cribchronicles.com

i saw a beggar
leaning on his wooden crutch
he said to me
you must not ask for so much

and  a pretty woman
leaning in her darkened door
she cried to me
hey, why not ask for more?

– Bird on a Wire, Leonard Cohen

Josephine pulled herself up yesterday for the first time. i turned my head and there she was, looming precariously over the old wooden chest on trembling legs, laughing like a banshee and trying to bounce.

the old chest is a relic from our Korean days, with metal strapping for hinges and pointy metal studs on top. perhaps an alternate coffee table substitute is in order for the next few months.  she’s growing teeth fast, but not as fast as she could snap ’em off toddling ’round that hazard.

Oscar knows the names of all the dinosaurs, all of a sudden. we sing dinosaur songs to the tune of “I’m a Little Teapot, ” detailing the secret lives of the various species: who plods, who roars, who eats rotten meat. “I’m a Stegosaurus” is a particular favourite, not because stegosaurus is an especially interesting creature in and of itself, i don’t think, but because Oscar shares my affinity for rhythm, for the perfect fit of word to tune.

i will take him to the dentist with me this afternoon, for the first time.  this was the dentist’s idea, let me state for the record, in case he terrorizes the place while i’m stuck on a chair with tubes sucking spit from my throat.  but i don’t think he will, somehow.

they are growing up, these two.  part of me wishes wistfully for time to slow.  part of me hangs out the window like an eager dog, drooling as i peer into the wind, trying to see where we’re going.

in other news, i am researching tubal ligations.  Dave’s Big Snip got postponed…again. one of the only two urologists in the province has cancer, so the remaining doc’s practice has been suddenly overloaded.  if anyone has any caveats/personal experiences/information about tubals and particularly about their impact on women with predispositions to ovarian cysts, please share.

because i find myself suddenly done with the liminal state in which we’ve been floating since Posey was born, and i want a permanent solution, now. on this one front at least, i want to feel sure i can see where we’re going, be certain that there are no surprise turns in the road. so i can enjoy my, ahem, prime. erm, once i get just a little more sleep.

and i have another job interview tomorrow, this time in a department of the university i worked in back before Oscar was born. the position as they’ve advertised it fits tidily with my skill set, but seems limited in scope…i plan to try to go in and pitch the job i want to do, explain the vision i have for what the program could be, and see how the chips fall.

this scares the daylights out of me, of course. because i risk losing the competition by pushing too hard.

part of me figures if i’m not going to magically land in one of those nice mythical pensioned titles you can die in, then my absolutely next top choice, from a work-life balance perspective, would be to go back to this particular office at the university.  i like the people. i like the environment. once O switches to the university preschool this summer, Dave & Oscar & i would all be heading to one destination in the mornings…and Posey will be eligible for a sibling spot once he starts. plus my very best friend since junior high started working there last fall, as well. seriously. and the walls are made of candy. erm, no. but you get the picture.

part of me figures there is no point in me taking a job that does not challenge me, at this point in my life, no matter how pleasant the work environment.  i can make money doing freelance bits & bobs, researching and grant-writing and whatnot.  but to commit to an actual job…i want more from that. and i am afraid to ask for too much, at the same time.

i am hanging like a dog out the window, hoping not to get my head taken off, wondering if we’re there yet.

Her Majesty Queen Victoria doesn’t look like a terribly good time. she’s got that forbidding gaze, the beak of a nose, the turned-down mouth that makes it shocking that she ever had to say, “We are not amused” aloud.  surely a glance at her dour visage would’ve scared the living snot out of whomever was perpetrating the offense in question.

but on this holiday weekend, i must acknowledge the debt that generations upon generations of young colonials  here in Canada owe to Her Royal Highness, the grumpopotamus.

this is what’s colloquially known as the May Two-Four ’round these parts, a bizarre amalgamation of two seemingly opposed stereotypes of Canadian society.  yes, we meekly fetishize the British royal family, our nominal heads of state; we like to think they make us cultured, and some of us are even under the delusion that those twee little commemorative royal visit knick-knacks look  charming in our foyers and bathrooms.

we also enjoy drinking beer in the woods until we vomit.

the May Two-Four allows us to do both.

for us colonials, Queen Victoria is really the alpha and the omega of the British royal family. indubitably, there were all those fancy divine right of kings people before her, all those Henrys and a crazy George or two and a bunch of wars fought over some drafty castles. we know that. we read, thank you very much. but Victoria was the monarch of Empire, the one whose holy-shit-i-think-she’s-gonna-live-forever reign made it evident to us, with its Crystal Palace and its Jubilees and all the fancy schmancy stuff we didn’t have over here in ye olde provinces, just how truly lucky we were to be pimples on the bum of jolly England, ever the motherland.  Canada came into its own as a nation under Queen Victoria, and like any adolescent, we secretly long to be just like the fusty old battle-axe who spanked us soundly in our infancy before setting us loose on the world.

thus, despite the fact that England actually has a different queen at the moment, and one who’s giving Victoria a run for her money in the bum-warming-the-throne records, nobody actually knows Elizabeth the II’s birthday. (well, except me. but that’s because Oscar happens to share it…with the Queen and Iggy Pop, as a matter of fact. auspicious. yet schizophrenic.)

but everybody know’s Victoria’s birthdate. it’s Victoria Day, statuatory holiday. she’s been dead over a hundred years and we still drink like swine in her honour every May.

i suspect it started with with her PR folks. i didn’t know the Victorians had PR folks, but apparently they did. no tv jingles for them, nor Breaking News updates, just…children’s rhymes. Victoria’s PR posse were the first to recognize that if you get ’em young, you’ve got ’em for life. them and six generations of their hapless colonial offspring. and if you can give them something to threaten their parents with, all the better.

The 24th of May is the Queen’s Birthday
And if we don’t get a holiday
We’ll all run away!

thank you, Queen Victoria, for this very first example of an entire generation holding its breath until it turned blue. blackmail works swimmingly, wouldn’t you say?

of course, the children today do get a holiday. and they don’t exactly run away. they just go camping for the weekend. which is braver than it sounds, given that it’s barely above freezing in much of Canada this time of year. but they bring lots and lots of alcohol with which to warm themselves, the brave little royalists.

it’s been a long time since i properly celebrated May Two-Four. and those years i did, i don’t seem to remember. something about a drive-in party and and trying to look hawt in a down vest and the terrible error of smoking cigarillos and waking up with my tongue literally stuck to the roof of my mouth.

but this weekend, in honour of Her Imposing Majesty, Dave and i took a bottle of decent wine and two puffy winter coats out into the backyard, and sat outside like the intrepid Canadians we are, drinking for Victoria Day.  we discussed yardwork, as is probably fitting for the May Two-Four celebrations of the middle-aged, and also got a wee bit tipsy. we’re not usually so patriotic, but some things are just bred in the bone.

so just in case you live outside the borders of this fine land and wondered what in the heck we do up here this time of year…now you know. thus endeth your social studies lesson for the day. you may go.

long live the Queen.

with  trepidation, i’m planning to send this letter later today…to the hospital where Finn was born and where i did all the bedrest with O and the legion of ultrasounds with Posey.

i’m struck every single year by the ridiculous way in which this fine institution handles its fundraising. i’m not a fan of telethons in the first place, as the emphasis on “look at the cute little hard-luck children and their miracle stories!”  makes me uncomfortable in that eerie 1950 flashback way…but the annual mailout of miracle stories to a population that inevitably includes many bereaved families seems grievously insensitive, even this year when i’m feeling pretty healed and pretty equivocal.

i could use feedback – how does this come off? i want to make my point while still sounding positive and…um…uncrazy. help? please?  all suggestions/constructive criticism welcome. (deep breath).

and yeh, this is the real institution – the blog has been too public to insert false anonymity now. if you’re local, please don’t consider my critique a reason NOT to support the hospital – rather, i’m hoping to inspire them to revisit their fundraising strategies so that more families can support them without being brutalized by mail every spring.

April 28^th, 2009

Dear Mr. Shaw,

I received your PEI Cares Telethon newsletter/solicitation in the mail this week, and needed to write to you to explain why your institution’s fundraising efforts unintentionally but regularly raise my hackles.

Mr. Shaw, four years ago tomorrow my son Finn was born at the IWK. I’d been airlifted to Halifax a few weeks earlier, when my water broke at 24 weeks gestation. Finn was born at 26 weeks and a day. He weighed 2.2 pounds, and had brown hair and his father’s nose. He did not make it through his first night; he died in my arms early in the morning of April 30^th, 2005. He was our firstborn.

I was and am incredibly grateful to the IWK for the effort expended to try to save Finn’s life, and for the care shown him and me, both then and in my subsequent pregnancies with his younger brother and sister. We – along with some family and friends – have made memorial donations to the IWK every year in Finn’s name and memory, and plan to continue to do so. I recognize that fundraising is an integral part of the ongoing operations of the hospital, and that it is a significant challenge to mobilize the necessary funds to keep the standard of care at the level of excellence Maritime families have come to rely on.

But, may I suggest that including bereaved parents in your regular fundraising mailout is insensitive and in poor taste? Last year, one of the children featured in the mailout and on the telethon was a little girl from here in PEI who was born at the exact same gestation as my son, at only ¾ his weight, on his actual due date in August 2005. We happen to know this little girl and her family personally, and celebrate with them the fact of her survival and healthy development. But it is painful nonetheless to be faced with the public spectacle of that “miracle,” particularly as part of an emotional appeal designed to raise money. It creates a discourse wherein the children who do not have the happy ending or the camera-friendly story are further negated, in a culture which already treats infant and child death as the last frontier of horror. The telethon only reinforces the isolation of bereaved parents by reinforcing the “Oh, I couldn’t possibly imagine” response.

I give in my son’s memory because he mattered to me, and because I wouldn’t want another family to go through the same grief that we did if it were at all avoidable. But I can assure you that being confronted with intentionally emotionally manipulative mailouts asking me to “imagine” the difficulty of having a child in hospital does not make me at all more generous.

If your hospital were a cardiac facility for adults, I suspect you would not solicit donations among the widows of lost patients by sending smiling pictures of happy heart attack survivors: “This is Fred. He had a massive coronary but what a precious champion – he’s a fighter and today he’s back golfing again! Fred never gave up. His wife Joyce is just so grateful to all of you who made this miracle possible through your generous gifts.” It would be understood, implicitly, that such a mass fundraising strategy would be offensive, salt in the wounds of those whose partners did not survive their heart attacks. Losing a child is no less difficult than losing a spouse. Please show me, my family, and the other bereaved families whose children have not been lucky enough to leave the IWK healthy the same respect you would accord us if our loved ones had been adults.

Perhaps a separate database could be established, Mr. Shaw, wherein families who’ve made memorial donations for their children could have a simple, tasteful, “We’re fundraising and would very much appreciate your continued support in memory of your child, should you feel so inclined” letter sent, instead of the standard telethon-focused “miracle” onslaught?

I genuinely want to support the good work the IWK does, and would be happy to volunteer my assistance in revising your fundraising strategy amongst bereaved families. I ask you to please consider doing so, and in the interim, to please remove me from your mailout list. I will continue to donate, but on terms that respect my son’s memory rather than erase him from view simply because he was not, in telethon terms, a “miracle.”

Yours sincerely,

Bonnie Stewart

she jumps, our bouncing Josephine, all grins and glee and baby cackles.  it’s contagious, that laugh.  she’s a bouncing demon.

we held off on the Jolly Jumper until the up-down of her stout legs every time we grasped her hands made it clear that she was more than ready and would run off with a trampoline soon if we didn’t get her into something bouncy already.  now she gazes longingly at the apparatus from across the kitchen, trying desperately to scoot towards it.

she only crawls backwards. she is not deterred. yesterday she spun around, then slid across the floor until she was directly under the Jumper. she rolled over and beamed up at it, like a lover.

i had a Jolly Jumper too, one of the originals. i did not jump. there is a picture of me circa 1972 slumped over in the little seat, hanging from my mother’s doorframe. i look for all the world like i’d prefer to slit my wrists.

i mastered the withering stare early, it appears. the fact that i spent junior high banished to the hall, leaning against lockers with an eyebrow raised? destiny.

Oscar was like me, if less morose.

in his babyhood, he tolerated the Jumper as a place to sit, briefly, whilst mummy bustled about the hot stove or chopped things. luckily for him, my culinary ambitions are limited. the fact that he never used the Jumper for jumping didn’t seem terribly strange to me given the lore of my own disinclination; he occasionally gave a heart-hearted bounce but mostly saw the contraption as i did – a Baby Jail designed to keep him from interesting things like inspecting the inside of the cat dish or the laundry cupboard.

he’ll jump, i figured, when he’s ready.

ummm….he’s still not ready.

the poor kid is three, and he can’t jump. or won’t, i’m not sure which. he does this cute little half-hop wherein he shuffles his weight from one foot to the other, but even my mother-vision will not allow me to construe that particular action – adorable as it is, my mother-vision wants you to know – as a jump.  looks more like he has to pee, if anything.

we’ve been pretty chill on the jump front at home. about six months ago, we went through a momentary fit of laying things on the floor to jump over and hopping about the house, but that got old when we realized that Oscar was leaning back against the wall looking at us with exactly the same contemptuous eyebrow arch that got me sent out in the hall all those times in junior high. we were doing the bunny hop, he was listening to the Smiths in the corner. no go. we canned the jumpstravaganza.  we didn’t want to embarrass ourselves him.

lately though, Oscar’s started gymnastics, his very first organized class of anything, ever.  he loves it. it’s a toddler class, led by a fabulous British woman in her fifties who makes me think of Mary Poppins, and the little darlings run amok and sit on mats and learn to stretch and point their toes and climb and walk on a beam and, uh, jump off things. and on things.  and over things. jumping is big in gymnastics. it’s a basic skill, expected and foundational, on which they are intended to build.

we’re having a little trouble.  or rather, Oscar avoids the jumping stuff where he can or does his little i need to pee! hop off the trampoline without any of the other kids appearing to notice.  it’s no biggie to him, so far as i can tell. it’s me.  i’m having a little trouble.  i’m having to confront all kinds of childhood insecurities for which i have no coping mechanism other than the afore-mentioned eyebrow arch. gymnastics is stressing me out.

i figured one of the good things about having kids with an ex-athlete was that they’d have an even chance of being moderately coordinated, seeing as they weren’t going to get such bounty from my gene pool.  i figured these mythical, agile kids would surpass me in grace right about the time they started walking, if not before. so far, Josephine’s right on target, bouncing her way happily along the curve of averages to a toddlerhood of gymnastics prowess and a bright future as Tigger in the Ice Capades.

but Oscar’s looking more and more like me every day.

watching my kid struggle with things i struggled with, watching him flail and avoid and go circling off to climb through the rolly tube again rather than try to focus his physicality and do what just doesn’t seem to come naturally? shit, this is hard, people.  i don’t mind that he can’t jump.  i mind that watching him not jump, and trying gently to help him learn to jump, makes me feel like a sweaty-palmed bewildered gym class failure who could never even use the damn Jolly Jumper properly.

i don’t want him to feel that way, don’t want to indicate in any way that he should feel anything but mild interest in learning a new and useful skill.  a large part of me knows that he’ll jump eventually and probably just fine, thank you very much, and that me continuing to be chill on the outside and offer chances for him to practice are likely the best thing i can do to help.

so why do i want to lean against that toddler gym wall and raise my eyebrow and my collar and light up a smoke?  oh yeh, your kid jumps. mine? too cool. nothin’ to see here. (blows smoke ring).

sigh. maybe i’ll get Josephine to teach him to jump.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
have you watched your kids struggle through something that pushed your own buttons?  did you respond like an adolescent, too, or do you have, erm, actual helpful strategies i can try?

(and no drinking before gymnastics…that doesn’t count. i have to drive.)

every experience is a learning experience…just not always in the way you expect.

if i could tell the interviewers from yesterday what i learned about myself in that three-and-a-half hour marathon of self-promotion, it was this:

i am still learning.

applying for a position with the federales is a lesson in literacies, in thinking on your feet, in self-control.  i’m usually pretty good at reading my environment and between the lines of questions, at compiling answers to what’s implicitly being asked, but yesterday…i didn’t realize until it was too late that the structure of the interview placed the onus on me to put together a coherent picture of my management experience, my professionalism, in only five questions. clever. perfectly fair. but not what i’ve been accustomed to from academia, and perhaps not quite what i delivered, alas.

the old adage goes, every war is fought to win the previous war. i would’ve sailed through my last interview like a hero yesterday…but that interview was two years ago, and for a completely different context. and i got that job anyway.  this one…this one was a learning experience.

all that preparation, and only five questions.  of the five, i blew the second part of the first one utterly…got tangled in the time pressure, the scale of the interview and the work put into preparing, the fact of my own inexperience with the whole process, so when they asked about legislation i drew an utter blank. not because i hadn’t read the info on legislation in this particular department, but because it hadn’t been titled as such and thus i didn’t recognize what they were asking for. and the smallness set in…the terrible, supplicant, bewildered smallness. the feeling – acute and anxious – that one is a sham about to be exposed.

i’ve spent a lot of years putting that feeling behind me.  i realize now that all those years i carried it, it wasn’t deserved…a class marker and the internalized stigma of a growing up poor with a single mother in a small town.  the lingering sense that i was a charity case who needed to be extra-deserving made me my own worst enemy, dragging around an intrinsic certainty that security and stability and success were just a little above my station, inexplicably beyond me.

revisiting those ghosts of insecurities past in the middle of a job interview is NOT high on any top ten lists of success strategies, i suspect.  it was profound, though. i became aware of precisely how i occasionally fail myself when caught off-guard…unfortunately exactly at the moment i was failing myself. o costly knowledge, your price above rubies.  today, instead of merely kicking my behind halfway into next week,  i’m trying to focus on counteracting those old habits, those insecurities that sneak in the back door.  i can chew all the glass i want over the fact that the epiphany cost me interview points, but in the long run…i plan to make it pay me back. it has been warned.

cue Stuart Smalley: you will from here on find me in my mirror five minutes a day with Al Franken glasses on, whispering i’m good enough, i’m smart enough, and by gosh...

i’ll be Sally Field with an Oscar in hand by the time i do another interview.

overall, yesterday wasn’t bad.  the presentation part went reasonably well:  i tried to sell a social media-based strategic plan to government, which was bold at best and possibly crazy…but i got complimented on the content in the end, so…risk worth taking.  the test turned out to be a writing test, o merciful fates, and i humbly submit that i knocked it out of the park.  my answers to most of the interview questions were okay, though had i had a few more minutes to sit down with my actual BRAIN handy and consider the overall picture i was painting, i’d have sharpened my focus and sold myself far more effectively.

i did ask some good questions at close, and got a much more specific sense of what the job will really be as a result…a challenge, a steepish learning curve for whomever takes it, as it’s a newly created role. i want it, no doubt. it’s an opportunity to hone some of my talents into a full-blown profession, which i’ve been searching for since i left the classroom all those years ago, but something i never seized on, partly due to wanderlust and babies and tragedy and partly to that little voice that whispered oh, me? i couldn’t possibly.  but i can, i think. if not this time, soon.

your comments stayed with me, all your help and tips and reminders and support.  particularly your support.

and then i tottered out with my head spinning and my boobs bursting and drove home to discover our computers were all down and the baby had croup. and i said, funny one, scornful gods, and let it go, because what good in feeding the notion that a happy ending is beyond me?

live and learn.

(and give thanks that at least croup waited until after the big day to rear its nasty, up-all-night head. poor small barking Josephine. and me with no Dr. Google in the middle of the night…horrors! i had to dig out the old Brittanica for advice, and spent the rest of the night alternating between standing in the cold porch with her, and steaming up my bathroom. restful, that. any idea how long this lasts? we’re croup virgins here…ever learning, ever eager.)

when i was about the age Josephine is now, my father left.

he took with him a lot of what little my parents then owned, including all the cool stuff…the peace poster, the Dylan records, the Beatles. what was hip had never been my mother’s purview. she was left with six or seven records that became the soundtrack of my childhood…Joan Baez, John Denver, Roger Whittaker, The Sound of Music, Mario Lanza Sings Christmas (in mono, no less), Simon & Garfunkel, and Kris Kristofferson. i have a journal entry from the horribly self-conscious peach-satin-covered diary i kept in junior high that reads, Mom is playing Me and Bobby McGee downstairs and the sound of it is childhood, to me.

when i was four or five, i got lost in the K-mart.

i remember vaguely the feeling of surreality to it all, the many strange legs and bodies that were not my mother. i remember that some lady at the big service desk wiped my tears and gave me a lollipop, cherry red. but mostly i remember my mother’s story, trucked out in later years with a rueful laugh, of hearing the page and rushing to the counter only to find me happy as a clam, clutching a lollipop and singing.  singing Help Me Make it Through the Night to the K-mart shoppers of the day.

when i was twenty-four, i met Dave for the first time.

he was younger, brash and intense, and we were both spoken for. but i liked him. he felt kindred. and somewhere in a long evening of guitars and CDs beign spun, he dug out a scratched disc and said, i don’t know if you know this guy. and the opening strum and gravel intonations of To Beat the Devil sounded, and a friendship was sealed.

we’re hitting the road this morning. tonight, Dave and my mum and his dad and i will see Kris Kristofferson play.

…and you still can hear me singin’ to the people who don’t listen
to the things that i am sayin’
prayin’ someone’s gonna hear

and i guess i’ll die explainin’ how the things that they complain about
are things they could be changin’
hopin’ someone’s gonna care

i was born a lonely singer
and i’m bound to die the same
but i’ve got to feed the hunger in my soul

and if i never have a nickel i won’t ever die ashamed
cause i don’t believe that no one wants to know.

– To Beat the Devil, Kris Kristofferson, dedicated to Johnny Cash & June Carter

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

i think i have post-cultural depression.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

this past Saturday morning i woke up to a washing machine that had given up the ghost and gone to appliance heaven in the middle of a load of dirty diapers. very dirty diapers. apparently the washing machine rapture was unable to wait for my childrens’ poop to complete the rinse cycle.

this coming Saturday morning, on the occasion of my thirty-seventh birthday, i am getting a brand-new washing machine -the first i will have ever owned – delivered to mah house. on my birthday. and i think this is fabulous.

cue the girdles and the curlers, middle age is in da house.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
the summer i was nineteen, i saw Thelma and Louise in the theatre. twice. shelling out more than once was a wild indulgence….but i had to go back. there was this one scene – sunup in the badlands, a vintage Impala replete with Southern Comfort, and The Ballad of Lucy Jordan – that made me catch my breath, disappear into the story, into that car, into the song playing in the background. Marianne Faithfull’s broken voice and a housewife losing her mind, her self.

she could clean the house for hours
or rearrange the flowers
or run naked through the shady streets
screaming all the way
…
at the age of thirty-seven, she realized
she’d never ride through Paris in a sports car
with the warm wind in her hair

there was, of course, no Youtube then, to trace the lyrics that had grabbed onto me like grappling hooks and screamed you must not make this mistake, child. no Wikipedia to promptly inform me that children’s author and poet Shel Silverstein had written the words croaked out by Faithfull. it took two viewings of the credits for me to even figure out the song’s name, and a long afternoon in the bowels of an old radio station’s archives for me to find a copy. but the very first time i heard the words, i understood.

You will be old someday. Get out and live. Make sure you have no regrets for things undone.

thirty-seven was beyond old to me then. thirty-seven, as best i could figure, must surely mean wrinkliness in places i was loathe to contemplate. thirty-seven was last chance, the age after which nothing would ever happen again.

probably only a nineteen year old could believe so fervently in the possibility of living without regret. not all doors can be opened, after all. and in the end i am rounding on thirty-seven still without having ever ONCE ridden through Paris in a sports car, my head high, Thelma and Louise-style headscarf and giant sunglasses and warm wind in my hair. (Dave, please note…you have two days left…get crackin’. passport ready.)

but from the cusp of a threshold after which nothing will ever happen again…i am surprised. because i’m happy.

on Saturday i will be thirty-seven years old and i am getting a freaking washing machine for my birthday. and when the baby naps, i can clean the house for hours, or could rearrange the flowers if i could remember to, erm, water them. my days of streaking down suburban streets are long gone. i don’t sleep for more than three hours at a time anymore, and on the rare occasion we have friends over, i spend half the evening trying to keep my baby from yelling over the conversation. yet…i don’t feel stifled or oppressed. or not in the way that matters in the long run.

by my own terms, i’ve lived well. i’ve learned, i’ve experimented, i’ve sung and spoken and created. i’ve stood naked on a balcony looking out over Bangkok at sunrise. i’ve laughed until i cried. i’ve held three babies, freshly born. i’ve grieved. i’ve loved. i’ve grown old enough to be able, finally, to say “i’m sorry.” and i’ve survived my long and reckless searching to circle back home, to a place where two small faces smile at me each morning. and the cat bites my ankles.

at nineteen i was afraid i’d wake up one morning and find that life had passed me by, hemmed me in in such a way that i’d never get out and figure out all that i could be. in the end, i’m still looking for all i can be, even at thirty-seven. and i’m looking in places i wasn’t sure i ever would…in the drudgery of this day to day hard-won domesticity, and its little pleasures, and the sense of agency that i find in my modest goals for the year: learn French, get a longterm job, play more trivia, spend time alone with Dave, teach my kids and myself that sometimes you don’t have to get mad even when you feel mad. these things excite me the way goals like “visit Amsterdam” and “become a rock star” once did.

my only regret is that i didn’t know sooner that this quiet middle-age is not at all so small as i thought.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
how do you feel about where you’re at in your life? and what’s on your list of “must do before i die”? have these things morphed as you’ve grown older?

tonight, before bed, Dave was reading The Lorax to Oscar. it’s a Suess i missed out on as a kid, so i only heard it for the first time this past year. it’s a thinly veiled anti-industrialist Book of Revelations or An Inconvenient Truth for the younger set…or more likely, really, for their parents. in it the Lorax, who “speaks for the trees”, is the unheeded prophet of a grim future that the narrator ultimately brings upon himself.

as Dave launched into the story, i felt my ears cringe, fold over at the edges, shut themselves off. i knew what was coming, and tonight, i didn’t want to go along for the ride of guilt and broken-heartedness and complicity. i didn’t want to hear – i was busy fiddling vapidly with my own personal Thneeds. like most of us, i am all for righteous living so long as i don’t have to get uncomfortable. but sitting there half-listening, half-trying to turn my ears away from the sad story the tale weaves, i realized that the Lorax sounds awfully familiar.

Mad and Jen, with Suzanne, and for a while, Hel, have thrown their heart and soul, in stereo, into The Just Posts for two full years now. they’ve spoken for the trees, the seas, the hungry, the homeless, the gay. they’ve collected our voices, and helped us use the blogosphere to spread information and ideas about what we think might make a better world. i’ve participated, though less frequently of late. i’ve heard the call for contributions and glanced at my to-do list and thought, yeh, i’ll get to that. and then the tenth of the month has rolled around, and around again, without my lifting a finger, and my ears have closed off a little, because i am all for social justice so long as i don’t have to get uncomfortable. or say, make an effort.

i’ve been treating them rather like the Lorax. sigh.

and now, with life and parenting and moves to the jungle and maybe a little weariness with the blogging world and with the whole Lorax role, the women who started the fine thing that is The Just Posts are retiring. and i get it, and i am sad at the same time, because i’ve learned a lot from the roundtables. things about greening the environment and about the American health care system and mental illness and what a joke i am when it comes to committing to DO anything. they inspired me to get off my ass and volunteer at my local soup kitchen, only i got put on, uh, bedrest. then i got inspired to start a local cloth diaper exchange, which has kinda flopped thus far and possibly miscarried, but hey…if anyone out there in the Charlottetown area wants to work with me or just wants some diapers, super cheap, gimme a shout, i’m swimming in prefolds. i have most recently been inspired to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity in a clerical capacity…easiest with a colicky baby, i figure….but they, uh, haven’t called yet. nonetheless, i remain inspired. because knowing that people are out there trying matters to me, and is the thing about the Just Posts that has called me back month after month, helped me unstopper the shame and inertia that builds up like earwax and deafens most of us to the disconnect between our lives and our beliefs.

as a parting gift, the Just Post hosts have asked that we out there who care about this baby they’ve grown and nurtured for the past twenty-four months commit to putting our money where our mouths have been, and write about a cause we believe in and support financially.

i figured this at least i could do without fucking up.

it’s Old Christmas today, Epiphany. in the internal calendar of my mind, set back in a childhood far more canonically observant than the adult moi can even remember, i haven’t completely missed sending appropriately and timely holiday wishes/messages/cards so long as said missives go out by epiphany. today i wrote to my friend Susie.

happy new year, read my (very creative, non?) message. Pakistan, eh, Suse?

on December 28th, Susie left for northern Pakistan for her fourth tour with Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors without Borders). i copied a letter she’d written from her second tour, to Chad, the fall before last. before that, it was Darfur. since then, a cholera camp in Congo. this time, Pakistan. i’m hoping she’ll have internet, as otherwise my holiday message won’t reach her ’til May. there’s no pretending that’s on time.

on her way to the airport, she sent this note. “We are setting up a program in an area that MSF hasn’t been before, and because of all the cultural/political intricacies in the area the going is slow. There is no acute emergency like cholera, and there are no IDP’s/refugees in this area, but the people have very poor access to health care. Especially the women, and this will hopefully be an area we can improve. Because of the divide between men and women, especially marked in these more remote tribal areas, it is hard to even get an good idea of the health needs of the female population – as a female doctor I should have more access then the men and so hopefully be able to help a bit. It is also an area that was hit by the 2005 earthquake and that has affected access to healthcare. There are areas of the coutry that probably have a greater need for help but they are a little too unsafe at the moment, so we will start out in Darband and see how it goes. One of our goals is to start up a Cutaneous Leishmaniasis program, since there seems to be an outbreak in the mountain villages. (for the non-meds, that is a skin infection caused by a parasite and spread by sandflies. It is not fatal but can leave a lot of scarring and has a significant social stigma).”

for a year, when Suse first went to Darfur, Dave and i gave monthly to MSF. since then our charitable donations have been focused more on the local children’s hospital where Finn was born and died, and where i was followed closely through my pregnancies with Oscar and Josephine. this, and cancer and the War Amps and whatever local groups happen to get to my door first have been my particular personal commitments. but this year there will be no more babies. and this year, i think it’s time for us to look a little further afield again in our giving, to commit again to MSF, and maybe…in appreciation for this luxury of being able to feed and raise these two beautiful kids in our house, sponsoring a child too. i’ve looked into World Vision in the past, and Foster Parents’ Plan. if anyone has any caveats or suggestions about groups who coordinate child sponsorships, please make free with them in the comments.

Happy Old Christmas, Just Posts. thank you for your courage, for speaking and inspiring even when some of us tried to close our ears.