and project ‘familiarization’ and was trying to juggle the dirty diapers and figure out whether babies like frozen pizza, when i lost sight of it. and now…nowhere. all gone. whooosh! vamoose! skedaddled.

(apparently when i’m left all alone to write with no supervision from my brain, my little closet fetish for funny-sounding words comes out to fill the void.)

i will admit ye olde brain looked a little shell-shocked and overstuffed at last sight, like one of those unfortunate foie gras geese right before they…oh goodness, there it is! was! went! oh dear. oh my stars. oh, the humanity!!!! the howwor!!!

my brain has exploded.

and now there are tribbles all over my house. bugger. who’s going to clean all that up while i’m at work?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ okay, kidding. but seriously. the surreality of suddenly sitting at a desk for long, unbroken stretches but with no proper freedom to blog aside, this working stuff really isn’t so bad.

it’s just kicking my ass. or more accurately, my head.

so. much. new. stuff.

with all. same. old. stuff still needing to be done. it’s busy. and weird. i keep wondering if my coworkers need a diaper changed, or something. not that they smell. more just…i’m not quite sure how to sit still and focus for that long anymore. and i’m really not used to being accountable to anyone who weighs more than twenty-five pounds, except, erm, myself.

i hadn’t noticed, over the sixteen months or so that have passed since i last spent eight or nine hours at work in one stretch, how much i’ve changed in the interim. being at home with Oscar, i’ve become a more flexible person than i’ve ever been before in my life. i’m in the middle of something and have to drop it and run before my child eats cat food/discovers gravity/smears shit on the refrigerator/self-destructs? i’m gone. i can multi-task, and remember all seventeen things O needs before we leave the house…and i can also slow right down and spend ten minutes staring at grass if the mood so strikes him, even if there are twelve other things burning a hole in my to-do list. but in doing for O, and with O, i am still doing for a big picture that’s very integral to me. and there are nap times, bless their little restful windows of peacefulness for my soul.

i kinda forgot that at work there are no nap times. i kinda forgot that it’s not all about my big picture, my judgement calls, my need to find self-expression and validation in writing to all of you, dear readers.

instead, it’s about stuffing my brain very full of interesting new project plans and strategies, until it blows up and tribbles leak out. eventually, i think i’ll find my stride with this, i really do…once i get past the vacuous, stunned phase and get my brain, kicking and screaming though it may go, back to a mode where it remembers how to really value things that happen outside my house.

it better. because the inside of the house gets a little scarier every day that i’m not here, ministering to my OCDs its tidying needs.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

in all the kind, generous, supportive comments to my previous post, many of you mentioned that i might want to, say…try blogging at work. yes. mmm. there’s a little problem with that. see, i’m very lucky. and spoiled. i’m not working for The Man. i’m, ummm, kinda working back at the local university…and i’m working alongside…ahem…Dave. my Dave. who reads my blog. as does our boss, sometimes. so, um…gee whillikers! am i workin’ hard!!!

you might wonder why my fine, supportive partner would care whether or not i fuck the dog at work by blogging, rather than focusing diligently on my nice duties? vested interest, friends. and pride, on my part. i’m now the project manager for a grant Dave…um…wrote. (insert blush here and plug ears while the walls ring with shouts of “nepotism!” um, yeh. then…hold head high and recount with dignity my staggering qualifications for job. then…spit. it’s PEI, people. everyone ends up being related to their coworkers/bosses/brother-cousins at some point or other).

i can’t have Dave think i’m not working harder than him at work, folks. how then will i get him to do everything when we get home?!? ;)

i now go to re-assemble brain. happy hump day.

…why doesn’t somebody fix it?

i know. i’m hilarious.

but all my life, i’ve suspected that morning was a cruel plot dreamed up by sadists in order to rob me of the pleasure of my warm, sleepy nest…no other purpose for it than that. one of the reasons i think i hesitated about parenthood until i passed thirty was that i couldn’t imagine consistently getting up before nine am…or better, noon. the fact that i worked an erratic schedule (read: slept my lazy ass in half the time) did little to assure me that i would actually survive without fairly regular morning naps.

and thus far, i have…i have! (takes bow). but i have a dirty little secret, internet. i’ve been cheating. i haven’t really been doing much of the morning parenting.

in the early days, when O had what-might-as-well-have-been-colic and alternately screamed and nursed through the nights, Dave & i settled into a routine. i got up at night, and he got up in the morning. fair trade, worked for both of us, kept me moderately sane and unembittered at three am, because i knew that come seven, no matter what, i could go back to bed until Dave went to work. praise Jeebus.

and we just kept doing that. even though Oscar has actually been sleeping through the night pretty consistently for…oh…about seven months now. i kinda thought maybe Dave hadn’t noticed. :)

apparently he had. he was just biding his time.

most mornings, if Oscar peeps at god-forsaken hours, (which is anything before six-thirty, in my current estimation of time) i’m the one who pops up and goes to him and tries to soothe him and usually fails – because my child is a Morning Person, oh cruel fates – and then eventually lifts him from the crib. but we don’t stay up. we go to the big bed, curl up against the sleeping lump that is daddy, and nurse. and snuggle a bit, and are purred on by the cat, and doze. or i doze, which is really what i’m looking for from a morning, after all. Oscar flails and sucks and plays with my bracelet and occasionally turns around and gives a squeak of delight about the fact that the cat is perched nearly atop his head, and we all get about twenty minutes of this, and i love it. love it. then if it’s seven o’clock already and a work day, daddy gets up with Oscar and mommy goes back to sleep for another forty-five minutes or an hour.

i am a spoiled, spoiled woman.

and it’s all about to change. because now that we’re back from The Big Trip and O has settled into his twice-weekly days at the sitters and daddy’s not doing anymore business trips for awhile and we’re still likely a good few weeks from me starting any kind of full-time job thingy, it seems like a reasonable time to wean, finally. no other major adjustments going on this week, and doing it now’ll give us a chance to get into a bit of a routine in terms of the New Morning Order before i actually go out to work…it makes sense. i know it makes sense.

but (cue violins)….i don’ waaaannaaaaa!!!!! (end violins).

i never really believed that O and i would make it past a few months breastfeeding, once we started juggling bottles and formula in the mix when he was eight weeks old. a few times, i was sure we were done. yet, on we’ve trucked, haphazardly. for months now, our nursing has been only a first-thing-in-the-morning and last-thing-at-night operation, a bit of a cuddle to open and close the day. it was supposed to miraculously quiet him on our flight to Europe…which definitely did NOT happen…but the prospect of The Big Trip was what kept me nursing to his one-year birthday, nonetheless. at least ostensibly. in truth, i couldn’t really figure out what we’d do in the mornings if i stopped. i mean, this child often wakes somewhere in the vicinity of six am. was i supposed to just…gasp…GET UP?!?

surely you jest.

but when i broached this conversation with the cold-hearted bastard Oscar’s patient, loving father last evening, he suggested that getting up was, indeed, what i really ought to consider doing. what we actually ought to consider doing. both of us, out of bed. on the same morning. downstairs with Oscar. drinking coffee and presumably conversing, around about the time we used to go to bed. i looked at him blankly. he apparently wasn’t kidding. he’s even looking forward to this. Dave has, it seems, been hiding a secret fondness for mornings from me, all these years, out of respect for my aversion to them. he was just waiting ’til i was ready to wean to break it to me.

now i know who to blame for Oscar’s early rising.

so this is it, internet. my last day nursing my boy who is no longer a baby. my last day as a lie-abed slag. my last day before the New Morning Order turns me into one of those people who make snide comments about other people sleeping in. i am awash in nervousness, and a little sliver of sentimentality about all my years spent spurning the morning…this will, if it actually works, be a significant identity change for someone who’s been hibernatory all her life.  it’s scary, to commit to mornings.  it’s scary, to wean this little boy. i’m grateful to have been able to hold on as long as i have, to my bed, to nursing O, to the morning pile of two adults and baby and cat in a bed, all purring dozily. i’m going to miss that nest, that snuggling.

tell me there are better things to come. tell me Oscar & i will still find places in our days for cuddling, even though he’s like a bouncing ball whenever he’s not eating.  tell me i can sleep in again when he’s twelve.  please.  Dave needs backup on this plan, methinks.

Oscar went to the sitter’s for the first time today.

all day.  all day.

i had the whole day, from nine-thirtyish until four, to myself.  at home.  around town.  i was a single white female just catching up on things, making calls, dropping off job applications, running out to pick up milk, weeding a small corner of the disaster that is my garden, even – no shit – shopping for clothing that doesn’t look like it should have spit-up on it somewhere.  doing stuff that takes two hands and is messy.  going places that aren’t stroller friendly.

i had no schedule but my own.  it was glorious.

it was the first time in nearly thirteen months…not counting the trip to New York, which was also glorious but in a different, less mundane way.

it was better than i’d expected.

and it was long, at the same time.  filling the time was not a problem…i still have a list of twelve petty but necessary and thus to my sad, stodgy brain satisfying little future accomplishments that i didn’t even have time to get to, but as some of them i haven’t gotten to for months now i shall not fret.  it was the nature of the time.  the all-to-myselfness.  it was like toffee, all warm and stretchy and pulled out to wild lengths of buttery indulgence and every now and then i wondered if i was having too much of it to be good for me.  because i am no longer used to commanding my time, and i felt sinful.

and i worried, absently, a little refrain of anxiety just under my skin, under my heel, all day, trying to assert itself.  it wondered whether O was napping peacefully or crying himself into a frenzy in a strange place, all alone.  it fretted about the big screen tv that was blaring away at his sitter’s house when we arrived this morning.  it reminded me, several times, that there is a dog at the sitter’s house, too, and that dogs bite children.  it wasn’t an unreasonable voice, but rather a statistical type of one, incarnating all my fears and all the rational, informative panic behind them into a little song i carried around with me all day, in my diaper bag.  (yeh, i still carry the diaper bag when i don’t have the baby with me.  it’s hott.  and i’m afraid to unpack it or switch for fear of what might be hiding in there).

i had to keep stifling that little voice in order to keep myself from taking off at a run, and hurtling – okay, sprint-waddling – the whole six blocks to the sitter’s to rescue my son from…

from me.

from my terror that he will be hurt someday.  from my knowledge that he will be hurt someday.  from all the things that bring hot tears to my eyes and make me gag on my own utter helplessness to stop them, to see the right ones coming, to throw myself in their path and protect him.  they’re things that i never let myself think about and don’t acknowledge at the conscious level, almost ever, because i am afraid that if i start i will never stop and then poor Oscar will grow up in some kind of fear-ridden hothouse and be damaged more by me than he ever would have been by the world.

i usually do okay quashing the fear. but today, with O in the care of strangers for more than a couple of hours, for the first time, i couldn’t silence the little voice completely.  so i sang it.  i let it play across my tone-deaf ear, like a bad Liberace, and turned the litany of barely articulated fears into a little song, a hum that buzzed around with me all day at a dull roar.  the singing kept it from escalating, from gaining ground on me, from paralyzing me.

and somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, while i was noticing how irksome it is that all this year’s ‘stylish’ tops seem to make me look like i’m still pregnant, i also noticed exactly what it was that was going around in my head to the tune of “The Lonely Goatherd”.

for a second, the panic stood up and grabbed my attention again, and i wondered if i should listen to it.  if a Good Mother would listen to it.

then i shook my head.  i know, from my long career as a daughter, that part of being a Good Mother is letting your children go, little by little, step by step.  this was our first big one, O & i, the first leap beyond the protection of family, the first foray into the scary, wonderful world of “out there” in all its diversity and fascination and sometimes callousness.  turns out Oscar had a grand day.  when i showed up ten minutes early to pick him up, he was happy and snuggly and content and his caregiver seemed delighted with him and he wasn’t even all that thrilled to see me, and he didn’t want to leave the dog behind.

and i realized, this is what it’s going to be like for the rest of my life. this is the song that will buzz in my head every time he steps away from me to go further out into the world on his own.  it is how i will keep from running after him and smothering him, to keep myself from choking on my fear.

it’s the first love song i’ve ever written.

home.

weary world travellers three, but home…and happy. and one of us is getting molars, which is an activity better done in the comfort of one’s own bed, methinks.

lessons learned? they are legion, i’m sure, but in my addled state i can boil them down to a simple triad: one, i could’ve packed less. Oscar would have been happy with two or three books and a couple of the ten toys we dragged all over hell’s half acre. the new environments and places to explore were excitement enough for him, and a plastic airline cup is waaaay cooler than the crap mummy had stuffed in her bag anyway. two, i should’ve stressed less. i know better. no matter how many phone calls you make or policies you read, you can never really tell when an individual airline employee is going to choose to be generous and helpful or otherwise (and you know who you are, oh ye cruel Easyjet snotbag whore, may you rot in your bad makeup). in the end, if you get there, it’s all good… and we got there. and in the process, i got to know my son a little better. that was lesson number three – that i learned what a cool kid Oscar is. so he’s not wild about being confined to laps against his will, true, but he’s sociable, and adaptable, and patient, and curious, and just plain gorgeous to explore the world with.

(i also learned – or at least finally processed – a few things about myself in the frustrating moments of the journey, now that i think about it…but i’ll save those for another post, less light and more focused than this one).

in the meantime…a photo essay of Oscar’s European tour.

first, in London, wee baby Sherlock paid a visit to 221 B Baker Street…

and played Templar of the stroller set at Temple Church

then on to Praha…but first a little wine for the flight

hanging with Daddy outside a potraviny in Prague

and downtown with the cool kids

crossing the Charles Bridge, half asleep

trying his first lemon at a sidewalk cafe

O finds a car just his size

back in London, we checked out Tower Bridge

and the ancient Roman wall

and found some fine lads to kick about with

and a lady love to picnic with at the market.  i think she ovulated, there was so much cooing.  Oscar is still pining.

it was a fine, fine journey, and good to lift my wings.  but it is good, too, be home.

so…what’s been up with you?

he would have been two today.

you can barely see him, i know, in this photo. he was small, just a bit over two pounds…and the lights were glaring, and the tubes got in the way of the camera. but his little hand was curled around my finger. he squeezed. i sang to him. we told him he was wanted, and we told him he was loved.  he opened one eye, just once, just a flicker.  i like to believe he knew we were there, that there was comfort for him, in our arms.  i like to believe.

he had his father’s hands. and when i close my eyes, i can still feel those tiny fingers on my own.

i am grateful. for every second.

happy birthday, little Finn. your mama and daddy love you, forever.

a year. a whole year.

Oscar, baby boy, you are one year old.

it feels dreamily like yesterday or maybe last week that i went into labour, mama Cheshire Cat sitting smugly through the evening’s book club, timing my contractions, breathing most cleansingly. all my earth mother zen flew out the window in the car on the way to the hospital, when i suddenly lost the capacity to sit without being ripped in two with excruciating immediacy. i was six centimetres dilated when we arrived. the rest – two hours, you were in a hurry, son – belongs to that other country that is labour, wherein i crawled outside myself, almost, beyond any capacity to ground or gather myself and i remember mostly your father’s eyes and your grandmother, my mother, trying to pray inconspicuously behind his shoulder.

then you.

you, Oscar, warm and crying and cheese-coatedly new…and breathing, breathing all on your own and i think it’s taken me a full year to really let out my own breath and believe that you are here and safe but there you were, wrapped and peering, a foreign creature older than time and more innocent than kittens, all in one. yourself. my own. nothing like me, little visible trace of me even yet in your blond, solid boy-ness, nothing like your brother yet so clearly your father’s child.

you are Other to me, a mysterious surprise who grows more and more enchanting all the time. i get to open you every day. i am amazed by your unfolding into a person, by your developing sense of humour, your sturdy implacability, your gentleness, your fierce, stubborn determination. and your trust. your trust, which has been there from the first moment they laid you in my arms. you looked at me, as if to say “qua?”…and then you relaxed, acceded, gave over. as did i, to the blue-eyed blond boy i’d never imagined, and have not since that moment been able to imagine myself without.

i love watching you learn. i love holding you snug against me as we read But Not the Hippopotamus for the seventy-third time, love hearing you hiss “sssss” when you are deeply pleased with yourself, love the smack of your fat little hand on my skin as you explore the terrain of my face without compunction. i love nursing you down into fluttering sleep, this almost-gone shadow of what already feels like your long-distant babyhood, the suck of your open mouth. i love the steps you are taking away from me, and the ones that bring you hurling yourself back into my arms.

i cannot think of anything better to celebrate than your birth, Oscar. you have brought us joy, your father and i, and a strange, disrupted peace that i would choose over all the free time in the world. you are loved, and you are good.

i wish you a lifetime of happy birthdays.

today is my very first blogoversary. please help yourself to a virtual cupcake.

a year ago today, i waded – waddled, really, since i was 35 weeks pregnant and all out in front – into the blogosphere, and welcomed the world to the crib. the world didn’t particularly seem to notice…but i didn’t know any better, and babbled on blithely for months in a near-vacuum populated by a few faithful friends. the blog made me happy. i was writing for me, and for the baby-to-be who quickly became the baby (O came into the world only ten days after the blog was birthed) and who is now, relentlessly, becoming the boy. i was writing to mark myself down on the slipperiness of time, to keep track of and make sense of this journey of learning to parent in ways the baby books didn’t leave room for. i was afraid this first year would get lost…or i would…or both, if i did not write.

and in writing, and in time, i found more than i’d ever expected out here. a community, and laughter, and connection, and great, deep, proud relief in knowing that some of my words and thoughts don’t just spiral out into nothingness but actually take on lives of their own, out there, finding fertile ground in other living, breathing humans who then send back support and advice and new ideas. i have found friendship, of a kind. and a sense of accomplishment. and…most importantly, during a long, cold winter at home with an eternally teething baby…i have found that i am not alone. in my exhaustion, my battles with selfishness, my sarcastic and unmotherly thoughts, my grief, my quiet but profound awe and wonder at my child and at my love for him.

so now, i’m still writing for me, and for O, but not just as a record for the future or a lifeline to some reflective, contemplative version of self-hood. i’m writing to contribute to a conversation…and it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than just talking to myself.

it’s fitting that something that’s come to mean this much to me started in April. April, with crocuses peeking through the scarred earth. April, in which my children were born. April, which marks Finn’s death, and my Nan’s, and others less primary but no less rites of passage. April, when i first kissed Dave. all the big beginnings and endings of my life seem to have come in April…and to my surprise, one year in, the blog ends up having a place among these April milestones. April, bleak and barren-looking, naked, full of promise. yes, April is the cruellest month. but it has also brought the best and most beautiful things i have known…and the voice and community i have here among them.

it makes me happy, this crib. thanks for coming, and for reading, and for leaving your own mark on it in the passing. have a cupcake.

i am standing on a crossroads, it seems…and i don’t know which way to go.

my maternity leave ends tomorrow.

and i have been grieving. not overtly, but rather in a quiet, self-pitying, forlorn, why-the-bleep-does-the-world-hate-me kind of way. you know. subtly and maturely. none of my choices seem clear or simple from here, and the fact that i need to keep walking anyway, straight into the cloudy blur in front of me with O on my hip, gives me very real heartburn. both literal, and figurative.

the thing is, i’m spoiled…and i know it. i’m Canadian. in the year before O was born, i worked my way past the minimum 600 hours needed to qualify for the Canadian government’s employment-insurance-based maternity and parental benefits, and thus, from the time i went on bedrest at 25 weeks pregnant, i’ve been receiving approximately $1400 a month in benefits from Ottawa. plus this other $100 a month taxable bonus that they threw at us to avoid having to create new daycare spaces, but that’s another story. all in all, while i have not been getting rich sitting here on my childbirth enhanced arse caring for my offspring, the income has been nice. very much appreciated. not only has it enhanced our moderate but reasonable family income as earned by Dave, but it has made me feel like a contributing member of our partnership…because for all i value what i’m doing here at home with O – i read all the feminist manuals and hell, so did Dave – i do not feel particularly good about myself when i am not paying at least some of my own way.

(unless, of course, a potential sugar daddy happens to be reading this and would like to reward me for cavorting in lingerie whilst carrying a lavender-dyed poodle in my Gucci purse and slurping up champagne. if that’s you, and you’re dashing and have one of those turn-my-knees-weak Scottish brogues or something, forget i said anything about paying my own way. just understand that you are a sideline, good sir, and not my real life. and then, call me. Dave is a supporter of small-business enterprises, and would i’m sure appreciate my efforts to contribute to the family coffers. with maribou slippers on.)

in my real life, though, i don’t have a job to go back to when this mat leave ends. in my real life, i do have some money coming in for April, from editing and p/t teaching that i’ve been lucky enough to round up, but in my real life i know that very soon i have to make a decision between trying to juggle the feast or famine of freelance contract work or whoring myself out accepting something full-time but not necessarily rewarding or even reflective of my skills and experience. in my real life, i need to find a good, responsible, loving human being to care for O when i’m bringing in money, and i need to find her before i can actually give her a, say, starting date for my imaginary job-to-be, or tell her whether i’ll need part-time or full-time care. in my real life, i don’t know if p/t work will even bring enough in to pay a babysitter. in my real life, i have minor panic attacks late at night about the secret, hurtful things that might happen to my little boy if he spends all his days in some other house with a bunch of other kids and a frazzled caretaker, before he is big enough to even tell me what’s happening.

these are petty things, in the big picture, maybe. i have a roof over my head, and food for my loved ones. we can pay our heating bill, probably even if no job is forthcoming for me. i have the luxury of choosing – from a small pool, but still choosing – who will care for my child if i am away from him for work. my situation is not a social justice cause, i know. i know. but still…i am angry…confused. because there are so few jobs out there, here. because almost everyone in town whom i’ve told i’m looking has said, “oh, do you waitress?” or “oh, do you tutor?” and all my life, until now, i’ve jumped at whatever’s come up, to pay the bills. i’ve never been proud, or particularly ambitious. but suddenly, i’m furious. i’m thirty-five years old. i have an MA, part of a Ph.D, and more than a decade of teaching and administrative experience. i want secure, rewarding work that makes leaving O worthwhile, and an income more than i could have made straight out of high school if i were a labouring male in this stupid economy. i want clear choices, dammit, not this amorphous limbo that makes me feel passive and powerless. if i stay at home, even some of the time, i want it to be because i’ve chosen that, not because i have some mysterious suck-gene that makes people seem to want to under-employ me on an ongoing, forever kinda basis.

i have discovered my sense of entitlement. thank you, no, i do not want to waitress this summer. not anymore. i’m sorry. fuck off.

if anyone has some nice cheese for my whine, please share.

i don’t understand where all this fury is coming from…nor my confusion, my paralysis. maybe it’s this unfamiliar “let’s wait and maybe the options will look better” kind of flavour in my mouth.

i mentioned last week that i used to make decisions pretty easily. my pre-parenthood self was a wanderer…looking for home and worth and experience, trying to trace the line of greatest reward between responsibility and recklessness. the act of choice was something i thrived on…assessing the paths different opportunities presented, weighing my options, and committing. and usually, at sucking up the inevitable limitations or hardships or responsibilities that came with the paths i’d selected…or, at the very least, at changing paths. i have been living with the consequences of choosing for a very long time.

but now, the consequences are not just mine to bear. there is O. there is O. he changes everything.

and so i waffle, at this crossroads, unsure whether even focusing on trying to start a decent career here is silly at this point. wondering if i don’t, will i ever? will i miss that boat permanently, having waited this long? should i commit to the small, piecemeal things available that i could do in my sleep, despite the crazy schedule and juggling and stress they’d bring with them, or bring out the big guns of my job application skills for the handful of fulltime jobs that are likely to crop up over the next few months, and hope it all works out for O?

i do not know. i do not know what’s best. i do not even know possible, or what’s good, here…for Oscar, for me, for Dave. i’m just stumbling along, from here…no longer trying to balance between recklessness and responsibility, but between various responsibilities: to my child, to my sense of self, to my family. i have finally become exactly what my mother aspired for me my entire life – painfully middle class. oy. now if i could get a nice middle-class job and buy her a nice little house to retire in…
sweet lips of Jesus, help me walk.