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we traipsed into the woods like Hansel and Gretel…except, well, we were the parents. with our mini-me folk in tow. and there was no gingerbread house to be found.

that, and getting lost in the woods in PEI is damn near impossible because if you keep walking you will, indubitably, end up either on a beach or smack-dab in the middle of some nice farmer’s field. with cows.

but still, the woods. and we were trespassing because the only hiking trail i know of around here is part of a government park that’s currently – alas – for sale and locked down for the season so really we were far more wary of park rangers than witches but then, i have authority issues anyway. and there was the smell of pine needles and the slip of moss on old roots underfoot and i remembered coming out to this trail an angsty high school emo kid with my emo friends to write tortured poetry and commune with nature but damn, i did not remember the trail being so steep or my sad legs so jiggly.

nor did i remember the woods being so silent…not a squirrel in sight, to Oscar’s crushing disappointment. nor a birdsong to be heard.

and i wonder if the gumdrop houses haven’t eaten them all up.

i didn’t realize he’d suddenly seem so HUGE.

i didn’t realize how ambivalent i’d feel about that, about his seemingly shocking catapult leap from my baby to this…boy. this boy, this big, solid, willful boy with a sweet streak who’s coping with the arrival of his sibling relatively gracefully, really, but also bringing out the big guns of no and i can’t hear you mama and i’m not going to sleep past 5:45 am nyah nyah nyah thank you very much, ma’am so that my exhausted brain sometimes clamps down on him more sharply than it ought, labelling new behaviors manipulative where really, i can see how they make sense, how they’re a reasonable use of the tools in his arsenal given the upheaval around this place in the last two weeks.

i just didn’t know that, looming over the frail stick limbs of his newborn sister, my boy could seem foreign, could trigger my mama bear protective response against him. ouch. he was here first, says my heart. she’s so breakable, it counters in the same breath, a house divided.

and still he trots over in the morning cooing “my baby!” and even if the proffered kiss is not for me and this decentering has us both a little shaken my heart warms to see him take it all in stride as best he can, facing the world with his chin out like he does, my sunny kid with the hands like meathooks. i marvel at how those paws got so big without me even noticing, each day an increment until the whole escaped me and i wonder if he isn’t secretly sixteen already and i’ve just failed to keep up?

then i stand back and look and am shocked to realize, he’s still little too.

both of us are wandering a strange and tilting path these days, negotiating a family structure in which our roles have shifted, been altered forever. and a part of me longs for space alone with him, not my firstborn but still my first in so many ways, my little boy, my O, my Other. something about the change leaves me with a nagging feeling of anxiety, like in this new completeness and contentment i’d overlooked or undersold the whole that was Oscar and i, bargained it off permanently, irrevocably. in a sense, maybe i have. but then i remember that he has always shared that space of the whole with shadow siblings, his elder brother gone but so present in Oscar’s early days, this always-wanted second – third – child hoped for from the beginning. my guilty heart breathes a sigh of relief, and reads from the Second-Time-Around Parents’ Handbook, Standard Version…what Oscar is to me has not been changed by Josephine…only the lens through which i can focus on him, see him. and it will take time for that to feel balanced again. repeat. catch self. blink back tears at sight of elder child running across lawn like young gazelle, pointing out how fleeting all this is.

we have time, it seems. it seems they will keep growing, these miraculous creatures, the two of them.

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i never really had a brother, though. i have two half-brothers, both younger, one so much so that i was his babysitter and doted on him when they visited in summertimes…but distance made them more like cousins than siblings. i remember some twinges of jealousy when the younger was born…but they were the jealousy of a child who does not have a father feeling replaced by a sibling who will. i do not think i know what it is to be Oscar right now. nor do i have any real expectations of his relationship with Posey. all my female friends growing up – almost without exception – were eldest daughters. all my significant long-term relationships with men – which, admittedly, can be counted on one hand – have been with onlies or with the babies of the family. so i’ve got no model from which to imagine a relationship between a brother and sister, especially one where there’s only a couple of years between the two. and i wonder…is this like having a cat and a dog, or two birds of a feather? will they play together? like each other? drive each other crazy? be there for each other when Dave & i (knock wood) grow old?

i know only the two of them, as individuals, will work out the answers. and yet brothers are such foreign country for me that i cannot imagine anything beyond today, beyond the curly blond head bending to kiss the tiny dark one, and the endless refrain of “is she big enough yet, mama?”

tell me. tell me of brothers and sisters.

September has come, it is hers
whose vitality leaps in the autumn
Whose nature prefers
trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.

– Louis MacNeice

oh September, you’re a tease.

you’re there, just behind the curtain, waiting.  there’s a crispness to the air, suddenly, and it promises sweaters and lined pages all new and clean and the smell of apples and the sour beer of homecoming weekends.  for a moment today i felt it, the call of fall, and it stirred me and something sang out and my step was light and purposeful in beliance of the body i lug around these days mashed into too-small clothes, belly jutting, hips giving way to gravity.  for a moment, i felt at home in myself and in the time-space continuum, because it was autumn and i could smell it on the wind and it was good.

then i loaded myself into the car without air-conditioning, the car that had been sitting basking in the sunshine, and even before i got to the doctor’s appointment all the autumn was gone from my world and i was sweaty and lumpen again and it was me i was smelling.

but you reminded me, September, you reminded me of the season on the wing and the short, bright days coming and for all i may have said about September birthdays suddenly i feel just right about it all.

i am sharp with hope, glassy and jagged, trying to be patient.  so much uncertainty, still.  so much hubris to believe it will all unfold as seasons do, expected and then brought to fruition, natural as the leaves falling.  but this season ahead, i know.  it is mine, has been since i can remember, the one in which i am most myself.  and that old intimacy gives me the oddest comfort in all this anticipation and lurching hope and excitement and trepidation.  fall, i lie to myself.  i am simply preparing for fall.

if i could knit, i would make her a little hat, to wear when we walk in the yellow leaves together.

we left Korea for good that winter.

the fall beforehand was golden and rushed, one of those queerly vivid transition epochs where the body and mind are open and receptive, future utterly unknown and thus all changes possible answers in masquerade.  it is heady, that hurtle towards the break, and for me it was a productive time -i started writing professionally for the first time in years, took up jogging for the first time ever.  looking ahead, i tried to lay ground. looking around me, with eyes that knew i was leaving, i tried to store all that i could of the city and culture, the small apartment with its sliding glass doors, the autumn light pouring in, the sweet-sour tang of mokkoli and cheom-chi kimbap, the hectic market across the street, laden with strange fruit that had become familiar.

in casting ourselves upon the fates that fall, we went whole hog.  i threw out the birth control pills, had my cystic ovaries checked at Our Lady of Mercy Virgin Mary Obstetrics and Gynecology – the head OB had learned his English at a Catholic college in the United States, he informed me proudly – and one Monday morning in November, watched two clear blue lines materialize on a pregnancy test i’d had to play charades to acquire from the apothecary’s on the corner.  there is a lot of vocabulary that a life spent in classrooms and bars does not necessarily teach.

every season of life has its soundtracks.  this one was a single CD, a nothing-else-quite-like it literate and intimate collection of folky imagery-laden songs that a friend who lived in another city had brought one weekend in October, that we played all through that fall and early winter as we planned and packed and i threw up.  those songs, with their quirky rhythm and their haunting, non-linear stories, were burned on me in those months just as Korea was.  i was wax, taking everything in.  and all my hopes and anticipation sang in me to those tunes and words, lullabies to the little life inside around whom all the changes centred.

we brought the CD back to Canada, though the light was harsher here.  the last time i played it was in the hospital after my water broke too too early, headphones stretched across my belly.  i was still hopeful, the laws of inertia internalized to such an extent that continuing to hope was not so hard as it has been ever since.  i chose, the first night after my airlift, in the 3 am quiet of the hospital room, to tune in to the baby inside, to spend what time we had left together present to him or her.  i sang to him, spoke to her – we had been told girl, then boy, then girl again, that time ’round – played him music.  for that three weeks, i was tender and more in-the-moment than i have ever been in my life, connected and maternal in ways i hadn’t imagined i had in me.  until he died in my arms.  all those months of hoping and planning, all we’d tried to build toward, all the light and song packed into that period, dissipated into ash.

last night, Dave and i were watching back episodes of a tv show on the computer.  in the climactic moments, a song started up, a song neither of us had heard.  but he recognized the voice…the same singer whom, as if by unspoken, accidental agreement, we have not listened to in over three years.  my ears perked up, and just the familiarity of a single word, characteristically pronounced at the end of a line, assured me he was right.  the scene unfolded on the screen in front of us.  but i didn’t see it anymore.

i saw a small apartment with muted light falling over a sleeping mat, a huge desk rescued from the side of the street one evening.  i saw the campus-issue furniture and the pillows brought back as bounty from Thailand, the coffee grinder propped up against the yogurt maker and the funny little packets of bacteria bought at the same apothecary’s as the pregnancy test.  i saw ashtrays and ESL books, plastic tables set outside the neighbourhood corner store for drinking at, neon signs advertising singing rooms, internet cafes, chicken.  i saw rows and rows of persimmons, ripe to bursting, and crisp pears that look like apples, and packets of salty seaweed for snacking on.  i saw, though i had not known i remembered.  and i felt it all again, the hope and the shattering that followed, as if the episode we were watching were one from our own lives.

and i wept, because i knew the ending to all that risk and hope and openness.  because it was like watching a replay of my own personal train wreck, and i could not shout out a warning, could not do anything but sit and let the brokenheartedness of it all wash over me.  and because it was beautiful, too, to have it all come flooding back, to remember what it felt like to be in that skin and that mind, faithful for the last time to the belief that all will ultimately be right.

i like to think i’ve healed.  but not once in this pregnancy, or with Oscar, have i stretched headphones over my belly, unselfconscious, and sung to my child.  not like that.

i don’t even know if i should try.  i don’t know if i can.  i wish i could, though.  i realized last night that i wish i could.

out. Saturday morning in the zoo-like crush of the local farmer’s market. old ladies and old hippies sweep by me, children push past. all our bodies are just a little too close – and mine just a little too large to accommodate the dodging i attempt – but the thronging mass is cheerful, busily engaged with wax beans and homemade sausages and shawarma with tabouleh, please.

i am standing, Oscar in my arms, his hands snaking over my shoulder to swipe at the display of chocolate chip cookies behind us. i am balancing my market bag and the giant lettuce i’ve just purchased – from which i half expect a Cabbage Patch Kid to emerge, yellow yarn hair and all – when suddenly i realize that i am actually doing this, this perfectly normal, multi-task-oriented, socially and commercially engaged juggling act. that i am standing holding thirty pounds of squirming kid on one hip with thirty pounds of bedrest and more offspring spread across the general middle of me and juggling a wallet and organic lettuce and the cookie that i seem to have managed to buy and begin to nibble on without even noticing, and that i am carrying on three conversations at once, and that it is all, like an intricate act of magic, working. my legs are holding. my back has not collapsed. i have not dropped the child nor the lettuce nor – god forbid – the cookie. and despite having not been out in public for more than four months, despite having hardly made chitchat with anyone in the interim, i’m saying hi to an old acquaintance and babbling about tomatoes to a vendor and keeping Oscar from stuffing his entire half of the cookie in his mouth all at once, and it is easy. natural. sheer body memory.

until i pay attention. then my eyes grow wide and glazed and Oscar leaps from my arms and runs into the crowd whilst i trip over my own bags and lettuce tumbles around me. suddenly, mechanisms exposed, it is all too much, exhausting, this press of people, this exertion. this normalcy. and for a second i want to flee screaming from the market like a bat out of hell, and retreat to the safe predictability of ye olde couch, sanctuary.

i mentioned to somebody early this week about how coming off bedrest is both exhilarating and discombobulating at first, because simple acts that you’ve taken for granted most of your life have, in the duration, become curiosities, foreign and unaccustomed. how they play themselves out in living colour, almost assaultive, because your protective filters have been turned off for so long. the response?

i’m sure it’ll be just like riding a bike.

i laughed, which i think confused my friend. but this friend has not known me so long as to realize that twenty-three years ago this week, at thirteen, i managed to fling myself over the handlebars of my bike on my way to work the very last morning of my very first summer job, a three-week all-day babysitting gig. i landed on my face. smashed the left side of my jaw into smithereens. split my chin open, and re-graded the gravel road with the lower half of my visage. knocked out a tooth that my just-removed braces had been working hard to align for years. bent the frame of my bike enough that it was unridable. spent three months with my jaws wired shut, carrying little scissors in my pocket to unleash the steel facemask in case i for some reason needed to vomit and wanted to avoid choking to death. had my first taste of the relief that is morphine, and the nastiness that is withdrawal. started grade nine looking like Bride of Frankenstein.

i have been on a moving bicycle exactly twice in the twenty-three years since. and both times, it felt both utterly normal and terrifyingly bizarre, all the intangibles of that delicate balancing act wrought vividly visible by the fear and cloistering that had separated me from the act in the duration between. i ride a bike like most of us would walk a tightrope; in a state of acute awareness and surreality.

this morning, i dusted myself off, caught my errant child, retrieved my enormous, slightly bruised lettuce, wiped some cookie crumbs from the shelf that is my belly, and headed back into the crowd, smiling to myself. i was nodding, noting internally, with great interest, heck, it IS exactly like riding a bike. it’s fun, and probably doesn’t look strange from the outside. but dude, it’s also crazy as shit.

just before bed, every night, with Oscar all cozy under his blanket and his baby doll and stuffed rabbit in his arms, we read Guess How Much I Love You or Goodnight Moon or some other board book with little animals heading to bed. the Boynton one if he’s particularly giggly, the “goodnight little mouse” one if he’s been sad and needs a little extra last bit of sweetness to carry him off to sleep.

tonight, though, i left the animals behind, went for a slightly bigger book, thinking we’d change it up a bit, read something we’d never read before.

this moment of parenting genius didn’t precisely result in a bedtime story, per se, but in Oscar’s mother’s total breakdown into a hulking, gasping, weeping mass of snivelling snot.

i tried to read him The Giving Tree. aloud.

there was snorting and nose-wiping, then whole pages read in hoarse whispers with long pauses between sentences as i attempted to collect myself. then outright sobbing and honking. night night, honey. mummy’s just going to go bawl/collapse/slit her wrists now. a comforting picture, i think. just what the toddler set needs before sleepytime.

i knew better. the very first time i read The Giving Tree was to a class of kindergarten kids. i was a green young childcare worker who’d never seen the book before, but thought the line drawing of the tree on the cover compelling. i picked it off a shelf, perched in the middle of a semicircle of four year olds and proceeded…and then collapsed into a sobbing heap halfway through, gulping “and the tree…blubber…heave…loved the BOY!!!” until little hands were reaching out to pat me and mercifully, the damn story was over.

apparently the fifteen years in the interim haven’t toughened me up any.

it’s a confusing book. it troubles me. the tree in its welcoming vulnerability breaks my heart, and the presentation of the boy – who is “the boy” throughout, though he becomes an old man before the story is ended – seems intentionally pitiless, leaving room for one to wonder if perhaps if the tree hadn’t been so goddam selfless if the boy might have treated her better in the first place. i have never figured out if Silverstein meant it as a paean to the love that marks parenthood at its best, or a cautionary tale about sparing the rod…or even if it might not be about parenthood at all, but about love and forgiveness and human-ness in general. the story is flawed, i think, but i cannot figure out exactly where. and yet, in the way it encapsulates what it is to love and the need to love, the satisfaction and sorrow in loving for its own sake, it is also one of the most melancholically beautiful books i have ever read. i bought it for Oscar for his first Christmas and inscribed it so, though i knew we were years from reading it together.

we are, apparently, still years from reading it together, unless i want to spring for therapy for post-traumatic-bedtime-syndrome.

what i want to know is, if you’re familiar with the book, what do you make of it? can you actually read it aloud without melting into a puddle?  if so, are you simply made of stone or are there other books you can’t get through without boohooing like a faucet?

i think tomorrow we’ll return to the Boynton books. or maybe Long Day’s Journey into Night, or something cheery.

last night i rambled through the neon streets of a nameless north Asian city, lost and utterly foreign and happy as a clam.

like any dream, it made no narrative sense. i was simply elsewhere, escaped, otherworlded. it was vivid, a montage of sense recollections and body memory, smells and sights and pace all propped up like rusty actors on a stage that seldom has much call for them. they fought for their star turn, elbowing in on each other in rapid succession, costumes dusty but still perfect in form, bizarrely familiar in their forgotten but once-intimate Otherness.

it was day and night both in this dream, and Seoul and Osaka and Beijing and Busan and Daejeon all together…a hundred human habitations of relentless urbanity merged, distilled…all these but never Shanghai, nothing so recognizable and coherent to the occidental eye as the grand old Whore of the Orient with her Art Deco facades. there were piss-ridden alleys and sterile fusion bars, ten-lane thoroughfares with whizzing cars and motorcycles and scooters, both sides of the street jammed with a cacophony of lit signs that disdain all notions of harmony and makes Times Square look tame. i do not know what they hawked, in my dream, but then i never knew what they said when i was there, either. the in-jokes of signage were lost on me just as the Engrish hilarity of neon proffering “pork catlet” – cutlet – was presumably lost to those who lovingly promoted such wares. in my dream were colours, so many colours cutting into the dark in bright clean lines, blurring into a haze, and the graceful arc of the few old buildings that remain against the cigarette-box-design of the new, thousands of them, disappearing into the horizon in a sea of unending ugliness made vibrant by the tang of sugar or garlic or vinegar or liquor from the street vendors and the fetid waft of garbage and sewage beneath the open grates of the alleyways. and always, for months, the fallen cherry blossoms lingering. in the dream they were underfoot and all the paving tiles were shaped like diamonds.

girls with kewpie-doll double eyelids, surgically created but so ubiquitous that the under-thirties appear utterly genetically different from their elders, bestowed stewardess smiles upon me as i plowed along, eating up ground in this imaginary Ur-city too big to be outwandered. people thronged, fifty thick on the streets. fish flopped in plastic basins, pigs’ heads and carcasses with paws grinned glassy-eyed at me from market hooks. the modesty of appropriate dress perched alongside the gaudy love hotels, grinning at me, sex unmentionable yet discreetly everywhere, vending machines with cock rings displaying their wares like cans of coffee or goggle-eyed stuffed animals. cartoons everywhere. i felt a little, on waking, like i’d been in a cartoon, some strange cigarette-smoke and plum wine-laced anime tableau designed for aesthetic impact…but then remember that i always felt that way, there.

ah, the sometimes beautiful invisibility of being Other, of being so hopelessly and irredeemably different that there will be no true belonging, no amalgamation. all is pardonable or ignorable, chalked up to the barbarity of skin rather than individual indiscretion. no history, no ties. my feet were shod in army boots, then in the plastic bathroom slippers one would never sully with dirt from outside one’s apartment. but i went marching, marching, flashing through corner stores and chicken stands and grand public edifices to historical events i do not really understand, all in hard pink plastic footwear bearing homonculous-shaped toy rabbits on it, and my legs were strong and did not ache.

i could have walked all night long through those kaleidoscope streets, dreaming. and when i woke too early to the sound of “mama” echoing through my bedroom in my house in a town i have known all my life, i felt suddenly, incongruously homesick.

my mother and i went to a funeral this morning.  for a family friend, a big, warm bear of a man whose daughters i was close to when we were children, a man who then left that family and started another and whom i hadn’t seen in nearly twenty years when i wandered into his antique store in December of 2005.

it was just before Christmas, but i was the only one in the shop.  i recognized him and introduced myself, asked how he was, innocuously.  and i watched him, suddenly, without warning, crumble in front of me.  it was his first day back at work.  his wife, his second wife, had died just weeks before, on the operating table where they’d expected to save her life.  instead she was gone.  oh.  how was i?  oh.  we were seven or so months out from losing Finn, and i’d gotten used to saying, “fine,” to putting on the mask, but i didn’t then, didn’t need to…couldn’t.  it would have shamed us both, somehow.  so i told him, and he listened, and we stood there amongst the dusty wooden rockers and the phonographs with tears on both our faces and it was the most honest random conversation i think i’ve ever had in my life.  with a man i barely knew and yet had known for as long as i can remember.  it was the only real conversation we ever had.  i was grateful for it, then and now.

and they piped him out today, Donnie who always wore his kilt for occasions, the Skye Boat Song and roses for everyone to take home with them because Donnie loved to give flowers.

we couldn’t go to the cemetery because they don’t provide wheelchairs or chaise lounges for the bedresting,  so my mother brought me home.   and told me, on the drive, that she doesn’t expect to see me in heaven after she goes.

this came out deadpan, a total non-sequitur.  i laughed a little nervously, uncertain if a lecture on my moral failings was about to follow.  it did not…which was a relief of an almost palpable nature…rather, my mother wanted to inform me of her own theological predilections so that i could instruct whomever takes command of her funeral when the time comes that mention of “hanging around up there, waiting for you all” is not to happen.  my little black heart could not have swelled bigger.  my mother and i have our differences of faith – she has one, i do not, a rather significant difference – but it appears in this we are almost…alike.  the afterlife is mysterious to both of us, veiled.  and i find bizarre comfort in this unusual synchronicity.  i told her if it turns out we’re wrong and heaven really is all gowns and harps and reunifications, i’ll understand it if i get there and she’s sulking in the corner, refusing to talk to me just because she doesn’t want to admit having made a mistake.  she retorted that if heaven really turns out all that conventional, she doesn’t expect i’ll be showing up at all.  and we both laughed.

she also told me she’d like a piper for her funeral, like Donnie had.  i nodded at this, tears suddenly in my eyes.  we live in a part of the world where nearly half the population is still pure-blood highland Scots, two hundred years removed from clan and the auld country but fiercely attached to what remnants remain of that dour legacy of clearances and imperial machinations.  i would like to take her to Scotland, someday…but i don’t think she actually wants to see the real place.  the Scotland in her mind is hers, her own.  if we went , she’d risk feeling less connected to the reality than she does here, at a remove, where its romance and sentiment are keystones of her birthright, her identity, the community to which she belongs.  none more Scots than the Scots abroad, och aye.  so she will have a piper, i promised.  i asked for one myself, just in case.

speed bonnie boat, like a bird on a wing
onward the sailors cry
carrying the lad who’s born to be king
over the sea to Skye

i didn’t tell her that the other songs on my secret personal funeral list are “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead and Sinatra’s “My Way”…and that really, if we have to have a funeral, why not make it all-music, an all-night hootenannie, with plenty of liquor?

i’d like to keep her around for awhile if i can, not kill her off with horror.
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have you ever thought about your own funeral…what you’d want said, or read?  played?  any suggestions for my ever-revolving list of (secular) life-affirming classics?  though i do have a soft spot for old staunch hymns, i must admit…but i doubt Dave would allow them any play, if he outlived me. ;)

i have this list.  it involves things i like to fantasize that i will do in order to make myself more sane, more human, more humane…just more.  it evolves, changes daily sometimes.  more frequently, it gets shoved to the back of my mental clutter drawer, ignored until some trigger calls it forward, calls it back to my attention.  often, in regular life, i get too busy and consumed to pay much attention to it.

one of the gifts and cruelties of bedrest is that i am not too busy to pay attention to it.  it worms its way to the front of my subconscious and perches there, accusing me in the lulls between work phone calls and doctor’s appointments.  it shouts, you could be writing the great Canadian novel!  you could be learning tax law/saving children in Botswana/improving your French/organizing the back porch recycling pile!  you could be doing something useful!

it’s not wrong.

and the longer i turn a deaf ear on it, the worse i end up feeling.  so last night, with work winding down in a couple of weeks, and another three months of bedrest to go if all goes well, i sat myself down and let the list reel out, loose and wild.  i came up with a couple of things, all of which were salient reminders right now – as i bob helpless and prostrate on the waves of whatever shores destiny has in mind for me, feeling more like an aimless couch lump with every swell – that i am still making choices, even if i don’t control everything i’d like to.

1. i need to stop eating corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup.  i have insulin resistance, for chrissake…mild insulin resistance, but hell, mild diabetes doesn’t really sound nearly as good as no diabetes.  i have eaten three entire bags of red licorice in the last week…i’ve gone on a Nibs kick, and have been eating them like they’re a drug.  which, given their contents, they kind of are.  it’s not just the gestational diabetes heebies on my mind, either; it’s the whole subsidized corn industry in North America, my discomfort with the ubiquity of all this over-sugared, processed corn in every bloody thing.  we protect corporate giants whose products infiltrate our grocery carts like secret spores, even when we try to make finer choices.  i do not want to be a part of it.  i do not want the poison.  erm, except, of course, it is so silky and sweet in my mouth…but i will stop.

2.  i need to start cooking in general.  pregnancy does weird things to my appetite, makes me ravenous and finicky all at the same time.  vegetables molder in the fridge while bananas get consumed as if Curious George lived here.  Dave cooks, and i wrinkle my nose and crave corn syrup, impossible to please.  the work of food – the sheer labour of it – makes me feel defeated and paralyzed and like there are no decent easy options and then comes the whole poison lure again.  but cooking makes me feel creative, and even frugal and virtuous if i approach it as challenge rather than chore.  i can chop sitting down, and choose recipes that don’t take a lot of physical exertion or standing to cook.  i can.  i’ll feel better.

3. i need to get out and interact with other human beings not interested in taking my medical history at each encounter.  i called one of my oldest friends last night and asked her to take me out on a dinner date next week.  i called the local food bank and asked if i can volunteer to make sandwiches there and serve them (whilst sitting) one lunch hour a week, so long as i’m not in the hospital.  i need a place to be that is not here.  i need to feel useful, part of something outside this house.  i need random encounters with people…little conversations, snippets of other lives to intersect with, concrete things to do.

4.  i want a wife.  Dave and i are taking applications, actually, for a mutual wife of the Betty Crocker variety, if anyone has any candidates they’d like to volunteer.  there’s a sweet-faced farm girl at the local market who’d be perfect…she makes the best lemon squares, and is hearty and capable, like she could whip the place into shape in no time flat, making our home more organized and economical and wholesome and preferably installing solar panels on our porch in her spare time too.  she’d weed the garden, which is choking to death already, before the window boxes are even planted, and would have a dustbuster concealed under her apron to suck up all the cat fur congealing in the corners.  she would bring me cold water every hour, whilst i write on the couch.  she would be all the caretaker – cooking and childcare aside, we can handle that – that Dave and i want to be but are unable to achieve in these strange, imbalanced days…me invalid and him overloaded, flotsam piling up around us.

5.  i need to create something, engage in making something tangible, more permanent and protectable than consumable meals and mortal offspring.  not the great Canadian novel, probably, but something.  four summers ago, i spent a week in the Swiss alps with filmmaker Peter Greenaway, as part of the Ph.D that languishes unfinished and largely unmissed behind the letters in my name.  Greenaway, famous for “The Pillow Book” and “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover,” is a piece of work, a charmingly fierce and self-replete personality…and inspiring in ways i never expected.  what i took away from that week of mornings sitting around boardroom tables watching short films and doodling in my notebook is mostly encapsulated in this four word note: dude is obsessed with lists.  his work, from the earliest days, is all about cataloguing, layering narrative with signs, permutations of order, rosters.  i groove on this.  my imagination was fired by this.  fiction and history with trivia and minutiae…squee. so i am making a private list for my daughter, this long-imagined daughter whom i still cannot believe my own fortune in getting, whom i still cannot believe will cross safely into my arms.  we are fifteen days before the threshold of viability, this daughter and i…and this list will be fifteen stories of mothers and daughters, my lineage, what i know.  i figure i’ll finish it sometime before she learns to read.  or will have something to prove to myself she was here in the now, squirming as i type, no matter what.

6. i cannot be a lover right now, on strict pelvic rest, but i need to find ways – beyond desserts – to inhabit this swelling body that i’ve been ignoring now for months on end, eyes averted not from the externality but from the inner secret of this divided house, afraid to be madonna, not allowed to be whore.  i spent years of my early sexual life disconnected from myself, caught then in cycles of self-loathing i did not believe i’d ever heal.  fear is more disembodying than self-hatred, i discover.  and yet i long to relax into myself, loosen myself, stop living closed away like a prim, crisp bakery box that might spring open if even looked upon too lushly.  milkshakes are not cutting it.  i miss the loving, the release.  but what i need is to find ways of being present in my body without those, for now.  preferably without involving the young farm wife.  advice welcome.

i am still here, still abiding.  i am trying as hard as i can.

i think i know now why i blog.

the company’s good and the outlet is needed, and appreciated, sure.  but they’re not the primary reason.  turns out blogging is the only thing keeping me from having to face the stark fact that i am actually, secretly, an incoherent twit.  yep.  oh, the shame.  i blog to keep up my self-esteem, folks, to maintain the facade that i’ve actually mastered some command of my mind, heart, and the English language.  snort.

basically, i am congenitally incapable of expressing myself concisely and thoughtfully in any form other than writing.  seriously.  i’m gregarious and all, and i can chatter away and be a pretty good conversational reflector of what the other party is saying, but ask me to actually form an unprepared idea in words, out loud, in real time, to an audience…and i hem and haw and turn into that painful, stereotypical grade 9 chemistry teacher who rambled on and on in ever-pitiful and incomprehensible circles until the students were all asleep or trying to burn their ears off with Bunsen burners.

and after six weeks on bedrest, sitting in my house all day writing work emails and making small talk with, um, my cat, i’m getting worse. the raging head cold isn’t helping, either.

last week, i got to take an afternoon off of babysitting my couch and trucked off to the local CBC station to record a Mother’s Day-focused conversation with some other Maritime mummies.  i was psyched.  an outing!  a conversation!  a chance to talk about parenthood in what i hoped would be a multi-faceted way!  then i put the headset on and sat in front of the mic…and died a thousand small deaths.  my brain began flitting about aimlessly, unable to organize itself without letters and lines of text to confine it.  each question – and these were not shocking questions, folks – left me stunned, unprepared, searching desperately for a train of thought to land on.  apparently trains are running sparse in these parts.

when the interviewer asked if we’d always wanted to be parents, i answered yes, and said honestly that i remembered being twenty-nine and newly single and suddenly wondering if motherhood would ever happen for me and realizing that some part of me would never fully come to fruition if it did not.  dandy.  then, following the base rules of logic and conversation, that pesky interviewer followed up with, “oh? and what would that part of you be?”

uh…um…errr…my knee?  nope, nope, that’s not right.  focus, Bonnie, focus.

i sputtered and floundered and rambled on for a few minutes, saying basically nothing, blathering on about how important it seemed to get to shape a life from the start, thus probably coming off like a controlling nutjob and offending countless adoptive parents of older children in the process.  even as the words rolled out, all tripe and cliché, i knew they were the wrong ones…ones that didn’t really get close to the feeling i was trying to express…but i couldn’t collect my thoughts, couldn’t line them up and sort them and make them shiny and incisive and pretty, not for the life of me.

all the while in the back of my head a blog post eloquently composed itself, but only for the benefit of my keyboardless fingertips.  my tongue was left to fend for itself, and i was left wishing i could rip it out.

it happened again today.  a visitor dropped by and in the process of feeding me lunch, bless her, asked me a real question, a genuine, complex, recount how you feel about all this kind of question, and i was so delighted to have someone to actually talk to that i launched into a disconnected diatribe worthy of the Jerry Springer show.  my guest smiled politely throughout, but again, i had this weird sensation of failing, profoundly, to get across what i was actually trying to communicate.  and i faintly wished she could have called in her question an hour or two before, y’know…just to give me a chance to process, to get my thoughts down.

i could have a whole sheaf of papers taped to my chest!  why do i love parenthood?  see page 23!  how do the dynamics of my extended family impact me?  that’s a whole chapter, pages 40 through 57!  how am i handling all this bedrest?   what?!  can’t you tell i’m doing splendidly?!?!  see the frozen terror in my eyes at the prospect of human contact?!?!  maybe that one is actually kinda taped to my chest…or face…figuratively speaking and all.

so here’s what i want to know…is this incoherence – at least the part of it that isn’t solely housebound battiness – just me?  is this a phenomenon common among bloggers?  could it be part of the reason so many of us are drawn to writing, this pleasantly editable, controllable space for presentation of our most intimate thoughts, but dressed up in their best lingerie?   does blogging make it harder and harder to actually adjust to the ephemeral messiness of real-life conversation?  am i just slowly beginning to lose all semblance of social skills the longer i spend perched on my couch in isolation, fighting off cabin fever?

note to self: do NOT watch The Shining while on bedrest.  and lock all the axes in the shed.  i have my nice blog, and don’t need any other ways of expressing myself, thank you very much. ;)