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he caught me on Facebook chat.

i have all the balls and forthrightness of Piglet when it comes to cutting conversations short. my mother raised me polite to a fault, especially with people who make me uncomfortable. but this conversation got ugly fast. by the time i managed to pull my parachute and eject, he’d already covered at least three or four mutual friends and acquaintances.

the gist?  he’d apparently like to hit them. and not in the vernacular sense.  twenty minutes of who owes him money and who he’d like to beat up.

what a charming way to reconnect, i thought.

i never knew him well. he wasn’t a lover, not even really a friend. in any other life, we’d probably never even have spoken to each other. but one year, in an expat bar far from home, he and i wiled away many a smoky hour at proximal tables. we knew each other surprisingly well for people with almost nothing in common but Canadian passports and a year of birth.  we knew all the same people.  i knew who he went home with, those three and four am pickups, and was baffled by his popularity.

some girls must like to listen to litanies of people a guy wants to beat the shit outta. or maybe he found different things to say to those girls: i was never sure. he called me Bonaventure, the biggest word i ever heard him use.

he bummed more cigarettes than anyone i’ve ever met.

he was the Don Cherry of our circle.  he wore snakeskin shoes with a hockey jersey, usually. he had a mullet. in 2001. i don’t know if he still has it: his facebook profile is a picture of a monkey.

fitting…sure. cheap jokes are easy, though.  i always thought he was limited, or…conversely…at least that my understanding of him was.

i begin to wonder.

which one of us spent twenty minutes on FB chat entertaining himself? and which one spent twenty minutes trying not to offend someone who’s built an entire identity out of being mildly offensive?

i ask you: which one of us is the fool? ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

i am drained and tired these days, choking on my words. these are all i have, in lieu of a hundred things that really matter. all i know is when i put my son to bed half an hour after escaping that ridiculous chat – that chat that ate the luxurious few minutes of me-time Dave granted by taking both kids upstairs for a bath – Oscar lashed up at me, both fists swinging. uncharacteristic, for him. one of his stories had been rescinded. but each little punch was a question more than an expression of anger.

his eyes watched me, sage and distant, learning. what will happen if i do this?

i took his hands. i said, we don’t hit. we talk. it’s a better way to express your feelings. it helps other people understand you, rather than just feel hurt by what you DO.

and then i prayed a faithless little prayer that i am right.

anybody know where i might get him some miniature snakeskin shoes, if i’m not?

here’s the truth of it, in all its ugliness: raising a boy is making me a better person. not a better parent, mind you. but a more rounded human being.

i didn’t know i needed reinvention. but turns out those beer ads from college were correct: what does not kill you makes you strong.

or at least, less of a bigot.

i blame SuperBowl XXVI for some of my former wayward and biased assumptions. in 1992,  my birthday was the same weekend as the SuperBowl. i spent most of my supposed “party” perched on the corner of my boyfriend’s dumpster-dived couch choking on the acrid fumes of weed and spicy chicken wings for eight straight hours of joyous pregame- and game-centric celebration with a pack of 200 lb boys and ten 2-4s of beer. nobody – boyfriend included – said two words to me other than, “chips?”

what’s wrong with that, you ask? even in college, i didn’t like beer. or football. not even a little. and chips are nice and all, but they are not birthday cake.

somehow, i have been bitter about “manly” pursuits ever since.

on twitter last week, there was a brief flurry of discussion on moms of girls only vs. moms of boys only. it raised the question of whether boy moms and girl moms end up being different from each other, in spite of being otherwise similar in age, tastes, class, career, education, etc.

and the consensus seemed to be yeh, a little, overall.

and i can see it. or at least, i could see it in ME, had things gone a little differently.

(aside: those of us with children of both sexes were cruelly ostracized from this conversation. please note that we need enlightenment too, people! a little “are you a bi-mom?” quiz would help me know myself, please and thankyou. stage direction: end self-mockery of stereotype i am actually trying to explore.)

when i was a little girl, and lived in a mindscape constructed mostly of cast-off and stolen characters & scenarios from Victorian children’s literature, all hard-knock lives and depths of despair and pretty pinafores, the so-called world of boys seemed like a foreign land.

i tried, occasionally, to venture there. not so much in person: the boys i knew were relegated, in my egocentric universe, to occasional supporting roles of annoying little brother or know-it-all classmate. i did not know enough about dinosaurs or Star Wars to talk to them past first grade.

i thought of their world as a strange exotica populated by Spiderman cartoons, boring little metal cars that never went anywhere and Dukes of Hazzard pyjamas.

i created families in my doodle pads, large multi-generational family trees populated by imaginary people with extraordinary names. i killed off the parents ruthlessly, dull folk named George and Sandra and Ervin and Eunice, gave them dates of death and tidy tombstones. but their children, whom i frequently sent to orphanages dressed in middies and awkward lederhosen sewn from curtains a la Sound of Music? well, some of those children had to be boys. so i drew Jasons and Norberts and Antonys, and relegated them to the rat-infested basements of the asylums inhabited by their far more interesting sisters.

i didn’t really them see them, as a whole, as characters, worthy of empathy or inner lives.  i mistook the stuff that didn’t interest me – the superheroes, the sports, the whole discourse of boyhood – as a sign that the entire gender were dismissable.

yeh, i liked a few of ’em. but i treated boyfriends – particularly after that unfortunate SuperBowl birthday – as rare fossilized humans trapped in the amber of maleness, that most regrettable rock.

and i never imagined myself the mother of a boy. i wanted girls, absolutely. but beyond that, far more importantly, i thought that to be the mother of a boy was to be forever stuck at that SuperBowl party with nobody to say three words to and my nose permanently crinkled in bewildered distaste.

and that, i venture, is exactly how i’d feel today if i’d never had a boy.

mothers are, uh, female. meaning that that most of them were once female children. and a lot of the female children i knew back when i was myself a female child shared exactly the same opinion of boys that i did: ewww. admittedly, a lot of us later changed our tunes, at least regarding individual exceptions to the rule, but i suspect that for many the prejudice against male things and manly pursuits and so-called “boy stuff” remains. fair enough. i still don’t like football.

but i don’t get to perform my parenthood as a bastion against it, draw simple lines that exclude it and keep me and my offspring safely spared, relegated to our “girl things” and smugly superior in our remove. i don’t have to encourage my son to like it, but i do have to reign in my contempt, consider it, try to offer him literacies and considered views as he begins to negotiate the world of what boys are “supposed” to like.

i don’t know if it’ll ever do my kid any favours. but i think it may have actually made me a bigger person.

that, and the nachos i’ve just eaten writing this post through the SuperBowl.

a new year.

we pass on the highway, separate units in our similar orbits, packed lock, stock, and barrels of monkeys into the little worlds that are our vehicles. a thousand holiday travellers, all hurtling past. we are invisible to each other, each on our own personal trajectories.

voices chatter and sing, slightly off-key. the baby, still riding backwards, intones “ba ba lee lee tiki tiki daaa” to the doll she flails back and forth into the car door like a weapon. her brother leads his father and i in an indulgently pious version of Away in the Manger, our voices all cracking on the high notes, the mentions of heaven. the road hums beneath us, salt spraying.

we roll into tomorrow, into a year clean as snow.

freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, i sing under my breath as i drift in the passenger seat, contented. my voice is well-suited to the acoustics of a Kia Rio, to an audience afflicted with the benevolent ears of family. i feel replete, pleasantly unmoored. most of what i love in the world is with me. we could go anywhere. the weight of a hundred loads of laundry slips from me.

i imagine in the new year i will live more freely. for a moment, i forget the two-hour frenzied dance of baby wrangling and organization that led to this stuffed small car.  i do not yet know that we have forgotten the bags of carefully wrapped presents for the cousins we are going to meet. i ignore the sunglasses left behind, in spite of blinding snow glare, and the fact that i did not put out the compost bin.

i imagine us a covered wagon, lurching overland in search of the mythical land of the free.

for a moment i’m all gingham and Little House on the Prairie. then i remember the Donner Party. i laugh unprettily, startling my travelling companions.

but the sense of going somewhere, anywhere, bound all together, still tempts.

we are doing it, of course. we do it everyday, waking to the lives we’ve made, in the midst of changing bums and making suppers and running to pediatric clinics. we are already there, in a life of comfort, of work and reward. the pioneers with their pestilence and their hunger and their lofty goal of eventual tar-paper roofs would’ve traded in an instant.

still, the simple act of moving tastes like possibility.

in a life with small children and duties and responsibilities and goals i haven’t gotten to yet, remaining open to possibility is the very hardest job. i chafe for time that is not already filled, demanded, eaten. i stress. i remember the taste of surprises, of days that simply evolved, conversations that meandered on into the night and lit me like the hundred cigarettes that burnt down around us.  i seldom remember how to be that person. i am wound tighter now, a Prussian officer humping along on schedule, trying to drag a checklist of completed items with me. the bohemian life looks dirtier, from here, than i could ever have imagined.

but three hours in a moving car where all i have to do is sit and dole out sippy cups and sing? glorious. packed away from it all in a tiny metal box, i coast on the fumes of gasoline and Diet Coke and imagine that ahead there are open doors and time to play, to think.

it gets me every time. it is my siren’s song, always just ahead. and damn the torpodoes, and the rocks.
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it is snowing, hard, when we return. the wipers swish ineffectively across the windshield, leaving little ice arcs in their wake. the road alternates black to white, where drift has laid three inches of slippery snow down.

we move slower now. we know about precious cargo.

we are in the hills, where the roads slalom gently back and forth and the drops from the shoulder grow steeper. a white cube van perches precariously on the side, and my eyes try to trace the track of his wheels and fail. my head cocks, and Dave answers.

he came from the other side of the road.

i see it then. we are abreast of the tilting van and his slide is evident. sharp turn just ahead. he careened through it, hit the snow, spun backwards across the lanes, was caught by sheer luck and gravity just before the tumble. phew. i am about to nod when Dave inhales.

another van hitting the same patch of snow at the same ill-advised speed just after the turn. he lurches out into our lane. we are collision-bound. i cannot tear my eyes away; my body spreads and flattens against the seat, futile protective instinct. my babies.

his wheels catch the road. he corrects. we pass.

i blink.

and suddenly, reminded of how enamored i am of the wholeness of my own skin, i get it.

we are always moving, in time, into the new and the uncharted, even when it looks like the same old pile of to-dos and busy-ness. there is always possibility and surprise ahead. surprise is not always benign.

so i will stay put and learn to carve out space and moments for ditching the Prussian Officer uniform. i will give thanks for the bounty of job and family and crap to be done, even as it bears down on me. and i will try to stop trying to do it all, for the egotistical sake of doing it all. i will keep learning to let go of what nobody needs.

i will even post my new year’s post a day late. take that, schedule.

happy 2010 to you and yours. may the surprises be mostly good. may you find strength and grace and peace where they are not. and may you all find time for possibility, whatever it means to you.

what does it mean to you? what do you hope for, from this still new-ish year?

darkness in late November comes at 5 o’clock.

we four emerge into the damp gloom, make our way to the end of the block where the street is cordoned off. we are bundled within an inch of our lives, ridiculously so given the unseasonal warmth, the threatening rain. little family throngs are gathered already, waiting, clustered on lawnchairs and under blankets.

the annual town Santa Claus parade.

Oscar has a blinking red nose, a party favour sent long ago by WhyMommy. it is his prized possession: during the long wait, all ants in his pants, he runs up to neighbouring children and adults with upturned face,  imploring them to admire his Rudolphesque visage. most comply. if you’re willing to sit through an hour of flatbed trucks and farm machinery strung with lights to ring in the Christmas season, a three-year-old with a blinking nose is an obligatory smile.

a little boy behind us, perhaps a year or two older than O, wears a red velour hat with white trim. he nods to the nose, then announces his own festive adornment. i compliment him, ask him if he’s excited. he explodes with fervour.

it’s SANTA! he nearly shouts, beaming into Oscar’s face. SANTA’s gonna come!!!

Oscar pulls himself up conspiratorily, so he is as near to eye-to-eye with his new friend as he can get.

Santa’s not REAL, he declares.

i die inside.

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i still remember, vividly, the day i found out about Santa. i was in kindergarten, not quite yet five, in the back of somebody’s big ol’ seventies car stuffed with children. before car seats, car pools were huge.

from the bench seat ahead of me, Robbie Trainor’s freckled face popped up. Robbie had older brothers; he knew things.

he dropped the bomb.

all four little girls in the back seat were eldest children, each of us cloistered darlings who until that moment had presumably never questioned the verity of the jolly fat elf. mouths hung open. not one of us said anything; rather, an embarrassed kind of silence spread over the car.

i don’t remember anything else: not debate or tears or whether the adult driving said a word. in my memory, the moment is utterly internal, an invisible tectonic shift.

a child’s first cognitive dissonance.

from that day on, i thought of Santa as a story, not a man. but i was an only child, a private kid who felt things deeply. i did not know how to speak the things that made me uncomfortable. and so when my mother cheerfully made reference to Santa that Christmas, and the Christmas after, i performed; i went along pretending i knew nothing about the grim reality, the void that was St. Nick.

i thought my mother believed. and i did not want to ruin that for her.

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the moment the words leave Oscar’s mouth, my lips are in his ear, stage-whispering, it’s not POLITE to tell people that someone they believe in isn’t real.

i realize i’m hoping the other kid’s parents can hear me. i realize i’m hoping the other KID can hear me, and i consider tacking on something like, Santa is the spirit of Christmas! in my chirpiest voice.

mostly i realize i’m wondering how the hell my kid became THAT kid, destroyer of worlds, the one who goes around flatly bursting the most cherished notions of others.

oh right. that was us.

i don’t think we’ve ever said outright to Oscar that Santa isn’t real. but we’ve never said he was, either. and we likely won’t. we’ll play along, to an extent…but Christmas for us is all about a constant negotiation of stories. if i had my druthers – and we lived in either a bucket or a truly multicultural big city – i might get away with the sixties secularized version of a warm fuzzy Christmas, where we’d celebrate with candlelight and food and The Grinch and maybe some Alvin & the Chipmunks. except we’d all gather ’round our non-existent piano and i’d raise the roof with my glorious contralto version of O Holy Night, my grandmother’s favourite carol.

instead, Oscar plays a lamb in the Sunday school play this year. and his parents, the agnostic and the atheist, will likely tag along to kneel in adoration at the livestock by the creche, while his faithful grandmother praises god at the sight of all of us in church. he’ll get a daily dose of Santa every day at preschool, just as he has for the past two weeks anyway, and we’ll open an advent calendar with Playmobil knights hidden behind it, a purely materialist construction if ever there was one. for the holidays themselves, we’ll hang out with his Jewish cousins and exchange gifts for what they call International Present Day.

he’s never asked about Santa. i’ve asked him what he knows, and told him the legend of Saint Nicholas. i’ve sung him Away in a Manger and Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. i’ve told him Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Jesus, but also a holiday where a lot of people like to get together and have special times with their families. i’ve told him that in the darkest months of the year, most people like to celebrate one way or the other, and share gifts with the people they love.  he has a stocking and a dreidel and a blinking red nose.

and apparently a complete and total disbelief in Santa Claus.

a part of me feels that as failure, and another part as success. and the rest just wonders how i can get him to respectfully hold his tongue on the subject so that we don’t get run out of town by December 24th?

they were shorter than i remembered.

coming home to a three-year-old and a one-year-old is a like entering a fun-house mirror. in your mind, these tiny creatures who whip your sorry ass out of bed at ungodly hours and spend half their waking moments trying to boss you into oblivion just seem…taller, somehow. they are large in spirit.

until you burst through the gate at the airport and the impossibly tiny boy who is your big kid hurtles in your arms laughing and you realize his little body is barely heavier than a suitcase.

and then, home finally, you come through the door and tiny legs run thump thump thump to meet you and your body sweeps up its baby like a missing piece and there are tears in your eyes.

you don’t know whether it’s going to be good to get home until you get there.

it was. and i was relieved to find it so.
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seventeen years ago, i sat on a back fire escape in Montreal on an October night, weeping into a boyfriend’s arms. we were scheduled to leave the next morning, head back to the tiny college town that had been our stage and our womb for 3+ years. Magic Johnson had just announced he had AIDS. the boyfriend’s father had just announced he had diabetes.

neither were the source of my misery, only the flavours that separate that trip from the others in the cloudy, grotty puddle of memory.

i just didn’t want to go back.

i don’t think it was the seedy charm of the big city, or even the pressures of the daily grind as a senior honours bulimic with a manic-depressive roommate and no clue of what to do with myself after college.

it was me. i just didn’t want to go back to the confusion of being me at nearly 21. a Thanksgiving weekend in somebody else’s parents’ apartment was a vast relief. i ate pumpkin pie made with Splenda and said thank you and washed up the dishes and everything was nice and externalized and tidy and i felt validated and safe.

the kid i was that fall hadn’t felt particularly safe in a long time. and the year that was about to follow would knock everything out at the knees – my first real breakup, my first betrayal, a reckoning, the scattering of my circle to the wind post-graduation. and in the midst of it all, my grandmother’s house, the one she’d been born in, the one that’d been my only constant home in a childhood of apartments, sold and lost as the slow decay began.  i didn’t know any of  that out on that fire escape, watching the city, but i think maybe i sensed it, smelled the shift on the air. or maybe i simply knew i didn’t have a clue how to handle the inevitable closures that accompany one’s last year of anything.

i was scared shitless. i grew up risk averse and yet reckless, a combination not so uncommon among those who have little to lose in status and material goods. i had no long-term planning skills, no sense of agency to choose next steps or any belief that the choices i made would actually impact anything much. i felt like i was supposed to be figuring something out, but i couldn’t, for the life of me, sort out what it was.

i remember thinking, if we could just stay here, skip all the next steps, the part i don’t know how to do. get to the next chapter, whatever that is.

i found myself thinking the exact same thing last week.  different fall evening in Montreal.  no fire escape, no tears this time.  and the illusions of safety centered around leaving the city rather than staying. homecoming as escape from having to get to the next chapter somehow.
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i spent our five days in Montreal last week wondering if we could live there, if  i could drag a whole family of four to the city and have us stay afloat, financially and emotionally.

while we were there, i met with a woman who analyses writing and discourse and rhetoric for a living. she’s kind, funny, disarming. open. and she stated flat-out that she’s willing to work with me on my long-neglected Ph.D, be a mentor and supervisor for my dissertation. i’d need to commit to two years in the city.

they have little Portuguese pastries there, and a Czech bar. they also have rents three times our mortgage. there are museums, places other than MacDonald’s to take kids to play on a rainy Saturday. there are waiting lists a mile long for childcare, and apparently you have to know where you’re going to be living to even get on them. there would be no Nannie there…my mom gets traveller’s cheques just to leave PEI. which is an occasion reported on the local news.

i meet tomorrow with a representative from the fledgling Ph.D program here.  two faculty members here, whom i respect and am deeply fond of and whom i’ve worked with for a few years now have also said yes, they’d take me on.  if the program will accept me, because they’re only taking four students next year. four is a teensy little number. a number so small it hurts the ego to attempt it, because Everyone Will Know. (that and the blogging about it. that always helps with the privacy).

not much funding for first year in either program, so far as i can tell. my mouth gets dry as cotton when i look at the proposals, the grant applications.

it’s heady and daunting both, an eight-ball of self-doubt and projected glory.  part of me tells myself it makes sense, either way – that investing in my education, after my childbearing hiatus, is the kind of long-term planning i’m still struggling to master.  part of me wants to flatten myself to the ground like a hedgehog and stay stock-still until i can just wake up in the next chapter.

i need to do something about that instinct.

but i have these little kids. they were born in the aftermath of upheaval and sorrow like i hope never to know again. and since they came along, grounding me, making me happy to come home even from the glamour of a hotel room with cable, change scares the shit out of me even more than before.

halp. what would Jesus do? what would you do? i know people move to big cities all the time, even without much capital and with kids. but lord above, this all has me nervous, people. even staying. just the risk of putting it out there, applying, courting the possible no. and the possible yes.

talk me down off the fire escape after all these years, friends. tell me how to think about it all in a way that doesn’t hurt my head quite so much?

they say when your children are born and placed in your arms for the first time, you become – truly, finally – aware of your own mortality, of the cyclical, revolving nature of this thing called life and the loss inherent to it.

they say this awareness comes like a thud, sad and sweet and built like a concrete block. wham. hello, it says.  behold your replacement. and the helpless, squalling bundle in your arms opens its eyes and you know, without a doubt, that you will die someday and that you’d die for this child because something as old and raw as pride has risen inside you and you understand, in that instant, that everything else you’ve ever done is ephemeral compared to this.

or so i think it goes.  in reality, that moment kind of escaped me.

it happened out of order for me, true.  my initiation was sadder than most. but it still had its joy, its wonder and beauty. but no sucker punch of oh my god i couldn’t have expected this love. oh my god life is sorrow and beauty all wrapped up.

i already knew.

i think i read too much as a kid to be properly shocked by anything that has happened to me since.

children in books have everything happen to them. they’re orphaned, abandoned, lost, set adrift into magical lands. they encounter Danger and Adversity, are tested to the very limits of their understanding and often beyond. all, in the end, to build character, in the most literal sense of the word.

in books, these lead characters are always a little different from the crowd: some quality separates them, makes their stories worth telling. usually, their differences are redemptive, sources of sympathy on the part of the silent witnesses who read the narratives and stand in judgement or outrage or sorrow at the outcomes. it is the plucky heroine and the bright little chap who shine, and in their shadows the pleasant normal children seem plastic, dull, bovine.

Mr. DeMille, i’m ready for my book now.

i grew up a defacto only child with an absent father, a great-aunt-cum-grandmother as timid and nervous as a mouse, and a mother who by 24 had lost both parents, an adoptive father, a husband, and any sense of long-term planning or agency.  between them, they made for rather stark horizons.  nobody talked about much, but subtexts of loss and betrayal and stiff-upper-lippedness and things unsaid ran under the surface of our lives like an exposed vein of acid. we were all marked by the exposure. the adults could not acknowledge their own scars. whether mine were invisible to them, i do not know.

the other kids i knew weren’t much like me. protected, perturbed by things without happy endings, they seemed to take for granted a world as friendly and secure as a 70s tv show.  by eleven or twelve, i had begun to suss out our differences, conduct a puzzled sort of ethnography on them. they went to Disneyworld and played soccer and cried when their dads went away for work for a week. i watched without jealousy, only curiosity. they were my friends, and yet when i scratched the surface, another species.

tiny megalomaniac that i was, i decided that they must be mere background characters in the great novel that got played out day by day in the trenches of junior high. i – by default – the oddball melancholic  o so attuned to the low violin strings of the human heart, must be special.

i became my own protagonist.

and so i read, looking for models. everything i could get my hands on, from the Victorian children’s classics of orphaned heroines to my aunts’ discarded 70s sexploitation novels about stewardesses and cadres of gymnast bankrobbers, most of which puzzled my ten- and eleven-year-old self. i read my mother’s Norman Vincent Peale meditations and my grandmother’s Harlequins and randomly acquired copies of The Godfather and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. i read the Doonesbury comics my father sent in lieu of birthday presents, even though i understood nothing of the political landscape they satirized.  he was the only person in my family who could have given even a three-word description of Reagan’s politics, or even Trudeau’s. i read earnestly, hopefully, trying to prepare myself to live. i tried to prepare myself for everything, just like the kids in stories.

i think i overdid it.

i’ve lived a life in which no stone of experience has been left unturned.  i’ve cleaned toilets, modelled nude for money, eaten Mr. Noodles for months on end and thrown them up anyway in a battle between economy and the waste and self-abnegation of bulimia. i’ve moved coasts and continents, been married, been divorced, had my heart broken. i’ve loved randomly and loved well, and learned that there’s only sometimes a difference but the difference? is the world. i’ve studied all i could get my hands on, drunk all i could get my hands on, tried most substances i could get my hands on. i’ve stayed up til 8 in the morning and invited the bar back to my place for breakfast. i’ve birthed three babies. i’ve held one as he died.

your protagonist, gentle readers, has cultivated herself as a character for more than two decades now. i am done. i am tired of being a protagonist.

my half-brother and his wife had a son last week. i went to the hospital to meet the new arrival, to cradle this nephew in my arms and suck the new-baby-smell of his head deep into my lungs.

his mama was in the same bed where i stayed after Posey was born, only thirteen months ago. i stood there holding the wee Griffith, my body remembering what my mind had forgotten, all the ways newborns squeak and blink and curl into you like small frogs. and something hit me that finally, for the first time, took me by surprise.

this is all behind me, my wistful dog-in-the-manger, climb-every-mountain, i’m-at-the-centre-of-every-story heart crooned.

and that is okay, whispered back a voice i’m not sure i’ve ever heard before. a voice i’d never read about. but mine. definitely mine.

then a wave of something like relief washed over me, warm and wet and i teared up and smiled at Griffith and i’m sure he thought the outburst all for him. as he should.  him, and Oscar, and Posey, their little clan of fellows and rugrats, a whole new generation to fancy themselves the characters from which stories are wrought. they can have it, that sense of destiny, that specialness.

i’ve spent the last twenty years looking for a story to be in. and now, somewhere in the rush of getting two kids out the door and folding laundry and teaching and dreaming up Ph.D applications and smiling at Dave when he plays Blood on the Tracks for the thirteenth time this week,  i notice i have one. just like that. and it is enough.

i am not Prince Hamlet, nor was i meant to be.

and like nothing else ever has, that shocks me.
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perhaps this ought to be the part where i say i’m done. that this is the swan song, the last post.  i was tempted. Dave made me a gift last week, ordered a book of the blog to date. this post – which has taken longer than any post i’ve ever written to eke out, blindly poke my way through – lay alluringly in draft like a perfect coda in waiting. why write outside the bound covers of…gasp…a book?

but it is not the blog i want to leave behind. i don’t write as much as i used to, true…but i write better. at least by my own, erm, humble estimation. and i owe that to this platform, this space, where i have – after long imagining myself a walking book – written enough to be happy to call myself, quietly, a writer.

so you’re stuck with me. in my new, terribly happily boring incarnation. now please. please tell me about YOU.  i need fodder.

classes start tomorrow.

the campus is all preened, gussied up in Institutional Fresh, with just a hint of aspirational ivy.  the air is crisp and sunny yellow in a way it only seems to be in September. and the little Lisa Simpson who’s lived in me all my life is chomping at the bit, ready to go Back to School.

it’s been four years since i last taught a class of my own, and longer than i care to remember since the first time i stood up in front of a group of curious, wary faces and said, i’ll be your teacher this year.  i remember pausing that first time, half-expecting a camera crew to pop out of a bookshelf with kazoos in hand, shouting ha ha! just kidding! puh-leeze.

when they didn’t materialize, i was only half-relieved. if nobody was going to show up to send me back to the gutter, that meant i actually had to teach that rabble in front of me.

i’m less afraid, now, than i was then. i wonder if old standup comedians get like this, punch-drunk with been there, done that? it’s not like the crowds change, after all. this September, there will likely be the same few frowns behind the desks, the two or three Very Serious Folk there on suffrage of some sort, who need to put the teacher on notice straight off the bat. the difference is that i enjoy those people, now. they may challenge me, in either sense of the word…but i no longer mind. i smile and bide my time.  i am a mountain. the final exam will come.

i glance in the mirror and see Monty Burns staring back, rubbing his fingers together with glee, whispering Excellent, Smithers.  i grin.

(sure, i can be all Simpsons’ characters at once. i am legion.)

most students, though, no matter the culture or age group, bring an earnestness to the classroom that always surprises me, humbles me.  i teach English academic writing this year, to foreign students. and i am excited.

i realized yesterday, staring in bewilderment at the glut of eighteen-year-olds suddenly filling up the city in their little Shinerama frosh tshirts, that it has been twenty years since i started university. twenty years since my mom and i took a ferry over to the small university town just a couple of hours away on a sunny September morning, and she left me there – mostly happily, i think, on both sides of that equation – to start what has become, in effect, my life.

i didn’t know it, then. i stood in front of the mirror, that first day of class, peering at myself, wondering if i looked like a college student. my shirt was a button-down, a stained-glass coat of many colours.  i tucked it in, then pulled it out.  i tied my hair back with a bandana, then tried a barrette. it was 1989. hair needed pouf.  my jeans were old, just perfectly so, pegged at the bottom.  i cringe to admit i wore boat shoes. i cringe to admit i even remember all these things.

but i do, because that morning twenty years ago is burned into my mind, and it feels like yesterday.

going away to university at seventeen was in a sense a stupid thing to do.  i’d spent my adolescence chafing under the motherlove of a parent who believed in authority with a capital A, and so the minute i was esconced in the freedom of my concrete bunker dorm, i dispensed of any recognition of convention or authority whatsoever. i eschewed the bovine festivities of frosh week, for the most part, but took up Drinking 101 with an enthusiasm only matched for my English lit intro and the shabby-bearded political science prof who slouched cavalierly and spoke like David Bowie. i kept my scholarship, but skipped all 8:30 classes, and wasted learning opportunities that would have done me far better had they come a few years later when i’d learned to actually think for myself, not just posture as if i did.  in my first years at university, i was more Bart Simpson than Lisa.

god help me if my children ever turn into such impossible, impertinent little ingrates.

and yet, those years were invaluable to me, too. because standing in front of that dorm room mirror that morning in 1989, i was truly on my own for the first time in my life. i was paying, with loans and scholarships and money socked away from a $4.50 an hour job. i had no curfew.  the people i met i could meet on my own terms, and the things i fucked up i fucked up on my own terms. consequences of my actions were my own.  i have never – even in moving countries, marrying, divorcing, losing my child – known a divide quite so great between before and after.

that September morning in front of my dorm room mirror i didn’t understand that the person i’d been in high school would fade for me so quickly, become a blur i cannot yet, twenty years out, quite bring into focus, while the girl who stared back at me would become my first memory of myself.

i wish she’d known then that her skin was dewy and that shirts three sizes too big should never be tucked in, and that morning classes were not necessarily the handiwork of the devil, after all.  i wish she’d understood that she was smart and worthy, and stood straighter and learned earlier to ask questions. i wish she’d known how quickly twenty years fly by.

tomorrow morning, when i stand in front of the faces of my students, most of them just flown in from around the world and on their own for the first time, there will be a part of me that yearns to gather them in close, show them the girl in that mirror with her dated hair and her silly shoes, and exhort them to gather ye rosebuds while ye may, carpe diem and live deliberately and all those things that ring silently in the September air.

i won’t do it. they’d laugh. they’re business students, most of them. they’d be more inspired by a pie chart of earnings corresponding to time invested. and yet, as the term rolls on, they’ll struggle and stumble over the same heady temptations of independence and consequence that i did, lo those many years ago. and i will watch, and nod, and reach out a hand and try to teach what i know, very little of which has to do with English academic writing.

i was angry when i slipped the note into the dark maw of her desk, around the rim of chewed, dried gum.

furtively, i shoved the paper deep. i remember the feel of it leaving my hand, its sharply crumpled edges, the not-quite-moment-of-hesitation.  i let go. and then i stood and walked away.

i don’t think i thought of it again until the teacher called me in after school a day or two later. a tank of a woman who ruled the seventh grade like a German train line, she sat me in front of her, the note between us. her gaze and sheer bulk bore down on me.  my knees began to shake.

it wasn’t a nice note. i don’t remember if it was a signed note, oddly, though some niggling shred of memory tells me it was.  i do remember there was no denying it was mine. and suddenly, like the floor dropping out from beneath me, no way to justify or explain.

i had left a note in another girl’s desk telling her she was a jackass. jackass.  apparently my gift for cussing came later. i believe i also called her a baby. only now do i realize that it was that which was far more cruel.

this note was not the first this girl had received that fall, my teacher informed me.   the other, which i assume was unsigned, hadn’t come from me. to this day i don’t know who the other player in the story might have been, or what they’d said to the girl. but the poor kid had brought the notes to her mother and her mother had brought them to the teacher and there i sat, bewildered and suddenly – for all intents and purposes – a bully.

i was eleven years old that fall.  i was a January baby, which due to the school cutoff dates  here, meant i’d started kindergarten at just four-and-a-half.   i’d been ready enough, until junior high: both socially and academically able to negotiate the terrain of each school year.

grade seven, though, hit like acid. i had finished sixth grade an eleven-year-old girl who played with Barbies and liked to read. i was earnest and smart and, as the only child of a mother who treated me with great sincerity, utterly and completely innocent of the subtleties of human communications, particularly those on the snarky & sarcastic end of the scale.

grade seven made me a fast learner.

we moved that summer, left the apartment where we’d lived since before i’d turned two. we moved to a far crappier place in a nicer neighbourhood near my new school, the big school where we were marched off to different teachers for different subjects and suddenly girls i’d known all my life grew catty and judgemental and style & status mattered and there was makeup and i felt like Alice through the Rabbit Hole.

i remember, still, the confusion of those days, how friends suddenly and seemingly randomly took sides, practicing power, choosing who would be included and who cut out.  without siblings, i’d never had the experience of fighting with other kids, had few conflict resolution skills, had never even seen the give & take of frustration and reconcilation modelled within my family. i believed i was in a zero-sum game: once ostracized, i’d be alienated forever.

my Barbies got relegated to the back of my closet, a secret comfort i took out only when alone. i studied the other girls, the play of language, the codes of maturity, the attitudes of those who carried themselves with authority.  i tried like hell to grow up, all in a few crazy weeks.

i knew i did not understand popular. but i understood smart, and i applied every ounce of smart i had to figuring out how to mimic the mock-grown-up performance my peers seemed to embody so effortlessly.

or most did. the girl whose desk i left that note in that November lived around the corner from my new home.  she was older than me, by a few months, but she still played Barbies. she wore bows in her hair. and she coped, i guess, with the maelstrom of change that fall by digging in her heels, rejecting the shift in environment and ethic from childhood to adolescence. or maybe she just didn’t notice.

i remember her voice as flat, and loud. i remember being embarrassed by her public appeals to play Barbies at her house, by her ingratiating overtures of friendship, always a little too close, a little too eager. she was a Daddy’s Little Girl of high degree and seemed to expect everyone to treat her as her Daddy did: perhaps she thought if she just got close enough, she’d get the petting she was accustomed to.  i didn’t have a Daddy, and didn’t know what to do with her need.  i remember recoiling, scrabbling to distance myself from her. and when she didn’t recognize my clumsy attempts at indifference or respect the efforts i made to show my hard-won grownupness, i grew panicky, and baffled, and contemptuous of such bovine insensibility to all that was so inexorably and painfully evident to me.

i wasn’t actually a mean girl, not really. and i was a bit of an utter coward, when it came to confrontation. so the culmination of my frustration was the scrawled note i shoved righteousnessly in her gummy desk, which read along the lines of, LEAVE ME ALONE, JACKASS. YOU’RE A BABY.

it was cathartic. it marked the distance between us in a way she couldn’t ignore.

it was cruel too. i know that, maybe even knew that then.  i apologized after, and mostly meant it, because hurting her feelings hadn’t been my primary intent.  what i’d wanted to do was rock her oblivion, her self-appointed coddled pet role, her privilege in getting to remain a child while the rest of us were forced, like it or not, into an adolescence some of us were most definitely not ready for.  i wanted to punish her for being too stupid or too protected to notice that everything had changed.

i wanted her to be my scapegoat, because everything had changed and i was utterly at sea.
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after the first few days at his new preschool and an unproductive parking-lot meeting wherein i made a lot of “not really appropriate placement” noises and the director mostly appeared to wait for me to be done talking, Oscar suddenly and without warning got moved up to junior kindergarten last week.

so instead of our April 2006 boy being in a peer-grouped class almost entirely of 2007 babies, he was a class of 2005 babies. mostly early 2005 babies.

he loved the room. they had plenty of dinosaurs, and interesting books, and lots of stuff he hadn’t seen before. suddenly, he came home talking about dressup, about cannons, about billy goats gruff.  but whenever we showed up to pick him up, he was attached to a teacher or playing alone.

it took almost a week to get a meeting about it, because it is July and people are taking holidays. by the time the meeting rolled around, the school had come to the conclusions that Dave & i had raised eyebrows about when they first made the move: he not only wasn’t really interacting with the bigger kids in meaningful ways, they were beginning to tease him a little for his pronunciations, and he’d turned into the teacher’s permanent tail. in spite of our efforts to teach him strategies for interacting with the other kids, they weren’t necessarily responding in ways he could make sense of or take up.

so we agreed to move him back to preschool – after all, there are two other three-year-olds there now, both nice little girls.

he didn’t want to go. and even four days in, full of genuine and significant efforts on the part of the preschool teachers to scaffold age-appropriate activities with him and the small group of 2006ers they have on hand, he doesn’t want to be there. he wants to be in the junior kindergarten.

and i am trying to figure out what it is that draws him there, with those kids a head taller, whom he can’t really seem to keep up with or engage in conversation with.  and a part of me wonders whether the shift up to the bigger class simply started one of those inexorable shifts for him, as junior high did for me, where the world opens up and going back – not in the literal sense, but in terms of how one views one’s role in the world – is emotionally and intellectually impossible, no matter how unprepared one is to cope.

maybe not.  but we have some decision to make on behalf of this little boy, and i wish i understood better what was going on in that small blondish head.  as an educator, i’m no fan of accelerated placements, particularly at this age. and other than the fact that i’m going back to work next month and need childcare, our primary reason for having Oscar start preschool wasn’t really about learning opportunities in the classic cognitive sense, for all this school provides many, but rather socialization.

kids who get moved up, or who are among the youngest yet highest-performing in their classes, as both Dave & i were in our illustrious (snort) childhoods, hear the words, “you’re so smart” a lot.  like any label with positive attributes and reinforcement attached, it can become a bit of a drug. i was a little freaked out when the school first reported that they’d moved Oscar up because he seemed “advanced” – i’d been advocating that his placement was inappropriate because he was essentially in a baby room, not because he’s some kinda prodigy.  i forget that his vocabulary – pronunciation quirks aside – has become pretty wicked over the past eight months or so, since a year ago he was in speech therapy and only i could distinguish more than ten words he said.  but they heard him riffing on the finer points of stegosaurus, and i know even the older kids gathered ’round that first day he got moved up and held court around the dinosaur book, and i would bet my teeth he heard a lot of “oh, such a smart boy!” and a part of me wonders if this isn’t the reason his stubborn little self insists he belongs in that room, because he’s dying, inside, to recreate that moment of stardom and glory.

there is a scene in the old Jimmy Stewart film “Harvey” in which Elwood P. Dowd, a character my eleven-year-old self would have had no way to comprehend, says something along the lines of, “In this life, you end up being either oh-so-smart or oh-so-pleasant. I’ve tried smart. I prefer pleasant.”

it’s a lesson i wish i’d learned a lot earlier. and one of the main ones i want my children to have some exposure to, early.  yep, we want O with kids he can talk to, in an environment with age-appropriate stuff.  but we also want him to understand that being kind and thoughtful trumps being smart, in terms of how one values oneself and one’s relationships with others.

and that growing up too fast is no fun.