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on Sunday afternoon, at the park with the kids, my bracelet broke.

online friends made the bracelet for me shortly after Posey was born last fall. an ornate art deco clasp, and three strands of silver beading, each with the name and birthstone of one of my children. Oscar & Finn, April, crystals. Josephine, September, sapphire. it was gorgeous. and i cried when i opened the little package, because this bracelet made and sent by semi-strangers had all three of my babies’ names on it, the only thing in my possession linking the three so visibly.

it made me smile.

the strand that broke last Sunday was Finn’s. i scrabbled in the early spring grass, trying to contain the beads as they rolled brightly away and at the same time keep Posey from swallowing the ones i retrieved.  i found a few of the crystals, found the F, the two Ns. but the little square bead with the I escaped me. i got down on my hands and knees, traced the dirt with my fingertips. gone.

the strand of my broken child, always so elusive, broken. the wind blew my hair into my smarting eyes.

then i caught myself. i raised my head to the sharp gust and the dry leftover leaves skittering. he is not in a bracelet, i told myself. he cannot be lost again. he is everywhere, dust, in these leaves, in his brother and sister. he is written on you.  i stood up, spun my head around almost as if i expected to see him there, some little colt-legged shadow with a brown bowl cut.

hello, you.

i left that bead somewhere in that playground, lost like the child himself, relinquished to the world, the universe. it is there, somewhere, in that grass. i just cannot see it.

it is fitting, the bracelet perhaps more honest with its broken strand than it was before.  this is my family picture, three children, one floating free, without an I.  and on his birthday this year, i do not sorrow any more. where once there was a hole where he had been, a gaping wound, now time has left mostly love, indelible, stronger than death.

happy fourth birthday, my Finn…my wee one, my shadow baby, my son. i smile at you.

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

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

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

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

April 28^th, 2009

Dear Mr. Shaw,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours sincerely,

Bonnie Stewart

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

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

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

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

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

Oscar was like me, if less morose.

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

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

ummm….he’s still not ready.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a year ago, the only word combination he could utter was “no, mama” and its paternal equivalent. “bah” stood for ball, bear, book.

yesterday, we perched at the table and he piped up, “…so. this morning i wouldn’t let Daddy and Grandpapa play with my castle. i only wanted to play with Grandmaman. i took the helmet off the castle man and put it on backwards! haha. wasn’t that funny?!?!”

tomorrow, he is three. he inhabits a body that leaps and wiggles and reminds me of the cherubs of stone cathedrals come fresh into the world, round belly and perfect bum and dancing feet.  he is not tall for his age, yet to me somehow stretched beyond comprehension, this boy now. the baby is almost gone from his face.  in its place, eyes sweet with wonder and fierce in the sulk, an open, curious, willful, playful boy…an imp.

and i am consistently amazed and driven crazy and delighted and moved by him. he is a force, now, and reckoning with him sometimes takes all i have and i run dry on endurance and urge and push and snap at him to hurry up! or to be quiet! and i long to just lie down limp on the floor and rest for a moment from this barrage of need and demand, always changing, morphing and oh my god he will eat me alive, i swear, but then, sometimes there is grace and the patience his lovely, learning little soul deserves and i look into his eyes and see that he is still whole, unbroken by my petty flaws, and my heart crumbles with relief and terror and a love that would destroy worlds to keep him just as he is except i know his job is to ripen and become and oh, how i hope for him a life rich and rewarding.

he has a joker’s heart, a showman’s sense of audience, of timing.  on Saturday, we took him and his little cousins to the local annual Pinch Penny Fair for his birthday “party”, for face painting and a magic show. the magician took him up onstage, and Oscar gaped at the man, compliant but slackjawed, almost in trance, suddenly smaller than i’d seen him in ages.  until the applause started and he turned to the audience, awestruck by the sound. in his eyes, a light came on, a recognition, and for a second i saw him ageless and beyond me, soul exposed. and i thought, i see you, my son.

and i beamed up at him, reaching out my hand to steady him as he tottered off the stage in his little rubber boots.

then he turned into a tiger for the day and we had cake and i gave thanks for him, for the thousandth time these last three years.

happy birthday, big  boy.  my god, how i love you.

we were high high up in the nosebleed seats, view almost blocked by the tinny square of the spotlight snaking down in front of the giant monitor where Neil Young rocked out like an aging hobbit, utterly possessed.

he was fabulous. i was rapt. my acoustic inclinations make me a far more avid fan of Neil’s folky-country incarnations than his extended experiments in distortion and the wa-wa pedal, but live, even the 20 minute guitar solos were infectious. dude is hardcore.

we didn’t look so hardcore, ourselves. the march up to the seats had nearly toppled my friend, thirty weeks into her pregnancy. she and i perched in our lofty plastic buckets, catching up, surrounded by elderly bikers and kids young enough to be our children. most of them wore tour shirts and latex hooker chic.  one woman, who bore a surreal resemblance to Carla from Cheers, dropped her binoculars square onto my skull and was too drunk to notice.  or apologize.  in this back o’ the class equivalent where beer and vomit flowed free, my blue spring coat and scarf were prim, i suddenly realized, and my friend – resplendently maternal in a floral shirt and elastic-waisted jeans – barely resembled the barefoot, chain-smoking girl who spent a week in the Via Rail bar car with me fifteen years ago.  i tapped my feet in white boots, probably looking like a misplaced housewife who expected at any moment to find myself magically transported to a Nancy Sinatra show.

i found myself wishing my tattoo was visible in clothing.

we are OLD, i shouted in my friend’s ear.

she laughed, the same girlish pealing giggle she’s had as long as i’ve known her.  i KNOW, she mouthed back at me.  and we goggled at each other, heads cocked, two pixie-haired torn-jeaned free spirits turned to motherly sorts. with purses.

then the cheeky whippersnapper parked two seats down from my friend sparked up something with embers glowed orange in the dark. the first whiff snapped my head around like a dog on a choke chain.

ah, smell, the sense most closely connected to memory. the air got thick with weed and, with a furtive look around i, uh, breathed deeply.  ooooh.  nineteen all over again.  my friend and i grinned, mother-to-be and nursing mother ahaze with guilty pleasure.

smells like Derek, i said. my college boyfriend. the one with the acute case of amotivational syndrome.

somewhere out there in parts unknown, Derek turns 39 years old today.  i met him the April he turned 20, in a heady wet spring when a young girl’s fancy turned to thoughts of love. i was 18. he was funny, brash, a Montreal boy who seemed worldly to my small-town self. he became my first Other, the first for whom i ever gave over that part of me i don’t know if i’ve gotten back since…the sense of the I as singular, as truly solitary and my own.

i no longer remember what it was i loved about him. i remember the curve of his collarbone and a funny little scar on his chest, almost remember the way he laughed. i remember that he lied, not disloyally but to impress, a storyteller, exaggerator, promiser of what could not be delivered. i remember that he bought smokes and borrowed money from me for food and i let him, though i was far more broke than he.  i remember that last excruciating year, when we could not connect and could not fuck and could not, it seemed, figure out where the hell either of us were going let alone how we might go there together, how he blew the LSAT he’d fumblingly placed his hopes in and i pushed and pushed at him to talk and in the end he punched a hole in the cheap wall in the poverty palace that was his apartment. the girl upstairs heard the shouting and the thud and called the cops who came and separated us and gently bullied with questions, sure i was covering a beating. but no, only my heart, struggling to understand how we could love and see no future.  the last April before graduation, we lay awake late together in tears with Neil Young’s Harvest Moon playing in the background, whatever we had been dissolving like the snowbanks with the coming of spring.

and in the morning, a last ritual wake & bake and then convocation and i drove away in my grandmother’s borrowed Datsun and waved, and i have never seen him again.  it was before email, dear readers, in that strange othertime where you could actually lose somebody completely, even if you didn’t really want to.

i heard later that he became a car salesman, and took up golf.

but he was the time and place in my life where the air was thick and green, and for a second at the concert the other night i could almost believe i saw his shadow, a few rows down, if i squinted my eyes just right.

i don’t think i would have changed anything if i had seen him…i’d have sat there, swinging my white boots in my pretty little coat singing my heart out while my lungs burned a little in the hazy air, and smiled, and gone home happy and fed the baby who then woke – probably, erm, with the munchies – all the rest of the night.  that’s all.

i don’t think of him that often. but i remember.

the blog turned three the other day. and it snowed.  huh.  fuck you too, April.

i  could swear i’ve had no time to bake any celebratory blogoversary virtual cupcakes this year, except…erm, they’re virtual.  practically instant. perhaps it just feels like the circles we run in out here are too choked with sadness and fear lately for anyone to want to eat any.

grief makes me uncomfortable.

when i was in high school, five friends and i put on a play called Passacaglia in the local drama festival. we played the denizens and matron of a nursing home, rhapsodizing back on dreams deferred. my cynical, virginal self had to speak the line “we made love” aloud without dissolving into ironic distance or giggles. we powdered our hair, wore Tender Tootsies. the six of us spent a lot of time together that spring, talking about aging and who we hoped we’d be when we got old.

the following spring, one of us drowned, with her older brother.

their funeral was, as you would imagine, enormous. they played U2’s With or Without You. and i sat in the back, compelled and repelled all the same by the proceedings, my eyes on Sarah’s white coffin and the bent heads of her parents. i felt sad and angry. and scornful at the same time, at the weeping and the wailing from those whom i knew had known her no better than i, those who cried because it was a time for crying.

i wanted to say, i knew her. i knew what she wanted to be when she was ninety years old. but my claim to her seemed so small, so peripheral, that to speak it at all felt like playing a part. i did not know if i deserved to mourn.  to do so publicly felt somehow distasteful…not to do so, almost disrespectful.

i always feel weird when private sorrows become hugely public, go viral. our society creates spectacle out of grief, and part of me recoils, afraid of appropriating, claiming what is not my own.  and yet to pretend grief is not in the room when it has swallowed all the air…that only harms, i think, never helps.  grief is the dirty underbelly of living, of community, of friendship.  if ever you think it’s not present, scratch a little deeper. or wait.

in the three years of its existence, the blog has been the site of more public grieving on my part than i care to think about.  it is the place i put things i cannot say in my real life. i do not want to walk into the grocery store today and say, hi. did you know that this is the anniversary of the day things went irrevocably wrong for me?  that four years ago this morning i was airlifted to the IWK because my water broke? i was 24 weeks, almost. my son was born a couple of weeks later. he died the morning of the last day of the month. my son. my Finn, firstborn.

i am so uncomfortable with grief even after the intervening four years that if i had say the words above aloud to someone today, i’d grin all the way through, my rictus of pleasant polite-itude desperately trying to counter the message.

so i tell you, here.  because it is April, again, and i need to mark it.  without the grin. without needing the grin, or tears either.

i’d feel ridiculous telling anyone in person that tomorrow is nine years since my Nannie died, after a good long life and a miserably long death.  but i tell you.  i acknowledge, remember aloud, onscreen. a line or two is all.

and my heart is calmed, having borne its small witness to these people whom i loved, thrown those words into the chorus of sadness and memory and love that exists out here.

which is, i suppose, what we are all trying to do as we muddle through this mess of an April.

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in one of April’s happier anniversary dates at our house, a “yellow cake with a yellow train” has been requested for Oscar’s third birthday next week. i tried to talk him into chocolate, to no avail. nearly-three-year-olds are a hard-headed people, i am discovering. and as sweet and quirky a kid as Oscar can be, he knows what he likes…so yellow his cake shall be. and possibly homemade, if i do not chicken out and buy a box of Betty Crocker yellow.

now, i have no clue how to actually make a cake from scratch, let alone make it, uh, yellow without adding brain cancer food colouring. but i like a challenge, so if you could bring on your best yellow recipes whilst i mutter curses at the babysitter for cultivating strange, non-chocolate-centred tastes in my offspring, that’d be great.

if it’s too ugly to serve to the three-year-old set, rest assured i will hand out virtual slices – and photos – here. one can always aspire to be on Cake Wrecks, if nothing else.

ah, blogging. you make everything just a little less lonely, at least.

there’s this little girl i want to meet someday. her name is Lily. she was four weeks old yesterday.

her parents live here, in this smallest of capital cities. i don’t know them…though in the newpaper clippings they look vaguely familiar, as if perhaps i’ve brushed by them in a grocery store aisle or a coffee shop over the years.  i may happen on them again someday, later, our daughters in the same gymnastics or driver’s ed class. i may. i hope i do.

they are not here right now. they’re in Toronto, with their daughter, at Canada’s foremost hospital for sick children.  Lillian O’Connor is four weeks old. she is waiting for a heart transplant.  without one – and soon – she will not survive.

there’s another little girl in the same hospital who i’ll never meet. her name is Kaylee. she was two months old yesterday. she has a rare and fatal brain malformation…there’s nothing doctors can do to save her.

Kaylee’s parents want to donate Kaylee’s heart to Lily, if there is compatibility and the ethical protocol can be met…and if Lily does turn out to be highest on the recipient list when Kaylee is declared dead.  the story is an emotional Paaschendale…mud and tragedy enough to drown in.

21 years after the first successful infant heart transplant, infant organ donation is still a very messy issue.
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i’ve been waking up with Kaylee and Lily’s parents on my mind the past few days.   i’ve been waking up a lot, admittedly, with a teething baby whose bronchiolitis has her jacked up on ventolin and sleeping in torturously small 45 minute increments the past 36 hours or so.  crawling out of bed at 2:30 am, and 3:30, and 4…i consciously force my brain to remind itself, i’m glad she’s here. i’m glad she’s relatively healthy. this too shall pass...and it can hurry the f*ck up and not let the door hit it on the…grumble grunt…zzzzz. the reminders keep me from cursing quite so flagrantly.

four years ago i would have eaten glass for the luxury of waking to soothe my baby.

i think Lily and Kaylee are both first babies, as Finn was.  i peer into the picture of their parents’ faces, these four new parents, on my computer screen and wonder.  any time a death sentence is pronounced upon your child, the world crashes in on itself.  when it is your firstborn, and parenthood is a new world you’ve turned your life inside out to embrace, the crash is perhaps particularly bewildering, because you become that contradiction our society has no words for…a parent who has no child.

i wonder what will happen to them, to Kaylee’s parents, to Lily’s. about waiting by the bedside of your daughter, waiting for news of a transplant heart, every cell trained on wishing and praying and willing the universe to provide; about the helplessness and heartbreak of knowing mercy can come only in the form of another family’s hell. i wonder about Kaylee’s mother waking in the middle of the night a month from now, and whether some small part of her will rail that it was not her girl who could be spared. i wonder how their sorrow will mark them. her mother is only twenty…i heard her voice on the radio this morning, and it made me cry. i hope her strength is long, enduring. i hope nobody is fool or cruel enough to say to her, “you’re young. you can have another baby.”

i wonder at the grace shown us, strange backhanded grace, that we were never given hope after Finn’s first lung collapse at an hour old.  i knew his death came because nothing more could be done for him…not because the cure didn’t come in time, not because there were no donors to save him.
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nobody talked to us about organ donation when Finn died. he only weighed a kilogram, hefty for a 26 weeker, but – as vital organs mostly need to be transplanted among people within similar weight ranges – probably too small for any recipient baby to have undergone the transplant procedure.  his corneas? probably too underdeveloped. and the oxygen loss he suffered when his lungs failed him at birth – that probably made him a poor donor too.

or so i tell myself. in truth, the possibility of donation didn’t cross my mind during the hours we had with him. and it was never mentioned, probably for all the reasons above.

if it had been, in that strange underwater blur of clanging ventilators and harsh lights and fear and beauty that was the lifetime lived in the blink of an eye beside that little incubator on which i wrote his name and all my fierce, defiant hope on a piece of masking tape, i might have resented it.  it takes time to process the shock of having had a baby at all, let alone a baby whose prognosis is suddenly more dire than ever imagined…and time is precious when you don’t have much of it and thinking about after when he was still here was something my mind flatly refused to do, full stop, except to cram in as much of the sight and the smell and the feel of him, tiny fingers squeezing my own, as i could while i could.  because i did understand, right from the moment that first doctor clapped hope shut all over my eager face, that time would be too short and time with him was all that counted.

and yet, in the same breath, i would’ve said yes, had it been an option. because some part of him, then, would have had more time. even if that part was not for me to touch, to know.  the hardest point of coming home with just a blitzkreig of memories and an urn was that my child – in the eyes of the world – disappeared. i could do nothing to help him. but to help another child live through him? that difference would’ve been staggering, i think, on the long road to my own peace.

organ donation among infants is relatively rare, and controversial. even when a child’s  physiology is incompatible with life, as in the case of ancephaly or the brain anomaly Kaylee suffers from, the requirements for declaration of death are often not met until healthy organs have deteriorated past the point of transplant.

the rules exist to protect the living from having organs harvested, obviously.  and yet the system works particularly poorly with infants because definitions of death – brain death vs. cardiac death – are inconsistent and because the organs are so small and easily damaged.

as it stands at latest reporting, Kaylee’s parents plan to take their little girl off life support today.  they plan to make her heart available – so doctors will stand by, waiting for her heart to stop beating, and for the full five minutes to pass before she can legally be declared dead. and Lily’s parents? they have to decide whether to accept the heart, to risk having their daughter prepped for surgery and readied to receive the heart, without knowing whether or not after the five minutes required by law have past Kaylee’s heart will still be viable.

gah.

and i sit here in Lily’s hometown, what should be Lily’s hometown someday, my heart in my mouth.

these two families have found each other in Toronto over the past week or so, and in each other found the possibility that their daughter’s stories may merge, two hearts into one life.

Update: the story only gets more fraught…last night, Kaylee’s parents said goodbye and their daughter was brought into surgery to attempt donation (though it apparently isn’t clear whether Lillian was, in fact, the designated recipient), but Kaylee stayed awake when life support was removed. as her condition means her organs only fail when she’s asleep, the surgery was obviously called off.  it doesn’t mean her prognosis, unfortunately, is any rosier, and her family is vowing to try again for donation if circumstances make that possible.  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090408.BABY08/TPStory/TPNational/Ontario/

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

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

i am still learning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

live and learn.

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

baby, you’re much too fast.

Posey scoots now, small arms propelling her backwards over the hardwood like a slippery, self-denying seal.  it makes her happy, this autonomy, this discovery of the world. ooh, another dust bunny! i think i heard her coo.

shoulda bought one of those sleepers with the mop attachment on ’em. happy baby, clean floors.

i have a job interview tomorrow.

it’s a big one, a federal job, a job with pension and all those exotic things that i haven’t had in the almost twelve years since i left the K-12 classroom. i spent a whole weekend last month compiling my twelve-page application, and most of the trip to Halifax having Dave quiz me on policies and mandates and the 73 other things i’m trying to stuff into my brain so i have a chance of not being blown out of the water by the internal candidates.  March is going out like a lion, a foot of snow here last night, and so school is closed and i’m trying to prepare a strategic plan for the presentation part of the THREE-HOUR interview while two sets of small snotty hands paw at me.

Dave is home, bless him. he has my back. and my babies.

it feels heady to draft communications strategy, to luxuriate in concepts like innovation and coherence. the notion of this job sings siren songs of salary and semi-security and skills development, of arriving.  i am all ears, a silly adolescent eager to put out for the big letter sweater who makes her feel she’s good enough.

but the prospect of shoehorning my stretched, milk-swollen bosom into my good jacket like a trussed chicken makes me feel exposed, faintly grotesque…Betty Boop playing professional.

and every time i try to imagine opening my mouth to say something articulate about my qualifications, i choke, feel brittle and strange and false, like a child caught believing in imaginary friends.  i want this. it scares me.

i have grown accustomed to being home. i catch Josephine’s eye as she gnaws fiercely on a stuffed rabbit, and her eyes crackle with light.  Oscar dons his Miffy apron and pulls his stool up to the kitchen counter to help me cook; wanders the house in underpants. my daughter will sit up soon, then walk, speak her first words. and if i get this job, i will not be there for nearly so much of that.

part of me wants to freeze this moment, the weight of this babe in my arms, the laugh of my boy as he shouts hoo-way! that part of me would stay here forever.  it is afraid i will fail at anything else.

i will not know unless i try.
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… some help, if you will.  i’m rusty at this interview stuff, struggling to remember the cadence of work, how people sound when their conversations aren’t mostly about poop. what’s the best job interview question you’ve ever been asked?  what do you wish you’d answered?

you can be my practice team.

wish me luck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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