cribchronicles.com

part one is here.

so, my two day Ph.D orientation was September 1st and 2nd. yesterday. the day before.

i was not there.

i’d been joking for awhile about the campus tour part of the orientation, since the campus is about as big as a minute and i’ve worked there for five years, in four different buildings. but i was still looking forward to it. it’s the first Ph.D program this faculty has ever run: there are only four of us entering, and we’d spend the two days with pretty much the full faculty contingent and get a lot of the research and funding questions i’ve had since the spring finally answered. this was the fullest, most concerted access we’d have to each other just as people, stating interests, exploring options, before the race of the year got underway.

but last Friday i had a headache. Saturday, i woke up with a sore, sore throat and an overall sense of ick. Sunday, i could barely even GET up. it was like a flu on a scale i’d never had: full body aches and chills and sweats like a roller coaster. i felt 107,and a weak 107 at that . Monday, vomiting started, and i could barely swallow. Dave took me to the ER. doc said strep: i got an IV and a couple litres of fluid and a prescription for Amoxil. went home, looking forward to getting better right quick, like a bunny. because i had orientation.

instead, Tuesday morning my throat was more raw than ever and i cried each time my body spasmed into swallowing. every drop i choked down i brought back up. but i got the Amoxil down with Gravol and they stayed and i crawled into bed and waited for relief.

instead, something crawled behind my eyes.

if you have ever taken hallucinogens in your misspent youth, you will notice, i’ve heard (ahem), that there is a point at which you think these goddam things aren’t going to work. and just as you are about to give up on the excitement you’ve, say, paid good money for or crawled at dawn all over a good golf course to pick, there comes a slight crawling, trailing motion behind your eyes and you realize the Tilt-A-Whirl has just started up and you’re locked in and there is – quite literally – nothing to do but go along for the ride for the next, oh, six or eight hours.

this felt like that. which when you have a 103 fever and can’t swallow and have long left silly college experimentations behind and have An Orientation Tomorrow to get better for, is not exactly the feeling you are looking for, whatever thrills it may have conjured in the past.

i lay in the bed wondering if i was just being silly. i opened my eyes, looked around my room, nodded, and closed them again. the exact imprint of my cat, who stood staring down at me from the side of bed, popped out in white against the dark curtain of my eyelids. then the sounds started, my ears like bizarre amplification instruments out of Dr. Suess’ own torture chamber. i could hear in 3D. i could hear conversations across town. i could hear my throat, my ragged breathing.

fuck.

i carefully got up, dressed my shaking body, put the pills in my purse, and called Dave. by the time he got home i was hiding under a pillow on the couch. by the time we got to the packed ER, for the second time in less than fifteen hours, i was near feral. we didn’t wait five hours that time. i was in a lovely private ER room in minutes, courtesy of myapparently perfect mimicry of a total nutcase.

they thought i had meningitis, swelling of the brain. nobody seemed interested in my theory that i was being poisoned. possibly because i was also adamant that if they made me take my sweater off – it was a swelterish 30 degrees out – i’d drown.

i came back to myself almost exactly four hours in, about 1 pm. i remembered the events of the previous few hours, but as if through a prism. i felt wrung like a wet rag. they took more blood than i thought i possessed. a poor student nurse was the first to try, shades of the night before school twenty-four years ago, but she might as well have stabbed me with a fork and i screamed and they sent in the elder LPN instead, the one who could thread needles like butter. i babbled incoherently at her, not because i was still delusional, but because i was so damn grateful the student had stopped.

twelve holes in my arms to add to the two from the night before. i have tracks like Keith Richards in 1968.

then, after the IV took hold and the fever broke and i lay spent in the pool of my own sweat, a spinal tap. or actually four, because the very nice doctor kept saying, in a curious flat tone, i can’t seem to find any cerebrospinal fluid.

it is a strange thing, to be bent in half, mostly naked and sick, over a hospital bedside tray with the most vulnerable corners of your spine stretched like a cat to a man you’ve never met before and have him say such a thing about your white little back. it felt oddly my fault, as if i’d thrown a party and failed to ensure my guests had drinks. fluids are the hostess’ responsibility. and that silly feminine guilt was easier than acknowledging the fear that raced through the pathways of my brain, recently fried like eggs. i had a spinal tap once before, twenty years ago. i’ve had three epidurals. but in none of them has anyone ever said, i can’t seem to get this right.

he did, on the fourth try, leaving me mercifully unparalyzed though with the killer cerebrospinal headache that still haunts me to this moment. while he waited for the fluid to drain a nurse strolled in and announced Bed Twenty-two? She has a blood alcohol level of ninety three.

there was clucking, impressed though not unkind, from the faceless sea of medical professionals circled around my C-curved body. out of nowhere, afraid i would laugh and paralyze myself if i did not get the thought out, i muttered, I’ve had drinks that had alcohol levels lower than that. they skipped a beat, because they had all, i think, forgotten me as more than a back, an exposed lumbar. then they laughed, again kindly, and the doctor spoke wearily to the nurse and made sure that the woman would get all the treatment they could give, even though she was apparently uninsured for some of the extras. or something. it wasn’t clear, nor was it my business. and yet in that moment, i felt the doctor’s tired, capable, patient hands on my back, and i felt more human than i had in hours, or would again until i got home.

our local ER is new, quite lovely if understaffed, and full of state-of-the-art private rooms. so i was rolled, all taped up to multiple monitors like a neonate, to one of these glamourous holding tanks until late late, just when i’d decided to sleep, a cheery nurse named Kathy came for me and brought me inexplicably to pediatrics. i realized later it was the only private room available in the hospital. they were keeping me in isolation until the meningitis tests came back.

rooms with Disney stickers are lonely when you miss your kids.

i felt better the next morning – my throat less raw after the fourth bag of IV fluids – and my fever came under control and by 4 pm when they came in to say that it was definitively strep and not meningitis, i was feeling pretty good.

then they said, here’s your Amoxil.

i mentioned that the nice ER doctor had said i wouldn’t be having any more of that. the whole “thing” the day before might have been a reaction.

they stared blankly at me, these particular nurses in their teddy bear-print shirts. they had just come on shift: i had never seen them before. do you have a rash? they said. Amoxil reactions are rashes, one clarified, with an abrupt finality. they said the doc on call had ordered it, for strep. she emphasized the last part slowly, an equation, like i might be a little stupid.

they shook it at me. my mother was there, both of us uncertain. i understood there were no chinks for my words to get a toehold on in this particular version of the system. no way out but through.

i took it.

twenty minutes later, i asked my mother to kindly put out the bathroom light behind her, as the sight of it was suddenly searing my eyes. then the crawling started. goody.

this second time i understood what was happening, and was neither feverish nor dehydrated nor in debilitating pain. and so, with my mother patient beside me and then, team switch, with Dave, i rode it out again, watching the big black hospital clock on the wall. with my eyes open it crept around, unruly. with my eyes closed, only the stark white circle of it stood out, imprinted against the back of my lids.

four hours, i told myself. four hours.

lucky me. i have a rare neurological allergy to amoxicillin, my file now states.

the night nurse, in the absence of a rash, still eyed my nightside table suspicously and treated me like a juvenile delinquent all night long. the one who came on the next morning couldn’t have been more different, more warm, more empathetic. people. timing. random luck.

and so i walked out of the hospital yesterday morning, shaky and weak but slowly recovering from the fever and the strep, with a prescription for an unrelated penicillin and a sense of having been to another land, one out of time and body.

which i suppose, in the end, is as good an orientation for going back to college as i could have had. whatever i missed at the actual deal, i think they’ll kindly avail me of anyway. but the strange heart of darkness that can come – even for a 38 year old woman in a pediatric ward, attended by her mother – hell, that kind of exploration i’d forgotten.

i’d forgotten that reality isn’t truly the same for us all. i’d forgotten that being treated as rational, knowledgeable, human, is a privilege, not an everyday occurrence in all circumstances, something that one can be stripped of in a heartbeat. i’d forgotten that institutional systems are not always inherently benevolent, no matter how helpful nor how needed in a given circumstance. i had forgotten, from years of good luck and good health and the taking for granted that comes when one has all the privileges of race and class and education, what it is like to be vulnerable to other people’s misconceptions about your particular circumstances, what it is like to be vulnerable to the human frailty of power, even if that power ostensibly means well and has teddy bears on its shirt.

i could have taken an entire Ph.D and not learned something so valuable, so human.
***

for all those of you who kindly asked…i’m doing a lot better. throat decent, fever down, food slowly making its way back to my world. as soon as the Old Testament prophet behind my left eye stops smiting it with the lightning bolt that is my cerebro-spinal take-home present from the spinal tap three days ago, i’ll be grand. the headache still gets worse every day. i am hoping today is its pinnacle. tomorrow, we have a hurricane coming.

*In the Irish Fenian Cycle, the hero Finn McCool gains all the knowledge in the world
when his mentor, the poet Finnegas, catches the fabled salmon of wisdom. The boy is
helping Finnegas cook the fish over a fire when a drop of fat burns young Finn’s thumb.
he lifts his thumb to his mouth, and thus is the first to taste the fish. Finn
becomes the wisest person in Ireland and the leader of the Fianna.*

the summer i was ten, my father took me fishing.

i was far from home and nearly sick to my stomach with the heady out of place-ness of it all. a six week odyssey with a family who were my kin yet nearly strangers, summertime visitors i only clapped eyes on every second July. the day-to-day father i’d longed for all year, present and material but more complicated than my fantasies had prepared me for. plane rides west, then north, way north, on what seemed a tin-wrapped hot dog with a bathroom and a stewardess. on the tundra in the land of the midnight sun.

i played baseball that summer at two in the morning. i had never stayed up past nine in my life. i had never played baseball before.

change is a heady thing, discombobulating and lonesome and free. that summer laid the groundwork for my experience of every major shift period in my life thereafter: i swallowed all those giant empty feelings of being cast adrift in a sea without shape until late in the night, in my bed, they all welled up in a panic like a balloon and i heaved a little.

i was ten. i cried for my mother.

i threw up my stepmother’s pea soup through my nose that summer, and refused to let Ernie Lyall feel me up in the canned goods aisle of the Co-op even though he was a strapping thirteen and said the word “fuck” like it was a good thing. i dragged my youngest half-brother – smaller than Josephine is now – around the prefab northern bungalow on his duck blankie, and drove my other half-brother’s mini-dirtbike into garbage cans until i finally learned to do a wheelie. i learned that the map of Canada wasn’t paper but a vast span of emptiness and tiny square subdivisions all amazingly replicate from the air, like a land of tiny model houses. i saw a field of Alberta canola like neon against the sky and my father called it rape and i was mortified, puzzled, curious. i ate a Yellowknife eggroll the size of my plate. i sang The Rose until my patient stepmother threatened to make me walk the four thousand miles home to PEI.

and i went fishing with my father, on the tundra, north of the Arctic Circle, in the black-fly-infested height of midnight-sun summer. my almost-eight-year-old half-brother and i in a tent that never quite got dark. we watched a herd of muskox thunder by miles in the distance, a swarm of speeding pinpricks that made the earth shake.

we caught char, fresh Arctic char: i know this from the photographic evidence, two children in rubber boots smiling into a camera with bright, silvery fish hanging gilled and gutted from our fingers. i remember the impossibly thick fleshy weight of them, their slippery bodies trying to escape even in death. my smile, gap-toothed, wavers between pride, obligation, and utter revulsion.

for as long as i can remember, i have hated fish. i would as soon eat bugs.

and yet, that night, i bit into the salmony flesh of the char, tender and raw, because it was my duty as a daughter.

my father told us stories of the Tundra Monster in the twilit tent that night, the three of us perched at the top of the world. i remember thrilling with my terror, with laughter, with the light of my father fixed on me like Christmas in July.
+++

in the present, a weekend with old friends from our expat days. between us, five preschoolers. there is smiling, staring at each other in wonder at this bounty of children and wholesomeness and chaos from lives that just yesterday seemed so gin-soaked and littered with ashtrays.

we took the kids into the woods, on a little trail on the back of Dave’s ancestral lands. and we spun our heads back, three of us at once to see Posey in her tutu and her grandmother’s fake plastic pearls chomping heartily away on…something.

three parental mouths opened in unison to say what’s she eating? and then Dave crossed the three steps between him and her in only one and he pried the berry from her mouth. ew, she said.

he grabbed the culprit to ask the internet, once we were back at the house.

baneberry, it said, and his eyes met mine, because nothing that starts with “bane” can really be good. white actaea, a cardiac poison, and then she started to throw up as if on cue, her little body heaving and her blue eyes so much like his boring into mine and i made my gaze as calm and easy and comforting as i could, like the safest place in the world, even if i lied.

we were in the car and then there was an ambulance and for a second i thought i might start to cry and then it was okay, all okay, and the hospital pronounced her free and clear and she got a bear with a paramedic tshirt for her troubles and i realized i miss those days of gin and ashtrays. my fingers twitched.

lucky. lucky.

then, news of my father, from back home on PEI. his motorcycle, smashed.

a driver made a left turn with his head bent away, talking to his son in the passenger seat, and the bike was totalled and the car wrecked and my father, my complicated father, somersaulted over his handlebars to take out the car windshield with his back and then…bounced. he landed on his feet in the grass, a cat.

i caught my breath and felt as if i, for once, had landed myself in the safest space in the world. guilty careless mother, absent daughter, but no matter. absolved, mine house passed over. lucky. lucky.

i am wary of too much luck and i crossed myself and spat and threw salt, all in the temple of my solitary mind, because everybody knows bad things happen in threes.
+++

on our last day of vacation, Oscar goes fishing with his father and grandfather, his father’s father, for mackerel. his first time. the phone rings at the house. his high sweet voice pierces the line even though the wind takes most of his words. i understand he has caught a fish. his first fish.

i understand i will be eating mackerel for supper and i curse, because this, then, is my perfect third for the triad of luck. fear and catharsis, love.

i would as soon eat bugs as fish, even now. but the proud mother of the young fisherman will not let on.

i meet them on the shore, and Dave cuts the shining head from the last of the catch. i watch my son, four and innocent, observe the bloodshed and i think, this boat is your birthright and i wonder at what happens inside a little boy when he watches an animal die for the first time. i wonder at how close we all live to the old law of kill or be killed and i think of sociopaths in barns and attics torturing the four-footed and the eight-footed and i heave a little.

it is not fear. it is the letting go.

until now, i have made for my children as coherent a world as i can, one where the shapes make sense and what they encounter is scaffolded and processed aloud: where people are mostly decent and the lie of safety emanates from my arms, my eyes. they do not lie awake in panic, scrabbling for comfort, for a port that will hold them until the world makes sense again.

i still do.

i know the world is big and cold and strange and luck is a finicky friend, and every time we cast the dice we risk everything we have. i know the path of life will teach my children this eventually, and i shudder with the knowledge, because they will inevitably hurt for it.

i know too, though, that life is full of reprieve and second chances; that we are never as alone as we feel at three in the morning.

and that last night of vacation, i stare at the mackerel, barbecued in its skin, on my plate, and i bite because it is my duty as a mother, and i smile and give thanks for fish.

Oscar with his father and his father’s father, fishermen all, and his first fish

in the backyard, there is a box. six feet by three, two feet deep. in it, a jungle.

i eye it nervously.

last spring, when Dave’s father built these garden boxes for us and delivered them, Dave told Oscar we’d grow lettuce, and tomatoes, and wax beans. and cucumbers. oh, the cucumbers, he promised. visions of pickles danced in his head, all crunchy and tart. i saw them. i could almost taste them.

but i sensed a problem. i like to identify problems.

my inner Lisa Simpson leapt up and waved her hand. brightly, i said, are the boxes deep enough for cucumbers?

my inner Lisa Simpson, it seems, is a closet Chrissy Snow. Dave and his dad didn’t stop laughing for weeks. they are still prone to fits of braying at my expense.

apparently, cucumbers are not a root vegetable. well, ahem.
+++

i was not born to this harvest of bounty from land, not even from little backyard boxes.

the garden has grown rife with tomato plants. a pea shoot towers over me. cucumber leaves the size of my head are totally trying to block the poor carrots from the sun. the whole box oozes with lusty obscenity, an overflowing pile of procreation curling in over itself. tendrils reaching out to clasp and claim whatever comes near.

i call it Audrey. i do not get too close.

waiting for our harvest, i pull storebought peas and wax beans from my fridge and wonder at the fur on them. didn’t we buy those last week? from the Farmer’s Market? shouldn’t they still be good five days later?

i think i understand why people eat out of cans. real food is too wild for me.

i am aware that i am silly, feeling burdened by the luxury of excess. having enough food that i do not need to worry, enough that things can get lost in my fridge, ought to be something i celebrate. but instead, i happen upon the wilted spinach and smack! there i am, nursing a sore arse at the bottom of the depths of despair.

when my vegetables die unconsumed, i feel panicky, incompetent, and wracked with guilt.

i didn’t grow up like this. food was purchased, good food, and used. eaten. diligently. there was no room for the kind of casual rotting that takes place in my home. poverty sat on the doorstep. good stewardship of what we had was the highest source of pride.

waste was a sin on par with baby smuggling.

it occurs to me, looking out the back door, that the fact that we didn’t grow food is damn near criminal. my mother and i rented, yes, but through my high school years we had a duplex with a yard. why not? i don’t know. my grandmother grew tomatoes, and we tried one year, but just the one. literacies and time and perceptions of value: all the hundred other complex reasons the poor stay poor, and why urban poverty – even in a small town – is different from rural poverty.

but i suspect the primary reason why we never grew much more than an African violet was that my mother, like me, is secretly appalled at the sheer fecundity and tangle of garden-hood.

it’s not Puritanism, or prudishness, even if i did recently threaten to start an @ShitMyMomSays Twitter account and tell the world she irons her underwear. (and it looks very nice, mom).

it’s loss of control. i know this, because i am coming with age to realize that i am exactly like my mother. only worse. because her coping mechanisms have always made sense within the strictures of her life and reality.

they do not make sense in mine. they leave me overwhelmed by food. by the capacity for rot. by overgrowth. by others.

more than anything else, i did not grow up learning to live with, uh, others. as in other living things. no cats in the house. no dogs. no siblings. no garden. no father. one house plant and a short-lived fish named Ernie.

we were the model of zen minimalism, our lives a proud and carefully stacked Andy Warhol painting, all Campbell’s soup. which we ate to the last drop.

the most abiding legacy of this careful, measured childhood is that i do not scale well.  i am most comfortable with small measures. with just enough. with direct control. when i am the only one putting food in the fridge, and the one doling out the meals, no matter for how many, i can be the most virtuously economical person alive. it’s how i got through college. i lived on $100, maximum, a month, after rent and utilities. i lived fine.

but now i live with another adult, one who trails beer caps around the house like an overgrown Hansel, and who has the temerity to buy produce and stuff it at the back of the fridge sometimes. who plants gardens. who procreated these two lovely, messy children with me. and not one of them seems to care that there are seven peas at risk of rotting before we eat them.

i overlearned the lessons of my childhood.

what about the starving Armenians? the inside of my head shouts in alarm, wringing its metaphorical hands. then it realizes whether i eat the peas or not, they’re not making it to Armenia. and they’re certainly not time-traveling.

and so i give thanks – deep, genuine, soul-rocked thanks – for this harvest of bounty that i live on a daily basis. even if it is more than i can chew.

and then i close the door to the backyard and i line up all the produce in the fridge until i can breathe again.
+++

teach me, wise ones. do you have garden stories of your own? does food go bad in your fridge? tell me how to love the chaos and growth and fecundity and dirt. i’m getting there, but i could use a guide or two. otherwise, Jamie Oliver’s gonna come and beat me up.

she was six the last time i saw her.

the younger of two little girls, she had gold-brown hair, big gold-brown eyes. she liked storybooks and swings and made me an initiate into the world of Dora the Explorer. when i visited, she and i and her older sister drove Barbie convertibles and painted toenails and drew pictures with our fingers on each others’ backs.  she was learning English, i, French. in the language of laughter, we sang songs of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and queens.

Posey, my imp, is uncannily like her, this child i remember from a lifetime ago.

she was my niece by marriage. the November night she was born, the call came in from the small town hours away from the college landscape her uncle and i inhabited. safe birth, great joy. i smiled, raised a beer bottle across the lumpy mattress in his rented attic room with the rainbow wallpaper, to welcome Emilie.

i had known him two months. i did not think, then, that i would marry him.

but months unfolded into years and we went, we two, hand in hand into the world like children clinging to each other. not all who wander are lost, we intoned, secretly uncertain. escape artists for lack of a better plan, we spent all we had on train tickets to the west coast. a week in the smoky bar car and we came into sight of the Rocky Mountains at five in the morning, sharp and majestic, inky black against a sky bigger than we’d ever seen.  our heads tilted together, Simon & Garfunkel on the headphones stretched between them, and there were tears in my eyes but i did not know why.

we lived in basements there, slept on floors, sold magazines to the Chinatown exchange. we ventured north of the Arctic Circle, rounded back again east to within the scent of the sea, exchanged rings. we were prodigals, forever coming home to the tiny town where his parents and his sister and her children were rooted. we brought back treasures from all over, trinkets, baubles, seashells. i bought them their first copies of Love You Forever and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Anne of Green Gables and The Little Prince. i wanted daughters, and loved Emilie and her sister like promises, practicing with an open heart.

but i loved their uncle like a brother, which is the world and not enough, all at once. he and i pulled at each other, stretched apart. Ani diFranco sang in each other’s shadow we grew less and less tall, and we waltzed our slow swan song in denial and sorrow, respectively, Hansel and Gretel run dry on breadcrumbs to find their way back. and when we left for the last time to go halfway round the globe, there were tears in my eyes then too as we waved goodbye to the little girls through the car window, and i pretended to myself that i did not know why.

you lose things in divorce, no matter how little you have or how amicable it’s all supposed to be. we had no property, no furniture, one ancient Volkswagen long sold and a cat who went to live with old folks and got better dental care than i’ve ever had. but in the cloister of the expatriate lives we made in the hermit kingdom amongst equally uprooted friends, we each lost more than we bargained for. he slept with my friend, but i chose his. the first was almost expected, the other, unforgiveable. i did not know why. i do now.

for a couple of years i still sent cards and tokens to the little girls on birthdays, Christmases. but airmail takes a long time, and dates crept up and address books got away in all my transience. when i asked him for his sister’s P.O Box address, i felt unworthy, awkward. i had chosen to be an outsider.

and so, cowardly, i stopped. Ma Tante Bonnie disappeared, kin and kind.
***

they found me two years ago, or so, on Facebook. first Emilie and then her sister. teenagers suddenly, all legs and curves and makeup, Dora and Barbies long left in the dust. they wrote and i wrote back, eager, trying not to be too effusive, too cloying. i had disappeared. disappearance is unfair to children, bottom line. but i was found, and i sent love and remembrances through the ether.

if it weren’t for Facebook i’m not sure i would have recognized her Saturday, in the hot dog line at the park. we are in New Brunswick, visiting grandparents in a small town not so far from the one i waved goodbye to ten summers ago. Oscar was with me, and his cousins, boys not much different in age than she and her sister were then.

it was the look on her face that caught my attention, rather than the face itself, at first. her eyes searched mine, for confirmation, recognition.

it took a beat for me to fully connect the dots. Emilie. as tall as i, with the long, sleek hair and angled cheekbones i know only from Facebook photos. i think i said her name, and opened my arms in the same moment she did. her English was perfect. i told her she was lovely. i asked banal questions about grade eleven, and her summer job, and her sister. and i grinned like a fool and bobbed my head up and down, heart happy.

but what do you say to a girl you last knew as a first-grader? we were intimate, you and i. i taught you all the words to Quarter Master Store, you taught me Christmas carols in French. i still think of you every time i hear Le Divin Enfant. i still note your birthday every year as it comes round on the calendar. but your Barbies are all put away now. i cannot pull you in my lap and trace your name on your back and say i’m sorry i left you. i didn’t mean to.

there are things you can’t say. you don’t get to take back ten years, whatever your paltry reasons.

her gaze was cautious, after the first blush of hello. in her eyes i felt as exposed as i have ever been. she smiled at Oscar, though, bent her head down to try to greet him where he hid behind my leg. something in the movement reminded me of the tiny girl she’d been, and i saw the image of her gold-brown bob juxtaposed against the way Josephine looks today, and i gasped again at how damn fast it all goes, how easily it slips away.

i’ve known people who moved into separate homes – for years – but still didn’t tell the children they were divorcing. i know families who manage – even after fracture – to gather the clans, cousins and ex-aunties and new partners and all – for holiday gatherings. i’ve raised my eyebrows, though with a tinge of jealousy. i grew up in a family where divorce meant my parents lived three thousand miles away from each other for twenty-eight years. when i was told by my ex that his nieces were no longer mine, i acceded.

but i knew. i knew i was wrong.

my eyes said, i’m sorry. my tongue said be well, Emilie. give my best to your family. and i took Oscar by the hand and walked away from the last memories of Ma Tante Bonnie, whom i will never be again.

i lick my finger and stick it into the wind. i smell money.

i stick up a butterfly net to see if i can catch any, but it floats on by. i raise my eyebrow, stick out my lip. a twenty slaps me in the eye. it’s sticky, a little oily. on a long string, it trails a thousand tiny obligations and ties. i let it pass.

i turn the eye to the sun, looking for a bigger bill, one trailing things i already want to say.

there’s been cash in the oxygen out here in the ether for a long time, since before my time.  but the ecosystem has shifted in the past couple of years. make no mistake, social media is now a business environment.

sure, plenty of folk out here still have active and rewarding and even successful social media lives on many different terms without engaging in any sort of commercial transactions. there’s much beauty out here that’s not selling anything.

except itself.

be it beauty or ideas or humour, it matters not. if you put it out there and it works, it builds reputation. reputation can be leveraged, sometimes into capital, sometimes into opportunity, sometimes simply  into connection. we all have our eyes on a prize; we are none of us pure, without want.

likewise, those here to do business are still entities within a social environment. we are here, all us Whos; identities performed here as friends and caregivers and consumers and braggarts and afficionados. we may be tycoons, or mothers: the walls between leak and merge. this changes everything for everybody, creates new ground rules.

and the first is this: the word brand does not mean what you think it means.
***

i tried to write about this a month or so ago. i meandered my way through a big messy post trying to posit that branding – a word many consider vulgar beyond redemption – is a key in understanding how to educate 21st century kids, who exist within this relational economy and expect to be able to interact with information and with people in ways that schooling structures seldom allow. i made it part way towards articulating my own research interests and ideas. but as my wise friend Sue pointed out to me on twitter, to bring anybody else along with me i need to explain what i mean by branding.

i say branding is the sum total of the choices you make about how you get presented and understood through social media…and also, how those choices get taken up by others.

branding is what is read on to you, how you are perceived, what you signify in the eyes of everybody else. it is not you, but a version of you. it is an act, and a group act, one that does not exist without a network of some sort to reflect and amplify it. it is ephemeral, a wisp on the wind. it is not about content or truth. it is about image and perceived capacity.

your brand is whatever version of your best self you happen to be selling out here. even if it isn’t you at all.

branding, for all its polluted inheritance of capitalism and cows, actually allows for the complexity that one’s reputational identity or brand can be both contrived and uncontrolled. you can try all you like to look cool, but unless somebody takes you up on it and shares your cool with their peeps in turn, little happens. you do not amplify.

(branding is much like reputation, but as reputation is an equally sullied word laden with strictures about how women should act, i find brand less confining. plus branding better captures the fact that one’s online identity exists within an economy of monetization. whether you capitalize or not – or how high up the ladder you wait to capitalize – is up to you.)

you can ignore your brand all you want. but it won’t stop others from perceiving it, and perceiving you through its lens.
***

years ago, when Dave and i were first together, we had a conversation about clothes.

his wardrobe had always puzzled me, and since our friendship preceded the relationship by many years, i’d had the opportunity to observe it up close for quite some time. it consisted of a pile of disparate items that all seemed to have been bought by different people. it was not so much eclectic as just…odd, like anchovies on a hamburger. he wore polo shirts or funky Malaysian handwoven pullovers, apparently without distinction. he tended to look like he’d been dressed by well-intentioned missionaries.

i’d said nothing. we were still – clearly – in that first blush of love.

and then we went shopping.

i held stuff up, asked for reactions. i just wanted to know what he liked, what his impression was of different things, whether he thought they suited him. he refused to engage the conversation. he tried to step outside it.

my clothes aren’t ME, he said. and i understood.  he saw clothes as extras, add-ons. he saw the thousands of implicit judgements we base on clothing as false, masks for the genuine human beneath.

i know, i said. clothes do not make the man.

but you DO get, right, that you not wanting to be interpreted by others based on your clothing choices doesn’t mean you AREN’T?

yes, he was a unique snowflake. yes, he was more than just a jock, or a geek, or a post-grunge hippie expat and wanted to be understood as such. but there is no way to put clothing on the human body that does not open you to the interpretation of other people, however shallow or misguided they may be. you still dress like something, i was trying to explain to my dear one. unless “dressed by missionaries” is the image you’re dying to project, you might as well make choices that impact that interpretation along lines you actually, y’know, like.

so that’s what i mean by branding. we signify, everytime we interact with others, through our clothing or our tweets or our blog headers (and thankyou, kind and clever Kate, for eventually staging the intervention on my out-of-the-box theme template). we signify whether we want to or not. it is part of the price of admission.

there is no neutral. you cannot escape making some kind of statement. you might as well decide which one interests you and make it.

in every arena of life, it takes time to become literate in making judgements even for yourself. Dave’s found a style of clothing that he’s comfortable with, but it took time and years of watching and paying attention to understand what social significance different choices carried, and what he wanted to convey of himself with those options. me, i’m not so sure Hawaiian shirts go with corduroy blazers. but it’s his call to make. it took me a long time to even see that my old blog theme said much of anything, because reading social media images was a skill i hadn’t cultivated. i was aiming for neutral.  Kate took me gently by the hand and said, in effect, there is no neutral. and i said, oh merciful gawd, thank you. can i have typewriters? art deco typewriters?

if you are out here, you are being read: your words, your style, your interactions, all you carry with you. this is brand. own yours.

i was in college when The Golden Girls wrapped in 1992. to give the swan song of such a pop culture opus its due, my roommates and i held a most magnificent drinking game around the final episode.

when it came down to deciding which among us was which character from the Golden Girls, i ended up as Betty White.

Betty White. not the sexy one. not the smart one. not even the wiseass mother hen. the ditz. Betty White. Rose. Rose fucking Nyland.

for lo these eighteen years, friends, i have puzzled and stewed about being tagged as the Betty White of the co-ed set. i was flabbergasted. i thought i was smart, possibly a dry wit. i was aiming for sexy, however awkwardly. and i definitely wanted to be funny. but instead, at least to a gang of drunken undergraduate rugby players, i was Betty White.

today, with the death of Rue McLanahan, who taught me sexy doesn’t end at thirty, bless her tawdry little heart, Betty White became the last Golden Girl standing.

and i thought, this is my hour.

then i spent the day with the Golden Girls theme song stuck in my head. yes. you are welcome.
***

the good thing about being Betty White, besides her recent SNL glory and the fact that she’s, you know, alive, is that she’s nice. as Rose, she was vapid, sure, a little slow on the uptake. but good people.

and more than anything of the other Golden Girls, she was fearless. Rose Nylund wasn’t afraid to be kind. or to say she was hurt. or to look like a fool.

i want to be more like that.

that is all.

i can see myself as an old lady. my grandmother, whom was perhaps my unwitting model for my more feminine attributes, looked a lot like a much older Betty White, with the same little cold wave perm and the lipstick that came from Woolworths. she was almost 70 when i was born, and it is around 70 that i imagine myself truly growing into my skin, fully and completely, just as it softens for good and begins to collect in little pockets all over me, like pompoms.

i will learn to make tea properly, and to have the patience to drink it. i will sit with my lady friends and be silly and make them feel smart, and i will not care one whit about my own damn vanity and ego. i will laugh. i will be a friend in a way i don’t find much time for, these busy days.

and i’ll be fearless. except maybe of cockroaches. but i’ll be so damn sweet you’ll all get rid of them for me.

i’ll be Betty White, finally.

who do you want to be, when the days grow short? what kind of old lady (or old gentleman, or dude) do you see on your horizon, your someday?

as my Mother’s Day present to my long-suffering mother, i went with her to church last weekend.

church is the centre of my mother’s orbit in this life. her social whirl, her weekly schedule, her sense of what matters are all directly and primarily shaped by the faith community in which she grew up. the church is having a clothing sale? the kids must have something they’ve outgrown. a fundraising dinner? she’ll mash potatoes by the bucket, even if her swallowing disorder means she hasn’t eaten pork roast herself in a quarter century. sponsoring a refugee family? she’s suddenly on Wikipedia for the first time ever, learning everything she can about Somalia.

i could, on the other hand, spend weeks in Somalia, and my mother might eventually look up what side of Africa it was on. she is generous with her time, loves her grandchildren, loves me. but despite the fact that the age difference between us is small and that i have friends her own age, my mother has not even a foot in my world, or even in her own generational world. David Bowie, whom i’ve been set since the age of twelve on marrying someday, is a year older than she. yet only if David Bowie came to sing at her church would she ever suddenly develop any interest in being able to identify his music. i suspect she’ll recognize him at the wedding, but only just.

so i’m a little jealous. i’m an only child. it’s hard to share your mother with God, okay? look what happened to Jesus.

ba dum bump.

my mother’s church, and my grandmother’s before her, and her grandmother’s before that, is housed in a big, old, austerely grand building with wooden vaulted ceilings. it has deep, dour Protestant Reformation roots: it does not draw attention to itself. there is no showy witnessing in its circle, no language of prayer and The Lord permeating everyday conversation. as i cringe when people attribute daily actions and outcomes to deities – unless they’re swearing – the circumspection and minimalism of the place suits me. i like sitting there, my back against the pew, stained-glass-light dappling the old people’s hair in front of me. if i squint, i can imagine that i’ve time-travelled, that one of the bluer rinses a few pews ahead is my Nannie, gently croaking out an old staunch hymn the congregation hasn’t sung in forty years. i love that.

but i don’t go.

i have this private hubris that i’m a Personal BadAss. now, Personal BadAsses eschew church and all its middle-class bourgeois self-satisfaction. rows of women in fur stoles, passing the peace of Christ? earnestly updated hymns laden with sentimental theology? Personal BadAsses are deeply uncomfortable with all that…comfortableness. they like Mapplethorpe exhibits and whatever makes other people squirm. they only wear fur they killed with their own teeth. why, they’d smoke, still, just to blow it in somebody’s face, if the habit hadn’t gotten so gosh-darn expensive and wouldn’t land them in an emphysema ward.

the problem with being a Personal BadAss is that it does not wear particularly well after the age of 35. unless one is PJ O’Rourke, i suppose. or Mickey Rourke. or Mr. Roarke from Fantasy Island, but he was more suave than bad.

God did not make me suave. i should ask my mother to speak with him/her about that.

anyhow, one day you look around and you’ve been carrying your diaper bag to work as a purse for six months and your car is a glorified mini-van and even the haircut you thought had edge makes you look – at best – like an aging Depeche Mode fan and you may as well haul granny’s fur outta storage and go sit in a pew.

so last week i went to church with my mother.

we stood in the pew where i sat as a child. no one stared. no shouts of “blasPHEEEMer!” went up in the sanctuary. i smiled nervously.

and then the heavens parted.

i am not a believer, plain and simple. which is the main reason simply being in a church makes me feel like a wretched hypocrite. but it was Mother’s Day, which i figure is forgivable by any standards.

and by Jesus, God went all out fer me, people.

my daughter, the hurricane, sat quietly in her grandmother’s lap for half an hour, then went to sleep on my shoulder for the first time since she weaned six months ago. Oscar led the procession from Sunday school with Mother’s Day carnations and a beatific little smile. i sang beside my mother and the words to the old hymns were quick on my lips. a tear leaked down my face.

i thought JESUS, Jesus. you trying to do me in?

there were no furs, no self-congratulations. in the prayer, they spoke to mothers who grieve, mothers with AIDS, mothers who wait for babies that never come. the sermon was as radical a piece of public discourse as i’ve heard out loud in years, replete with visuals of gay adoptive parents interspersed with biblical stained-glass allegory.

i was ready to shout Amen. which would have embarrassed my mother almost enough to qualify me as a BadAss all over again.

the last shot that went up on the screens projected at the front of the old church was Michelangelo’s Pieta. the mother cradles her broken adult child, her body braced to hold his weight. he is gone; she is utterly alone.

i looked down at Posey in my arms, eyelashes fluttering. my lip trembled as i smiled on her. i made sure she was breathing.

over her head, my eyes met my mother’s. we both nodded at the miracle between us, the slumbering child. my mother raised her eyebrows in bemusement, i shrugged my shoulders in response.

we laughed. aloud, right in that moment of perfect silence before the offertory.

the Very Model of a Modern BadAss Family, i told myself, raising my chin with great pride.

***

i didn’t go back to church with my mother this morning. if i were a good daughter, i might’ve. maybe. there’s still that little hiccup of belief standing between me and the way i was raised.

my mother began bringing Oscar to Sunday school last September. he loves going, she loves bringing him, and we figure it’s a fine education in community and literacies plus an hour with one less child every weekend. but for the first time this morning as the two of them walked out the door hand in hand, i felt grown up. because for all my respectful mother has never once asked me to come – even last week, i volunteered – every week the part of me that remained petulant Personal BadAss sulked with self-consciousness at the very idea of church. even though no one was asking me.

until today, i really couldn’t quite have told you whether i stayed home out of personal ethics or because i am secretly Twelve. it felt nice, finally, to figure out the difference.

today, i just smiled at my mom when we met her at the door.  Posey reached for her shoes, and i said, no honey, no church for us today.

nap! she chirped, protesting, and my mother and i both broke out laughing. again. clearly, we all have our own ideas about what church is for.

so i stayed behind, content in my lack of belief. and my mother and Oscar went off to the bosom of her Other Family and i waved from the window.

and it was good.

sometimes, if i hold my head right, i like to pretend i can see through time.

i’ve been taking an open, online course in Education Futures these past few weeks. Dave’s one of the instructors, along with the luminous George Siemens. it’s a heady ride. there are 700+ participants, though the majority mostly lurk – but still, the experience is slippery, decentered, enormous and fascinating. it’s free. there are no grades, which is probably good, as i suspect Dave would enjoy nothing more than to give my Lisa Simpson ass a nice flat D for once. what you take out of it is not only what you put in, but what roads you choose to navigate, what conversations you choose to be in, which fellow classmates you choose to engage with. it reminds me of the blogosphere, and this blogging “experience” that is really thousands of separate experiences contextualized by a few common parameters.

education futures isn’t about predictions. it’s about perceiving trends and shifts, conceiving of how they intersect and influence each other to impact humans and behaviour and norms. it’s a semi-informed guessing game, a Gladwellian enterprise based on perceiving what is and reconfiguring the way it’s interpreted, until possibilities open and – maybe – everything looks radically different.

our social media personae are made up of the perspectives we bring to these online skins, these avatars by which we negotiate identities and connections out here, in the virtual.

you know me as a mommyblogger. however awkward that skin is, i cannot say it does not fit. my voice inhabits it, has grown to fill it, has used its maternal contours to speak into being a child whom those who know me only in my physical skin seldom get to see. my motherhood in all its complexities is the platform on which i’m grounded, both in my online and day-to-day lives.

i am also an educator, whose work and thought are predominantly shaped by the contexts of higher education and the online communities centering around educational technologies and theory. i think of education as a social and societal experiment. generally, i think of blogging the same way.

it’s where these two perspectives come together that i catch a teensy whiff of what smells like the future.

in my grand decline, when i look back over mint juleps and maribou slippers to dissect the ‘blogging revolution’ of my long-faded 30s, i think two things will stand out vividly.

first, Virginia Woolf was right.

a room of one’s own matters, and is a condition necessary to creation. what Virginia missed was that the room doesn’t need to be an actual office or garret or physical space, nor does it matter if the would-be writer’s physical space and life are crowded with small bodies. these are fodder, rich and full of marrow.

the chance to narrate said fodder into a room of one’s very own, a virtual shelter for one’s words & stories & a persona beyond the bounds of Barney and chewable books? has mattered. and freed from the gatekeeping and market pressures of traditional publishing systems, the opportunity for parents to build these little birdhouses for their souls has created an explosion. said explosion – and the nature of its particular technologies, which permit an etiquette of commenting and linking and personal advocacy & promotions – have resulted both in an unprecedented meld of brand & identity, and a brave new world in which communities and networks are able to truly transcend space and time.

in the educational futures conversation it’s easy to miss the branding and identities part of the picture, whereas in the parental corner of the blogosphere, sometimes one is left wondering whether there’s really anything else going on at all. as blogs have become increasingly business-focused and the concept of self as brand has become ubiquitous, many of us have learned enough to confidently blather on about SEO optimization and concepts like earned media and how to promote small businesses through social media.

but what particularly interests me is that as our children grow up in families and communities permeated by these concepts of identity and interaction, they’ll bring these implicit understandings of what it means to be a self into their classrooms. and if we are to shape our archaic, industrial-era education system into something relevant to their perspectives on the world and on their futures, we ought to be ensuring that our classrooms enable students to build rooms of their own, and share them, and through them interrogate the assumptions of market, knowledge, and identity that our culture reflects and reifies.

the other thing that i think will leap to the foreground of the picture when we look back at this first decade of blogging through the mists of time: our concepts of privacy are about to be blown wide open.

i love cities. i love to walk in cities. the bigger and more anonymous the better. i pound the pavement and imagine i could be anybody, because all the other anybodies slipping by me could be anybody too, and maybe the most fascinating interaction in the world is about to take place in a glance. cities, for me, are near-infinite networks of possibility, without the glare and responsibility of being known.

anyone who grew up in a small town knows what it is to be known. “cherish your reputation,” my dear mother always told me, by which i – probably unfairly – assumed she meant for me to keep HER reputation intact and unsullied by whispers. when you focus on reputation, you sometimes assume people care more than they actually do. but in a small town, you also know that people can be cruel, and judgements made on the whim of the moment. so you guard yourself…and sometimes, if the weight of public castigation grows too heavy, you become what they already say you are. in a small town, it can be death to be different.

in branding, on the other hand, differentiation is key to success.

i see online identity as a small-town self, acutely aware of the possibility and the consequences of being recognized, meandering about in a truly infinite city of networked relationships. this branded self is at least semi-consciously aware of its goals and its optics; of how it appears to the anybodies passing by the artifacts and traces of itself it shares out here in the ether. the branded self may view connections as personal or instrumental, or both, and is probably inclined to see attention as positive so long as its network doesn’t ostracize it as a result.

in other words, to a branded self, there is no purpose in privacy. all the world’s a stage.

in the four years or so i’ve been reading blogs, one of the most common refrains i’ve heard is “i’m taking down photos/names/poop stories because i don’t want the record i’ve created here to follow my child through life.” wisely, i think, we recognize that in writing of our children, we risk writing them into roles that they themselves may not want to embody.  we don’t want them to feel they have to become what we’ve said they are. or at least, we don’t want to appear that way.

but in the post-blogging world of tomorrow, it is almost unthinkable that our kids won’t have online identities far beyond what we’ve written for them. what’s more, i don’t think our concepts of negative attention will have a great deal of meaning to our kids’ generation as they grow into adults, except in those awful, inevitable, pan-human moments where the network – be it the football team or cranky bloggers or politicians and half of twitter – blows up against a particular self in moments of bullying and ostracism and brand-backlash writ large. it’s not likely to happen over potty tales; they’re too universal.

the dance of successful branding is about balancing the creative capacity for difference with the critical capacities for self-judgement and prudent projection of consequences.

our children’s online selves will fluctuate and change as they grow, but teaching them early to leave trails they won’t be dogged by or ashamed of later – because nothing online is truly private, or really goes away – has to be one of the challenges of raising this generation of children for which we’re least prepared. as a culture, i think we’d all benefit from work on critical projection, since more and more of us seem to have no intention of going back under the dome of domestic privacy. and as an educator within this culture, i wonder if one of the greatest conceptual tools we could give kids today would be that sense of big-city network navigation in a small-town, self-aware skin?

then they could build rooms of their own within which to capture their own realities and perspectives, and there hopefully weather storms if/as they arose, all the while understanding in a way our generation is only beginning to taste that no network – no matter how powerful the popular girls seem when one is in junior high, or a mommyblogger – is ever finite, be-all and end-all.

what do YOU see when you look through time? and how do YOU see your online persona? are you a small-town brand or a citified network person by nature? or am i missing something beyond/between that polarization?

when i started working at an intersection of the fields of education and technology about twelve years back, my then-boss taught me the phrase early adopter. she was a proud, flag-waving version of the breed, a proselytizer of The New. she had a PalmPilot, with that little stylus i could never figure out how people managed not to lose. i disdained the thing, thought of it as conspicuous consumption. i could barely keep track of my $8 daytimer with the vinyl cover.

i’ll never be an early adopter. even if i try.

it takes time for me to learn to love a thing, an object: my appreciation is the kind that builds only over time. historical time, glacial time, no matter – when i hold a thing in my hands, it becomes for me a portal to its personal history. if it has none, i have nothing to attach to; it has no context for me. the patina of age is full of stories: the hows and whys of a particular place and time. i like the cultural trajectory of use-value, the sense of how hands touched objects and what they used them for. fingerprints are romance.

is there a cultural opposite to the early adopter? can i be the maudlin clinger?

my real soft spot is for the utterly obsolete.

i am a rest home for dead technologies. my blog header sports the image of an art deco-era typewriter: i own one. it is my grandmother’s vintage finger-chewer, and it sits proudly in a closet, waiting for some mythical me to unspool a bottle of absinthe and write my great novel. less grandly, we have a VCR. and a Discman, which i can still be seen using. you should see the looks them young whippersnappers get when they clap eyes on that baby. in my freezer, until only last year, sat a carton of Kodak 35 mm film. i bought it at a Costco in South Korea – cheap, but not quite cheap enough to throw out – sometime in 2003. who doesn’t need film? erm, yeh. i hand-imported the box back to Canada when i moved in January 2005. those rolls of film were better-travelled than most people.

when i finally let them go to their great kodachrome reward, it wasn’t out of any rational recognition that film had jumped the shark. rather it was out of avoidance, because every time i opened the freezer i felt guilty staring the box in the eye. i didn’t want the film to know it was dead.

i didn’t want to admit, for some reason, that i would likely never again wind a roll of cellulose into the back of a camera, or that my children would grow up finding the process as foreign as hitching up a buggy. whoa, Nelly. the world really does change in a blink.

and then all these fascinating artifacts clutter up our space, obsolescent but marked all over with fingerprints.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

in the four years i’ve spent out here in the blogosphere, i’ve seen a lot of models and trends in social media boom and bust. remember memes?  lolcats? the tender etiquette of blogrolls? ah yes. weren’t we cute?

(yes, i am likely the very last person on Teh Interwebs to have a blogroll. and it is sadly out of date. hush. i like to think of it as vintage.)

in gazing back through time at my VCR and my typewriter and my defunct Pentax K-1000, i don’t see Sodom & Gomorrah, a charnel-mess of sin and misery receding in the distance. nor do i see us striding inexorably forward into progress. sure, i like my digital SLR very much, and this fancy-pants MacBookPro and iTunes and all the other privileges that are my particular riches of time and place and class and living with an Educational Technologies Professional. i appreciate the affordances of these current technologies. but i appreciate in them the very same things that i love in my boneyard of the dead and cast-off: the fingerprints they make possible.

blogging’s fingerprint has changed, dramatically, over the past 3 or 4 years. sure, we’ve been told since at least Christmas 2008 that blogging is dead as a doornail. still, plenty of us do it. and there are people who started only when the death knell was proclaimed who still seem to be making a damn fine time of it. some, perhaps even a living.

when i first ventured out into wild social world of blogging, the parenting corner of the blogosphere – which was then still a relatively coherent entity – was like a hopping mixer dance on the first weekend of summer camp. connections were personal, often intense, and frequently had a tinge of wonder about them. i found you! we exhaled, collectively, and it was glorious. the playing field wasn’t flat – some people were obviously well-established and incredibly popular by late 2006 – but it all still seemed to be mostly about self-expression, rooms of one own. and for those who valued that kind of voice & space, this world seemed to be a democratizing agent beyond wildest dreams; a community of relative peers performing identity and parenthood in the 21st century.

then, subtly, the game changed. the model moved from summer camp to conference. one’s blog became a business, whether one happened to notice or not. and if one didn’t, one was – without doing anything differently – suddenly missing out.

months ago, on twitter, i proposed that maybe the term “blogging” has run its course. we don’t call all writers by the same handle: we have novelists and tech writers and humourists and PR people. increasingly, i suspect bloggers might be a less fraught community – or rather, group of communities, overlapping – if we had different names for the things people do in their online spaces, some for recompense, some for reputation, some for craft, some for the sheer hell of it.

the conversation around blogging – and particularly around mommyblogs – has monetized. and with that, the relatively egalitarian conversational field that existed into 2007 has fractured into a multiplicity of communities who lack any coherent centre other than the fact that their writers make up what advertisers tend to believe is a coherent market. we still make connections, often deep and personal ones. but they begin in networking, now, as much as in any enthusiastic recognition of self. those are not necessarily opposites – but they serve different ends. and i wonder about that.

i know i’m a dinosaur: i’ve clung to my narrative, non-commercial model for the blog just as i cling to the idea that my grandmother’s typewriter is funkalicious. for me, it works, mostly because i always figured i could capitalize more reputationally than monetarily from the kinds of writing i’m good at. i build my body of work here, and someday…who knows? i am not so proud or dumb or rich as to be averse to money. but i don’t relate to this blog primarily as an entrepreneur, and as such, i am still a relic of a former era, an artifact of blogging’s history. most writers who start out on the internet today have no desire whatsoever to be like me: they’ll either build their own site painstakingly as a business success through advertising and sponsorships and giveaways and carefully cultivated network relations, or they’ll write their hearts out – but with an eye to being picked up by a commercial site with SEO potentiality and paid for their words through the visibility of their name and the development of their cred.

the room of one’s own is supposed to turn a profit, these days.

i want to know what gets lost, in that shift, and what it means. i want to know if there’s a tradeoff, and what it says about our culture. i want to know if it’s good, and how…and for whom.

over the next three years, i’ll research social media and study technologies and trends and futures and what they all might mean for education and culture in the 21st century. for a dyed-in-the-wool Lot’s wife, wistful and salty, forever looking back, it’s a funny choice. but it’s what gets left behind that interests me.

i want your input on this little corner of that conversation. pretty please. tell me what’s changed about blogging in however long you’ve been doing it, or reading. tell me what’s changed in the community compared to your original expectations and hopes. tell me i’m wrong, or crazy, or hopelessly outdated. tell me why i should advertise, or write that review about feminine crotch spray i got pitched a few months back. tell me about writing giveaways, and if it’s hard or easy. tell me why you read, and what you think you’ll see from the internet and the blogosphere (if such a thing exists) a decade from now. tell me what difference this whole evolving world has made in your life.

tell me what fingerprints you think you’re leaving.

i may just do a dissertation on it all…my own little artifact.

for months now, i’ve been feeling like i can’t see straight.  metaphorically, i’m used to that. literally, not so much.

not anymore.

about the end of seventh grade, i got my first pair of glasses. i’d been having headaches for awhile, a couple of years. my mom took me to an opthamologist, who snapped lenses in front of my eyes and made letters magically blur and reappear.

i was seduced by the subject position, by the strange, sheer power of being tested. sitting in that Star Trek chair, i felt like a mystery waiting to be solved: a terribly interesting problem waiting to be identified. i liked feeling terribly interesting. was the red side of the square the machines projected clearer, or the green?  for me, one was brighter, the other crisper: i couldn’t figure out what “clearer” meant. so i made it up as i went along. i felt obliged to be somehow worthy of the visit.

my logic in that moment told me loud and clear that to come out without needing glasses – hell, to come out without needing eye SURGERY – was to somehow fail.

i am a pleaser. even today, if you are examining me for breast lumps, i feel vaguely apologetic and disappointed in myself if you cannot find any. not because i want breast lumps, or all they imply. but because it makes me deeply and profoundly uncomfortable to waste your time, and if your job is to find breast lumps, i wanna help. in the moment, at least.

when my mother and i were informed i needed glasses, i suffered a pang of guilt. i had succeeded in helping the opthamologist do her job of finding me defective. but now other neuroses took over. i want to please, yes. i also had, even by twelve, the pleaser’s history of falsified medical complaints, and thus a complete lack of faith in diagnoses.  i feared being outed as a faker. i envisioned some clear-thinking individual seizing upon my newly-prescribed glasses – not even yet chosen – and flinging them from my face, grinding them under heel in a public act of shaming. YOU CAN SEE!!!, this truth-teller would shout, not as faith-healer but prophet, returning me to my sorry state of anonymity, unworthy of all the attention i’d commandeered in the Star Trek chair.

and the world would look upon my lenses and know that they were fake.

(no, i’ve never had therapy. why do you ask?)

imagine my shock when a week or so later my first pair of glasses – giant, round pinkish things, the height of 1984 cool – were ready, and i snugged them over my ears for the first time.

i looked in the mirror first – insecurity is oft mistook for vanity, ye who judge – though it is impossible to remember how i thought i looked in those rose-coloured monstrosities. they probably set the braces off nicely.

what i do remember is glancing around the small room with its walls of frames and catching sight of a tree outside a window, a good thirty feet from me.

with my new glasses on, that tree was a revelation. it had leaves. bright, individualized, perfectly visible leaves.

my mouth must’ve hung open. because each of those perfect, far-away leaves, in all its glorious detail, negated my secret certainty that i’d faked the whole thing. i’d been half-blind and not known it. and now i could see.

amazing. grace.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

over the past few months, my eyes have been bothering me. it was a background hum at first, a faint annoyance. it took awhile to notice it was getting worse, and by the time i did i noticed mostly that my eyes were red. all the time. and tired.

i began to play little games with my eyes, trying to figure out what was straining them.

and that’s when i noticed i couldn’t focus anymore.

if i tried to direct both eyes to a single focal point, they refused to cooperate. one or the other would take over, so i could still see, but the balance was off. it was as if the lifelong pair that had been my eyes had suddenly unyoked themselves, become free agents. i felt like a child whose parents suddenly and silently divorce, without warning.

when i realized i’d started tilting my head like an aardvark to compensate for this weird lack of focus, i’d had enough. i asked Dr. Google.

Dr. Google suggested i might have a detached retina. or be a physics experiment, that was about it. no matter how i tried to find the right words for my symptoms, i came back to deeply scientific descriptions of how lenses work, or the occasional dire prognosis for my own.

so i did what any self-respecting neurotic would do. i asked twitter.

sometimes crowdsourcing doesn’t work, even if the attention did make me feel rather comforted. nobody had a clue. and i developed the feeling i ought to have some sort of dread disease to make myself worthy of the brainpower tweeps kindly spent trying to sort me out.

i find it hard to take myself seriously in the absence of external confirmation.

so i went to my eye doctor.

and there it was. astigmatism. nothing strange, nothing scary. but something. real. i’ll get a new lens for my right eye this coming week. and i am harbouring a secret hope that when the optometrist pops it in, and i put my glasses back on, i’ll experience a revelation of sight and perspective as dramatic as the first one all those years ago.

because an astigmatism is a refractive error of the eye, caused by a change in shape, creating the inability to focus.

my life is ever changing shape. the last eight months or so have been stable, for the first time in a long, long time. same job, solid sitter for the kids, no huge curve balls.

for five years, my life was centered around the quest for a family. Finn. Oscar. colic. contract work. the day Oscar turned eighteen months old, i found out i was pregnant. a month or so later, a d&c. then the possibility of Josephine, and 24 weeks of bedrest.

Posey will be 18 months old on Monday, and there will be no positive pregnancy test: that much is sure. but the rest is all in flux again. i am waiting on news of my Ph.D: if i’m accepted, that’s the next four or more years of my life, and a path. if i’m not? cry and then regroup, i suppose. but in what direction? a taxi stand moved in next door last month: we’re considering moving, but that decision has to stay on hold until i know what my professional options are. my contract at work has only four months left on it.

i feel as if i cannot bring my choices into focus.

and Friday afternoon, at five to five, we showed up at the sitter’s and were met with tears. hers, not the kids’. as of next Friday, she can no longer keep them. licensing regulations, cutting numbers. we’ve known the shift was coming, but we were assured we’d keep our spaces. the numbers the province has ultimately allotted preclude our two – the last sibset she took on – staying.

one of the women who’s worked for her for the past two months or so is willing to take them at her house instead, which i’m grateful for. she seems nice enough; the kids like her. but i don’t even know her last name. and with the province moving kindergarten finally into the schools this coming September, daycare centres are being stripped of the funding that came with the kindergartens, and are closing left right centre ’round here. we have been on three waiting lists forever, but spaces for both kids in a licensed learning environment will be September at the earliest. prices are rising, and the mood’s getting desperate.

i used to imagine myself making thoughtful, informed choices about my children’s preschool caregivers. i pictured long conversations, careful interviews regarding philosophies and healthy food and stimulating activities. instead, knowing that parents two streets over have nobody, i find myself nodding passively. you breathe? you’re kind? you’re on the way to work? dandy.

as if this shift is something simply to be accepted. as if the concept of choice is an illusion.

it’s felt like a long, gray, blurry winter.

i need my astigmatism corrected. and soon, so i can come to terms with the shape of my life and begin to focus on it. so i can see its leaves, each one, in all their vivid green.