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i used to think that i’d be famous.

when i was a kid, i had an almost overwhelming internal sense of profound singularity, of being impelled to star in some exalted and unfolding story that i didn’t really understand but found fascinating just the same. (mind you, i was also enthralled by my barrette collection. really, i was bathos incarnate.) but in my secret soul i was convinced: i was not like other people. i didn’t quite understand that others have their own story, nor had i yet figured out that my dramatic sense of destiny was probably just the accidental result of reading too many Victorian children’s novels. i ached with the vague thrust of vocation, with being called to great things. i longed for the future, for a stage big enough to hold all that was in me.

it was, for all its hubris, an innocent delusion. i wasn’t prideful, not really. it wasn’t the bucktoothed, brown haired, slightly pot-bellied kid with the mushroom haircut whom i thought was so unique and bound for glory – it was the internal me, the potential me, the mind and soul inside that awed me. maybe not because they were so special. coming to know one’s mind and soul, their myriad complexities and depths and poignancies and fears, is a wild ride – i think – for every human being. it’s what driven literature for millenia. and for me in those strange, lonely introspective years of adolescence and what’s now called tween-hood, my own self, unpeeled, was far richer than any book i knew, any pale glimpse i’d caught of a fellow human behind the mask of manners and social graces and distance. so i was sure, utterly certain, in the privacy of my own company, that someday all this wonder inside would simply have to shine through. i would be famous. i would rise to the promise within. i would matter.

i’m gonna live forever, i’m gonna learn how to fly high
i feel it comin’ together, people will see me and die
fame!
i’m gonna make it to heaven, light up the sky like a flame
fame!
i’m gonna live forever, baby remember my name
remember, remember, remember…

it was 1983 and my bathroom mirror knew all the words to that song, oh yeh.

to my bewilderment, though, the world has sped in fast-forward to 2007. and, nope, i ain’t famous. i haven’t been discovered in a soda shoppe, i haven’t cured cancer or written the great Canadian novel or become the next Bob Dylan. i have not saved kittens from a burning building, not once, nor made a million dollars.

i feel a quiet pang admitting and owning that fame has passed me by, as though i’ve perhaps betrayed what my childhood self saw of who i am, or could have been. some secret chord in me still cries out to be played, to be heard…to have David Bowie pluck me from a crowd and say “you. it’s you.” (and if that ever happens, my own Dave is on notice. i get twenty-four hours, no recriminations. i figure in twenty-four hours i can get me on the cover of the Rolling Stone, at least.)

but…but. my childhood self was naive, as well as innocent. the fame i dreamed of was a limitation of scope, of exposure, of understanding. had any of it actually miraculously landed at my clay-fashioned feet, i’d simply have ruined myself, i think, one way or the other, on a grand scale that my more humble real-life path hasn’t allowed for. like some piteous ‘Gift of the Magi’ twist, the excess of fame might have destroyed that spark within which led me to believe i was destined for it in the first place…that simple discovery of my own humanity in all its glory.

my real life has dulled that humanity, and battered it about. i’ve made choices that have cheapened it, time and again. but if i look deep and call up again the eyes of the child i once was, i can still see it.

because in prosaic, fragmented, unliterary ways, i have managed to matter. i am loved. i love in return. i work on patience and sometime succeed. i make eye contact, or try. the part of my soul that longs for voice has found this little crib, this stage in which i stand and stamp my feet and shout to be heard, kind of like Oscar in the morning, and it does me good. i recycle. i laugh. i try not to be unkind. i try to listen, especially to people with less power than i have. i have brought out the best in a few people, over the years. only a few. but there was such beauty in that best.

when i was a kid, i mistook the scale of fame as the scale on which one measures what matters. i didn’t know that impacting one life can matter more than broadcasting to millions. i didn’t know that instants worthy of chapters in a book, in some great tome on the human experience, can happen and never make the papers.

Julie asked us about how we matter, and i almost choked and didn’t answer, because some fragment of the child in me still waits for external validation, for fame.

but then i looked at the question again. and the secret heart that spoke to me at eleven of the promise of my humanity spoke me back to myself. matter. to matter…that agony of longing i’ve carried all my life. but once…once, i outdistanced it.

i’ve been in that moment of grace where life ends and passes into the unknown, into the vastness to which all secret souls eventually return. most go on unspent, i think, with the songs of their potential barely sung. but i held my dying son and sang to him. i sang as he moved from life, into matter. i sang because he mattered, to me, to us. and i have never mattered less to myself than i did then, though the moment will mark me and remain on me until the day i, too, slip away, my particular story closed. but i get – blessed am i, amongst women – to believe i mattered to him, in those moments…my smell and my voice familiar, his first and last window, saying “it’s okay, little one, it’s alright sweetie…you’re safe, you’re beautiful, you’re good, you can rest.”

it was not the stage i imagined, that stage set for an exit, harsh lit, with only three of us there, behind our curtain. but it is the stage on which i became a mother, and a whole world for one small lifetime. that mattered. and made all the rest, all the accolades that could ever have come my way, all the other songs that might have had a hundred listeners, so cheap in the comparison that i can barely hear them whisper to me any more.

and i will sing my same mama song to Oscar tonight, sick with a cold and waking almost every hour, plaintive and wailing. i will stumble from bed and rock him in the dark, his head on my shoulder, a rare quietness. a vocation.

as a lefty-ish, po-mo loving Canadian with an obsessive-compulsive fetish for vocabulary and saying things with just the right emphasis, i don’t encounter too many regular interesections between my self-image and Mr. George W. Bush. continent of origin? yep. species? erm, okay. putting food on my family? i suppose, though i’m working hard to discourage that trait in Oscar and really have to start setting an example.

but we’ve got one clear and indubitable tie, me and Dubya, no matter how far apart we may be on any societal spectra. i’ve spent my whole life wanting to be The Decider, too.

i grew up as an only child. with a single parent. clean, blatant lines of authority, clear roles, direct communications, nobody to play off anybody, and nobody requiring consultation. we may have battled through my teens, my mother and i, but for as long as i lived under her roof, i lived with her decisions. i frequently loathed being the subject party TO those decisions, admittedly…particularly the ones which brought my mother’s pantyhose-wearing notions of a ladylike social life into conflict with my own. but i admired the ergonomics of it all. it was my norm, and all i knew, and all – for the longest time – that i could imagine of what parenthood might be.

during the many eons in which i fantasized about babies whilst waiting to get my life in some sort of order before all my eggs dried up and moved to Rio, i noticed that most of my fantasies involved a very decisive, capable, nurturing version of myself in the mama role, and a very hazy, charming, miniature baby-sized model of myself in the kidlet role…but no papa. or rather, papa, if present, did not seem to be a speaking role.

this worried me, because while i didn’t mind the notion of being a single mother, i was – at the time – married. and later, when that particular barrier to my future as Head of the Family was removed, my secret vision of myself as The Decider still caused me worry. would i find someone else with whom to procreate? how, with all that ambivalence about the papa job? i don’t tend to be terribly attracted to people who don’t want speaking roles. but i could not imagine the irritation of potentially having to negotiate every single choice made about childrearing, either. nor the loss of control it implied.

i went into motherhood secretly terrified, not that i would be a bad parent, but that i would be absolutely driven mad by having to share parenting with someone else. even someone as otherwise fine as Dave. because i knew too well that he’s inclined to ideas, and that he makes a crappy yes-man.

what i didn’t know, of course, is that the decision-making that i’ve always found so simple and rational and easy to live with my entire life long has absolutely NOTHING to do with the kind of decision-making one is faced with as a parent. the kind where there’s not only probably no right answer, but the only way to play the game is to pick and see how it all works out. with your child as guinea pig. the kind where when your partner’s been away in bleeping England for five days and your child’s in the midst of a nap strike, your sitter calls to say that her own daughter – a fierce little elfin figure in your child’s home day-care environment – has chickenpox. or some other mysterious dread outbreak of sores all over her small body. but you can bring your child in tomorrow nonetheless if you need to go to work…your call.

or rather, my call. my call…whee. The Decider. i’m really The Decider now.

and i’m here to tell you, it sucks donkeys.

because being The Decider in relation to your child means never knowing what the consequences of your decision will be, no matter how much effort you put into gathering information and hedging bets. it means weighing the fact that Oscar’s been vaccinated for the pox against the fact that the sitter’s daughter has as well…and still has spots between her wee toes and in her mouth, this is no mere vaccine reaction…and acknowledging that he’s already been exposed but without knowing whether prolonged exposure puts him at greater risk in spite of his vaccination. being The Decider means having to add up all the things i’m supposed to do at work tomorrow and trying to see how many of them could still be accomplished from home if – gods willing – there was a naptime, and how many of them would cause serious problems or offense or render me further obliged to parties i’d rather not incur favours from. and it involves judging whether or not it is fair and right to ask a mother to care for my child while her own is sick, and judging whether it is likely that mine will get the care i want him to in that instance, no matter her efforts or the sturdiness of his vaccine.

and if i’m wrong…it’s O that wears it all, the consequences of my choices. that’s the kicker. and this is not a life or death decision, or shouldn’t be…but they’re all complicated, once you involve a child. piss. shoulda known power wouldn’t be all glorious and fun…stupid chickenpox.

so i’m, um, thinking maybe i should stay home, at least until final diagnosis comes in? and i’m definitely thinking of abdicating from my lustful pursuit of Deciderhood…of rounding out my fantasies so they look more like the reality i’m realizing i’m blessed to have, when it’s not buggered off to Blighty. and i’m thinking i should call my mom and say thanks for wearing that mantle, that responsibility of deciding, alone, year in, year out, all through my growing up. i had no clue how heavy it was, how unrelenting.

(and can anybody get me in touch with Georgie W sometime real soon? i really really want a second opinion on this whole chickenpox thing….)

my grandfather closed up his cottage this weekend, with the annual labour day cornboil. this means it’s fall now, clear and true as the schoolbells in the air and the smell of woodsmoke curling down the street.

fall makes me nest, and reflect. i want to bake and pickle things, and settle into my surroundings…i want to walk through my neighbourhood, noticing things before the snow comes to blanket them.

it would be easy to say there isn’t much to see.

we live in a part of town that noticed the real estate bubble only after its collapse a couple of years ago…in a neighbourhood that is still very similar to what it was when i grew up in this city twenty-some years ago. we are – as yet – far from gentrified, sandwiched between the Dairy Queen and the bootlegger district, with a tattoo shop conveniently located on the corner. this narrow street has a vacant lot and a chop shop where motorcycles come to have unspeakable things done to their baffles, and a row of plain, aged clapboard houses in varying states of disrepair and decay and outmodedness. ours was the nicest on the block long before we bought it and let all the bushes grow wild and the garden eat itself, alas, but we’d still win any block contest no matter what we did to the flora. we have a porch with cute little paned windows, and shutters. we’re adorable.

i like where we live, inordinately and perversely. our neighbourhood doesn’t have what real estate agents usually call “character,” and yet…if you look hard enough, and with a little imagination, it’s bursting with it. it’s neither especially pretty, nor particularly reflective of my own values or tastes. but it’s interesting. it’s no Stepford community, pristine and swimming in bland inoffensiveness. there are the cars in the muddy lot by the chop shop, waiting to be built up and brought back to life, all of them looking vaguely like El Camino wannabes. there’s the lot itself, rutted with tire tracks and rife with weeds and puddles, a fascinating place for a small boy. there are the houses, mostly small, a generation or three old now. judging from the last two open houses we attended on the street, most haven’t had their lineoleum changed since 1962. a few have window ledges lined with little glass animals i vaguely remember my grandmother collecting in my childhood. a few others, less fastidiously tidy, have recycling bag mountains piling up in the three feet of front yard. there’s a driving school that runs out of the house next door because this is a mixed use corridor, and a Very Large Tattoed Dude across the street in what used to be the world’s tiniest little crackhouse. there’s the boy up the street, no more than fifteen, who sits on his front stoop in the evenings and smokes cigarettes with great contempt for all that is not as cool as he. this boy manages – with a practiced smoothness i secretly admire – to spit out of the side of his mouth with such fluidity that the serious business of his smoking is barely interrupted.

i considered, one night, walking by with O in his stroller, asking the boy to babysit. just to see what he’d say.

i have spent many hours in the comfort of my own head, trying to suss out why, precisely, the area’s quiet seediness makes me feel so damn happy. or entertained. or virtuous. i have come to the conclusion that it’s partly because despite my Academic Pretensions i am still naive enough to believe i am One of the People, child of a single mother who always felt just a little out of place in my friends’ suburban homes (what a sparklingly unique urchin, yep…cue violins), and thus i believe that in living here i have somehow managed to maintain my down-with-my-bad-self authenticity. or conversely, because in living here, i get to look like the classy one on the block in spite of the fact that our lawn has gone to seed. both are true, even if neither are simple. plus the ‘hood pleases me because i’m cheap. and lazy. despite Dave’s preference for a nice acreage way the hell out in the Back of Beyond, we bought this house because it was inexpensive and cozy and had a yard and a shed and was still really, really convenient. as in, ten minute walk to the downtown core, all two blocks of it. as in, four minute walk to a variety of grocery and drugstore shopping complexes, plus a cute little bakery, plus the best pizza in town. as in three doors down from great Chinese food…and did i mention the Dairy Queen? did i mention the view out our front door is the corrugated siding of the biggest liquor store in the city? (i think that was what sold Dave, in retrospect. it’s an acquired taste, that view, but it shor’ is handy.)

but i think the truth is i like living here because it connects me – the long-transient, dislocated, vagabond part of me – to the visceral textures and smells not only of childhood, but the paths i’ve travelled since. this is as close as i can get to urbanity and still live in a town whose city status is really only a politeness. here, there are pitted sidewalks and old trees, and cooking smells, and the chance to wander with a bit of anonymity. it’s still safe…doors are only sometimes locked, and crime is lower than in wealthier areas, so long as we don’t mind occasional rude graffiti. people are nice, too, for the most part…they nod and smile. but they don’t want to know what i do, or whether i’m good for their property value. and when i step out the door at night, i still get That Thrill. not a thrill of real danger, which, chickenshit that i am, i don’t really go for. just That Thrill of being out in public space. shared, contested, public space, used by different generations and different classes of people, seen in totally different ways by different eyes.

i walked across the vacant lot last night, trying to get to the Co-op before closing. Dave and i were making an apple-blueberry crisp for my grandfather’s corn boil, and we were out of brown sugar. it was just past dark, and warmish, and since the Co-op is literally a four-minute walk across the lot from our door, it seemed stupid to drive. but it is so seldom i walk alone at night any more. especially across a dark lot, where kids drink, and bikers tinker and cats prowl. even though the lot is directly across from the well-lit, patio-lanterned porch of two of our elderly neighbours, who sit in there nights and watch the goings on, and even though most of the bikers who frequent the chop shop are actually city cops (go figure, freakin’ noise polluters), i still got That Thrill creeping up my neck.

genuine cheap thrills are hard to come by in this life, especially on a Saturday night when you’re out of brown sugar.

is that enough to make a neighbourhood? i wonder sometimes. there are no kids Oscar’s age, and i think in three or four years that may start to matter a lot. and yet i’m not sure that there isn’t great value for him in feeling at home in a place like this too, among people who are different from those he will encounter at the university where mummy & daddy work, or among the kids likely to be his friends at the French school we’ll eventually likely send him to. i both want people like us to move into the neighbourhood, and at the same time don’t want to teach him that only people “like us” are worth getting to know, worth considering as part of your community.

what counts as “neighbourhood” to you? and what do you want in a neighbourhood for your kids?

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.

ah, summer.  sweet, humid, vapid summer…season of sunny delight.  if all our cultural, seasonal stereotypes marched off to high school together, summer’d get to be head cheerleader.

except this summer has been kicking my ass like some kind of sadistic personal trainer, instead.  without me even getting a single toned ab in the process.

our household is emerging from an entire month of miserableness and poxplagues and coughing the night away. i’m working the full forty-plus hours a week for the first time since oh, about 1998, and full-blast, since the project i manage was three months late getting funded and still needs to be ready to launch in schools come September…plus there’s this impish wee boy who comes home every evening and has learned something new and i’m smitten and need some full-blast left to go to the park after supper and make sure he doesn’t actually eat those whiteboard markers he so enjoys extricating from my bag. and everyone i know, plus their dog, has come to visit over the past three weeks.

what i’ve seen of summer basically amounts to a few evening promenades, about three mosquito bites, and an attempted trip to the beach that resulted in me trying to Febreze the scent of Oscar’s vomit out of the back of the car.  the rest? has been spent frantically juggling.
i don’t know how to stretch myself a whole lot further. i am a haggard poster child for “needs a summer vacation.”

but if i had five or ten straight days off, to bask in sunbeams and drink mojitos, what would i likely do? (other than get my child to the beach with a sandpail and Gravol, of course). i’d spend it on the internet, catching up on all the conversations and life changes i’ve missed while summer’s been holding me captive from my online community.

yep.  if i could save time in a bottle, dear internets, i’d huddle inside with my laptop and  spend it with you.

now, culturally, that desire represents a heinous abomination.

because summer is the time to unplug.  in pop culture, summer seems to signify some glorious release space from the grind of everyday life…it’s carefree time, outdoor time, relaxing time, all set to some Beach Boys song or the soundtrack from Grease. and it’s eternally sunny, but without humidity or skin cancer.  this version of summer doesn’t have rain.  it’s a simulacra, a copy of a cultural childhood memory that never really existed in the first place except in pastiche, all the best pieces from a hundred zillion sources, distilled…but that only makes it more powerful.  i may never, ever, in my life have spent a summer wiping the sand from my browning shoulders at a cottage by a lake…but i still hearken to the siren song of that image.  and i can still smell the suntan lotion on my imaginary skin and covet the freedom to do that much nothing with my day.

and yet…and yet…the idea of going unplugged for a week makes me shudder.

because much as i wouldn’t mind pulling the plug on the work email for awhile, and could live happily without deadlines, no number of umbrella drinks by a pool or glassy waterskiing surfaces can replace the play i get to revel in out here in the blogosphere, websurfing.  this girl, in reality, can only handle so much sand in the crack of her bathing suit, and nothing bores me faster than lying in the sun wondering if my pasty flesh shouldn’t get covered, already.

the cultural fantasy of summer is built on the premise that trading routine for some version of sun-drenched reclining and pampering is the ultimate in relaxation.  if that vision did once reflect the dream of us teeming masses, it may need some reinvention, and soon.

because my new Summer 2.0  fantasy model involves a cottage with wireless.  while i’d love to be freed from the regular grind of work and laundry and traffic so i could check out shells on a beach with Oscar for a week, and watch the stars come out and build bonfires and practice my breaststroke, part of what it means to me to ‘relax’, now, is to commune with you all.  to enter this virtual room of my own, and track an infinite number of stories.  if i had infinite time to comment and engage and pontificate and giggle, too…whilst reclining in a hammock with an icy pina colada?  i might think i’d died and gone to heaven.

but Oscar?  yeh.  um.  see, i want him to come to this fantasy cottage without too many electronic games or DVDs or whatever plugged-in gadgets and necessities his older self might deem necessary in this fantasy world of summers-t0-come-where-i-actually-get-a-vacation.  yeh.  double standard.  but there’s a whole world of nature out there to discover, you  know?!?  sigh.

what does “unplugged” mean to you?  is it an unnatural state only tolerated due to the power outages following summer lightning storms?  or would you retreat to a cabin by the sea for months at a time if you could, and eschew electricity for the beauties of nature alone?  do you think there’s a sea change coming in what it means, culturally, to relax?  does ‘getting away from it all’, for you, involve getting away from teh internets too?

what’s the longest you’ve ‘unplugged’ for over the past couple of years?

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this is cross-posted at BlogRhet, where we could use some nice bland innocuous commentary at the moment. :)  bring yours on over there, if you will.

the days at work slip faster than days at home did
my deepest resources
of patience

mines of tunneling to sustain self

and small one too

less taxed now, if lonelier
for touch

but we are both content
so far as i can tell
so far as he can tell

my arms more patient

greedy now when he is in them

still time for playing blocks and touching noses

and i exhale
relieved

i can forgive that this skin fits

these work clothes please me, yes.

but the wheel of time spins by me

careening almost greasy

it has been four weeks already

i wonder will i come home tomorrow and find him grown into a rockstar overnight…?

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.

bless me, the bounty.

Thordora, thinking blogger and one of the most original and frank voices in my corner of the blogosphere, is callin’ me names. and i like ’em.

the Thinking Blogger award is one of my favourite bits of badgy bling that go around out here. yes, it’s been bestowed upon me before. yes, i am a shameless hussy braggart, perhaps, for even mentioning it again. but it plays to my weakness, this particular prize, because it goes straight to the heart of my personal hubris. i’m not in line to be voted sweetheart of the blogosphere, or Homecoming Queen, nor even likely – alas – win a ROFL award. alack. ahem. but i think, yep…it is my brain in which my confidence has always resided. i honour smartness above rubies, and i like complexity, and i preen a little when my thinky feathers get petted. i know preening is unbecoming. but i am unrepentant.

since the last time the Thinking Blogger graced my inbox, however, a lot has happened here in the crib. my world has gotten bigger. and in that expanse, i’ve found something quite amazing – a crapload of other people who think. and write about it. often beautifully, incisively, reflectively. most of the bloggers i return to again and again are, in some way or another, thinking bloggers…bloggers for whom thinking – channeling the meanderings of the mind into a keyboard to try to make some meaning emerge – is at least in part the purpose of blogging. i adore this. it’s a community the likes of which i’ve never had, in my real life. and it feels like a mere corner of the spiderweb – right now, on my radar screen, are at least ten other bloggers whose sites i’ve hit once or twice, and been deeply moved by, or impressed with, but who i haven’t quite had time to incorporate into my regular reading list yet. and when i do, there will always be ten more on the horizon.

but one small group has managed to come together in a semi-cohesive fashion over the past month or two, to navel gaze think proudly and overtly and right out in the open, about – as the header says – identity & writing, and community & authorship.  for all that, even though my membership in the group probably qualifies this as shameless self-promotion even more unbecoming than preening, i award BlogRhet, as a collective, my quota of the Thinking Blogger awards for this go-round. because it’s a thinky blog. and a shared, collective effort…though one birthed by Joy and HBM, to give credit where well due. the group’s composition is ever-shifting and growing, and all it takes to become a member is to let Joy know you’re interested, and then run the risk of actually posting your work on a site dedicated to thinky posts. which is harder than you’d think, no pun intended. but is making for fascinating conversations.

now please excuse me whilst i go over there and finish my latest thoughts on this facebook phenomenon. and class. and what this article here has to say about facebook being the Pottery Barn of social networking software for kids, and why i think maybe if i were fourteen again i might be on Myspace.  or wish i was.

if you haven’t been to BlogRhet…go get you some.

i graduated from university, the first time around, in the spring of 1993.

on a late April morning, i packed up the little old Datsun i’d borrowed from my grandmother, sucked up my raging hangover, kissed the boy i’d spent three years with – my first real love – goodbye…and drove out of that tiny college town.

i’d lived the previous four years in a tight-knit, if amorphous, community of friends and acquaintances, where almost everyone i knew was in some way connected to everyone else, and where even the communities i’d left back home weren’t entirely separate…a fair number of graduates from my high school had chosen the same university as i did, so friends at other schools could be referred to, linked into stories. i was far enough from home that my mother never heard much about my escapades (i don’t think?!?), but not so far that most of my college friends didn’t eventually meet my mother, or have my tales about her corroborated by people i’d known most of my life. i had a network, and a place in it.

and then, we graduated. and scattered. most of us outgrew our forwarding addresses within a year or two of leaving the cocoon of our undergraduate world, drifting far and wide in a search for work or roots or wings or further education. a recession does terrible things to prospects in a part of the world like the Maritimes, so very few stayed nearby. and in that infancy of email communications, when few of us even knew what an email address was and – if we had one – had it tied to an institution or provider that we no longer were affiliated with in a short period of time, people got lost. i never saw that first love of mine again, after i drove away from him that morning…not once, even randomly, in the fourteen years that have passed since he blew me a kiss through the Datsun window. we exchanged a few letters and phone calls over the first few years, still friendly, but they dwindled. i lost contact with people who held huge, significant chunks of my history in their hands. that network just…evaporated, leaving only a few individual threads, stronger than the rest.

but for years afterwards, i had this fantasy. David Bowie walks into a bar and says erm, okay, i had a few different fantasies. but in this one, everyone i’d ever really been close to or thought cool or interesting or smart, they were all at a dinner party. with me. and i looked hott it was fabulous. there were cocktails and cross-pollination of conversation, and constant catching up, and i could look around me at the faces of everyone who’d actually been significant in my life to date. i could introduce them to each other and merge the various networks i’d become part of, the various lives i’d led, and mostly – best of all – just eavesdrop, sate my curiosity about what had happened to everybody while life was busy with me elsewhere. at that imaginary table, i could see all the various incarnations of self that i’d been, reflected in the faces of these people i had once connected with, even if only briefly.

this fantasy always brought me comfort, imposing an imaginary coherence on the disconnects of the itinerant life i led for a long time.

but lately, i have abandoned that daydream to the ‘obsolete’ pile. i don’t need it anymore. i have facebook.

facebook. crackbook. social networking software that’s supposed to make my pretty head spin, and get me back in touch with a world of friends who probably didn’t even know they were lost. i got my first invite – from, appropriately, a woman i’d only ever met twice, more than a decade ago, and hadn’t spoken to since – back in mid-April. now i have a respectable-sized hodge-podge of facebook friends from all sorts of weird pockets of my life, including this girl who used to steal my lunchbox back in second grade. i’ve found some of my favourite lost people from high school, the ones who never come to the reunions, and some of the regulars from the bar i lived in frequented that year i fell into a cheap gin bottle in Korea. i’ve tracked down a couple of good friends who’ve scattered themselves all over the globe and never email, and an old roommate from college who’s mixing a fine art degree with a professional gig breaking horses. i haven’t found that college boyfriend, though. or any of the other ones that got away, come to think of it…apparently, they’re all still in hiding. sigh.

but much as i do find it entertaining to skulk around on the facebook pages of people i haven’t laid eyes on in ten or fifteen years and gaze upon photos of their offspring and their tattoos, much as i take voyeuristic pleasure at scrolling through the friend lists of my friends and squinting at little teensy avatars trying to remember whether i ever knew the person pictured, much as i could admit that i occasionally pull up my own nice little friend list and gaze at it with satisfaction, as if it were a banquet table at my fantasy dinner party…facebook is still a disappointment.

and blogging is the reason why.

all online social networking – that which operates through formalized software like facebook and myspace and explode all do, and that which we do out here in the blogosphere with our freeform webs of commenting and blogrolling – serves a multitude of purposes. it creates belonging and community, sure – or at least a semblance thereof, a picture of connectedness. a quick glance at a facebook page or at a blog’s comments gives a snapshot of the community to which the owner belongs. and not just in numbers. the absence of many visible ‘friends’ or comments may suggest that the owner is new to the form or unusually private or hasn’t really ventured ‘out’ much, but those people that are there become all the more intriguing. if it’s facebook, why were they chosen? if a blog, how’d they end up here? and who are they, in their turn?

my mother always told me, with a faint shrillness in her voice, that i’d be known by the company i keep. i think she feared the all-seeing eye of random church ladies “tut-tutting” as if we were all extras in a scene from Anne of Green Gables, but somewhere deep in me some part of her message sank in, though it got skewed in the absorption. if i want to be an interesting person, i figure, i need interesting friends…and lots of ’em. i’m an Aquarius, after all. i cultivate quirkiness, originality. i like odd, interesting people. and i enjoy basking in my collections of people, online and in real-life, bringing them together, surveying my domain, as it were. part of my own identity is indeed wrapped up in the company i keep – not merely in having friends, but in exploring what qualities my broad group of acquaintances and readers and online pals share, and how they differ, and what they reflect of me.

and that’s where, in the end, facebook simply can’t compete with this spiderweb of connections i’ve made out here in the blogosphere over the past few months. blogging is – at least for me, and for most of the people on my blogroll, no matter how they differ – part confessional, part journal, part satirical essay, part performance art, part sacred reflective space, part grocery list, part word play, part dissertation. the scope for personality to come through in blogging is boggling. some of my ‘blog friends’ are real life friends, too…but friends with whom i’ve shared more of me – my ideas, my sadness, my flights of fancy, my pride in my son – here than anywhere else in our relationships. here, i get to take up as much space as i want. here, i can be honest, and be rewarded. here, if i make someone uncomfortable, they can simply ignore me without hurting my feelings. here, i am constantly stretching the boundaries of my self, or least of my self-expression. and here, i make connections with people based not on happenstance but on empathy and shared experience. i’m not sure i can say that about any other circle of friends and acquaintances in my life.

most structured social networking programs don’t work this way. in facebook, i feel choked by the forms to fill out, by the applications to add, even by the fact that everytime i add something new everyone gets notified. in facebook, i cannot perform my identity in nearly the same way. it is not a journal for self as expression, it’s a bulletin board, a pastiche advertising – it’s self as branding, as identification with various groups, as surface. it is my mother’s version of “you are known by the company you keep,” updated for a piercing-friendly generation. but there is no room on facebook for the underbelly of self that i’ve gradually come to expose – and in the process, heal and learn a great deal from – being out here in the blogosphere.

which, for me, is fine. i can pop into facebook and gaze at my nice pile of friends and add a few photos of Oscar and then come here and actually think and write and share and be what i consider to be a real person. or – gasp – i could, you know, interact with people in the flesh, and all. but i hear blogging is dead, on its way to the obsolescence my former fantasy of the all-friends dinner party suffered. and i wonder what the confines of facebook and instant messaging will mean for a generation growing up on them as mother’s milk? i think it’s valuable, at all ages, to have online spaces to explore and perform identity, and absolutely necessary to the human psyche – or at least my human psyche – to have some sense of belonging to a network…but i am uncomfortable with the idea that those spaces so successfully taking over society’s concept of what it means to network online may be leaning in the direction of cookie cutter self-marketing environments rather than freeform exploratory spaces like we have out here. i think that this corner of the blogosphere has done something extraordinary, making the connections we have, creating these webs of communication with actual content in them. i’d go so far as to say that, for me, it’s been radical and empowering.

whereas facebook couldn’t even find me that old college boyfriend. ;)

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this is cross-posted at BlogRhet and is a mere opener in what i hope will be a larger, more thinky conversation about facebook and social networking and all sorts of things. it’s also, in part, a response to the BlogHer call to action posts. if you’d like to participate…Her Bad Mother‘s invite is below. has blogging empowered you? seriously, tell. maybe we can keep this medium cool, somehow. :)

“…sometime before midnight this coming Friday, write a post about blogging and the empowerment of women and link to MommyBlogsToronto. Not only will you feel really, really good about yourself, you’ll be eligible to win a two-day registration to BlogHer. Or candy. Your pick. And your post will be linked up at this [HBM’s] site, and at MBT, and at BlogRhet, where the brightest minds in the blogosphere will immediately set about deconstructing it and identifying its greater meaning. An offer you can’t refuse, no?”

(Post are eligible to win a two-day BlogHer registration package OR candy. If you’re not going, opt for the candy.)

nothing like a little adversity to get in the way of one’s pity party.

there i was, all balled up in misery and feeling three apples tall because nobody has called me regarding the job i interviewed for last Friday, wondering why on earth my well-being consistently requires external validation and whether or not – in the same breath – i’m really worthy of anything nice whatsoever, when a stray cat from the back deck decided to sidle on in to our house and make it home.

ah yes, kitties. they make everyone feel better. :)

unfortunately, we already have a cat – a rather similar looking one, actually, both of them gingery – who was at that moment parked about three feet from the deck door. as our Clementine had, until that moment, been unaware of her adopted status and presumably had thought herself a human, she was a little, erm, shocked to discover this four-legged interloper twin in her porch. she puffed up like the abominable snowman, with a tail like a feather boa. the hobo cat followed suit. i, intrepid tamer of wild beasts that i am, was caught squealing in the middle. in two seconds flat, before anyone could say “i’m in ur porchez giving u rabiez,” there was a flurry of squirming and howling – most of that me, i’ll admit – which resulted in one incensed urchin kitty outside the door, one incensed – and still puzzled – indoor kitty inside the door, and one stray-cat puncture wound to my right hand.

now, it didn’t really hurt. nor did it bleed much. but wow, did it make me feel better. because, suddenly, i was exempted from flailing about in my existential limbo of internal vs. external validation. i was in. danger. of. death.

death, people! death is very validating. and dramatic. wouldn’t you want to hire someone who’d just escaped the jaws of death?

okay, it was a very small danger. after some helpful internet research, Dave pointed out to me that only some infinitesimal number of people (the exact count has been blocked from my brain out of respect for my own dignity) have actually died from rabies in North America since 1924. and most of them were bitten by bats, not kittens.  but still. it gave me a script to be in, and even if that script looked less like a pleasant, rewarding office setting than a replay of all the high noon showdown moments between man and rabid beast in Old Yeller and To Kill a Mockingbird, it was still interesting, at least. Atticus Finch would line up to shoot me! moi! that dashing Gregory Peck, i bet he’d even wink at me a little as i lurched toward him, foaming in the noonday sun. i bet he’d wonder why no one had given a nice girl like me a good job, before i sank to such depravity.

of course – and to the relief of the large part of my psyche more concerned with survival than narrative entertainment – nothing so exotic has gone down. i still haven’t gotten a call about the job. the cat bite, thoroughly washed with antibacterial soap, is looking pretty insipid and uninfected. the trip to the hospital at 11 pm by myself for the recommended tetanus shot – because i can never find that damn card with my vaccination records when i actually need it – was really quite dull, if peaceful, as driving through an empty town in the dark always is for me. i haven’t done that for awhile, seen the city lights down low, scooted through dark streets with no one else in sight. i enjoyed it. i enjoyed the perspective it offered, the feeling of self-sufficiency and being sufficient unto myself – me in my Kia, cruisin’, with cat bite.

nothin’ like a little daydream of dread disease to perk one up, i always say. perversely inspirational to my slightly beaten self-esteem, which just wants to star in something.

now that i’ve found my tune – or my Wild West drama of pestilence-infested underdogs, hell i ain’t fussy – again, i’m good. a little curious about whether a sane person should be cheered by imagining herself a rabid dog about to be shot, yes, but only idly. whatever works.

now i just need to explain to poor Clementine why she’s furrier than the rest of the family.  i think she suspects something, now…any tips for breaking it gently?