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…My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

***

…These woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep.

– Robert Frost, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening

the earth turns and i eat whipping cream.

this morning, at 4:59 am, that dread hour from which parents rarely wring any further sleep once wakened, a cry went forth from the little green room that is our children’s. i padded from bed and soothed and hushed until there was silence again.

they heaved and sighed and rolled over and were gone, back to slumber land.  too small to know the fear of not getting back to sleep again.  too small to know that their clockwork little bodies would be waking them – and me – again within the godforsaken hour.

i knew.

still, i tiptoed back to my bed in the blackness and burrowed into the warmth of duvets and the dark that blankets the long dawn of the shortest day of the year. and i lay quiet and bleary and consoled myself with the promise of pineapple cream for breakfast.

you may have to get up, the voice inside my head whispered gently, but you don’t have to work today. you and the kids can stay in your pajamas. and eat glorious Christmasy concoctions of whipping cream and, uh,  gelatin and crushed pineapple. sweet joy on a spoon. you can eat it ’til it’s ALL gone.

i cooed, and exposed my belly so the voice could rub it. then i remembered. i’d finished all the pineapple cream the night before.

i cried myself back to sleep and Dave got up with the kids
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when you are the only child of an only child, you inherit strange things. habits, insularities, responses to human behaviour that you eventually discover, launched from the nest, are not the ways of people accustomed to broader interactions or to jockeying for position within families.  but treasures, too. capacity for intense one-on-one conversation. all the family photo albums, from when god was young. a glass lemon juicer from your great-grandmother’s 1901 wedding, because your mother already got one for hers so to you comes the handmedown. your grandmother’s Art Deco engagement ring and wedding bands, worn on the third finger of your left hand in marriage and out, just as they were worn by her.

recipe books.

my junior high did not have a cafeteria. it was also only three blocks up the hill from my grandmother’s house. she was pushing 80 that year i started seventh grade and my mother had caught her eating a spoonful of ancient jam from the fridge and calling it “dinner” the summer before, thus it was decided i would have my lunches at my grandmother’s at least three days a week. my mother worked. my grandmother was lonely. and sandwiches? meh.

she promised my mother she would make me a hot lunch. this which she would not do for herself, she did gladly for me. i promised my mother i would go, faithfully. this which i’d otherwise have shunned for the cool autonomy of a brown paper bag, i did for my Nannie. or so i thought. my mother’s bargain was wise, a great gift.

we were always close, my Nannie and i. but this ritual of eating together, adolescent and octogenarian, brought me into an awareness of her world and the times she’d lived in a way that all the younger afterschool days at her house never had.

she was a contradiction in eras, my grandmother.  some days, i would arrive to old recipes, puddings from the old country she’d never seen or biscuits just out of the oven, the tiny ancient biscuit cutter made of iron, her mother’s. other days, the 50s reigned, and i would arrive to casseroles of tomato soup or cream of mushroom soup, served with bright green pistachio Jello pudding, her miracles of modern convenience.  she served me Tang until the last, believing it a treat. she bought pop only at Christmastime.

and at Christmastime, the pineapple cream.

it was a hybrid, relic of her Victorian roots yet reinvented in shiny 50s to incorporate handily imported canned goods. it is a miracle it was not reinvented to include Jello.

every year she served it in the same bowl, a thick glass objet d’art with deeply scalloped edges, so its gelatinized sides shaped the indulgence within. it was only made at Christmas. there was always a little left…carefully saved, slightly dried out…for me on the first day back to school.

it was rich and mild and creamy and just barely sweet. it tasted better than anything i have ever eaten since.
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in the last years, when my grandmother had to give up first the house she’d been born in and then the apartment a block away, the one my mother lives above right now, i inherited her recipe books. they were old things, crumbling, their pages stained brown with butter and time, larded with newspaper cutouts of recipes paper-clipped to the pages, and rich with her commentary scrawled on the entries.

“from Muriel R,” reads one, “keep oven low or a little tough.”

another, for dumplings, “sift flour carefully. Get lumpy fast.”

i have never made a dumpling in my life. but these books sing to me. and the one i love the most, despite its prosaic surface, is a coil-bound scribbler i bought myself just before i made the big move West.

you promise me you’ll eat, she’d said in passing, wet eyes acknowledging that i was already gone.

i promise you i’ll COOK, if you help me, i said in return a few days later. and i handed her the scribbler and a list of all my favourite childhood recipes.

i have it still, tucked into the island where we eat everyday. the pages are beginning to yellow, fifteen years later, and even brown in places where butter has smudged them. every time i open it, her handwriting stares up at me, her slanting tidy script from before it got away on her.

i was here, it says to me.  i loved you.

i have made it every Christmas, excepting that one year in Thailand. this year Oscar and i went to my mother’s apartment with the scribbler, and we made it in the heavy scalloped bowl which my mother has not seen fit to bestow into my possession just yet. i polished it off last night and woke thinking of it. i keep my promises.

PINEAPPLE CREAM (also called Bavarian Cream, can be made with fresh strawberries if in season – so sayeth the original notes)
2 level tbsp gelatin
1/2 cup cold water
1 can crushed pineapple (do not drain)
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp lemon juice
3 cups whipping cream (too much, say the notes. the first few years i raised my eyebrows at this, as i come from the there’s-no-such-thing-as-too-much school of whipped cream appreciation, but damn, she was right. 2 and a half? about perfect.)

Soak gelatin in cold water 10 minutes. Heat pineapple, add sugar, lemon juice & gelatin. Chill – when slightly thick, fold in (pre-whipped) whipping cream. Chill until set (preferably in pretty bowl).

It does not say devour. enjoy. but it should. Merry Christmas.
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i sent the card to Evelyn, replete with last year’s Christmas photo of the kids, since we didn’t quite get around to doing one this year. she won’t know, i figure.

i also discovered that the dude who works at the desk next to Dave’s knows the former owners of the house, so her card found its intended home with them, as well.

and…thanks to all of you and the faithful – and possibly illegal – frequent voting of my lovely and enthusiastic mother-in-law i came first, somehow, in the Best Personal Blog section of the Canadian Blog Awards! the raw data Saturday showed me in second, but i apparently squeaked ahead of the oh-merciful- heavens-why-wasn’t-i-reading-her Better Now not because of overall votes but because i was more people’s backup choice. yay for second-best! apparently close does count. http://cdnba.wordpress.com/finalists/finalists-and-winners-2009/

i also came second in the Best Overall Blog category, and third in Best Family Blog. a perfect trifecta, i think?i’m not much of a betting woman, though: i’d never have bet on this kind of result.  but i’m happy. and proud. and grateful, to all of you who took the time to help make me feel this good on a Monday when i’ve been mostly awake since 5 am.

it is nearly the end of term.

the skies grow gray, the days grow short. the exam looms.

and for students – hell, for me – dragging one’s carcass  out of bed to come to class gets harder and harder.

teachers are a vast repository of entertaining if specious excuses for missed classes. we hear it all: the grandmothers who die three times a term, the mysterious “appointments” that seem to occur at the same time every second week, the belly aches that magically disappear just in time for the afflicted learner to be located lounging in a coffee shop.

i’m a bit of a hard-nose about attendance. i expect an email and a decent reason, just as if school were a job. and i notice. i have small classes, where an empty seat yawns like a missing tooth. i know everyone’s names the second week of class.  there’s no hiding from me.

but they are adults, my students, at least legally, university kids far from home for the first time. some of them straggle in at noon, late, flustered, clearly having just rolled out of bed. i gaze upon them with vicious, bare-fanged envy.

some miss too many classes. the exam for our course is a repeat of the placement exam they wrote back in September; a single timed essay, its purpose to determine whether or not they can meet the demands of full-time credit courses without additional English support. if they don’t attend, they have to wait an extra couple of weeks to write it.  no traditional grading scheme, not much to hold over their heads. their only real punishment is that they miss out on my delightful company and my wisdom, of course. and i miss theirs.

still, most buy in. it is an amazing fact of human nature that when treated reasonably, most people respond reasonably. i teach things they need. i make that explicit, strategic. and i am clear about my expectations without getting terribly het up when they do not meet them, particularly in the realm of attendance. oh, i give them The Look. and The Grave Talking To. I explain consequences in terms of things they actually give two shits about, like ultimately getting the heck out of our mandatory program. but i have been fifteen years a teacher. i do not get excited about their white lies, the emails that clock in three minutes after the start of class saying – again – dear Bonnie, i sick. tomorrow i will not sick.

i do not bite.

i edit these notes, sometimes, send back refined versions explaining how to craft an appropriately professional excuse for absence, but i do not get excited. i will know when they are truly slipping, endangering their term, beginning to shred under the strange, unspeakable pressure of navigating my world and their own internal lives and priorities and burdens. then i will flurry into action and do everything i can to whip & bolster & comfort them back into line, because then and only then will they allow me any real part in the process at all.

as it should be.

the fact that i expect them to come to class at all is an act of stunning hypocrisy. if my undergraduate profs had kept attendance records, i’d have had to apply to get them expunged in order to land a teaching position at any self-respecting institution.

i was once the Queen of Excuses. it started early, along about eleventh grade, when i simultaneously learned to mimic my mother’s handwriting and noticed that she left for work before i walked to school in the mornings. this happy coincidence, combined with the fact that i had English class first thing every second morning and my English teacher had a significant if unfortunate Valium habit, meant that i went back to bed a lot that year. i still like nothing better than to crawl back into bed an hour or two after rising. i do my best sleeping at about 7:53 in the morning.

i embarked on this first of my creative writing projects with enthusiasm, crafting regular notes detailing dramatic yet seemly reasons for not being in class. i made sure to keep most of them painfully normal: eye appointments, dental troubles, vague feminine complaints, flu. but i also let the purple prose of adolescence run away with me a few times: had my teacher been fully aware of who i was, i suspect he might have wondered why my mother occasionally wrote notes worded as if she’d recently escaped from Wuthering Heights. but he said nothing, poor lost man, even when i broke my own rule of no-more-than-twice-a-month and dozed through an entire week of Catcher in the Rye safe at home in my own bed, handing in notes that hinted, with the delicacy of bricks, that i’d been at exotic locales named in the book but utterly unheard of near our provincial capital: a prep school, the zoo. i stopped short of the mental institution that frames the story: i didn’t want to make my teacher feel embarrassed. still, i felt Holden Caulfield would’ve been proud.

over the years, as i gradually learned the art of intrinsic motivation, i stopped making excuses and learned to haul myself out of bed. and that was good.

but as i began collecting excuses from students instead, i realized you can tell a lot about a person by the kind of excuses they make.  in delving into our psyches to validate ourselves – however speciously – to authority, we expose a lot about what we’ve been raised to think of as worthy of excuse, of forgiveness, of coddling.

all liars, after all, ultimately want to believe themselves.

the students who present with a hushed, eyebrow-raised disclosure of “stomach problems” – or better, in twenty-somethings, “tummy problems”: oh, how they blush when i ask about their diarrhea.  and suddenly fifteen years falls from their faces and they are little children again, learning to keep their bodies the ultimate secret, the That Which Shall Not Be Named.

the ones who send vague notes like “i have a headache”? i call them to the mat, later, and ask, with great, head-bobbing interest, big headache? little headache? did the lights bother you? generally they blush and avoid eye contact, caught out in the act of having not bothered enough to write a decent excuse. i then teach them the word “migraine” and hopefully a lesson in being organized, intentional, and specific in all acts of writing.

i particularly enjoy the ones who describe their afflictions in detail, digging out dictionaries or Dr. Google to look up medical words. these are conscientious class-skippers, this lot, the kind of kids who generally work hard and feel guilty about their trangressions and are clearly accustomed to having someone take more than a passing interest in their health. they tend to equate severity with validity, even if they are most often found missing early morning consultations but assuring me heartily in their notes that they’ll visit the clinic and make it to class at 3pm.  i once had a student recover fully from what he described as acute pancreatitis by 3 pm. i asked the class to join me in offering praise for the miracle, particularly since i’d noted their stricken classmate downing a pizza in the Student Centre only an hour past the missed appointment.  alas, sarcasm is somewhat lost on intro-level ESL-speakers.

yesterday, however, i came face-to-face with an entirely new breed of excuse, one i wish i’d had the creativity to dream up all by myself.  i call it Medical Excuse by Obfuscation. the email which delivered it ran like this:

Bonnie, after I ate my lunch, I feel bad with my bingy, I have to go to the washingroom every ten minues.

bingy. huh. what in the nameagod is a bingy?

do YOU know? me neither. and for once, i was afraid to ask. and so this very lovely, generally hardworking student returned to class today utterly unmolested except for a vague “you okay?” from me.  and i bit my tongue, and thought, well done, dude. you got me. you foiled the Queen of Excuses.

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what kind of excuses do you make?

and please assuage my guilt and tell me i’m not the only one who perfected her mother’s handwriting? (if you’re reading, Ma, forgive me. it’s all made-up, total fabrication. Munchausen’s syndrome, i’m sure. i’ll be better by 3 pm).

i lean against a toyshelf that was once a changing table in a playroom that still contains within it an office. a child clambers over me and a sippy cup drips rice milk into the suit i never bothered to change after work, while the other child beats my head cheerfully with a hairbrush. brush mommy’s hair gently, i chirp. she pauses, cocks her head to peer at me, then swats.

jenNEE? she inquires solicitously. i beam. gently, i say.

we talk, now, she & i. we talk.

my brain flits for a moment on a memory of eighth-grade science class and a mustachioed teacher labouring over arcane powders and the mystery of States of Change. in the scene, thirteen-year-old me  sits slackjawed, nonplussed, an empty thought bubble half-deflated above her.

thirty-seven-year-old me ponders the conversion from gas to liquid and dismisses it.  rather ostentatiously showy, really.  hell, we’re all in a constant science experiment of State Change: life would’ve been simpler if they’d just laid THAT out in junior high rather than bothering us with all that garble about kinetics and theories of matter, whatever those were.

i am matter. my children are kinetic. never the one shall catch the others, nor keep them still and static. memorize that, kids.

world’s Slowest Ever Esprit d’Escalier. so there, Mr. Plaid Pants and Moustache.
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Dave is at his desk two feet away, lord of itunes. he is at home this month, washing my delicates and harnessing GoogleWave as a home project management tool, meaning i can sit at work and pile pearls of  inspiration like “buy baby wipes!” onto his list rather than my own sad little daytimer. we’re four days in and he is rising to the occasion with grace. i gaze at him and imagine he sits in his chair slightly differently, more aware of the house around him, of the overflowing trash can sulking at his feet.

i hum a little Rocky Horror, slightly altered to suit:

in just seven days i can make you…a wi-i-i-ife.

i thrill, and wonder if he’ll start meeting me at the door dressed in fishnets, casseroles in his oven-mitted hands.  then i realize he needn’t bother with the fishnets. i am so goddamned tired i have the libido of a wet, dead mackerel.

time change is a cruel instrument of torture dreamed up by sadists. since Sunday morning, my children have not slept past the new 5:45. at night, they’re wired, exhausted, a once-peaceful bedtime degenerating into a drawn-out circus.

dear powers that be: i’m already coping with a chronic case of State of Change. nobody needs to fuck with my clock, too.

it’s a good thing i have a wife, even temporarily. it would be better if anybody was getting anything resembling a decent night’s sleep.
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Dave reaches out an arm and scoops Oscar up to the computer, brown head and blondish one close together. Josephine beetles away from me, off to thwack her hairbrush on some unsuspecting inanimate object.

the music catches me off guard – the opening chords of the first pop song i ever loved. Annie Lennox’s voice thrums up through the synthesizers.

i want to walk in the open wind
i want to talk like lovers do

like lovers. ah, lovers.

i remember being perhaps twelve, in my bathtub, still ignorant of chemistry and States of Change but shaving my legs for the very first time, Eurythmics my soundtrack for this rite of passage.  i ran a finger up the expanse of one wet, newly shorn calf, trying to inhabit the song, to imagine – from a vantage point of utter innocence, pure tabula rasa – the exotica of whatever it might be that lovers really did do. then i looked over my shoulder, mortified, and broke down in giggles in my bubble bath.

“lovers” meant sex. whatever that was.  but…they talked? like in sweet nothings? what would i say to a lover? another empty thought bubble hung limp above my adolescent head. so much is unimaginable when the mind is young.

sitting on the floor, though, soft and tired and sticky with sippy cup spillage, i understand the lyrics for the first time.

i remember waking languidly and looking for his eyes. i remember being two, just two. i remember that once upon a time, i saw nothing in a room but him. the memory is so vivid i almost glance over my shoulder as i did at twelve, embarrassed to be caught out naked with my own thoughts.

i could spit across the room and dirty his shirt. but i barely see him. and the lovers we once were feel as far away from me as that bathtub where i first shaved my legs twenty-five years ago.

i would not trade. but oh, god, i would like to visit.

next week, we escape to Montréal for five days. just us. in a city, gray and anonymous and magical to me, sleeping late in hotels and buying baguette for breakfast.  cafés.  wine.  nowhere to be.

and maybe we will talk like lovers do, up late, lost again in a world of our own creation. maybe. maybe the constant State of Change can circle round.

i would rather that than a wife, even. and that’s saying something.

every year on the 30th of April, Dave’s parents set the lobster traps.  out to sea, to open the season.

some part of me finds this fitting, that this day is also the date of Finn’s death. blood inheritance and heritage and salt water all swirl around incoherently in my imagination, making me wish i could cobble an Alistair MacLeod story out of it all, set the bones of the frame, tidal and unforgiving, around what is not there.

this year, we went to New Brunswick for the opening of the season.  Dave went out with his father, the small boat loaded down with traps and bouncing in the whitecaps. the kids and i watched on the beach; i buttered toast for the return to shore.  i am useful that way.

Dave and i met on that beach behind his house, almost thirteen years ago.  we thought we’d like bring some of Finn’s ashes to the beach…and scatter them on the first day of the season, four years to the day of his death.

except i, uh, forgot them.

huh. one gets used to things…to a white ceramic urn that sits at the back of the dresser top, to packing the car with suitcases and diapers and snacks and videos and wet weather clothing and asthma meds and plastic in case of puking.  one does not normally trot about on family vacations with an urn.  the two do not relate.

and so Finn got left behind. i realized my mistake about two hours into the drive, halfway there. and i felt simultaneously ill – wracked with guilt – and wryly bemused – wracked with laughter.  what kind of mother forgets her child? i whispered over and over in my head, first in lament, then with the increasing mania of a dawning joke, until the contorted expression on my face caused Dave to turn his head and stare.  we forgot one of the kids, i nearly quipped, but caught myself.  our skins have thickened, mine and his, over the metaphorical holes in our hearts, but there are places where there are still thin patches. one does not want to stick a foot through.

i wrote his name, instead, in the sand on that gravelly beach, that night when the other two were safe in bed and watched over by grandparents. Dave & i took some wine down to the beach, our bodies bundled up against the bone chill of the night, and we sat and watched the sun go down over the Gaspé Peninsula and there was driftwood and the smell of the tides in the air and we were peaceful.

and the dead child, he did not mind. that is the thing about the dead, the gift they give in the end when the life’s blood of sorrowing is finally bled out and you realize that they are still there with you, in their way. what remains is steeped in forgiveness.

so the little urn still sits upstairs, some of its contents under the trees in the backyard, the rest waiting until we are ready – or just, erm, smart enough – to remember to bring them with us some lobster season. maybe next year.

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in other news, i – lifelong disdainer of seafood, and shame to my Maritime roots – was the one who managed to convince Oscar to try some lobster the next day at lunch.

Oscar has been an adorer of lobster – in their living, tank-swimming form at the local Superstore – for some time. i don’t know how it started…but every time we’ve gone grocery shopping together for months now, he’s clamoured to go see the “los-bter.”  he waves, and they sit there prehistoric and piled up on each other pitifully, and i cringe even if their brains are the size of peas and he calls out joyously “bye bye los-bter!” and we roll away.  i tell him it’s Seaworld.  it’s as close as he’s getting.

but Shamu is unlikely to magically show up on his plate, fished by his beloved grandparents. so when he turned up his nose at the morsel in front of him that lunchtime, we all hesitated a little, unsure whether his rejection was just the usual toddler turndown of anything new and non-cupcake-related, or a far more complex emotional quandary surrounding the eating of his fun marine friends.

i told him lobster was good with butter.

he downed most of a claw, dipped in hot gold goodness, and wanted more. so much for the fun marine friends. though we have yet to return to Seaworld the grocery store since our homecoming…i wonder if the los-bter will retain their in-tank crustacean charms?

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while we were in NB, an old friend and colleague from our Korea days dug up a video of Dave and i rehearsing a two- person play we later performed at one of the local expat poetry slams.  i’d never seen the footage, had forgotten it had even been taken. me, platinum blonde, spiky-haired, smoking, Dave without sideburns, both of us lighter. perched awkwardly in the big wooden chairs of the bar i liked to call my “living room” in that strange, liver-rotting year…familiar chairs, obviously, but ill-suited to the frenetic body shifts blocked by our director.  i resemble wooly-headed insect, all limbs and corners and bravado and unladylike postures; Dave a comic study in intensities. we play out scenes of courtship and bawdy humour, alternatingly awful and amazingly connected, we who had been friends almost five years and had started sleeping with each other only weeks before in that far-away land where we were both so unmoored.  time capsule, June 2001.

the video confirmed two things. one, that Academy Award acceptance speech of my dreams?  i don’t think i need to worry too much about polishing it. i am the twitchiest, most physically unnatural creature ever to grace a stage. i need confine future acting aspirations to voiceovers. two, i was not that much better-looking when i was thinner. so there, muffin-top.  take that.

it’s been eight years for he and i, now. our anniversary the other night coincided with the unfortunate splash of my IWK “news” all over the local media in a manner that pandered to the cheap stereotypes of “grieving mother complains” and brought the best of the trolls out from under their rocks. it was ugly, and distinctly unromantic.  the fact that my radio interview even got picked up by the news cycle was a shock to my naive ass, o lesson learned, and the shoddy and inflammatory way in which the story was misrepresented disappointed me immensely.  but Dave, chivalrous internet knight, had my back with tweets and emails to the troops…and with support from many of you and me repeatedly stating my actual position in the comments section, by yesterday afternoon i had a direct apology from one of the trolliest trolls and the tide had utterly turned. a small victory, i think, of social media over mass.

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the issue of how the story was taken up in the first place is something i’m addressing with CBC.  in the interview broadcast i made it clear that i was actually in a good place, giving me the strength to address the issue and risk exposing myself as a bereaved person, which is always draining because there is no comfortable cultural place for the narrative of child loss. but the story pulled from the interview immediately recast me, and then used the headline term “complains” to represent what i had hoped was a constructive and respectful point.  such is the discourse around motherhood, unfortunately, and so go headlines. but, as i said to CBC,  if anything related to a supposedly grieving mother making a point consistently gets reduced to a story that sounds like someone playing victim, then comments will be vicious, the discourse about language being important will never get anywhere, and people will clam up for fear of being attacked at their most vulnerable.

i do not want a public apology or anything, though. i’m too afraid of the trolls that would drag out of the pond bottom.

in terms of the story that should have been told if indeed the interview even warranted clipping into a newsbyte, the IWK Foundation has been admirable and prompt and open in their response to me, and ultimately we’ll be sitting down together next month to try to work towards a positive fundraising strategy that respects all the families served by the IWK.  the CEO of the Foundation, the Mr. Shaw to whom my letter was directed, also lost an infant daughter at birth. her dates almost coincide with Finn’s. i am grateful to him and his staff for being willing to give the issue of language and wording their attention, and for being gracious enough to include me in the process.

now i just need to keep thickening that skin of mine.

yesterday was supposed to be vasectomy day.

a crazy morning running around making sure kids were fed and watered and changed and temperatures taken and fevers broken and medicines swallowed and diapers packed and i made french toast but that was as much time as we seemed to have for special things, for taking stock. and i wanted to drive him to the hospital even though i knew it made no sense to drag the baby out at nap time, but he would have come with me, i knew, and so i felt callous just waving goodbye at the door.

we stood there for a second, awkwardly, neither knowing what to say.  such a strange thing, this act, this leavetaking.  my mind offered up a smorgasboard of Wildly Unhelpful Possibilities, vasectomy version…grab him heartily by the crotch! launch into Monty Python’s Every Sperm is Sacred! pat him on the head! cry! wax sentimental about your entire tragicomic reproductive history as a couple! ask to kiss the sperm goodbye!

the inside of my head is a regular SNL skit.

i settled for smiling and muttering, thanks for doing this. and he was gone.

two hours later the door opened. i looked up, startled – he was supposed to be on an operating table, wowing the nurses.  but his virility remained unsullied – the Big V had been postponed. until July. he hadn’t changed his mind.  i asked, though his face – all baleful i wasted a whole morning on this – told me the answer before the words left my lips. he’s been the one driving this train from the beginning. he just wanted it over with.

July. o Canadian health care system, no pun intended but we were not the couple you wanted to fuck with on this one. we’re careful and responsible, yes, and too tired to be up to much fun anyway. but seriously? July? when he went on the list last September? when we’ll have to continue being careful for a good three months or so afterward?

i am in my prime, people. and the baby is starting to sleep through the night occasionally. ahem.

this is not a case of a simple trade of crappy wait times for universal health care…good friends of ours, same town, same OB, went on the vasectomy list a month AFTER Dave and the gentleman in that partnership was cleanly snipped seven weeks later. mmmhmmm. but us? oh, ten and a half months. genius.

our babies are COSTLY, o Canadian taxpayers.  i bounce back and forth between two provincial systems getting them here and the dollars spent on ultrasounds alone would blow your mind. then the little dears come early. trust me, you could buy a Sea King with what it costs you to help us reproduce, and even then it’s a gamble. you don’t want us making more.

perhaps a letter-writing campaign. the internets get Dave a prompt vasectomy, live on the six o-clock news. heartwarming story of family spared interminable nasty condom use and fretting.

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he went back to work at noon.  cue laughter.

no direct way to address it publicly without titters and sardonic smiles…the Big V vasectomy cuts to the heart of too many social stereotypes and gender grievances to be simply a personal thing.  too many men refuse, or refuse to even contemplate. the male reproductive system remains too sacrosanct, too tied to cultural notions of masculinity, of manhood. too much responsibility for contraception falls to women, too much damage – physical and emotional – occurs in pregnancy and birthing and all the messiness in between, and so a brutal undercurrent of cultural contempt is tapped here, brought to the surface.  and we joke, all of us, speak of the vasectomy out of the corner of our mouths, unable to address its contradictions head-on.

it is both noble sacrifice and dismissable inconvenience. it is men’s turn, and the unmanning of the mythical macho man we still mourn even in our recriminations.  we have not found him a replacement.

all that and it is still surgery. we laugh, we can’t seem to help but laugh, even if we mean it kindly, but it is still surgery. are there any other surgeries we laugh at, in this culture? do we ever otherwise feel so free to tease a person about to go under the knife?  i wonder.  is a man allowed to be nervous about a vasectomy, not because it’s his manly bits but just because it’s surgery?

the needle will still go into his arm.  he will still have to stare at the OR ceiling and those enormous lights and try to disassociate himself and hope that all is going okay and the doctor’s clean and sober and on top of his or her game and all those little mutters from down at crotch level don’t mean there’s a problem. it will still hurt, after. no huge deal…sure. not like an emergency c-section, no. but not nothing.

i figure it’s a sign of how far we have yet to come both in gender equity and our cultural relationship to sexuality that the mass response to a man’s announcement of a vasectomy is snickers and bravado.

mind you, Dave had to phone me from the door of the hospital, his mind suddenly blank, to ask me what the operation was really called. he’d been calling it ‘neutered’ for weeks.

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and now, he is not neutered.  and i look at him with one eyebrow raised, this man who seems suddenly dangerous.

even in the moment Dave walked out the door and drove away, even as i thanked him for sparing me this one last interventionist chapter in our reproductive history, i wasn’t sure i felt done.  practically, sure, i know i’m done.  my OB and my mother and Dave himself all tell me so.  my body is no safe sanctuary and we have a little house and two healthy kids and it’s a privilege to even be able to just conceive by plain ol’ sex – i have too many friends who are either infertile or in same-sex partnerships to take for granted the luxury of needing the vasectomy –  but all those fine, good, sensible thoughts didn’t stop the little voice in the back of my head that made petulant noises about the small Hugh or Blythe who are never to be,  whom my heart still calls to.  i was Janus, casting ahead and backwards all at the same time, unable to believe i could be done with babies for good.

until Dave walked back in and said, nope, July. and my first, gut response was sweet lips of God no! what if i get PREGNANT?! my brain had dashed out for the pill and a diaphragm to  boot and was back tying on the chastity belt before he’d even finished his sentence.

so i guess i’m done. good to know. now to get that July thing sped up.

there appears to have been a rip in the space-time continuum because both my children are currently sleeping. in the daytime. in their beds.

lest you think i exaggerate the rarity of this blessed event let me explain that the younger one is just learning to nap like a civilized infant whilst the elder one is – cue wails from the maternal peanut gallery – in the processing of outgrowing his tenure as a civilized infant and instead barreling whole hog towards being either a Big Child or a pirate, depending on the day, and neither Big Children nor pirates nap particularly well, unfortunately. i suspect it’s all the swaggering and roaring, in either case, but at the moment both my offspring are dozing and i am lying here on my side on the couch sans the company of short people and thinking that the gray light flooding in the window makes it feel rather like the beginnings of bedrest last year and wondering if i’m any different now than i was then.

i wonder this because i have this pesky attachment to the idea of myself as a dynamic, improving being. it’s the old modernist myth of progress boiled down to the individual level, where i get all twitterpated each time i become conscious of some personal failing as personal rather than the only reasonable and normal response to a given situation – oh, huh, not everybody goes into paroxysms of fury at drivers who fail to signal? – because, my stars! the emancipation! the agency! i can shed this flawed skin and emerge from my chrysalis new and delightful and better! now with more cowbell!

sometimes the change is real. i can learn. i now reserve all my turn-signal righteousness for my poor, beleaguered mother, who – as she is also capable of learning, if not of turning on her blinker before she engages the car in a turn – now simply refuses to drive me anywhere. win win, jolly good, pip pip.

but mostly i suspect that the idea that we are ever-improving beings is shite. it’s a dangerous siren song, and one so ubiquitous that as a culture and a species we repeatedly steer blindly towards the paths of our own demise. we choose short-term gains in spite of long-term damage and in almost all areas carry on as if nothing rotten is ever really going to happen to us. we’re engaged in progress! we’ll be fine! i know all the seventy-three reasons why high fructose corn syrup is bad for my glucose-intolerant self and my goal of looking less than four months pregnant again someday and my commitment to avoiding the agro-industrial complex where possible, but i saunter by that pack of Nibs in the store and damn! they are just so shiny and purty i swear they hop into my cart of their own accord. every time i go grocery shopping, it’s like groundhog day in the candy aisle.

some self-sabotaging habits are easier to make fun of than others.

from the time i was four, i wanted a little girl of my own. i had Finn and lost him and broken/brokenhearted realized i wouldn’t have traded him for a thousand girls. then Oscar, and i adjusted my expectations and the joys of a baby boy became the rhythm of my days and i understood, for the first time, that my preference had been a prejudice passed down and picked up, and i was shamed. then a miscarriage, and i began to bargain with precisely the sort of god i don’t believe in for just one more baby and damn the vagina i’d be more than blessed with another sweet boy and i meant it, i really did. except that underneath there was still a wistful part of me that ached – and seethed with a dirty, private jealousy – each time someone i knew who’d wanted a girl just…had one…seemingly magically, first try, no complications, as if plucked from the sky. i figured that this embarrassing allergy to other people’s good news was me being ungracious about not getting what i’d set my mind on all those years ago. and i’d wallow a bit and then kick myself and give thanks for my wee pirate-in-training and within a day or two the ugly green head of my jealousy and self-pity would bury itself again and i could get back to going about my life.

then i found out Josephine would be, indeed, Josephine. and i was amazed, because wanting her had come to seem like wanting the sky. and i said, self, take note. sometimes it comes easy. remember. you did not need to adjust your expectations. so get over yourself. a persecution complex ain’t pretty.

last spring i lay on this couch and wondered if maybe i’d be a better human once my heart’s desire of this healthy baby girl got safely here and the quavering over whether it would ever happen for me ended, once and for all.

i can report that the answer is…um, alas, nope.

one of my most beloved old friends is having her first baby. she’s 38. she’s always wanted a girl, and said on the phone last week that she was sure it was a girl, that she hadn’t really given any thought to it being anything else. turns out she was justified.

this baby will be loved and delighted in, by me almost as much as by her parents. she & Josephine will be close in age, and i know that my friend will be a beautiful mama, a good mother. but my first, visceral reaction? the same old jealousy, green and slimy and bilious. i cringed at the pique and said nah. really? but before i could even get the rejection formed it had delivered its soliloquy of woundedness and petty pity. why so easy for her? she didn’t even know she was pregnant until she was almost three months…she did all the things i never did, and bang, she gets her heart’s desire, nonetheless perfect and healthy.

oh, ugly. why not her, after all? i don’t know better people than her. and we all have our lucky breaks and our broken places and this friend of mine deserves all the joy in the world and i’d give it to her if i could so what in hell is this curmudgeonliness? i lack for nothing. there is no zero sum economy. life is too short to compare. adjusting one’s expectations can be good for growth. and yet there it is, the jealousy, naked and quivering. it helps nothing; i do not want it. but like groundhog day, it pops up. and i need to unlearn it, somehow.

she will not know, my friend, not from the face of genuine celebration i turn to her. it is not her burden. i don’t want it to be mine. but change is not so simple as skipping the Nibs aisle.

oh frail human. the same mistakes over and over, the same songs and refrains of willful blindness and short-term self-interest and stupid jealousy that sometimes i get so full to boiling i just want to spit.

today is the day after groundhog day, and i wanted to wake up different.
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i hesitate to publish this. jealousy is like the final frontier of friendship taboos…especially the messy stuff, the real stuff that runs way deeper than the cultural cache of yo bitch! your kids are sleeping?!? hate hate hate that counts as sisterhood these days. and i know – both out here and among real-life friends who struggle with IF or have lost babies or unlike me did not get one of the gender they’d set their heart on – that i risk revealing myself as an ungrateful moron when a sweet pirate and a baby girl sleep upstairs.

i sat with friends a few weeks ago, all of us mamas a few times over, and a pregnant one (not to be confused with pregnant friend above) recounted the drama of telling her infertile SIL about her news, after SIL had responded to another family pregnancy announcement by crying all day. the pregnant one found this frustrating, hurtful. i found it heartbreaking.

both are true, i think, depending on where you’re standing. i believe we most of us have our heartbreaks, and also that we’re responsible to those we love to try to fix our shit, try to be as good as we can be. i despair at how often it feels like we’re just groundhogs running on hamster wheels, stumbling over the same old thought patterns and habits and emotional minefields, blind and unable to flip the calendar over to a fresh page.

is it just me? do you have responses – emotional and otherwise – that you’d like to leave behind? how do you do it?

(…or rather, love by one who cannot speak.)

you have your first crush, daughter.

on your brother.

(ahem…it’s true, that’s not as unusual as it ought to be ’round here. we have entire towns in these parts where only two or three last names can be found on the mailboxes…we’re, uh, like royalty that way, us Maritimers. but i’m thinking you’ll outgrow this smitten state at some stage. like when you realize he’s been stealing your toys for months now.)

still…you could do worse for your first love, your first case of hero-worship. he’s noticing your gaze, standing straight-backed and benevolent in the light it casts around him. i kinda hope you keep a little of this same twitterpation in your eyes for him, throughout your lives. i hope he keeps a little of the tenderness he sometimes shows you in his.

(you will note that the “short” new haircut is not so short, just…not so long, thus saving O from impending mullet-hood.)

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?

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

– Mark Twain

the longer i’m a mother, the better my own mother begins to look.

i always knew she was a good mother, that i was lucky to have her. but we spent a lot of years with horns locked, she and i. never in a vicious way…rather fundamentally, inescapably, despite efforts on both sides to smooth the ragged edges of the bond. i lived away for fifteen years, always thinking that someday i’d come home and find that we’d become sympatico, the love between us finally morphing into companionability. instead, i’d arrive…and undergo a miraculous and instantaneous transformation back to scowling adolescence. i’ll never need a facelift, i joked with friends. if i want to drop twenty years, i just visit my mom. it’s instant.

my world was not hers. i called from university – my hard-drinking, eating-disordered university years, awash in ideas about High Modernism and international nuclear accords – and our conversation was about home, about what so-and-so had done in church on Sunday last. i called from Vancouver, from the Arctic, from Cambodia, from Hungary – seeing the world, sending money home – and our conversation was about whether i was hurting my back with that backpack/suitcase/big teacher satchel. are you brushing your teeth? uh, yes. and i’m seeing this! learning this! crickets. the sniff of disapproval and disinterest always lurked in the wings, ready for its grand entrance. and my indignance lurked too, hair- triggered, ready to sulk and feel misunderstood and pubescent at but a moment’s notice.

still, my mom was great for the big stuff. move away to Asia and decide to get divorced? from half a world away, i got motherlove and unintrusive but genuine support. while in Asia, getting gawked at on the streets by a culture not quite yet used to white folk, decide to dye hair platinum blond? still half a world away, i got nattering and tears and outrage and oh, what will people think? i was TWENTY-NINE years old…a little elderly for maternal panic over hair colour. but my mother, resolutely gray since her thirtieth birthday, disapproves of hair dye. stretching across contexts to imagine a world different than her own has never been her strong suit…suffering other people’s opinions with grace has never been mine. so on we went, like two small dogs with an invisible yoke between, yapping in tandem at the ankles of the other.

it didn’t miraculously change when i moved back here, nor when i had kids. the bickering about hair colour morphed into bickering about Children’s Tylenol and whether i should get my tubes tied, the nattering about brushing my teeth (my teeth, for the record, are quite well-cared-for) became don’t hesitate to take Oscar to the dentist/doctor/speech therapist. i took him, quite liberally. but the running commentary continued to rankle. until lately.

i’ve noticed a strange detente creeping over us.

only yesterday, i realized why. Oscar and i were playing pretend on the floor, Josephine curled against me, asleep in her sling. we were eating imaginary cookies at an imaginary restaurant, Oscar treating himself to the baby’s share too, since she only eats milk. we were a picture of happy pretend domesticity when, out of the blue, this suddenly so-big boy of mine leapt up and zoomed around the baby and i and announced, i’m going to space! i’m in space, mama! and i looked at him and understood, this is the trajectory of it all. our shared world giving way to realms unknown, all of a sudden. he has ideas now, that did not come from our shared experience. and i do not know so well how to play along. this is how it will go, how rapid it will be.

and i looked at him, and i said, space, honey? oh. do you want to bring a cookie? don’t forget your toothbrush!

never have i understood so clearly what it is like to stand in my mother’s shoes, relentlessly offering the known, the familiar, in hopes that it will somehow tether the one who has so suddenly soared away.  when i called her a little later, i mentioned, in passing, how i’d just bought new toothpaste.

Originally uploaded by o&poecormier

at first i was sure he was innocent. i mean, look at that face…those curls…that sweet expression. what could bring more joy to a mama’s heart than to see her boy snuggling her baby, both of them smiling?

then i looked a little more closely at the photographic evidence. more specifically, i looked at her.

that was no smile. he was definitely goosing her.