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i am all ascatter.

my work is mostly done…my formal work, my paid work.  the paid part, at least, is totally done.  there are still a few finishing touches i’ve committed to finishing up as freebies, just ’cause i get this nifty sense of validation from being involved in things that exist outside the four walls of my house.  but these bits, these leftovers, languish now.  there is no drive, no rush.   after almost fifteen weeks on bedrest, i have actually unyoked myself from schedule, from the fetters of duty, from the little voice in my head that berates me with its ancestral refrains of Protestant Work Ethic virtues until i am compelled to accomplish, to complete, to drone away my days in busyness.  i have sent the voice away on a whisky binge.  i hope it is enjoying itself.

but i’m kinda lost without it.

i loll my way through my days, browsing the Baby Center naming boards, assembling photo albums, considering the abject state of my dish pile.  having to lay around in the sunshine reading books and whiling away the hours hydrating myself with lemonade?  um, yeh, it’s torture.  ahem.  or really, not at all.  but that same little voice that ought to be soused by now on its whisky vacation still seems to have left an echo behind it, a hollow sound that eats at my pleasure in all this unaccustomed time just to Be.

i am more than capable of filling the time.  but the fact that i spend half of it worrying that i’m not making the most of it and the other half trying to appear more productive than i really am suggests to me that i have a problem.

this morning i literally tripped over the root of the problem.  it skittered away from me across the hardwood, and i sank into the couch and stared at it, revelation dawning.  it was clear as a bell, and a beautiful blue.  it told me, friends, that my life is not actually my own, to enjoy or squander as i wish.  i have a colonized mind.  my life, o lo my brothers and sisters, is a Thomas the Tank Engine episode, and the narrator is eager to get my lazy ass redeemed, already.  my name is Bonnie and i am addicted to being a Really Useful Engine.

if you are not parent to a two-year-old boy, you may not be familiar with the smugly innocuous yet sanctimonious little morality plays that make up the backdrop to our waking moments here at chez crib – but if Oscar is awake and not eating, he can usually be found either carrying around a small blue train, begging to watch the same small blue train on YouTube or video, or demanding that someone read to him from his Big Thomas Book (a collection of righteous stories written – surprise! – by a post-war Protestant Reverend) or his Baby Thomas Book (a catalogue of Thomas products which Oscar’s parents could spend thousands of dollars to buy for him if only his mother were not so cheap and ironically Protestant in her attitudes towards material expenditures…and if she needed more things on the floor to trip over).

in nearly every Thomas episode, wayward Thomas gets distracted by mere petty enjoyment or vanity, and must be redeemed, brought back into the fold of industriousness by some mishap, train crash, or other teachable moment.  the Sodor branch line which Thomas runs has a disturbing number of crashes and mishaps, to be frank – i would not suggest anyone book their next vacation with them.

but i have the sinking feeling i’ve done just that.

i am not sure when this conversion to the Church of Usefulness happened to me.  i spent decades sleeping in, taking jobs in odd corners of the world because they offered a twenty-hour work week, drinking myself cheerful in seedy little bars and puzzling over obscure philosophy for fun, not credit.  i still paid all my bills and was sober for all my classes, admittedly, but i was free from the internal compulsion to validate myself by busywork, by accomplishment, by checking things off the to-do list.

is this part of motherhood, or am i just a loony shut-in?

first meeting of Really Useful Engines Anonymous at, um, my house.  soon.  send help, wisdom, or at least some toothsome sweets.

ever since it dawned on us the other night how dire the situation with the runt tree is, Dave’s taken to watering it in the evenings.  birches are thirsty creatures.  we know that our weeding/nitrate-enriching measures – however highly recommended by Tree Doctor Google – likely won’t save it, but trying feels better than sitting back and watching it wither.

on Saturday, before bedtime, Oscar “helped” Dave tote the big bucket from the tap on the side of the house back to the shady corner where the trees stand.  i watched them, Dave adjusting his pace to that of O’s stubby, eager little legs, the big hand and the small balancing the handle between them.

it was Canada Day yesterday…and it was hot.  stinkin’ hot.  after a jaunt to the petting zoo with Daddy and Nannie, Oscar spent the late afternoon lounging in his backyard blow-up pool.  because his is a glamourous life.

i was parked in a lawnchair beside said pool, cooling my feet in the three-inch depths of grassy, chilly water, being busily splashed by my son.  Dave was drinking a beer. the big bucket with which the pool had been filled lay upturned beside it on the lawn.

when Oscar picked up the bucket and dipped it into the pool, i looked at him.  quizzically.  i didn’t realize he had fully mastered the zen art of water transference, so when he hoisted the bucket and trotted off with it and its contents most determinedly, i was puzzled.  i asked him what he was doing.

wawa dee, said he.

i speak Oscar-ese pretty fluently, but this took me a second.  i cocked my head and peered at him, and he repeated himself, a hint of exasperation in his voice.  like, duh, mama…wawa dee.  poor beleaguered Oscar, his parents dumb as muffins.  he gave up on me and toddled off across the lawn, heaving the bucket fully half his size along with him.

and he watered the tree, the dying tree, of his own volition.  his brother’s tree.

and his father and i sat with our feet in the kiddie pool in the hot sun, tears in our eyes…but of pride, not sorrow.

*

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in non-tree-related news, the lovely and literate Mad nominated century for a Perfect Post this month.  Mad, thank you.  a post nominally about children’s literature, nominated by a children’s librarian who doesn’t even really like Anne of Green Gables?  dude, you made me feel like a writer.   :)

it is dying, the little tree.

it is a clump birch, the smaller of the two that flank the lithe red maple in our backyard.  we planted the three of them on Mother’s Day the year that Finn died, eight days after.  his father dug the holes in the rain, i sprinkled some of his ashes in the mud. our parents gathered, and Dave’s sister and her husband and their baby, and my grandfather, and my mother’s friend who was once a minister, and he said a few words but nothing of god and i was grateful and stood like a stone, unweeping, unable to mourn what i could not yet believe was gone.

we called him Runt, when he was in utero…a pet name far more prescient than we’d ever dreamed, bestowed upon a seven week fetus we’d been told was lost, and then, miraculously, recovered.  small, but strong, the Korean doctors said.

the little tree has been the runt of the three since the day we planted it.

but we have not been such good stewards to it, beyond that first summer.  we are not gardeners, not so earth-connected, us, and though bits of watering and aerating have been done we have left it too dry, i realize now, for seasons on end, and pruned at the wrong times, and Dave tried to save it by butchering one and a half of its stalks this spring but the bugs have come and are eating it and there are pods i’ve never seen on its leaves, pods that have not touched the other, healthy birch, thriving twelve feet to one side.

last night in the late dark we wandered out to the yard.  it is quiet there, in that back corner, and i let my mind play ahead brash with hope to two healthy living children playing in the shade of those three trees until i looked up at the sky and the vision was shattered by the silhouetted leaves of the runt tree, all full of holes like pinpricks, being eaten alive.  and i knew, then, that there will not be three trees just as there will never be three children.

during WWII, Dylan Thomas wrote in the poem “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, By Fire, of a Child in London,” after the first death there is no other.

i know this tree is not my child.  i know that the pests that feed upon its vulnerability are part of the natural order of things, that our neglect and hapless caretaking have not harmed the other two, that this small birch may simply have been weak, unfit, even.  but it hurts, no less, to look upon this death, to watch this one more thing i could not nurture, did not protect from harm.  and it will hurt, in the bittersweet way of blunt truth, to look into that corner of the yard in other summers and see two trees, one of each kind, their place in the yard forever slightly off-kilter without the invisible third to balance them.  the shadow tree, the first planted, will remain only as a scar of what was once loved and hoped for, invested in.

when it is gone, i will not mourn the little tree, the runt…it will go as trees go, robed as we all must be eventually in “the long friends, the grains beyond age” that Thomas called up.

but he wrote of death as a done deal, the destruction complete.  and when it is not, not yet, when the tree is still here and struggling, i mourn the runt and all it means to succumb again to the inevitability of its death.  heartbroken by its small stripped branches, my veins sing with useless tears, with the helplessness of my hands as they flail against what i do not know how to stop.

so, um…yeh.  the hospital in Halifax sent me home.

i am free, and grateful, and confused, and a little sheepish.  do you think a cervix can have Munchausen’s syndrome? or a split personality?

my doc here sent me because she can only check me manually, and she’s feeling a lot of softening and related shortening so far as she can tell.  a strong cervix should – so rumour has it – feel rather like the tip of a nose, firmish and almost cartilaginous.  mine does not.  or does, and doesn’t, and back and forth…but on Wednesday when i went for my checkup she declared it “mush,” more like an earlobe than a nose tip, lacking any structure.

i can feel the softening, the subtle but sharp twinges that i noticed but assumed were normal before all hell broke loose in my first pregnancy, the same ones that hearkened shortening and hospital bedrest when i carried O, the same ones that i thought i must be fabricating in my own neurotic brain last March when the routine ultrasound revealed my cervix disappearing at the bizarrely early mark of twelve weeks, necessitating cerclage. i feel ’em.  they’re familiar…they don’t even cause panic.  i just mark them silently, note their frequency and severity.  they are not extreme.  and by Monday, i will have had five checkups in a span of two weeks, so it is not like they are going unmonitored.

but they are being dismissed by one half of my care team, as is the concern of the other half of the cross-provincial partnership.  because of ye olde stitch of steel up there millimetres from my bladder, all this softening doesn’t mean anything.  or so says Halifax.  they don’t even check the softening, so uninterested are they in texture, in whether i resemble a nose or an ear or a green alligator.  they are numbers people.  their magical dildo wand does not lie.

and according to the ultrasound evidence clearly provided by said dildo wand, my cervix was nearly a normal 4 cm long yesterday.

i try to imagine the look that must have crossed my face when this shocking (and fabulous) news was delivered.  i suspect i looked rather like some poor sot who’s just woken from a dream wherein he’d discovered himself onstage, naked, in a play he’d never learned the lines for, as part of an exam he’d never studied for, and unexpectedly eight months pregnant to boot.  the dreaming self feels trapped, helpless, afraid.  the waking man is befuddled and bewildered by the sudden change of states, but damn happy to give his head a shake and return to the status quo of mundane reality.

i am home.  i am relieved, beyond measure, to return to the relatively comfortable status of couch troll. but i am still a bit groggy from the dream, from all the drama.

i see my doc here again Monday.   i don’t know what to expect.  i have tried, so hard, to be patient and passive…to sit tight and trust my caregivers.  but i do not know if i can keep riding this emotional roller coaster of preparing to leave O behind, preparing myself for the terror of another micropreemie, preparing myself to weather the summer in a hospital that – all the other nights spent in there aside – is still and will forever be imprinted on me as the place where my child died.  i don’t know if i can handle this kind of mindfuck every week, not when each time i pack it gets harder, and not when it keeps being a bloody false alarm that one doc rings and the other dismisses.  living on orange alert is a wearying, exhausting thing.  i do not want to keep bouncing like a pingpong ball between dire prognoses and “oh, you’re fine.”  i want to be fine.  i want this baby to be fine.  but i am starting to wonder if perhaps we don’t all have a bad case of teh crazy, instead.

maybe this whole circus is some strange fabrication that my apparently-imaginative cervix has concocted to relieve the boredom of pelvic rest.  maybe my doc here is secretly pulling for some other contestant in the Miss Cervix Universe ’08 pageant and is trying to sabotage me.  maybe i’m dreaming.  these seem like rational explanations, from where i’m sitting lying…just as rational as my cervix gaining a gorgeous three entire centimetres in 24 hours, much as i don’t want to appear ungrateful for the apparent miracle of the latter.  but it’s weird, folks.

in any case, if i am a loon i’m a loon whose carcass is happily back on its own couch, and appreciative – if embarrassed – about all the kind messages of support and love that were utterly unnecessarily sent its way.  except, well, they did make me feel awfully nice.  really, very, awfully, nice.

as you were.  nothing to see here.

we leave for Halifax first thing tomorrow.

the wheel has turned again.  i can feel my cervix leaving the building, softening, losing interest in its task.  so we go for safe-keeping, for measurement and steroids, to be four floors from the best NICU east of Montreal rather than four hours.  if i were a gambling man, i’d bet on me staying for awhile.  my doctor mentioned i might want to bring my things.

i tried to be extra careful this past week, tried to look at the cool of this shuttered house and its green yard and the cat and the boy and the man i share it with as a playground of freedoms…a broad horizon, compared to the alternative.  i tried not to chafe, not to putter, not to allow myself just one more little privilege to do.  but i suspect the freedom to make those choices is about to be rescinded.  and i understand it is for the best, know better than anyone how far i would go if need be to try to ensure a safe arrival for this little one, this one my body shelters and threatens, all at the same time.  i want to do right by her, and i will go.

and still the light pours in yellow on the white French door in the long June twilight and i kiss Oscar good night and sorrow to leave…afraid that change and chance will somehow fail to deposit me back in this place, this summer’s night of now, ever again.

my boy fell asleep tonight like a small, curly-headed rock.

he and his father spent what must have been half of this true first weekend of summer running in the yard.   it’s the first time it’s been genuinely warm here…i know the rest of you have been melting, in more southerly climes, but i seriously only packed away the sweaters last week.  summer comes every year to the east coast of Canada like a shock…we draw out dampness and chill well into June, begin to lament and moan that decent weather will never come, and then…snap!  suddenly it’s beautiful out and acres of terrifyingly pasty Scottish and Irish-descended flesh is bared, en masse, to the public eye in a dazzling display of blue-veined wonder.  sunglasses are recommended if one wishes to brave the glare at the beach.  so is a thermal wetsuit, for that matter…but the freezing temperature of our waters is not my problem this year.  this year, my yard is my oyster, enclosed and enforced, and only those who venture into my lair must endure the shiny pallor of my tender, unexercised thighs.  bless their hearts.

Oscar is too young yet to notice that the yard is, perhaps, not entirely a complete and magic kingdom unto itself.  or perhaps it is, and it is only this year that i will be pinned, by circumstance and lack of alternatives, into taking notice.  certainly for Dave and O it seems to suffice.  they played kickball…Oscar learned to kick just this weekend and all attempts warrant a very intense goose-step, making him resemble a tiny mid-century soldier with eleven-inch legs, commandeering his yellow beachball about the property.  they somersaulted on the lawn.  they played up-down…wherein Oscar beetles up and down the two-degree-grade hill between our yard and the one next door, shouting “up!”, “down!” as he goes, pell-mell.  the subtleties of the game escape me, but watching a man in his thirties, perhaps a few years and as many pounds from the heighth of his athletic glories but as focused and intense about anything he does as the most disciplined, competitive pentathlete, sprint up and down a hill barely visible to the naked eye some hundred-ought times to the tune of a toddler was…charming.  and rather entertaining.

they climbed into the hammock Dave had suspended from a tree.  they repeatedly visited the marvel of the hose on the side of the house.  and they played airplane, my son hurtling through the air, laughter echoing in the blue blue sky.

i watched, sidelined.  i felt guilty, not being able to play, not being able to take my share in the parenting, in the fun, in the strange mix of it all that is both joy and responsibility at once.  but then i remembered…i don’t particularly like running.  or ball-chasing.  or most of the other physical delights a backyard offers…hence the reason i’ve never really enjoyed mine much before.  which is not to say i wouldn’t enjoy these things with Oscar…i think i might.  maybe.  i hope i get to, next year, and the year after, with two little laughing creatures zinging madly across the grass.  and sure, i realized, it would be nice to be able to do more, nice to not be sitting here with my leg muscles turning to jelly.  but it is still nice, this absently planting petunias into a pot on the back deck while half-reclined, watching my son and his father exhaust each other.  i am home, with the people i love.  the baby is still safely inside.  and all i have to do is sit, and watch.  the livin’ is easy.

even if i could do a hundred things with a Sunday, i wouldn’t have changed today.  when i am old, if i get to be old, i hope my memory retains the sight of that little boy and that grown one, giggling and panting their way around the young trees in this small backyard, with the June sky open behind them.

one hundred years ago today, a woman who would be known to posterity as L.M. Montgomery, a spinster in her thirties living in a rural farmhouse belonging to relatives, received a package in the mail.  it was the first edition of her first novel, titled Anne of Green Gables.  it went through five printings by fall of that year, and became a bestseller, with a longevity that would have stunned its author.  she did not live to see it transform the pastoral island that was her home into a red-headed orphan industry for the tourists from Japan and Romania and Tennessee who flock here every summer to lap up raspberry cordial and handmade soaps and cheap tshirts with the lead character’s freckled likeness stamped upon them.  she did not live to see the quiet Cavendish corner cemetery road become the site of the town’s first stoplight, with a Madame Tussaud’s knock-off across the road and her own grave tarted up sometimes like Jim Morrison’s at Père-Lachaise, only with more Hello Kitty, less whisky.

it must have come in brown paper, that first edition.  i imagine her unwrapping it, gazing at it with a sort of amused disbelief.

in the same tiny province, some miles away, a little girl celebrated her fourth birthday on the same day Maud Montgomery marked her own birth as an author.  i do not have to imagine the girl, as there is a faded sepia snapshot, disappearing more each year, of she and her friend Doris at a table set for tea.  there is a cloth on the table, with lace edging, and a white bow half as big as the birthday girl’s head holds back black curls that spill, as if coaxed, behind small, round shoulders.  the girl sits, clutching a doll, looking into the middle distance with the timid Mona Lisa of a smile that remained hers for nearly ninety-six years.  her black-booted feet perch demurely on the chair rung.  the plate of cookies appears to belong entirely to Doris, whose face is pinched and gazes directly into the camera, pigeon-toed Mary Janes kicking.  both girls wear puffed sleeves.

i know that Doris and the birthday girl lived across the street from each other nearly all their lives, well into their nineties.  i remember Doris myself, a tiny, gentle woman, bird-like and brown, who lived with another elderly lady as “the Missies Tait and Matheson” all through my childhood and my growing-up, in a yellow house with a goldfish pond in the back garden.  one day late in my teens a light dawned and i began to wonder if Doris and her friend were as quiet and conventional as they seemed…but i did not ask.  sapphic was not a word that tree-lined street seemed acquainted with. in staring the fierce four-year-old Doris in the face, in the photo, i wonder again, and smile back at the faded girl and all the unspoken mysteries that mark the century between us now.

the girl who turned four that day a hundred years ago was her mother’s eldest living child, though her father had a much-older daughter from a first marriage, who’d been whisked down to the Boston States upon her own mother’s death.  and there had been twins from the girl’s parents’ own marriage, boy and girl, born too soon and gone in the year or two before the birthday celebrant’s safe arrival.  there would be one more sibling, three years down the road; a three-pound boy child also born too early, kept in the oven in a shoebox, fed with an eye dropper.  in between the girl’s birth and his, i presume losses, miscarriages, other premature arrivals.  but like Doris and the older half-sister, they are mysteries, their absence now swallowed by time.

i wonder, wryly, if the imprints of our lives are writ for us in the leaves of family Bibles, patterns repeating themselves until they work their purpose out, or until medicine becomes so modern that their weakness is eradicated.  when i was a child, i knew no one else who was the elder half-sister, far away, who watched siblings grow up like distant cousins with a father to spend their birthdays with.  when my firstborn died, i knew no one else who had borne and lost her child, knew no one who inexplicably tended to premature delivery.  and yet there they were, these doppelgangers shaped like me, crumbling in old ink on the family tree.  i do not believe in destinies, and yet i am pleased, strangely comforted, to find them foreshadowing me, as if in continuity perhaps there is something meaningful, something more than simple waste and sorrow.

the birthday girl’s unborn brother would, in his late thirties, of course, become father to my mother.  and he would die, too young, and by the time of my birth the girl would be a nearly seventy-old childless widow who had raised her niece and would help her niece raise me.  i called her my grandmother, and every year on the twentieth of June we celebrated, our small left-over family, and every year the expression that peeked out in pictures from the face of the birthday girl grown old was that same prim, self-contained almost-smile that hid a heart made of pansies and crocuses.

in L.M. Montgomery’s novel, the orphan Anne comes, rather by accident, to stay with an upright, rather dour farm woman and her shy bachelor brother.  the dance of the three, between spirit and indulgence and the Protestant work ethic, taking in the kinship of the young with old and the pull of societal shoulds and responsibility against imagination and the sentimentality of a child who has understood disappointment early, all form the web of the novel, its structure, its imprint.  it was my first literary model for identity, for understanding the shape of one’s life by seeing it reflected in pages, long before i ever looked in the family Bible for other incarnations.  it may have been just because we were three, my mother, my grandmother, and i, and rooted in the same cultural impulses Montgomery understood and subverted, cunningly, that the three of us played out our roles almost like a parody sometimes, my mother serious and practical and concerned that i be tamed into goodness, my grandmother less directly responsible and thus more free to cultivate mischief and sentiment, and more open, in her shy way, to what the love of a child brought into her life in those late years.  whatever the reason, in Anne i found that first shock of recognition, the first realisation that patterns exist in human interaction, the first taste of meaning larger than the mundanity of my own life.

i gather that no one bought my grandmother a first edition of Anne of Green Gables for her fourth birthday; i don’t suppose they were even in the stores yet.  certainly if one was ever owned, it disappeared, another lost mystery, possibly sold to the auction man like my mother’s 1959 Barbie and a hundred other maybe-treasures of the attic that got cleaned out every few years when money got tight because my grandmother’s shyness and politeness made her the most vulnerable touch on the street, and she never did learn that the old would come back in value where arborite and paperbacks might not.

but it was her, i know, who bought me the book first, when i was seven or eight.  and it was her, every summer, who paid to take me to the theatre where the wondrous hidden orchestra would warm up with scales and the lights would dim and my breath would catch and then Anne would strut on stage in all her musical glory and a bright red wig.  and i would sit high up in my seat in my most old-fashioned dress singing along, fervently hoping and praying that some unfortunate actor would trip and fall and require replacement and some knowing director would peer out amongst the audience and see me there with my brown bowl cut and my puffed sleeves and say, you, little girl, you. yes.  come up here.  i did not know about understudies then, only that i longed to shine.  i do not think my grandmother was well-versed in the ways of theatre, either, this being the only show we ever went to.  but had she known what i was imagining there in my seat, she would have patted my hand as sure as sure, and said, well, i don’t know, honey, i can’t see how they’d pick anyone but you.  and i would have beamed, knowing someone saw me as i truly was, and she would have smiled the same Mona Lisa smile that she had at four years old.

one hundred years ago today.

the Wheel of Fortune is a lucky card in a Tarot deck, so long as it is not reversed.  in some incarnations of the deck, the wheel bears a circling sphinx, representing the riddle of fortune; in others human figures ride the wheel, some rising with the tide of luck, others falling.  my favourite version, though, is the one with the asses and jesters clinging to the wheel as it turns, riding helplessly, almost rueful.  they make me smile, in recognition.  when i look in the mirror these days, i see a donkey in a three-belled hat, a fool spinning at the mercy of the fates.

the only trick is to tell which way the wheel is turning.

a week ago, i was told all was magically and surprisingly stable in the cervical department, and that i would be home – unexpectedly, gratefully home, eating cherries rather than hospital gruel – for the month of June.

on Monday, my hold on the Miss Cervix Universe ’08 crown got shakier, as did i.  my doc here reported shortening, softening…and we talked of steroid protocols and unplanned trips back to Halifax and stricter bedrest.  i looked around for evidence of sabotage from other, jealous contestants, but could see no one.  only bebe, head down and pushing.  and the harsh sounds and lights and the sheer fear of the NICU came flooding back to me, the team of yellow-gowned strangers rushing into your birthing room at the sound of an alarm, STAT, your tiny child whisked away in a trail of blood and fluid as you wait, helpless and unable to follow, and the clatter of the last-ditch oscillating ventilator as it tries to do what the child’s lungs cannot.  and i quaked and brayed my terror, remembering, projecting forward.

today, i went back to my doc here for one more check before packing for Halifax.  i knew baby had flipped, could tell by the respite of pressure, but had no sense whether that in itself would be enough to turn the wheel back, stabilize my fragile cervix back to the firm wunderkind that caused my perinatologist to brag about me to an entire waiting room.

for the moment…it has.

i have less cervix than a week ago, but enough that there is no real worry, no cause to flee to the region’s neonatal Mecca.  i have firmed up again.  and so i stay put for another week barring any further signs of pressure.  and i will eat cherries and jingle the bells on my hat, and though my card in the Tarot deck has always been the Queen of Swords, sharp and poised between insight and sorrow, i will hope instead to draw the World card of the major arcana…itself symbolic of a cervix, of a successful birth and conclusion to a journey, wherein patience pays off and the Queen at the centre of it all becomes a teacher and traveller, celebratory, complete.  i will hope that the wheel – and the baby – do not reverse again, and literally and figuratively head back downward, at least not too soon.

shuffle deck.  jingle hat.  stroke donkey ears.  wait.

Father’s Day has always been my least favourite holiday on the Hallmark calendar.  my father spent my childhood thousands of miles away, a voice on a phone, a series of semi-regular notes and letters in a cursive script round and beautiful.   he was, always, my father.  he was not a dad, though, never a daddy – neither rulesetter nor guide of my heart nor anything else the painfully gendered and whitewashed selection of Father’s Day cards at the gift shop have ever suggested he might have been, had he wanted to.  i have called him by his first name since i could speak.  every year for the past twenty-five or so, i have gone looking for a Father’s Day card for this man with whom civilities have always been observed with some pleasantness, and have struggled to scrounge up something that does not use the words “Dad” or “Daddy”, that does not refer to the great wisdom he imparted or patience he showed or money he doled out at my every whim, and yet that neither diminishes him to some couch potato stereotype ineptly blowing up a bbq, nor makes fart jokes.  every year, i am baffled to discover that such a card does not exist, except occasionally when The Far Side saves my ass.  this year, i had to resort to a card that ran along the lines of “i didn’t get you a bad tie, i just got you this card.”   i was rather shamed.  i love my father, for all…well, for all.  i think he deserves a better card than that.  but there was nothing else there that did not ring ridiculous, that did not cue the tumbleweeds to come blowing through the holes in the scenery, making them obvious, even cruel.

so i didn’t try to get Dave a card.  if our local supplier doesn’t carry much for the post-divorce family, finding something touchingly appropriate for “my not-quite husband on one of those fake holidays we hate anyway and have loathed particularly since we spent our first versions thereof as parents without a living child and thus realized just how wretched and contrived and surreal the whole shebang is” seemed, well, unlikely.  but i did let him sleep in, and made him an omelet and coffee.  and i hope somewhere in there i said thank you to him, because Oscar is too young to say it yet, too young to know that life doesn’t always come this way, with a dad who is willing to love you up close and everyday and with patience and joy in your accomplishments, who is able to be present and steady, who is able to teach you to laugh at yourself and at him, too, and who will love you without reservation.  but i am grateful on O’s behalf that he has this kind of dad, more grateful than i can say.

and as i watched the two of them play today, daddy and boy, i realized i never fully knew how much i was missing all those years, growing up for all cultural intents and purposes without a father.  i am grateful for that too, because the twinge of comprehension does not cut nearly so deeply as it would have had i not come to the recognition here and now, as a part of something beautiful and strangely healing, this partnership and gift that parenting is, for us, when we are paying attention.

no angst today.  we’re all out.  i made 24 weeks today, safely past yesterday’s milestone of having had my water break at 23w6d the first time around, necessitating airlift and uncovering all sorts of previously unanticipated complications…

so today i’m just breathing, grateful, good.

and in celebration, i’m doing laundry.  because i really AM that much of a party animal, yep. and because it’s a sunny, windy day, and Dave put up a clothesline a few weeks ago, and the ten foot walk to the back deck from the washing machine is a fine form of exercise for those who have no musculature left.  and because this bedrest thing has meant there’s been a slight, erm, build-up of laundry in our home of late and now that i’m allowed to do a little, i feel it’s incumbent upon me to save the hamper from utterly self-destructing under its own weight.

but also because i want to do a little public service announcement.  i think there’s probably little so misunderstood in the entire parent-sphere (blog or real-life) as cloth diapers. and having just laundered some, i’d like to counter some of the rumours.

i keep hearing about how they’re hard, how they create a lot of work.  i can see the reasons behind those assumptions – my own mother, who owned a total  of twelve cloth prefolds during my entire pre-potty-trained existence and used ’em, day in and day out, with a wringer washer, believes Pampers are some kind of miracle of Jesus.  i get that.  i’m not above disposables – we use them sometimes when we’re travelling, and they have their place in my canon of Reasons i’m Happy it’s Not 1970.  but what i want to lay out here, just in case there’s anybody out there waffling on the fence about diapering options…cloth is actually no big deal.  not a lot of work, not a lot of gross, not a lot of waste water.  seriously.  it does seem to end up sounding like a lot of work nearly every single time i hear about it in media or on discussion boards or at baby showers, unless the person speaking is some kind of earth mother goddess type…but i call bullshit babyshit on that.  it’s a myth that keeps us comfortable, societally, keeps us consuming, keeps us thinking we’ve got it good.  but it’s a myth that makes a mountain out of the molehill of work actually involved in cloth diapering, and a myth that ends up perpetuating a fair amount of, um…waste.

this week, as public radio helped me while away the tedium of collating the final report for the project i’ve worked on all year, there was a show on about some Canadian dude who’s gone to England to recycle that nation’s disposable diapers, because a) Canadians aren’t nearly so interested in the whole recycling thing and b) England only has nine years max of landfill available for nappies before, well, babies are just going to have to stop pooping or people are going to have to change their practices.  sometimes i suspect all this space we have around us here in North America doesn’t exactly channel our better angels.  in any case, the companion piece to Mr. Diaper Recycler was a panel of three moms from across this country discussing the diapering choices they’d made.  and while all were making efforts to be greenish in various aspects of their lives, the discourse around diapers was pretty familiar.  the mom using cloth was a serious eco-hippie, kudos to her, who’s also used elimination communication with her kids and had them totally trained and probably growing patchouli and playing guitar by the age of two.  the mom who used disposables had intended otherwise during pregnancy but got overwhelmed by a colicky baby and now “just doesn’t think about it and doesn’t feel guilty about it.”  and the mom using compostable g-diapers mentioned the waste of water resources that go into cloth in any case.

of all of them, the one i identified most with personally was b…the overwhelmed one.  i’m not the natural mama sort, not by nature.  when it became clear that i had a child intent on crying and not sleeping for the first three and a half months of his little life, i struggled.  i was not a pretty sight.  and we’d been sent home from the NICU with a crapload of preemie and newborn Pampers, so i used ’em and into the landfill they went, and i felt a wee bit nasty about that but seriously, when you’re not sleeping, eco-footprints can go screw themselves, especially if you don’t see an equally simple option at hand.  when the Pampers ran out, O was about two months old and coming on ten pounds and starting to look like he might not swim in the prefolds and wraps i’d bought…so i tried them.  and they leaked, and it was a bit of a disaster and i very gravely contemplated throwing the whole venture into the landfill just out of spite.

it was mostly the fact that i had a friend who’d used cloth successfully that kept me going.  this wasn’t just some crazy thing that nobody i knew actually did.   i had someone to ask, to learn from.  and so just in case any of you might need that person in order to give cloth a try, assuming you even you want to, here’s me uh…being that person?  or volunteering to try, at least.

there are a few things i needed in order to be able to use cloth as much as i have and as long.  most important was a washer (and preferably a dryer too, though i try to line/drip dry a few loads a week to save energy).  had that washer not been conveniently located between my kitchen and my back deck, it would have been a more daunting workload, for sure.  the second most important, particularly once i went back to work, was a sitter willing to try cloth.  i’ve been lucky on both counts.  but mostly what i needed was just to work out a system that i could keep simple.

here’s what we use:

1) we used prefolds and wraps for the first six months or so because i’d been given a bunch of prefolds and i’m cheapish.  i never did find great wraps but all of them starting working better and leaking less once i started washing with Arm & Hammer green, because we have hard water here and “free”-type detergents just add to the build-up on diapers.

2) around six months, i retired the prefolds and ordered pocket diapers: eight Fuzzibunz mediums and six Happy Heinies from an online Canadian company.  pocket diapers are brightly coloured covers which you stuff an insert into – we got some terry “Thirsties” inserts and some hemp.  Thirsties have been better inserts for us (O is a heavy wetter), though a double-stuff with one of each work great at night.  all of them work best if they go in the dryer at least every second or third wash.  Oscar is still wearing the Fuzzibunz mediums – when he turned a year i ordered twelve size larges as well, as he was beginning to outgrow the the Happy Heinies.  all but one of our stash of twenty Fuzzibunz have held up beautifully, despite hard and constant use.  they’re a little bulky, kind of like having two disposables on at once, but are cut slim between the legs unlike some cloth options i’ve seen, so they’ve never impacted his walking or comfort, just give him a cute little bubble butt that is occasionally hard to get those pesky toddler skinny-jeans over.

3) Kushies makes biodegradable liners, which i put in most of Oscar’s diapers (especially if a poop is due).  when i change him, the liner and its contents just flush away.  if there’s anything runny that’s gone beyond the liner’s borders, i swish the whole diaper in the toilet while flushing.  two flushes max per poopy diaper, if that.  my hands seldomly get poop on them, but if they do it’s no more than they would in an infant blow-out.  i wash them after, or use Purell.

4) i have a green $5 plastic bucket with a snap-on lid in my bathroom.   wet and dirty diapers go in there.  i do not soak them.  i just rinse the bucket every second wash or so with water and a bit of baby shampoo, in the tub.  if i remember.

5)  we also have a purple “wet bag” (also ordered online, about $12) which goes to the sitter with Oscar everyday, along with 4 or 5 pre-stuffed diapers.  the stuffing and packing in his daycare bag takes max 4 minutes – his sitter sends home the wet bag (which is fabulous and holds all smell in despite having been washed nearly daily for the past 14 months) in his daycare bag, and it gets opened and the contents dumped directly in the washer or in the diaper bucket, if we’re not washing that night.

the system that works for us, basically, is that most nights all the day’s diapers (4-6, depending) and O’s pajamas from the night before and any underwear or socks or tshirts lying around the house, plus any sheets or towels or baby facecloths that need washing, all get dumped in the washer with the wet bag.  all together.  i do one single large load of wash on hot, with a cold rinse, a small amount of detergent, and (at least once a week) a shot of vinegar.  when Oscar was smaller his clothes got washed in there too, as they were frequently rather bodily-fluid-stained themselves.  mine too.  clothes and diapers come out clean and sweet-smelling.  they go in the dryer or get hung to dry.  the wet bag hangs out for the night and goes back in the daycare bag in the morning.  we do this wash four or five times a week, and end up with clean socks and underwear and whatever else in the process.   particularly when Oscar was smaller and making a mess of clothes all the time, it was literally no more wash than i would otherwise have been doing anyway.  and there’s never a stink build-up, because we don’t leave them lying around for more than 36 hours or so.

i dunno.  it’s taken me four times longer to write it all down than it would to do it.  and maybe it’s not very convincing…or maybe it’s just not for you in any case, and that’s your business.  but just, please…don’t believe it the next time you hear cloth diapers are so hard, or that they’re just as bad as disposables because of the water usage (unless, perhaps, you live in drought-stricken Australia and never actually do laundry).  the truth is, our society just hasn’t done a very good job of supporting people in learning to use them.  even with me on bedrest, they’ve added up to perhaps a half-hour of work per week for Dave & i over the last few months.  we don’t spend money on diapers (or haven’t since i got the last twelve on Ebay for $160 thirteen months ago).  we never run out.  we’re not even doing a lot of wash that we wouldn’t otherwise be doing.

just sayin’.  there’s a learning curve, for sure.  but if anybody wants some assvice or some support trying to get there, you are welcome to pick my brain until the cows come home.  because i do think that financially and ecologically they’re a worthwhile option, and one i’d love to see more families trying rather than being intimidated out of it before they ever even get started.