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Pushing through the market square, so many mothers sighing
News had just come over, we had five years left to cry in
News guy wept and told us earth was really dying
He cried so much his face was wet, then I knew he was not lying

i think i have post-cultural depression.

you may not have heard of this bleak state of affliction –  i, uh, just coined it – but you might still be suffering more than you think.  symptoms may vary…but one minute you’re bumbling along, feeling like you belong to a people, a history, a place in time, and the next the whole ass-end has dropped off the cart and you notice that you’re living in a shallow, consumerist, spectacle-feeding pond-bottom where people are irrationally attached to a whole myriad of contradictory and self-sabotaging behaviors, including but not limited to bikini waxing and reckless use of Hummers.  the cacophony of mud-slinging from all sides starts to buzz in your ears and you begin to despair of common ground or cohesion or any kind of future whatsoever for a species so Babel-stricken and though you’re definitely not the millenarian type you begin to wonder, really wonder. you avert your eyes from the world, then, stick fingers in your ears and sing “lalala can’t HEAR you” but it all leaks in anyway.  and it chills you to your bones, because for a split second you can see through time and your time looks like nothing so much as Roman ruins in waiting, a diorama of the blithe deaf and blind.

people with post-cultural depression can be found hunched frozen over their Twitter keyboards, at a loss to condense boundless terror and angst into 140 characters or less.

I heard telephones, opera house, favourite melodies
I saw boys, toys electric irons and t.v.s
My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there

we watched a documentary on Antarctica and the polar seas, and the conclusion of most of the scientists onscreen is that we’re doomed.  the vanguard of biologists and ocean experts suspect the tipping point is probably past and we’re on our way to climate change so significant that major extinctions are likely.

and all i could think about was the two little kids sleeping upstairs.

watched another documentary on the 1937 ‘Rape of Nanking’,  and a three-minute scene of an elderly man describing firsthand the death of his mother and baby brother by bayonet made me break down sobbing.  man’s inhumanity to man, same old song, seventy-odd years ago but i know it unfolds everywhere in every war and i hear there are wolves at the door, destruction in the air.

A girl my age went off her head, hit some tiny children
If the black hadnt’ve pulled her off, I think she would have killed them
A soldier with a broken arm, fixed his stare to the wheels of a Cadillac
A cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest, and a queer threw up at the sight of that

because i have these children, see?  a cliché, damn straight, but all this shit threatening to hit the fan, all this horror of human history, this waste, this helplessness…it’s them i see.  them i am afraid for. i wonder what armageddon i’ve unleashed them into. i wonder if it’s not too late. i am the Tammy Faye Bakker of the agnostic-ish set, wandering around dripping mascara and clutching kleenexes and wailing, repent!!!  who will think of the children?!?

perhaps need to stop watching documentaries. and, uh, all other forms of media.

this despair is not simple fear for my kids. i have that too…the death of one has made me neither immune nor more vulnerable to that bogeyman…just…acquainted.  i can sit quietly with those fears, look them in the eye. but this is not lung failure or childhood cancer or a car accident or even predators…this is a fear beyond my kids’ individual lives and lifespans, a fear of the ultimate contract breach.  i am afraid that they will have to contend with a world without a future.

and i will have to say, yeh, i, um, recycled. guess that helped, huh?

Your face, your race, the way that you talk
I kiss you, you’re beautiful, I want you to walk

maybe if i believed in an afterlife or much of anything, i’d be better with the whole prospect. but i’m reverent mostly to the shades and shadows of beauty and joy that filter down to us humans in our simple, incarnate selves…the baby laughing with her whole body, her brother’s goodnight litany that extends to every soul he’s ever met, the glances, tired and solemn, that pass between Dave & i as we struggle through another half-sleepless breakfast still as present as we can be to this thing we’re doing as a family, the sound of that last high, harmonic note in the final verse of The Band’s The Weight.  i’m a sucker for this whole heritage of being human thing. and i’m scared we’re fucking it irrevocably up. right now, just in time for the two little people sleeping upstairs to reap the whirlwind.

the sorrow and shame of that possibility sits on me like a whole other skin.

perspective is hard to get out here on the misty slough of despond.  part of me hopes maybe i’ve just finally unhinged, and need to go gnash my teeth and rend my garments and maybe spend a few years sitting atop a forty-foot pole like the crazy doom-saying prophets of old…hell, their worlds seldom ended, at least not like they’d foretold.

part of me hopes that all this fear is part of a process of learning how to change, maybe even drastically enough to make a difference.  part of me hopes someone out there will say, me too. and this is what helps…

part of me hopes somebody invents a Prozac for this malady and fast, so i can stop looking at my offspring like poor doomed children. it’s bad for discipline.

We’ve got five years, stuck on my eyes
Five years, what a surprise
We’ve got five years, my brain hurts a lot
Five years, thats all we’ve got

– Five Years, David Bowie (first released the year before i was, um, born)

an old friend came into town last week on her way to a conference not far away. she was a friend in our expat days, someone we spent late nights and hangovers with, someone whose apartment floor we crashed on, whose ashtrays and rare collection of actual decent English books we made free with.

she arrived as my brain was waddling knee-deep, delayed but engaged, through the soupy fascination of online point and counterpoint about what it means to be a woman, whether motherhood is a dividing line more definitive than the others that mark us.

my friend moved back to Canada around when we did, to study obscure bits of Russian history and politics.  she’s currently doing a Ph.D, and is spending her mid-thirties immersed in student life in a communal house littered with Doc Martens. she has an indie music show on the campus radio station, and her fiancé, who arrived with her, is eight years younger than she. both have hair to their waists.

they arrived at our house right exactly in the midst of the chaotic ballet of suppertime. it was potty-training week for one child and teething and first-foods week for the other.  tofu and baby cereal and Thomas cups half-full of milk were strewn around the kitchen along with the ingredients for the curry i’d make later for the adults, and the baby was fussing in her high chair whilst Dave and i improvised “pooping is so fun” songs to the half-naked boy perched on his throne in the middle of the kitchen floor. the boy who hadn’t pooped in two days, because the power of withholding was a mad concoction he’d discovered two nights before when we got ourselves all het up about imminent potty success and a poop party and pretty much terrorized him into constipation. so there we were, all nonchalant-like.

oh hi! hugs. you brought champagne? wonderful. i’m shouting over the howling baby, who has developed an occasional but vehement stranger aversion. i unrolled a breast sloppily from the armour of my nursing bra, rocking rhythmically.

our friend had knit Oscar a hat, a fabulous fish creature which i mistook for a dinosaur. it itches, he complained, without guile. she looked crushed. he saw this and kept it on. he liked her on sight.

our guests perched on stools in the midst of the chaos, trying gamely to keep a so how’ve you been? conversation going betwixt the dance of chopping and feeding and creating a poop-positive environment and Oscar retrieving most of his toys from the playroom for them to admire.  she told of a trip to St. Petersburg – the Russian one, not Florida – and a summer in Spain and he showed off the amazing silver jewellry he creates and i interjected inanely with salient comments like wow! and where? and omygodDaveithinkhe’spooping!

like our noses couldn’t tell.

so the offending prize was duly carried away and celebrated in absentia with chocolate chip cookies and high fives and then it was bedtime and our entire family disappeared upstairs for the usual ablutions of tooth-brushing and bathing and medication-doling and stories and the very fussy Josephine settled only to let loose with a torrent of howlage that recalled me upstairs only minutes after i’d made it down, and kept me up there for what felt like the entire night but was actually only 20 minutes or so. i was afraid they’d drink all the champagne without me.

finally, we ate. and my friend asked, so what do you do here, for fun? is there much of a music scene? you doing any theatre? and i looked at her like she was speaking Swahili and chirped, uh, i have book club tomorrow night! like a birthday-party magician who’s been asked to conjure a pony but can only come up with a lame and slightly off-topic rabbit.  i didn’t admit that i couldn’t actually remember what we were reading for book club and went on that yes, there is a decent arts community here but we don’t go OUT really and i caught my friend’s head tilt and the chasm between us gaped and i realized that it was pointless for me to assert that i’m happy in spite of how it sounds because that would just be protesting too much. and i felt like i might as well just lie down and die in my apron, and stick a sign over me saying here lies Bonnie, the caricature of motherhood, fit only to be pitied and judged…unless you Get It.

but here’s the thing.

my friend has kids.

two of them. she had them young and she was the primary caregiver to a girl and a boy thirteen months apart for years while their dad drove a truck until when they hit school she hit a wall and went out and found herself and shares custody of these almost-teens while she studies and makes for herself a life that has to be very different from the one she lived for five years while they were small.

and still, much as she has a heart the size of Texas and charmed Oscar and cooed over Josephine, she doesn’t Get It anymore. it was as plain as day, written all over her face…she has simply forgotten that there could be a life so circumscribed by bodily functions and one’s own lack of sleep.  maybe it shocked her to discover that it wasn’t just her and her circumstances that made those early years so crazy, that two little kids blows most of us out of way out of the hipness pond for awhile, if not forever…but it shocked her, that much was clear.  i was not entirely the person she came to see, even if she was as gracious as could be about it.

we are both girls and both women, my friend and i, depending on whether the topic of conversation is silly or serious. we are also both mothers. but one of us is in a place where the energy for outside stimuli is sucked out of me on a regular basis by tears and poop and guiding and comforting and all those things that my children will only come to me for overtly for a few more years, really. she gives me hope that someday my conversations will NOT be about poop…and in the interim, i hope she – and you – will bear with me.

happy International Women’s Day, chicas.
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how have your friendships been impacted by children?  did your friends have kids earlier or later than you, or at all?  does how you perceive other women – or interact with them – shift according to their parenting status?

i woke up last night in the dark hours confused, heart pounding, uncertain of where i was. i’ve been sleeping with earplugs and not sleeping very well even at that but i had dropped deep and in the glub-glub hum of my own head had drifted far, far away, so much so that waking to my own tangled sheets and the baby’s cot beside me was startling.

in my dream i’d been deep sea diving, the flick of my flippers propelling me like a porpoise, all grace and power and weightless agility.  then, wham, i was beached in bed with cold feet and dry mouth, totally subject to gravity.

i grabbed onto my pillow, bewildered but relieved.  i am terrified of diving.

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i’ve spent most of the past month wishing myself elsewhere. the relentless gray and frozen slush of Maritime February has lost whatever charm it may once have had when i was young and slept more.  the call of beaches has been a siren song in my ear lately. it’s funny. i generally eschew sunbathing and stuffing myself into the sausage casing  of a swimsuit, but the feel of warm sand on my feet? oh, i lust. sheer, wet, shameless lust.

while driving the other day – because being sleep-deprived isn’t enough for me, i like to make driving just that leetle bit more thrilling by not paying attention, either – i tallied up the places Other Than Here where i have spent Februaries in the past.

*Vancouver – February ’95 …rainy.
*elsewhere in the Maritimes – Februaries ’89-’94, ’98-2000, 2006 …as frozen & slushy as here. and February 2006 was spent entirely in a hospital room in Halifax. with a stellar view of the slush.
*the Arctic – Februaries ’96 & ’97 …uh frozen. and -70 most of the time. with about four hours of daylight.
*Turkey – February 2001 …coldish, jean jacket coldish, and mostly rainy. still fun.
*Korea – Februaries 2002 & 2003 …coldish, though with cherry blossoms beginning to bud on the trees. they have real spring there, the kind that doesn’t just sneak up for a wet week in late May.
* Thailand – February 2004 …ah. there we go. sigh. THIS is the way to spend February. warm sand. the best food in the world. fresh coconut shakes. ancient monuments. gaudy temples. ladyboys. liquor served in little sand pails.

(admittedly, Dave & i got ourselves robbed on Valentine’s Day that February, but we kinda primped ourselves up and begged for it, so you can’t hold it against Thailand. we stayed up late at a little outdoor beach bar drinking way too many of those little sand pails filled with Singapore Slings and, somewhere about one am and three sheets to the wind we decided to wander home along the beach and go swimming.  without our clothes.  or wallets…which we left in the sand where we, uh, thought we could see them. in the dark. ’cause we’re superheroes like that.  when we stumbled back up out of the deliciously warm water and realized our clothes had been rifled through and our wallets were short on cash, we just thanked god & robbers for leaving our passports intact. drunk tax, as they say. should YOU ever visit a beach where the drinks come in delightful little pails, please do not be so stoopid.)

Thailand is where i wish i was, especially when it is cold and gray here and i long to disappear from the drudgery of diaper, rinse, repeat and are those mashed peas dried onto the side of the potty or no?  Thailand, you have become the fictional paramour of all my tourist fantasies. you don’t even need to send roses.

just let me stay above water.

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is it mixing metaphors to say that the first time i went diving, it was for a swan song?

we were far from home and falling apart and we knew we would not make New Years’ but still we booked for Christmas on a Thai island paradise, the honeymoon we’d never had. walking out of the airport into the nighttime swelter, curiously fragrant, i saw the box marked “Passengers, please leave guns here” and knew i was not in Kansas anymore. we sang carols over warm Southern Comfort Christmas Eve in a room with a fan and two twin beds, and in the morning the trail of ants to our sticky glasses was a thousand strong and there were flowers in my hair and i missed a cocky hairpin turn on my rented motorcycle and ground out in a gravel spray on the way to a Golden Buddha we never did find. and in a cheap hotel the last night in-country we sat over complimentary toast triangles and he was the one who asked for a divorce but i was the one who made him, too cowardly to own the words myself, and it was done.

in between, there was the diving. he’d always wanted to. i thought i had too, which is really to say i’d never thought much about it except that i liked Jacques Cousteau documentaries and no other opportunity had ever presented itself. and then we were sitting in a little training room and suddenly there was an unfamiliar queasy hum in my head and my mind flailed for the exit but i’d already paid and so  i donned my tank and my mask and we jumped in.

underwater, even a few feet underwater, is a world unto itself.

sometimes the human psyche can only handle so many brave new worlds.  sometimes, when a person who cannot swim and who’s just left all ties behind and moved halfway around the planet finds herself underwater with her mask leaking chlorine into her eyes and her marriage to the one person within five thousand miles who knows her name crumbling, she begins to feel a little untethered.

i lost my shit, panicked.  tried to kick up to freedom, to the known, to the sense of safety i suddenly noticed i’d utterly abandoned.

the instructor, a newbie, held me down.  in seven feet of water.  apparently they try to break trainees of panic surfacing – the bends can kill, you know.

she broke me, indeed. panic swelled to desperation, then deflated. i gave in, to all of it. i sank to that pool floor and sobbed, sobbed out all the loss and confusion and fear in the middle of a fucking public diving lesson, in the strange solitary underwater hum, while the newbie instructor tried to pry me off the floor of the pool and the man who would become my ex floated quietly in front of me, steadying me with his eyes.

and then i surfaced and went back to our hut alone, to pack.

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robbed. humbled. did i mention sunburnt? the Thai tourism board will be hiring me any day.

i made four trips to Thailand between December 2000 and February 2004….one of the very few countries i’ve ever visited repeatedly without working in.  that first visit stripped me naked, made me feel – perversely – utterly at home there, at home in my foreign skin and wanderings in a way i was nowhere else during those years abroad.  i left something of myself – tears, but also pride, and a blind clinging to the known – behind at the bottom of the pool that afternoon.  and ever after, when i am weary and worn and in need of a good skin-shedding, it seems to be where i long to go to warm my bones and rest myself and surface, changed and ready to go on.

though i have never again felt the compulsion to go along on someone else’s adventure sport lesson, thank you very much.

do you have a corner of the earth that calls you, that you long to see or return to? do you have things you’re scared to do?

is it still fucking winter where you are, too?

Originally uploaded by o&poecormier

her first solids, if a thin rice-oatmeal gruel can really be considered solids.

and there i am, pimping the mush, coaxing her little bird mouth to open, beaming with pride when she reaches out for more. smiling, watching, as i push her off the ledge.

into whatever her life’s relationship with food will be.

until today, it’s been subsumed in her relationship with me. she lights up when she sees me, this girl, but her love is that of the gourmand for a good meal. i am her walking cheeseburger, her magically reappearing smorgasbord. but lately, she’s been watching suspiciously as the rest of us bite and munch our way through our days, realization clearly dawning that she’s been missing something. yesterday she took a swipe at my ginger cookie as she lolled in my arms, and nearly wrested it clear out of my hand.

time, obviously, to break out the gruel.

her reaction telegraphed across her face like a storm squawl that ended at the pot of gold, all what in the sam hill is THAT and oh oh oh lord have mercy where can i get more?!? only gruel and thin gruel at that but she comes from a long line of canny Scots on my side and the gruel we call porridge is haute cuisine for our kind so she had no complaints. at least until an hour later when she vomited all over the kitchen and then spent three hours fussing and crying out in her sleep.

uh, i’m going to blame the teething for that one. i’m hoping food is kinder to her than that.

what i’m hoping is that she and food have a long and happy life together. i’m hoping that the dairy sensitivities fade as she grows, so that she can someday enjoy the melting sensation of a soft brie – or Velveeta – or her tongue. i’m hoping no real allergies develop, the scary kind, the anaphylactic kind that will leave us scrambling to shield her from foods as from traffic or dread disease.

i hope she will find pleasure in food, in trying things…at least as an adult. i hope she will be more like her father, the culinary adventurer, and not like me. for me it’s mind over matter, food. i’ve never even tried a clam because the idea of eating its WHOLE BODY freaks me out. i’ve passed up caribou eyeballs, silkworm larvae, wok-fried cockroaches. i’m not sorry. but i am kind of sorry that i’m the sort of person more likely to starve than adapt. i hope she can come to see food as less fraught with strictures of culture and comfort than i do.

and i hope the pleasures she finds in eating are not false promises, substitutes for love that is never enough, empty fill for aches she cannot face.  i hope that i can give her what she needs to grow strong and self-confident, so that the inverse of our current nursing relationship does not come to pass and find her seeking ME in a cheeseburger, or ten.

i hope she can love herself with food, respect her body in the ways she feeds it. i hope she never looks in the mirror with loathing, or spends seasons with her head down a toilet or her mouth barred shut in a desperate feint to control the mess of living.

i hope there is enough food. i hope i can feed her well and healthily, without too much fear for the grocery pennies or for empty silos, drought, famine.  she is born to plenty, this one, all double chin and thigh rolls, no trace of preemie limbs left. yet so many starve in other places while food rots here. and her generation may know more of that than i can imagine, if we keep driving the planet beyond capacity, using resources in ways that maximize profits and not human dignity, decency. every tuna can in the local grocery store here is labelled product of Thailand. there is no sustainable tuna fishery anywhere near Thailand, according to any sources i can find. will such a shortsighted system survive her lifetime? we are precariously imbalanced. and selfishly, because she is my child, i hope the collapse is not so drastic that she must scrabble in the dirt for sustenance as so many must already.

what i wish for her is food to feed her…food as blessing, without the curse of too much or too little. with tears in my eyes, because i find it hard to believe that such a thing could be possible.

all this i offer up, smiling at her as fat hands reach for the bowl. today, daughter. today, you started.

the year i was in seventh grade my mom and i moved across town. we’d lived on the second floor of an old century house, all slant ceilings and mysterious cupboards, most of my childhood. the elderly couple who owned the place and lived below were like grandparents to me…but the street was an oasis of quiet in an otherwise seedy neighbourhood and nowhere near where i went to school, or where my friends lived. and the old couple were growing older and my mother decided it was time we got movin’ on up to a deee-luxe apartment within walking distance of, well, everywhere we went.

only problem? our new digs were not in the sky. they were in a basement.

aesthetically, i was a naive, optimistic little soul who embraced the varnished plywood and ill-fitting doors of the new place enthusiastically enough. i was thrilled by the built-in ledge that ran around my bedroom at ground level, and decorated it with artfully placed cassette cases – Luba here, Synchronicity and Rock Hits ’83 there. i liked being able to walk to school, rather than shunted across town by a harried mother trying to get to work on time. i liked being able to walk home after school and sneak in some General Hospital before said mother got home even more.

giant bumblebees had nested in the unused cable hole and apparently there was a young guy who lived upstairs and used to stumble in drunk on weekends. those things bothered my mother, but not me. what made me come to hate the place was the silverfish.

i still remember the first one. i found it in the tub a couple of months after we moved in. the teardrop shape of it, tiny, suddenly moving as if with jet speed, slithering down the drain. i leaned in that first time, curious…i’d never seen one before in my life.

within weeks we had an infestation that still makes me shudder. our apartment was next to the laundry room, and the combo of standing water and darkness seemed to have produced a bumper crop of the little creatures, hundreds of them wandering blindly into our bathroom. all the time. my mother tried javex, drano, all measures of elbow grease and prayer. not a thing worked. they thrived, and the bathroom crawled with them. i don’t remember when i crossed the line from curiosity and mild distaste to phobia…but by the time we bailed and moved in with my grandmother the following summer i was a full-blown bug hater, scarred for life. the rational, adult part of me knows no bugs in the Canadian climate can actually hurt me much, but it crawls? i creep out. and i have a special cotton-mouthed place in my heart for silverfish.
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why this little walk down the sunny cobbles of memory lane, you ask? well, i had a little reunion with one of my old friends the silverfish today. only the little fucker wasn’t on my bathroom floor. it was in my DRINK. floating. in my soy chai latte, doing backstroke.

in my half-finished soy chai latte.

when i quietly presented the barista with said insect on my plastic spoon she gagged – as i, incidentally, continue to do, um, nine HOURS later because i am a gentle soul with a suggestible mind and i am convinced the slight tickle in my throat is because i swallowed the little fucker’s kin and ewwwww – and then she said sorry, that’s disgusting, hey Terry come here see what ended up in this latte you poured and gave me my five bucks back.

then she stopped short and said, errrrr, wait…did you just want another one?

no. no thank you.

even the idea of drinking water makes me think of silverfish escaping taps and drains.

i think they could’ve at least thrown me a freebie card, for damage control. and for making me re-live grade seven, thank you very much. has anybody ever sued a coffee conglomerate for beverage therapy costs?

i went to bed last night with a conversation i couldn’t speak aloud running through my head.

my OB – or rather, my former OB, as Dave, my mother, and various medical professionals have begged me to swear that i am never, ever putting anyone through another of my “special” pregnancies – has become something of a friend. which is great and weird at the same time, likely on both sides. she was here last night with my book club, and when the conversation turned to twitter i flipped open the laptop and showed off the shiny silly wonder of social software and explained how i feel like i “know” most of the people i follow because we’ve been reading each other for years through my blog. oh yeh, i have a blog, sez me. nearly three years. and then my eyes caught on her face and i wondered if she were wondering like i’d be wondering about trust and the strange double-edge sword of professional intimacy and being a character in others’ stories, and whether there was anything in here that in a town this small she’d rather not have broadcast and the words came chirping up in my throat oh! i said nice things about you! but i swallowed them because they seemed so trite and obsequious and sometimes the elephant in the room is perhaps better left alone with the cake crumbs than spoken of, or to.

but what i wanted to say, what i went to bed still trying to give voice to in my head an hour later, was
i only started this two weeks before Oscar was born. after the bedrest was over, and almost exactly a year after that day in Room 2 when you said “i’m sorry, it IS amniotic fluid after all” and you called for the airlift and i still somehow thought everything would be okay but it wasn’t.

i started it because i’d been a mother since that day but not in a way i could speak of and i was facing down another birth and apparent, hopeful normalcy and “real” motherhood and it frightened me because i had no idea how to reconcile those selves and all the subjectivities relating to motherhood that i’d ever seen reflected in culture didn’t resonate with where i was and i figured if i could write, maybe i could reconcile the mess in my own head.

but we don’t talk that way at book club.

i don’t talk that way out loud much at all. unless i’m teaching, and even then, i stumble. verbal me and written me have different fluencies, different contexts. written me is comfortable with the language of the subject, the myriad of selves we humans portray and embody and understand ourselves to be. written me could negotiate motherhood with all its fierce love and exhaustion and bewilderment and grief and mundanity in a way that verbal me still trips over, feeling exposed and guilty if i articulate the ambivalence of parenting aloud.

the kids? oh, they’re good. baby has colic. ummm…but she’s a joy. cue smile.
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i woke up this morning to the news that John Updike died yesterday, and i thought, yes. that’s it.

i feel like i’ve been watching the blogosphere – or at least this corner of it – run out of steam lately. i suspect we’ve collectively hit a place where our revelations feel like deja vu…like i could write this but so-and-so wrote in the same vein last week and hell, why bother? so many of us don’t, self-silencing because the sheer volume of what we’ve put out here has made us aware both that we’re not alone in our experiences of parenting but also that we’re, well, maybe not particularly special in our experiences of parenting. saturation.

but i also see an overall sea change in the ecosystem we release our posts to, when we do write them.

what blew me away when i belatedly discovered that i wasn’t blogging in a vacuum out here was the richness of the subjectivities mothers were exploring in their writing. like the seething mid-century suburbs of Updike’s Rabbit series, the public veneer of motherhood hid complex inner lives and a multitude of aspirations and secrets and feelings and validations. i didn’t see this version of mothering on tv, or in most of the ads and products aimed at my burgeoning belly…at best i found commodified hipster defiance without other content, at worst the same vapid recycling of mother-as-tender-selfless-fulfillment image that’d been hanging around Tide commercials since my childhood. but in blogs, i found conversation and exploration, stretching of these images, poking fun at them and at ourselves. i found moments of honesty and disillusionment and connection. i found a place to speak truths that verbal me could never say aloud…and people who would say, “i hear.”

it was no sheltered idyll, detached from a crass real…by the time i wandered into it, the blogosphere was actively trying to figure out how to make money, and new aggregator sites popped up all the time. but it was an economy that hadn’t yet figured itself out and narrowed its options. many fine writers found recompense for their words; many more found the recompense slim. pros and cons and implications of ads were discussed. comment whoring was owned up to. the subject as mother/writer/marketer became a common one, an overt one…and we were all marketing, even those of us who never ran an ad.

we still are, except the market has flattened out and the meta-conversations are no longer so fresh. lately, i feel like the mass, stereotypical mainstream mommy images have re-emerged to suck up too much of the conversation, subjectivities once imposed on us taken up as self-fulfilling prophecy, especially on the commercial side of things. snide tones that once seemed refreshing or ironic now resonate with weary, petty bitchiness. the aggregator sites drip with celebrity gossip and cheap wit and outrage and clearly they succeed so this must be what we’re buying with our clicks, our comments, but the tireless self-promotion of it all feels brittle to me. our little ecosystem of multiple possibilities is more toxic, the subjectivities narrower.

and yet i’m still here, blathering on. and reading, just from a smaller pool. and still happy with blogging, for what it is. because twitter’s 140 characters don’t quite allow me the scope to say more than the kids? oh, they’re good. baby has colic. ummm…but she’s a joy. cue smile.

and if you’re still here…i’m glad. and if you’re my former OB, i promise not to write about you anymore.
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if you have a blog, how would you describe its subjects, the yous that populate it?

somewhere, in a box that has gone through four or five moves unopened and unsorted, is a picture. a snapshot of a woman – a girl, really – in a Kodachrome red polyester mini-dress, hugely pregnant. her hair is black. her smile fills the photo. on the back it says, Christmas Eve, 1971.

i was born exactly a month later. the film must have been developed afterward, because under the date in my father’s idiosyncratically beautiful handwriting, the snapshot notes, “Bonnie Elaine has gotten so big!!” they did not know i was a girl, did not choose my name before my birth – i have always known this. but when i found the photo a decade or so ago, cleaning out my grandmother’s apartment in preparation for the final move to the nursing home, i cried. because there was so much i did not know, had no memory of. the intact family, the young father writing my full name with pride, the way my mother smiled, curtains yet undrawn.

by the next Christmas they had torn each other apart in ways that we are all, thirty-seven years later, still trying to recover from, and it was irrevocably over.

the picture shocked me, when i found it. the girl in the picture – my mother, impossibly young and shyly deferential, hopeful – broke my heart. i could see the script, knew what came next. what i hadn’t known, until that moment, was how much got lost in the unravelling of it all.

i grew up in a family that did not speak of rupture. my mother was a canon of propriety, a brave one-woman show of sacrifice, the two of us a rigidly upright single-parent family in a town where the term usually connoted stigma, even trash. she bought me a pass out of lowered expectations, and out of sentimental longing for a past i couldn’t remember. we were what we were, and a bright and shining – if threadbare – face was the mask worn to the world. but the facade balanced on a carpet beneath which much destruction and mess were swept, much confusion and woundedness pre-processed and handed down as truth. the divorce and its betrayals i knew too much about too early, but no one had heard of therapy, not here. the disintegration of my family of origin and of my parents as non-embittered entities was presented not as my own loss to grapple with but something in the past, sterile and at safe remove. “my parents divorced when i was an infant but i have a good relationship with my father,” i was instructed to write in my fourth grade autobiography. i do not remember having any idea of how to articulate such a thing publicly in any other way. only nearly twenty years later, holding that photograph in my grandmother’s empty apartment, did it occur to me that i’d been sold a line…that maybe i had a right to feelings and thoughts on the subject, after all.
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i started this blog two weeks before Oscar was born, less than a year after Finn died. i was struggling with the fact of my feelings on a subject that would have made me profoundly uncomfortable to discuss aloud…with whether, on the cusp of Oscar’s birth, i had the right to feelings about Finn at all, at least feelings not as tidied and safely neutered as those i’d learned about my parents’ divorce…or later, my own. the blog offered sanctuary from a lifetime of self-silencing, of living an internal reality different from any external indication of identity. it became a place where i could make up my narrative of parenthood as i went along, and weave both my sons in.

i think it saved my sanity. i think you all did.

but i am not in that place anymore: there is a sea change at work in me, a transition i do not yet understand. i look ahead to 2009 and the blank slate of it baffles me, leaves me nervous. the primary goal of 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 is finally shelved…we have our family, are blessedly, quietly triumphant in the two Christmas stockings that we stuffed for little people last week. after five calendar years with highs and lows marked out almost entirely by pregnancies, i do not want to be pregnant in 2009. the lifelong fantasy of my children yet-to-be has been retired, wistfully but with finality. but what now?

Posey talks to me, these days, soft little coos and the sweetest giggles my ears have ever heard. i am allowed to say this, i think, because Oscar was neither cooer nor giggler, his vocalizations late and sparse. but lately the words tumble over each other in complex pronouncements of will and observation and imagined delights, even his brief stutter suddenly overcome, left in dust. he mimics what i say, how i act.

and i am more and more uncomfortable in the skin i see reflected. i am strained, i am tired, yes. but i am also too quick to carp, to judge, too easily made anxious by departures from whatever script i’ve concocted at the time. my household ego is fragile, particularly with my partner. and lately i have found myself puzzling ’til my puzzler is sore about where it all goes from here, about how, now that we have these wanted children, to raise them. i have no model for doing that in partnership with anyone…the children or their father. yet i do not want to beat my head against the same walls of authoritarianism and appearances my mother beat hers into with me. i do not want to teach my kids that their feelings matter only if externally validated.

i mean no indictment of people i love, people who did well to survive. i just feel at sea, shamefully unprepared for this business of living, even when i’ve been at it all these years. tired of feeling like i have to work everything out from scratch, and certain that i don’t know how to talk about any of this in ways that are publicly appropriate and still honest. we remain children of our upbringing, often in ways invisible to us, long after we’ve left childhood behind.

hence my silence. i am here. blogging may be dead, proclaim the pundits rounding out the year, but i am not particularly done with it. it’s just, to quote Leonard Cohen, that i can’t speak.

my words lie dormant, taut and jumbled under a cocoon, as i drag myself through the metamorphoses of whatever is struggling, slouching into being, and i hold my breath at all this crazy unknown ahead and hope that this year’s Christmas photos do not someday make my children well up with tears at all that could have been if pride and patterns learned and stubborn foolheadedness had not gotten in the way.

because it feels like a precipice, this new year looming, waiting to be born.
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what do you see in the tea leaves for 2009? what do you hope for? and what do you do when the words fail you?

it’s snowing outside and our new furnace is roaring like a jet engine, making Posey and i most efficiently toasty if a wee bit deaf, and i am sitting here nursing her and staring at the tree lights and wondering absently whether the proximity to Christmas means my sudden urge to indulge in a large shot of Bailey’s at 3pm is merely sad or, in fact, festive.

i’ve developed an aesthetic crush on the early sixties, lately.  i blame all the Mad Men episodes i’ve been watching online while feeding the bebe.  she suckles, and i watch crisp suits and wasp-waisted housewives and worldly, shapely secretaries cheerfully destroy their livers, lungs and marriages whilst munching tuna casserole.  them, not me.  i don’t like tuna casserole.  i also don’t much like martinis or affairs or aprons, and my waist currently pudges out from my hips, rather than veering alarmingly inward.  i don’t wear kitten heels…hell, i seldom wear shoes.  so why am i enamoured of their Peter Pan collars and their Marlboros and wingtips and modernist furniture and their bold, splashy print ads and their utter lack of irony and social awareness?

i dunno. i get that lolling about gossiping with ice cubes clinking and cigarettes trailing in the heyday of hateful suburbia was probably dull and stifling and gosh, i have you guys for virtual lolling and you’re all swell but maybe it’s just not the same as having you over for pimento loaf. or maybe i’m just buying the myth of space age plastic and the quaint, whitebread innocence of that otherwise chauvinist, racist, elitist world where all seems so cut and dried and tidy and drinking alone at 3pm is, umm, normal.

sigh. can’t have the Bailey’s anyway…i’m off dairy.  milk seems to bother Posey more than a little booze.  but a girl can dream.
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i am nearly through the second season of Mad Men.  i need a new fetish, my friends.  maybe old episodes of something less likely to drive me to drink?  i’ve missed a lot of reputedly good shows over the last decade or so…what would you recommend? what’s your tv poison? and why?

two sick kids and grandparents visiting while Dave’s away in England. my thoughts clot up for lack of time, for want of downtime in the 24/7 press of feeding and tidying and playing and doing. my house clots up with snot and baby wipes, despite the helpful extra pairs of hands who clean the shed and rake the leaves and shovel the unseasonally early snow and rock the baby. always the relentless present. i long to abdicate, say excuse me. please run my life for a few days whilst i take to my bed. i do not know how. my pride, my foolish pride. someday i will be an old woman tottering my last on spindly legs and i will make my stand by the laundry pile, stubbornly folding clothes until i drop not because i love laundry but because it makes me sweaty with shame and self-consciousness to admit, i cannot. i want rest. sloth, the deadliest public sin, the one i cannot bear to wear in other people’s estimation. the one i chase lustily, glutton-like, in the privacy of my head.

my house is drowning.

or rather, i feel like my house is drowning…to the outside observer, it more likely looks a little cluttered, overstuffed. and dusty, definitely dusty. but i can live with the dustbunnies…we reached a detente years ago, where they keep to their corners and i keep to mine. it’s the clutter, the sense of being crowded in on by stuff, stuff everywhere, that makes me batshit crazy, turns my voice shrill and my eyes all deer in headlights. i have more tolerance for dental drilling than i do for clutter, especially clutter of the sort where there’s really nowhere left to put any frigging thing and you can no longer keep track of what half of it is for or where it would go.

i blame the children.

Josephine, it appears, was born with six suitcases worth of stuff to her name. i swear i didn’t buy it, much…it just materialized with celebrations and kindnesses, donations and gifts and hand-me-downs and my occasional breakdown in the face of wee smocked dresses on sale. Oscar, too, owns more clothes than i do, and seems to sing toys from the sky like birds.

or bird droppings. scattershot, they adorn our den helter-skelter, while i flap about the house trodding on Thomas the Tank Engine and squawking “confusion and delay!” in my best – if unintentional – Sir Topham Hatt imitation. Thomas at least has spent a solid year enthralling my offspring…the charms of others have not been so enduring. i didn’t realize how quickly kids outgrow their toys…that the Little People farm will not do him until he’s twelve, no matter whether i spent fifty bucks on it or not. in any case, old toys are banished to the shed to lie in wait for Posey or for loan to little cousins, and new ones arrive to take their place. the task of trying to squeeze them back into the house when Poe is ready looms like a date with my own personal idea of hell.

yesterday my half-sister, bless her, brought her rainforest swing for Josephine. it’s a gorgeous swing, almost new. the baby loves it. and it has a footprint the size of a small zeppelin…i’ve slept in rooms smaller than the floorspace that swing eats up. i’ve been hyperventilating since it arrived, trying to figure out which wall to knock out in order to make room for the bloody thing. i want it, don’t get me wrong. but i don’t want to give up the room for it. and when your house is twelve hundred square feet, room is not in infinite supply…thus clutter happens.

so much has come so easy. fifty years ago, families of four and five and six children were regularly raised in houses precisely this size, likely with fewer lamentations and a lot less clutter. my mother, who has not hesitated to inform me more than a few times that she got me through to toilet training with only a dozen thin old diapers and a wringer washer, stares in thinly veiled horror at the largesse of toys and outfits that her grandchildren possess. i shrug lamely and swear i didn’t buy it all, and she and i both recognize how lucky i am to be freed from the worry and want that haunted her all through my childhood.

but it’s too much, people. it is a joy and privilege to be able to give my kids some nice things…creature comforts, imaginative toys, cute clothes. i am in no way above the materialism of my world and my time…this age of indulgence that’s crept over all of us – or at least all of us who can lay our hands on credit – has left me thinking little of dropping dollars on things that please me. and things for my children please me. but when we live more simply than most people we know and i still have nightmares wherein colonizing, primary-coloured plastic toys eat me alive whilst playing tinny nursery rhyme tunes, there’s a problem somewhere. and maybe it’s not just that i’m disturbed.

recession scares me, sure. the shitkicking my savings have taken over the past month or so leaves a little tang of fear in my mouth so sour that my brain prefers not to consider the subject at all. but, at the same time, the Scots pioneer deep down in my soul feels freed by the prospect of reckoning, of forced frugality, of a retreat from a culture of such excess that my not-quite-six-week-old owns more stuff than whole families not so far from here whom fortune has not treated so generously. parenting as a consumer pastime is not what i want to be. i need less, folks, less than what i have.

we may all have to make do on less, and i don’t want to paint that as falsely rosy. for some, there is genuinely no wiggle room. but for many of us, less is a very relative term at this juncture…our less still more than any generation before us ever considered having, and much of it unnecessary. i hope our culture can use this downturn to do a little needed paring of our bloat, our clutter. i do not want my children to mistake all this for entitlement, or for happiness. and – for the sake of my sanity – i do not want to step on another godforsaken toy train.

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are you drowning? in stuff, or fear of what a downturn will mean?