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they say when your children are born and placed in your arms for the first time, you become – truly, finally – aware of your own mortality, of the cyclical, revolving nature of this thing called life and the loss inherent to it.

they say this awareness comes like a thud, sad and sweet and built like a concrete block. wham. hello, it says.  behold your replacement. and the helpless, squalling bundle in your arms opens its eyes and you know, without a doubt, that you will die someday and that you’d die for this child because something as old and raw as pride has risen inside you and you understand, in that instant, that everything else you’ve ever done is ephemeral compared to this.

or so i think it goes.  in reality, that moment kind of escaped me.

it happened out of order for me, true.  my initiation was sadder than most. but it still had its joy, its wonder and beauty. but no sucker punch of oh my god i couldn’t have expected this love. oh my god life is sorrow and beauty all wrapped up.

i already knew.

i think i read too much as a kid to be properly shocked by anything that has happened to me since.

children in books have everything happen to them. they’re orphaned, abandoned, lost, set adrift into magical lands. they encounter Danger and Adversity, are tested to the very limits of their understanding and often beyond. all, in the end, to build character, in the most literal sense of the word.

in books, these lead characters are always a little different from the crowd: some quality separates them, makes their stories worth telling. usually, their differences are redemptive, sources of sympathy on the part of the silent witnesses who read the narratives and stand in judgement or outrage or sorrow at the outcomes. it is the plucky heroine and the bright little chap who shine, and in their shadows the pleasant normal children seem plastic, dull, bovine.

Mr. DeMille, i’m ready for my book now.

i grew up a defacto only child with an absent father, a great-aunt-cum-grandmother as timid and nervous as a mouse, and a mother who by 24 had lost both parents, an adoptive father, a husband, and any sense of long-term planning or agency.  between them, they made for rather stark horizons.  nobody talked about much, but subtexts of loss and betrayal and stiff-upper-lippedness and things unsaid ran under the surface of our lives like an exposed vein of acid. we were all marked by the exposure. the adults could not acknowledge their own scars. whether mine were invisible to them, i do not know.

the other kids i knew weren’t much like me. protected, perturbed by things without happy endings, they seemed to take for granted a world as friendly and secure as a 70s tv show.  by eleven or twelve, i had begun to suss out our differences, conduct a puzzled sort of ethnography on them. they went to Disneyworld and played soccer and cried when their dads went away for work for a week. i watched without jealousy, only curiosity. they were my friends, and yet when i scratched the surface, another species.

tiny megalomaniac that i was, i decided that they must be mere background characters in the great novel that got played out day by day in the trenches of junior high. i – by default – the oddball melancholic  o so attuned to the low violin strings of the human heart, must be special.

i became my own protagonist.

and so i read, looking for models. everything i could get my hands on, from the Victorian children’s classics of orphaned heroines to my aunts’ discarded 70s sexploitation novels about stewardesses and cadres of gymnast bankrobbers, most of which puzzled my ten- and eleven-year-old self. i read my mother’s Norman Vincent Peale meditations and my grandmother’s Harlequins and randomly acquired copies of The Godfather and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. i read the Doonesbury comics my father sent in lieu of birthday presents, even though i understood nothing of the political landscape they satirized.  he was the only person in my family who could have given even a three-word description of Reagan’s politics, or even Trudeau’s. i read earnestly, hopefully, trying to prepare myself to live. i tried to prepare myself for everything, just like the kids in stories.

i think i overdid it.

i’ve lived a life in which no stone of experience has been left unturned.  i’ve cleaned toilets, modelled nude for money, eaten Mr. Noodles for months on end and thrown them up anyway in a battle between economy and the waste and self-abnegation of bulimia. i’ve moved coasts and continents, been married, been divorced, had my heart broken. i’ve loved randomly and loved well, and learned that there’s only sometimes a difference but the difference? is the world. i’ve studied all i could get my hands on, drunk all i could get my hands on, tried most substances i could get my hands on. i’ve stayed up til 8 in the morning and invited the bar back to my place for breakfast. i’ve birthed three babies. i’ve held one as he died.

your protagonist, gentle readers, has cultivated herself as a character for more than two decades now. i am done. i am tired of being a protagonist.

my half-brother and his wife had a son last week. i went to the hospital to meet the new arrival, to cradle this nephew in my arms and suck the new-baby-smell of his head deep into my lungs.

his mama was in the same bed where i stayed after Posey was born, only thirteen months ago. i stood there holding the wee Griffith, my body remembering what my mind had forgotten, all the ways newborns squeak and blink and curl into you like small frogs. and something hit me that finally, for the first time, took me by surprise.

this is all behind me, my wistful dog-in-the-manger, climb-every-mountain, i’m-at-the-centre-of-every-story heart crooned.

and that is okay, whispered back a voice i’m not sure i’ve ever heard before. a voice i’d never read about. but mine. definitely mine.

then a wave of something like relief washed over me, warm and wet and i teared up and smiled at Griffith and i’m sure he thought the outburst all for him. as he should.  him, and Oscar, and Posey, their little clan of fellows and rugrats, a whole new generation to fancy themselves the characters from which stories are wrought. they can have it, that sense of destiny, that specialness.

i’ve spent the last twenty years looking for a story to be in. and now, somewhere in the rush of getting two kids out the door and folding laundry and teaching and dreaming up Ph.D applications and smiling at Dave when he plays Blood on the Tracks for the thirteenth time this week,  i notice i have one. just like that. and it is enough.

i am not Prince Hamlet, nor was i meant to be.

and like nothing else ever has, that shocks me.
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perhaps this ought to be the part where i say i’m done. that this is the swan song, the last post.  i was tempted. Dave made me a gift last week, ordered a book of the blog to date. this post – which has taken longer than any post i’ve ever written to eke out, blindly poke my way through – lay alluringly in draft like a perfect coda in waiting. why write outside the bound covers of…gasp…a book?

but it is not the blog i want to leave behind. i don’t write as much as i used to, true…but i write better. at least by my own, erm, humble estimation. and i owe that to this platform, this space, where i have – after long imagining myself a walking book – written enough to be happy to call myself, quietly, a writer.

so you’re stuck with me. in my new, terribly happily boring incarnation. now please. please tell me about YOU.  i need fodder.

i tend to take research results with a grain of salt.

our accumulated human & societal experiments fascinate me. but when your own flawed self has been the architect of a plan or project designed to illuminate the human condition in some way or another, truths and illuminations from other people’s plans and projects start start to look a lot more jury-rigged themselves. it’s not exactly that they appear less true than they might have before; rather that true itself starts to seem like a conditional state, a window in time and perspective rather than any stamp of mythical absolute authenticity.

still, when i read the other day that 50% of children born in this decade may live to be 100 years old, my head swivelled.

sure, it swivelled in part because i’ve been reading Consumption, by Kevin Patterson. it’s a story of tuberculosis and famine and the Hudson’s Bay Company & mines that all eventually combined to wrangle the Inuit in off the land less than fifty years ago, and the diseases of affluence that have since ravaged that population on a scale that even the most forbidding landscape on earth never touched. diseases of affluence we all suffer from and carry the seeds of deep in our bodies the way that previous generations and many of the world’s poor still today carry TB…diseases like cancer, vascular impairment, diabetes.

we die today mostly because of how we eat.  how we choose to eat. as i type this i’m wiping crumbs from homemade pumpkin tarts off my keyboard. hey, they’re seasonal. they’re homemade. they have only 2/3 cup of sugar in, like, the eleven of them i just inhaled. whee. but i wasn’t actually hungry.

if this is how i have to suffer from my own affluence, it’s no wonder people are getting on board this train. even if it is bound for the boneyard.

still, however naively, however in denial of the effects of what i feed them, i like the idea of my kids living to be 100.  i usually live in abiding fear of the planet up and belching us all off its weary back long before either of them get their threescore and ten in, and so the possibility that this generation may have longer lives rather than shorter, more brutish ones is deeply comforting.

still, that wasn’t why the news made my head swivel.

it swivelled, dear friends, because i first came across the info as tweeted by film director Duncan Jones, object of my first stalking experiment in social media.  poor Duncan. i’m sure it would crush him to know that of his 6000+ followers, the chirpy mom with the slightly twee username who chats him up now and then is actually, uh, strategically and shamelessly using him.

it’s probably not his first time ’round this block. because Duncan Jones, whom you may know better as Zowie, is the 38 year old son of David Bowie, with whom i’ve been conducting an, erm, faithful if one-sided twenty-five year love affair. in my head.

imagine if twitter had existed in my angsty adolescence. i always knew Bowie had a son my age, but seeing as my parents weren’t interested in sending me to a dour and pricy Scottish boarding school, and Zowie cum Joe cum Duncan never once put up a penpal ad in Rolling Stone, i had little access to this otherwise obvious avenue of ingratiating myself into the Bowie clan. pity. dude was probably as estranged from his father at that age as i was – we coulda been buds. and then, you know, i would’ve finagled myself an invite to Christmas dinner and my charming insights woulda brought son to a renewed appreciation of father and father to a recognition of the marvel of a human being lying undiscovered in my old soul – in a manner most un-Polanski-esque, of course – and he’d have married me and that pesky Iman woulda just had to find herself another rock god. i’d have been Bonnie Bowie and the director of Moon my stepson and we’d all have lived happily ever after.  ahem.

oh dear god, i cringe in anticipation of my children’s adolescence, if they have imaginations and wills anything like mine.

anyhoo, i follow Duncan Jones on twitter. it entertains me. and the other day he mentioned the study reporting that children today have a 50/50 chance of living until the age of 100. to which i tweeted back some crack about needing to invest in their retirement now, before they’re outta diapers. to which he responded. and then he RE-TWEETED ME.

(because – all kidding aside – i’m damn right. if the poor kids are going to live to be 100, somebody better be planning to pay for the cancer-causing morsels of mush that will sustain them into that long-delayed good night.)

but i digress. research smesearch. the nifty study was merely the catalyst, the subject matter upon which i belatedly and somewhat circuitously launched my lifelong dream. i had a Real Live Online Conversation with the son of David Bowie. direct descendant. fruit of loins. the thirteen-year-old still lurking inside me swooned and fainted dead away.

twenty-five years is a long time to carry a torch.  my engraved invitation to the Bowie Christmas dinner? on its way, people.  Duncan & i, we’re getting tight. we chatted again, with me at my obsequious best, on Tuesday. we’ll be BFFs in no time. at my current rate of progress, i’m guessing on actually graduating from son to father and finally making personal Bowie contact about 2038. The Thin White Duke’ll be a mere 91. maybe i can spoon-feed him.

then we’ll get married and i can die a happy woman, of whatever disease of my affluence would like to have its way with me.

sigh. if only Bowie’d been born in this decade, i could be half-certain he’d live that long.

when i was a kid, i spent a lot of time alone.

i was not lonely, not particularly. i remember myself as social, eager, a child not overly burdened by shyness. yet i spent the majority of my time, it occurs to me, in solitary pursuits.  books, Lego, Barbies. i remember spending a lot of time lying on my stomach. hey, it was the 70s. gimme a shag rug to sprawl on and i bet i could still while away a Saturday like nobody’s business.

mostly, i drew. i was good at drawing, or so the adults around me told me. and i liked that. so i drew more. and whether it happened because i wanted to be good at it or because i was naturally inclined towards it, drawing became my oeuvre. i got lost in it, created worlds with pencils and blue Bic pens. i was never into colouring. all the little boys in my colouring books, i diligently turned into long-haired girls; beyond that, colouring held little interest. i liked the lines i followed to be my own.

over my elementary school years my busy hands must’ve filled a hundred doodle pads, those newsprinty sheafs of absorbent pastel paper. each would’ve been chock-full and bursting,  every one an almost-picture-book with wordless narratives and imaginary worlds now lost to history. landfills today are still shifting and digesting my childhood fancies.

i am impatient, these days, with Oscar. he is not yet three-and-a-half, and the fact that he does not like to be alone, sleep alone, or play alone is perhaps no terrible oddity on his part.

it is, however, driving me crazy.

true, i’m an extravert, a social creature who gets energy from interactions with others. but i am the kind of extravert who binges, who will go all out for a given occasion if opportunity arises, who can stay up til sunrise having just the right conversation. and who is then sated for, oh, months. or at least a few hours, y’know? i’m an extravert who needs a few minutes of silence to catch up with my own head every couple of hours, at least.

so the Mommy Mommy Mommy of a three year old who wants my attention and participation in everything he does? combined with the sweet chirpings of a one year old just learning to say Mama? my heart hears the crescendo and reminds me these little voices will only be small once, and swells, wearily. my ears hear the crescendo and want to run and hide themselves under a pillow until i can hear myself think.

i found the infancy of both children hard. it was partly colic, partly leftover grief, largely my own personality. a few months into Oscar’s life i found myself crying at the kitchen table late one night, worn to shreds not only from the incessant crying but just the need that came with a high-intensity infant. he needed me around the clock, took an hour to feed, fed every two hours. there was no time to regroup, to collect myself, to be anything other than a stumbling purveyor of milk and clean diapers and kisses. and though i loved him deeply and dearly and fiercely, i had to admit to myself that being needed to that extent was not a need of mine.

maybe there are women out there – people out there – who fall into parenthood as into a vat of butterscotch pudding, an all-consuming satisfaction of everything they’ve ever dreamed of, even if it is a bit hard to breathe. me, i never liked butterscotch pudding. i’m a compartmentalizer. and Mommy is not a role that compartmentalizes particularly well.

i marvel at people who accomplish things when their children are small. baking, writing, decorating, exercising…you name it, i marvel at it. because just in order to keep the house functionally clean & tidy and keep us all fed and clothed, Dave & i seem to be busting an awful lot of ass. and doling out a lot of hush, honey, just a minutes.  it’s not pretty, the number of times i seem to say that to my kids in the course of a day, or even a supperhour. it’s even less pretty, the cacophony that still permeates our house despite my gentle entreaties for just another bleeping second to finish chopping your carrots so you don’t CHOKE to death, thank you very much!! ahem. i can barely chop carrots in that headspace. if you can decorate your house or write your magnum opus under the same conditions, you are an ubermensch.

please don’t tell me otherwise. i’ll just feel worse.

in the meantime, i’m just hanging on, hoping they learn to draw – or knit or dance or quietly hatch diabolical plans for world takeover, whatever their little hearts desire – soon.
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mind you, if they do begin to draw like fiends, i’ll just have a  new time-succubus on my hands. what do YOU do with all the art projects your little Picassos generate? is your living room wall, like that of my college friend Susie’s family, a giant colourful varnished collage of your children’s most beautiful creations? or, uh, do you send ’em to the trash?

inquiring minds need to know. the box on the freezer in the back porch? she’s gettin’ full.

some things come easy.

it is fall again and the light is yellow and crisp and i swear i only brought her home yesterday but there she is, Josephine walking, tottering like a blithe drunk about the house, careening into everything faster than my hands can catch her.

she took her first formal steps, the first real replicable confident stutter from here to there, exactly on her first birthday. a true Virgo, fastidious and precise and on time. two weeks later, she is unstoppable, a whirlwind. she is delighted with herself. i am delighted in her.

it’s easy when thing line up tidy-like. smugness rises like cream, unbidden, unintentional. i have to slap myself.

i suspect that some poor lost Virgo – perhaps the part of me from which Josephine’s timeliness sprang – lurks under my Aquarian skin, trying to run a Prussian train line through the soup that is life. my inner Virgo wants to believe that someday all the books will not only be shelved but alphabetized, that the dishwasher will empty itself, that everything will go on schedule, that there will be an Answer.  all the things i just never made sense of in this big ol’ game of Go Fish, she’s been tallying, saving up, waiting for me to put in order.

this Virgo, she gets louder and more anxious every year. virgins are like that, i retort. she glares, haughty, above me.

but she forgets too easily, this Virgo. she lets herself believe that order=safety, that norms=virtue. she lets herself believe in the medieval laws of hermetics and falls prey to the mugs’ game of pride in random milestones, mistaking them for a promise that all will continue.

normal only means the bus hasn’t hit you yet.

normal is a trick of the mind, one that lets you believe yourself cossetted from the awfulness you glimpse now and then at the periphery of things. yet it is normal to have suffering come for you eventually, not only in the thud of mortality but in the hundred shocking ways a world can be swept from under you.

when you know this, and make yourself remember, nothing comes so easy. first steps – on a first birthday or months before or later – are a marvel, a quiet, private symphony unto themselves.

my Virgo, trapped eyeless under my skin, cannot see this. her lens turns only inward, tallying these small blessings gifted me by my children, and nodding yes, yes.  she believes she is due.
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each September for the past few years we’ve gone apple picking in the same orchard not far from the city; a wide, sloping place that veers down towards water, all small, twisty trees abundant with fruit.

there are few things in my adulthood i’ve done five years in a row…i have not stayed still long enough for that kind of consistency, ’til now.  but this local teacher-turned-farmer and his earnest operation of organic apples keep us coming.

Oscar’s first year in the orchard he slept against his father’s chest, cheeks like apples peeking out above the carrier. two years ago he was just big enough to ride on the little apple basket trolley without toppling. last year, he batted at the trees and filled the basket mostly with half-eaten remains of all the apples he tried, while i carried eleven-day old Josephine in her sling and tried to pick one-handed. this year, even my baby girl took a chomp at temptation, her cheeks shuddering when the tartness hit.

the first year, though, we went without children. a friend dragged us out in our crappy old station wagon, her energy buoyant enough to break through the cloister we’d imposed on ourselves those months after Finn died.  i was newly pregnant with Oscar, as fragile and closed as an eggshell, emotionally, but the apple-picking pleased me, comforted. the small trees and the low-hanging fruit were easy, the first thing in that long season of drastic change and adjustment that seemed to come without undue effort. we filled baskets, the sun shone, i smiled. and then we paid and drove away and our friend said i know the prettiest country road.

isn’t that how Deliverance starts?

we were playing Lucinda Williams on the stereo. raw, reckless, rollicking Lucinda, wailing I think I lost it, lemme know if you come acrost it, lemme know if i let it fall along a back road somewhere… the only song i seem to remember from the haze of bewilderment and grief that had been that summer of ’05.  our friend Christina, with pipes like a church choir, competed with Lucinda from the back seat. i droned happily in my three-note warble.

and then a bang and a metallic ripping sound. the car bumped gracelessly to a halt. the scenic red-dirt lane had torn the ass-end straight out of our vehicular lemon and we were a good few miles from nowhere without even cows to gaze upon our distress.  Christina sacrificed a belt to try to tie the necessary underbelly back onto the car, to no avail, and Dave plucked at a barbwire fence for the same purpose. i did nothing. i had, with the very first bang, gone under.

normal may be an illusion, but there are times the human brain can only sustain so much of its absence. i just moved continents, been airlifted and lost my hard-scrounged job all in the same breath, had a child and had that child die in my arms. but it was our poor old fugly station wagon – bought for a baby who never rode in it – that sent me off the rails.

i didn’t do much. you wouldn’t have known, to see me. i sat by a ditch, patting my bag of apples, still singing Lucinda Williams. but inside something had snapped, gone rogue.

the Virgo had been telling me all my life that if i just worked harder, tried harder, was better, things would work out. the universe, though, was seemingly expending all its energy thwarting my need for any sort of positive outcome or expectation of normalcy whatsoever. or that’s how it felt, then, at the side of that dirt road.

and so for a minute, i gave up. i dropped my head to my knees and breathed deep and jagged and stared into the red mud puddle between my feet and forgot, briefly, that i was verklempt and bereaved and hopeless and apparently cursed of god and Hyundai, both.  i picked up a shiny, crisp apple, fresh from the tree, and bit it.

my brain said, this is nice.

the Virgo heaved and gnashed her teeth. i heard her, vaguely, through my chewing. you are sitting in a mud puddle! lost in the backwoods! your baby died and you’re broke and your ridiculous life makes no sense at the moment! and you had such POTENTIAL! did i mention that tow truck is going to cost a fortune? and that you’re IN a mud puddle?

i looked at Dave, ten feet away, trying to clean the barb wire rust off his hands. i looked at Christina, fearless in the face of our sadness, who had befriended us when we had nothing to offer except need. i looked at my apples and decided i could walk back to civilization on apple power if i had to.

i thought, these will possibly be the darkest days of my life.  i felt almost eager, thinking it, delusional and free, like a glimpse into some other time usually veiled from my eyes. i watched the sun play on my hands and realized i was going to live through these rotten, ludicrous days, even if they didn’t come easy.
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states of grace never last, at least not for me. i told the Virgo to fuck off, and it was good. but she was back the very next day.

the places in me where she is woven deepest i still rise, indignant, at any sign of my own bad luck, any sign that i am again cast beyond the bounds of what i deem normal for folks to have to bear. i know better, and still i fall for it, the old line that i have somehow paid my dues and am exempt from future suffering.

someday, if we are lucky, we will all be old. and we will suffer. to be old is to ache, to lose one’s loves, one’s friends, one’s independence. i sometimes wonder if we have our goals straight.

but for right now, in this gift of my neglected functional body, and the healthy maelstrom of short legs that is my children’s sweet solidity and simple, easy development, i am replete. the Virgo be damned. i see blessings.

classes start tomorrow.

the campus is all preened, gussied up in Institutional Fresh, with just a hint of aspirational ivy.  the air is crisp and sunny yellow in a way it only seems to be in September. and the little Lisa Simpson who’s lived in me all my life is chomping at the bit, ready to go Back to School.

it’s been four years since i last taught a class of my own, and longer than i care to remember since the first time i stood up in front of a group of curious, wary faces and said, i’ll be your teacher this year.  i remember pausing that first time, half-expecting a camera crew to pop out of a bookshelf with kazoos in hand, shouting ha ha! just kidding! puh-leeze.

when they didn’t materialize, i was only half-relieved. if nobody was going to show up to send me back to the gutter, that meant i actually had to teach that rabble in front of me.

i’m less afraid, now, than i was then. i wonder if old standup comedians get like this, punch-drunk with been there, done that? it’s not like the crowds change, after all. this September, there will likely be the same few frowns behind the desks, the two or three Very Serious Folk there on suffrage of some sort, who need to put the teacher on notice straight off the bat. the difference is that i enjoy those people, now. they may challenge me, in either sense of the word…but i no longer mind. i smile and bide my time.  i am a mountain. the final exam will come.

i glance in the mirror and see Monty Burns staring back, rubbing his fingers together with glee, whispering Excellent, Smithers.  i grin.

(sure, i can be all Simpsons’ characters at once. i am legion.)

most students, though, no matter the culture or age group, bring an earnestness to the classroom that always surprises me, humbles me.  i teach English academic writing this year, to foreign students. and i am excited.

i realized yesterday, staring in bewilderment at the glut of eighteen-year-olds suddenly filling up the city in their little Shinerama frosh tshirts, that it has been twenty years since i started university. twenty years since my mom and i took a ferry over to the small university town just a couple of hours away on a sunny September morning, and she left me there – mostly happily, i think, on both sides of that equation – to start what has become, in effect, my life.

i didn’t know it, then. i stood in front of the mirror, that first day of class, peering at myself, wondering if i looked like a college student. my shirt was a button-down, a stained-glass coat of many colours.  i tucked it in, then pulled it out.  i tied my hair back with a bandana, then tried a barrette. it was 1989. hair needed pouf.  my jeans were old, just perfectly so, pegged at the bottom.  i cringe to admit i wore boat shoes. i cringe to admit i even remember all these things.

but i do, because that morning twenty years ago is burned into my mind, and it feels like yesterday.

going away to university at seventeen was in a sense a stupid thing to do.  i’d spent my adolescence chafing under the motherlove of a parent who believed in authority with a capital A, and so the minute i was esconced in the freedom of my concrete bunker dorm, i dispensed of any recognition of convention or authority whatsoever. i eschewed the bovine festivities of frosh week, for the most part, but took up Drinking 101 with an enthusiasm only matched for my English lit intro and the shabby-bearded political science prof who slouched cavalierly and spoke like David Bowie. i kept my scholarship, but skipped all 8:30 classes, and wasted learning opportunities that would have done me far better had they come a few years later when i’d learned to actually think for myself, not just posture as if i did.  in my first years at university, i was more Bart Simpson than Lisa.

god help me if my children ever turn into such impossible, impertinent little ingrates.

and yet, those years were invaluable to me, too. because standing in front of that dorm room mirror that morning in 1989, i was truly on my own for the first time in my life. i was paying, with loans and scholarships and money socked away from a $4.50 an hour job. i had no curfew.  the people i met i could meet on my own terms, and the things i fucked up i fucked up on my own terms. consequences of my actions were my own.  i have never – even in moving countries, marrying, divorcing, losing my child – known a divide quite so great between before and after.

that September morning in front of my dorm room mirror i didn’t understand that the person i’d been in high school would fade for me so quickly, become a blur i cannot yet, twenty years out, quite bring into focus, while the girl who stared back at me would become my first memory of myself.

i wish she’d known then that her skin was dewy and that shirts three sizes too big should never be tucked in, and that morning classes were not necessarily the handiwork of the devil, after all.  i wish she’d understood that she was smart and worthy, and stood straighter and learned earlier to ask questions. i wish she’d known how quickly twenty years fly by.

tomorrow morning, when i stand in front of the faces of my students, most of them just flown in from around the world and on their own for the first time, there will be a part of me that yearns to gather them in close, show them the girl in that mirror with her dated hair and her silly shoes, and exhort them to gather ye rosebuds while ye may, carpe diem and live deliberately and all those things that ring silently in the September air.

i won’t do it. they’d laugh. they’re business students, most of them. they’d be more inspired by a pie chart of earnings corresponding to time invested. and yet, as the term rolls on, they’ll struggle and stumble over the same heady temptations of independence and consequence that i did, lo those many years ago. and i will watch, and nod, and reach out a hand and try to teach what i know, very little of which has to do with English academic writing.

a year ago tonight, late in the dark last hour of the clock, i stepped out of my house and shut the door on a chapter of my life.

i had meant to stop there, on the threshold, and breathe deep. i had meant to note, in the night air, this is the last time i will ever be pregnant.  i’d meant to mark the momentous occasion, honour it, compose myself whilst glowing gracefully in the anticipation of my coming baby.

i don’t even remember leaving. i think i blew out that door like a lumbering, lumpen White Rabbit, mutters of I’m late, I’m late, for a Very Important Date interspersed with merciful Jesus, Dave, move yer ass! my water had broken with my cerclage still in, and as i’d delivered Oscar not long after arrival at the hospital, i was convinced this poor babe was poised to tear my cervix to shreds right in the car. never mind that the hospital is only five minutes from our house. i remember nothing of my last exit from my home as an expectant mother.

what i remember, instead, is the surprise of a long, steady, unhurried labour, marked by kindnesses and support and mercifully little one could call an emergency. i remember the cot brought for Dave so he could snore beside me through the quiet night, and capable hands and encouragement and the triangle of dark chocolate Toblerone i was allowed to sneak, fourteen hours in. i remember the OR lights above me and two doctors fighting between my splayed legs with the recessed stitch that had kept my baby in for months and didn’t want, in the end, to let go. i remember the thick, fibrous pages of the novel that kept me company in the wee, cramping hours, and the surprising solidity of the rocking chair’s varnished arm when suddenly, finally, in the early afternoon of the next day, labour finally announced itself familiar and clear.

i remember the last moments when i pushed her from me, the moments where the pain and fear and memory threatened to take me over but i surfaced and held and just for a moment i understood the beauty of a body bringing another body into the world. it took me three births to taste that, to glimpse the animal power and glory of those last fierce reserves from which babies slide, bloody and blinking.

mostly i remember her, the little squished face and shock of wet, black, waving hair, body red as a cherry popsicle. Josephine, daughter. born 10/09/08. my little countdown.

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last night, 363 days later, i nursed her before i fell asleep. i keep meaning to stop this nursing, this night nursing in particular.  she goes all day without me now, takes a bottle or a sippy cup happily, and at 20+ pounds has probably not needed a dream feed for months. and yet each night before i lay me down i find myself at her door, and i heft her away to the big bed and hold her close and nurse her quietly, just a few minutes more.

her first birthday – even before it happens – has ended up being a comedy of errors and happenstance, a milestone that will likely be no more marked by solemnity and reflection than the night i stepped out the door and into the first day of her life. it is the busiest week of the year for me at work, so we hijacked her cousin’s birthday party last weekend so as not to have to throw one of our own. klassy. and the battery charger for the fancy camera we bought so that the second child wouldn’t feel less photographed than the first? lost. camera’s dead as a doornail.  the homemade cupcakes i made last week when her grandparents were visiting, for the early semi-birthday celebration we actually made an effort with? looked like a pink poodle had shat on them, no exaggeration. i bought a cake today to bring to her daycare party tomorrow, and because of a restriction on chocolate at the day home and the limited selection the grocery store happened to have, it’s a blue cake, three days old, with Happy Birthday Posey scrawled on it in hideous red by an apparent illiterate, colour-blind house elf. Cake Wrecks is coming knocking. and possibly Child Services.

and yet, i know it doesn’t matter.  she won’t remember. and i will teach myself to forget. the things you think you should remember are never the ones that matter.

in the dark last night, her hands fluttered and came to rest against my collarbone, skin to skin. they are delicate hands, soft, with long, tapering fingers that she laces together just so. the night she was born, at six hours old, she lay in my arms with her tiny hands fluttering, and then wove the tips of her fingers together under her chin. last night, in the half-light of the nightlight, i watched her make the same sleepy, drowsy cathedral of fingertips. and i pulled her tight and whispered her name like a little song and marvelled that she has only been in my life a year.

happy birthday, Posey.  a lifetime of happy birthdays to you. one of these years, i’ll get it right.

suddenly, it is cold.

there is an old adage here that after Old Home Week, the mid-August local exhibition/horserace/parade extravaganza, summer’s over.  my mother likes to repeat these little kernels of local lore, intoning them like scripture, benedictions of wisdom our infidel ears might need to hear as we march round the calendar. i like to scoff in response, the taint of living away so many years bleeding through in my scorn for her small town liturgies.

but my mother must’ve paid off the weatherman this year, because after three weeks of unusually sweltering humidity the weather dropped ten degrees overnight the very day that Old Home Week ended. wham, bam, and goodbye and good luck, Madam Summer. the temperature’s continued to slide, until we’re left whiplashed and shivering in our suddenly unseasonal sandals.

i put away the kids’ summer clothes today, to make room for the woolies and long-sleeved things i’ve foraged for across town this week. Oscar was okay, mostly – he still has long-sleeved tshirts from last year, and sweaters that i bought a size too big, and his size 2 jeans are only just beginning to show signs of growing short. but Posey, my wee Posey, was suddenly looking distinctly urchin-like in her scanty little cotton frocks, chubby legs chilly and bare as the leaves hurry to turn.

she’s spent the summer in dresses. gingham and smocked and ruffled, all carrot-dribbled sweetness and light. they were mostly gifts and hand-me-downs, dainty things with puffed sleeves and tiny buttons down the back.  i remember looking at them lined up in the wardrobe last fall, bafflingly voluminous for the six-pound baby bird in my arms, and wondering how i’d ever find enough occasions to dress up one little girl in so many fancy things.

Posey solved that problem for me by having the fattest little baby thigh known to humankind. with her stumpy dumpling legs and the mushroom bubble of her cloth diapers, she hasn’t fit into any of the pants she owns since, oh, April. so dresses it was, day after day. for the park or the beach or nowhere at all, they became, simply, her clothes. they were easy and cool, and my fierce, smiley girl was adorable in her rumpled finery.

this change of seasons has caught me off guard. a baby’s outgrown clothes are not so hard to leave behind; the baby him or herself makes it clear that these soft little things once washed and folded and exclaimed over with such anticipation are now done, finished. they have had their day. their time is past, and straining snaps and too-short sleeves and too-tight legs announce it unequivocally, no matter how mama may sniff and sigh.

but with these wee dresses, it is only time and the season getting away on us. they still fit. her body has not yet left them behind. their soft folds and eyelet trim speak of this summer, my daughter’s toddling, cruising, bruising first summer, and i am bereft, have to leave that behind so suddenly, with only a folk proverb for warning. i hung them fresh from the line in the closet last week, pleasantly oblivious to the fact that they will never again flounce around the dimples of her knees.  i tried them with leotards, just to be sure; they looked like diaphonous hankies hanging above the wooly tights.

and next summer, when the weather finally warms again, they will be relics, too small, ridiculously so.  i will hold them up and marvel that she was ever this tiny.  and so today, i stroked them gently as i folded them away.

i have never been a fancy girl. i recently took to wearing mascara for the first time in my life; the black raccoon smudges it leaves are a novelty that makes me feel all womanly.  but mostly i’m a no-makeup & jeans soul, the sort who always imagined her longed-for daughter not in dresses, but overalls.

still, i longed for that girl. there is another old adage, not so local this time, that once haunted me. one crow sorrow, it rhymes, two crow joy. three crow girl, four crow boy.

the first year we moved home, the city was maggoty with crows, like a neverending episode of Hitchcock’s The Birds. and three days before my water broke with Finn, too early, already leaking, Dave drove me to the hospital for an extra cautionary ultrasound. on the way, i caught sight of a crow alone on the stark April branches by the water. my brain remarked on it, on the oddity of seeing one of the legion all by his lonesome, and the old rhyme began to play in my head. then two more crows swooped up and landed next to him. three, i told myself, three.

at the hospital, my OB found nothing wrong, no sign of fluid loss. and she told me my baby was a girl.

i thought about that one crow after. adrift in grief’s magical thinking, i looked to the trees for portents of what another pregnancy might bring. to this day, i hate the sight of a single crow.

the day we drove to another hospital in another city for the ultrasound that eventually revealed Josephine’s gender was also a spring day. there were buds on the May trees, and as we pulled into the hospital i saw a dark flapping out of the corner of my eye, and turned my head. two crows, birds on a wire by the big tree at the front of the instition, the one i could see out my window during the long months i waited there for Oscar to be born.

i looked for a third. then, horrified by my greed, my stupid hubris, my silliness, my brain clamped down on my eyes like a vise and shut them, literally. two. joy. two. joy. i repeated the mantra all the way up to the seventh floor. one should not be cavalier with the luck one gets. joy meant a baby still kicking, a heart still beating, an amniotic sac still sound. i told myself i did not care about gender.  i definitely did not care about dresses.  i wanted the joy of continued hope, of a cervix that showed signs of holding.

and i also wanted a girl.

for once, i did not have to adjust my expectations; i got my three crow girl. wish fulfillment, random luck.  i would’ve loved a boy, too, and deeply, but i got my heart’s desire. and with her a crateload of dresses, never looked for yet utterly perfect, girl-ness embodied. this summer, in the daily rotation of Posey’s little frocks, i lived my two crow joy in the tactile delight of tiny blue gingham dresses with apples embroidered on them, in pink confections with grosgrain ribbon. those days after days of little dresses were the physical embodiment of an old, deep dream, one that, after Finn, seemed too petty to even acknowledge.

it has healed something, this summer of silly frocks.

she has new striped leggings and little sweaters for fall, and hand-me-down long-sleeved onesies of her brother’s that i am happy to greet again, old friends from seasons long since committed to Rubbermaid storage. she will be a pint-sized tornado no matter she wears. but she looks taller in the little pants than she did in her dresses; she reminds me that these last vestiges of babyhood are slipping away from our house.  Posey’s clothes will not go into storage, to be saved for the possibility of another child someday. she is my last baby.

so today, as i smoothed each dress, a mascara-riddled tear snaked blackly down my face, with the bittersweetness that is the flip side of two crow joy. but i am smiling.

razors pain you
rivers are damp
acids stain you
and drugs cause cramp
guns aren’t lawful
nooses give
gas smells awful
you might as well live
– Dorothy Parker

i have always thought myself a cat person. and by some alchemical trick of metaphysics and assumption, my medieval mind has occasionally, therefore, convinced me that i am thus – metaphorically, of course – a cat.

it is only when things change drastically that i am forced to notice one significant problem with this little identification of the heart: penchants for napping and sloth and shedding notwithstanding, i am no feline. felines, thrown through the air, make graceful arcs and solid landings, all twenty-plus paw pads absorbing shock.

pretend felines, thrown through the air, claw and shriek and flail, spinning paws in mid-air like old LooneyTunes characters discovering the earth has given way beneath them. then they go splat.

both kinds of felines, the real and the ones with pretensions to cat-ness, then retire to corners to lick their wounds in private.  when one is not a cat, this can take awhile.

all this to say, i have been quiet, learning yet again that i am not a cat. and that landing on one’s feet is not a graceful process, when one is not a cat. seismic shifts disrupt my comforting routines and leave me anxious, unstable, vulnerable.

uh, yeh.  who, me? a tissue? don’t mind if i do.

but then this strange new world begins to take shape and its reflection in the mirror grows less foreign and i begin to understand the ways i can be competent with this, the ways not all is different, the gifts and possibilities of what this new will be. and my equilibrium recalibrates and i find my balance and stop kicking in midair, stop licking my raw spots.

when one is not a cat, one sometimes realizes one is an old dog, struggling yet again with these damn new tricks.
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Friday, 3:56 pm
with a little wincing grimace that means, “i’m really sorry i’m leaving with a pile of painfully tedious data entry left to do so students can register Monday especially since i already left early Wednesday but Dave’s in Vancouver so i HAVE to go get the kids ’cause the sitter’s on summer hours” i wave happy weekend at my poor, patient, beleaguered boss – left sitting in the disorganized pile of new Soviet prison furniture dumped in my office earlier that day – and race out the door.

starting work has been easy, really.  the office is both familiar and welcoming, the culture there affirming and social and all i’d hoped and remembered it would be when i took the job. i’m taking over from a person who is tidy of mind, and working for a person who’s been the closest thing to a mentor i’ve found since i moved back here four-and-a-half years ago. my bestest friend, lifelong, is in the office next door. the data entry part of things literally nearly blew my brain wide open for a couple of hours until i pried it open and personally lobotomized a few errant and unnecessary bits i wasn’t using much anyway, but other than the fact that they have no couch for me to recline upon and Gulags R Us designed the gray aesthetic anaesthetic that passes for new desks there, i’m happy.

the rest has been harder. Dave was away. kids weren’t sleeping, either at the new sitter’s or at home. time was suddenly chewed up like an all-day pizza and come 9pm i’d find myself at the end of a long, long road of supper/tidying/bedtime/laundry/prep for tomorrow and staring down the prospect of watering my poor sunbeaten pansies and tomatoes and wanting to wilt myself for want of sweet downtime.  Oscar grew dawdly and i found myself frog-marching him through our hours together, trying desperately to get me and two kids dressed and fed and out of the house with all we needed for the day by the hour that two weeks ago meant we’d be sitting down to breakfast. Posey cried whenever she saw me, and my heart ached and fretted and pined for her, for the impossible assurance of a good decision made.

Friday 4:09 pm
i wedge the children and their daycare bags and the dirty-diaper bag and my own work bag (which is, ahem, actually still my regular diaper bag/purse/chasm of magical disappearance) into the sun-stroked, stifling car. four years ago, when we bought the cheapest car on the market, paying $1000 extra for A/C sounded like the most ridiculous idea i’d ever heard. now, of course, the most ridiculous thing i’ve ever heard is the whimpering of my sweaty baby slowly cooking in the back of a non-air-conditioned car because her mother is a cheap sow, but i digress.

the baby’s dress, i notice as i strap her in, is covered in a sticky brown substance that is unmistakably either Fudgsicle or chocolate ice cream. Oscar cheerily informs me that he didn’t nap today because a movie was on during quiet time.

my brain conflates these two pieces of information and comes to the logical conclusion that my children spend their days drinking Coke and watching soft porn and will grow up to skin kittens with their teeth. my spirits slump on the steaming, filthy car mat.  i wallow in the certainty of my own failure.

Friday 4:25 pm
the hot little car of misery and chocolate stains arrives at my grandfather’s cottage, because PEI actually is only three apples wide.

the cottage – and i use the term loosely, as “rustic plywood shack” might cover it better in some estimations – is a living testament to my late grandmother’s foray into creative needle art of the 60s and 70s. the curtains are faded brown and orange op art specials, the walls plastered with crewel work depicting owls, turtles, boats, and various other flora & fauna. souvenir ashtrays abound, relics of guests long since forgotten. the faded patchwork couch, a Coat of Many Colours for the furniture set, was replaced two summers ago by well-meaning family friends who meant to surprise my grandfather, but i think he misses the zany, threadbare thing. i do.

Rusty greets us at the door, from a prone position in front of the fan, towel laid over his hind end. in German Shepherd years, Rusty is about 107. he’s my father’s dog, though my grandfather’s soft spot for him is notorious and deep. they are the patriarchs, my grandfather and Rusty. he calls Rusty noble, and i sometimes wonder if he isn’t fishing for the compliment to be returned.

i met Rusty first as a pup in the Yellowknife airport in the summer of 1996. it was early August, tail end of the midnight sun, and i was flying back north for a second year of teaching. i crossed paths with my father’s clan on their way back from PEI to the town they’d called home for ten years. my half-sister had sweet-talked them into a puppy, and he sat bouncing in his cage, smiling at me.  when he licked me, i laughed, and was surprised.

Rusty still has the same open gaze, the same trusting brown eyes.  i’m not a dog person, have never been a dog person, but Rusty’s sweetness charms me. and even splayed on the orange shag rug in my grandfather’s cottage, his bounce long since gone, he charms my kids. Posey puts her hand on his nose and he bats his eyes at her like a scene out of Disney.  Oscar, upon discovering that Rusty can no longer swat flies away with his tail, fans them for him dutifully.

Rusty is a dog on borrowed time. his left back leg stopped working awhile back, and on Wednesday my father and stepmother had planned to make that last sad trip to the vet to put him down. there is a point after which sustaining life is no mark of love. but mercy is a tricky thing. when Rusty perked up and started enjoying his food, stopped showing pain, they decided a last week at the shore might be nice for all concerned.

at 89, my grandfather has to pick his way down the crooked steps to the beach with a cane. my father brings the old sky-blue motorboat in from its mooring, readies it, helps his father in. but once in the driver’s seat, my grandfather drops thirty years. he is still the best waterski driver i’ve ever seen – patient, smooth, able to read the pull on a rope and adjust accordingly.

Friday, 4:45 pm
Rusty can no longer go down the steps to the beach. when the crew make their way down the sandy red cliff – Oscar included, life-jacket-clad, in my stepmother’s arms for his very first boat ride ever – Posey and i stay behind with the old dog. he whimpers at them leaving. he is a water dog, a people dog, part lab, part shepherd.  this being left behind alarms him, say his big brown eyes.

i look at him and feel as if i’m looking in a mirror. i feel grizzled with exhaustion, with heat, with the anxiety of inexorable change and my own inability to keep up, to land easily on my feet anymore.  i reach out and rub Rusty behind the ears, where he’s still soft. i coo a little song of “we’re here, buddy, it’s okay,” though he is long since deaf. and we are companionable, two old dogs; one who thinks she’s a cat, one who’s sure he’s a person.

then i hear the boat grumble to life down in the water and i forget Rusty because it is Oscar’s first boat ride and i want to know that he is okay, want to mark with my eyes that he once rode in the boat with my grandfather at the helm so i can tell him someday. i step out the old screen door with the baby in my arms and it slaps shut behind me and i am peering, craning out to see the small form in the seat beside my grandfather when i hear the door creak again and it is Rusty nosing it open, unwilling to be alone.  he pauses at the small threshold between cottage and porch and then leaps, old strong front legs carrying his bulk despite the dead hind end and he crashes down beside me apparently unfazed and my jaw hangs open and i turn my head in strange respect so he will not see my tears.

Posey claps in delight.  and my grandfather’s boat speeds away over the water like it has done every summer since i can remember but this time with my son in front, so small and riding away from me, wind in his hair. and i sit with Rusty in his reprieve, in his last days, and ruffle his fur.

when one is not a cat, all you can really do is get through today and keep leaping, no matter how graceless your landing.

there is always a last day.

tomorrow, when i go back to work, i worry that my couch is going to miss me. for seventeen months now i’ve lain here in a troll-like mockery of fetal position, curled on my left hip and elbow, peck-peck-pecking at the computer.

well, not when the kids were AWAKE. much. but still. whenever baby wrangling duties subsided into the glorious quiet of naps, this left-hand corner of the corner of the couch has been my lair, my retreat, a spaceship that’s floated me far and wide in the midst of a tethered life; Major Tom in the ass-groovy comfort of my khaki corduroyed personal tin can.

tomorrow i blow back through the atmosphere to the professional world. i hope i don’t burn up trying to actually sit up all day. i haven’t spent eight hours in a chair since March of last year. i suspect by midday they’ll find me flopped over my desk like an overcooked noodle, legs helplessly flapping in their search for pillows to twine around.

i never quite recovered from bedrest. or rather, staring down this transition back to work, i see how i’ve failed to recover from the past four-and-a-half years.

August 4th was Finn’s due date.  it is his grandmother’s birthday. he would’ve been a Leo, a Rooster in the Chinese zodiac.  these futures i once invested in so unsuspectingly are still traced on the lens through which i see this month, casting shadows that never made it into the picture.  in the photo album marked ‘alternate universe’, there’s a boy four years old, a little brown haired kid with a summertime birthday party, hat cocked to one side and skipping.  he looks like his father.

i can neither not see that album – ignore it completely – nor ever fully bring it into focus.  it is not real, and i dare not pine for what could’ve been, only nod as the pictures float by. i am afraid to pine, for fear all i do have will be snatched away.

that fear is mostly normal, and the function it serves is likely healthy. but the shakiness it underscores is me, quivering here on the couch, afraid to get up and move forward.

i go back to work tomorrow.  for four-and-a-half years, thanks to the uncertainties of contract work and bedrest and four fraught pregnancies, envisioning my life more than a few weeks or months at a time has been a fantasy. my stints at home with the kids have been marked by job searches, by “maybe we could do this but i might be back at work by then,” by frantic contracting.  conversely, any work i’ve done has been yoked to – and sometimes dropped for – the internal clock of fertility and the push to create this family, hell or high water.

i am done with babies. there will be no more bedrest, no more colicky nights, no more plastic pee sticks, no more long months ruled by the nap schedule.  starting tomorrow, this period of my life is behind me. but i do not really know what’s ahead; have not forged much of a path in that regard. so going back to work – even only for another contract position – feels daunting, a sea change, because it marks the end of the only way of life i’ve known for so long i can’t remember how it felt to be different.

so on the last day before this last day, i cut off all my hair.

i’ve done it before. in university, a few times, and when i lived in the concrete winter grayness of Vancouver, and once in Malaysia when the stylist must’ve mistaken me for a Sinead O’Connor wannabe and shaved me nearly bald.  each time, i was lost in transition, feeling pulled along and pulled apart by conflicting tides and my own lack of direction.

when i used to teach young adults struggling with issues of powerlessness and lack of agency, i watched the girls, particularly, for sudden, shocking haircuts. something is going on under the surface there, i’d say to my fellow teachers. watch. she’s got change on her hands. this is what she can do to exert her power, exert her self. and i would get in beside whoever that girl was and probe, gently, trying to unearth the seismic shifts that led to the shearing. they were almost always there for the asking.

we mark ourselves, we humans. when things get too tangled, too overwhelming, we cut.  if we are lucky, it is only hair.

i am happy with yesterday’s haircut. i saved the ponytails, all ten inches of them, and will mail them off to Pantene’s Beautiful Lengths this afternoon. they make wigs for cancer patients, so my scrawny little tails, i hope, will help someone out there feel a bit better about a terrifying situation they have little control over.

but getting rid of them has already helped me. it marks this threshhold, this fresh start, on the outside, so that on the inside i can spend this last day canoodling mindlessly with my beloved couch, believing that it – and those two little kids i love and agonize over – will still be here when i get home from work tomorrow.