cribchronicles.com

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

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

– Bird on a Wire, Leonard Cohen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

we talk about it, her father and i.

without hand-wringing, because it is neither of our first priorities, but with curiosity nonetheless, because observation of humanity is a hobby here. like a betting people taking wagers, we muse about it with gravity, as if it mattered…and in the same breath, with cavalier pretense, as if it didn’t.

will she be pretty?

it’s not a polite thing to talk about.  unless offering up compliments or weighing aesthetics and symmetry, ‘pretty’ is not a subject for public discussion.  society is more comfortable with those judgements kept under catty cover, spewed all over reality tv but never actually parsed out at the dinner table.

and yet…her father and i ruminate on the topic like cows at a cud, chewing it over.

she’s as cute as a bug’s ear, we’re clear on that.  fuzzy head, skin like butter.  her blue eyes are bright and, we’re quite sure, intelligent. we’ve been known to break into parental rhapsody over the edible nature of her fat little legs.  we also call her Piggy Nose.  hey, it’s a piggy nose. facts is facts.

do not get me wrong.  her little face with its elfin gaze and double chins is precious to us: the most beautiful baby girl face we know. because it is hers…and we love her, without qualification or caveat.  but still we wonder.

maybe it’s simple validation-seeking, a co-dependent search for the cheap pat-on-the-head that says we has us a pretty baby and thus must therefore, by genetic extension, be not so terribly fugly ourselves.  could be. we are not above cheap pats-on-the-head, us.  but i think it’s more.  especially since we never once had this conversation about Oscar, who is equally the fruit of our loins and really rather a pretty boy, if i do say so myself.  but in this one area, there is no gender equity.

we shouldn’t care if she’s pretty, after all.   smart, sure.  kind, yes. resilient, absolutely.  empathic and hard-working and thoughtful would be nice too.  with a side order of creative, thank you very much and i’ll deal with the crayoned walls later.  but pretty? beyond the flattery to our own gene pools, why would we care about pretty?  the exotica of the child beauty pageant circuit holds no lure for us; trolloped-up little girls in mascara and pint-size prom dresses give me the heebies.  we eschew sex-specific toys, let our son’s hair grown long, harbour hope and suspicion that gender is mostly a construct.  pretty shouldn’t matter to us.

but pretty always matters more than it should.

no matter how feminist our politics, there’s no escaping the fact that we live in a world where for girls, “worthy” and “pretty” end up conflated more than they should.  even if we reject the connection utterly, others will eventually take it up.  it’s in the ether of this culture. we will teach her that beauty is inside, and mean it, and love her for every inch of herself. but that will not protect her from the pageant that is simply living in a female body, coming to selfhood in a skin that gets appraised and assessed and reflected and judged, every day from puberty through to cronehood.

pretty is bound, at some point in her life, to be the yardstick against which she judges herself.

part of me thinks our musings on the subject are us trying to guess at how and when she and the yardstick will collide, readying ourselves to help her negotiate a relationship with pretty that does not subsume or damage all the other things she is.  because pretty is a brutal master, no matter what one’s face actually looks like.

Dave swears that his personal early research into Women, the Species, shows that the girls who grew up believing themselves “the pretty ones” often ended up stunted, their personalities self-restricted, externalized, by the emphasis placed on their surfaces.

i was the opposite.  i grew up in a house where pretty never came up.  when my father left, he took with him my mother’s sense of her own attractiveness…and i was well into college before she took any of that back.  i was expected to be clean, pleasant, pleasing, polite…but  “pretty is as pretty does” was as far as my mother ever went towards an assessment of my looks.  i grew up with the overwhelming sense that being embodied in female form was a vaguely shameful thing, and that my flaws – crooked nose, pudgy belly, short humpy neck – were horrors barely to be tolerated.  i was 21 the first time i ever remember being called pretty, flat out pretty.  i was so grateful i nearly fell over myself to sleep with the flattering party, to an REM soundtrack in a dirty little room.

so yeh, my late-blooming sense of my own appeal did inspire me to develop a sparkling, uh, wit and intellect as compensation, but it also led to a deep, longstanding insecurity in the worthiness of my physical person.

i don’t want either extreme for Josephine.

and so we talk about it, this unspeakable thing in terrible taste. we hope she’s pretty, but not too pretty.  we hope to teach her that even if the question of pretty is always out there, waiting to tempt her or cause her doubt, her worth is more than the sum of her parts.  no matter how lovely her parents think they are.  or how loony they sound talking about it out loud.

do you talk about pretty?  do you wonder, for your own daughters?  have you worked out your own relationship to your looks and how they’re taken up by others, in this life?

my mother tells me i walked at nine months old.

she has been telling me that for as long as i can remember. she’s also prone to mentioning that i spoke in clear sentences by two, and stayed dry through the nights shortly after.  

oh, i was a starbaby, clearly. and my mother’s pride in the accomplishments of my infant self has been a reliable camp stove for the cockles of my heart for, um, ever.

sure, i’ve done other things in my life. i have a good eight or nine years of post-secondary education under my belt, been around the world a few times, have written a few things i’m proud of.  but ask my mother, and you’ll get the distinct impression i peaked in 1973.

it took me a good 35 years to figure out the sad truth about my child prodigy status. 

being the first among my little friendlets to walk never actually made a better walker than they were.  i spoke early, yes, and admittedly i haven’t stopped…but once you hit grade three or so, being a monolingual, publicly verbal creature ceases to be so impressive. and i seldom wet myself, true, but so far as i’m aware, neither do many other thirty-somethings.  (well, except for those unfortunate post-partum bladder indiscretions…HUSH. for years i was continent, people. totally, reliably continent.)

my mother has spent my entire life exuding beatific pride in perfectly normal milestones that almost all typically-developing children meet somewhere within a twelve-month period.  i was no freakin’ Mozart, composing symphonies in Pampers, for crying out loud. i walked early. i stopped pissing myself a few months before some of my friends. 

i spoke in sentences probably a full year before my son did. but now that he’s reached what the charts call age-appropriate fluency…whaddaya know? he says stuff just as smart as the kid who started talking a year earlier.

my handy-dandy parental primers, mostly used as helpful doorstops since the early days of Oscar’s infancy, all have the same message: the  delicate self-esteem of a child has its first roots in the reflections cast back to said child by his or her caregivers. you are good, you are special, we communicate to the little folk, and THIS is why.  

i made them doorstops because they all communicated to ME one troubling message: my self-esteem is rooted in the very same old sacred cows that i’ve been railing against since i turned thirteen.  dammit. 

my mother, bless her good and earnest heart, wasn’t trying to set me up for a middle-age of nagging insecurity. she is, to her core, a believer in Authority. she appeals to it, honours it, makes an occasional shrine of it.  and left alone young, with an infant to raise, she turned to Authority to bolster and validate her efforts.  enter Dr. Spock, with his normative charts.

if i walked early, she must be doing a good job. spoke early, and without that pesky island accent? she was offering rich language development resources in the home environment. toilet trained before two? clearly, despite the pinched disapproval of single parenting amongst the Good Families of the city in that time, she must be morally upright enough to earn some stamp of approval and seal of quality, else i’d have been soiling myself all over town until well past three.

you see where all this goes wrong, right?  i grew up with the idea that doing things early was not only a marker of my great, if vague, potential…but that it was a good in itself.  i was good because Authority declared me good. and prompt. that is all. thanks for playing.

my mother’s Dr. Spock book – i read the damn thing myself in adolescence whilst plowing indiscriminately through her bookshelf – stopped at age three.  and so did any discussion of my skill set, my qualities as an individual.

the school system eventually took up where Dr. Spock had left off, as Validating Authority for my mother’s efforts to raise an acceptable (and preferably slightly above average) child.  the school system was generally kind to me, because i had been raised with literacies it appreciated.  and when the school system was done with me and had convocated my Honours-achieving hind end out its doors – early, yet again, as i graduated high school at 17 and had completed two separate bachelor’s degrees at 22 – i assume my mother believed some other benign system of authority, some Dr. Spock of the professional world, closed to her but in her mind a meritocracy clearly waiting to welcome me with open arms, would step in to take me up on my promise, my potential.

for a brief period, she even stopped talking about my potty training achievements and instead offered up my degrees as social appetizers at every occasion, even having them framed at her own expense and hung in her apartment.

but i did not arrive.  i worked hard, but had no idea how to leverage the skills i had into opportunity.  i didn’t even understand the concept. 

when i finished school, i knew i’d walked early and toilet-trained early, but other than that my personal canvas of self-description was filled only with my own adolescent graffiti.  “i like to imagine myself as David Bowie’s personal concubine” is not a self-description one could go far with in the depressed Canadian economy of the early-90’s recession.  and so i floated, town-to-town, up and down the dial, always working, trying every path. and  i came to find myself in my late-ish thirties, writing about tutus and wondering what i want to do with the rest of my life. 

and my mother, who loves me and whose ambitions for me only ever extended so far as me being acceptable to Authority – a line i’ve been falling on and off of like a wagon since junior high – has gradually settled into an apparently contented relationship with my achievements, wherein her acquaintances relate stories of their adult childrens’ law practices and government pensions and sojourns with Doctors without Borders, and mom chirps “Bonnie’s always been gifted with words. Do you know she could speak in full sentences by the time she was twenty-two months?  Of course, she walked at nine months…she was always bright…and she was dry through the night by the time she turned two. Children these days seem to be in diapers right until kindergarten…have you noticed…?”

…and then all the maters cluck in unison, and magically, any discussion of my current skill set disappears entirely from view.

which i’m starting to see the benefit in.

 if my mother wants to bask in the glow of my prodigious tippy-toeing across a carpet during the Trudeau heyday (or Nixon’s China visit, for you south-of-the-border readers)…well, that’s her prerogative.  it keeps my potential open. and i’m beginning to think maybe there’s potential in being a late-bloomer, after all.

so as Josephine closes in on nine months happily flat on her puffy diapered ass, i say dandy. pass the cookies. take your time, kiddo.  

what was your sense of your own potential, growing up? where did it come from? and do you think you’ve fulfilled it, in any way?

when i was four, i wanted to be a ballerina.

i think it was the tutus. you couldn’t just buy a kid a dressup tutu at the Woolworth’s back then; dressup was old plastic jewellry and mom’s clunky platform shoes to break an ankle in. unless you had a real live ballerina in the family, tutus were relegated to the category of fairytale items, confections of crisp, gravity-defying tulle glimpsed only in picture books.

i coveted.  i fantasized. with a tutu, i would be transformed.  i would be fabulous.

ballet lessons, therefore, were a magical initiation by which i would undergo my metamorphosis. i had no concept of ballet as an art, no concept of sport or applied discipline or unrelenting practice.  i thought i would put on a tutu and slippers and be a ballerina, lithe and graceful, about to take flight.

i jonesed for it all so bad my beleaguered mother finally signed me up for lessons.

my first clue that not all would be as i’d imagined was that there were no tutus; rather i got a stretchy, polyester black leotard that sagged and bagged off my bum.  i did get slippers, but they were my aunt’s hand-me-downs, rescued from twelve years in a closet and cracked and black, not even that pretty pastel pink that looked like bandaids and gum.

my ballet teacher still comes to me dreams sometimes, 32 years later. her face is vague, but her tight-bunned silhouette is has become a mythology unto itself, for me, as if all the evil stepmothers of legend and story were rolled up into one sharp-nosed, straight-backed harpy. she was not from the school of coddling children. she wanted us to work, which was affront in itself to a puzzled five-year-old with little interest in the boring foot positions. i just wanted to soar. 

but the real conflict between my five-year-old self and Serious Ballerina was about costume.  costume, from my perspective, was the core of the whole thing, the reason i was there. if i couldn’t have a tutu, i was set at least on making my dowdy, saggy short-sleeved leotard pretty by wearing a frilly blouse underneath, sleeves and collar peeking out.  

i thought i looked beautiful. i thought beauty would make me dance.

i remember the feeling of a bony hand digging into my shoulder, marching me back to the dressing room. i remember vaguely the big bulbous lights that surrounded the mirrors there, casting yellowish shadows on the cement walls. i remember the goosebumps on my naked arms, stripped of their finery, and the heavy clumsiness of my feet as they tried to turn out and in and tripped over themselves through the repetitive drudgery of classes. i remember my bewilderment; my certainty that if only the dragonlady would allow me dress the part, i could dance.

i took ballet lessons for three months. by the time i turned six, my career in the ballet was closed.

a friend told me recently she’s traditionally dated as if she’s job-shadowing; picking people not for their personal qualities but for their interesting careers/lives/families/circles of belonging. i’m the opposite. i’ve never started a relationship with anyone who really even had a career. the fact that Dave had a car when we first got together seemed glamourous. my career goals have never been based on anything so concrete as job-shadowing, in or out of love.

my aspirations have mostly been based on the same premise as that first dream of the ballet…a completely groundless and non-empirical faith that if i do this, i will be transformed.  

i’ve never learned the lesson.  the promise of the costume, the role, always shimmies in front of my shining eyes, waiting to work its magic on me, transform me from a jack of all trades to a master of…something. i fall again and again for the siren song of the incantation that will release my secret inner potential; i believe each time that if i only take on the mantle, i will soar.

i didn’t get that federal job i did the three-hour interview for a few months back. i did start a small, one-day-a-week gig in the interim, researching research grant opportunities for the university. it’s not my research, in the sense that if i do ever continue that Ph.D i once started in a whole other life, this will not be my area of focus…but the grant knowledge is transferable. and i had the opportunity to adjudicate some local arts grants recently, which was a process i enjoyed way more than i should have, probably because it’s been a very long time since anybody – ahem, i mean YOU, three-year-old – expressed any interest in the whys of my decision-making processes.  i applied for another, non-grant-related job last week. and i actually did some writing that stretched longer than a blog post for the first time since last summer’s workshop.

but the truth is, my focus is still all over the place, professionally. if one were an optimist, this could be said to leave me with many options open; a flexible skillset. if one is less rosy in outlook, one could also level the accusation that i still don’t know what i want to do when i grow up…that i am still, at 37, looking for the tutu that will magically make me dance.

both are true.  and even after all the years i’ve put in doing the grunt work and discipline of learning to teach and research and project manage and write and strategize, i still perch precarious, seemingly aimless and undirected between them all.  i wait, bewildered, for the role to come along that will unlock my potential, even as in the same breath i decry the determinism and passivity all that  implies. 

in some part of me, i still just want to be the ballerina of my childhood mind’s eye, to know what it is to soar. 

how did you end up choosing the path you’re on, whatever you do with your days? and is there some kind of tutu still out there in your dreams, calling your name?

she’s been out now longer than she was ever in.

yesterday marked sixteen months since the day i found out i was pregnant with Posey. it was an eight-month pregnancy that felt like eighty. and eight and a half months later, i think i’m finally recovered-ish. send flowers.

they say we humans have a fourth trimester to pregnancy, the final one spent outside the womb thanks to the engineering clusterfuck of large brains and tender perinea.  i say four-schmore.

i’m more of a six-trimester mammal, myself.

both times i’ve come home from the hospital with a baby, it’s taken an entire pregnancy-length again for me and the offspring to begin to show signs of being human. the colicky infant and the feeding machine who doesn’t sleep more than three hours in a row are not functioning people, people.  they are still gestating, albeit perhaps in separate beds. they are creatures of the body, days dictated by routines of demanding bellies and sheer exhaustion and a lot of mindless wiping.  of everything.

the taller of the pair may occasionally engage in conversation and give the impression of being a thinking adult, but do not be fooled.  that is not thinking. that is just the habit of talking in complete sentences, which is hard to break even when one actually has nothing to say other than “i wiped vomit off my shirt seven times today.”

it gets easier after that fourth trimester, sure. but only after the full mirror pregnancy has been ticked off the calendar do i actually feel as if my body or my life are in any way my own.  slowly, my self creep back, at first distorted, hard to recognize. slowly, between six and eight months after the baby arrives, my sense of being utterly consumed, of being with child in a way even more total than during pregnancy itself, trails off…not with the bang of birth, but with a whimper.

one morning i wake up and notice that i’ve actually slept. all week. ’til an almost-civilized hour. and i go in to find my little baby laughing at her brother, who’s peering into her crib, and she’s watching him knowingly as if she’s more than cognisant of exactly what’s going to come next and i realize that our rhythms have shifted from pure bodily function to social patterns – that i no longer have an infant, but a very small, very sweet, watchful, fierce little girl.  in a baby body, but a baby body that rocks and crawls and explores and feeds itself whatever it finds on the floor, indiscriminately, and gets closer to independence every day.  she loves the cat. she has a sense of humour. she high-fives, and dislikes lentils.  her lip quivers when i tell her “no.”

and i congratulate myself and say, “hey! you! you had a baby!” and then i look around and know that it is done, survived, that long, brain-numbing road of extended gestation that seems to be my lazy, elderly arse’s response to infancy and colic and sleep-deprivation and nursing.  it is done, except for the nursing, and even that begins to wane, takes less precedence, demands little except a happy cuddle.

we are two now, almost fully. semi-civilized both, my baby girl and i each brought safely to ourselves.

the whimper that escapes comes from me.  and i do not know if it is relief or longing, for that strange half-life for two that will never come again.

Posey eating shoe. she's worth 16 months.

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i know not everyone seems to have these pitifully long elephantine gestations, in the sense that some of you bounce back into your jeans and your actual senses of self miraculous weeks after birth. i consider you robots amazing specimens. ;)

did you have that sense of being still utterly baby-consumed after birth? what was your mirror gestation length? and how did you feel coming out the other side?

in my town, there’s a former suburb, long since absorbed into the city limits, rich with ’50s bungalows, called Sherwood. in a nod to somebody’s idea of clever literary allusion, most of its street names follow a woodsy theme – Pine, Maple, Oak, Ferndale, Heather – so that taken as a whole, you got yourself a Sherwood Forest.

before amalgamation, the village sign even featured Robin Hood.  and until last night, the most popular diner in the area – arguably in the entire city, such as it is – was called Maid Marian’s.

Maid Marian’s burnt to the ground last night.

my grandfather, who lives up the hill from the burnt out hulk that housed the best lemon pie in town, has eaten breakfast and most of his suppers at Maid Marian’s every day for the past 21 years, literally. the servers used to call his house by 7:15 am if he hadn’t shown up yet.

i am wondering if i will need to drive to Sherwood every morning with hot buttered toast until they rebuild the damn place.

my grandfather will be ninety this fall. he still drives. he still works at the autoelectric shop his former students & colleagues opened up years ago when the place he’d put his life into since the war shut down without pensions. he can’t do nearly what he’d like to, anymore, but he goes in every morning and stays ’til his back gives out. they keep him on.  i do not ask.

the kitchen of the house he shared with my grandmother has literally not been touched, except for a glass here and there for water or rum & coke, and an occasional plate for toast & Cheez Whiz, since the day she died. my grandfather does not cook. even the hulking microwave, now thirty years old, sits utterly unused on the counter looking more and more like a Star Trek relic every year.

my grandfather will need a new restaurant. not because he will starve – he’s mastered toast, and cereal, and has family & friends who invite him out for suppers and weekend brunches.  but in his own shy, slightly curmudgeonly way, he needs a place to belong to.  Maid Marian’s has been his wife  since my grandmother died.  it’s fed him, and not just bodily.  there was hot coffee waiting for him, the staff knew him by name, knew his business, asked after him. there are waitresses there he’s been telling to “stay pure” for 21 years, bless their tolerant, non-sexual-harrassment-suing hearts.

and now they’re out of a job. but he’s out of a home, in a way.  he was a fixture at the place, so much so that the local radio station called him this morning for the “human interest” angle on the fire.

i don’t know whether to buy him a cookbook or a condolence card.
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if my grandmother knew that her husband had been eating out twice a day since she died, her frugal bones would roll in their grave. if she knew he’d been on the radio announcing this shameless, mortifying, spendthrift fact, i suspect the bones would find a way to reconfigure themselves so they could at the very least wag a finger at him from the afterlife.

yet in the year before cancer took her, i doubt they ever once talked about how he would eat, after 45 years of her cooking every single meal and packing his lunches for work.  that was part of their generation.

but just the other day, a good friend whose dad just had heart surgery mentioned that she doesn’t think her mother’s ever used a bank card.  her mother is not quite seventy.

another friend had her parents split up this past summer, after 39 years of marriage. her mother – a professional, independent-spirited sixty year old – had no clue where to even begin to get her taxes filed for the year.

those of us lucky enough to have longterm partners almost inevitably fall into divisions of labour, around housework or yardwork or money or laundry or who buys birthday presents for the relatives or swats Junebugs. often these divisions are gendered, though not always…sometimes, to those of us who grew up in a post-feminist world, they’re far more surprisingly gendered than we’d ever imagined for ourselves, and we blush when the nice electrician asks about the fuse box and we find ourself pointing vaguely towards the damp clay cellar that we realize we’ve only been in twice. ahem.

all partnerships have their secret agreements – i will take this, you take that.  it is nice to have someone to do a little of the dirty work that you don’t fancy.

but is it incumbent on us to stay mildly abreast of the dirty work that keeps our lives functional? it gets harder as time goes by and habits settle, and i suppose as technology changes. i wonder if the idea that we’re supposed to know how to do it all for ourselves is a peculiarity of my own generation?  these fine, skilled mothers of my friends were part of a generation who moved from parents’ home to marriage bed, for the most part.

now their adult daughters, pushing forty, are the ones who teach them the literacies that the daughters learned on their own, for the most part.

what do you think your adult children will find themselves needing to teach you? if you find yourself alone after a long partnership, what do you think will come hardest…or do you avoid thinking of things like that, at all?  do you see a generational difference between the way you and your parents dealt with these questions?

and does anybody know a nice diner where my grandfather can get some coffee? and a cute waitress to ogle? ’cause i’m willing to cook him a steak, but…boundaries, people. i have boundaries.

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

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

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

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

the May Two-Four allows us to do both.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

long live the Queen.

years ago, after a few shots of honesty absinthe on a concrete balcony one October evening, Dave and i got to talking about having kids.

i was thirty, he was turning twenty-eight.  we were living in separate apartments in the bleak  post-Soviet suburbs of the Hapsburg Empire, where we taught English to aspiring supermodels and went broke for awhile, soaking up kultur.  we were both in the middle of long, ex-pat divorces.  we were happy.

then he said, i worry about your anger, with kids. i worry that you couldn’t control it.

and my head spun round and i ate his off in one big bite, munch.  end of story.  what anger? whatever could you be referring to?  braaaawww-kk. urp.

erm, or not. but i remember being gobsmacked by the conversation, the vein of indignant righteousness popping out on one side of my forehead while the other brow fell in shame at being judged and found wanting.  so, he’d seen me lose my shit at an officious customs officer AND an on-the-take taxi driver only the week before.  irrelevant, i told myself.  they were adults. if they’d been children trying to fleece me with their petty little graft schemes, i’d have been much more patient.

besides, i might have occasional temper control issues – they run in my family, i heard a voice say petulantly, and cringed – but he was the chronic pain in the ass, after all.  look to thine own molehill, or however the proverb goes.  i was the Nice One of the partnership. he could ask anybody.

i don’t know if he did. i know that we never really revisited the conversation, just kept on keeping on, the way people usually do when neither of them is perfect.  i took my umbrage at his comment and channelled it into trying to be a calmer person, mostly.  it was good for me, i found.  and possible, which surprised me more than i could ever have said.  i occasionally pointed ostentatiously to examples of me holding my temper, especially with Dave himself, and for his part,  he slowly grew into less of a pain.  we were still happy.

and eventually, with much ado and struggle along the way, we found ourselves living in a house with two very short people, both of whom seem to require an inordinate amount of attention. right now.

and mostly i do okay.

not always.

this morning i woke up with a cold like two Mack trucks had parked themselves in my sinuses overnight. i’m drippy and blurry and my head hurts like a sonofabitch and i sneeze every twelve seconds and i’m home all day with a 3 year old going through a whiny phase and a baby who seems to be teething. again. because every 8 month old needs to be able to rip apart raw steak with her 87 chompers, right Mother Nature? yeh. fuck off.

by 10:30 this morning i had morphed from weary, slightly self-pitying maternal figure with a cold into John Goodman in The Big Lebowski.  Oscar demanded milk again, after having been told he’d had enough, reminded to use his pleases and asked to just get on the ever-lovin’ potty for what felt like the fifteenth time that minute.  his last caterwaul of miiiiiiiiillllllk woke the baby from a nap already previously interrupted by the alarm clock in their room going off mysteriously, thanks to his early morning curiosity about the buttons and my inability to figure out the snooze on the damn thing.

i found myself standing in the middle of the bathroom, having separated myself from both the children in some instinctual act of species preservation. i was seething, in full tantrum. my face was red and my voice trilled shrilly up and down.

i was muttering, shut the fuck up, Donny. shut the fuck up, Donny. shut the fuck up, Donny. louder and louder, angrier and angrier, all theatrical pitch and emphasis and vicious rage.  it felt good.  it felt remarkably good.  i was vaguely wishing i’d named BOTH the children Donny, just to make it all the more satisfying. i was also considering tearing out my hair, which seemed like a perfectly pleasant idea at the time.

then Oscar appeared at the door.

it’s not Donny, he said.  it’s BONNIE. silly goose. bbbb-Bonnie. and he walked away.

good. now i’ve taught my kid to cuss me out.

i got him some milk. and thought maybe Dave had a point, all those years ago, and is 10:30 am too early for a shot of absinthe? i have swine flu a cold. it’s medicinal.

do you, uh, get angry?

when i was a little girl, they gave out carnations at church on Mother’s Day. white if your mother was deceased, pink if she was alive. my mother’s was white, mine, trailing beside her, obviously pink.  they were crinkly and soft, the flowers, little pom pom indicators.

these days, Oscar tags along to church with my mother some Sundays.  we’re not believers, his father and i, even of the mild sort frequented in the social gospel-focused United Church of Canada with its left-wing politics…but his grandmother is eager to bring him and i like the idea of him having exposure to the literacies of liturgy and scripture that are so foundational to the history of western culture…as well as him being part of a genuine multi-age community, where old folks fuss over him and note that he’s gotten his hair cut.

thus far my mother has refrained from having him guerrilla-baptized, so it’s all going along swimmingly. he likes church, especially the cookies at the end.  i hope his eventual faith choices will be based on deeper calls than those of his sweet tooth, but i suspect there may be a few in every congregation who are actually there for the cookies…so he’d not be alone, at least.

he came home today with carnations. one white, one pink.  one for his Nannie, and one for him to bring home to me. my mother stayed for lunch. and i was happy.

there is much that the pink flower on my kitchen table tonight does not tell about my relationship to Mother’s Day.  it does not explain that my mother and i sometimes can barely speak without snipping at each other. nor how i worry about her.  it doesn’t explain how she was left with me when she was only 23, already an orphan; how i sometimes rail that i was raised with not a single useful skill in the world and other times feel full to bursting at all she managed to hold together for me.

the pink flower does not note my own motherhood.  it does not mark that first Mother’s Day eight days after my son died, sprinkling ashes under the trees dug into the raw earth of our yard. neither does it note that my daughter is eight months old today, my last baby, already pulling herself up.  it does not know that it is carried in Oscar’s sturdy hands,  proffered up with a shy smile of bestowing.

when i was a kid, i thought the flowers told all.

i did not know about neglect, about abuse, about the holes adoptions can sometimes leave in mothers and in children.  i did not know about miscarriage and the death of children, about infertility, about role reversals and daughters who become caregivers and the hurts we inflict all over each other just in living out this primal relationship of Mother.  i did not know.  i was lucky.

i know, now.  i know this whole Mother’s Day thing is fraught with complications that Hallmark can’t begin to address.

but i got a pink flower, today.  and i smiled at my boy coming in the door and my mother behind him, and held my baby close in my arms and was grateful.  i am lucky, still.  i have my mother with me.  i have these children.  i am beyond thankful.

here we is.

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

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

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

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

except i, uh, forgot them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i told him lobster was good with butter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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