cribchronicles.com

back a few years ago, when i was still frequently startled to discover that there were other people out there in this online thingy box, i woke up one morning to find i’d been given an award. i was more delighted than was strictly necessary, but the world of memes and blings was still a vast untrodden snowfall for me, and it looked right pretty. the bestower of said award had honoured not just me but another writer, so, curious, i clicked the link and wandered over to check out the company i was keeping.

and that was how i first stumbled across Vicki Forman. Vicki wrote a column called Special Needs Mama, part of the Literary Mama e-zine family, about parenting her son Evan.

in an ensuing email exchange the likes of which i never seem to engage in anymore, alas, i discovered that Evan’d had a twin, Eleanor, who died a few days after birth. and that Vicki’s elder daughter was Josephine.  had Finn been a girl, i wrote back, he’d probably have been Eleanor. or Josephine.

it was early 2007. it was the first time i had seen any shadow of my own reflection – in name tastes or in loss. and i found the idea that Vicki was out there somewhere immensely comforting, normalizing. i also found it thought-provoking.  she brought dignity and unflinching matter-of-factness to her narratives of Evan and her role as parent to a significantly disabled child. she did not pander to people’s pity, or expectations of a fluffy, inspirational happy ending. reading Vicki, i began to take steps towards writing my way out of a box i’d seen no other other exit to.

one of the most surreal parts of having lost Finn, for me, was the silencing effect it had. it created a space around me that felt filled with cotton batting, or a choking kind of insulation.  a dead baby is the conversational equivalent of a cement truck. i did not know how to introduce the subject in relation to myself, did not know how to negotiate the weight it carried without feeling awkward or skinless or somehow miscast. i was neither serene nor destroyed, which were the main culturally available motifs for my new role. i was simply…messy, then.  too messy and too vulnerable to even begin to invite attention to it all. and so this tremendously important part of me, the struggle with my grief and anger and fear and sorrow, became isolating and…unspeakable.

i was lucky, in that i was surrounded mostly by kindness. but people who knew me and knew of Finn skirted the subject, probably afraid of hurting me with reminders, probably afraid of saying the wrong thing.  i understood that. but in the midst of all that well-intended ignoring of the elephant in the room, i sat smothering under the silence and the elephant itself; the face i presented to the world a mask that ellided everything underneath.

i’d allowed my grief to be socially relegated to a little airless box, and i was choking in that box.

so i started to write about it, face-on, to allow myself to begin to explore here the things i desperately wanted to and needed to, but couldn’t, not aloud. and in doing so, i started to integrate my inner life back into the face i wore to the public, even this small, semi-private, semi-anonymous public out here online. it was enough.  i believe writing here kept me from suffocating  in my own bewildering loneliness and sadness.
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mostly i think i’ve absorbed Finn’s death. sometimes, though, i’ll catch a scent in the air at a particular time of year, or read a story, or hear a pregnant woman dismiss risk as if she were immune, entitled, and scenes crash in on me, the horror reel of it all going wrong.

the grim neonatologist who came back to the delivery room to tell us, bluntly, that he would not make the night and then walked away. my baby’s tiny, punctured chest, only an hour old and already his body breached and bloodied while we were not even there to comfort. the machine-gun gasp and pound of the ventilator.  the  nurse who told me his blackened fingers and toes were a sign of something congenitally wrong, then the other nurse – when i finally got up the courage to ask – who stared at me surprised and said, no, he’s perfect, it’s just oxygen deprivation. the swell of fear and rejection that backed up in my throat the first time i saw him there in his isolette, splayed out, red-raw, so compromised, and how my mind hissed you’re going to die at my newborn son before my hand reached out without me and touched his and his fingers wrapped around mine and i was lost, in spite of myself, to wonder and tenderness, to loving him. the confusion of it all, the helplessness. the feeling of somehow having being stripped of the right to compassion by the crisis, and stripped of the right to hope.

all these swarm in and punch me in the gut and i am left gasping, stunned by what my memory has secretly stashed away.

i thought maybe i was crazy, the kind of closet cat lady who looks perfectly bland from the outside but one day snaps and ends up on the nightly news because the picture bombs in her head finally exploded.

apparently not. apparently it’s just my amygdala, a part of the brain “so ancient and original it’s present even in lizards,” where the raw fight-or-flight emotions triggered by significant trauma are preserved and kept alive. the brain cannot integrate or defuse those emotions. there they sit, preserved in neurotransmitter amber.

i have Vicki Forman to thank for the comfort of the amygdala, because Vicki published a book this summer, a book called This Lovely Life: a memoir of premature motherhood.  and i ordered it and ate it up and found myself reading it half in her world of the summer of 2000 and half in my own of spring 2005. and then she explained the amygdala, and i felt…once again…just a little more able to breathe.
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Vicki’s book is not an easy read.  there’s no enlightened, illumined mama guru enriched by the smiling happiness of her disabled child. rather, the book tells the story of the trauma of the twins’ birth, Ellie’s death, and the unfolding story of Evan’s blindness, seizure disorder, and survival in a light that most of us would shrink from shining on our egos, our mother roles.  it is one of the most honest and troubling and beautiful stories i’ve read in a long time, and though Vicki is the figure at its centre, it is the evolving relationship between her and her son that the book stands as paean to.

in one of the cruel twists that life deals out sometimes, it seems that Vicki had just finished this book and landed a publisher when Evan, days short of his eighth birthday, died suddenly and without warning.  i read the book knowing that the child whose survival seemed so uncertain would grow to become the boy his mother wrote about at Special Needs Mama, but also knowing the heartbreak at the end of the story, the coda that even the writer of the reflections in its pages couldn’t see.

i want to thank Vicki for sharing Evan. i want to thank Vicki for consistently, at Special Needs Mama and in This Lovely Life, carving out a space of words and dignity that has helped me with my own processing, my own healing, my own understanding of how vast and fraught and boundless the word mother can be.

i want to encourage you to read this book.

i was angry when i slipped the note into the dark maw of her desk, around the rim of chewed, dried gum.

furtively, i shoved the paper deep. i remember the feel of it leaving my hand, its sharply crumpled edges, the not-quite-moment-of-hesitation.  i let go. and then i stood and walked away.

i don’t think i thought of it again until the teacher called me in after school a day or two later. a tank of a woman who ruled the seventh grade like a German train line, she sat me in front of her, the note between us. her gaze and sheer bulk bore down on me.  my knees began to shake.

it wasn’t a nice note. i don’t remember if it was a signed note, oddly, though some niggling shred of memory tells me it was.  i do remember there was no denying it was mine. and suddenly, like the floor dropping out from beneath me, no way to justify or explain.

i had left a note in another girl’s desk telling her she was a jackass. jackass.  apparently my gift for cussing came later. i believe i also called her a baby. only now do i realize that it was that which was far more cruel.

this note was not the first this girl had received that fall, my teacher informed me.   the other, which i assume was unsigned, hadn’t come from me. to this day i don’t know who the other player in the story might have been, or what they’d said to the girl. but the poor kid had brought the notes to her mother and her mother had brought them to the teacher and there i sat, bewildered and suddenly – for all intents and purposes – a bully.

i was eleven years old that fall.  i was a January baby, which due to the school cutoff dates  here, meant i’d started kindergarten at just four-and-a-half.   i’d been ready enough, until junior high: both socially and academically able to negotiate the terrain of each school year.

grade seven, though, hit like acid. i had finished sixth grade an eleven-year-old girl who played with Barbies and liked to read. i was earnest and smart and, as the only child of a mother who treated me with great sincerity, utterly and completely innocent of the subtleties of human communications, particularly those on the snarky & sarcastic end of the scale.

grade seven made me a fast learner.

we moved that summer, left the apartment where we’d lived since before i’d turned two. we moved to a far crappier place in a nicer neighbourhood near my new school, the big school where we were marched off to different teachers for different subjects and suddenly girls i’d known all my life grew catty and judgemental and style & status mattered and there was makeup and i felt like Alice through the Rabbit Hole.

i remember, still, the confusion of those days, how friends suddenly and seemingly randomly took sides, practicing power, choosing who would be included and who cut out.  without siblings, i’d never had the experience of fighting with other kids, had few conflict resolution skills, had never even seen the give & take of frustration and reconcilation modelled within my family. i believed i was in a zero-sum game: once ostracized, i’d be alienated forever.

my Barbies got relegated to the back of my closet, a secret comfort i took out only when alone. i studied the other girls, the play of language, the codes of maturity, the attitudes of those who carried themselves with authority.  i tried like hell to grow up, all in a few crazy weeks.

i knew i did not understand popular. but i understood smart, and i applied every ounce of smart i had to figuring out how to mimic the mock-grown-up performance my peers seemed to embody so effortlessly.

or most did. the girl whose desk i left that note in that November lived around the corner from my new home.  she was older than me, by a few months, but she still played Barbies. she wore bows in her hair. and she coped, i guess, with the maelstrom of change that fall by digging in her heels, rejecting the shift in environment and ethic from childhood to adolescence. or maybe she just didn’t notice.

i remember her voice as flat, and loud. i remember being embarrassed by her public appeals to play Barbies at her house, by her ingratiating overtures of friendship, always a little too close, a little too eager. she was a Daddy’s Little Girl of high degree and seemed to expect everyone to treat her as her Daddy did: perhaps she thought if she just got close enough, she’d get the petting she was accustomed to.  i didn’t have a Daddy, and didn’t know what to do with her need.  i remember recoiling, scrabbling to distance myself from her. and when she didn’t recognize my clumsy attempts at indifference or respect the efforts i made to show my hard-won grownupness, i grew panicky, and baffled, and contemptuous of such bovine insensibility to all that was so inexorably and painfully evident to me.

i wasn’t actually a mean girl, not really. and i was a bit of an utter coward, when it came to confrontation. so the culmination of my frustration was the scrawled note i shoved righteousnessly in her gummy desk, which read along the lines of, LEAVE ME ALONE, JACKASS. YOU’RE A BABY.

it was cathartic. it marked the distance between us in a way she couldn’t ignore.

it was cruel too. i know that, maybe even knew that then.  i apologized after, and mostly meant it, because hurting her feelings hadn’t been my primary intent.  what i’d wanted to do was rock her oblivion, her self-appointed coddled pet role, her privilege in getting to remain a child while the rest of us were forced, like it or not, into an adolescence some of us were most definitely not ready for.  i wanted to punish her for being too stupid or too protected to notice that everything had changed.

i wanted her to be my scapegoat, because everything had changed and i was utterly at sea.
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after the first few days at his new preschool and an unproductive parking-lot meeting wherein i made a lot of “not really appropriate placement” noises and the director mostly appeared to wait for me to be done talking, Oscar suddenly and without warning got moved up to junior kindergarten last week.

so instead of our April 2006 boy being in a peer-grouped class almost entirely of 2007 babies, he was a class of 2005 babies. mostly early 2005 babies.

he loved the room. they had plenty of dinosaurs, and interesting books, and lots of stuff he hadn’t seen before. suddenly, he came home talking about dressup, about cannons, about billy goats gruff.  but whenever we showed up to pick him up, he was attached to a teacher or playing alone.

it took almost a week to get a meeting about it, because it is July and people are taking holidays. by the time the meeting rolled around, the school had come to the conclusions that Dave & i had raised eyebrows about when they first made the move: he not only wasn’t really interacting with the bigger kids in meaningful ways, they were beginning to tease him a little for his pronunciations, and he’d turned into the teacher’s permanent tail. in spite of our efforts to teach him strategies for interacting with the other kids, they weren’t necessarily responding in ways he could make sense of or take up.

so we agreed to move him back to preschool – after all, there are two other three-year-olds there now, both nice little girls.

he didn’t want to go. and even four days in, full of genuine and significant efforts on the part of the preschool teachers to scaffold age-appropriate activities with him and the small group of 2006ers they have on hand, he doesn’t want to be there. he wants to be in the junior kindergarten.

and i am trying to figure out what it is that draws him there, with those kids a head taller, whom he can’t really seem to keep up with or engage in conversation with.  and a part of me wonders whether the shift up to the bigger class simply started one of those inexorable shifts for him, as junior high did for me, where the world opens up and going back – not in the literal sense, but in terms of how one views one’s role in the world – is emotionally and intellectually impossible, no matter how unprepared one is to cope.

maybe not.  but we have some decision to make on behalf of this little boy, and i wish i understood better what was going on in that small blondish head.  as an educator, i’m no fan of accelerated placements, particularly at this age. and other than the fact that i’m going back to work next month and need childcare, our primary reason for having Oscar start preschool wasn’t really about learning opportunities in the classic cognitive sense, for all this school provides many, but rather socialization.

kids who get moved up, or who are among the youngest yet highest-performing in their classes, as both Dave & i were in our illustrious (snort) childhoods, hear the words, “you’re so smart” a lot.  like any label with positive attributes and reinforcement attached, it can become a bit of a drug. i was a little freaked out when the school first reported that they’d moved Oscar up because he seemed “advanced” – i’d been advocating that his placement was inappropriate because he was essentially in a baby room, not because he’s some kinda prodigy.  i forget that his vocabulary – pronunciation quirks aside – has become pretty wicked over the past eight months or so, since a year ago he was in speech therapy and only i could distinguish more than ten words he said.  but they heard him riffing on the finer points of stegosaurus, and i know even the older kids gathered ’round that first day he got moved up and held court around the dinosaur book, and i would bet my teeth he heard a lot of “oh, such a smart boy!” and a part of me wonders if this isn’t the reason his stubborn little self insists he belongs in that room, because he’s dying, inside, to recreate that moment of stardom and glory.

there is a scene in the old Jimmy Stewart film “Harvey” in which Elwood P. Dowd, a character my eleven-year-old self would have had no way to comprehend, says something along the lines of, “In this life, you end up being either oh-so-smart or oh-so-pleasant. I’ve tried smart. I prefer pleasant.”

it’s a lesson i wish i’d learned a lot earlier. and one of the main ones i want my children to have some exposure to, early.  yep, we want O with kids he can talk to, in an environment with age-appropriate stuff.  but we also want him to understand that being kind and thoughtful trumps being smart, in terms of how one values oneself and one’s relationships with others.

and that growing up too fast is no fun.

she had white carpet in the entryway.

i think there was a mirror there, but i have no recollection of my reflection in it, only the shock of the blood seeping into the white of my new shirt, proud-bought just days before with my very own money. it was the very last morning of my first summer job.

but i was not at that tall gray house, three blocks up a hill and right at the stop sign, where i should have been babysitting two little boys. i was in a stranger’s hallway, spilling blood onto a carpet, trying to catch the bright, thick drops that splatted quietly into the plush.

i grabbed at them like gumdrops, willing them back, attempting to unmark the snowy surface and wind time backwards as if the trail could lead me back through her door whole.  i leaned into the doorjamb and made a bloody handprint on its creamy surface. everything was white and red.

i gave her a number. she called my mother. i could not make my mouth move properly and a tooth hung like a cat door, teetering back and forth, fascinating my frightened tongue. i could not pronounce my own name.

she spoke into the phone hesitantly, Are you Monnie’s mother?

then we were in the car and speeding across the city, my mother and i, my mother who is cautious and measured in every action. we still had trains then, here, in that long ago summer, and blocks before the hospital there came the ding ding ding of the crossing and we were no longer moving and the sun poured in on the black upholstery. suddenly it was stultifying in that little Toyota and the train rumbled on forever and my mother, my upstanding mother, hissing Jesus Christ, fuck, come ON, and i knew absently that i must be dying.

i do not remember any pain. that only came later, when the technicians tried to lie me on my back over and over and over again for head x-rays, and the piece of my jawbone that had snapped in the centre and at the hinge kept falling back into my eardrum. they will not radiate a head like that, today.

somewhere between the stitches and the torture sessions at x-ray and the trip across the city again to the orthodontic surgeon’s office and back, my mother propped me up in a tiny washroom in the ER and proceeded to induct me into the arcane mysteries of the belted maxi pad, long out of date even then but all that the hospital dispenser provided. and i sat there, trussed and broken, nose packed with gauze and wondering how much more blood i could lose before i myself would fade to white.

then there was the blur of anaesthetic, counting backwards from one hundred, and the waking to find my face encased in bandages and jaw immobilized with hardware and then the pain, oh the pain and won’t you shake hands, sweet sister morphine? and then nothing is clear for weeks except a memory of finally coming home and seeing beetles emerge from under the radiator in the swelter of an early August bathroom and while some part of my brain knew there were only two another part saw Disney’s Fantasia march: two and two and two thousand, kaleidoscoping. morphine withdrawal is no joke. i remember my mother holding my full-grown body, bigger than her own, in her ams like a baby while i screamed in terror with my mouth wired shut.

and every time she changed those bandages more gravel emerged from my face, black spots in the red-brown stains on white gauze.
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i think i have told some of this story before.

what i did not tell is that on a hot summer day when i see bicycles with long-legged children on them darting into the road i see splashes of red against white backgrounds, like Pollack paintings or blood drops on white carpet. i see my Supercycle, frame twisted, lying in the middle of a torn-up street with my retainer next to it in the gravel as it was when i pulled myself up and stumbled bleeding into the doorway of the woman who had been out retrieving her paper when i sailed through the air in front of her.

i babysat for that woman, a year or so afterward. she had called my mother to find out how i was doing. it was the carpet i looked for when i first walked in the house…they had replaced it with something in a more serviceable colour. i remember my bright flush of embarrassment at this realization: i did not want to take their money. i remember wondering at the cost of carpet.

Dave started biking last year. it is healthy, earth-friendly. and i have essentially not been on a bike in almost 24 years.

yesterday, i stopped at the toy store. and there in front, on the grass, was a shiny red Radio Flyer first bicycle, with training wheels and white handlebars. it was beautiful, and just almost exactly the size Oscar will need next summer.

and i took a deep breath and told myself i will buy it in August when it goes on sale.  like throwing salt over my shoulder, i will pretend that it is not the colour of blood and i will teach him how to pedal.

and i will put this story away, forever, because the stains it left do not belong on him.
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tell me your stories of bicycles, instead. when did you learn to ride? what colour was your first bike? what are YOUR memories of hot days and bicycles?

i hear it everywhere, popping out from headlines, referenced casually until it begins to smell of truth. and stink a little with the impotence and collective rot it creates.

a whiff of faint bewilderment, the fear of mortality and obsolescence. the thrill of feeling one has eaten from the prescient tree of knowledge, even if the tree is plastic, planted in sand.

our children will not be like us, it whispers. they are wired, and thus wired differently. they are beyond us, aliens of the future. sit back and watch the reckoning. wash your hands.

it is no Kahlil Gibran, this voice, cautioning acceptance and unconditionality. it is more Bradbury, laced with the pleasures and promise of the macabre. it tells us these children we’re raising are blasphemous offspring of the cultural collision of the human and the technological – beings whose integrated circuits are inherently foreign to our own, digital natives whose minds we will never entirely fathom.

in all this repeated discussion and dissection and fretting, there is one note missing.

yes, they will grow up in a digitized world. they play their games on screens, in many cases. they conduct entire relationships on Facebook. their cognitive synapses may fire slightly differently from those of us who grew up with only Candy Land. but if they are cyborg, oh my friends, do not fear.

they are no more so than we ourselves.
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if i invited you over for a playdate, if i sat you down on my couch with a coffee or a glass of water or a mimosa  -whatever your poison – and looked into your eyes and said, so, hey, i’m a cyborg…i suspect you might be taken aback.

cyborg. huh, your head might shrill, as you’d politely flatten yourself against my door, eyes wide and darting, looking to grab your precious babies and run for the hills.

she seemed so pleasant on her blog. barely batty at all… and she never even talked about Star Trek, let alone cyborgs. jesus. this is worse than an Amway party. is there an eject button here?!?

i know.

but if i say it here in this ether space where we are accustomed to interacting and performing our rites of friendship and social grooming…maybe the words will not seem so alien.

i am cyborg. and so are you. precisely because of this space.  we have evolved in our own lifetimes, into creatures of 20th century myth.
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the cyborg was never truly about technology.  we may not yet have our screens embedded into our retinae or curliqueue wiring connecting flesh to metal and plastic, and we’re still – inexplicably – bound to the keyboard and print text…but we all of us who live out parts of our identities in front of our screens, whose lives are rich with people we know and bare our hearts to and exchange ideas with daily in many cases yet have never, ever laid eyes upon? cyborgs, all of us, creatures of the integrated circuit.  and so is our parenthood.

our lives are couplings between organism and machine. our internal worlds are not circumscribed by the mere physical, and our external worlds – even and perhaps especially our days spent hands-on with the children we cherish – are not an existence solely of or in the body.  this world, wherein we write and speak and interface and connect, is always present or available on the internal screen of our minds. it is a room of one’s own, even if our houses overflow with toys and dishes and no space that is ours alone.

Donna Haraway wrote The Cyborg Manifesto more than twenty years ago, now.  her cyborg was, as she wrote it, a creature without origin and without innocence, resolutely committed to “partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity.” its existence breaks down the old dualisms of nature and culture, of public and private – it exists between, a hybrid.

as we do out here, in this ether. we write representations of ourselves that are partial, constructed…simply by the very nature of time constraints and audience, we cannot write ourselves whole. thus the “us” we speak through out here is an avatar, without innocence, aware of its origin as a narrative, a story told in once upon a time fashion.  we exist between the public and the private, all of us negotiating the boundaries of how these avatars interact and integrate with our flesh selves and the others in our lives. we connect. we interface. some of us pay a high price domestically for the space for self we carve out here, this intimate space where we are so often ironic and perverse.  the patriarchy, Haraway cautions, is threatened by the cyborg, its bastard child, unwanted issue. illegitimate offspring, she notes, are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.
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the cyborg mother, of course, ought to be a contradiction in terms. the mother image is organic, the original origin story. but the cyborg is contradiction embodied. and the cyborg mother lives firmly in the postdigital age that the voices of doom and essentialistic difference do  not realize has reached us. the digital age is as much a part of us as the technology of the telephone or the pencil. we have incorporated it into ourselves – our baby monitors, our Dr. Google, our youtube videos of our children or for our children, our networks of identity and friendship and expression and marketing. who we make of ourselves as a result will be different from the mothers we grew up with, indeed, as will our children be different from the 70s and 80s versions of self we once were.

but our children as aliens, morphing inexorably into creatures of a vaguely foreboding future we cannot conceive? nay. not to those of us out here already, living on the integrated circuit, connecting, living beyond the boundaries of our flesh and in it, holding those selfsame children by the hand.

now if only the cyborg as mother could just break down the pointless polarization of good mother and bad.
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what does it mean to you, the space to be connected, ironic, intimate, perverse? if it all collapsed tomorrow, this online world, what of yourself would you find amputated?

hot days. finally summer.  i live on an island with beaches that get touted in ads around the world.  we ran a campaign in the 80’s that sold PEI as “the warmest waters north of Florida.”

i remember a local comedian quipping, c’mon. don’t shit me here. i took geography. the warmest waters north of Florida are about a mile past the Florida border, people.

he had clearly sampled the testicle-shrivelling waters of our heralded beaches in the month of June.

so rather than take the kids out to eat sand and freeze their tootsies in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, i figure they could eat sand just as well at the park.  i like the park. it is not so crowded, requires less sunscreen, and does not involve either a long car ride or the indignity of me sporting a a bathing suit.

Dave has been in England. he came home to find there’d been a cancellation on the vasectomy waiting list and i’d booked him in for only 28 hours after his arrival home. that‘ll teach him to travel. but in the meantime and until he and his bag of frozen peas can get comfortably off the couch, my mother, bless her, has been coming around at the end of the days when she can, helping to get the kids bathed and to bed.  she came along on our late-day park journey, the four of us galumphing down frost-humped sidewalks with a plastic tricycle.

the baby was tired. both kids were sick the whole time Dave was away.

until Oscar had surgery last December to have tubes put in his ears, every cold he got had a tendency to turn nasty. he’d fill up, cough for a day or two, and then end up in the ER not breathing properly, no matter how carefully we applied the preventative puffers and avoided dairy and followed the asthma clinic’s recommendations. but since the tubes? golden. he gets a cold, he coughs, wakes up at godforsaken hours miserable and whatnot, but…no ER. the asthma clinic actually released him in April, saying that very likely he does not actually have asthma, as his attacks only ever came when otherwise sick.

at the park, Posey and i stopped to chat to another mother & baby pair, and to look at some leaves on a tree, and to wipe her nose call down armageddon on all & sundry. Posey does not like having her nose wiped.

i looked over in the midst of her howling and noticed O having a bit of a fit of his own with my mom. odd, as the two of them are tight and he is generally at his shining #1 grandson best with her, the pleaser in him rewarded by her proverb-loving approach to the world. but they were at the swings, which has never been his favourite park activity, and he was also in a baby swing, which he generally eschews now even when he consents to swinging.  with Daddy away, however, he’d been playing “baby” all week. i figured perhaps i’d wander over.

as i got closer, i heard him.

but Nannie, but Nannie… great gulping tears here, and the plaintive confusion of a frustrated child who’s hit a wall he doesn’t understand.  but Nannie…i just want to RUN.

this park is a relatively spartan space, and as a result has a long expanse of green that Oscar loves to run free-form through, his little legs pumping, growing tinier and tinier as he beetles away from me until i can see him for how small he still really is.  he knows that he is only allowed to run through a particular space in the park, far from the cars, and he’s a pretty good kid. he has never transgressed those boundaries.

but when he’d run over to Nannie at the swing set, she’d heard him breathing heavily. and had decided that the thirty feet he’d covered were plenty, and he might have an asthma attack – though he has never once so much as threatened anything resembling a classic asthma attack brought on by exertion – and plopped him, unwilling, into the baby swing.  she was exhorting him in the urgent voice she uses when she’s anxious to “just slow down, be calm.”

your body needs you to be still, she said, while he wailed.

i looked at the two of them and made a judgement call, one that was perhaps as unfair as i’ve ever been.  i sided with the three-year-old.

i thrust the baby at my mother and released Oscar from the swing. he ran off, sounding for all the world like a kid with a slight cold.  i maneuvered the baby into the swing instead, and stood pushing her gently, shaking, trying valiantly but probably unsuccessfully to sound like a grownup.

Mom, he’s okay running, i think.

i only have a single memory of my mother ever running. i was still quite small, so she could not have been yet thirty. we ran through a park one day, just a shortish run to get to some play destination whose shape eludes me now. it is my shock i remember. my mother could RUN! faster than ME!

she is not an unfit person…she works on her feet, she walks, she is a bustler by nature. but outside that one vague childhood recollection, i have never once seen my mother actively exercise.  rather, she cautions against excess, dogmatically distrusts anything that involves sweat or physical discipline.  i grew up believing that the moment something hurt at all…even just a twinge, a slight catch in my breath, i should stop.  beyond that limit was some amorphous fear, some bogeyman of unseemly danger.

my body needed to be still.

so i was. and grew into a lazy arse who’s had to spend a disproportionate period of what ought to be my comfortable middle age learning to push myself.  not necessarily in terms of regular exercise…i still struggle to find the will for that, given how i was encouraged to dismiss it utterly from the earliest of ages. but rather just to function – to continue, as one must, to care for the kids even when one is sick, to push through the strain of sore arms to keep digging in the garden, to trudge on with the baby growing heavier in her sling by the minute. i have learned in my thirties that my body is far stronger than i ever gave it credit for. and that knowledge has been a powerful, beautiful thing, allowing me to learn to trust said body – just a little – for the first time in my life.

i am, if truth be told, happy about Oscar’s relatively cautious nature, and scared shitless of the fearlessness Josephine exhibits even at nine months old.  i want my children to care for themselves and their bodies, of course. i do fear them getting hurt, and i want them to know how to be calm and still when calm and still are called for.

but.  i also want them to know the free feeling of running until they can’t run any more, the confidence that comes from finding some of their own physical limits and learning to trust that their bodies, mostly, can do more than they think. learning to trust that their bodies heal. learning to trust that their bodies are their own, and not just disconnected shells which must be treated according to externalized rules.

i do not want them to think the body should always be easy and quiet. perhaps i should get off my duff and take them to the beach.

he came up as a suggested Facebook friend.

that application baffles me, i admit.  it repeatedly pimps my brother’s dead dog’s memorial account, along with the guy who groped me most awkwardly – and somewhat traumatically – on that camping trip in college.  erm, no.  thank you.  and then there’s the gaggle of people i swear i’ve never heard of even if FB is convinced they were in my high school graduating class. i come from a town with ten last names, Facebook. i know these folks are strangers.  lovely strangers, i’m sure. friends i haven’t met yet.  but seriously, there are a ton of people i’ve lost touch with that i did actually know and like, once upon a time. couldn’t you throw me a bone?

but his name came up and i did a double take, and clicked through, and there he was, in limited profile.

he would be nearly nineteen.  the shock of recognition that came at seeing him was visceral, instant, even though it was not in fact recognition but a trick of genes and time.  he is the spitting image of his father, same jutting chin and curve to the nose, same post-adolescent pocked cheeks, same searching eyes. i looked for his mother in the planes of that face and found no trace of her, my long-ago friend.

and yet the summers before and after he was born came back to me like yesterday, so present i had to shake my head and do the math and blink in wonder.  one gets so old so fast.

she got married the summer i was eighteen and she was nineteen.  we were both a year out of high school – i’d gone off to university to learn to drink out of funnels and shot glasses; she’d gone to college and met a fast-talking boy with angry, hungry eyes. she’d dropped out by Christmas.  they had an apartment downtown, plastered with vintage posters of The Wall that i coveted dearly.  he and i got along, in our way, intensity drawn to intensity around the calming, gentle oasis that was my friend.  he and i talked music, politics. she and i talked pregnancy tests, that summer.

when she asked me to be her maid of honour, i’d never even been to a wedding. the pomp and circumstance bewildered me, and i thought getting married at nineteen to a man whose interest in his impending fatherhood was vague at best was a ridiculous prospect.  but i stood with her at the front of that church when he gave her a showy kiss and they were pronounced man and wife, and i clapped, and caught the bouquet, and tripped over my taffeta frock.

Jesse was born in February.  i had just turned nineteen, she was a month shy of twenty. i had never held a newborn until i came home that weekend, hitchhiked into town special just to see him, not realizing that barging in on a mother who’d just given birth might be anything but thoughtful. i cradled him, tiny squashed face still bruised from a rough birth, and wondered at his perfect nails and brought him a hardcover Richard Scarry book and handed him back with relief to return to my life of books and things that seemed so much bigger than that tiny, dark apartment with the bassinet perched by the futon.

i spent that summer with them, baby Jesse and his mother, working shiftwork not far from where they lived. she and i took him to the playground at the school i’d gone to as a child, and spread out blankets and watched him sink sink sink, buddha belly to the ground as he struggled to learn to sit up.  he had fat cheeks and laughing blue eyes and i thought him impossibly beautiful.  and i looked at him there and tried to imagine one of my own, casting tea leaves against a future i could not see.

that summer, outside in the grass, my friend talked of her days and i watched her with troubled eyes, this sunny girl with the boy-husband who did not really want to be a husband at all, and i swallowed all the sorrow that welled up on my tongue, the sorrow that comes with being a child left behind by a father who never really became a daddy, and i hoped for different for them both.

it did not unfold that way. the boy-husband left, eventually, found someone new, started a life that at last notice barely included Jesse and the younger brother who came into their lives just before it all dissolved. my friend struggled, went back to school, started again, found a life i think and hope makes her happy.  we ended up in the same town together briefly, ten years ago now, one of the few times i’ve seen Jesse since that summer i was nineteen.  he was still a little boy ten years ago, but long-legged, all motion, and i was flummoxed, wondering where the baby on the blanket had gone.

today, i looked into the face of a young man.  my eyes combed his, searching for the blue-eyed baby of nearly twenty years ago until i realized, finally, that that baby is lost to all but memory.  he is grown.  in a blink.

this time the tea leaves spread themselves out like trollops in the sun, crystal clear.  this is the future, they sang to me.  this is how fast it goes.

and so today i will spread a blanket on the grass in my backyard and watch my baby tumble and try to stand, and taste grass and other delicacies, so that tomorrow when i blink and find her grown i will have this baby face still burned on my memory, open and tiny and laughing in the sun.

who was the first baby to ever make you imagine yourself maybe a mother, someday?

a long time ago now, i went North.  to teach.

i’d crossed the Arctic Circle once before, as a kid; the summer i was ten years old, i spent six weeks with my father in a landscape that looked like the moon to me – the sand and lichen and hardy little flowers of the tundra, dotted with patches of snow even in July. we caught fish. i had my first dark chocolate at the Hudson’s Bay Store. at 2 am in the midnight sun, i went outside – me who’d never been up past nine – with the other kids around town. i started grade six, because school starts in August up there. i was the only white kid in my class. there was a girl who was pregnant. the teacher was decapitated in a three-wheeler ATV accident a few weeks after i went home, back south, to my mother and a world i understood.

that six weeks was both the freest and loneliest i’d ever been.

thirteen years later i caught a plane the size of a sardine can and flew again up past the tree line, to a hamlet in the middle of the Northwest Passage.

i had a teaching license myself, this time around, and stayed away from ATVs. i taught the very first grade ten classes ever available in the community.  the end of the residential schools, the long history of students being forced to travel far from home to be given what the dominant culture considered an education.  nowhere near the end of their colonial legacy, of course. but i didn’t know that.

i thought education was an uncontested good.

one of my students was older than i was.  at least 50% of them were parents, or pregnant.  i taught To Kill a Mockingbird, brimful with naivete. i taught Midsummer Night’s Dream reinterpreted as Inuit legend. i taught a Canadian history curriculum that my students did not even exist in; a curriculum that rendered them absent, invisible, less than footnotes.

i did not understand why i was so angry.

something in me loved the North. the light, where the world tilts on its axis, flooded me whole.

the rest of me felt alien, Alice down the rabbit hole.  it was culture shock.   most human beings find it uncomfortable to be Other, to be constantly read as representatives of a foreign group rather than as an individual. i was not only white, teaching students who assumed i’d lived a Beverly Hills 90210 existence back at home, but a white teacher, part of a long history of imposed “education” implicitly aimed at colonizing the Inuit mind into a proper externally-determined subject.

i stayed two years. by the second year, i was no longer angry. but i was still uncomfortable. the job had made it impossible for me to ever see education as a neutral, straightforward process again.

it’s now twelve years since i left the North. some of the students i taught are dead now, lost to suicide and cancer and overall the lowest life expectancies in North America. many are grandparents. Nunavut has come to the Inuit, and brought with it not necessarily the self-determination hoped for, but a neo-colonial layer of bureaucracy that threatens – say a lot of Inuit voices – to stifle everything they aimed for.

and i have the chance to be involved with work there, again. research, ironically, on how the education system of which this research would be a part is perhaps incompatible with the traditional knowledge structures and ways of knowing of the people it has ostensibly tried to “help” for generations.  research that would explore how the research construct itself privileges, once again, the belief systems of the dominant culture and contributes to making the Inuit “Other” even in their own eyes.

part of me chomps at the bit. theory is what i love, where my mind takes flight.  and yet the prospect of this research makes me feel free and lonely like i did at ten, running wild in the midnight sun at two in the morning, wondering if i have any place in this at all, wondering if i can de-centre myself enough to ever really understand.

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i know the content of this post is pretty esoteric. but what i’m getting at is, i’m afraid of agreeing to stick my nose where i’m not sure it has any business being.

and at the same time i’m excited.

and i’m wondering, would YOU leap in?