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tonight, before bed, Dave was reading The Lorax to Oscar. it’s a Suess i missed out on as a kid, so i only heard it for the first time this past year. it’s a thinly veiled anti-industrialist Book of Revelations or An Inconvenient Truth for the younger set…or more likely, really, for their parents. in it the Lorax, who “speaks for the trees”, is the unheeded prophet of a grim future that the narrator ultimately brings upon himself.

as Dave launched into the story, i felt my ears cringe, fold over at the edges, shut themselves off. i knew what was coming, and tonight, i didn’t want to go along for the ride of guilt and broken-heartedness and complicity. i didn’t want to hear – i was busy fiddling vapidly with my own personal Thneeds. like most of us, i am all for righteous living so long as i don’t have to get uncomfortable. but sitting there half-listening, half-trying to turn my ears away from the sad story the tale weaves, i realized that the Lorax sounds awfully familiar.

Mad and Jen, with Suzanne, and for a while, Hel, have thrown their heart and soul, in stereo, into The Just Posts for two full years now. they’ve spoken for the trees, the seas, the hungry, the homeless, the gay. they’ve collected our voices, and helped us use the blogosphere to spread information and ideas about what we think might make a better world. i’ve participated, though less frequently of late. i’ve heard the call for contributions and glanced at my to-do list and thought, yeh, i’ll get to that. and then the tenth of the month has rolled around, and around again, without my lifting a finger, and my ears have closed off a little, because i am all for social justice so long as i don’t have to get uncomfortable. or say, make an effort.

i’ve been treating them rather like the Lorax. sigh.

and now, with life and parenting and moves to the jungle and maybe a little weariness with the blogging world and with the whole Lorax role, the women who started the fine thing that is The Just Posts are retiring. and i get it, and i am sad at the same time, because i’ve learned a lot from the roundtables. things about greening the environment and about the American health care system and mental illness and what a joke i am when it comes to committing to DO anything. they inspired me to get off my ass and volunteer at my local soup kitchen, only i got put on, uh, bedrest. then i got inspired to start a local cloth diaper exchange, which has kinda flopped thus far and possibly miscarried, but hey…if anyone out there in the Charlottetown area wants to work with me or just wants some diapers, super cheap, gimme a shout, i’m swimming in prefolds. i have most recently been inspired to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity in a clerical capacity…easiest with a colicky baby, i figure….but they, uh, haven’t called yet. nonetheless, i remain inspired. because knowing that people are out there trying matters to me, and is the thing about the Just Posts that has called me back month after month, helped me unstopper the shame and inertia that builds up like earwax and deafens most of us to the disconnect between our lives and our beliefs.

as a parting gift, the Just Post hosts have asked that we out there who care about this baby they’ve grown and nurtured for the past twenty-four months commit to putting our money where our mouths have been, and write about a cause we believe in and support financially.

i figured this at least i could do without fucking up.

it’s Old Christmas today, Epiphany. in the internal calendar of my mind, set back in a childhood far more canonically observant than the adult moi can even remember, i haven’t completely missed sending appropriately and timely holiday wishes/messages/cards so long as said missives go out by epiphany. today i wrote to my friend Susie.

happy new year, read my (very creative, non?) message. Pakistan, eh, Suse?

on December 28th, Susie left for northern Pakistan for her fourth tour with Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors without Borders). i copied a letter she’d written from her second tour, to Chad, the fall before last. before that, it was Darfur. since then, a cholera camp in Congo. this time, Pakistan. i’m hoping she’ll have internet, as otherwise my holiday message won’t reach her ’til May. there’s no pretending that’s on time.

on her way to the airport, she sent this note. “We are setting up a program in an area that MSF hasn’t been before, and because of all the cultural/political intricacies in the area the going is slow. There is no acute emergency like cholera, and there are no IDP’s/refugees in this area, but the people have very poor access to health care. Especially the women, and this will hopefully be an area we can improve. Because of the divide between men and women, especially marked in these more remote tribal areas, it is hard to even get an good idea of the health needs of the female population – as a female doctor I should have more access then the men and so hopefully be able to help a bit. It is also an area that was hit by the 2005 earthquake and that has affected access to healthcare. There are areas of the coutry that probably have a greater need for help but they are a little too unsafe at the moment, so we will start out in Darband and see how it goes. One of our goals is to start up a Cutaneous Leishmaniasis program, since there seems to be an outbreak in the mountain villages. (for the non-meds, that is a skin infection caused by a parasite and spread by sandflies. It is not fatal but can leave a lot of scarring and has a significant social stigma).”

for a year, when Suse first went to Darfur, Dave and i gave monthly to MSF. since then our charitable donations have been focused more on the local children’s hospital where Finn was born and died, and where i was followed closely through my pregnancies with Oscar and Josephine. this, and cancer and the War Amps and whatever local groups happen to get to my door first have been my particular personal commitments. but this year there will be no more babies. and this year, i think it’s time for us to look a little further afield again in our giving, to commit again to MSF, and maybe…in appreciation for this luxury of being able to feed and raise these two beautiful kids in our house, sponsoring a child too. i’ve looked into World Vision in the past, and Foster Parents’ Plan. if anyone has any caveats or suggestions about groups who coordinate child sponsorships, please make free with them in the comments.

Happy Old Christmas, Just Posts. thank you for your courage, for speaking and inspiring even when some of us tried to close our ears.

i rang in the new year with an honest-to-god blizzard and the flu. if new year’s day is a harbinger of what the year will bring, 2009 is looking pretty cloistered…the plows didn’t even try to make it down our small street until this morning, so we had snow half-way up the front door and a wonderland blanketing the place. and, uh, me lying on the couch whimpering.

as i spent literal whole, entire seasons of 2008 lying on the couch, whimpering my way through bedrest and the Miss Cervix Universe Pageant…apparently 2009 was just trying to make me feel at home.

i did notice that a day of me stuck on the couch, unable to tidy whilst the toddler raged about amidst the Christmas detritus i’d hoped to spend the afternoon packing away, did not actually kill anyone. even my blood pressure survived. i found this mildly shocking…and a little disappointing, as it takes some of the urgency out of my directives to Dave to Put Things Away Or I Will Implode. oh well. he did bundle up the boy and drag him out in the yard to enjoy the storm, thus initiating him into his Canadian birthright of wintry freeze-yer-arse-off play and allowing sick mama and sick baby sister to sleep for, oh, ten minutes.

when they blew back into the porch, trailing snow like capes, Oscar’s cheeks were bright with that wet, rosy flush that comes from traipsing through thick, fresh snow, socks falling down inside your boots, nose running, skin so exquisitely cold it’s hot. just about exactly ready for cocoa.

and i looked at him and thought, yep, after today i get off the couch. after today, bugger the laundry and that pesky control impetus, i go outside too.

that is as good a resolution as any, for a new year as clean and untrammeled as the snow, just for now.

somewhere, in a box that has gone through four or five moves unopened and unsorted, is a picture. a snapshot of a woman – a girl, really – in a Kodachrome red polyester mini-dress, hugely pregnant. her hair is black. her smile fills the photo. on the back it says, Christmas Eve, 1971.

i was born exactly a month later. the film must have been developed afterward, because under the date in my father’s idiosyncratically beautiful handwriting, the snapshot notes, “Bonnie Elaine has gotten so big!!” they did not know i was a girl, did not choose my name before my birth – i have always known this. but when i found the photo a decade or so ago, cleaning out my grandmother’s apartment in preparation for the final move to the nursing home, i cried. because there was so much i did not know, had no memory of. the intact family, the young father writing my full name with pride, the way my mother smiled, curtains yet undrawn.

by the next Christmas they had torn each other apart in ways that we are all, thirty-seven years later, still trying to recover from, and it was irrevocably over.

the picture shocked me, when i found it. the girl in the picture – my mother, impossibly young and shyly deferential, hopeful – broke my heart. i could see the script, knew what came next. what i hadn’t known, until that moment, was how much got lost in the unravelling of it all.

i grew up in a family that did not speak of rupture. my mother was a canon of propriety, a brave one-woman show of sacrifice, the two of us a rigidly upright single-parent family in a town where the term usually connoted stigma, even trash. she bought me a pass out of lowered expectations, and out of sentimental longing for a past i couldn’t remember. we were what we were, and a bright and shining – if threadbare – face was the mask worn to the world. but the facade balanced on a carpet beneath which much destruction and mess were swept, much confusion and woundedness pre-processed and handed down as truth. the divorce and its betrayals i knew too much about too early, but no one had heard of therapy, not here. the disintegration of my family of origin and of my parents as non-embittered entities was presented not as my own loss to grapple with but something in the past, sterile and at safe remove. “my parents divorced when i was an infant but i have a good relationship with my father,” i was instructed to write in my fourth grade autobiography. i do not remember having any idea of how to articulate such a thing publicly in any other way. only nearly twenty years later, holding that photograph in my grandmother’s empty apartment, did it occur to me that i’d been sold a line…that maybe i had a right to feelings and thoughts on the subject, after all.
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i started this blog two weeks before Oscar was born, less than a year after Finn died. i was struggling with the fact of my feelings on a subject that would have made me profoundly uncomfortable to discuss aloud…with whether, on the cusp of Oscar’s birth, i had the right to feelings about Finn at all, at least feelings not as tidied and safely neutered as those i’d learned about my parents’ divorce…or later, my own. the blog offered sanctuary from a lifetime of self-silencing, of living an internal reality different from any external indication of identity. it became a place where i could make up my narrative of parenthood as i went along, and weave both my sons in.

i think it saved my sanity. i think you all did.

but i am not in that place anymore: there is a sea change at work in me, a transition i do not yet understand. i look ahead to 2009 and the blank slate of it baffles me, leaves me nervous. the primary goal of 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 is finally shelved…we have our family, are blessedly, quietly triumphant in the two Christmas stockings that we stuffed for little people last week. after five calendar years with highs and lows marked out almost entirely by pregnancies, i do not want to be pregnant in 2009. the lifelong fantasy of my children yet-to-be has been retired, wistfully but with finality. but what now?

Posey talks to me, these days, soft little coos and the sweetest giggles my ears have ever heard. i am allowed to say this, i think, because Oscar was neither cooer nor giggler, his vocalizations late and sparse. but lately the words tumble over each other in complex pronouncements of will and observation and imagined delights, even his brief stutter suddenly overcome, left in dust. he mimics what i say, how i act.

and i am more and more uncomfortable in the skin i see reflected. i am strained, i am tired, yes. but i am also too quick to carp, to judge, too easily made anxious by departures from whatever script i’ve concocted at the time. my household ego is fragile, particularly with my partner. and lately i have found myself puzzling ’til my puzzler is sore about where it all goes from here, about how, now that we have these wanted children, to raise them. i have no model for doing that in partnership with anyone…the children or their father. yet i do not want to beat my head against the same walls of authoritarianism and appearances my mother beat hers into with me. i do not want to teach my kids that their feelings matter only if externally validated.

i mean no indictment of people i love, people who did well to survive. i just feel at sea, shamefully unprepared for this business of living, even when i’ve been at it all these years. tired of feeling like i have to work everything out from scratch, and certain that i don’t know how to talk about any of this in ways that are publicly appropriate and still honest. we remain children of our upbringing, often in ways invisible to us, long after we’ve left childhood behind.

hence my silence. i am here. blogging may be dead, proclaim the pundits rounding out the year, but i am not particularly done with it. it’s just, to quote Leonard Cohen, that i can’t speak.

my words lie dormant, taut and jumbled under a cocoon, as i drag myself through the metamorphoses of whatever is struggling, slouching into being, and i hold my breath at all this crazy unknown ahead and hope that this year’s Christmas photos do not someday make my children well up with tears at all that could have been if pride and patterns learned and stubborn foolheadedness had not gotten in the way.

because it feels like a precipice, this new year looming, waiting to be born.
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what do you see in the tea leaves for 2009? what do you hope for? and what do you do when the words fail you?

the shortest day of the year. morning crept up late but bright, everything reflected in the mirror ball of fresh snow.

i was awake. i lay quiet, feeding one child and listening for the call of the other, wondering at the marvel of him sleeping ’til first light on this latest sunrise on the calendar, he who woke before dawn all summer long.

only stillness.

there is something in the cyclical nature of our existence, this seasonal turning of a beleaguered planet, that brings me comfort. solstice, the sun standing still. for a moment, the movement of it all is invisible to the eye, the music of the spheres silent. hibernation. all suspended. in the stillness, for me, lurks warmth and respite and the imaginary cave of wintertime that i suspect the ur-human in most of us still hearkens to, a pre-electric feast of treats and firelit shadows and long winter’s nap.

visions of sugarplums and of woods dark and deep, outside of time.

the only sound a baby suckling, a baby who may someday be an old woman, who will someday be dust while this earth keeps spinning and i felt the blink of it all, the crazy speed at which we run out our course and the dizzying smallness of us all, riding on a planet circling in the dark.

and then on dasher! on dancer! and a little voice calls from the other room and tired feet hit the ground running because the spell is broken and we are off again on the carousel of living, with promises to keep.

it’s snowing outside and our new furnace is roaring like a jet engine, making Posey and i most efficiently toasty if a wee bit deaf, and i am sitting here nursing her and staring at the tree lights and wondering absently whether the proximity to Christmas means my sudden urge to indulge in a large shot of Bailey’s at 3pm is merely sad or, in fact, festive.

i’ve developed an aesthetic crush on the early sixties, lately.  i blame all the Mad Men episodes i’ve been watching online while feeding the bebe.  she suckles, and i watch crisp suits and wasp-waisted housewives and worldly, shapely secretaries cheerfully destroy their livers, lungs and marriages whilst munching tuna casserole.  them, not me.  i don’t like tuna casserole.  i also don’t much like martinis or affairs or aprons, and my waist currently pudges out from my hips, rather than veering alarmingly inward.  i don’t wear kitten heels…hell, i seldom wear shoes.  so why am i enamoured of their Peter Pan collars and their Marlboros and wingtips and modernist furniture and their bold, splashy print ads and their utter lack of irony and social awareness?

i dunno. i get that lolling about gossiping with ice cubes clinking and cigarettes trailing in the heyday of hateful suburbia was probably dull and stifling and gosh, i have you guys for virtual lolling and you’re all swell but maybe it’s just not the same as having you over for pimento loaf. or maybe i’m just buying the myth of space age plastic and the quaint, whitebread innocence of that otherwise chauvinist, racist, elitist world where all seems so cut and dried and tidy and drinking alone at 3pm is, umm, normal.

sigh. can’t have the Bailey’s anyway…i’m off dairy.  milk seems to bother Posey more than a little booze.  but a girl can dream.
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i am nearly through the second season of Mad Men.  i need a new fetish, my friends.  maybe old episodes of something less likely to drive me to drink?  i’ve missed a lot of reputedly good shows over the last decade or so…what would you recommend? what’s your tv poison? and why?

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

– Mark Twain

the longer i’m a mother, the better my own mother begins to look.

i always knew she was a good mother, that i was lucky to have her. but we spent a lot of years with horns locked, she and i. never in a vicious way…rather fundamentally, inescapably, despite efforts on both sides to smooth the ragged edges of the bond. i lived away for fifteen years, always thinking that someday i’d come home and find that we’d become sympatico, the love between us finally morphing into companionability. instead, i’d arrive…and undergo a miraculous and instantaneous transformation back to scowling adolescence. i’ll never need a facelift, i joked with friends. if i want to drop twenty years, i just visit my mom. it’s instant.

my world was not hers. i called from university – my hard-drinking, eating-disordered university years, awash in ideas about High Modernism and international nuclear accords – and our conversation was about home, about what so-and-so had done in church on Sunday last. i called from Vancouver, from the Arctic, from Cambodia, from Hungary – seeing the world, sending money home – and our conversation was about whether i was hurting my back with that backpack/suitcase/big teacher satchel. are you brushing your teeth? uh, yes. and i’m seeing this! learning this! crickets. the sniff of disapproval and disinterest always lurked in the wings, ready for its grand entrance. and my indignance lurked too, hair- triggered, ready to sulk and feel misunderstood and pubescent at but a moment’s notice.

still, my mom was great for the big stuff. move away to Asia and decide to get divorced? from half a world away, i got motherlove and unintrusive but genuine support. while in Asia, getting gawked at on the streets by a culture not quite yet used to white folk, decide to dye hair platinum blond? still half a world away, i got nattering and tears and outrage and oh, what will people think? i was TWENTY-NINE years old…a little elderly for maternal panic over hair colour. but my mother, resolutely gray since her thirtieth birthday, disapproves of hair dye. stretching across contexts to imagine a world different than her own has never been her strong suit…suffering other people’s opinions with grace has never been mine. so on we went, like two small dogs with an invisible yoke between, yapping in tandem at the ankles of the other.

it didn’t miraculously change when i moved back here, nor when i had kids. the bickering about hair colour morphed into bickering about Children’s Tylenol and whether i should get my tubes tied, the nattering about brushing my teeth (my teeth, for the record, are quite well-cared-for) became don’t hesitate to take Oscar to the dentist/doctor/speech therapist. i took him, quite liberally. but the running commentary continued to rankle. until lately.

i’ve noticed a strange detente creeping over us.

only yesterday, i realized why. Oscar and i were playing pretend on the floor, Josephine curled against me, asleep in her sling. we were eating imaginary cookies at an imaginary restaurant, Oscar treating himself to the baby’s share too, since she only eats milk. we were a picture of happy pretend domesticity when, out of the blue, this suddenly so-big boy of mine leapt up and zoomed around the baby and i and announced, i’m going to space! i’m in space, mama! and i looked at him and understood, this is the trajectory of it all. our shared world giving way to realms unknown, all of a sudden. he has ideas now, that did not come from our shared experience. and i do not know so well how to play along. this is how it will go, how rapid it will be.

and i looked at him, and i said, space, honey? oh. do you want to bring a cookie? don’t forget your toothbrush!

never have i understood so clearly what it is like to stand in my mother’s shoes, relentlessly offering the known, the familiar, in hopes that it will somehow tether the one who has so suddenly soared away.  when i called her a little later, i mentioned, in passing, how i’d just bought new toothpaste.

Originally uploaded by o&poecormier

last year he called him “Yaya.”

this year, the words trip from his mouth with more ease, and he notes the red hat and beard with an enthusiasm that takes me aback, makes me wary. “Santa!” he squealed in the grocery store last week, when we happened across a blow-up display of the jolly old elf. i wonder where this delight sprang from and for the hundredth time i simultaneously blame and thank his sitter for doing the normative work of acculturating my child whilst his father and i shrink and critique and dither. and then my brain skates off, wondering about this Santa fetish encouraged in the preschool set, this strange semi-magical, semi-materialist construction of Christmas, this incessant “what will Santa bring you?”

last time he was asked, he said he wanted a Christmas hat. he’d just taken the one in the photo off minutes before. i don’t think he gets it, what this fat man in red is supposed to represent. i don’t know if i get it either.

i was not quite five yet when i found out about Santa. a boy in my kindergarten carpool had an older brother and thus, i guess, a mainline to truth. i don’t remember any longer why i knew he was right, why i believed him and not the elaborate fabric of myth. he was a redhead, that little boy, a freckled face that popped up from the bench seat at the front of a car whose other inhabitants and details escape my memory…a spitefully gleeful freckled face that shouted “Santa’s not real! Grownups buy the presents and eat all the cookies!”

i believed him, but i thought my mother truly believed in Santa, and so to spare her feelings i said nothing, not a word, and dutifully dictated my letter to the North Pole anyway.

two Christmases later she sat me down to explain, very gently, that Santa was only the spirit of Christmas, of giving, of the gift of Jesus to the world or however those two are supposed to relate and i said, “i know” and i think we both looked at each other a little oddly and that was the year i woke up Christmas morning to the longed-for Hugo, Man of a Thousand Faces courtesy of the Sears’ Christmas Wishbook and a mother who’d been unsure if my father’s cheque would show up in time, and the ruse of Santa Claus fell into disuse in our house after that.

my childrens’ parents are faithless, their closest cousins Jewish.  they will never experience full immersion in Christmas a religious holiday.  Oscar goes to the church nursery most Sundays with his Nannie, and the lesson of “different people believe different things,” is what i hope he takes out of it all in the long run…because i have nothing more certain to offer, for myself. we have an advent calendar, but mostly for the chocolate and to try to help him understand that holidays change with the seasons and Hallowe’en is, alas, over until next year.

and yet we decorate our tree and we will celebrate Christmas in our own way, where what is holy is the quiet of the dark season and the time with family and maybe all the bounty of food and treats and holiday baking, and Santa will elbow his jolly way in there no matter what we do and maybe the baby Jesus too and all i can hope is that some of it is magic for the children somewhere along the way and that, at least, we give them to believe in.
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whatever your belief system, if you are in the English-speaking world, how do you explain this inescapable, hegemonic holiday to your kids? what do you think they make of it?

i woke up this morning to a deafening crash and crunching sound.

it was not, actually, the cry of my beloved country falling down around my ears, though times are mad up here and unprecedented parliamentary nuttiness is most definitely afoot.  the clamour was, rather, the house across the street being flattened – chewed up and shredded by an enormous claw.  big chunks of roof and wall were being torn to pieces…family entertainment right at our window!  we pressed ourselves to the glass to watch.

Oscar peered out at the destruction and exclaimed, oooh!  a big mess!

(the parallels to our national political state are, admittedly, irresistable.)

i’ve never had a ringside seat for demolition before.  it’s violent, a little sickening.  fascinating, because the private is so suddenly exposed, made visible…but sad too.  the little house was a postwar relic.  when we moved in three+ years ago, the inhabitants had frequent ‘guests’ who stayed all of about five minutes and used the back door.  either dealers, we figured, or very popular people…but they never brought a casserole by so we never really got to know.  for the past year or more the place has been abandoned.  watching the linoleum layers clinging like rainbow skin to the detritus of the walls, i wondered about the hands that built the house, about the hopes that once must have been housed under its roof.

and i began to sing Tom Waits’ The House Where Nobody Lives, aloud, to Oscar.  i wanted to be very clear with him that the little house was somehow different from ours, that the big claw wasn’t coming for our walls anytime soon.

good thing he doesn’t follow politics.

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side note: the fact that i began above with the words “i woke up” means, in case you missed it, that i slept.  as did the bambino.  and the rest of the household.  thanks to you all for the hardcore love…i’m not sure if any of you managed to put a hex on colic or what’s going on, but i am in a better mental state today than i have been in awhile and i think a lot of it (beyond the blessed, blessed sleep) was the release of getting out that toxic stuff, knowing i’d been heard.

just for today – to steal outrageously from Mad and the other clever tweets out there – i’m okay if the Governor General doesn’t prorogue my life ’til January.  (and if you’re not in Canada and thus the word “prorogue” means no more to you than it did to me last week, see how edifying blog reading can be?)

it feels like rage.

like metaphorical acid reflux, lava-hot. it splashes up without warning, spatters out of me in mutters and expletives and tears, my face raw and shocked.  i am all powder, fuse worn down to a nub.

i am fine, and insane, all in the span of thirty seconds.  and when i am fine i think the insane is probably a drama queen, self-aggrandizing and blown out of all proportion.  and when i am not fine i think we cannot all get out of this alive.

it is lack of sleep and the bitter loss of the happy, weary infancy i’d dared think we’d finally gotten, third time lucky.  it is two weeks of asthma attacks and flu and both children up several times a night, in addition to the colic, the brutal colic, the sweet-merciful-Jeebus-seriously-who’d-i-torture-in-my-last-life colic that stomps on my last, frayed nerve and breaks my heart and makes me feel helpless and cruel, a mockery of comfort and motherhood.  it is the laptop broken and the furnace rusted out all at once and all the lightbulbs burnt in chorus and the diamond earring lost raking leaves, my only diamonds, ever, gone…like money hemorrhaging, like lurking failure and chaos have found me easy prey.   it is the call i got yesterday that Oscar’s ear surgery – scheduled for this Thursday – has instead been postponed to the day before Christmas Eve.  because heck, when better to trek to the hospital with a two year old and infant for the day?  what else would i be doing that time of year?

it is all these things, and none of them.  it is that they all add up.

one last straw, again and again and again, and in my head i listen for the laugh track and hear only crickets and then the anger surges and i am awash and afraid all at once.  i see red, literally.  i flail, inside, look for things to throw and then despair even of that release because, fuck it everything’s broken anyway.

everyone else’s happy babies send me into paroxysms of mourning and self-beratement.  the warm buzz of the early, contented-ish weeks and you deserved a break this time around has fallen silent.  i did not deserve a break, after all.  apparently if i can squeeze out a live baby i should expect no further mercy from fortune.  apparently it is my lot to watch helpless and frayed as my children suffer, one after the other.  colic is better than tubes and a ventilator and blue-black toes and death, i know.  i know.  and yet it all feels bizarrely similar from where i sit watching my days unravel…the useless mother, unable to comfort, unable to protect.  perhaps that is where the rage comes from.

there are few witnesses, save for a screaming infant and the little boy.  i hide my face from them, afraid of this ugliness, this fury.  i do not want to be this way.  i do not want to mark them, leave them pocked with  acid.  i do not want them scarred.  i do not want to excuse rage as a reasonable, acceptable response.  i do not want to be what i am right now.

it will end.  the part of me that is fine and rational intones this.  the insane part knows that doesn’t matter in the moment, unless it ends now.  another month, perhaps, given that she was nearly a month early….in the grand scheme, it seems so little to endure.

but in the moment, exhausted, choked with bile, it is too much, too unfair, too big, and i wonder if the next cry or the next stupid broken household item will be the one that breaks me, and i long for a protector myself, for someone to rescue me from this powderkeg while i am still fine some of the time.

unstable/embittered but housebroken thirty-six year old, up for adoption.  seeks mother.  will travel. likes pina coladas and predictability.  free to good home.  bonus miniatures included, requiring tlc and earplugs.

we were dancing.

Posey and i, on our first day to ourselves in more than a week, both of us slightly flu-impaired and grumpy but mercifully alone, the house ours, our day free from doctor’s appointments and toddlers and other civil company. she’d been kvetching in her swing, so i picked her up, grabbed the ancient cassette tape Oscar had unearthed from god knows where at breakfast time, thanked fortune that we still possess an equally ancient stereo, and plunked the sucker in. and there we were, sliding across the hardwood of the den, her a whimpering ball in my arms, me a grimly determined picture of festive joy. i was inaugurating my infant into tradition and holiday cheer; Paul Revere riding the dark days of Canadian November, shouting the holidays are coming! the holidays are coming!

we were dancing to the Boney M Christmas classic Feliz Navidad.
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i’m not entirely sure how Boney M became a Christmas classic for the rest of the world…i guess catchy kitsch goes a long way for a post-sincerity generation that prefers traditions leavened with irony. but for me, personally, Feliz Navidad became a centrepiece of all that is warm and fuzzy and delightful about the holidays the very first time i ever heard my college roommate sing it aloud.

her name was Andrea.  she had a decent voice…good pitch, clear tone.  her voice carried above the rest of us.  and somewhere in the middle of an impromptu drunken exam-time singalong, we all trailed off and cocked our heads, eyebrows raised.  because Andrea wasn’t singing Feliz Navidad as she bounced earnestly in time to the marimbas.  Andrea was singing at least no one died.

i don’t claim to speak Spanish, but i knew that was a pretty Eeyore-esque take on the spirit of the season, however accidental.  and i loved it.

sometimes i’m a bit of a Grinch when it comes to the holidays.  i don’t like the commercialism and the pressure to spend, i’m not religious, i find putting up the tree a daunting chore.  and yet, there’s something about the darkness and the snow and the lights and the forced family time – tense though it often is – that i value, that i hearken to.  even at eighteen, i got that “at least no one died…i wanna wish you a Merry Christmas!” was the ultimate in frank and honest Christmas caroling.  so in the years when we are lucky enough to gather without new faces missing from the tables – because with three sets of grandparents and four separate belief traditions in our immediate families there’s always more than one table for us at the holidays – i sing me some Boney M and grin and bear it all, with the help of the seasonal chocolate boxes.

that’s what i was reminding myself of yesterday, holding this longed-for daughter, safely here despite colic, despite a rough run with all of us sick and tired.   a year ago, had i been able to look ahead and see us, the four of us, with our extended family still well and present in our lives, i would’ve thought, how lucky.
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i had just soared into full vocal flight when the elderly creaky tape gave up the ghost.  it died, in the middle of At Least No One Died.   the voices slowed alarmingly, and deepened, the old sound of stretching plastic strangely familiar and yet from another world, a lost time.  then it snapped.

i was crestfallen.  we were dancing.  i was cheering myself up.  i was introducing my daughter to one of the primary Christmas carols.  i was being resilient, dammit, after a rotten couple of weeks.  and then my heirloom tape…gone to Jesus.  cruel, cruel world.

i tweeted my sorrow, noting that the holidays were now ruined before they even began.  Josephine and i trudged upstairs, and i moped about, whistling lamentations that sounded like Boney M, the Funeral Version.  she fed, and was just gearing up for one of her wailing sessions when i thought i heard footsteps on the stairs.  Dave.

he had read my tweet, left work, run to the record store and purchased me a fine new CD version of Boney M Christmas, replete with disco cover art and snowflakes.  then driven it home, all with twenty-five minutes flat.  no gift of the Magi was ever so kind, so thoughtful…especially when you consider that he’s now doomed himself to a steady diet of Boney M over the next four weeks.

i think i already got all i wanted for Christmas, this year.