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the cuts seem to be coming hot and heavy now, after months of doom and gloom breathing down our necks. the downturn is crossing class lines, impacting manufacturing and media and corporate finance alike.

the shit from an inflated, entitled culture that fed on bogeymen and retail therapy is hitting the fan. now the bogeymen appear to be closer to home, bankers and polluters, a different kind of us & them than we’ve grown accustomed to stressing over in the past decade. it’s change, at least. we’ll see about hope.

i am looking hard for hope, peering around corners and down the decolletage of all the pretty girls tarted up to distract me from cultural dissolution.  ooh!  Olympics!  food porn!  mommy bitchfests!  my hands dip into the pop culture well and come up empty, grasping me and mine to me all the closer. i am looking for work in this economy, and i have kids i want to provide both a home and a healthy world for in the midst of this hysteria. i do not want to be the Joads, fleeing the dustbowl in our jalopy. i do not want to go up in flames or fourhorsemen.

part of me tires of hearing it all, wants to close in on myself and hunker down with my backyard tomato plant and my babies. i want to say, i feel helpless.

but a little voice that speaks an old, blood tongue deep in my familial bones says, don’t.

yes, there are terrible things going on.  yes, there is insecurity.  fear is eating at us, as a culture.  this is not a fear we can wall ourselves away from…this fear chews at all the fat we thought we’d socked away, untouchable. this fear makes us angry and protective and shrill, seagulls from Finding Nemo.

it’s easy to be transfixed by the sight of our ship that was a-comin’ in going down instead.   but the voices of my grandmothers, who lived through the Great Depression young and poor and Scots Protestant proud whisper, if we live as islands, we will die as islands. i think they mean at least metaphorically, but they were fierce and a wee bit harsh, those grandmothers. plain speakers, they hiss, stop yer whinin’ and get out and DO. grow. help. share. use your talents, use what you got. or helplessness in the face of this recession will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

the human interest stories i used to hear on the news don’t seem to be getting much play lately. we’re all downturn all the time, visuals of houses foreclosed upon our Dorothea Lange equivalencies, unemployment stats riveting us. these things matter. but if a magic wand fixed it all tomorrow, our world would still be a place of hurt, with cancer and hunger and loneliness.  helplines still need volunteers.  kids still need recess monitors.  seniors and their caregivers still need support in the face of dwindling health care and mental health resources. places like the Greater Good Network, where you click ye olde mouse once a day to accrue sponsored donations to causes like literacy, breast cancer research, rain forest preservation, animal shelters, and hunger are finding their clicks have dropped significantly. but all it takes is a computer and two minutes.  will it save the world? nope. will it save your mortgage? nope. but as long as you have a computer, can you do it every day? yep.  and you can buy fair-traded products from their sponsors for everybody’s birthday gifts, too, for less than you’d often spend at Walmart. the habit of considering the greater good, even in something as simple and surface as clicking a daily link, may help all of us begin to reconstruct our society as the place we’d like it to be.

hope won’t hurt. the lovely and talented shutter sisters are vying for the grand prize in Microsoft’s Name Your Dream Assignment – $50,000 plus the glass & technology to travel the world. they want to photograph stories of hope, focus our eyes on hope. you can vote for them here, if you like. check out the contest, at least. if you use Microsoft products at all, and even the most open source and Machead-inclined among us end up doing so almost inevitably at some point, you may as well direct a little of what the company is doing with its profits. beats what banks seem to have been doing with theirs.

there is an old adage of questionable origin that an ancient Chinese blessing and an ancient Chinese curse merge in the words, may you live in interesting times. we do, unquestionably. whether we make of them a blessing or a curse is, at least in small part, up to us.

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what are your hopes, for your self and your family, for your culture and your world?  what do you feel you can and can’t impact?

at precisely 9:37 am this morning, i woke up.

i’d been up for hours, obviously. people who sleep until 9:37 with two little children in the house usually have Child Protective services knocking on the door…or so i comfort myself. morning coffee is most scrumptious dark and bitter.

but at 9:37 i became conscious.

(gives head a shake, looks around warily. flexes muscles. discovers muscles – mental and physical – have atrophied. shrugs.  notices that shrugging hurts.)

i’ve been  housebound – thank you bedrest, colic, and interminably freezing winter – for about ten days short of a year, now.  it’s made me alternately shack-wacky, morose, and, uh, lazy.  but also eerily phlegmatic.  contented, even.  i march to the frazzled low-grade ommm of Radio Free Mama.

once you give over to the idea that you don’t control your days, you’re free. absolved.  you’re not going to cure cancer, you’re just going to get through today. smile at that baby. keep the house at a dull roar. clean yourself. change a few diapers, read what snatches of posts you can, empty the potty.  even do some contract work, but blearily, one foot in front of the other.  no long-term plans. no sustained focus. no pressure.

until you wake up. and you notice that you have been operating on the intellectual plane of a Stepford Wife.

oh, i think. i fret, even.  but for the best part of a year, other than ponying up to the bar of past birth traumas, i haven’t done any significant fretting about ME.  being just a vessel – for life, milk, and stray eyebrow hairs – is kinda refreshing.

then you remember that vessels eventually have to GO somewhere.

so there i am in mid-stride on a weekday morning and i suddenly notice that i am not bone-shakingly exhausted. i glance in the mirror, but barely know myself without my eyelids down around my knees. i cast about for something to focus the energy on, and discover that showering and laundry suddenly no longer feel like Olympic accomplishments.  this is disappointing.

what in the name of god do i do NOW?

send life purpose, please. must be compatible with parenting small children and preferably enjoy being squeezed into ten-minute intervals and be achievable from the comfort of my home couch.  nothing requiring extensive sustained focus need apply. copious monetary reward an asset. should challenge mind and preferably do something for thighs as well.

perhaps i will start an Ashram. online. i will be its guru.

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being home with baby for nearly a year after birth, with maternity benefits that help pay the bills, is a privilege. i’m grateful, o Canada.  i’m a parental leave proponent.  but mentally, the always-on-call nature of parenting and the cloistered compartmentalization of being at home makes it altogether the most isolating and exhausting thing i’ve ever done, bar none. i learned this when Oscar was small.  i forgot, until today, because i was too tired to remember.  when O was fourteen months old i started a new full-time contract outside the home, and for the first while that forty-hour week really felt like going to a goddam day spa.

(please not to stone us. we bruise like a peach. and i am totally boggled and awed by you wild Americans who end up back at work with six-week-olds.  both my kids had nasty, sleep- and sanity-destroying colic for at least four months and i’m quite sure i would have killed someone, possibly the children, had i had to get up for work every morning and actually dress myself and drive somewhere, let alone perform job duties. not kidding. you have either my utmost respect or my deepest sympathies: i’m never sure which is appropriate.)

i’m just sayin’ there comes a point at which i begin to fray from lack of adult interaction, from the absence of the casual verbal contact that feeds my extrovert self, from a desperate need to engage in the back-and-forth of social capital.

hence Twitter and Facebook updates and the occasional post when i manage to focus long enough. social media pundits critique these forms of communication as a bunch of people talking at each other, but i’m not sure they’ve ever gone to a playdate with a bunch of stay-at-home parents trying desperately to carry on a conversation over howls and wiggles and toy-retrieving – tweets are positively linear and interactive by comparison. and i get to make someone laugh without nibbling their toes.  not that i don’t love toe-nibbling, but now, a year into my odyssey of A Hundred Years of Semi-Solitude, i am beginning to wish i lived on a kibbutz. or a commune. or in a climate where taking the children outside on the first day of spring wouldn’t need to involve snowsuits.

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what was/is your experience of being at home with the little people?  and do you think i need saffron robes for my online ashram?  and perhaps cupcakes?

Pushing through the market square, so many mothers sighing
News had just come over, we had five years left to cry in
News guy wept and told us earth was really dying
He cried so much his face was wet, then I knew he was not lying

i think i have post-cultural depression.

you may not have heard of this bleak state of affliction –  i, uh, just coined it – but you might still be suffering more than you think.  symptoms may vary…but one minute you’re bumbling along, feeling like you belong to a people, a history, a place in time, and the next the whole ass-end has dropped off the cart and you notice that you’re living in a shallow, consumerist, spectacle-feeding pond-bottom where people are irrationally attached to a whole myriad of contradictory and self-sabotaging behaviors, including but not limited to bikini waxing and reckless use of Hummers.  the cacophony of mud-slinging from all sides starts to buzz in your ears and you begin to despair of common ground or cohesion or any kind of future whatsoever for a species so Babel-stricken and though you’re definitely not the millenarian type you begin to wonder, really wonder. you avert your eyes from the world, then, stick fingers in your ears and sing “lalala can’t HEAR you” but it all leaks in anyway.  and it chills you to your bones, because for a split second you can see through time and your time looks like nothing so much as Roman ruins in waiting, a diorama of the blithe deaf and blind.

people with post-cultural depression can be found hunched frozen over their Twitter keyboards, at a loss to condense boundless terror and angst into 140 characters or less.

I heard telephones, opera house, favourite melodies
I saw boys, toys electric irons and t.v.s
My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there

we watched a documentary on Antarctica and the polar seas, and the conclusion of most of the scientists onscreen is that we’re doomed.  the vanguard of biologists and ocean experts suspect the tipping point is probably past and we’re on our way to climate change so significant that major extinctions are likely.

and all i could think about was the two little kids sleeping upstairs.

watched another documentary on the 1937 ‘Rape of Nanking’,  and a three-minute scene of an elderly man describing firsthand the death of his mother and baby brother by bayonet made me break down sobbing.  man’s inhumanity to man, same old song, seventy-odd years ago but i know it unfolds everywhere in every war and i hear there are wolves at the door, destruction in the air.

A girl my age went off her head, hit some tiny children
If the black hadnt’ve pulled her off, I think she would have killed them
A soldier with a broken arm, fixed his stare to the wheels of a Cadillac
A cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest, and a queer threw up at the sight of that

because i have these children, see?  a cliché, damn straight, but all this shit threatening to hit the fan, all this horror of human history, this waste, this helplessness…it’s them i see.  them i am afraid for. i wonder what armageddon i’ve unleashed them into. i wonder if it’s not too late. i am the Tammy Faye Bakker of the agnostic-ish set, wandering around dripping mascara and clutching kleenexes and wailing, repent!!!  who will think of the children?!?

perhaps need to stop watching documentaries. and, uh, all other forms of media.

this despair is not simple fear for my kids. i have that too…the death of one has made me neither immune nor more vulnerable to that bogeyman…just…acquainted.  i can sit quietly with those fears, look them in the eye. but this is not lung failure or childhood cancer or a car accident or even predators…this is a fear beyond my kids’ individual lives and lifespans, a fear of the ultimate contract breach.  i am afraid that they will have to contend with a world without a future.

and i will have to say, yeh, i, um, recycled. guess that helped, huh?

Your face, your race, the way that you talk
I kiss you, you’re beautiful, I want you to walk

maybe if i believed in an afterlife or much of anything, i’d be better with the whole prospect. but i’m reverent mostly to the shades and shadows of beauty and joy that filter down to us humans in our simple, incarnate selves…the baby laughing with her whole body, her brother’s goodnight litany that extends to every soul he’s ever met, the glances, tired and solemn, that pass between Dave & i as we struggle through another half-sleepless breakfast still as present as we can be to this thing we’re doing as a family, the sound of that last high, harmonic note in the final verse of The Band’s The Weight.  i’m a sucker for this whole heritage of being human thing. and i’m scared we’re fucking it irrevocably up. right now, just in time for the two little people sleeping upstairs to reap the whirlwind.

the sorrow and shame of that possibility sits on me like a whole other skin.

perspective is hard to get out here on the misty slough of despond.  part of me hopes maybe i’ve just finally unhinged, and need to go gnash my teeth and rend my garments and maybe spend a few years sitting atop a forty-foot pole like the crazy doom-saying prophets of old…hell, their worlds seldom ended, at least not like they’d foretold.

part of me hopes that all this fear is part of a process of learning how to change, maybe even drastically enough to make a difference.  part of me hopes someone out there will say, me too. and this is what helps…

part of me hopes somebody invents a Prozac for this malady and fast, so i can stop looking at my offspring like poor doomed children. it’s bad for discipline.

We’ve got five years, stuck on my eyes
Five years, what a surprise
We’ve got five years, my brain hurts a lot
Five years, thats all we’ve got

– Five Years, David Bowie (first released the year before i was, um, born)

if there were no calendars i would have no sense of how to tell my story, any of it outside the press of now, of in this moment I Am.  a chorus line of dates has spun through my head since childhood and even my I Am is always counting, ordering, tallying the numbers according to who I Was, trying to leave a trail of breadcrumbs hardy enough that maybe someday i can find my way home.
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my baby is six months old.

six months ago this morning i was in labour, water broken nearly twelve hours, cerclage finally wrested from me by two grunting doctors while the blessed anaethetist stroked my hair (erm, hairnet) and tried to get her drip to keep up with the escalating carnage below.  in the end, the double loop of wire ended up in a waste disposal somewhere, too much scar tissue on it to be offered as a prize. and i didn’t care.

the prize, of course, was Posey, born seven or so hours later dark and lusty and shouting, on the very last dregs of that epidural cocktail so that i felt the asunderness of it all but maybe not it all and i was present to my body and hers as she slid from me and somewhere in those moments of gasping i glimpsed something powerful and primal and i understood it can be good like this and some part of me sighed and let go.

or almost. the letting go is the way i’d like the narrative to read. it is so close to truth.
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four years ago this morning in the same hospital i lay on an ultrasound table twenty weeks pregnant for the first time all nervous and excited and a little puzzled because this was my first Canadian ultrasound and in Korea where i’d been until a few weeks before they’d always let me see the screen but this technician was gruff and closed like a box, four walls sealed tight and grim.  i was anxious because the day before i’d had this sudden gush that had first embarrassed and then frightened me and i was eager for the reassurance and i smiled at the lady, that Nurse Ratchitt with her jellied wand but she did not so much as make eye contact. there was Stan Rogers playing on the radio – the Mary Ellen Carter, of all ironies – but when i singsonged, oh, i love this!, still shocked to be back in a country where music i recognized played on the radio, the technician said nothing.  when i mentioned the incident of the day before and asked if she could check my bladder – because i wanted desperately to believe it had been my bladder that had failed me in front of thirty high school students, the alternative being too terrifying, too oh Bonnie stop being dramatic – her monotone response was only, the requisition doesn’t say bladder. when after what felt like an eternity of her cold and silent machinations over my belly, screen turned away from me, i got up the courage to ask, is anybody awake in there? because it was my first pregnancy and i still had not really felt the baby move, she answered, could be.

could be. huh. as in, fuck off and shut up, it’s not your turn and i will give you information when i damn well have to and not before and don’t go getting uppity and asking QUESTIONS. when she did turn the screen to me it was with a perfunctory baby looks fine, see? lots of movement and fluid looks fine and i am not permitted to tell you anything else.  and i smiled with relief and tenderness at my wiggling, floating cargo but went home shaking, feeling almost violated and utterly dismissed and disappointed.

and then he died, my Runt, our Finn, eleven hours after he was born because it was fluid and his lungs had been damaged in their development by its absence around the twenty-week mark.

and it’s not exactly that i blamed the technician once i dug her up from the bowels of my memory in the aftermath. stunned and heartbroken, i gave her very little thought. logically, i understood that it was quite possible that despite her appalling bedside manner, she’d been thorough and no fluid loss had actually been evident. certainly i’d had a fluid ferning test done at my doctor’s office the same day as the ultrasound and they’d found no evidence of amniotic leakage. perhaps she’d just been having a bad day, or is a generally unpleasant person with a shit-ass personality. perhaps she did not actually dismiss my concerns the way she dismissed me, the human being. whatever.

i still, in a very off-hand, not terribly time-consuming way, hated her with the fury of a thousand suns.  from that day to this.  not even for the what-ifs so much as for the simple fact that as Finn’s mother, i resent the fact that she got to be one of the few people who ever had the privilege of seeing him, even in utero, and of being a part of his story.

she is the piece of damage and mistrust and resentment i didn’t let go of when Josephine was born.

whoever she is, that technician, i don’t want her anymore.  i’d like to leave her here, in hopes you will receive her, take her from me, help me let her go.  is that possible? can you just drop someone from the calendar of the mind? can i drop the little tic in my head that says March 10th…Posey’s half-birthday, oh, and that was the day of that awful ultrasound with that raging fascist…

right, letting go.
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friends of ours had a baby boy last week, their third baby, second son. we were pregnant together the first time, back in Korea…even had accidental back-to-back appointments at Our Lady of Mercy Virgin Mary Gynecologist and Obstetrician – which is, you have to admit, the funniest name EVER for an OB office – on the very day they found out Euan was a boy and we saw Finn bounce and wiggle his fingers at us for the very first time.  we moved back to Canada shortly thereafter; they went to Australia. we have not seen them since, not in person…but they were brave ones, staying close in touch even when the unspeakable came between us.

their little boy’s name is Finian. he will be called Finn. he will be my boy’s namesake.

and that this fills my heart only with joy and the happy kind of tears is a sign, i think, that there has been healing, and luck.

an old friend came into town last week on her way to a conference not far away. she was a friend in our expat days, someone we spent late nights and hangovers with, someone whose apartment floor we crashed on, whose ashtrays and rare collection of actual decent English books we made free with.

she arrived as my brain was waddling knee-deep, delayed but engaged, through the soupy fascination of online point and counterpoint about what it means to be a woman, whether motherhood is a dividing line more definitive than the others that mark us.

my friend moved back to Canada around when we did, to study obscure bits of Russian history and politics.  she’s currently doing a Ph.D, and is spending her mid-thirties immersed in student life in a communal house littered with Doc Martens. she has an indie music show on the campus radio station, and her fiancé, who arrived with her, is eight years younger than she. both have hair to their waists.

they arrived at our house right exactly in the midst of the chaotic ballet of suppertime. it was potty-training week for one child and teething and first-foods week for the other.  tofu and baby cereal and Thomas cups half-full of milk were strewn around the kitchen along with the ingredients for the curry i’d make later for the adults, and the baby was fussing in her high chair whilst Dave and i improvised “pooping is so fun” songs to the half-naked boy perched on his throne in the middle of the kitchen floor. the boy who hadn’t pooped in two days, because the power of withholding was a mad concoction he’d discovered two nights before when we got ourselves all het up about imminent potty success and a poop party and pretty much terrorized him into constipation. so there we were, all nonchalant-like.

oh hi! hugs. you brought champagne? wonderful. i’m shouting over the howling baby, who has developed an occasional but vehement stranger aversion. i unrolled a breast sloppily from the armour of my nursing bra, rocking rhythmically.

our friend had knit Oscar a hat, a fabulous fish creature which i mistook for a dinosaur. it itches, he complained, without guile. she looked crushed. he saw this and kept it on. he liked her on sight.

our guests perched on stools in the midst of the chaos, trying gamely to keep a so how’ve you been? conversation going betwixt the dance of chopping and feeding and creating a poop-positive environment and Oscar retrieving most of his toys from the playroom for them to admire.  she told of a trip to St. Petersburg – the Russian one, not Florida – and a summer in Spain and he showed off the amazing silver jewellry he creates and i interjected inanely with salient comments like wow! and where? and omygodDaveithinkhe’spooping!

like our noses couldn’t tell.

so the offending prize was duly carried away and celebrated in absentia with chocolate chip cookies and high fives and then it was bedtime and our entire family disappeared upstairs for the usual ablutions of tooth-brushing and bathing and medication-doling and stories and the very fussy Josephine settled only to let loose with a torrent of howlage that recalled me upstairs only minutes after i’d made it down, and kept me up there for what felt like the entire night but was actually only 20 minutes or so. i was afraid they’d drink all the champagne without me.

finally, we ate. and my friend asked, so what do you do here, for fun? is there much of a music scene? you doing any theatre? and i looked at her like she was speaking Swahili and chirped, uh, i have book club tomorrow night! like a birthday-party magician who’s been asked to conjure a pony but can only come up with a lame and slightly off-topic rabbit.  i didn’t admit that i couldn’t actually remember what we were reading for book club and went on that yes, there is a decent arts community here but we don’t go OUT really and i caught my friend’s head tilt and the chasm between us gaped and i realized that it was pointless for me to assert that i’m happy in spite of how it sounds because that would just be protesting too much. and i felt like i might as well just lie down and die in my apron, and stick a sign over me saying here lies Bonnie, the caricature of motherhood, fit only to be pitied and judged…unless you Get It.

but here’s the thing.

my friend has kids.

two of them. she had them young and she was the primary caregiver to a girl and a boy thirteen months apart for years while their dad drove a truck until when they hit school she hit a wall and went out and found herself and shares custody of these almost-teens while she studies and makes for herself a life that has to be very different from the one she lived for five years while they were small.

and still, much as she has a heart the size of Texas and charmed Oscar and cooed over Josephine, she doesn’t Get It anymore. it was as plain as day, written all over her face…she has simply forgotten that there could be a life so circumscribed by bodily functions and one’s own lack of sleep.  maybe it shocked her to discover that it wasn’t just her and her circumstances that made those early years so crazy, that two little kids blows most of us out of way out of the hipness pond for awhile, if not forever…but it shocked her, that much was clear.  i was not entirely the person she came to see, even if she was as gracious as could be about it.

we are both girls and both women, my friend and i, depending on whether the topic of conversation is silly or serious. we are also both mothers. but one of us is in a place where the energy for outside stimuli is sucked out of me on a regular basis by tears and poop and guiding and comforting and all those things that my children will only come to me for overtly for a few more years, really. she gives me hope that someday my conversations will NOT be about poop…and in the interim, i hope she – and you – will bear with me.

happy International Women’s Day, chicas.
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how have your friendships been impacted by children?  did your friends have kids earlier or later than you, or at all?  does how you perceive other women – or interact with them – shift according to their parenting status?

i woke up last night in the dark hours confused, heart pounding, uncertain of where i was. i’ve been sleeping with earplugs and not sleeping very well even at that but i had dropped deep and in the glub-glub hum of my own head had drifted far, far away, so much so that waking to my own tangled sheets and the baby’s cot beside me was startling.

in my dream i’d been deep sea diving, the flick of my flippers propelling me like a porpoise, all grace and power and weightless agility.  then, wham, i was beached in bed with cold feet and dry mouth, totally subject to gravity.

i grabbed onto my pillow, bewildered but relieved.  i am terrified of diving.

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i’ve spent most of the past month wishing myself elsewhere. the relentless gray and frozen slush of Maritime February has lost whatever charm it may once have had when i was young and slept more.  the call of beaches has been a siren song in my ear lately. it’s funny. i generally eschew sunbathing and stuffing myself into the sausage casing  of a swimsuit, but the feel of warm sand on my feet? oh, i lust. sheer, wet, shameless lust.

while driving the other day – because being sleep-deprived isn’t enough for me, i like to make driving just that leetle bit more thrilling by not paying attention, either – i tallied up the places Other Than Here where i have spent Februaries in the past.

*Vancouver – February ’95 …rainy.
*elsewhere in the Maritimes – Februaries ’89-’94, ’98-2000, 2006 …as frozen & slushy as here. and February 2006 was spent entirely in a hospital room in Halifax. with a stellar view of the slush.
*the Arctic – Februaries ’96 & ’97 …uh frozen. and -70 most of the time. with about four hours of daylight.
*Turkey – February 2001 …coldish, jean jacket coldish, and mostly rainy. still fun.
*Korea – Februaries 2002 & 2003 …coldish, though with cherry blossoms beginning to bud on the trees. they have real spring there, the kind that doesn’t just sneak up for a wet week in late May.
* Thailand – February 2004 …ah. there we go. sigh. THIS is the way to spend February. warm sand. the best food in the world. fresh coconut shakes. ancient monuments. gaudy temples. ladyboys. liquor served in little sand pails.

(admittedly, Dave & i got ourselves robbed on Valentine’s Day that February, but we kinda primped ourselves up and begged for it, so you can’t hold it against Thailand. we stayed up late at a little outdoor beach bar drinking way too many of those little sand pails filled with Singapore Slings and, somewhere about one am and three sheets to the wind we decided to wander home along the beach and go swimming.  without our clothes.  or wallets…which we left in the sand where we, uh, thought we could see them. in the dark. ’cause we’re superheroes like that.  when we stumbled back up out of the deliciously warm water and realized our clothes had been rifled through and our wallets were short on cash, we just thanked god & robbers for leaving our passports intact. drunk tax, as they say. should YOU ever visit a beach where the drinks come in delightful little pails, please do not be so stoopid.)

Thailand is where i wish i was, especially when it is cold and gray here and i long to disappear from the drudgery of diaper, rinse, repeat and are those mashed peas dried onto the side of the potty or no?  Thailand, you have become the fictional paramour of all my tourist fantasies. you don’t even need to send roses.

just let me stay above water.

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is it mixing metaphors to say that the first time i went diving, it was for a swan song?

we were far from home and falling apart and we knew we would not make New Years’ but still we booked for Christmas on a Thai island paradise, the honeymoon we’d never had. walking out of the airport into the nighttime swelter, curiously fragrant, i saw the box marked “Passengers, please leave guns here” and knew i was not in Kansas anymore. we sang carols over warm Southern Comfort Christmas Eve in a room with a fan and two twin beds, and in the morning the trail of ants to our sticky glasses was a thousand strong and there were flowers in my hair and i missed a cocky hairpin turn on my rented motorcycle and ground out in a gravel spray on the way to a Golden Buddha we never did find. and in a cheap hotel the last night in-country we sat over complimentary toast triangles and he was the one who asked for a divorce but i was the one who made him, too cowardly to own the words myself, and it was done.

in between, there was the diving. he’d always wanted to. i thought i had too, which is really to say i’d never thought much about it except that i liked Jacques Cousteau documentaries and no other opportunity had ever presented itself. and then we were sitting in a little training room and suddenly there was an unfamiliar queasy hum in my head and my mind flailed for the exit but i’d already paid and so  i donned my tank and my mask and we jumped in.

underwater, even a few feet underwater, is a world unto itself.

sometimes the human psyche can only handle so many brave new worlds.  sometimes, when a person who cannot swim and who’s just left all ties behind and moved halfway around the planet finds herself underwater with her mask leaking chlorine into her eyes and her marriage to the one person within five thousand miles who knows her name crumbling, she begins to feel a little untethered.

i lost my shit, panicked.  tried to kick up to freedom, to the known, to the sense of safety i suddenly noticed i’d utterly abandoned.

the instructor, a newbie, held me down.  in seven feet of water.  apparently they try to break trainees of panic surfacing – the bends can kill, you know.

she broke me, indeed. panic swelled to desperation, then deflated. i gave in, to all of it. i sank to that pool floor and sobbed, sobbed out all the loss and confusion and fear in the middle of a fucking public diving lesson, in the strange solitary underwater hum, while the newbie instructor tried to pry me off the floor of the pool and the man who would become my ex floated quietly in front of me, steadying me with his eyes.

and then i surfaced and went back to our hut alone, to pack.

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robbed. humbled. did i mention sunburnt? the Thai tourism board will be hiring me any day.

i made four trips to Thailand between December 2000 and February 2004….one of the very few countries i’ve ever visited repeatedly without working in.  that first visit stripped me naked, made me feel – perversely – utterly at home there, at home in my foreign skin and wanderings in a way i was nowhere else during those years abroad.  i left something of myself – tears, but also pride, and a blind clinging to the known – behind at the bottom of the pool that afternoon.  and ever after, when i am weary and worn and in need of a good skin-shedding, it seems to be where i long to go to warm my bones and rest myself and surface, changed and ready to go on.

though i have never again felt the compulsion to go along on someone else’s adventure sport lesson, thank you very much.

do you have a corner of the earth that calls you, that you long to see or return to? do you have things you’re scared to do?

is it still fucking winter where you are, too?

Originally uploaded by o&poecormier

her first solids, if a thin rice-oatmeal gruel can really be considered solids.

and there i am, pimping the mush, coaxing her little bird mouth to open, beaming with pride when she reaches out for more. smiling, watching, as i push her off the ledge.

into whatever her life’s relationship with food will be.

until today, it’s been subsumed in her relationship with me. she lights up when she sees me, this girl, but her love is that of the gourmand for a good meal. i am her walking cheeseburger, her magically reappearing smorgasbord. but lately, she’s been watching suspiciously as the rest of us bite and munch our way through our days, realization clearly dawning that she’s been missing something. yesterday she took a swipe at my ginger cookie as she lolled in my arms, and nearly wrested it clear out of my hand.

time, obviously, to break out the gruel.

her reaction telegraphed across her face like a storm squawl that ended at the pot of gold, all what in the sam hill is THAT and oh oh oh lord have mercy where can i get more?!? only gruel and thin gruel at that but she comes from a long line of canny Scots on my side and the gruel we call porridge is haute cuisine for our kind so she had no complaints. at least until an hour later when she vomited all over the kitchen and then spent three hours fussing and crying out in her sleep.

uh, i’m going to blame the teething for that one. i’m hoping food is kinder to her than that.

what i’m hoping is that she and food have a long and happy life together. i’m hoping that the dairy sensitivities fade as she grows, so that she can someday enjoy the melting sensation of a soft brie – or Velveeta – or her tongue. i’m hoping no real allergies develop, the scary kind, the anaphylactic kind that will leave us scrambling to shield her from foods as from traffic or dread disease.

i hope she will find pleasure in food, in trying things…at least as an adult. i hope she will be more like her father, the culinary adventurer, and not like me. for me it’s mind over matter, food. i’ve never even tried a clam because the idea of eating its WHOLE BODY freaks me out. i’ve passed up caribou eyeballs, silkworm larvae, wok-fried cockroaches. i’m not sorry. but i am kind of sorry that i’m the sort of person more likely to starve than adapt. i hope she can come to see food as less fraught with strictures of culture and comfort than i do.

and i hope the pleasures she finds in eating are not false promises, substitutes for love that is never enough, empty fill for aches she cannot face.  i hope that i can give her what she needs to grow strong and self-confident, so that the inverse of our current nursing relationship does not come to pass and find her seeking ME in a cheeseburger, or ten.

i hope she can love herself with food, respect her body in the ways she feeds it. i hope she never looks in the mirror with loathing, or spends seasons with her head down a toilet or her mouth barred shut in a desperate feint to control the mess of living.

i hope there is enough food. i hope i can feed her well and healthily, without too much fear for the grocery pennies or for empty silos, drought, famine.  she is born to plenty, this one, all double chin and thigh rolls, no trace of preemie limbs left. yet so many starve in other places while food rots here. and her generation may know more of that than i can imagine, if we keep driving the planet beyond capacity, using resources in ways that maximize profits and not human dignity, decency. every tuna can in the local grocery store here is labelled product of Thailand. there is no sustainable tuna fishery anywhere near Thailand, according to any sources i can find. will such a shortsighted system survive her lifetime? we are precariously imbalanced. and selfishly, because she is my child, i hope the collapse is not so drastic that she must scrabble in the dirt for sustenance as so many must already.

what i wish for her is food to feed her…food as blessing, without the curse of too much or too little. with tears in my eyes, because i find it hard to believe that such a thing could be possible.

all this i offer up, smiling at her as fat hands reach for the bowl. today, daughter. today, you started.

Originally uploaded by o&poecormier

a rough night, little one. you are on the threshold of so many things these days that sleeping – so recently finally mastered, o thing of beauty – has suddenly left us, abandoned ship. i am bereft, blurry, unable to steer a straight course with the gaping hole of its absence sitting square across my forehead.

the shreds of my mind split into two camps.

i am agog that the human race survives in spite of these hallucinatory days that seem so common as to be unremarkable.

and i am suspicious, wondering what i’m doing wrong, what false idols of civilisation i’ve blindly bought into to thus rob me and mine of the natural rhythm of things? babies in tents and camps and caves must have slept, for millenia they must have snored beside their parents and sisters and brothers and aunties and the family goats or whatnot.

i tested this theory, minus the goats.

but about four months old, you, my cosleeping nursling, began vying for the title of Most Likely to Be Voted Out of the Igloo, or Off the Island. wide awake at 3 am every night. for hours. most unhappy. so we began training you to sleep in your little cot, teaching us both to learn to rest beside each other without spending half the night awake. i thought you were the one fighting rest, Josephine. but when you finally did sleep through, i popped awake every time you sighed or cooed.

sleep is a habit, that much is clear.

i got earplugs and we spent a week in heavenly habitual peace. i’d been thinking we’d soon move you into your brother’s room. my hubris called fever down on our heads.

you scared me, little one. so hot, burning hot, suddenly, in the middle of the night. i almost left you to fuss, not realizing. then i bundled you up in my arms, recanting on all the fine sleep training habits inculcated with such strain, and your skin shocked me. almost 104 on the ear thermometer that runs cold. i was awake then, bolt upright, hands juggling medicine bottles and cool cloths and Web MD. 29 minutes for the drugs to play paper rock scissors with the fever and the drugs won and i exhaled but now it has been four days and i’m not sure we’ve slept since and there are teeth on the horizon of your gumline and baby girl, it feels a bit much, really.

teeth already. so fast.

and not fast enough, if their coming lets the sleep come back so i can trade this river of disjointed thoughts for rest.

yesterday was supposed to be vasectomy day.

a crazy morning running around making sure kids were fed and watered and changed and temperatures taken and fevers broken and medicines swallowed and diapers packed and i made french toast but that was as much time as we seemed to have for special things, for taking stock. and i wanted to drive him to the hospital even though i knew it made no sense to drag the baby out at nap time, but he would have come with me, i knew, and so i felt callous just waving goodbye at the door.

we stood there for a second, awkwardly, neither knowing what to say.  such a strange thing, this act, this leavetaking.  my mind offered up a smorgasboard of Wildly Unhelpful Possibilities, vasectomy version…grab him heartily by the crotch! launch into Monty Python’s Every Sperm is Sacred! pat him on the head! cry! wax sentimental about your entire tragicomic reproductive history as a couple! ask to kiss the sperm goodbye!

the inside of my head is a regular SNL skit.

i settled for smiling and muttering, thanks for doing this. and he was gone.

two hours later the door opened. i looked up, startled – he was supposed to be on an operating table, wowing the nurses.  but his virility remained unsullied – the Big V had been postponed. until July. he hadn’t changed his mind.  i asked, though his face – all baleful i wasted a whole morning on this – told me the answer before the words left my lips. he’s been the one driving this train from the beginning. he just wanted it over with.

July. o Canadian health care system, no pun intended but we were not the couple you wanted to fuck with on this one. we’re careful and responsible, yes, and too tired to be up to much fun anyway. but seriously? July? when he went on the list last September? when we’ll have to continue being careful for a good three months or so afterward?

i am in my prime, people. and the baby is starting to sleep through the night occasionally. ahem.

this is not a case of a simple trade of crappy wait times for universal health care…good friends of ours, same town, same OB, went on the vasectomy list a month AFTER Dave and the gentleman in that partnership was cleanly snipped seven weeks later. mmmhmmm. but us? oh, ten and a half months. genius.

our babies are COSTLY, o Canadian taxpayers.  i bounce back and forth between two provincial systems getting them here and the dollars spent on ultrasounds alone would blow your mind. then the little dears come early. trust me, you could buy a Sea King with what it costs you to help us reproduce, and even then it’s a gamble. you don’t want us making more.

perhaps a letter-writing campaign. the internets get Dave a prompt vasectomy, live on the six o-clock news. heartwarming story of family spared interminable nasty condom use and fretting.

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he went back to work at noon.  cue laughter.

no direct way to address it publicly without titters and sardonic smiles…the Big V vasectomy cuts to the heart of too many social stereotypes and gender grievances to be simply a personal thing.  too many men refuse, or refuse to even contemplate. the male reproductive system remains too sacrosanct, too tied to cultural notions of masculinity, of manhood. too much responsibility for contraception falls to women, too much damage – physical and emotional – occurs in pregnancy and birthing and all the messiness in between, and so a brutal undercurrent of cultural contempt is tapped here, brought to the surface.  and we joke, all of us, speak of the vasectomy out of the corner of our mouths, unable to address its contradictions head-on.

it is both noble sacrifice and dismissable inconvenience. it is men’s turn, and the unmanning of the mythical macho man we still mourn even in our recriminations.  we have not found him a replacement.

all that and it is still surgery. we laugh, we can’t seem to help but laugh, even if we mean it kindly, but it is still surgery. are there any other surgeries we laugh at, in this culture? do we ever otherwise feel so free to tease a person about to go under the knife?  i wonder.  is a man allowed to be nervous about a vasectomy, not because it’s his manly bits but just because it’s surgery?

the needle will still go into his arm.  he will still have to stare at the OR ceiling and those enormous lights and try to disassociate himself and hope that all is going okay and the doctor’s clean and sober and on top of his or her game and all those little mutters from down at crotch level don’t mean there’s a problem. it will still hurt, after. no huge deal…sure. not like an emergency c-section, no. but not nothing.

i figure it’s a sign of how far we have yet to come both in gender equity and our cultural relationship to sexuality that the mass response to a man’s announcement of a vasectomy is snickers and bravado.

mind you, Dave had to phone me from the door of the hospital, his mind suddenly blank, to ask me what the operation was really called. he’d been calling it ‘neutered’ for weeks.

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and now, he is not neutered.  and i look at him with one eyebrow raised, this man who seems suddenly dangerous.

even in the moment Dave walked out the door and drove away, even as i thanked him for sparing me this one last interventionist chapter in our reproductive history, i wasn’t sure i felt done.  practically, sure, i know i’m done.  my OB and my mother and Dave himself all tell me so.  my body is no safe sanctuary and we have a little house and two healthy kids and it’s a privilege to even be able to just conceive by plain ol’ sex – i have too many friends who are either infertile or in same-sex partnerships to take for granted the luxury of needing the vasectomy –  but all those fine, good, sensible thoughts didn’t stop the little voice in the back of my head that made petulant noises about the small Hugh or Blythe who are never to be,  whom my heart still calls to.  i was Janus, casting ahead and backwards all at the same time, unable to believe i could be done with babies for good.

until Dave walked back in and said, nope, July. and my first, gut response was sweet lips of God no! what if i get PREGNANT?! my brain had dashed out for the pill and a diaphragm to  boot and was back tying on the chastity belt before he’d even finished his sentence.

so i guess i’m done. good to know. now to get that July thing sped up.

baby and toddler

Originally uploaded by o&poecormier

i had no idea how complicated it would be, these two, these little lives unfolding in my house yet solitudes unto themselves.

she turns to him, all baby squeak and anticipation, oozing delight; he turns away, all toddler moody i will go this far and then no further and then repentant. he turns back, suddenly empathic, his tallest self, most kind, solicitious, and brings her blocks and teethers only slightly pre-chewed and he sing songs baby baby baby this is a little song for you do you like it baby and sometimes she lavishes him with the praise of her laughter like bells but other times there are her toes to explore and he could be the wind, invisible.

i watch. some animal instinct tells me this is between them.

he sprays her with his froggie in the tub and laughs his belly laugh and she mimics with her little heh heh heh and then she beams at him like he hung the moon and i catch my breath, full of wonder.