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the year i was in seventh grade my mom and i moved across town. we’d lived on the second floor of an old century house, all slant ceilings and mysterious cupboards, most of my childhood. the elderly couple who owned the place and lived below were like grandparents to me…but the street was an oasis of quiet in an otherwise seedy neighbourhood and nowhere near where i went to school, or where my friends lived. and the old couple were growing older and my mother decided it was time we got movin’ on up to a deee-luxe apartment within walking distance of, well, everywhere we went.

only problem? our new digs were not in the sky. they were in a basement.

aesthetically, i was a naive, optimistic little soul who embraced the varnished plywood and ill-fitting doors of the new place enthusiastically enough. i was thrilled by the built-in ledge that ran around my bedroom at ground level, and decorated it with artfully placed cassette cases – Luba here, Synchronicity and Rock Hits ’83 there. i liked being able to walk to school, rather than shunted across town by a harried mother trying to get to work on time. i liked being able to walk home after school and sneak in some General Hospital before said mother got home even more.

giant bumblebees had nested in the unused cable hole and apparently there was a young guy who lived upstairs and used to stumble in drunk on weekends. those things bothered my mother, but not me. what made me come to hate the place was the silverfish.

i still remember the first one. i found it in the tub a couple of months after we moved in. the teardrop shape of it, tiny, suddenly moving as if with jet speed, slithering down the drain. i leaned in that first time, curious…i’d never seen one before in my life.

within weeks we had an infestation that still makes me shudder. our apartment was next to the laundry room, and the combo of standing water and darkness seemed to have produced a bumper crop of the little creatures, hundreds of them wandering blindly into our bathroom. all the time. my mother tried javex, drano, all measures of elbow grease and prayer. not a thing worked. they thrived, and the bathroom crawled with them. i don’t remember when i crossed the line from curiosity and mild distaste to phobia…but by the time we bailed and moved in with my grandmother the following summer i was a full-blown bug hater, scarred for life. the rational, adult part of me knows no bugs in the Canadian climate can actually hurt me much, but it crawls? i creep out. and i have a special cotton-mouthed place in my heart for silverfish.
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why this little walk down the sunny cobbles of memory lane, you ask? well, i had a little reunion with one of my old friends the silverfish today. only the little fucker wasn’t on my bathroom floor. it was in my DRINK. floating. in my soy chai latte, doing backstroke.

in my half-finished soy chai latte.

when i quietly presented the barista with said insect on my plastic spoon she gagged – as i, incidentally, continue to do, um, nine HOURS later because i am a gentle soul with a suggestible mind and i am convinced the slight tickle in my throat is because i swallowed the little fucker’s kin and ewwwww – and then she said sorry, that’s disgusting, hey Terry come here see what ended up in this latte you poured and gave me my five bucks back.

then she stopped short and said, errrrr, wait…did you just want another one?

no. no thank you.

even the idea of drinking water makes me think of silverfish escaping taps and drains.

i think they could’ve at least thrown me a freebie card, for damage control. and for making me re-live grade seven, thank you very much. has anybody ever sued a coffee conglomerate for beverage therapy costs?

and then sometimes it just all builds up and the urge to run, to outdistance, unfetter, leaves me shaking.

i live in the nexus of family and old friends, in the town where i grew up, the town where, sometimes, i feel smallest. the sidewalks testify to memories three decades old and to go out in public is to shoulder the burden of all the selves i once was, those big pink 1984 coke-bottle lenses and the gym suit with the bow around the waist and those times i didn’t know what to say so i got too loud and tittered at That Boy like a shrill macaw, all these Bonnies dragging around behind me like tin cans off a wedding jalopy. clang, they jar into my present, blurry shadows when i turn to look at them yet heavy still, time having layered them with the cement of self-consciousness and discomfort in my own skin. my tin can necklace, encrusted with pearls of shit.

elsewhere this accoutrement dissolves, worn away by years of learning to laugh at myself, to walk tall, but here the past sometimes is too much with me. here there is no distance from which to shed myself, those skins long outgrown and constricting.

i’ve been watching CBC online while nursing, watching Erica Strange wander through her own past to learn lessons missed along the way. i’m compelled by the show on one level. Erica’s ‘failed potential’ schtick resonates, though not quite so much as seeing my own wardrobe on tv for the first time ever…so what if its in all the 90s flashbacks? ahem. but on another level the premise frustrates, as stories of time travel so often do…if the Erica who goes back to the prom makes different choices than she did the first time ’round, wouldn’t the cumulative effects of the experience carry over into the intervening years, thus changing the person she ends up being at 32? or at least making different lessons necessary?

what keeps me glued to the screen is the hypnotic sense of homesickness that creeps over me every time Erica flashes back to an era i hadn’t ’til now fully realized was so long gone.

i would like, for an afternoon, to shed the years between now and 1992 just to go back and walk through that life, to revisit its minutiae. sure, it would be good to take a long, kind look in the mirror and see the beauty in that twenty-year-old face and twenty-year-old body and convince my twenty-year old self of both those things once and for all. and if i could walk once more into the high, cool foyer of my grandmother’s house and find her waiting, see her eyes glint blue for smiling at me…my joy would be without bounds. but that is too much to ask. i would settle for far less.

for one afternoon, i’d like to walk down the road that runs by my street and see it as it was seventeen years ago. not because i expect it was so terribly different, or better, or worse…rather because i’d like the luxury, now, of simply being present to it. i’d note whether the cars were bigger than i remember, the hair bigger, the peg-leg jeans as funny as i remember. i’d walk drugstore aisles and say, hallo there hair gel and salutations, photography film and yo, Snapple, did you change your packaging somewhere along the way? i would drink in all these once-familiar mundanities, walk through the old grocery store like a museum-goer, all enamoured by what was once just life.

i would say, this is 1992, and i would know that those were magical words.

the day-to-day is impossible to recall in detail once the backdrop changes. the dramas and hurts that get lived out over that background sometimes linger far too long. i wish i could shed the past and cradle it to me all at once, visit in doses like a favourite seaside rather than find myself drowning and sputtering in tides too strong only to be cast up on the shores of the unfamiliar future, unready to let go wholesale of worlds that once were mine.

one of those weeks without enough coffee in the world.

3 am, 4 am, 5 am, 6 am, and 7 am all witnessed on the clock by my bleary eyes. sleep training feels like one big irony from here, a joke concocted by sadists. training me to do without sleep, is apparently what the fine print musta read. i can’t vouch for it. i can barely see.

i was quite happy just bringing her into the bed and nursing through the wee hours, dozing and shifting, the two of us a cosleeping tangle that i never intended but found rather civilized. ’til now. apparently the regularity of our round-the-clock feedings have encouraged Ms. Posey in the belief that one must also wake up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, in regular intervals around the clock. jesus have mercy. there was a point in my life where 3am was a perfectly reasonable time of day for oh, i dunno, ordering up a round of shooters, but now that i am denied such revelries i think she should be too. so i’m trying to break her of the expectation of a full breakfast at 3, replete with cheery mommy waitress. instead, we lie in the dark, swaddled and shhhhing, repeatedly inserting the reviled – by Josephine – soother while she scratches at it and me with her baby wolverine talons. quality time, that. and she’s got stamina, my kid.

last night she actually stayed in her little sidecar bed, granting the soother a haughty acceptance. i have removed all the stimuli i can think of from the experience, all the motivation…we did not feed, we did not talk, we did not rock. there were only gentle shhhhes and the pat of my drowsy, drooping hand on fat cheeks. and still she was wide awake from 3am until 5:30.

Dave got kicked out of bed and down to the couch when it became clear that the swaddle and the Fisher Price aquarium lullabies weren’t doing anything to soothe the wee, savage Iggy Pop all a-frolic in her cot. i figured one of us might as well sleep. he in turn then got up with Oscar so that when slumber finally fell heavy on our daughter at dawn, i didn’t have to watch 8 am come round on the digital display. at 8:12, she woke for good…but at 8 am i was dreaming that i’d forgotten to get on the plane for my vacation.

vacation, ha. but small mercies, small kindnesses. love in this house.

last night, bathtime for munchkins. Posey had been retrieved wriggling from the water and primped and packed plumply into her sleeper and sleepsack and we sat nursing in the rocker whilst Oscar finished his rousing rendition of do mi mi, mi so so for his bath toys and then i heard Dave lift him out of the water and O made the very same request as he’s been making after bath since he learned to finally articulate the words months ago.

tell me a storwy about Diesel, Daddy.

Oscar has a Thomas the Tank Engine fetish. to please our young enthusiast, his father and i have for what feels like a lifetime been fabricating – and massacring – stories about Thomas. the liberties we’ve taken would make Sir Topham Hatt cringe, delightfully.

but we’re tapped out. done. saturated. we’ve drawn the line. no more post-bath Thomas improvisations. please.

which doesn’t mean Oscar’s done asking. dulcet tones for the request, and his father’s firm “no” in return. a pause. then the parry, tell me a story about YOU, then, Dada. silence. the fuzzy silence that sweeps over even the most talkative of us when put on the spot and unsure if we know any stories about ourselves that are remotely interesting yet appropriate for two-year-olds. do two-year-olds like beer stories as much as trains?

ever helpful, i piped up, tell him a story about ME. i’m lots of fun!

a laugh wafted through the door. and i heard…

once there was a girl named Bonnie. she was a nice girl. one day she found herself on a very beautiful beach where she met a handsome prince.

and i glanced down at my wool socks and thought, oooh, i could love this story even though in non-fiction i am not so much the beach heroine type.

he continued, the prince was VERY handsome. very very handsome. amazingly handsome.

i began to suspect that i was not about to encounter George Clooney in this fairytale. scrreeeeeech went the sunny Thai beach in my mind. another set snapped down in the backdrop, another beach, a humbler one on New Brunswick’s north shore, and a bonfire, and guitars, and a twenty-one year old boy with sharp blue eyes and shocking frankness and a pestilent sense of humour…a boy who would lend me his old, torn Levi’s – to keep – that first night i met him. a boy who would seem to me to be the little brother i never really had for almost five years, until the kinship swelled into something urgent and less than brotherly.

and Bonnie thought she was SOOOOO lucky to have met the handsome prince…

that they both ran off and married other people! i inserted from my perch in the rocking chair.

Bonnie was very wrong-minded, intoned the storyteller cum toddler tooth-brusher in the other room. but eventually the handsome prince found her in a land far, far away, called Korea, he continued, and she looked at him and realized just how truly marvellous he was.

she had been drinking a LOT of gin, i pointed out.

he forgave her obvious flaws and weaknesses came the voice from the bathroom, trying hard now not to laugh, and then they lived happily ever after and had beautiful babies named Oscar – yes, Oscar! – and Josephine!

Me, Daddy?

yes, you, Oscar.

Oscar’s little face, pink-cheeked from his bath, peeked around the corner into the bedroom, his curls a halo. he looked at me intently, exultantly.

Mama, you have a PRINCE! he shouted, laughing as if this were the most hilarious thing in the world. then he stopped dead and looked me straight in the eye. where is he?

love in this house, and laughter.

there appears to have been a rip in the space-time continuum because both my children are currently sleeping. in the daytime. in their beds.

lest you think i exaggerate the rarity of this blessed event let me explain that the younger one is just learning to nap like a civilized infant whilst the elder one is – cue wails from the maternal peanut gallery – in the processing of outgrowing his tenure as a civilized infant and instead barreling whole hog towards being either a Big Child or a pirate, depending on the day, and neither Big Children nor pirates nap particularly well, unfortunately. i suspect it’s all the swaggering and roaring, in either case, but at the moment both my offspring are dozing and i am lying here on my side on the couch sans the company of short people and thinking that the gray light flooding in the window makes it feel rather like the beginnings of bedrest last year and wondering if i’m any different now than i was then.

i wonder this because i have this pesky attachment to the idea of myself as a dynamic, improving being. it’s the old modernist myth of progress boiled down to the individual level, where i get all twitterpated each time i become conscious of some personal failing as personal rather than the only reasonable and normal response to a given situation – oh, huh, not everybody goes into paroxysms of fury at drivers who fail to signal? – because, my stars! the emancipation! the agency! i can shed this flawed skin and emerge from my chrysalis new and delightful and better! now with more cowbell!

sometimes the change is real. i can learn. i now reserve all my turn-signal righteousness for my poor, beleaguered mother, who – as she is also capable of learning, if not of turning on her blinker before she engages the car in a turn – now simply refuses to drive me anywhere. win win, jolly good, pip pip.

but mostly i suspect that the idea that we are ever-improving beings is shite. it’s a dangerous siren song, and one so ubiquitous that as a culture and a species we repeatedly steer blindly towards the paths of our own demise. we choose short-term gains in spite of long-term damage and in almost all areas carry on as if nothing rotten is ever really going to happen to us. we’re engaged in progress! we’ll be fine! i know all the seventy-three reasons why high fructose corn syrup is bad for my glucose-intolerant self and my goal of looking less than four months pregnant again someday and my commitment to avoiding the agro-industrial complex where possible, but i saunter by that pack of Nibs in the store and damn! they are just so shiny and purty i swear they hop into my cart of their own accord. every time i go grocery shopping, it’s like groundhog day in the candy aisle.

some self-sabotaging habits are easier to make fun of than others.

from the time i was four, i wanted a little girl of my own. i had Finn and lost him and broken/brokenhearted realized i wouldn’t have traded him for a thousand girls. then Oscar, and i adjusted my expectations and the joys of a baby boy became the rhythm of my days and i understood, for the first time, that my preference had been a prejudice passed down and picked up, and i was shamed. then a miscarriage, and i began to bargain with precisely the sort of god i don’t believe in for just one more baby and damn the vagina i’d be more than blessed with another sweet boy and i meant it, i really did. except that underneath there was still a wistful part of me that ached – and seethed with a dirty, private jealousy – each time someone i knew who’d wanted a girl just…had one…seemingly magically, first try, no complications, as if plucked from the sky. i figured that this embarrassing allergy to other people’s good news was me being ungracious about not getting what i’d set my mind on all those years ago. and i’d wallow a bit and then kick myself and give thanks for my wee pirate-in-training and within a day or two the ugly green head of my jealousy and self-pity would bury itself again and i could get back to going about my life.

then i found out Josephine would be, indeed, Josephine. and i was amazed, because wanting her had come to seem like wanting the sky. and i said, self, take note. sometimes it comes easy. remember. you did not need to adjust your expectations. so get over yourself. a persecution complex ain’t pretty.

last spring i lay on this couch and wondered if maybe i’d be a better human once my heart’s desire of this healthy baby girl got safely here and the quavering over whether it would ever happen for me ended, once and for all.

i can report that the answer is…um, alas, nope.

one of my most beloved old friends is having her first baby. she’s 38. she’s always wanted a girl, and said on the phone last week that she was sure it was a girl, that she hadn’t really given any thought to it being anything else. turns out she was justified.

this baby will be loved and delighted in, by me almost as much as by her parents. she & Josephine will be close in age, and i know that my friend will be a beautiful mama, a good mother. but my first, visceral reaction? the same old jealousy, green and slimy and bilious. i cringed at the pique and said nah. really? but before i could even get the rejection formed it had delivered its soliloquy of woundedness and petty pity. why so easy for her? she didn’t even know she was pregnant until she was almost three months…she did all the things i never did, and bang, she gets her heart’s desire, nonetheless perfect and healthy.

oh, ugly. why not her, after all? i don’t know better people than her. and we all have our lucky breaks and our broken places and this friend of mine deserves all the joy in the world and i’d give it to her if i could so what in hell is this curmudgeonliness? i lack for nothing. there is no zero sum economy. life is too short to compare. adjusting one’s expectations can be good for growth. and yet there it is, the jealousy, naked and quivering. it helps nothing; i do not want it. but like groundhog day, it pops up. and i need to unlearn it, somehow.

she will not know, my friend, not from the face of genuine celebration i turn to her. it is not her burden. i don’t want it to be mine. but change is not so simple as skipping the Nibs aisle.

oh frail human. the same mistakes over and over, the same songs and refrains of willful blindness and short-term self-interest and stupid jealousy that sometimes i get so full to boiling i just want to spit.

today is the day after groundhog day, and i wanted to wake up different.
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i hesitate to publish this. jealousy is like the final frontier of friendship taboos…especially the messy stuff, the real stuff that runs way deeper than the cultural cache of yo bitch! your kids are sleeping?!? hate hate hate that counts as sisterhood these days. and i know – both out here and among real-life friends who struggle with IF or have lost babies or unlike me did not get one of the gender they’d set their heart on – that i risk revealing myself as an ungrateful moron when a sweet pirate and a baby girl sleep upstairs.

i sat with friends a few weeks ago, all of us mamas a few times over, and a pregnant one (not to be confused with pregnant friend above) recounted the drama of telling her infertile SIL about her news, after SIL had responded to another family pregnancy announcement by crying all day. the pregnant one found this frustrating, hurtful. i found it heartbreaking.

both are true, i think, depending on where you’re standing. i believe we most of us have our heartbreaks, and also that we’re responsible to those we love to try to fix our shit, try to be as good as we can be. i despair at how often it feels like we’re just groundhogs running on hamster wheels, stumbling over the same old thought patterns and habits and emotional minefields, blind and unable to flip the calendar over to a fresh page.

is it just me? do you have responses – emotional and otherwise – that you’d like to leave behind? how do you do it?

i went to bed last night with a conversation i couldn’t speak aloud running through my head.

my OB – or rather, my former OB, as Dave, my mother, and various medical professionals have begged me to swear that i am never, ever putting anyone through another of my “special” pregnancies – has become something of a friend. which is great and weird at the same time, likely on both sides. she was here last night with my book club, and when the conversation turned to twitter i flipped open the laptop and showed off the shiny silly wonder of social software and explained how i feel like i “know” most of the people i follow because we’ve been reading each other for years through my blog. oh yeh, i have a blog, sez me. nearly three years. and then my eyes caught on her face and i wondered if she were wondering like i’d be wondering about trust and the strange double-edge sword of professional intimacy and being a character in others’ stories, and whether there was anything in here that in a town this small she’d rather not have broadcast and the words came chirping up in my throat oh! i said nice things about you! but i swallowed them because they seemed so trite and obsequious and sometimes the elephant in the room is perhaps better left alone with the cake crumbs than spoken of, or to.

but what i wanted to say, what i went to bed still trying to give voice to in my head an hour later, was
i only started this two weeks before Oscar was born. after the bedrest was over, and almost exactly a year after that day in Room 2 when you said “i’m sorry, it IS amniotic fluid after all” and you called for the airlift and i still somehow thought everything would be okay but it wasn’t.

i started it because i’d been a mother since that day but not in a way i could speak of and i was facing down another birth and apparent, hopeful normalcy and “real” motherhood and it frightened me because i had no idea how to reconcile those selves and all the subjectivities relating to motherhood that i’d ever seen reflected in culture didn’t resonate with where i was and i figured if i could write, maybe i could reconcile the mess in my own head.

but we don’t talk that way at book club.

i don’t talk that way out loud much at all. unless i’m teaching, and even then, i stumble. verbal me and written me have different fluencies, different contexts. written me is comfortable with the language of the subject, the myriad of selves we humans portray and embody and understand ourselves to be. written me could negotiate motherhood with all its fierce love and exhaustion and bewilderment and grief and mundanity in a way that verbal me still trips over, feeling exposed and guilty if i articulate the ambivalence of parenting aloud.

the kids? oh, they’re good. baby has colic. ummm…but she’s a joy. cue smile.
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i woke up this morning to the news that John Updike died yesterday, and i thought, yes. that’s it.

i feel like i’ve been watching the blogosphere – or at least this corner of it – run out of steam lately. i suspect we’ve collectively hit a place where our revelations feel like deja vu…like i could write this but so-and-so wrote in the same vein last week and hell, why bother? so many of us don’t, self-silencing because the sheer volume of what we’ve put out here has made us aware both that we’re not alone in our experiences of parenting but also that we’re, well, maybe not particularly special in our experiences of parenting. saturation.

but i also see an overall sea change in the ecosystem we release our posts to, when we do write them.

what blew me away when i belatedly discovered that i wasn’t blogging in a vacuum out here was the richness of the subjectivities mothers were exploring in their writing. like the seething mid-century suburbs of Updike’s Rabbit series, the public veneer of motherhood hid complex inner lives and a multitude of aspirations and secrets and feelings and validations. i didn’t see this version of mothering on tv, or in most of the ads and products aimed at my burgeoning belly…at best i found commodified hipster defiance without other content, at worst the same vapid recycling of mother-as-tender-selfless-fulfillment image that’d been hanging around Tide commercials since my childhood. but in blogs, i found conversation and exploration, stretching of these images, poking fun at them and at ourselves. i found moments of honesty and disillusionment and connection. i found a place to speak truths that verbal me could never say aloud…and people who would say, “i hear.”

it was no sheltered idyll, detached from a crass real…by the time i wandered into it, the blogosphere was actively trying to figure out how to make money, and new aggregator sites popped up all the time. but it was an economy that hadn’t yet figured itself out and narrowed its options. many fine writers found recompense for their words; many more found the recompense slim. pros and cons and implications of ads were discussed. comment whoring was owned up to. the subject as mother/writer/marketer became a common one, an overt one…and we were all marketing, even those of us who never ran an ad.

we still are, except the market has flattened out and the meta-conversations are no longer so fresh. lately, i feel like the mass, stereotypical mainstream mommy images have re-emerged to suck up too much of the conversation, subjectivities once imposed on us taken up as self-fulfilling prophecy, especially on the commercial side of things. snide tones that once seemed refreshing or ironic now resonate with weary, petty bitchiness. the aggregator sites drip with celebrity gossip and cheap wit and outrage and clearly they succeed so this must be what we’re buying with our clicks, our comments, but the tireless self-promotion of it all feels brittle to me. our little ecosystem of multiple possibilities is more toxic, the subjectivities narrower.

and yet i’m still here, blathering on. and reading, just from a smaller pool. and still happy with blogging, for what it is. because twitter’s 140 characters don’t quite allow me the scope to say more than the kids? oh, they’re good. baby has colic. ummm…but she’s a joy. cue smile.

and if you’re still here…i’m glad. and if you’re my former OB, i promise not to write about you anymore.
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if you have a blog, how would you describe its subjects, the yous that populate it?

Originally uploaded by o&poecormier

a year ago this morning, i woke up well before dawn in a tidy brown English hotel with jet lag and a faint gin headache, more from lack of sleep than excess of indulgence. i’d been circumspect, but careful.

i crept into the deco-tiled bathroom and pulled a thin plastic package from my bathroom kit and cursed the international moratorium on flying with scissors. i dragged the plastic open with my teeth, raggedly, balancing on the cold tile and trying not to piss myself.

victorious, i pried plastic from its plastic casing and peed on my prize, hand-imported across the Atlantic on the previous day’s journey. and then i perched on the edge of the tub and waited.

thin pink line. positive. and my hands started shaking and i whispered please. this time, please, let it all work out okay.

it was my thirty-sixth birthday.

like Gollum with his ring, i pocketed my plastic, uh, treasure and slipped downstairs by myself to wait for the hotel breakfast to open. a linen-dressed table, decaf in fine china, porridge with real cream and me with my journal and my secret, the only person in the world aware of the fragile blossoming within.
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this morning, i woke with a slightly less faint headache to that same no-longer-so-fragile blossom squeaking and beaming up at me.

my preciousss, i cooed. my birthday pressssent.

poor kid. every year she’s gonna be stuck with my Lord of the Rings impersonations. at least by next year she’ll be able to share in my cake to ease the trauma.

it all worked out okay.

this past Saturday morning i woke up to a washing machine that had given up the ghost and gone to appliance heaven in the middle of a load of dirty diapers. very dirty diapers. apparently the washing machine rapture was unable to wait for my childrens’ poop to complete the rinse cycle.

this coming Saturday morning, on the occasion of my thirty-seventh birthday, i am getting a brand-new washing machine -the first i will have ever owned – delivered to mah house. on my birthday. and i think this is fabulous.

cue the girdles and the curlers, middle age is in da house.
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the summer i was nineteen, i saw Thelma and Louise in the theatre. twice. shelling out more than once was a wild indulgence….but i had to go back. there was this one scene – sunup in the badlands, a vintage Impala replete with Southern Comfort, and The Ballad of Lucy Jordan – that made me catch my breath, disappear into the story, into that car, into the song playing in the background. Marianne Faithfull’s broken voice and a housewife losing her mind, her self.

she could clean the house for hours
or rearrange the flowers
or run naked through the shady streets
screaming all the way
…
at the age of thirty-seven, she realized
she’d never ride through Paris in a sports car
with the warm wind in her hair

there was, of course, no Youtube then, to trace the lyrics that had grabbed onto me like grappling hooks and screamed you must not make this mistake, child. no Wikipedia to promptly inform me that children’s author and poet Shel Silverstein had written the words croaked out by Faithfull. it took two viewings of the credits for me to even figure out the song’s name, and a long afternoon in the bowels of an old radio station’s archives for me to find a copy. but the very first time i heard the words, i understood.

You will be old someday. Get out and live. Make sure you have no regrets for things undone.

thirty-seven was beyond old to me then. thirty-seven, as best i could figure, must surely mean wrinkliness in places i was loathe to contemplate. thirty-seven was last chance, the age after which nothing would ever happen again.

probably only a nineteen year old could believe so fervently in the possibility of living without regret. not all doors can be opened, after all. and in the end i am rounding on thirty-seven still without having ever ONCE ridden through Paris in a sports car, my head high, Thelma and Louise-style headscarf and giant sunglasses and warm wind in my hair. (Dave, please note…you have two days left…get crackin’. passport ready.)

but from the cusp of a threshold after which nothing will ever happen again…i am surprised. because i’m happy.

on Saturday i will be thirty-seven years old and i am getting a freaking washing machine for my birthday. and when the baby naps, i can clean the house for hours, or could rearrange the flowers if i could remember to, erm, water them. my days of streaking down suburban streets are long gone. i don’t sleep for more than three hours at a time anymore, and on the rare occasion we have friends over, i spend half the evening trying to keep my baby from yelling over the conversation. yet…i don’t feel stifled or oppressed. or not in the way that matters in the long run.

by my own terms, i’ve lived well. i’ve learned, i’ve experimented, i’ve sung and spoken and created. i’ve stood naked on a balcony looking out over Bangkok at sunrise. i’ve laughed until i cried. i’ve held three babies, freshly born. i’ve grieved. i’ve loved. i’ve grown old enough to be able, finally, to say “i’m sorry.” and i’ve survived my long and reckless searching to circle back home, to a place where two small faces smile at me each morning. and the cat bites my ankles.

at nineteen i was afraid i’d wake up one morning and find that life had passed me by, hemmed me in in such a way that i’d never get out and figure out all that i could be. in the end, i’m still looking for all i can be, even at thirty-seven. and i’m looking in places i wasn’t sure i ever would…in the drudgery of this day to day hard-won domesticity, and its little pleasures, and the sense of agency that i find in my modest goals for the year: learn French, get a longterm job, play more trivia, spend time alone with Dave, teach my kids and myself that sometimes you don’t have to get mad even when you feel mad. these things excite me the way goals like “visit Amsterdam” and “become a rock star” once did.

my only regret is that i didn’t know sooner that this quiet middle-age is not at all so small as i thought.
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how do you feel about where you’re at in your life? and what’s on your list of “must do before i die”? have these things morphed as you’ve grown older?

(…or rather, love by one who cannot speak.)

you have your first crush, daughter.

on your brother.

(ahem…it’s true, that’s not as unusual as it ought to be ’round here. we have entire towns in these parts where only two or three last names can be found on the mailboxes…we’re, uh, like royalty that way, us Maritimers. but i’m thinking you’ll outgrow this smitten state at some stage. like when you realize he’s been stealing your toys for months now.)

still…you could do worse for your first love, your first case of hero-worship. he’s noticing your gaze, standing straight-backed and benevolent in the light it casts around him. i kinda hope you keep a little of this same twitterpation in your eyes for him, throughout your lives. i hope he keeps a little of the tenderness he sometimes shows you in his.

(you will note that the “short” new haircut is not so short, just…not so long, thus saving O from impending mullet-hood.)

they are getting bigger.

nothing odd in this and really, it shouldn’t come as news. they’re children. the job of children appears to be to grow (or to clutter one’s household, interrupt one’s sleep, and use up one’s extra income that one otherwise wasn’t sure what to do with. either way). but it feels as if since Josephine came along, the two of them have ganged up together and are riding time like a carnival pony, spanking its ass to go faster! and faster! until i expect to turn my head one day and catch them making off with my car keys.

Posey was four months old Saturday, all intense and rosy-cheeked and enamoured with her fingers. Oscar got his first big boy salon haircut that same morning, courtesy of a stylist friend of my sister’s he’d met last month and liked enough that the idea of going to see her outweighed his otherwise paroxysmal fear of haircuts, which i think he inherited from his father.

i took his picture in the lobby of the salon, while we waited, and i got this face.

then the magical hairdresser propped him up on a padded board stretched over the arms of the barber’s chair and draped the cape around his neck and suddenly, there scratching at the back of my brain was a beauty parlour and a big plank across a seafoam vinyl chair and the acetone smell of hairspray in a big gilt can. memory tickled the nape of my neck and i was the little kid with my legs sticking straight out under my cape. i had forgotten…but when it all came back it felt like yesterday and i was shocked to count what must be thirty-odd years between then and now. i scoured the traces of that memory for specifics…who brought me? where were we? what polyester confection was i wearing? but those are gone, just as Saturday is already mostly gone for O except for the pictures. the battle that was haircuts is over, for him, and now we are on to whether naps are really necessary and a hundred other big boy things and is Josephine big enough yet to have a cookie and shouldn’t he have hers instead and really, won’t he always get more cookies anyway?

when he was a baby i’d gaze dotingly upon him, memorizing the fleeting infant face, the curve of chubby cheek, the down of what i desperately hoped would someday become eyebrows. and in moments, sometimes, i’d be sure i’d seen through time, caught a glimpse of the adult face that would someday emerge from the bundle i cradled.

watching the curve of his head emerge, though, from his clipped curls on Saturday, i realized that i was wrong, then. in the baby face i hadn’t seen the man inside the boy, only my own daydreaming and playacting and projecting, like when he gets jealous over a cookie his sister cannot even eat yet, learning what it is to be a sibling as i was learning to be a mother. but the babyface still evident even in the lengthening bones of his big boy frown? like a tickle on the nape of my neck and a beauty parlour probably long since torn down, it sits, tucked away in the vault of memory, called up by the twist of a grin or a particular raise of an eyebrow……it will be my babies i catch sight of in the faces of my children, no matter how big they get. and i will be shocked, every time, i think, to count how far away yesterday has gotten, how fast.

i’ve been thinking a lot about food lately.

two separate flu bugs in the first three days of 2009 actually started the year off with weight loss, for once. worry not. i’ve made up for it since…those Christmas chocolates were at risk of spoilage.

food is my crutch, my weak spot, my pleasure, though we try to have a straight arrow relationship these days. Posey’s digestion seems depressingly sensitive to what i eat, so i’ve cut dairy and most legumes from my diet entirely. add in the fact that my gourmandaise star turn into artichoke cauliflower soup the other evening turned her little gut into a kettle of gas, and we’re back to keeping the cruciferous vegetables in check too. for ethical/environmental/financial/ colon cancer prevention/save the children reasons i’m also trying to rein in my rather outlandish meat consumption, and yep…the prospect of making dinner with what’s left drives me to break out the chocolates again.

unfortunately, as i learned – however unwillingly – from Mad a few months back, chocolate isn’t exactly a food choice without a footprint. i kinda knew that before, but i was ignoring it. thanks to the Lorax The Just Posts, i am now trying to green my chocolate purchasing. i won’t single-handedly end child slavery, but i need to at least take responsibility for not making the problem worse.

i’m still coming to terms with the idea that not only does everything i eat impact my body, but it comes from somewhere. it impacts the earth, it impacts an increasingly global system of capital and resource exchange, it impacts what seeds farmers can plant in rural India and whether kids eat in Botswana.

i like the idea of the hundred-mile diet.

then i look out my window at the five feet of snow blanketing my neighbourhood and i quake at the notion of ever seriously adhering to something so…disciplined. i live on a small island in Canada, people…unless i want to go out and jig for fish under the ice six months of the year or subsist on sprouted spuds all winter, my options end up even more limited than they are already. yes, we have a fine farmers’ market and some local organic growers, but i’ve asked about out of season products at the Saturday market and discovered that their fat spring blueberries come from Chile, just like those at MegaGroceryMonopolis. except more expensive.

though, everywhere, even MegaGroceryMonopolis, food seems to be more expensive these days. part of me laughs and says, good thing we all resolved to eat less for January, huh? part of me knows the distance of irony is a privilege. the inflation will mean some hungrier kids, some emptier food banks.

i’ve been wandering the aisles of my local grocery stores noticing that all the produce – even the goddam potatoes, in a province almost synonymous with spuds – are from locations crazy far away. i also noticed, just yesterday, that while all the apples at MegaGroceryMonopolis A are imports, even the Macintoshes, which grow locally and should still be quite nice this time of year, the organics were actually the same price as the non-organics. this is the first time i’ve ever seen price equity. and the whole web of supply and demand is so complex that i don’t even know if that’s a good thing. it’s good for me. it means Oscar will get his beloved apples sans pesticides without us eating up more of our budget to buy ’em, and since apples are one of the few things still left for me to bloody eat, they’re a significant part of that budget right now. i guess it means that if more people buy organic apples, maybe more growers can go organic, thus indirectly and eventually creating less profit for companies like Monsanto, and maybe less pressure for farmers to subscribe to ecologically and financially ridiculous proposals. but these organic apples still appear to have been shipped thousands of miles to make it to my fruit basket.

maybe i should’ve tried to be more hundred-mile and, uh, canned the pile of apples we picked at the local organic orchard back in September. but who eats canned apples?

i dunno what to make of all this. i don’t want to spend as much on food as i do. i don’t want to eat as much crap as i do. i want to make informed choices wherein what ends up on my plate has logged as few travel miles and oppressed as few living creatures as possible, while still being, y’know, delicious. and preferably chocolate.

i need ideas. ideas about what to eat that’s non-dairy and non-gassy and preferably grows somewhere at least in the northern-ish zones of North America without massive amounts of pesticides. cheap would be nice. recipes would be awesome. and in the interest of full disclosure, i am that odd Maritimer who actually does not eat fish or other sea creatures. they’re gross, don’tcha know? except tunafish from a can, but that’s all full of mercury and endangered to boot. sigh.

what do you eat? what are your priorities in terms of making choices…cost? health? environmental impact? likelihood of toddlers to actually consume it? tell me what you love, what you know, what you eat. because stew and spinach huevos rancheros (sans cheese, sniff) are getting waaaay tired up here.