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roses are red, violets are blue…
Mother’s Day has me tongue-tied
…and how about you?

i have been struggling to write some kind of Mother’s Day post for three days now, but you all keep beating me to it. and not by blowing posies and sunbeams at my posterior, bless you for your dignity and refusal to pander to what ends up being, unavoidably, a Hallmark-y kind of holiday. there are words going around out there that rise well above the packaged sentiments – and the genuine but single-layered sticky-sweetness – of the Mother’s Day cards i remember being vaguely repulsed by even in childhood.

to my dearest wife, for being so selfless and hysterical emotional…

to Mother, a gentle gift from God…

to Mommy, because now that i got you this card i can be a nasty little hellion for the rest of the day…(or the new tween version, call me anytime Mom, just as long as you pay my cell phone bill)

ack. thpppht. i has a hairball.

perhaps Hallmark needs some mommy bloggers working for them, rather than the Neanderthals of gender performance they’ve apparently hired. ’cause they ain’t doing this holiday justice. but you are.

Mother’s Day can be a bit like an iceberg in the calendar, all shiny, just waiting to sink those without mothers, those without children, those for whom the words on cards ring hollow, for whom some mother-child relationship in their catalogue is strained, disappointing, painful, or just impossible to sum up in the discourse of pleasantries circumscribed by Hallmark. if i ever have a worse Mother’s Day than the rainy one two years ago, spent planting trees in the backyard in memory of our dead newborn son, you can – please – just shoot me. there isn’t a card in the world for those kinda days, that kind of naked despair, that ache. and i cannot write one. i’ve been trying…but the words make me turn away, look away, clam up.

not you guys. between Bad‘s brave, exposed tribute to her mother’s fierce love, Julia‘s grace in straddling the inbetween of mothering the living and the dead, Kate‘s unfolding saga of two little boys born too early last week in the very same hospital where i delivered Finn and her fear and ambivalence and love and hope, all of which make my breath catch in my throat, and Jen bearing witness to the mothers and the moments that seldom get much press, there’s a thread of complexity and shadow in the Mother’s Day chorus that you’ve offered up…there is a stretch-marked, tear-stained, real love kinda chorus out there. and i am moved by it, caught up in it in a way i never expected to be by Mother’s Day. and grateful, to all of you, for finding the kind of words i wanted to but couldn’t.

it’s not that i categorically dislike Mother’s Day. i like mothers. i like my own mother, which is a gift i am more and more grateful for all the time …even if it creeps me out how she can occasionally up and walk right out of my mouth, like some uninvited ventriloquist genie. i am lucky to have a mother, at this place in my life. i am lucky to be a mother, and i find much in motherhood to celebrate.

but i’m not good at Mother’s Day. never was. when i was seven or eight, i resolved to make my mom a Mother’s Day breakfast in bed…i got up early that morn, intent and excited, and – despite a very passing acquaintance with the finer points of anything fancier than toast – made eggs and bacon and Kool-Aid and carried them into my mom’s bedroom on a cookie sheet. i was quite proud. of course, the Kool-Aid had no sugar, the eggs – which i thought were poached, except i hadn’t exactly added any water to the pan – were a burnt, stuck, half-raw delight, and the bacon had been hiding in the back of the fridge since Christmas. my mom was very gracious…just, oddly, not very hungry that morning.

i thought i’d be calling on a little of the same gracious reserve this morning, since things were not shaping up to be overly celebratory chez crib for Mother’s Day. Dave had to leave for a business trip at ten am this morning, and as of yesterday afternoon, when i asked – playfully, but with some vestiges of romantic entitlement – how exactly he was planning to pamper me before his Mother’s Day abandonment, he responded with “well, we have some Pampers somewhere in the baby’s room…”

har har, funny little man. i know where you sleep.

but i underestimated this partner i’ve chosen. Dave went to unusual lengths to get me a decent Mother’s Day card this year. it was waiting for me, with dark chocolate and coffee, when i came downstairs this morning.

it has a rather stuffy, formal etching on the front of some stereotypical hallowed hall of learning, and it says, floridly;

For the College Graduate…after which he scrawled, in his own personal chickenscratch, who has become a mother.

it’s a graduation card, acclaiming success. it’s the kind i would have laughed and felt silly about back when i actually graduated in exactly the same way i feel silly about Mother’s Day cards now. but as a Mother’s Day card, saying “hey, i know you’re a smart woman who changes diapers all day, and i know we’ve had a lot of sorrow on the road to get here and it’s bittersweet sometimes and and there’s anger and disconnect and fear and it’s not always intellectually fascinating but i know you believe it’s the most important thing you’ll ever do and i just want to tell you that you’re really, actually doing a good job, that you’re a good mom to this little soul who seems to have come to stay with us and to the memory of the other one that follows us around and has in part made us who we are, that you’ve genuinely succeeded in a way that our culture doesn’t actually offer cards for…and i thank you, for both our boys and for being my friend” – as that, it was just about perfect.

plus, he didn’t even eat any of my chocolate before he left.

i am blessed.

and i hope that you all feel some level of that real kind of blessing, no matter how ill-at-ease or thrilled you may be with the pomp and circumstance of an arbitrary holiday. happy Mother’s Day, blogosphere.  you out there have made my experience of motherhood richer, and better, and less lonely.

Oscar and i – and probably Dave, who notices things – thank you.

i am, alas, not an ideal travel companion.

i’d like to be. i have a bit of an idolatrous relationship with the concept of travel, and – if i am honest – with my vision of myself as an intrepid, worldly soul. i had this particular affectation of identity long before i ever went anywhere…books taught it to me young. damn books, making kids all uppity.

but this specific form of vanity makes me, generally, quite a reasonable traveller – i’d rather shoot myself than appear gauche and colonial, and i try very hard not to wander through halls of history and culture squeaking “don’t look, Ethel!” between the hayseeds in my teeth. true, i am ever-willing to mortify Dave by forcing him to pose, teeth bared, in front of statuary of the ancient world, but everybody has weaknesses, right? other than a minor fetish for cheesy photos and a terror of insect life that made a month in Malaysia back in 2002 perhaps not the best choice Dave & i ever made together, i’m a pretty savvy, culturally sensitive, adaptable traveller type, even with kidlet in tow.

until you get me in an airport or other official/officious-type environment. then, no matter how many maple leafs i might staple to my backpack and how many Canadian passports and formal documents i wave, i become the quintessential Ugly American, expecting the order of the universe to align just for moi, just like home, and right the fuck now, thank you very much. (and i say this with no offense intended to all you lovely Americans who aren’t like this whatsoever and bear no responsibility for this unfortunate stereotype which i, with all apologies, have perpetuated not just here but at airports and customs offices and such around the world. though i do try to say “eh” at the end of my sentences when i get outraged, honest.)

i hadn’t entirely acknowledged this little, erm, predilection of mine until this trip. Dave certainly had, over years. i’d remained in denial, even after i actually tried to claw my way through a plexiglass wall to the little cage where skanky Czech Easyjet drone sat smirking at me and demanding money for the very same piece of baggage the London Easyjet agents had passed through with no problem three days before, as per their stated policy which i’d called from freaking North America to check on…because i thought my reaction to said smug living Bratz doll was perfectly reasonable. i felt that my urgent, primal desire to make her feel as randomly powerless and screwed over as i did was a rational one, friends, even if she’d likely have shredded my face with her Lee press-ons had i actually been able to get through the plexiglass dumb enough to resort to physical violence.

i thought this right up to the point at which i found myself giving the finger to a customs officer in Montreal. this is bad form, i know. this is not smart. this is particularly not cool to do in front of your child, even if his back is turned. this is not especially cool for one’s travelling companion either, apparently, particularly if he does not relish the idea of spending the night in a holding cell with a sick baby and a crazy woman at the behest of an offended official.

mind you, the official never saw me flip him off. which i knew he wouldn’t – his turning away summarily, dismissively, was what had precipitated my reaction. there was no offense registered, only released. but Dave saw. and when he (quite politely, i credit him) drew attention to it, i realized…perhaps i have rage issues.

they’re not general rage issues…though there is a strain of deep fury running through me, angry at the world for its injustices and slights, still wounded in the places i have tried to make whole through a lifetime of writing it out, self-salvation or at least survival through words. but i can usually contain the rage. only those closest ever see it, and only those – i am very careful, and have been for a long time – who are not easy prey. only once, more than a decade ago, have i ever lost my temper with a child, or a person in my care. long before Dave & i ever had children we had this conversation. i trust myself with Oscar. i know better. i will not wound him with my own damage.

but those people who do the business of official paperwork and rubber-stamping, who hold the huge power of people’s comings and goings in their hands and who are often free to use or abuse that power randomly and without apparent logic or consistency, them i sometimes wish to wound. it isn’t personal, this rage. it is, rather, the depersonalization of this aspect of travel that sets me off. if an airline or customs official is remotely civil, or offers moderately humane explanations for the Kafka-esque policies and regulations that sometimes crop up in the course of changing countries and continents, particularly with baggage in tow, i am – in return – a perfect lady.

but apparently, my view of the whole transaction is a little skewed. the onus isn’t on them to be civil, though many certainly choose to be. the onus isn’t on their countries or airlines or policy-makers to be transparent, or to communicate their policies clearly, or even for those policies to be fair – in some cases – to people who come from outside their particular political zones or cultures or what have you. intellectually, i know this. intellectually, i know that my saga of what Dave laughingly calls “poor white girl fights ridiculously cheap airline” is silly in the grand scheme of human injustice, and perhaps even offensive. but it’s not the moral rightness of my position that i’m interested in defending, or even exploring (at the moment). when i rage, i rage like a moralist, my vocabulary full of implicit “shoulds” that the offending official has failed to deliver. but i think i take the moral position as a last ditch before the abyss.

my rage is a cover for horror. not at lack of civility itself, but at the absolute nothingness that seems to be left when civility is stripped away. at the way power allows human beings to take advantage of each others’ vulnerability, even in petty official ways. at my own nakedness and complete incapacity in the face of another’s choice to be officious and self-interested, no matter how i prepare myself, no matter how right i may be on paper, no matter how much i scream…because i am far from home, far from recourse and redress in that moment. or worse, because no matter how hard i tried to find out everything i needed to know, that i failed. and now i am subject to the whim of someone who gives not the fuck what i do next. that very realization, at some instinctive pre-verbal level, makes me want to scream. and so goes the vicious circle.

some people, less privileged than i in their accidents of birth or their reasons for international border crossing, live their whole lives in these Kafka-esque moments of subjectivity to the uncaring, unhearing, officious world.

i shudder.

i wonder what kind of rage that kind of impotence creates.

and i realize i have no clue how to deal with any of it, theirs or my own, except by being a little kinder every time i have power. i wish i thought it were enough.

i want to figure out a more grown up way to teach Oscar to deal with the world, else we’re going to have to stop this travelling thing damn soon. ‘how i spent my summer vacation in a Thai prison because mommy had a tantrum’…yeh, that would go over well.

i want to be above the fury and the abyss of powerlessness. i do not know how to get there.

from the expressions on their faces, can you tell which of these beautiful people (each of whom share half my genetic material, oh yes) is traipsing off to London tomorrow?

yep, it’s the one with the lip on. kids sure are ungrateful these days.

my mother, aside from a trip to Disneyland in 1961 – the exotic Technicolor souvenir of which i spent my own childhood covetously poring over – has never been outside of Canada. has never been west of Ontario. has never, in fact, left the Maritime provinces (check us on a map, we’re small) since i was an infant, which i assure you was long, long ago. she got travellers’ cheques for the four hour trip to Halifax once.

when i was a kid, we didn’t travel. my mum and i lived where i do now, in this small self-styled capital ‘city’ of Canada’s smallest province. unlike nearly everyone else in said province, we had no relatives in “the country”…which means anywhere more than fifteen blocks from home, in this town. so we seldom left town. when we did, it was so my grandmother – who learned to drive at 69 but feared left turns and speeds over 30 kilometres an hour – could visit her friends at their summer cottages. which were a half hour outside town. that was my idea of a long trip, until i was about thirteen.

i always hankered for movement, for the worldliness of travel, the freedom to wander incognito in far parts of the globe. from long before i left home at seventeen, i dreamed of Europe and the other mythical locales of my western-centric literary education (read: Europe + Katmandu + Istanbul-which-is-half-in-Europe-anyway) like my friends dreamed of hockey players or Sting. i figured Sting was in Europe, along with David Bowie, and if i just got my jailbait ass over there, they’d naturally swoon for my obvious songwriting talents and take me on as some kind of junior concubine/muse/partner.

i was almost twenty-nine before i actually got to Europe and found that aging rock stars are harder to find and woo than one might expect. but i enjoyed myself anyway. and i loved Istanbul. i never got to Katmandu but spent a good four years checking out pieces of Asia while on holiday from my incredibly sweet four-months-paid-vacation gig as an English professor in Korea. i have no retirement plan, true, but i have passports full of stamps from places that were once magic on a map to me, and i consider that a fair draw. i’ve flown around the world four times. i’ve sung off-key Maritime ballads in a pub in Ireland. i’ve studied in the Swiss alps. i’ve backpacked through Turkey by myself, for a month. i’ve stood naked on a balcony in Bangkok at dawn. i’ve lived, by any standards that the thirteen year old i once was would have respected.

but it makes me wonder, as we prepare to take Oscar along to London and Prague three days after his first birthday…what, then, will he hanker for? all this freedom, so long-awaited and hard-won, for me, site of my identity and rebellion against the parochial insularity and “why would i go anywhere else? this is God’s country” attitude of the place i grew up and the poverty i grew up with…what will it be to O but normality?

he’ll never remember this trip, except through photos. more than that, it will in a sense take his “travel virginity” forever…the long wait to launch himself on the world will not be his experience, his particular fantasy, his goal to work toward and shape himself around.

just as it was never my mother’s, and never will be, no matter how i encourage or offer.

i suppose my longstanding wanderlust is a generational signifier, and maybe a class one, or both, and more. as i’ve been packing and finally ticking off the list in my head of things that Must Be Brought in order to make travelling with a one-year-old less daunting to my otherwise fearless self, i’ve also been clearing room for excitement. London. Prague. the words are shiny in my mouth, and i can taste them. i am beside myself, suddenly, with anticipation…like i’ve won the lottery. we are travelling tomorrow. this is my childhood dream of adult life come true (minus the rock stars, yes. but still. my own Dave is quite cool. and our friends in Prague have a band.)

neither my mother nor my son are ever likely to know this feeling…not quite like this. it doesn’t taint it. but it makes me wonder. and it makes me write.

sometimes i envy the ostriches.

not just their long necks and big eyes…though they could give supermodels a run for their money in the ‘gawky with long eyelashes’ category. it’s more the metaphorical ostrich, head in the sand, oblivious to the sorrows of the world, whose willful blindness i covet.

i’m often plenty blind, all by myself. i walk past suffering every day, calculatedly oblivious. i barely turn on my tv in distaste for what may come pouring out the screen. i live comfortably with my relative privilege and may lament what security i do not have, but i seldom question my good fortune in all that i do have.

until the world breaks in and washes over me.

until i find a post like this one Little Monkies put up in the middle of last month, about trying to ignore the CNN loop at the gym, and being called to bear witness to human suffering but being just too damn overwhelmed, sometimes, to know where to begin. being so filled with rage and despair that you think you might lose it in the middle of the YMCA. being so frantic with the insanity of it all that you run like a wild thing to try to pound it all out of you…and get nowhere.

i think this is the treadmill we’re all on, societally. it’s the treadmill that Mad Hatter Mommy and Jen at One Plus Two are trying to address and throw a spanner into with the Just Posts…which both Little Monkies and i are honoured with, this month.

i’m glad to have discovered the Just Posts. i believe in social justice. i believe in equality, in inclusion, in fairness and in voice for the silenced. i teach this stuff, can talk it with my eyes closed. but i don’t always live it very well. like the ostrich, i try not to look too hard at the gift horses i’ve been blessed with. i dig my head down most days, and think “oooh, this sand is cool and pleasant” and ignore my exposed metaphorical ass waving in the air, taunting justice’s sense of humour.

the breadth of exposed derriere on me is a little larger – metaphorically, at least – than that of most of the people i know in person, so casual platitudes and aphorisms that people for some inane reason consider perfectly reasonable things to say splatter me with grapeshot. blithe commentary about families has a particular sting…”God gives us the family we’re meant to have,” say the smug and content who’ve apparently never struggled with infertility or had their children die, not considering what their statements imply about the same God’s feelings for the rest of us who’ve been a little less simply blessed. or “i’d just die if anything happened to my children.” i don’t think people realize that dying isn’t as simple as it looks, tempting though it may be in the darkest days of grief. i don’t think, basically, that people think about the things they say. we are a society of ostriches, kicking each other obliviously in our respective tender spots while we go about fiercely avoiding awareness of pain.

yesterday, as Dave & i drove back from a relaxing, if snowy, Easter weekend at his parents’ place, the radio fed us a steady five-hour diet of grapeshot. a father whose son survived a terrible, life-threatening illness ten years ago came on to tell about their family miracle…how God intervened and saved his child, personally and intentionally. how his prayers were answered…this on CBC, people, not the 700 Club. this between news clips of the 90th anniversary of Vimy Ridge, carnage extraordinaire, and six soldiers killed in Afghanistan, all from out here in the Atlantic provinces…six more families left to grieve. and i sat in the back seat watching Oscar’s lashes flutter against his cheeks, and wondered what kind of ostrich that father must be, to speak so blindly of a grace that direct and rewarding that the hand of God personally and miraculously intervened to save his child. and i raged. not that the child lived – i am not so cold a soul as to watch my own child sleeping peacefully and wish ill on that of another – nor that the same grace passed us on by. i raged at that father because the logical conclusion of what he was saying- however devout and thankful and well-meaning his intentions – was that the parents of the dead soldiers must not have prayed enough, or properly. that the whole generation of parents whose children died as fodder on Vimy Ridge ninety years ago must not have prayed to God’s liking. somehow, i suspect not. somehow, i don’t think grace works like that. talk to those who grieve…even amongst the world’s theologians…and i doubt you will find an equation so simple. i do not deny grace…i would not want to. but i do not think you can bend it to your own will, or demand it. and i do not think being its recipient absolves you of the responsibility to be merciful – even just in choosing what you say – to those who clearly have not been so blessed as you.

i live in horror of the realization that over the next ten or twenty years i will watch Oscar learn to be “normal” by learning to shut off and sidestep his empathic response to tragedy and suffering. by learning to be less humane. by learning that nowhere is where fighting the status quo usually gets you, so why bother bearing witness? by learning to be world-weary, so young…because there is just so much to be weary of.

i am embarrassed, now, at the arrogance of my rage at that father’s innocent, celebratory blindness…his thanks for grace. i tread all over others’ wounds and absences, unintentionally, and by grace or their mercy, go on still oblivious. we do not control grace, no matter what conception we have of it…if any. grace is not within our power to grant. but mercy is…and it is mercy i want to try to model for Oscar, in hopes that he can fight off the despair that is one of the birthrights of this society. in hopes that he come to expect it of himself. in hopes that this strange, bloated, lonely culture of ours can learn to face the suffering of others head on and not shy away in fear of suffering the same ourselves.

in hopes that we do not all become ostriches, however tempting.

so, Oscar apparently wants to cut hair when he grows up.

he was content, he was cheerful, he was downright tickled by the sparkliness of his environment. O sat parked in his stroller like Miss America on parade, gawking at the pretty blue cylinders with the combs sterilizing in them, smiling and waving at all the reflections in the mirror. he did come out with a light dusting of darker hair than he’s accustomed to sporting, but he didn’t seem to mind. for the whole six minutes Fast Eddy took to actually trim my hair at the walk-in salon, O was on his best behaviour. obviously, i could have dragged him along to the beauty parlour months ago.

live and learn.

i’m not unhappy with the results, either. for thirteen dollars, they’d pretty much have had to make me look like Bea Arthur for me to have any reasonable objections.

…and then there’s Maude?

nah, i’m cool. however, this whole ennui with my “mom look” has made me think. yep, i needed the haircut, and i appreciated the kick in the arse and the kind suggestions and commiseration from all of you. but retail therapy isn’t going to scratch this itch. this itch is me. i can’t buy me a new me, even if i save up big. as Jen pointed out, in the comments, maybe it’s acting like a mom that’s really getting to me. caring for my child is a good, primal thing. but i’m not sure that i know anymore what it means to care for myself, exactly, or act like myself. Mad asked what a mom acts like. my answer is that a mom acts like someone i’m not accustomed to being.

i am both the same and entirely different since the birth of my children.

i am also, as a few of you were probably sagely thinking to yourselves, well into my mid-thirties and thereby ripe for some kind of identity shift anyhoo. perhaps it just makes sense that i haven’t known what to do with my hair.

it sounds shallow, but to me it feels quite significant, near profound. the last eighteen months or so has been the first period of my life where i’ve actually worn my hair at some kind of medium-length…at least intentionally, not just as an in-between in the transition from Sinead O’Connor to Cousin It. i’ve been a swinger in the hairstyle department over the years, cultivating length and then chopping with abandon, thrilling with the power of the scissors. medium lengths were too safe for me.

safe hasn’t been a big feature or priority in my life to date. for the fifteen years of my post-high school pre-pregnancy life, i walked a tightrope between responsibility and recklessness. i went to university on a mix of scholarships and charity bursaries, plus the pittance my part-time jobs brought in and the contribution Canada Student Loans requested of my father. i could no more be reckless with money or with my good standing as a student than i could fly, thanks to a staunch Scots Protestant strain in my blood and upbringing, but i could spend myself freely. i learned early and hard the fine art of swilling whatever was going around, and i spent too much of my undergrad out until the wee hours, drunk on free-ish booze or high on free-ish pot, trying to shake the fear that something was happening somewhere without me. i never made it to an 8:30 am class in my entire undergrad career, but i could write essays, and i read fast, and i kept my scholarship while busily imagining myself some small-town Mick Jagger. ten years later, in the expat bacchanalia that was a South Korean university’s fifteen hour work week, i could pay for my own gin & tonics and did, aplenty. and my smokes, too. they were only two bucks a pack – the Scot in me needed to smoke like a bad crimping iron, i was saving so much. i did my job well, sobered up for work and held up my end of my contracts. but i didn’t do safe, or settled.

of course, i didn’t feel safe, either. only in the past year have i shed some of the panicky, metallic tang of dread and powerlessness that’s always washed over me at the mention of taxes, or investments, or any large-scale expenditures of money. i am the child of a single parent who still has no financial assets or security, and i came of age in the biggest recession and hiring freeze Canada faced after the Great Depression. for much of my adult life, i bounced like a pinball around the country and the world, looking for something meaningful to turn my attention to, something that would ground me, offer a cushion to fall back on. and in the absence of any sense of deep security, i felt like overt considerations of safety – for myself – were cheap jokes. why worry about lung cancer in my retirement when i’d never afford retirment in the first place? in my recklessness was anger, and sorrow at the lack of place i’d managed to find for myself. but in it, too, was a sheer, unfettered power, because i was mine to take risks with. i owed no one.

now, i do. two of them, in fact…three if you count my mother, who wisely showed very little curiosity about my doings all those years away. i have found my way home, and Dave and i are making a life here and managing, and…i am Oscar’s mom.

now, i wilt when the clock strikes midnight. now, that’s okay. i’m getting used to seeing sunrises on the way into the day, and i’m finding joy in that, because of O. i am less angry, and less frightened, less lost. i only miss the smoking sometimes. i do miss the late late conversations, but Dave & i still squeeze them in, now and then, and i am discovering that i do not mind missing whatever else may be going on in the world. the need is gone.

but now i value the safe in a way i never have. and this, i think, is what is changing me…and making me feel taut and strange when i catch myself in the mirror. i look like a mom, with my nice, inoffensive, medium hair. i feel like a mom, with my bag stuffed with crackers and ointments and chewable books, ready for all contingencies…so long as they’re family-friendly and don’t fuck with naptime. i am a stranger in a strange land. and i am not free to make decisions cavalierly, because they affect Oscar too. i am the responsibility side of the spectrum, without the recklessness. i act like a mom.

and i do not know this woman i see looking back at me with the tired and patient eyes and the medium hair. she is contented, secure. she has a place in the world, and it matters to her. the rage and the wildness and the searching are only shadows on her, now.

it will take time to learn to be her, fully, to be at home in this skin.

next time i need a little jolt of adrenalin and recklessness, though, i think i’ll get O to cut my hair. maybe that will give both of us a thrill. :)

i know…more thinking. this is getting like school.

i, of course, was one of those Lisa Simpson-types who liked school…at least until junior high. i spent junior high exiled to the hallways, the result of a sassy little tongue that i hadn’t learned to hold, and a deep, abiding, hopeless longing to be more bad-ass than nerd. sigh. it sucks to be me twelve.

i suspect that an awful lot of the generation of women currently metamorphosing into moms who blog were rather Lisa-like too, in their adolescent incarnations, teetering on the bleeding edge between earnest, expressive geeks and wanna-be rebels. the traces of it are there in the URLS and logos and images that populate the mommyblogosphere: clever send-ups of June Cleaver-types, witty references to pop culture, edgy inversions of “acceptable” mothering archetypes. there’s satire and incredible honesty and support out here, all wrapped up in stylish templates.

well, except mine. but my rebellion is in having a lamely over-sincere title and an unrelated image to which i pay no attention. it’s, um, intentional. yeh. i figure if i hang around in this acid-washed jean jacket long enough, it’ll come back in style. truth is, i haven’t been willing to invest the time. i’d like my inner cool to be reflected in my blogosphere image…but mostly i’m here to write. and sometimes i wish i’d had such freeing invisibility back when i actually was in school.

the meta-mommy fest i’ve been wallowing in hosting this week was sparked, in part, by a collection of questions that HerBadMother and Mad and Joy opened up to the community over the weekend. they contend that this community of so-called mommybloggers is a knowledge-making community, and are exploring how blogs are impacting the experience of parenthood, and for whom. they don’t mean the kids. rather, their inquiry is about who’s taking part in this community, and who’s excluded, and in what ways the act of mommyblogging is transforming the experience of motherhood. cool shit, basically. stuff that makes me want to come back in from the hall and sit in class and discuss.

and because i have a blog, i can. :)

the question they asked that really sucked me in and made me want to line up all my pencils (in order of length and chewed-ness) and start a nice, long essay was as follows…”What does the medium of blogging mean to all of this?” (all of this being the experience of parenthood and the experience of community shared by parents who blog and link and comment and…well…check out their posts.)

it would be indulgent to spit out the entire essay my gerbil brain is trying to gestate on the subject. but there are three specific things that, for me, stand out.

the first is so obvious it probably goes without saying…blogging allows me to communicate. to an audience of people who understand complete sentences. when i started, almost a year ago now, that audience was made up of a very small contingent of faithful friends/family, but that small contingent were still three people more than i otherwise had around to talk to all day long. i just wanted to think out loud, and share, and boast about my wonder-child, and question, and confess, and…record that i was thinking, somehow. i needed to. the unexamined life is not for me. i want to discuss. i want to be heard.

which leads to the second reason blogging works for me. it’s asynchronous. it lets me be heard on my own terms, and on my own schedule. unlike face-to-face communication, which requires the tactical skills of a four-star general to organize, these days, the blog allows for expression and response among a massive community of parents and interested parties at everybody’s convenience. and it allows me time to actually formulate my communications, too…i get to think about what i want to say, and i can hang up on a post if the baby starts shrieking, and not feel guilty or rude. i can ditch my audience mid-sentence, and they’ll still be there, faithful and oblivious to the slight, when i return.

but the biggest draw to blogging, for me, is the mommy-crack of comments and the high of logging in and finding something new. i have a wild crush on the internet simply for the fact that it delivers mail more than once a day. since i got an email account, i’ve been an inveterate checker…a junkie for new words. for conversation. for the new. and while my days with O are rewarding and quite sweet, each dirty diaper is pretty much the same. it’s the computer that feeds my hunger for novelty. i am the lab rat who sneaks up to that little buzzer bar fifty times a day, just in case this is the time it pops out a pellet.

is it just me?

feed my habit. tell me. please. because when there are no comments, i turn to chocolate. :)

yeh, i know. my fancy French numerals in these post titles aren’t exactly turning this into continental philosophy or anything. but, when i theme, folks…hell, i might as well theme grandly.

i woke up this morning to find that honours had been showered upon me…and no, for once it wasn’t just baby pee. even better. and rather serendipitous, actually…i’d just started blathering on about how i think – oh yes, such thinking going on here at the Crib this week – and then, in wacky tandem, Christy and Mrs. Chicken up and bestow Thinking Blogger awards on me! how perfectly lovely…and timely, which is unusual for me. i swear i did not offer either of them free babysitting, so i’m really quite puzzled about the kismet of it all. perhaps the planets have magically aligned in my favour and all that i say shall now become truth…oh heady fantasy. just in case, let’s pretend this post is about how i not only think, but sleep on a bed of hundred dollar bills, huh? ’til eight o clock every morning? whilst David Bowie waits at the foot of the bed to give me pedicures? and how jujubes have been found to be a health food?

alas, not quite. but i am deeply grateful for the honour…particularly coming from these two writers. Christy’s was one of the first blogs i discovered when i finally realized that there were multitudes of us out there, reflecting on what it means to raise little people and to change in the process. she relentlessly challenges her own assumptions and proves the limitlessness of love. her courage and honesty have humbled me, and given me the gumption in turn to unpack some of the more complex and cobwebby corners of my own experiences on this road. and when Christy’s not making me cry, Mrs. Chicken is. that, or causing me to spew coffee on my keyboard. she speaks freely of loss and disappointment and cheese products and working husbands and the sweetness of mothering, with a deep vein of thoughtfulness throughout. a morning without fresh chicken is like…well…worse than you’d think from the literal meaning of my words. ;)

so there. toot, goes my horn, and thanks to two great and generous bloggers, says moi. it’s amazing and rewarding to be reminded that people are out there reading…it really is.

but the fine gold (or silver, your choice) linky love props weren’t only being handed out in my direction. one of the other awards Christy bestowed went to Vicki at Speak Softly…for a post i’d likely never otherwise have found, just going to show that these marvellous head-swelling award memes actually do serve their nominally intended purpose of drawing new readers to fine posts. along with the head-swelling, which is fun too.

and Vicki, too, is wondering about what it means to blog and make community and shared meaning from the experience of parenting, but she’s pretty pissed about a potential publisher wrapping up the whole experiment in the cutesy – and therefore, inherently a little bit denigrating – package of “mommyblogging.” and so i had to think some more. damn lucky it’s my theme this week.

do i mind being called a “mommyblogger?”

as with anything, i suppose, my response is contextual. if some sneering suit is patting me on the head whilst using the word, particularly as code for “self-involved, over-privileged navel-gazing reindeer-sweater-bedecked surburban should-be soccer-mom who uses too many exclamation marks in the drivel she writes about the brats she barely takes care of…” (and i’m paraphrasing here, but i know that this view of the mommyblog exists) – then yeh. yeh, i mind. i’m not surburban, dude.

but seriously. the truth is that the notion that what many of us are doing out here is drivel is, itself, where the drivel lies. that old cesspool of contempt and derision and marginalizing condescension that so often accumulates around feminized work in our society isn’t, unfortunately, absent from the discourse surrounding the phenomenon of momblogs. or blogs by mothers. or blogs by writers who are also caregivers. as you wish. as Vicki points out, there’s no reason why all of us populating this corner of the blogosphere (while also populating the earth with our sweet offspring) can’t demand a little more dignity for what is, on both counts, pretty fine and significant work.

i know words matter. words cut and minimize and infantilize, if they are allowed to. but words also build amazing communities of thought and connection. and because so many of the women who write about their lives and their mothering write with such sharp wit and rich insight about the stereotypes that mommyhood brings with it, i want to have faith that we could, if we chose, reclaim the word “mommyblog” and make it something proud. we could wear it with the same patient, rise-above-it sense of irony with which we wear our children’s pee and spitup and mashed bananas every day. i think we could. i think we could take that snivelling little word and make it cool.

whether we want to, on the other hand, is a different conversation. how do you feel about it? what do you think about it?

finally….i also think – since this is still a blog about my boy & i, however the heck i style it – that i would like to announce that Oscar stood by himself today. for five. whole. seconds. it was beautiful, and scary.

and that’s all i can think for today.

so, i’ve been thinking. yep. more than i let on.

admittedly, the thinking these days happens in shorter, more sober, and more interruptable increments than it used to back in the glory days my former life. and most definitely, my thinking gets less press than it used to. Oscar hasn’t expressed any particular reciprocal interest in my musings on geopolitics or Baudrillard’s recent passing, so…we stick mostly to the “buh! yes, that’s a duck, dear!” strain of conversation, punctuated by occasional ramblings by moi on my abiding love for him and how it’s not nice to bite mommy and swat her glasses off.

and here in blogland, where i actually make some small attempt to use complete sentences and words bigger than “bunny,” i’ve stuck mostly to the practical, the anecdotal, and the emotional ends of reflection.

but during the past week, i’ve happened upon a few posts that have gotten me wondering, explicitly, about the fascinating circus that is the Internet and particularly about this whole act of mommy blogging and what the hell i’m doing here. not in the sense of “do i belong?”…true, i’ve been a slow starter in terms of actually figuring out and performing the requisite rituals of link and comment that connect one to community here on ye olde interwebs, but i get it now. i’ve been getting love and belonging and commiseration and pleasure out of the connections i’ve made. what i’m trying to figure out is “what is it? what are we doing here, us moms (and dads) blogging about the wild ride of parenting? or is that even what most of us are really on about?”

it started for me when i (belatedly, because i’m a stegosaur who never quite got around to using a blog reader) stumbled upon a post that social networking diva Josie Fraser put up last month about parents – especially parents whose work is largely online and who have significant net presence – posting pictures of their kids. issues of privacy were raised, and of consent, and of the eventual online identities of said kids being shaped or impacted by still-searchable photos of them on their potties, in a nutshell. and i, who do not yet have a potty for O but would probably post pictures of him on it if i did, said “crap! never thought about that one, quite that way.” and then i burned in shame. and then i said “but i’ve never noticed any other parenting blog mention it explicitly, either…” and i felt much better and quite consoled by the idea that i’m no suckier a parent than most of the rest of you out there. i mean, simply because reading about everyone else’s child-rearing foibles makes me feel more smug better about my own doesn’t make the rest of you bad parents or anything…erm…right?

in truth, even a cursory scan of the momblogosphere will show that those of us whose blogs – which in many cases ARE our online work and a large component of the online presence we lay claim to – are overtly about our family lives do not speak in one voice on the privacy & kids issue, even if we don’t meta-talk it. (or rather, even if my archaic blog-reading methods haven’t led me to the probably vast existing body of meta-posts on it). some of you nickname your kids on your blogs, or identify them only by initial. many of you choose not to post pictures. these are, implicitly, statements about what is or isn’t acceptable or safe or consensual or decent or private, in your esteemed estimations. but because these statements, at least – again – to my limited scope of awareness, are generally implicit, they don’t enter into my own conversation with myself (and Dave) about what level of online presence is acceptable for O. i simply accept them, and if they’re different from my own choices, i figure “heck, cute nickname her kid’s got” or “maybe she hasn’t figured out how to upload pictures yet.” at the very most, i assume you have safety concerns about your child being identified online in this world we’re constantly being told is scary, and i respect that and wonder vaguely whether i should be more concerned myself, and soldier on.

Josie’s post and the conversation it exists within, however, isn’t about the safety repercussions of posting our children’s pictures online, or even about whether refusing to do so buys into the potential sexualization of images of kids, or any of the various nasty Pandora’s boxes that relate to that end of the conversation. it’s about whether it’s fair and decent to expose our kids to the public eye when they aren’t capable of consent, and even more, whether it’s acceptable to contribute to the online and therefore public identities of our children. this is a question that previous generations of parents never had to consider, unless they were celebrities…but now, the creation of online identity is a lifelong process with fairly dramatic ramifications. in ten years, O may be able to google his name and find this blog. his friends may be able to google his name and find this blog. in twenty, his potential boss might do the same. is that cool?

i don’t have the answer to that. until now, i’ve failed to even ask the question. i’ve presumed my blog was inherently harmless…a wry but loving chronicle of his early days, and even more, of my own early days on this parenting path. in the act of writing us down i am able to make meaning from what might otherwise seem like an endless cycle of diapers and “yes honey, that IS a duck.” i love blogging, and am grateful for the outlet and community and audience it offers…it’s mommy crack for me, even on the small scale i operate on.  but i don’t want to lose sight of O’s dignity in my paroxysms of self-satisfaction, or draw unwanted attention to him in any form…be it from crazy predators or future child cyber-bullies. i don’t want to use him as cheap fodder for my own gratification.

(well, except for those cute naked photos i was planning to drag out for his prom…but see, that’s a parent’s prerogative, isn’t it?)

and that, in the end, is what i’m really blathering on about here. i’m Oscar’s mother. of course i’m shaping his identity, online and otherwise, at the moment. he’s a bloody baby…it is, very literally, my job to shape him, in his interactions, and his manners, and his tastes, and his knowledge of the world. his eventual online identity seems so minor an issue compared to all that, from where i’m standing. but when he’s ten years old, and not ten months, does that prerogative extend in the same way?

what do you think? what choices have you made around identifying and picturing your kids on your blog, if you have one…and why? do you think what you’re doing will matter to your kids someday?  do you think they’ll even know about it?  do you have a pre-set expiry date for your blog, if it’s kid-focused?  is there a point at which you think that offspring should be asked for consent before being commented on publicly?

i really want to know.

yep, a new holiday. i made it myself, from scratch. :)

i woke up yesterday morning with two – yep, not one, count ’em, two – massive pimples festering under my tender skin. these are not minor blemishes. these two are nasty and out for vengeance.

my attention was first drawn to the new tenants of my visage when Oscar managed to poke and scratch both of them during his morning feed…ah, tender moment. nothing like jolts of pain galloping across one’s face to really get the day underway. beats espresso…who knew?

since their debut thirty-six hours ago, the zit twins have personally absorbed all the nutrients i’ve consumed…which is kind of a bonus on the diet front, but not nearly as physically beguiling as it might sound. they’ve both tripled in size. one of them is competing with my nose for face space.

now, vanity hasn’t been at the top of my personal list of deadly sins since Oscar was born…days go by with me in the same torn jeans and smudgy glasses, and my hair is an overgrown straw bale that gets washed, but never really styled. i have a rotating collection of sweaters and hoodies that i like to pretend hide spit-up and my belly pooch, though deep down i suspect they ain’t fooling anyone. i’m rocking the mom look, day-in, day-out. Dave politely ignores this fact, and Oscar still smiles at me, so…who cares?

well, apparently, to my great surprise, i do. i had to laugh at myself this morning when i looked in the mirror at my two big ol’ pimples, and just like a thirteen-year-old, recoiled in horror. “oh my god!” i squealed in my head. “i can’t, like, go anywhere like this!”

then i remembered. right…i don’t have to. in fact, it’s -25 degrees again with the bloody wind chill factored in, and the car’s at work with Dave, so…i can’t. babies don’t do well with freezerburn.

sometimes housebound is a glorious gift, y’know?

so here i am, at home, in my hoodie and my grimy jeans, feeding chocolate to my zits and feeling, all in all, kinda thrilled to be a stay-at-home mom today. O is napping, bless his little heart, and the heat’s on and the cat’s in my lap, and as long as i don’t smile and stretch the swollen boil under my nose, i feel just great, and grateful. i think the blemishes even make me look younger, really…skin of junior high student, outfit of SAHM…all with a few wrinkles thrown in.  hell…it’s a niche look. worth celebrating with a holiday, friends.

so to all the rest of you out there in yoga pants or the same jeans you wore yesterday, happy international stay-at-home-mom day. screw adult conversation. this really IS the good life.

though i would kinda like to get out and get some Noxzema or something before these suckas actually take over the rest of my facial real estate. they’re vicious.

February already.

last night, late, i curled up in bed with my journal…the ‘real’ one, the private one, the one that i’ve kept for years in a largely unvaried series of black-bound sketchbooks. the one in which my handwriting – which is actually square-ish all-caps print, inordinately and bizarrely and pridefully straight – tracks across the page like almost-foreign calligraphy. the one in which i try to make sense of my life and my self, to mark my path down for some un-named posterity. or just for me, even…perhaps mostly for me, since glancing back through the pages of my journals is like catching glimpses of previous selves in a mirror – momentary immersion in a familiar but forgotten identity. i am always amazed by how quickly i forget who i’ve been.

since i started this blog last April, the journal has gotten short shrift…blogging satisfies much of the weird urge i have to archive my life, and it likewise takes most of the time i have for that particular indulgence these days. but last night, looking through the sparse journal entries of the past couple of months, i began to wonder if i’m not getting short shrift in the whole deal, too.

it’s not, gentle reader, that i don’t appreciate you. or that i’m not honest with you. or that i don’t frequently abuse your patience by appropriating the blog for navel gazing (i know! i know! i am doing it now, so sorry) and self-affirmation and exploration and all those fine things that a journal also provides a venue for. but ultimately, the blog has an obligation to be – or at least try to be…insert hopeful smile here – entertaining, and moderately polite regarding persons in my life whom some of you may actually know, or be. a journal doesn’t carry these burdens. and in my journal, i say things i’d never say here. or i used to. and i wondered last night if maybe i need to be saying a few more of those things to myself, for myself.

because before i became a mother, i used to only have myself to try to foster into the best person i could be. and some of that fostering was silly, like my OCD-driven (but very fetching) handwriting efforts, or the three years of high school i spent trying to decipher and write out lyrics to my favourite songs (yeh, this was before the internet. and before record companies printed lyrics inside the liner, apparently. in retrospect, not my wisest use of time). but some of it made me better. i spent a lot of time searching. i spent a lot of time questioning. i was achingly aware of myself, in a way that i occasionally find mortifying to read back on…but i was also, for the most part, self-aware.

now, aside from the time i spend trying to foster Oscar into being the best person he can be, which is more noble and more immediately rewarding than working on myself, i spend a lot of time looking for other wry, tongue-in-cheek, sharp mom blogs to link to, in hopes that they’ll like me and link me back. which is not quite the same as trying to make myself a better person.

so i was wondering, last night, if i really want to be self-aware, anymore? if it matters? if i were to look closely at my neglected self, i’d notice first that i haven’t gotten a haircut in six months, and that ye olde mommy pooch would be well-served by some sit-ups…but i’d also notice that for the first time in my life i really don’t give a shit about those things, and that i’m enjoying the heck out of being freed from my own vanity and its attendant slavery. self-consciousness is a fine thing to shed. deeper though, i’m not so sure that the neglect is serving me well. i notice that i’m a little more frayed than i like to be, that i’m struggling constantly with the issue of trying to carve out some time for myself. i write about it, now and then, but i don’t think i’ve ever gotten at what i’d like that time for, other than laundry and more blog-searching and the occasional piece of paid work that i’d like to do. but i think there is more. to me.

and i’ve forgotten.

it seems timely to try to remember, right now. a year ago today, in a snowstorm, i drove to my OBgyn’s office to have her confirm that i did, indeed, need to head back to Halifax to the hospital where we’d lost Finn, and where i would, indeed, need to go back on bedrest just as i had the year before, in hopes of a happier outcome. i was 25 weeks pregnant. i was scared all to hell. i spent seven weeks in that hospital bed, all of February and most of March…and then two more weeks in bed at home before O was born. i could have spent that time getting lots of self-awareness in, in retrospect, but i spent most of it trying to tamp down the nauseating panic of my own lack of control in this whole bid to bring home a child.

so really, the whole of this last year has been for O…about fostering him. it’s been about me in terms of my role as a mother, but little else. and i’ve grown in ways i never imagined possible for self-centered moi (and no, this is not an ass joke). being Oscar’s mama has made me more content than i’ve ever been in my life…but i don’t want to stop my development there. contentment does not make for interesting journal entries, or for a particularly interesting sense of oneself, dear readers. or for a particularly healthy mother-son relationship once he grows up and decides he’d like a life of his own, after all. so i am going to try to remember that i’m here too. mother, but also more.

um…yeh.

the big question, of course, is where the hell do i start? what does more mean, at this place in my life?

i need to dig out the rest of those old journals.