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it ought to be perfect.

there are steel rails installed, by the toilet and the shower. the LaZBoy throne has been replaced by a marvel which – at the touch of a button – deposits him from its egg-carton-cushy-foam seat onto his feet, and gently. there is a hospital bed in the master bedroom. nurses come daily, to take his blood pressure, check for bedsores, make sure he is nourished and cleaned and supported.

my grandfather is home. after almost four months of hospitalization and convalescent wards, he has come home well enough to stay.

he ensconced himself on the fancy new recliner and with an ancient Zippo, lid aflame like an Olympic torch, lit up the cigar that he kept in his bedside drawer the entire time he was gone.

and then he asked for the keys to the truck.
***

during the long days of January and February, when he lay in bed, one arm swollen to the size of a football, and his skin and circulation breaking down faster even than his heart appeared to be, he was confused a lot of the time.

i would visit, and he’d ask how my father was, even though my father was there every day. he asked his own room number over and over again.  he seemed unable, a great deal of the time, to hold his moorings: the day-to-day that had been his life for years appeared to slip from him. we did not talk about his house or his job.

what we talked about was the Lysander.

my grandfather, a farm boy from PEI, was a British agent from 1939-1949.  he spent WWII and the early years of the Cold War between Camp X and Bletchley Park and occupied Europe, with homebase in NYC.

he spent half his war in planes.

in lumbering matte-black Lysanders, unmarked, navigating by moonlight, they flew perched on trunks of plastic explosive. they smoked as they flew. they made their way over enemy territory, readying themselves to parachute behind lines to Tito’s resistance, to the Free French.

the Lysander was an ungainly thing, but it could take off on ten feet of runway or less, a hulk of engines and fabric rising into the sky like a fat bird. during WWII, its main role was with intelligence, dropping agents and doing photo reconnaissance. it was no good for bombs, too slow for fighting. but it was steady, reliable. it could be flown by any agent who made it alive to the pre-agreed point of takeoff. and a Lysander brought my grandfather home safely.

in June, an airshow on PEI will feature a reconstructed Lysander, air-ready. before the heart attack in January, my grandfather was contacted by the organizers. would he like to fly in the plane? he would.

he thought, i think, that he’d like to fly the plane again.

and so all through the confused days of the winter it was the Lysander we returned to. he did not worry – aloud – that he would not make it to see the plane, but rather that he would not be able to climb in. that he would not be well enough to go up in her.

mostly, though, he told me that he could fly her.

he last flew a plane only three years ago, with his equally octegenarian buddy. the event made me wonder if i ought to warn the whole of Prince Edward Island to take to their basements while the cast of Grumpy Old Men ruled the skies.

but it is different now. for the first time in his life, his body has failed him, showed its vulnerability. he knows he will not fly the Lysander, ever again. and he curses being old.
***

there is a service that brings meals, as do i, and my stepmother. but the restaurant he ate at daily for 21 years – the one that burnt last spring – has reopened. my father brought him back the first time, while he was still on the convalescent ward, frail but triumphal. he was welcomed like a prodigal.

the diner is down the road from his house. and he drives. when we arranged last week to meet there for supper, he said, “i’ll meet you there!”

i balked. we can pick you up! i chirped. we have extra seats in the new car!

“oh, i’m good.” his tone brooked no argument. “i drive down most nights.”

he is perhaps no more dangerous a driver than i. i do not know. i know the idea of him behind the wheel still makes me terribly nervous, Cassandra attuned to all the doom the horizon can hold. it is not him i fear for. it is the someone else the candy apple truck could run into: the lives – theirs, his, all of ours – that such a tragedy would eat away at. if he is no longer independent, then we are all complicit.

this week, he will take his provincial driving test again, for the first time in seven decades. they have endowed family doctors with the capacity to order driving tests for seniors, finally. after having watched the fierce struggle between my mother and my grandmother fifteen years ago, when it became clear that at eighty-nine, the latter was no longer safe to commandeer her Datsun through the streets of Charlottetown, i am grateful that my father does not have to fight the same battle with his father.

but i fight it in myself.

i fear he will ace the test, come home with a bright, shiny license and no place for any of us to stand and caution. and i fear what will happen to him if he does not. i grieve the idea of him trapped in his house, waiting for others to wait on him.

he is ninety. he will never fly his Lysander again.

i know there is no such thing as perfect. and still, i feel cold and cruel for wanting to take his truck too.

as my Mother’s Day present to my long-suffering mother, i went with her to church last weekend.

church is the centre of my mother’s orbit in this life. her social whirl, her weekly schedule, her sense of what matters are all directly and primarily shaped by the faith community in which she grew up. the church is having a clothing sale? the kids must have something they’ve outgrown. a fundraising dinner? she’ll mash potatoes by the bucket, even if her swallowing disorder means she hasn’t eaten pork roast herself in a quarter century. sponsoring a refugee family? she’s suddenly on Wikipedia for the first time ever, learning everything she can about Somalia.

i could, on the other hand, spend weeks in Somalia, and my mother might eventually look up what side of Africa it was on. she is generous with her time, loves her grandchildren, loves me. but despite the fact that the age difference between us is small and that i have friends her own age, my mother has not even a foot in my world, or even in her own generational world. David Bowie, whom i’ve been set since the age of twelve on marrying someday, is a year older than she. yet only if David Bowie came to sing at her church would she ever suddenly develop any interest in being able to identify his music. i suspect she’ll recognize him at the wedding, but only just.

so i’m a little jealous. i’m an only child. it’s hard to share your mother with God, okay? look what happened to Jesus.

ba dum bump.

my mother’s church, and my grandmother’s before her, and her grandmother’s before that, is housed in a big, old, austerely grand building with wooden vaulted ceilings. it has deep, dour Protestant Reformation roots: it does not draw attention to itself. there is no showy witnessing in its circle, no language of prayer and The Lord permeating everyday conversation. as i cringe when people attribute daily actions and outcomes to deities – unless they’re swearing – the circumspection and minimalism of the place suits me. i like sitting there, my back against the pew, stained-glass-light dappling the old people’s hair in front of me. if i squint, i can imagine that i’ve time-travelled, that one of the bluer rinses a few pews ahead is my Nannie, gently croaking out an old staunch hymn the congregation hasn’t sung in forty years. i love that.

but i don’t go.

i have this private hubris that i’m a Personal BadAss. now, Personal BadAsses eschew church and all its middle-class bourgeois self-satisfaction. rows of women in fur stoles, passing the peace of Christ? earnestly updated hymns laden with sentimental theology? Personal BadAsses are deeply uncomfortable with all that…comfortableness. they like Mapplethorpe exhibits and whatever makes other people squirm. they only wear fur they killed with their own teeth. why, they’d smoke, still, just to blow it in somebody’s face, if the habit hadn’t gotten so gosh-darn expensive and wouldn’t land them in an emphysema ward.

the problem with being a Personal BadAss is that it does not wear particularly well after the age of 35. unless one is PJ O’Rourke, i suppose. or Mickey Rourke. or Mr. Roarke from Fantasy Island, but he was more suave than bad.

God did not make me suave. i should ask my mother to speak with him/her about that.

anyhow, one day you look around and you’ve been carrying your diaper bag to work as a purse for six months and your car is a glorified mini-van and even the haircut you thought had edge makes you look – at best – like an aging Depeche Mode fan and you may as well haul granny’s fur outta storage and go sit in a pew.

so last week i went to church with my mother.

we stood in the pew where i sat as a child. no one stared. no shouts of “blasPHEEEMer!” went up in the sanctuary. i smiled nervously.

and then the heavens parted.

i am not a believer, plain and simple. which is the main reason simply being in a church makes me feel like a wretched hypocrite. but it was Mother’s Day, which i figure is forgivable by any standards.

and by Jesus, God went all out fer me, people.

my daughter, the hurricane, sat quietly in her grandmother’s lap for half an hour, then went to sleep on my shoulder for the first time since she weaned six months ago. Oscar led the procession from Sunday school with Mother’s Day carnations and a beatific little smile. i sang beside my mother and the words to the old hymns were quick on my lips. a tear leaked down my face.

i thought JESUS, Jesus. you trying to do me in?

there were no furs, no self-congratulations. in the prayer, they spoke to mothers who grieve, mothers with AIDS, mothers who wait for babies that never come. the sermon was as radical a piece of public discourse as i’ve heard out loud in years, replete with visuals of gay adoptive parents interspersed with biblical stained-glass allegory.

i was ready to shout Amen. which would have embarrassed my mother almost enough to qualify me as a BadAss all over again.

the last shot that went up on the screens projected at the front of the old church was Michelangelo’s Pieta. the mother cradles her broken adult child, her body braced to hold his weight. he is gone; she is utterly alone.

i looked down at Posey in my arms, eyelashes fluttering. my lip trembled as i smiled on her. i made sure she was breathing.

over her head, my eyes met my mother’s. we both nodded at the miracle between us, the slumbering child. my mother raised her eyebrows in bemusement, i shrugged my shoulders in response.

we laughed. aloud, right in that moment of perfect silence before the offertory.

the Very Model of a Modern BadAss Family, i told myself, raising my chin with great pride.

***

i didn’t go back to church with my mother this morning. if i were a good daughter, i might’ve. maybe. there’s still that little hiccup of belief standing between me and the way i was raised.

my mother began bringing Oscar to Sunday school last September. he loves going, she loves bringing him, and we figure it’s a fine education in community and literacies plus an hour with one less child every weekend. but for the first time this morning as the two of them walked out the door hand in hand, i felt grown up. because for all my respectful mother has never once asked me to come – even last week, i volunteered – every week the part of me that remained petulant Personal BadAss sulked with self-consciousness at the very idea of church. even though no one was asking me.

until today, i really couldn’t quite have told you whether i stayed home out of personal ethics or because i am secretly Twelve. it felt nice, finally, to figure out the difference.

today, i just smiled at my mom when we met her at the door.  Posey reached for her shoes, and i said, no honey, no church for us today.

nap! she chirped, protesting, and my mother and i both broke out laughing. again. clearly, we all have our own ideas about what church is for.

so i stayed behind, content in my lack of belief. and my mother and Oscar went off to the bosom of her Other Family and i waved from the window.

and it was good.

sometimes, if i hold my head right, i like to pretend i can see through time.

i’ve been taking an open, online course in Education Futures these past few weeks. Dave’s one of the instructors, along with the luminous George Siemens. it’s a heady ride. there are 700+ participants, though the majority mostly lurk – but still, the experience is slippery, decentered, enormous and fascinating. it’s free. there are no grades, which is probably good, as i suspect Dave would enjoy nothing more than to give my Lisa Simpson ass a nice flat D for once. what you take out of it is not only what you put in, but what roads you choose to navigate, what conversations you choose to be in, which fellow classmates you choose to engage with. it reminds me of the blogosphere, and this blogging “experience” that is really thousands of separate experiences contextualized by a few common parameters.

education futures isn’t about predictions. it’s about perceiving trends and shifts, conceiving of how they intersect and influence each other to impact humans and behaviour and norms. it’s a semi-informed guessing game, a Gladwellian enterprise based on perceiving what is and reconfiguring the way it’s interpreted, until possibilities open and – maybe – everything looks radically different.

our social media personae are made up of the perspectives we bring to these online skins, these avatars by which we negotiate identities and connections out here, in the virtual.

you know me as a mommyblogger. however awkward that skin is, i cannot say it does not fit. my voice inhabits it, has grown to fill it, has used its maternal contours to speak into being a child whom those who know me only in my physical skin seldom get to see. my motherhood in all its complexities is the platform on which i’m grounded, both in my online and day-to-day lives.

i am also an educator, whose work and thought are predominantly shaped by the contexts of higher education and the online communities centering around educational technologies and theory. i think of education as a social and societal experiment. generally, i think of blogging the same way.

it’s where these two perspectives come together that i catch a teensy whiff of what smells like the future.

in my grand decline, when i look back over mint juleps and maribou slippers to dissect the ‘blogging revolution’ of my long-faded 30s, i think two things will stand out vividly.

first, Virginia Woolf was right.

a room of one’s own matters, and is a condition necessary to creation. what Virginia missed was that the room doesn’t need to be an actual office or garret or physical space, nor does it matter if the would-be writer’s physical space and life are crowded with small bodies. these are fodder, rich and full of marrow.

the chance to narrate said fodder into a room of one’s very own, a virtual shelter for one’s words & stories & a persona beyond the bounds of Barney and chewable books? has mattered. and freed from the gatekeeping and market pressures of traditional publishing systems, the opportunity for parents to build these little birdhouses for their souls has created an explosion. said explosion – and the nature of its particular technologies, which permit an etiquette of commenting and linking and personal advocacy & promotions – have resulted both in an unprecedented meld of brand & identity, and a brave new world in which communities and networks are able to truly transcend space and time.

in the educational futures conversation it’s easy to miss the branding and identities part of the picture, whereas in the parental corner of the blogosphere, sometimes one is left wondering whether there’s really anything else going on at all. as blogs have become increasingly business-focused and the concept of self as brand has become ubiquitous, many of us have learned enough to confidently blather on about SEO optimization and concepts like earned media and how to promote small businesses through social media.

but what particularly interests me is that as our children grow up in families and communities permeated by these concepts of identity and interaction, they’ll bring these implicit understandings of what it means to be a self into their classrooms. and if we are to shape our archaic, industrial-era education system into something relevant to their perspectives on the world and on their futures, we ought to be ensuring that our classrooms enable students to build rooms of their own, and share them, and through them interrogate the assumptions of market, knowledge, and identity that our culture reflects and reifies.

the other thing that i think will leap to the foreground of the picture when we look back at this first decade of blogging through the mists of time: our concepts of privacy are about to be blown wide open.

i love cities. i love to walk in cities. the bigger and more anonymous the better. i pound the pavement and imagine i could be anybody, because all the other anybodies slipping by me could be anybody too, and maybe the most fascinating interaction in the world is about to take place in a glance. cities, for me, are near-infinite networks of possibility, without the glare and responsibility of being known.

anyone who grew up in a small town knows what it is to be known. “cherish your reputation,” my dear mother always told me, by which i – probably unfairly – assumed she meant for me to keep HER reputation intact and unsullied by whispers. when you focus on reputation, you sometimes assume people care more than they actually do. but in a small town, you also know that people can be cruel, and judgements made on the whim of the moment. so you guard yourself…and sometimes, if the weight of public castigation grows too heavy, you become what they already say you are. in a small town, it can be death to be different.

in branding, on the other hand, differentiation is key to success.

i see online identity as a small-town self, acutely aware of the possibility and the consequences of being recognized, meandering about in a truly infinite city of networked relationships. this branded self is at least semi-consciously aware of its goals and its optics; of how it appears to the anybodies passing by the artifacts and traces of itself it shares out here in the ether. the branded self may view connections as personal or instrumental, or both, and is probably inclined to see attention as positive so long as its network doesn’t ostracize it as a result.

in other words, to a branded self, there is no purpose in privacy. all the world’s a stage.

in the four years or so i’ve been reading blogs, one of the most common refrains i’ve heard is “i’m taking down photos/names/poop stories because i don’t want the record i’ve created here to follow my child through life.” wisely, i think, we recognize that in writing of our children, we risk writing them into roles that they themselves may not want to embody.  we don’t want them to feel they have to become what we’ve said they are. or at least, we don’t want to appear that way.

but in the post-blogging world of tomorrow, it is almost unthinkable that our kids won’t have online identities far beyond what we’ve written for them. what’s more, i don’t think our concepts of negative attention will have a great deal of meaning to our kids’ generation as they grow into adults, except in those awful, inevitable, pan-human moments where the network – be it the football team or cranky bloggers or politicians and half of twitter – blows up against a particular self in moments of bullying and ostracism and brand-backlash writ large. it’s not likely to happen over potty tales; they’re too universal.

the dance of successful branding is about balancing the creative capacity for difference with the critical capacities for self-judgement and prudent projection of consequences.

our children’s online selves will fluctuate and change as they grow, but teaching them early to leave trails they won’t be dogged by or ashamed of later – because nothing online is truly private, or really goes away – has to be one of the challenges of raising this generation of children for which we’re least prepared. as a culture, i think we’d all benefit from work on critical projection, since more and more of us seem to have no intention of going back under the dome of domestic privacy. and as an educator within this culture, i wonder if one of the greatest conceptual tools we could give kids today would be that sense of big-city network navigation in a small-town, self-aware skin?

then they could build rooms of their own within which to capture their own realities and perspectives, and there hopefully weather storms if/as they arose, all the while understanding in a way our generation is only beginning to taste that no network – no matter how powerful the popular girls seem when one is in junior high, or a mommyblogger – is ever finite, be-all and end-all.

what do YOU see when you look through time? and how do YOU see your online persona? are you a small-town brand or a citified network person by nature? or am i missing something beyond/between that polarization?

when i started working at an intersection of the fields of education and technology about twelve years back, my then-boss taught me the phrase early adopter. she was a proud, flag-waving version of the breed, a proselytizer of The New. she had a PalmPilot, with that little stylus i could never figure out how people managed not to lose. i disdained the thing, thought of it as conspicuous consumption. i could barely keep track of my $8 daytimer with the vinyl cover.

i’ll never be an early adopter. even if i try.

it takes time for me to learn to love a thing, an object: my appreciation is the kind that builds only over time. historical time, glacial time, no matter – when i hold a thing in my hands, it becomes for me a portal to its personal history. if it has none, i have nothing to attach to; it has no context for me. the patina of age is full of stories: the hows and whys of a particular place and time. i like the cultural trajectory of use-value, the sense of how hands touched objects and what they used them for. fingerprints are romance.

is there a cultural opposite to the early adopter? can i be the maudlin clinger?

my real soft spot is for the utterly obsolete.

i am a rest home for dead technologies. my blog header sports the image of an art deco-era typewriter: i own one. it is my grandmother’s vintage finger-chewer, and it sits proudly in a closet, waiting for some mythical me to unspool a bottle of absinthe and write my great novel. less grandly, we have a VCR. and a Discman, which i can still be seen using. you should see the looks them young whippersnappers get when they clap eyes on that baby. in my freezer, until only last year, sat a carton of Kodak 35 mm film. i bought it at a Costco in South Korea – cheap, but not quite cheap enough to throw out – sometime in 2003. who doesn’t need film? erm, yeh. i hand-imported the box back to Canada when i moved in January 2005. those rolls of film were better-travelled than most people.

when i finally let them go to their great kodachrome reward, it wasn’t out of any rational recognition that film had jumped the shark. rather it was out of avoidance, because every time i opened the freezer i felt guilty staring the box in the eye. i didn’t want the film to know it was dead.

i didn’t want to admit, for some reason, that i would likely never again wind a roll of cellulose into the back of a camera, or that my children would grow up finding the process as foreign as hitching up a buggy. whoa, Nelly. the world really does change in a blink.

and then all these fascinating artifacts clutter up our space, obsolescent but marked all over with fingerprints.
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in the four years i’ve spent out here in the blogosphere, i’ve seen a lot of models and trends in social media boom and bust. remember memes?  lolcats? the tender etiquette of blogrolls? ah yes. weren’t we cute?

(yes, i am likely the very last person on Teh Interwebs to have a blogroll. and it is sadly out of date. hush. i like to think of it as vintage.)

in gazing back through time at my VCR and my typewriter and my defunct Pentax K-1000, i don’t see Sodom & Gomorrah, a charnel-mess of sin and misery receding in the distance. nor do i see us striding inexorably forward into progress. sure, i like my digital SLR very much, and this fancy-pants MacBookPro and iTunes and all the other privileges that are my particular riches of time and place and class and living with an Educational Technologies Professional. i appreciate the affordances of these current technologies. but i appreciate in them the very same things that i love in my boneyard of the dead and cast-off: the fingerprints they make possible.

blogging’s fingerprint has changed, dramatically, over the past 3 or 4 years. sure, we’ve been told since at least Christmas 2008 that blogging is dead as a doornail. still, plenty of us do it. and there are people who started only when the death knell was proclaimed who still seem to be making a damn fine time of it. some, perhaps even a living.

when i first ventured out into wild social world of blogging, the parenting corner of the blogosphere – which was then still a relatively coherent entity – was like a hopping mixer dance on the first weekend of summer camp. connections were personal, often intense, and frequently had a tinge of wonder about them. i found you! we exhaled, collectively, and it was glorious. the playing field wasn’t flat – some people were obviously well-established and incredibly popular by late 2006 – but it all still seemed to be mostly about self-expression, rooms of one own. and for those who valued that kind of voice & space, this world seemed to be a democratizing agent beyond wildest dreams; a community of relative peers performing identity and parenthood in the 21st century.

then, subtly, the game changed. the model moved from summer camp to conference. one’s blog became a business, whether one happened to notice or not. and if one didn’t, one was – without doing anything differently – suddenly missing out.

months ago, on twitter, i proposed that maybe the term “blogging” has run its course. we don’t call all writers by the same handle: we have novelists and tech writers and humourists and PR people. increasingly, i suspect bloggers might be a less fraught community – or rather, group of communities, overlapping – if we had different names for the things people do in their online spaces, some for recompense, some for reputation, some for craft, some for the sheer hell of it.

the conversation around blogging – and particularly around mommyblogs – has monetized. and with that, the relatively egalitarian conversational field that existed into 2007 has fractured into a multiplicity of communities who lack any coherent centre other than the fact that their writers make up what advertisers tend to believe is a coherent market. we still make connections, often deep and personal ones. but they begin in networking, now, as much as in any enthusiastic recognition of self. those are not necessarily opposites – but they serve different ends. and i wonder about that.

i know i’m a dinosaur: i’ve clung to my narrative, non-commercial model for the blog just as i cling to the idea that my grandmother’s typewriter is funkalicious. for me, it works, mostly because i always figured i could capitalize more reputationally than monetarily from the kinds of writing i’m good at. i build my body of work here, and someday…who knows? i am not so proud or dumb or rich as to be averse to money. but i don’t relate to this blog primarily as an entrepreneur, and as such, i am still a relic of a former era, an artifact of blogging’s history. most writers who start out on the internet today have no desire whatsoever to be like me: they’ll either build their own site painstakingly as a business success through advertising and sponsorships and giveaways and carefully cultivated network relations, or they’ll write their hearts out – but with an eye to being picked up by a commercial site with SEO potentiality and paid for their words through the visibility of their name and the development of their cred.

the room of one’s own is supposed to turn a profit, these days.

i want to know what gets lost, in that shift, and what it means. i want to know if there’s a tradeoff, and what it says about our culture. i want to know if it’s good, and how…and for whom.

over the next three years, i’ll research social media and study technologies and trends and futures and what they all might mean for education and culture in the 21st century. for a dyed-in-the-wool Lot’s wife, wistful and salty, forever looking back, it’s a funny choice. but it’s what gets left behind that interests me.

i want your input on this little corner of that conversation. pretty please. tell me what’s changed about blogging in however long you’ve been doing it, or reading. tell me what’s changed in the community compared to your original expectations and hopes. tell me i’m wrong, or crazy, or hopelessly outdated. tell me why i should advertise, or write that review about feminine crotch spray i got pitched a few months back. tell me about writing giveaways, and if it’s hard or easy. tell me why you read, and what you think you’ll see from the internet and the blogosphere (if such a thing exists) a decade from now. tell me what difference this whole evolving world has made in your life.

tell me what fingerprints you think you’re leaving.

i may just do a dissertation on it all…my own little artifact.

five years ago tonight i’d been in the same hospital room without leaving for more than two weeks. friends brought Lebanese food for supper, we laughed and ate. one commented lovingly on my little belly, which was finally blossoming past the pudge stage to a belatedly discernable bump. i talked to Dave on the phone: he was staying at my father’s, ready to rise and shine early and go get the keys to our new house, our first home.

i watched a Law & Order-style show of some indistinguishable flavour on the tiny hospital tv. i was restless. i spread earphones over my middle, played a little EmmyLou Harris for Runt. Red Dirt Girl.  the baby i thought was my daughter kicked, and i patted back in time with the music. i still believed the first ultrasound was right, that he was a she. i still believed it mattered, just a bit.

i still believed a lot of things. i believed, with all my cynical heart, that everything would be okay. we were 26 weeks. 75% of babies born at 26 weeks survive without significant complications, i’d read just that morning. there were no signs of labour, no signs of infection. i was adjusting to the institutionalization of bedrest, had recently had the quarantine imposed by my just-out-of-Korea status lifted, and was as prepared as i could be to sit on my enlarging ass right through April and May and well into Gemini and straight on til morning.

i went to sleep earlyish that night. i wish i hadn’t.

five years seems incomprehensible, as if now-me must be some time traveller from the future. it can’t be five years. it’s like yesterday. i’m no different.

that’s a lie. i’ve been different ever since. the girl-woman who fell asleep that night has been gone ever since, as gone as Runt, who became Finn, who made me a mother and changed me once and then twice with his own metamorphosis.

i am wary of wishes. from the day Oscar was born healthy and breathing, and his sister after him, i made myself stop wishing. playing Sophie’s Choice with the living and the dead scares me. from the day Oscar was born, i did not dare wish for Finn.

but tonight, here on my couch, i sit baffled at the affront of time. five years is too long. too strange, that it can be true.

and i wish, just for a moment, that i could time travel; that i could lift the veil between me and that creaky hospital bed i’m so sure i see clearly. the stark spring light, sun late in setting. the navy velour hoodie that stretched over my belly. how connected i felt to those little kicks.

i would not erase this life i live now, this half-decade that has passed since that last night before i became a mother. my wish is not to change the outcome. that seems too big, beyond the scope of my altered capacity for belief. just a night, just a few minutes of an ordinary Thursday night in April.

i’d change only one thing: i’d stay awake.

i’d sit vigil with my son on the eve of his birth, because i’d know that instead of a beginning, we were at an end of sorts. i’d know that we were parting, and i’d sing, rub the belly gently, drink some juice just to wake him up. he liked cupcakes: i’d scrounge some, somehow. cupcakes are small change compared to rips in the space-time continuum. i’d finish the little story i started for him in my hospital notebook, the one that still sits upstairs in the drawer, by the memory box. i’d tell it aloud, so he could hear my voice.

he would know i loved him. and just his presence would comfort me.

it was the last time that he was with me, not hurt and broken. neither of us hurt and broken.

i sit vigil anyway, here on this other side of five years, remembering. the veil flutters. i squint, close my eyes, try to feel the memory of that first-time belly under my hands. i fail, mostly. but not entirely.

happy birthday, littlest.

four years ago, right about now, we left for the hospital.

a little late, as it turned out. i’d been stretched out on the futon upstairs, practicing my breathing, hope a thing with feathers in my throat. i’d sat at the island in the kitchen, perched on a stool, writing in my journal. i’d broadcast the fact of labour to my three faithful readers, even though two of them were my inlaws and we’d already called them. the title of that post is still my very favourite, to this day.

we only live five minutes from the hospital. it was nearly midnight: the roads were empty. but suddenly, at a red light about halfway across the city, my body ramped from 0 to 60 and my seatbelt became a cruel instrument of torture. i writhed in my seat and tried to stand up,w hich is difficult to do inside a Kia when you are a reasonably tall woman with a watermelon belly. i became quite certain i was about to break in two from the inside out.

that’s Oscar. he’ll sneak up on you, beguile you with his gentleness. then he’ll blow you out of the water.

but he came out at 1:47 am, safely at the hospital. he breathed. he cried. i did too. and they placed him in my arms, swaddled in his blue blanket, and i blinked and thought, well, that’s who you are then. hello. and he blinked back at me, and i felt the first faint rustle of it, this love that still swallows me whole.

he was blond and scrawny and peaceful, somehow, with an enormous head and hands like baby meathooks. all i knew about him was that he shared a birthday with Iggy Pop and with the Queen. i figured that had promise.

i didn’t know, then, that he would grow into a dinosaur expert, a puzzle-master, a daily rescuer of heroic proportions. i didn’t know he’d be sweet and funny, that he’d wrap his arms around his younger sister to comfort her, that he’d remember whole verses of poems by heart. i didn’t know that he’d live in a world of magic and imagination, where towels become dragons. i didn’t know he’d drag me in by sheer force of will and delight.

i’m glad i do now. he has brought us laughter and sweetness. he has made my life infinitely more, just by being in it.

happy four, little dragon, with your very fierce claws.  use them wisely, and with joy.

four years ago today, at the rolltop desk in the upstairs den, i opened my old laptop – long since gone to Jesus, as has its replacement – and wrote my very first blog post.

welcome to the crib, i warbled tentatively, voice new-born and flippantly uncertain. i’d grabbed the first name for the blog that had come to mind, not wanting to spend too much time agonizing over it for fear i’d talk myself out of the enterprise altogether. i thought the handle was a bit twee, but then, i thought the whole idea of a blog was a bit twee, too.

and yet i so very much hoped that someone might be out there listening. i unspooled the first post half-breathless, feeling as if the keys were a microphone i was tapping: is this thing on?

if you’d asked me then, i couldn’t have made an honest bet whether i’d keep it going two weeks or two years. four was beyond my capacity to imagine.

i was in that late, waddling point in pregnancy when you’re wide open, all possibility, living with the swollen, sciatic awareness that even four days may alter your life irrevocably, let alone four years.

but it was more than that. i’d simply forgotten the long, streaming flow of time when things are normal and decent and mundane.

the only thing i ever took out of high school physics class was the idea, only half-understood and possibly half-garbled, was that Einstein said time is not the same for everyone, nor for any person over different periods.

i get it now. because when i look back at then, i avert my eyes.

i’d just come out of two months on hospital bedrest. in the same hospital where less than a year before, i’d delivered another baby. his ashes were in my bedroom. and we’d only been back in the country fifteen months, and had carried multiple part-time jobs – those i didn’t lose to hospitalization – the entire time, with periods for both of us where no work was forthcoming. unlike most Canadians, we had medical bills, for the airlift almost exactly one year before. we had a house to pay for, bought the day our son was born: perhaps the biggest booby prize in the history of first homes.

time and the world were heavy on me, then.

four years was a useless measure to me, from the vantage point of that rolltop desk. i was Lot’s wife, looking backwards, but in far shorter increments. at any point during the 11 and a half months before i wrote that first post here, i could’ve told you precisely how long it’d been since i’d held Finn in my arms.

grief seems to be like that, at least unless you are particularly gifted at ignoring it. it measures itself incessantly, gapes like the wound it is. you know time is supposed to be its only anaesthetic, but time crawls, refuses you the mercy of oblivion. and as it crawls, it obliterates what shreds you have to cling to: the crispness of a memory, the smell of a blanket. i had lived lifetimes some days, that year before.

four years was also irrelevant simply because it was far too large a measure. at any point in 34 or so weeks before i wrote that first post here, too, i could have told you exactly how far along i was in my second pregnancy and how long it would be again until this baby would pass the 26 week, 1 day mark at which Finn had been born, and the 28 week mark at which s/he’d ostensibly reach lung maturity. my life was measured in weeks, then. i had been boiled down to gestational time.

and even still, even at the nearly 35 week mark where i sat down and wrote the blog into being, i didn’t truly, fully believe that everything would go right and the baby would be okay, would come home with us. i didn’t care, really, what a charming little boy he’d be at four: that was no more real to me then than the sort of 50 year old he may turn out yet to be, when i am old and gray. i only cared, that April four years ago, that maybe he might cry when he was born, and breathe.

pregnancies after loss seem to be like that, no matter what.

that baby was Oscar. and he has grown to be more than i ever dared imagine him to be: my small companion, my heart on legs. but so has the little blog with the slightly embarrassing name that has given me a place to write my world slowly back to a place where time is joyfully, mundanely, normal.

i look back at that first post now and my heart goes out to a woman i no longer identify with: brittle and braver than i hope i ever have to be again.

the blog is four. four years olds are energetic and imaginative and boisterous and silly. i think my voice could use more silly. it’s matured over the past year, developed an internal compass that feels, for the first time, like skin. but three is a watching age, a pleaser’s age, the point at which change and consistency are primary focii. four year olds are ready to adventure. and perhaps my voice is too.

back when polyester was still a glorious gift to humankind, i started kindergarten at the ripe old age of four-and-a-half. this coming September, when this blog is four-and-a-half, i will start school all over again. a Ph.D program, in education, here at UPEI.

i am thrilled that i got accepted. i am still recovering from that year of everything going wrong. when things go right – when i wake up and realize i have two kids, and a job, that the faithful partner and friend i feared i’d lose in the chasm of 2005 is not only still here but has learned to do laundry…and that now, finally, for once, i didn’t get rejected for something i really, really wanted – i flop back on the pillows, flattened by gratitude.

i’ll be researching social media, so i suppose it’s possible i may put the blog to another four years of service. maybe i’ll write more about Einstein. i hope i’ll write less about loss. i hope these next four years fly, with the busy-ness of normalcy and mundanity and the joy of growth.

thank you for being here, for keeping me company no matter what. when i sat down four years ago hoping somebody out there would hear me, receive…i couldn’t really have imagined.

feel free to send cake. or just eat it, in copious amounts.

i was dragging two kids and some bags in the door. an envelope stuck out, lemon yellow, not the business kind. a belated Easter card, i thought, or an early birthday card for Oscar. i pulled it from the box, went to shuffle it under the electricity bill.

then i saw the writing. and the name.

she wrote me back.

in December, in a fit of what some might call romanticism, i sent my one and only Christmas card to an address in Ontario whose recipient i knew only by name. for five Christmases, we’d received a card for the former residents of our house. each of the five years saw the handwriting on the card get a little shakier. something in it reminded me of my grandmother.

i wished Mrs. F a Merry Christmas, and told her where the former owners of our house live now. on a whim, i went further. i included a picture of my kids, and told her how i’d mailed Christmas cards for my grandmother every year when i was younger, and how she’s reminded me of what i’d forgotten: that cards are meant to be a way of reaching out. i thanked her. and i smiled and went on my merry way, my little grinch heart a few sizes less tight.

today it sprang free from its confines entirely.

an Easter card, and a picture of an elderly woman standing beside a blond lady in her 50s, behind a man about the same age. an elderly man perches in front. a note, too, typed in a script font and signed in full.

she wrote:
Dear Bonnie and family –

It took me a long while but I am now getting around to telling you how much I enjoyed getting your lovely Christmas card with a picture of your children. Your note really moved me – it was not just letting me know of my mistake, but giving me the possibility of a new family.

It’s hard to put into words my feelings but if you are agreeable, I would like to try to be an Honorary Great Grandmother to your children. It is not very likely that I will get down to The Island again as I am 87 and in excellent health but with legs and feet that make it difficult to do much traveling. But there is always mail, phone, and email. If you would let me know birthdays it would be a pleasure for me to send cards then and at other special occasions. Does this sound like something you would like to be involved with? I’m not trying to replace your grandmother, but it might be fun for us both to keep in touch. And if you should get up to this part of the world I have room for overnight visitors.

Think about it – no harm in trying!

Yours sincerely,

E_____ F______

P.S. Please excuse the typed letter but I have “familial tremor” and sometimes my writing is legible and sometimes not.

P.P.S Julius (the picture identifies the younger man in the picture as her son, the blond as his wife, and the elderly man as Julius) and I have been separated since 1983 and he lives in M______.

i wept.

an 87 year old woman whose stray Christmas card i very nearly threw out invited me – a complete stranger – to stay at her house. with my rabble of a family. and told me a great deal about hers, in one photo.

we’ll likely never go. and i need a new penpal like a hole in the head. but also maybe like a hole in my heart, in the place where one never gets too old to need a grandmother.

because i understand that this is extension is not about what comes of it, whatever that may be. it is about the reaching out, the saying i am here, and i see you there, fellow traveler. and i nod.

i will write Mrs. F back and say, yes. you bet. your picture’s on the fridge. and again, thank you for reminding me.
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almost three years ago now, i reached out – with the thin words that come struggling in when things are dire and wrong – to somebody else, one of my first blog friends out here in this fellowship of travelers. she had written something a few months before that had stayed with me, her positivity a light i kept coming back to.

i hadn’t seen nothin’ yet.

when i wrote that post three years ago, i didn’t know that Whymommy‘s real name was Susan. i didn’t know much about her except that she was a scientist and a mom of two little boys, and that she was, in a way i was only beginning to understand as i forged tentative “real” relationships with so many of you i’d met out here in the ether, my friend. and i hoped that the reaching out would be some small thing to remind her that she was cared for, even by people who’d never met her.

since then, she’s become both a very real – if still never yet met in the flesh – friend, and my unintentional teacher.

and like Mrs. F did today with the generosity of her offering, she’s made me weep. when she had to give up BlogHer after her diagnosis that summer of 2007, she offered me her ticket. i couldn’t go – i’d just started a brand-new job, had no spare $1000 or holidays for a trip to Chicago – but i sat at my desk at work the day i got her email snorting back tears like a big wet hen. and the following summer, when after months of bedrest – months Susan could relate to, having being laid up flat on her back almost her entire pregnancy with Little Bear – i got far enough along with Posey to finally dare anticipate this longed-for daughter, she sent me a box of baby girl clothes and trinkets, bought for the girl child her firstborn turned out not to be. they were packed in tissue, as if each one had been gently patted, then let go. she’d had her ovaries removed – a preventative measure – the week before.

the little white and pink wooden basket she sent sits by Josephine’s crib. Oscar – a budding collector – kept ferreting pinecones and chestnuts away in it last fall, until i had to explain to him that his sister could choke on them, and empty it. but i thought nonetheless that the scientist in Susan might approve of the use we’d put it to. this past weekend, with the weather finally decent, my girl collected her own first pinecone. what she didn’t eat of it is in the basket.

Susan found out a week ago that her cancer has returned. it’s breast cancer, though she has no breasts anymore. it’s metastasized to the lymph nodes under her arms; six tumours. she will have them out tomorrow.

Susan has taught me, in a way i never understood before, why cancer research matters so much. there is no research yet that can tell her conclusively whether to have the tumours out tomorrow, or start chemo instead. if she did start chemo, there is no research to tell cancer patients when maintenance chemo can be stopped.

there are not enough answers. not yet.

i want there to be answers for Susan. but i don’t have any. none of us do.

all we have is the capacity to reach out. to get the word out about research. to tell Susan we love her, and we’re thinking of her. to tell her how she matters to us. to tell her to kick ass and walk tall.

Susan’s friend Jean of Stimeyland is hosting Team Whymommy’s Virtual Science Fair today.

friends of Susan’s, new and old, flesh and ether and all grades in between, are invited to join in. we’ve all done a little something special with our kids this past week, something with Susan the enthusiastic and inquiring scientist in mind.

for us, here, it was this.

seeds. the faith that life will spring. that the nod at the earth is worth the time, just as people, sometimes, are worth reaching out to. that come summer, there will be big beefy tomatoes. and possibly more cauliflower than we can ever eat in this life.

i still hold out a bit of hope that i may finally, belatedly, make it to BlogHer after all this August. and if i do, i better find Susan there. because i will have tomatoes for her.

i am heavily asleep, each time, somehow. this is not possible, and yet i would swear it true.

after three wakeups in the same night, deep sleep only occurs right in those precious three seconds before the next bloodcurdling scream of ma-mAAAA!!!!  i lift my head as if from a pool of sticky cobwebs. i blink, shake. wet dog. my feet are on the floor before i know where or who i am.

Shakespeare was a pansy, or MacBeth was allegory. motherhood murders sleep. end story. curtain.

my brain finally catches up with my ears about the time i hit the door to the kids’ room, and i pause. odd.  it is the elder child calling, the one who for two blessed years has slept like a rock, at least until quarter to crocus each bleary morning.

i creep in, floorboards creaking. i take the little body in my arms, note both how big he suddenly is and still how small. he sobs, falls into me. i wedge myself into the toddler bed beside him, because this is the third time he has been awake. i hold him, rubbing my hand across the spacemen that dot his pajamas.

i mutter, for the third time in as many hours, bad dream honey?  what happened? you tell mama.

but the horror of the unspeakable holds him in thrall. he shudders. we drift.

one of my earliest memories is a recurring dream i had around Oscar’s age. a giant carnivorous dinosaur, cartoon green, would emerge from behind the giant KFC bucket that hung suspended on a pole along my tiny city’s main thoroughfare. i would be driving my little red car. its enormous teeth would loom in front of my windshield, and then it would eat me.

sleep is a Pandora’s Box that unlocks our fears, all the busy-ness of our minds.

it occurs to me that he may not have the words for what has unfolded in the theatre of his own head.  so i ask again, differently. what scared you, buddy? it’s okay, whatever it is. you give it to me. i can help. i can listen.

the little shoulders shake again. and then the deep inhale.  it all tumbles out in a cry.

mommy and daddy got eaten by a shark. with big teeth. eaten up dead. and Finn died. and will Great-grandpa die soon? or Nannie? how do we know when we die anyway? and – this last with the sob of deepest fears given voice – when daddy dies, will he still be his…b-b-b-buddy?

my heart.

he is not yet four. and he is staring down the abyss.
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and my answers are shreds, Kleenex to mop up a river.

love stays with us, i whisper, even after people are gone.

no, we never know how long we have, honey. i don’t know when i’ll die. i hope not for a long time. but i don’t know. i can promise you my love will still be with you even if, someday, i’m not.

yes, Nannie will die. yes, mama too, sweetie. someday. probably not soon. people only die when their bodies are done, sweetie. sometimes that’s a surprise. usually not. my body is strong, baby. i’m very lucky and healthy. just like you.

yes, usually people die when they’re old.

no, Finn wasn’t old. Finn died when he was just a new baby. he came early, before he was ready, sweetie.  his lungs weren’t strong. your lungs are GREAT. blow. see? those are some serious lungs.

yep, he’s still my baby, sweetie, still a part of our family. we still love him. yes, we would love you even if you died. you’ll always be my son, forever. whether we’re alive or not.

yes, i miss him, sweetheart. you miss him too? i bet you do. oh, you’d share your dinosaurs with him? WOW. i think he’d have liked that, Oscar.

well, i don’t really know if he liked dinosaurs. but i bet he would.  he was just a baby, sweetie. he was little, very little. he had brown hair, like Josephine’s, and a cute little nose like yours. just like daddy’s. what did he do? well, he held mummy’s finger. like this. very tight. isn’t that neat? he could do that. but no, we didn’t get to find out if he liked dinosaurs. i would have liked the chance to read dinosaur books with him, yes. i love to read dinosaur books to YOU.

where is he? well…um…some of his ashes are out under the maple tree in the backyard, honey, helping it grow strong. everything that dies helps other things live.

is he here? he might be, Oscar. he might be. sometimes i think that. i would like that, to believe he was here with us, in the air we breathe.

he’s here though, in my heart, Oscar. feel my heart?  there’s love in there for all three of you, you and Josephine and Finn. my babies. no matter how big you get or how long you live. nothing takes love away. i’m sure of that.

yes, Great-grandpa loves you. no, he probably won’t be eaten by sharks. mummy or daddy either. there aren’t really any sharks around here, buddy. the water’s too cold. i promise i won’t go swimming with any sharks, okay?

yes, daddy will be your buddy as long as you live, your whole life. whether he’s here or not. you’re his special buddy, and he’s yours. that’s forever.

it’s okay, sweetheart. you sleep now. it’s gonna be okay.
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it is true, and it is not.

i lie there in the darkness, thinking of all i do not know. whether his brother watches over us.  what days are granted to us.  whether it is better to lie to a not-quite-four-year-old asking about death, or tell the lonely truth: we do not know.  you are loved, and yet alone. this is the human condition, the nightmare we never fully wake from.

i think of my friend Whymommy, fighting cancer for the second time in just under three years. i wonder about 3 am at her house and my heart catches. i say aloud, It is Not Fair.  i feel small and stupid and unforgivably lucky, just for clinging to the belief that it somehow should be fair.

i think of my friend Sue and her sister. my coworker’s dad, whose leg will be amputated tomorrow. the friend who just lost her third baby in a row.

i breathe deep into my son’s tangle of sweaty curls, and unfold myself from his tiny bed.

the spacemen rise and fall peacefully, and i watch in the blue glow of the nightlight. i am remembering Finn’s chest, punctured by tubes, his tiny fingers blackened from lack of oxygen, all just as beautiful to me as this boy.

your father would’ve called you little buddy too, i whisper to the air, just in case.
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only stories comfort this oldest of aches. what do you tell yourself at 3 am? and what do you tell your kids of fear and love and loneliness, and cabbages and kings?

…they say goldfish have no memory
i guess their lives are much like mine
and the little plastic castle
is a surprise every time

– Little Plastic Castle, Ani diFranco, 1998

it takes about ten years for hindsight to focus, for the dirty judgement we call clarity to settle on a bygone era.

before that, it’s just yesterday. then suddenly, you wake up and note that everything’s incontrovertibly different. that most of the clothing refugees your closet harbours from that era look suspiciously dated. that you had bad hair then. the photos prove it. you blush.

the times, it occurs to you, with a slight queasy nod to mortality, they have a-changed.

this past week, with all the kerfuffle and brouhaha pinging back and forth between the blogosphere and mainstream media on the subject of mothers and bloggers and bears, oh my, i’ve realized that a part of me pines for that suddenly historic epoch: the 1990s.
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the 90s were an ugly decade, i thought while they were happening. perms and big hair and the square, boxy shapes left over from the 80s hung on far too long into the decade. i wore a lot of army boots with flowy skirts then, plus thrift-shop shirts with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders and those giant, scratchy sweaters from Guatemala. my hair was by turns geometrically puffy and super short, except for 1999 when i grew it long and parted it straight down the middle, my ironic homage to Pocahontas. or Crystal Gayle.

i didn’t know what i was doing much, in those years. i was in my first year of university when we rang the decade in, and at the tail end of a short and not-so-stabilizing-as-i’d-hoped marriage when it all rang out ten years later. i was a student most of those years; a teacher in between. i lost my virginity in the first days of the 90s. i took up smoking somewhere in those strange seasons of eternal, cynical youth, and learned to play guitar. i hiked mountains, slept on trains, backpacked my way coast to coast. i was bulimic, then recovering, then vegetarian. between 1989 and 2000, the 90s plus a shoulder on each side, i experimented with whatever remnants of drug culture landed in my lap. before and since, clean as snow.

i thought i was extraordinary, a unique marvel waiting to be discovered. but i was a fucking caricature, just a child of my times trying to muddle my way through to adulthood with a whole generation of others like me.

in the rearview mirror, it’s clear as day. i grew up in a bygone era.

i spent whole chunks of the 90s – in my early 20s, my peak pick-up years, here, people – without shaving my legs. i catch sight of young women today with their flat-ironed hair and their ubiquitous spray tans and their waxed eyebrows and suspect their legs and nethers are equally primped and smooth, to a one. they make me feel vaguely Neanderthal, those nubile hairless wonders, and yet merciful free. to my eyes, their uniforms of mandatory perfect flesh look as confining as corsets, as pointy 50s Maidenforms.

in the 90s, girls got to be angry. our boobs were mostly our own business, as far as fashion went. our words, though, were pointy. especially the ones accompanied by music.

Ani diFranco and Liz Phair were sister-goddesses in heavy boots, with big words and loud chords, and every time i gave the finger to The Man i was cool as Kim Deal, baby. the Indigo Girls sang me into an un-selfconscious social consciousness, and for all the problems of the world, it was just plain powerful to be a young woman with a voice.

even the papers said so.

and i thought this was normal, even a bit trite. the mid-decade platinum-selling angst of Alanis Morrisette embarrassed me. i took the privilege of disdain for granted. i still believed, then, in the modern myth of progress…that we were inching ever closer to a world where equality and complexity would be prized; where anger would make way for better things.

i was so fucking cute i make my teeth ache.

it took me well into the next decade to find a venue for my voice. i knew, even as i fumbled painstakingly over my F chord and my Janis Joplin renditions back in my first days with my very own guitar, that nobody was ever gonna pay to hear me sing. and i had a journal, all those long transient winters of finding my way into adulthood, but the concept of a public journal via the Internets was years ahead of me, back then.

still, the voice i eventually wrote into being here was a voice shaped more by the 1990s than by this era i’m living through, in many ways. and i think an awful lot of the so-called mommyblogs are similar, just by virtue of their writers’ demographics.

we are the girls of the 90s grown into women, writing our lives with the expectation that it is right and proper to use the voices we have.
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times change, though, and with them, the bounds of propriety, most especially for women. today we live in a world of Hannah Montana and her young, sleek, interchangeable ilk, each of them more hairless and bland than the last. the angry girls are gone, for the most part, and if the media fixes its gaze on them now it’s because they’ve pulled an Amy Winehouse and self-destructed. again.

we live in a world of blogs and social media, but many mainstream media stories still make women’s use of these out to be frivoulous, or marginal: relegated to the domain of the domestic alone.  anything else is gold-digging; any run on capital and perks by a female can still be positioned as inherently suspect and unjustified.

we live in a time when being labelled overtly feminist is, for many, more cringe-inducing than Facebook photos of our early-90s snowplow bangs.

given these foundations, the furor over mommybloggers – whatever particular furor it may be, and whatever particular outrage of the week it may engender – shouldn’t be such a surprise. look back through the rearview mirrors of history: these are old stories, elderly tropes and narratives, rendered powerful again by uncertainty. they make me nostalgic for the good old days of my day when the bad girls were media darlings.

the belittling stories and the omissions are worth taking on, challenging, absolutely. that’s part of the point of having a voice.

but in the long run, having a whole generation of us out here writing our own stories has the potential to be far more subversive to those narratives of how dismissable we all are than our protests against them.

we get to write our rebuttals every day.

because the pendulum will swing, sooner or later. the hairless beauties will give way to the natural glory of the furry crotch once again, and girls will don boots instead of heels for awhile. and maybe that next generation will get somewhere with it all, or maybe they won’t, but maybe somewhere along the line some of them will find our words out here and realize that womanhood in this decade, whatever the heck it ends up looking like in hindsight, wasn’t entirely sleekness and sippy cups.

that we were more. that we hadn’t entirely forgotten that we grew up in the 90s, even if we did eventually get better hair. and learn to wax.

so. confess. do you miss your Guatemalan sweaters? do you depillate in a 90s or contemporary fashion? and do you care what people in the New York Times or Globe and Mail say about blogging by women and mothers?