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i hear it everywhere, popping out from headlines, referenced casually until it begins to smell of truth. and stink a little with the impotence and collective rot it creates.

a whiff of faint bewilderment, the fear of mortality and obsolescence. the thrill of feeling one has eaten from the prescient tree of knowledge, even if the tree is plastic, planted in sand.

our children will not be like us, it whispers. they are wired, and thus wired differently. they are beyond us, aliens of the future. sit back and watch the reckoning. wash your hands.

it is no Kahlil Gibran, this voice, cautioning acceptance and unconditionality. it is more Bradbury, laced with the pleasures and promise of the macabre. it tells us these children we’re raising are blasphemous offspring of the cultural collision of the human and the technological – beings whose integrated circuits are inherently foreign to our own, digital natives whose minds we will never entirely fathom.

in all this repeated discussion and dissection and fretting, there is one note missing.

yes, they will grow up in a digitized world. they play their games on screens, in many cases. they conduct entire relationships on Facebook. their cognitive synapses may fire slightly differently from those of us who grew up with only Candy Land. but if they are cyborg, oh my friends, do not fear.

they are no more so than we ourselves.
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if i invited you over for a playdate, if i sat you down on my couch with a coffee or a glass of water or a mimosa  -whatever your poison – and looked into your eyes and said, so, hey, i’m a cyborg…i suspect you might be taken aback.

cyborg. huh, your head might shrill, as you’d politely flatten yourself against my door, eyes wide and darting, looking to grab your precious babies and run for the hills.

she seemed so pleasant on her blog. barely batty at all… and she never even talked about Star Trek, let alone cyborgs. jesus. this is worse than an Amway party. is there an eject button here?!?

i know.

but if i say it here in this ether space where we are accustomed to interacting and performing our rites of friendship and social grooming…maybe the words will not seem so alien.

i am cyborg. and so are you. precisely because of this space.  we have evolved in our own lifetimes, into creatures of 20th century myth.
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the cyborg was never truly about technology.  we may not yet have our screens embedded into our retinae or curliqueue wiring connecting flesh to metal and plastic, and we’re still – inexplicably – bound to the keyboard and print text…but we all of us who live out parts of our identities in front of our screens, whose lives are rich with people we know and bare our hearts to and exchange ideas with daily in many cases yet have never, ever laid eyes upon? cyborgs, all of us, creatures of the integrated circuit.  and so is our parenthood.

our lives are couplings between organism and machine. our internal worlds are not circumscribed by the mere physical, and our external worlds – even and perhaps especially our days spent hands-on with the children we cherish – are not an existence solely of or in the body.  this world, wherein we write and speak and interface and connect, is always present or available on the internal screen of our minds. it is a room of one’s own, even if our houses overflow with toys and dishes and no space that is ours alone.

Donna Haraway wrote The Cyborg Manifesto more than twenty years ago, now.  her cyborg was, as she wrote it, a creature without origin and without innocence, resolutely committed to “partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity.” its existence breaks down the old dualisms of nature and culture, of public and private – it exists between, a hybrid.

as we do out here, in this ether. we write representations of ourselves that are partial, constructed…simply by the very nature of time constraints and audience, we cannot write ourselves whole. thus the “us” we speak through out here is an avatar, without innocence, aware of its origin as a narrative, a story told in once upon a time fashion.  we exist between the public and the private, all of us negotiating the boundaries of how these avatars interact and integrate with our flesh selves and the others in our lives. we connect. we interface. some of us pay a high price domestically for the space for self we carve out here, this intimate space where we are so often ironic and perverse.  the patriarchy, Haraway cautions, is threatened by the cyborg, its bastard child, unwanted issue. illegitimate offspring, she notes, are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.
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the cyborg mother, of course, ought to be a contradiction in terms. the mother image is organic, the original origin story. but the cyborg is contradiction embodied. and the cyborg mother lives firmly in the postdigital age that the voices of doom and essentialistic difference do  not realize has reached us. the digital age is as much a part of us as the technology of the telephone or the pencil. we have incorporated it into ourselves – our baby monitors, our Dr. Google, our youtube videos of our children or for our children, our networks of identity and friendship and expression and marketing. who we make of ourselves as a result will be different from the mothers we grew up with, indeed, as will our children be different from the 70s and 80s versions of self we once were.

but our children as aliens, morphing inexorably into creatures of a vaguely foreboding future we cannot conceive? nay. not to those of us out here already, living on the integrated circuit, connecting, living beyond the boundaries of our flesh and in it, holding those selfsame children by the hand.

now if only the cyborg as mother could just break down the pointless polarization of good mother and bad.
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what does it mean to you, the space to be connected, ironic, intimate, perverse? if it all collapsed tomorrow, this online world, what of yourself would you find amputated?

hot days. finally summer.  i live on an island with beaches that get touted in ads around the world.  we ran a campaign in the 80’s that sold PEI as “the warmest waters north of Florida.”

i remember a local comedian quipping, c’mon. don’t shit me here. i took geography. the warmest waters north of Florida are about a mile past the Florida border, people.

he had clearly sampled the testicle-shrivelling waters of our heralded beaches in the month of June.

so rather than take the kids out to eat sand and freeze their tootsies in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, i figure they could eat sand just as well at the park.  i like the park. it is not so crowded, requires less sunscreen, and does not involve either a long car ride or the indignity of me sporting a a bathing suit.

Dave has been in England. he came home to find there’d been a cancellation on the vasectomy waiting list and i’d booked him in for only 28 hours after his arrival home. that‘ll teach him to travel. but in the meantime and until he and his bag of frozen peas can get comfortably off the couch, my mother, bless her, has been coming around at the end of the days when she can, helping to get the kids bathed and to bed.  she came along on our late-day park journey, the four of us galumphing down frost-humped sidewalks with a plastic tricycle.

the baby was tired. both kids were sick the whole time Dave was away.

until Oscar had surgery last December to have tubes put in his ears, every cold he got had a tendency to turn nasty. he’d fill up, cough for a day or two, and then end up in the ER not breathing properly, no matter how carefully we applied the preventative puffers and avoided dairy and followed the asthma clinic’s recommendations. but since the tubes? golden. he gets a cold, he coughs, wakes up at godforsaken hours miserable and whatnot, but…no ER. the asthma clinic actually released him in April, saying that very likely he does not actually have asthma, as his attacks only ever came when otherwise sick.

at the park, Posey and i stopped to chat to another mother & baby pair, and to look at some leaves on a tree, and to wipe her nose call down armageddon on all & sundry. Posey does not like having her nose wiped.

i looked over in the midst of her howling and noticed O having a bit of a fit of his own with my mom. odd, as the two of them are tight and he is generally at his shining #1 grandson best with her, the pleaser in him rewarded by her proverb-loving approach to the world. but they were at the swings, which has never been his favourite park activity, and he was also in a baby swing, which he generally eschews now even when he consents to swinging.  with Daddy away, however, he’d been playing “baby” all week. i figured perhaps i’d wander over.

as i got closer, i heard him.

but Nannie, but Nannie… great gulping tears here, and the plaintive confusion of a frustrated child who’s hit a wall he doesn’t understand.  but Nannie…i just want to RUN.

this park is a relatively spartan space, and as a result has a long expanse of green that Oscar loves to run free-form through, his little legs pumping, growing tinier and tinier as he beetles away from me until i can see him for how small he still really is.  he knows that he is only allowed to run through a particular space in the park, far from the cars, and he’s a pretty good kid. he has never transgressed those boundaries.

but when he’d run over to Nannie at the swing set, she’d heard him breathing heavily. and had decided that the thirty feet he’d covered were plenty, and he might have an asthma attack – though he has never once so much as threatened anything resembling a classic asthma attack brought on by exertion – and plopped him, unwilling, into the baby swing.  she was exhorting him in the urgent voice she uses when she’s anxious to “just slow down, be calm.”

your body needs you to be still, she said, while he wailed.

i looked at the two of them and made a judgement call, one that was perhaps as unfair as i’ve ever been.  i sided with the three-year-old.

i thrust the baby at my mother and released Oscar from the swing. he ran off, sounding for all the world like a kid with a slight cold.  i maneuvered the baby into the swing instead, and stood pushing her gently, shaking, trying valiantly but probably unsuccessfully to sound like a grownup.

Mom, he’s okay running, i think.

i only have a single memory of my mother ever running. i was still quite small, so she could not have been yet thirty. we ran through a park one day, just a shortish run to get to some play destination whose shape eludes me now. it is my shock i remember. my mother could RUN! faster than ME!

she is not an unfit person…she works on her feet, she walks, she is a bustler by nature. but outside that one vague childhood recollection, i have never once seen my mother actively exercise.  rather, she cautions against excess, dogmatically distrusts anything that involves sweat or physical discipline.  i grew up believing that the moment something hurt at all…even just a twinge, a slight catch in my breath, i should stop.  beyond that limit was some amorphous fear, some bogeyman of unseemly danger.

my body needed to be still.

so i was. and grew into a lazy arse who’s had to spend a disproportionate period of what ought to be my comfortable middle age learning to push myself.  not necessarily in terms of regular exercise…i still struggle to find the will for that, given how i was encouraged to dismiss it utterly from the earliest of ages. but rather just to function – to continue, as one must, to care for the kids even when one is sick, to push through the strain of sore arms to keep digging in the garden, to trudge on with the baby growing heavier in her sling by the minute. i have learned in my thirties that my body is far stronger than i ever gave it credit for. and that knowledge has been a powerful, beautiful thing, allowing me to learn to trust said body – just a little – for the first time in my life.

i am, if truth be told, happy about Oscar’s relatively cautious nature, and scared shitless of the fearlessness Josephine exhibits even at nine months old.  i want my children to care for themselves and their bodies, of course. i do fear them getting hurt, and i want them to know how to be calm and still when calm and still are called for.

but.  i also want them to know the free feeling of running until they can’t run any more, the confidence that comes from finding some of their own physical limits and learning to trust that their bodies, mostly, can do more than they think. learning to trust that their bodies heal. learning to trust that their bodies are their own, and not just disconnected shells which must be treated according to externalized rules.

i do not want them to think the body should always be easy and quiet. perhaps i should get off my duff and take them to the beach.

a long time ago now, i went North.  to teach.

i’d crossed the Arctic Circle once before, as a kid; the summer i was ten years old, i spent six weeks with my father in a landscape that looked like the moon to me – the sand and lichen and hardy little flowers of the tundra, dotted with patches of snow even in July. we caught fish. i had my first dark chocolate at the Hudson’s Bay Store. at 2 am in the midnight sun, i went outside – me who’d never been up past nine – with the other kids around town. i started grade six, because school starts in August up there. i was the only white kid in my class. there was a girl who was pregnant. the teacher was decapitated in a three-wheeler ATV accident a few weeks after i went home, back south, to my mother and a world i understood.

that six weeks was both the freest and loneliest i’d ever been.

thirteen years later i caught a plane the size of a sardine can and flew again up past the tree line, to a hamlet in the middle of the Northwest Passage.

i had a teaching license myself, this time around, and stayed away from ATVs. i taught the very first grade ten classes ever available in the community.  the end of the residential schools, the long history of students being forced to travel far from home to be given what the dominant culture considered an education.  nowhere near the end of their colonial legacy, of course. but i didn’t know that.

i thought education was an uncontested good.

one of my students was older than i was.  at least 50% of them were parents, or pregnant.  i taught To Kill a Mockingbird, brimful with naivete. i taught Midsummer Night’s Dream reinterpreted as Inuit legend. i taught a Canadian history curriculum that my students did not even exist in; a curriculum that rendered them absent, invisible, less than footnotes.

i did not understand why i was so angry.

something in me loved the North. the light, where the world tilts on its axis, flooded me whole.

the rest of me felt alien, Alice down the rabbit hole.  it was culture shock.   most human beings find it uncomfortable to be Other, to be constantly read as representatives of a foreign group rather than as an individual. i was not only white, teaching students who assumed i’d lived a Beverly Hills 90210 existence back at home, but a white teacher, part of a long history of imposed “education” implicitly aimed at colonizing the Inuit mind into a proper externally-determined subject.

i stayed two years. by the second year, i was no longer angry. but i was still uncomfortable. the job had made it impossible for me to ever see education as a neutral, straightforward process again.

it’s now twelve years since i left the North. some of the students i taught are dead now, lost to suicide and cancer and overall the lowest life expectancies in North America. many are grandparents. Nunavut has come to the Inuit, and brought with it not necessarily the self-determination hoped for, but a neo-colonial layer of bureaucracy that threatens – say a lot of Inuit voices – to stifle everything they aimed for.

and i have the chance to be involved with work there, again. research, ironically, on how the education system of which this research would be a part is perhaps incompatible with the traditional knowledge structures and ways of knowing of the people it has ostensibly tried to “help” for generations.  research that would explore how the research construct itself privileges, once again, the belief systems of the dominant culture and contributes to making the Inuit “Other” even in their own eyes.

part of me chomps at the bit. theory is what i love, where my mind takes flight.  and yet the prospect of this research makes me feel free and lonely like i did at ten, running wild in the midnight sun at two in the morning, wondering if i have any place in this at all, wondering if i can de-centre myself enough to ever really understand.

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i know the content of this post is pretty esoteric. but what i’m getting at is, i’m afraid of agreeing to stick my nose where i’m not sure it has any business being.

and at the same time i’m excited.

and i’m wondering, would YOU leap in?

we talk about it, her father and i.

without hand-wringing, because it is neither of our first priorities, but with curiosity nonetheless, because observation of humanity is a hobby here. like a betting people taking wagers, we muse about it with gravity, as if it mattered…and in the same breath, with cavalier pretense, as if it didn’t.

will she be pretty?

it’s not a polite thing to talk about.  unless offering up compliments or weighing aesthetics and symmetry, ‘pretty’ is not a subject for public discussion.  society is more comfortable with those judgements kept under catty cover, spewed all over reality tv but never actually parsed out at the dinner table.

and yet…her father and i ruminate on the topic like cows at a cud, chewing it over.

she’s as cute as a bug’s ear, we’re clear on that.  fuzzy head, skin like butter.  her blue eyes are bright and, we’re quite sure, intelligent. we’ve been known to break into parental rhapsody over the edible nature of her fat little legs.  we also call her Piggy Nose.  hey, it’s a piggy nose. facts is facts.

do not get me wrong.  her little face with its elfin gaze and double chins is precious to us: the most beautiful baby girl face we know. because it is hers…and we love her, without qualification or caveat.  but still we wonder.

maybe it’s simple validation-seeking, a co-dependent search for the cheap pat-on-the-head that says we has us a pretty baby and thus must therefore, by genetic extension, be not so terribly fugly ourselves.  could be. we are not above cheap pats-on-the-head, us.  but i think it’s more.  especially since we never once had this conversation about Oscar, who is equally the fruit of our loins and really rather a pretty boy, if i do say so myself.  but in this one area, there is no gender equity.

we shouldn’t care if she’s pretty, after all.   smart, sure.  kind, yes. resilient, absolutely.  empathic and hard-working and thoughtful would be nice too.  with a side order of creative, thank you very much and i’ll deal with the crayoned walls later.  but pretty? beyond the flattery to our own gene pools, why would we care about pretty?  the exotica of the child beauty pageant circuit holds no lure for us; trolloped-up little girls in mascara and pint-size prom dresses give me the heebies.  we eschew sex-specific toys, let our son’s hair grown long, harbour hope and suspicion that gender is mostly a construct.  pretty shouldn’t matter to us.

but pretty always matters more than it should.

no matter how feminist our politics, there’s no escaping the fact that we live in a world where for girls, “worthy” and “pretty” end up conflated more than they should.  even if we reject the connection utterly, others will eventually take it up.  it’s in the ether of this culture. we will teach her that beauty is inside, and mean it, and love her for every inch of herself. but that will not protect her from the pageant that is simply living in a female body, coming to selfhood in a skin that gets appraised and assessed and reflected and judged, every day from puberty through to cronehood.

pretty is bound, at some point in her life, to be the yardstick against which she judges herself.

part of me thinks our musings on the subject are us trying to guess at how and when she and the yardstick will collide, readying ourselves to help her negotiate a relationship with pretty that does not subsume or damage all the other things she is.  because pretty is a brutal master, no matter what one’s face actually looks like.

Dave swears that his personal early research into Women, the Species, shows that the girls who grew up believing themselves “the pretty ones” often ended up stunted, their personalities self-restricted, externalized, by the emphasis placed on their surfaces.

i was the opposite.  i grew up in a house where pretty never came up.  when my father left, he took with him my mother’s sense of her own attractiveness…and i was well into college before she took any of that back.  i was expected to be clean, pleasant, pleasing, polite…but  “pretty is as pretty does” was as far as my mother ever went towards an assessment of my looks.  i grew up with the overwhelming sense that being embodied in female form was a vaguely shameful thing, and that my flaws – crooked nose, pudgy belly, short humpy neck – were horrors barely to be tolerated.  i was 21 the first time i ever remember being called pretty, flat out pretty.  i was so grateful i nearly fell over myself to sleep with the flattering party, to an REM soundtrack in a dirty little room.

so yeh, my late-blooming sense of my own appeal did inspire me to develop a sparkling, uh, wit and intellect as compensation, but it also led to a deep, longstanding insecurity in the worthiness of my physical person.

i don’t want either extreme for Josephine.

and so we talk about it, this unspeakable thing in terrible taste. we hope she’s pretty, but not too pretty.  we hope to teach her that even if the question of pretty is always out there, waiting to tempt her or cause her doubt, her worth is more than the sum of her parts.  no matter how lovely her parents think they are.  or how loony they sound talking about it out loud.

do you talk about pretty?  do you wonder, for your own daughters?  have you worked out your own relationship to your looks and how they’re taken up by others, in this life?

when i was four, i wanted to be a ballerina.

i think it was the tutus. you couldn’t just buy a kid a dressup tutu at the Woolworth’s back then; dressup was old plastic jewellry and mom’s clunky platform shoes to break an ankle in. unless you had a real live ballerina in the family, tutus were relegated to the category of fairytale items, confections of crisp, gravity-defying tulle glimpsed only in picture books.

i coveted.  i fantasized. with a tutu, i would be transformed.  i would be fabulous.

ballet lessons, therefore, were a magical initiation by which i would undergo my metamorphosis. i had no concept of ballet as an art, no concept of sport or applied discipline or unrelenting practice.  i thought i would put on a tutu and slippers and be a ballerina, lithe and graceful, about to take flight.

i jonesed for it all so bad my beleaguered mother finally signed me up for lessons.

my first clue that not all would be as i’d imagined was that there were no tutus; rather i got a stretchy, polyester black leotard that sagged and bagged off my bum.  i did get slippers, but they were my aunt’s hand-me-downs, rescued from twelve years in a closet and cracked and black, not even that pretty pastel pink that looked like bandaids and gum.

my ballet teacher still comes to me dreams sometimes, 32 years later. her face is vague, but her tight-bunned silhouette is has become a mythology unto itself, for me, as if all the evil stepmothers of legend and story were rolled up into one sharp-nosed, straight-backed harpy. she was not from the school of coddling children. she wanted us to work, which was affront in itself to a puzzled five-year-old with little interest in the boring foot positions. i just wanted to soar. 

but the real conflict between my five-year-old self and Serious Ballerina was about costume.  costume, from my perspective, was the core of the whole thing, the reason i was there. if i couldn’t have a tutu, i was set at least on making my dowdy, saggy short-sleeved leotard pretty by wearing a frilly blouse underneath, sleeves and collar peeking out.  

i thought i looked beautiful. i thought beauty would make me dance.

i remember the feeling of a bony hand digging into my shoulder, marching me back to the dressing room. i remember vaguely the big bulbous lights that surrounded the mirrors there, casting yellowish shadows on the cement walls. i remember the goosebumps on my naked arms, stripped of their finery, and the heavy clumsiness of my feet as they tried to turn out and in and tripped over themselves through the repetitive drudgery of classes. i remember my bewilderment; my certainty that if only the dragonlady would allow me dress the part, i could dance.

i took ballet lessons for three months. by the time i turned six, my career in the ballet was closed.

a friend told me recently she’s traditionally dated as if she’s job-shadowing; picking people not for their personal qualities but for their interesting careers/lives/families/circles of belonging. i’m the opposite. i’ve never started a relationship with anyone who really even had a career. the fact that Dave had a car when we first got together seemed glamourous. my career goals have never been based on anything so concrete as job-shadowing, in or out of love.

my aspirations have mostly been based on the same premise as that first dream of the ballet…a completely groundless and non-empirical faith that if i do this, i will be transformed.  

i’ve never learned the lesson.  the promise of the costume, the role, always shimmies in front of my shining eyes, waiting to work its magic on me, transform me from a jack of all trades to a master of…something. i fall again and again for the siren song of the incantation that will release my secret inner potential; i believe each time that if i only take on the mantle, i will soar.

i didn’t get that federal job i did the three-hour interview for a few months back. i did start a small, one-day-a-week gig in the interim, researching research grant opportunities for the university. it’s not my research, in the sense that if i do ever continue that Ph.D i once started in a whole other life, this will not be my area of focus…but the grant knowledge is transferable. and i had the opportunity to adjudicate some local arts grants recently, which was a process i enjoyed way more than i should have, probably because it’s been a very long time since anybody – ahem, i mean YOU, three-year-old – expressed any interest in the whys of my decision-making processes.  i applied for another, non-grant-related job last week. and i actually did some writing that stretched longer than a blog post for the first time since last summer’s workshop.

but the truth is, my focus is still all over the place, professionally. if one were an optimist, this could be said to leave me with many options open; a flexible skillset. if one is less rosy in outlook, one could also level the accusation that i still don’t know what i want to do when i grow up…that i am still, at 37, looking for the tutu that will magically make me dance.

both are true.  and even after all the years i’ve put in doing the grunt work and discipline of learning to teach and research and project manage and write and strategize, i still perch precarious, seemingly aimless and undirected between them all.  i wait, bewildered, for the role to come along that will unlock my potential, even as in the same breath i decry the determinism and passivity all that  implies. 

in some part of me, i still just want to be the ballerina of my childhood mind’s eye, to know what it is to soar. 

how did you end up choosing the path you’re on, whatever you do with your days? and is there some kind of tutu still out there in your dreams, calling your name?

in my town, there’s a former suburb, long since absorbed into the city limits, rich with ’50s bungalows, called Sherwood. in a nod to somebody’s idea of clever literary allusion, most of its street names follow a woodsy theme – Pine, Maple, Oak, Ferndale, Heather – so that taken as a whole, you got yourself a Sherwood Forest.

before amalgamation, the village sign even featured Robin Hood.  and until last night, the most popular diner in the area – arguably in the entire city, such as it is – was called Maid Marian’s.

Maid Marian’s burnt to the ground last night.

my grandfather, who lives up the hill from the burnt out hulk that housed the best lemon pie in town, has eaten breakfast and most of his suppers at Maid Marian’s every day for the past 21 years, literally. the servers used to call his house by 7:15 am if he hadn’t shown up yet.

i am wondering if i will need to drive to Sherwood every morning with hot buttered toast until they rebuild the damn place.

my grandfather will be ninety this fall. he still drives. he still works at the autoelectric shop his former students & colleagues opened up years ago when the place he’d put his life into since the war shut down without pensions. he can’t do nearly what he’d like to, anymore, but he goes in every morning and stays ’til his back gives out. they keep him on.  i do not ask.

the kitchen of the house he shared with my grandmother has literally not been touched, except for a glass here and there for water or rum & coke, and an occasional plate for toast & Cheez Whiz, since the day she died. my grandfather does not cook. even the hulking microwave, now thirty years old, sits utterly unused on the counter looking more and more like a Star Trek relic every year.

my grandfather will need a new restaurant. not because he will starve – he’s mastered toast, and cereal, and has family & friends who invite him out for suppers and weekend brunches.  but in his own shy, slightly curmudgeonly way, he needs a place to belong to.  Maid Marian’s has been his wife  since my grandmother died.  it’s fed him, and not just bodily.  there was hot coffee waiting for him, the staff knew him by name, knew his business, asked after him. there are waitresses there he’s been telling to “stay pure” for 21 years, bless their tolerant, non-sexual-harrassment-suing hearts.

and now they’re out of a job. but he’s out of a home, in a way.  he was a fixture at the place, so much so that the local radio station called him this morning for the “human interest” angle on the fire.

i don’t know whether to buy him a cookbook or a condolence card.
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if my grandmother knew that her husband had been eating out twice a day since she died, her frugal bones would roll in their grave. if she knew he’d been on the radio announcing this shameless, mortifying, spendthrift fact, i suspect the bones would find a way to reconfigure themselves so they could at the very least wag a finger at him from the afterlife.

yet in the year before cancer took her, i doubt they ever once talked about how he would eat, after 45 years of her cooking every single meal and packing his lunches for work.  that was part of their generation.

but just the other day, a good friend whose dad just had heart surgery mentioned that she doesn’t think her mother’s ever used a bank card.  her mother is not quite seventy.

another friend had her parents split up this past summer, after 39 years of marriage. her mother – a professional, independent-spirited sixty year old – had no clue where to even begin to get her taxes filed for the year.

those of us lucky enough to have longterm partners almost inevitably fall into divisions of labour, around housework or yardwork or money or laundry or who buys birthday presents for the relatives or swats Junebugs. often these divisions are gendered, though not always…sometimes, to those of us who grew up in a post-feminist world, they’re far more surprisingly gendered than we’d ever imagined for ourselves, and we blush when the nice electrician asks about the fuse box and we find ourself pointing vaguely towards the damp clay cellar that we realize we’ve only been in twice. ahem.

all partnerships have their secret agreements – i will take this, you take that.  it is nice to have someone to do a little of the dirty work that you don’t fancy.

but is it incumbent on us to stay mildly abreast of the dirty work that keeps our lives functional? it gets harder as time goes by and habits settle, and i suppose as technology changes. i wonder if the idea that we’re supposed to know how to do it all for ourselves is a peculiarity of my own generation?  these fine, skilled mothers of my friends were part of a generation who moved from parents’ home to marriage bed, for the most part.

now their adult daughters, pushing forty, are the ones who teach them the literacies that the daughters learned on their own, for the most part.

what do you think your adult children will find themselves needing to teach you? if you find yourself alone after a long partnership, what do you think will come hardest…or do you avoid thinking of things like that, at all?  do you see a generational difference between the way you and your parents dealt with these questions?

and does anybody know a nice diner where my grandfather can get some coffee? and a cute waitress to ogle? ’cause i’m willing to cook him a steak, but…boundaries, people. i have boundaries.

years ago, after a few shots of honesty absinthe on a concrete balcony one October evening, Dave and i got to talking about having kids.

i was thirty, he was turning twenty-eight.  we were living in separate apartments in the bleak  post-Soviet suburbs of the Hapsburg Empire, where we taught English to aspiring supermodels and went broke for awhile, soaking up kultur.  we were both in the middle of long, ex-pat divorces.  we were happy.

then he said, i worry about your anger, with kids. i worry that you couldn’t control it.

and my head spun round and i ate his off in one big bite, munch.  end of story.  what anger? whatever could you be referring to?  braaaawww-kk. urp.

erm, or not. but i remember being gobsmacked by the conversation, the vein of indignant righteousness popping out on one side of my forehead while the other brow fell in shame at being judged and found wanting.  so, he’d seen me lose my shit at an officious customs officer AND an on-the-take taxi driver only the week before.  irrelevant, i told myself.  they were adults. if they’d been children trying to fleece me with their petty little graft schemes, i’d have been much more patient.

besides, i might have occasional temper control issues – they run in my family, i heard a voice say petulantly, and cringed – but he was the chronic pain in the ass, after all.  look to thine own molehill, or however the proverb goes.  i was the Nice One of the partnership. he could ask anybody.

i don’t know if he did. i know that we never really revisited the conversation, just kept on keeping on, the way people usually do when neither of them is perfect.  i took my umbrage at his comment and channelled it into trying to be a calmer person, mostly.  it was good for me, i found.  and possible, which surprised me more than i could ever have said.  i occasionally pointed ostentatiously to examples of me holding my temper, especially with Dave himself, and for his part,  he slowly grew into less of a pain.  we were still happy.

and eventually, with much ado and struggle along the way, we found ourselves living in a house with two very short people, both of whom seem to require an inordinate amount of attention. right now.

and mostly i do okay.

not always.

this morning i woke up with a cold like two Mack trucks had parked themselves in my sinuses overnight. i’m drippy and blurry and my head hurts like a sonofabitch and i sneeze every twelve seconds and i’m home all day with a 3 year old going through a whiny phase and a baby who seems to be teething. again. because every 8 month old needs to be able to rip apart raw steak with her 87 chompers, right Mother Nature? yeh. fuck off.

by 10:30 this morning i had morphed from weary, slightly self-pitying maternal figure with a cold into John Goodman in The Big Lebowski.  Oscar demanded milk again, after having been told he’d had enough, reminded to use his pleases and asked to just get on the ever-lovin’ potty for what felt like the fifteenth time that minute.  his last caterwaul of miiiiiiiiillllllk woke the baby from a nap already previously interrupted by the alarm clock in their room going off mysteriously, thanks to his early morning curiosity about the buttons and my inability to figure out the snooze on the damn thing.

i found myself standing in the middle of the bathroom, having separated myself from both the children in some instinctual act of species preservation. i was seething, in full tantrum. my face was red and my voice trilled shrilly up and down.

i was muttering, shut the fuck up, Donny. shut the fuck up, Donny. shut the fuck up, Donny. louder and louder, angrier and angrier, all theatrical pitch and emphasis and vicious rage.  it felt good.  it felt remarkably good.  i was vaguely wishing i’d named BOTH the children Donny, just to make it all the more satisfying. i was also considering tearing out my hair, which seemed like a perfectly pleasant idea at the time.

then Oscar appeared at the door.

it’s not Donny, he said.  it’s BONNIE. silly goose. bbbb-Bonnie. and he walked away.

good. now i’ve taught my kid to cuss me out.

i got him some milk. and thought maybe Dave had a point, all those years ago, and is 10:30 am too early for a shot of absinthe? i have swine flu a cold. it’s medicinal.

do you, uh, get angry?

we were high high up in the nosebleed seats, view almost blocked by the tinny square of the spotlight snaking down in front of the giant monitor where Neil Young rocked out like an aging hobbit, utterly possessed.

he was fabulous. i was rapt. my acoustic inclinations make me a far more avid fan of Neil’s folky-country incarnations than his extended experiments in distortion and the wa-wa pedal, but live, even the 20 minute guitar solos were infectious. dude is hardcore.

we didn’t look so hardcore, ourselves. the march up to the seats had nearly toppled my friend, thirty weeks into her pregnancy. she and i perched in our lofty plastic buckets, catching up, surrounded by elderly bikers and kids young enough to be our children. most of them wore tour shirts and latex hooker chic.  one woman, who bore a surreal resemblance to Carla from Cheers, dropped her binoculars square onto my skull and was too drunk to notice.  or apologize.  in this back o’ the class equivalent where beer and vomit flowed free, my blue spring coat and scarf were prim, i suddenly realized, and my friend – resplendently maternal in a floral shirt and elastic-waisted jeans – barely resembled the barefoot, chain-smoking girl who spent a week in the Via Rail bar car with me fifteen years ago.  i tapped my feet in white boots, probably looking like a misplaced housewife who expected at any moment to find myself magically transported to a Nancy Sinatra show.

i found myself wishing my tattoo was visible in clothing.

we are OLD, i shouted in my friend’s ear.

she laughed, the same girlish pealing giggle she’s had as long as i’ve known her.  i KNOW, she mouthed back at me.  and we goggled at each other, heads cocked, two pixie-haired torn-jeaned free spirits turned to motherly sorts. with purses.

then the cheeky whippersnapper parked two seats down from my friend sparked up something with embers glowed orange in the dark. the first whiff snapped my head around like a dog on a choke chain.

ah, smell, the sense most closely connected to memory. the air got thick with weed and, with a furtive look around i, uh, breathed deeply.  ooooh.  nineteen all over again.  my friend and i grinned, mother-to-be and nursing mother ahaze with guilty pleasure.

smells like Derek, i said. my college boyfriend. the one with the acute case of amotivational syndrome.

somewhere out there in parts unknown, Derek turns 39 years old today.  i met him the April he turned 20, in a heady wet spring when a young girl’s fancy turned to thoughts of love. i was 18. he was funny, brash, a Montreal boy who seemed worldly to my small-town self. he became my first Other, the first for whom i ever gave over that part of me i don’t know if i’ve gotten back since…the sense of the I as singular, as truly solitary and my own.

i no longer remember what it was i loved about him. i remember the curve of his collarbone and a funny little scar on his chest, almost remember the way he laughed. i remember that he lied, not disloyally but to impress, a storyteller, exaggerator, promiser of what could not be delivered. i remember that he bought smokes and borrowed money from me for food and i let him, though i was far more broke than he.  i remember that last excruciating year, when we could not connect and could not fuck and could not, it seemed, figure out where the hell either of us were going let alone how we might go there together, how he blew the LSAT he’d fumblingly placed his hopes in and i pushed and pushed at him to talk and in the end he punched a hole in the cheap wall in the poverty palace that was his apartment. the girl upstairs heard the shouting and the thud and called the cops who came and separated us and gently bullied with questions, sure i was covering a beating. but no, only my heart, struggling to understand how we could love and see no future.  the last April before graduation, we lay awake late together in tears with Neil Young’s Harvest Moon playing in the background, whatever we had been dissolving like the snowbanks with the coming of spring.

and in the morning, a last ritual wake & bake and then convocation and i drove away in my grandmother’s borrowed Datsun and waved, and i have never seen him again.  it was before email, dear readers, in that strange othertime where you could actually lose somebody completely, even if you didn’t really want to.

i heard later that he became a car salesman, and took up golf.

but he was the time and place in my life where the air was thick and green, and for a second at the concert the other night i could almost believe i saw his shadow, a few rows down, if i squinted my eyes just right.

i don’t think i would have changed anything if i had seen him…i’d have sat there, swinging my white boots in my pretty little coat singing my heart out while my lungs burned a little in the hazy air, and smiled, and gone home happy and fed the baby who then woke – probably, erm, with the munchies – all the rest of the night.  that’s all.

i don’t think of him that often. but i remember.

the blog turned three the other day. and it snowed.  huh.  fuck you too, April.

i  could swear i’ve had no time to bake any celebratory blogoversary virtual cupcakes this year, except…erm, they’re virtual.  practically instant. perhaps it just feels like the circles we run in out here are too choked with sadness and fear lately for anyone to want to eat any.

grief makes me uncomfortable.

when i was in high school, five friends and i put on a play called Passacaglia in the local drama festival. we played the denizens and matron of a nursing home, rhapsodizing back on dreams deferred. my cynical, virginal self had to speak the line “we made love” aloud without dissolving into ironic distance or giggles. we powdered our hair, wore Tender Tootsies. the six of us spent a lot of time together that spring, talking about aging and who we hoped we’d be when we got old.

the following spring, one of us drowned, with her older brother.

their funeral was, as you would imagine, enormous. they played U2’s With or Without You. and i sat in the back, compelled and repelled all the same by the proceedings, my eyes on Sarah’s white coffin and the bent heads of her parents. i felt sad and angry. and scornful at the same time, at the weeping and the wailing from those whom i knew had known her no better than i, those who cried because it was a time for crying.

i wanted to say, i knew her. i knew what she wanted to be when she was ninety years old. but my claim to her seemed so small, so peripheral, that to speak it at all felt like playing a part. i did not know if i deserved to mourn.  to do so publicly felt somehow distasteful…not to do so, almost disrespectful.

i always feel weird when private sorrows become hugely public, go viral. our society creates spectacle out of grief, and part of me recoils, afraid of appropriating, claiming what is not my own.  and yet to pretend grief is not in the room when it has swallowed all the air…that only harms, i think, never helps.  grief is the dirty underbelly of living, of community, of friendship.  if ever you think it’s not present, scratch a little deeper. or wait.

in the three years of its existence, the blog has been the site of more public grieving on my part than i care to think about.  it is the place i put things i cannot say in my real life. i do not want to walk into the grocery store today and say, hi. did you know that this is the anniversary of the day things went irrevocably wrong for me?  that four years ago this morning i was airlifted to the IWK because my water broke? i was 24 weeks, almost. my son was born a couple of weeks later. he died the morning of the last day of the month. my son. my Finn, firstborn.

i am so uncomfortable with grief even after the intervening four years that if i had say the words above aloud to someone today, i’d grin all the way through, my rictus of pleasant polite-itude desperately trying to counter the message.

so i tell you, here.  because it is April, again, and i need to mark it.  without the grin. without needing the grin, or tears either.

i’d feel ridiculous telling anyone in person that tomorrow is nine years since my Nannie died, after a good long life and a miserably long death.  but i tell you.  i acknowledge, remember aloud, onscreen. a line or two is all.

and my heart is calmed, having borne its small witness to these people whom i loved, thrown those words into the chorus of sadness and memory and love that exists out here.

which is, i suppose, what we are all trying to do as we muddle through this mess of an April.

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in one of April’s happier anniversary dates at our house, a “yellow cake with a yellow train” has been requested for Oscar’s third birthday next week. i tried to talk him into chocolate, to no avail. nearly-three-year-olds are a hard-headed people, i am discovering. and as sweet and quirky a kid as Oscar can be, he knows what he likes…so yellow his cake shall be. and possibly homemade, if i do not chicken out and buy a box of Betty Crocker yellow.

now, i have no clue how to actually make a cake from scratch, let alone make it, uh, yellow without adding brain cancer food colouring. but i like a challenge, so if you could bring on your best yellow recipes whilst i mutter curses at the babysitter for cultivating strange, non-chocolate-centred tastes in my offspring, that’d be great.

if it’s too ugly to serve to the three-year-old set, rest assured i will hand out virtual slices – and photos – here. one can always aspire to be on Cake Wrecks, if nothing else.

ah, blogging. you make everything just a little less lonely, at least.

the cuts seem to be coming hot and heavy now, after months of doom and gloom breathing down our necks. the downturn is crossing class lines, impacting manufacturing and media and corporate finance alike.

the shit from an inflated, entitled culture that fed on bogeymen and retail therapy is hitting the fan. now the bogeymen appear to be closer to home, bankers and polluters, a different kind of us & them than we’ve grown accustomed to stressing over in the past decade. it’s change, at least. we’ll see about hope.

i am looking hard for hope, peering around corners and down the decolletage of all the pretty girls tarted up to distract me from cultural dissolution.  ooh!  Olympics!  food porn!  mommy bitchfests!  my hands dip into the pop culture well and come up empty, grasping me and mine to me all the closer. i am looking for work in this economy, and i have kids i want to provide both a home and a healthy world for in the midst of this hysteria. i do not want to be the Joads, fleeing the dustbowl in our jalopy. i do not want to go up in flames or fourhorsemen.

part of me tires of hearing it all, wants to close in on myself and hunker down with my backyard tomato plant and my babies. i want to say, i feel helpless.

but a little voice that speaks an old, blood tongue deep in my familial bones says, don’t.

yes, there are terrible things going on.  yes, there is insecurity.  fear is eating at us, as a culture.  this is not a fear we can wall ourselves away from…this fear chews at all the fat we thought we’d socked away, untouchable. this fear makes us angry and protective and shrill, seagulls from Finding Nemo.

it’s easy to be transfixed by the sight of our ship that was a-comin’ in going down instead.   but the voices of my grandmothers, who lived through the Great Depression young and poor and Scots Protestant proud whisper, if we live as islands, we will die as islands. i think they mean at least metaphorically, but they were fierce and a wee bit harsh, those grandmothers. plain speakers, they hiss, stop yer whinin’ and get out and DO. grow. help. share. use your talents, use what you got. or helplessness in the face of this recession will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

the human interest stories i used to hear on the news don’t seem to be getting much play lately. we’re all downturn all the time, visuals of houses foreclosed upon our Dorothea Lange equivalencies, unemployment stats riveting us. these things matter. but if a magic wand fixed it all tomorrow, our world would still be a place of hurt, with cancer and hunger and loneliness.  helplines still need volunteers.  kids still need recess monitors.  seniors and their caregivers still need support in the face of dwindling health care and mental health resources. places like the Greater Good Network, where you click ye olde mouse once a day to accrue sponsored donations to causes like literacy, breast cancer research, rain forest preservation, animal shelters, and hunger are finding their clicks have dropped significantly. but all it takes is a computer and two minutes.  will it save the world? nope. will it save your mortgage? nope. but as long as you have a computer, can you do it every day? yep.  and you can buy fair-traded products from their sponsors for everybody’s birthday gifts, too, for less than you’d often spend at Walmart. the habit of considering the greater good, even in something as simple and surface as clicking a daily link, may help all of us begin to reconstruct our society as the place we’d like it to be.

hope won’t hurt. the lovely and talented shutter sisters are vying for the grand prize in Microsoft’s Name Your Dream Assignment – $50,000 plus the glass & technology to travel the world. they want to photograph stories of hope, focus our eyes on hope. you can vote for them here, if you like. check out the contest, at least. if you use Microsoft products at all, and even the most open source and Machead-inclined among us end up doing so almost inevitably at some point, you may as well direct a little of what the company is doing with its profits. beats what banks seem to have been doing with theirs.

there is an old adage of questionable origin that an ancient Chinese blessing and an ancient Chinese curse merge in the words, may you live in interesting times. we do, unquestionably. whether we make of them a blessing or a curse is, at least in small part, up to us.

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what are your hopes, for your self and your family, for your culture and your world?  what do you feel you can and can’t impact?