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i may have, erm, mentioned that i went to see Leonard Cohen the other night.  i may have mentioned i was going in a wheelchair.  i may have made some flippant, agist cracks about how he’d probably find me more alluring that way, anyway.  and how i was gonna get me a little Children’s Wish Foundation sign that read Leonard, I – insert husky significance here, and little cartoon hearts – have a wish, wink wink, nudge nudge, and hold it up high whilst waggling my eyebrows.  pelvic rest (and our respective partners) be damned – it’s Leonard Cohen.  in town.  purrr.

he’s nearly seventy-four and yep, his hair is gray and he has a bit of a wattle and he stoops like he really does ache in the places he used to play…but oh, oh, i could overlook that for an evening. a jug of wine, a pack of smokes, and thou, Leonard. that VOICE. that poetry. that melancholic face under a gray fedora, earnest and compelling, arrogant and monkishly humble. in his words, beauty out of sorrows. in his songs, shameless celebration of the complexities of being human; the sacraments of wounding we inflict on each other and call love, religion, mythology. in my fantasy world, you could sit in front of Leonard Cohen and tell him anything – the deepest darkest, the pettiest, the saddest – and his old-world eyes would shine and say, i know. you are known. now crawl up on my lap and let me worship you. and then there would be nothing to hide from, anymore.

i had a friend in university, a male friend, who was convinced that Leonard Cohen was a dirty old misogynist pig. and i used to look at this friend and smile, and think, and that, dear Kevin, is why you are so utterly single. not because i’m into misogyny – i’m not. but Kevin missed the point. Leonard Cohen, with all his talk of women and sex and stereotypes, is the man who taught me the dignity of physicality, of sexuality; taught me that the cerebral and the poetic need the body, too. his writing is full of muses, sure, and muses do not make a full personhood to aspire to. but i wouldn’t have minded being one of his muses, nonetheless: his muses have power, are agents, make choices and are instruments of their own complicated destinies. he loves them, richly and without romance – and they are truly women, not ingenues or Barbies. his muses always have their own side to the story.

so it was with all this pent-up one-sided intimacy between me and Leonard that i rolled into the concert the other evening.   Dave dropped my friend and i at the stage door, so he could park – my friend went about procuring the wheelchair the commissionaire had said would be available.  it was.  we went through the entertaining little production wherein i transitioned magically before said commissionaire’s eyes from hale, hearty chick to the actual person wanting the wheelchair, but he adjusted with remarkable grace.  then we wheeled into the crowd.

and i swear not one person in that full house, all gathered about the lobby, mingling, electric with the ‘pinch me’ shock of an artist of Cohen’s stature and reclusivity performing here, made eye contact with me.  in this town i grew up in, at a concert where i spotted forty casual acquaintances without even trying, not one saw me.

it’s no affront to be rendered invisible when you’ve chosen the chair as a way of bending bedrest rules…when at the end of the concert you can sing out, “Praise Leonard! Hallelujah!  I’ve been healed!” and rise from your chair and walk, self-consciously but with no pain, no struggle, to the car that will return you to your couch and your temporary invalid status.  it is amusing, even, a social experiment of sorts.

but it is a hell of a lesson, too.

i learned from Leonard Cohen years ago that the body cannot be left out of the equation, that dignity is in being seen and embraced for all you are, raced and gendered and sized and abled and damaged and sexual and cerebral and individual and role, all at once. everyone deserves that dignity.

but the number of times, always in pregnancy, when i’ve been out and about in a wheelchair and realized that only kids are meeting my eyes…i don’t think we’re getting that message, as a society.

just a note, folks…the woman in the wheelchair trying to scoot by without rolling over your feet?  she may be ripe with designs on Leonard Cohen that would knock your socks off.  she may not.  she is often rendered so invisible as to be the anti-muse.  but she, i can assure you, still has her own side to the story, and is worth a look, a moment.  there is nothing to hide from…i swear.

they’re still there, gathered in overstuffed chairs and a greater cacophony of chintz patterns and floral fabrics than i ever imagined could exist in one room, possibly with a fire going, talking.  and talking.  and talking.  some more than others, though (ahem) perhaps the quieter souls are getting their turn more frequently now that i’m out of the way.  certainly, everyone is getting a better shot at more dessert now that i’ve made my exit, though i don’t know who’s nibbling up everyone else’s cake crumbs anymore.

Friday was a big day for me.  the ultrasound and the relief of good news and the shock of actually, possibly having a little girl – we were told Finn was a girl, mind you, so we won’t be entirely convinced until she’s safely here…but i actually got left alone with the u/s machine for five minutes and after the hundred-odd scans i’ve had in the past three and a half years, i was rather convinced even before the doctor came in and confirmed the news – and a sunny afternoon where i got to be out and about and Dave took Oscar and i for gelato.  good times.  then, with doctor’s permission, i got to hop in the car by myself for the first time in seven long pitiful dependent weeks and i hit the highway and drove into the sunset like i was Thelma and Louise all wrapped into one, nervous and free and under my own steam.  i sang along with the stereo like i was ten years younger and it was Friday night and i was off to party with my girlfriends for a weekend, feeling like for once, all was actually maybe alright with the world.  weaving along by the ocean and little fishing villages, i didn’t feel beholden to anyone, didn’t feel like a lump on bedrest.  i felt happy, and lucky, and sort of bedazzled by the unfamiliarity of it all.

i was amazed that i didn’t run into or over anything.

i made it to the restaurant first. i waited, watching boats on the harbour and chewing my nails, like an eager suitor at the world’s biggest blind date.  and then they spilled in in a bunch, all familiar from words and pictures yet new at the same time.  how weird to know so much about people and yet so little.  how surprisingly comfortable it was, and how entertaining.  and we ate and talked and ate some more and i finished Mad‘s and everybody else’s blueberry grunt along with my own and looked down the table at one point and realized, heh, that’s Bub&Pie and that’s Thordora and they’re here together and it felt rather like suddenly finding yourself at dinner with celebrities, whose lives you know from reading about them in grocery store lineups but there they are, real and laughing.  and we cooed over Hannah’s cuddly five week old James and Kate‘s ever-charming Ben, and then i got Niobe utterly lost and when we made it to the heritage Inn where Laura Ashley and the Victorians went to die, Andrea had joined us and Cin had her hair down and her camera out and we sat up talking and drinking tea and wine and beers until 1 am, musing about what we’ll tell our kids of our wild years once they’re grown.

and did it all again the next day.   and now, gone, i can think of fifty things i wish i’d asked and i almost regret not taking any pictures of my own, except i know theirs will be better.

i liked them.  i’m not by nature a group person, sociable as i am by nature…i’m most comfortable in smaller conversations, intimate gatherings.  but this was good, surprisingly good for nearly twenty-four hours of nine women getting to know each other…sharing histories and establishing commonalities.  i liked their quirks, the personality streaks and charms and idiosyncrasies that don’t come through in writing.  i liked their warmth.  i just liked being around them, all of us different – in history and personality and opinion – but linked by this shared hobby, this penchant for words and exploration of lives.

i’m back home now, back on my couch for another fourteen weeks or so of bedrest if we can keep bebe in that long.  back to poor miserable Oscar with his cough and his ear infection and his nasty recurring rash under his eyes (eczema, anyone?).  back to hun-nee, could you get me a glass of water?  the joys.  but i’m better, more myself than i have been in a long time.  even if i wasn’t taking a wheelchair trip to see Leonard Cohen tonight, i’d be good.  they filled me up, these women, these friends, that chance to be out on my own and with them.

and they are still there and i miss them already. :)

…Bon enters stage left, peers around with puzzlement, as if expecting something to fall from the sky…

then lies down.

she smiles tentatively, then looks up again sharply, suspiciously, and scans overhead.   she bundles herself into a small ball, looking very content…but most uncertain about this odd state of affairs. 

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after my u/s appointment, at which all Down’s Syndrome markers were totally written off, baby was active and measured a healthy happy normal percentile, no uterine septum was detectable, and fluid was plentiful, my doctor came out and announced to the receptionist – and the entire waiting room – “Bonnie has a beautiful big long cervix!”

it’s not a compliment i’m accustomed to receiving in public, i will admit, but i tried to smile and preen graciously, the very picture of a Miss Cervix Universe contestant.  i begin to believe we may make it after all.

and baby looks mysteriously and amazingly like the little girl i was sure i’d never have.  consider me knocked over with a feather.  :)

….they are not departed or gone
they were waiting for me
when i said that i just can’t go on
and they brought me their comfort
and later they brought me this song…

– Leonard Cohen

yesterday afternoon, after my (lollipopless) doctor’s appointment and Oscar’s (also lollipopless, how cold is that?) trip to the audiologist where we discovered that my boy’s wee eardrums aren’t vibrating at all and are probably the reason for his delayed speech and struggles with pronunciation…and that there’s a three month waiting list for treatment…my mother and son and i clattered into my front porch.  i was thinking grumble grumble, moo moo despite the unprecedented if not terribly exciting two trips out in one day when i all but trod on a large package sitting on my door mat.  with my name on it.  postmarked “Australia.”

whee.

i ushered Oscar and Nannie in, and got O divested of boots and Nannie set up for the hour of Thomas the Tank Engine delights she was about to most graciously endure so as to allow me to do some much-needed lying down, and then i opened the mystery package.  it held a big, simple, elegant photo/scrapbook album…with photos inside.  of me.  and Oscar.  and Dave.  recent photos, entertainly captioned, against cheery backgrounds…and one, combed from the archives of the blog, of Oscar’s eleven-month old fat fingers gently touching his brother’s urn.  towards the back, more pages and scrapbooking materials waiting to be used.  inside the front cover of the album, it read To Bon, Dave, Oscar & Finn…love George, Will, Euey, & Aoife.  26/04/08.

i blinked back tears and then realized i was losing that battle and hell, i was just so damn touched and surprised and there’s been a lot of that kind of marvellous, random kindness lately and i gave up entirely and just lay there and wholeheartedly sobbed.

because this old friend of ours, half a world away, whom we haven’t laid eyes on in the three+ years since we left Korea, spent hours putting this together for me.  and sent it airmail, at no small expense, to get me started on something to do while on bedrest.  something for my children, something to pass on.  and she did this the week she herself was home recovering from a D&C after the miscarriage of their much-wanted third baby.

i felt very humbled.  and very grateful, and blessed in the people i’ve been lucky enough to connect with in my life.

just as i felt when a few weeks ago or so the delivery dude showed up at my door with an Amazon package, again with my name on it, and i thought strange, i haven’t ordered anything from Amazon but heck, maybe it’s a happy mistake, and i opened the box to find two fabulous, stimulating, challenging books inside courtesy of Jen, who just kinda thought i might need something to read these days.

just as i felt a day or two later when another box showed up from London, from an old, old friend who’d read my post about losing the bracelet Dave gave me, and had sent me another, one that reminds her of the beach she & Dave & i used to hang about on, lifetimes ago…and had stuffed the box with Marks & Spencer candies and a pair of Wonder Woman underoos, i shit you not, in grown-up size!  i coveted Wonder Woman underoos all through my childhood, dudes.  i am now living the dream.

back a few weeks before that, when i lamented about trying to stuff Oscar’s cute little round bumtail into skinny jeans, Mad mentioned there was a sale on elastic-waist pants at a store in Sleepytown, and what size did i want?  and she just…sent them.  just like she sent cookies before Christmas, homemade gingerbread, after my miscarriage when i was slow and swamped with sorrowing.

i’ve gotten a lot of emails lately, from friends far away just catching me up with their lives, readers delurking to say nice things, longlost friends popping up out of the woodwork.

jeebus, people.  you make an old couch troll feel…nice.  and loved.  and kind of embarrassed.

because i don’t really do stuff like that so well.  i don’t make stuff for people, or buy things and put them in the mail.  i don’t send so many of those personal emails (or responses) as i’d like to.  it’s a near-lost art, in my world…one sacrificed to delusions of my own busy-ness, i think.  my own self-importance.  and i am ashamed, suddenly, of all the times i’ve thought “oh, i’d like to do x for so and so!” and then promptly forgotten, because x doesn’t fall in the top five list of priorities that anal moi is trying to organize and accomplish and keep moving at all times, even from my couch…because that’s how i live my life, insular except for these words here.

to Georgia, and Jen, and E, and Mad…and all of you with your generosity of words and humour and support…all of you who’ve befriended me and been good to me even though i’ve never sent you squat…thank you.  a big wet thank you, from the bottom of my little grinch heart.  because you’re helping, very much.  helping me stay mostly buoyant, helping me feel less alone, helping me remember how grateful i am to be on this couch in the first place, carrying this child i’ve wanted so badly.

…and in case anyone is inspired to send more bedrest delights, Dave asks me to mention how much i like beer.  hmm.  sometimes he’s not to be trusted, that one.

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this rush of positivity isn’t just the result of largesse and kindness…i also have more to look forward to in the next 72 hours than i’m accustomed to in, erm, 72 much longer measures of time.  tomorrow, we head to Halifax for my 20 week ultrasound, where we get to see the baby, which always makes me all sweet & squishy inside even if i have had, oh, two hundred odd utrasounds over the past three years.  tomorrow, we may even find out if i shall, as i suspect, become the thing i never ever imagined i’d look forward to with any kind of anticipation…mother to three boys.  yikes.  and yet…okay.  and thrilling just in the proximity to the big revelation.

also tomorrow, if the hospital lets me, i should get to dine with me Blog’Er mateys and the Upper Canadians bold enough to join us.  i’ve only ever met two bloggers before, and love them both.  tomorrow i meet seven more.  and we get to hang out all weekend.  and they’re going to get drunk and be waaaay more entertaining than those voices in my head that usually talk me through my days, so i’m psyched.

then…and i am still pinching myself on this one…on Sunday, we return home, where two old and dear and not-nearly-often-enough-seen friends will arrive at my house, and we will all head out to see Leonard Cohen.  Leonard Freaking Cohen.  who hasn’t toured in fourteen years.  who is playing in my teeny-weeny hometown, more generally reserved for such lesser events as Trooper reunions and high school plays.  i think Leonard knew i needed a little cheering up, that foxy old charmer.  i’ll be showing up in a wheelchair, but Leonard, baby…i’ll have bells on.

feeling pretty lucky, folks.  i’m betting Monday David Bowie shows up on my doorstep with cupcakes.  y’all are welcome to come watch. ;)

looky, looky mommy…that lady’s gone shack-wacky!

this is what the shrill little kiddie voices in my head have started saying.  it worries me.  when even the most tender and inexperienced of your personal imaginary voices notice that you’re stark raving mad a little peculiar these days, perhaps you need to get out more.

i’ve become grumpy, impatient, like an old codger in a home.  if i had a meal tray, i’d rap on it with my spoon and pester the nurse about why my mashed potatoes are cold and where are my damn peas and didn’t i ask to go out for a smoke or wait, was that yesterday?  i can’t remember.  the world has closed down around me, and the minutiae loom, suddenly irritating.  i am a Prussian officer, demanding that Dave empty that dishwasher now and stop dawdling about it and why won’t Oscar lie still so i can change the sodden rag that his diaper has become and doesn’t he know i can’t chase after him and is that fucking dishwasher empty yet?  if i have to do it myself, i will, you know.

but i shouldn’t, not really, and there’s the rub.  those who can, do.  those who can’t, harp. or rail at the dislocation and incompetence and sense of burden that overwhelms them sometimes…caught between the semblance of normal life still tangible around the house and the shifted reality underneath, snagged at the limits of their own patience.  there is no stress release here, no casual encounter, no random accomplishment, no exercise, no sex, no nothing.  and it is the helplessness, i think, that is spreading what’s left of me thin and raw…the subconscious realization that as we close in on twenty weeks we cross into the Danger Zone and are cast, supplicant, on the mercy of luck and fortune.

it gets wearing, and wearying, this lack of agency.

i do have a doctor’s appointment this morning, ending the nearly four-week drought between official visits.  seeing as i’m watched by two teams in two separate provinces, it’s by far the longest i’m likely to go in this entire pregnancy.

i hope i get a lollipop while i’m there.

it would be easy to say my mother never really knew her mother.

she was an only child, my mom, born to parents in their hardscrabble thirties in a postwar town that never quite boomed. her folks had long before given up on babies, but she came anyway, a surprise, a little black-haired come-by-chance with her father’s square brow, one of a thousand Barbaras born the same year. in the few pictures that exist of her first years, she gazes out from the stark b&w image under crooked bangs, an imp with curious eyes and a Mona-Lisa half-smile.

her father was a landscaper, a seasonal worker in years before there was employment insurance to carry families like theirs through winter. they lived in the old family home with its coal furnace, and even into my childhood lost pebbles of decades-old coal littered the gravel driveway, relics of a dirtier, smokier time. all i know of her mother is that the Doris Day fifties passed her by: she worked, this woman who was my unknown grandmother, in a time when it was a little bit shameful for a married mother to have to work. she had no education, she smoked cigarettes, and was the only female ancestor of mine who ever towered above 5’3. she was raised Catholic, my mother’s father Protestant; when they married, her family disowned her.

they had a rocky, loud marriage, apparently. disappointment on both sides, stress, conflicting temperments. my mother shared a room with her mother; her father had his own lair in the house. he was a packrat, and had once been a scholar…in the winters, off work, i suppose he would have been his daughter’s caregiver, so that unkempt, book-laden room is the only one my mother describes with any clarity from that era. mostly, she remembers going outside a lot, roaming. but even today, strangely acontextual quotes from Shakespeare leap from her mouth at odd times, chants five decades and more old, offered up like proverbs or incantations. the ironies of quoting Polonius have never troubled my mother’s self-image excessively. the lines are family jewels, and when she unwraps them her eyes shine and the little girl in them looks on her father again, lord of the book pile.

when my mother was six, a month after she started school, she got pneumonia. in those days it was a serious thing, taking months in the recovery and still claiming lives every season. but her mother could not stay home with her; her father, presumably, was not equipped to play nursemaid. the little girl was trundled across the street to the home of her aunt and uncle, a childless couple in their mid-forties. the uncle had a stable, middle-class job at the phone company. the aunt did not work. my mother, little Barbara, stayed with them until almost summer, losing a year of school, but recovering her health. she had her own room for the first time in her life. she was carried across the street to her own house only once, at Christmas. there are more pictures of her from this year of convalescence than from all the other previous six together.

she went home, then, my mother, to a mother and father who struggled. i do not know what the homecoming was like. i do know that less than three years later she crossed the street again to take up residence in that little back room of her own, and that she never moved home again. i know that her mother was sick, by then, and that she knew her mother was sick, that her mother had collapsed one day on the sidewalk taking little Barbara downtown on some rare excursion and had been doubled over in pain, unable to get up. i know now that it was cancer, colitis gone untreated by a family too poor to pay doctors and turned deadly. i know that my mother’s mother died three days before Christmas the year my mother turned eleven, and was buried Christmas Eve. i know that the woman who i called my grandmother all my life was actually my mother’s aunt, who raised that child who came across the street with pneumonia and gave her the first safe haven she’d ever had, and loved her…and eventually me, in my turn.

but i know so little about the woman who was my mother’s mother, absent and mysterious. i wonder at the disappearance of a mother. i can see the imprint of my mother’s father on her yet, but of her mother…not even shadows. for six or more years, this woman slept beside her child…breathed beside her, must have held her, brushed her black hair. for eleven years, she watched her daughter grow. i wonder how she felt about that move across the street…the first time, and the last. i wondered if she was relieved, unburdened…or if she was ashamed of having to turn her child over to her prim older sister-in-law for care. i wonder if she ached and raged at the unfairness of it all, if in the throes of a slow and cruel death she wondered what would happen to the girl child she’d borne, or if she knew all along that somewhere she’d lost her, maybe even abandoned her herself. i wonder if she had any peace.

i wonder what remains of her, unspoken and perhaps unacknowledged, inside my mother’s skin. i wonder if my mother misses her, thinks of her today, on Mother’s Day.

i don’t know. i don’t know if it is fair to ask. and yet i think of her, and i wonder, at this strange and terrible power of motherhood to render us so vital and so helpless all at once, so indelible and yet so utterly erasable.  her name was Thisbe, my grandmother.  and loyal child that a part of me is, i do not know if i am supposed to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day, or not.

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to my mother, who has, to her credit, shaped every corner of who i am…and loved me in ways i know she never knew.

i think i know now why i blog.

the company’s good and the outlet is needed, and appreciated, sure.  but they’re not the primary reason.  turns out blogging is the only thing keeping me from having to face the stark fact that i am actually, secretly, an incoherent twit.  yep.  oh, the shame.  i blog to keep up my self-esteem, folks, to maintain the facade that i’ve actually mastered some command of my mind, heart, and the English language.  snort.

basically, i am congenitally incapable of expressing myself concisely and thoughtfully in any form other than writing.  seriously.  i’m gregarious and all, and i can chatter away and be a pretty good conversational reflector of what the other party is saying, but ask me to actually form an unprepared idea in words, out loud, in real time, to an audience…and i hem and haw and turn into that painful, stereotypical grade 9 chemistry teacher who rambled on and on in ever-pitiful and incomprehensible circles until the students were all asleep or trying to burn their ears off with Bunsen burners.

and after six weeks on bedrest, sitting in my house all day writing work emails and making small talk with, um, my cat, i’m getting worse. the raging head cold isn’t helping, either.

last week, i got to take an afternoon off of babysitting my couch and trucked off to the local CBC station to record a Mother’s Day-focused conversation with some other Maritime mummies.  i was psyched.  an outing!  a conversation!  a chance to talk about parenthood in what i hoped would be a multi-faceted way!  then i put the headset on and sat in front of the mic…and died a thousand small deaths.  my brain began flitting about aimlessly, unable to organize itself without letters and lines of text to confine it.  each question – and these were not shocking questions, folks – left me stunned, unprepared, searching desperately for a train of thought to land on.  apparently trains are running sparse in these parts.

when the interviewer asked if we’d always wanted to be parents, i answered yes, and said honestly that i remembered being twenty-nine and newly single and suddenly wondering if motherhood would ever happen for me and realizing that some part of me would never fully come to fruition if it did not.  dandy.  then, following the base rules of logic and conversation, that pesky interviewer followed up with, “oh? and what would that part of you be?”

uh…um…errr…my knee?  nope, nope, that’s not right.  focus, Bonnie, focus.

i sputtered and floundered and rambled on for a few minutes, saying basically nothing, blathering on about how important it seemed to get to shape a life from the start, thus probably coming off like a controlling nutjob and offending countless adoptive parents of older children in the process.  even as the words rolled out, all tripe and cliché, i knew they were the wrong ones…ones that didn’t really get close to the feeling i was trying to express…but i couldn’t collect my thoughts, couldn’t line them up and sort them and make them shiny and incisive and pretty, not for the life of me.

all the while in the back of my head a blog post eloquently composed itself, but only for the benefit of my keyboardless fingertips.  my tongue was left to fend for itself, and i was left wishing i could rip it out.

it happened again today.  a visitor dropped by and in the process of feeding me lunch, bless her, asked me a real question, a genuine, complex, recount how you feel about all this kind of question, and i was so delighted to have someone to actually talk to that i launched into a disconnected diatribe worthy of the Jerry Springer show.  my guest smiled politely throughout, but again, i had this weird sensation of failing, profoundly, to get across what i was actually trying to communicate.  and i faintly wished she could have called in her question an hour or two before, y’know…just to give me a chance to process, to get my thoughts down.

i could have a whole sheaf of papers taped to my chest!  why do i love parenthood?  see page 23!  how do the dynamics of my extended family impact me?  that’s a whole chapter, pages 40 through 57!  how am i handling all this bedrest?   what?!  can’t you tell i’m doing splendidly?!?!  see the frozen terror in my eyes at the prospect of human contact?!?!  maybe that one is actually kinda taped to my chest…or face…figuratively speaking and all.

so here’s what i want to know…is this incoherence – at least the part of it that isn’t solely housebound battiness – just me?  is this a phenomenon common among bloggers?  could it be part of the reason so many of us are drawn to writing, this pleasantly editable, controllable space for presentation of our most intimate thoughts, but dressed up in their best lingerie?   does blogging make it harder and harder to actually adjust to the ephemeral messiness of real-life conversation?  am i just slowly beginning to lose all semblance of social skills the longer i spend perched on my couch in isolation, fighting off cabin fever?

note to self: do NOT watch The Shining while on bedrest.  and lock all the axes in the shed.  i have my nice blog, and don’t need any other ways of expressing myself, thank you very much. ;)

i married Isis on the fifth day of May
but i could not hold on to her very long
so i cut off my hair and i rode straight away
for the wild unknown country
where i could not go wrong
…

she was there in the meadow where the creek used to rise
blinded by sleep and in need of a bed
i came in from the east with the sun in my eyes
i cursed her one time, then i rode on ahead

Isis, oh Isis, you mystical child
what drives me to you is what drives me insane
i still can remember the way that you smiled
on the fifth day of May, in the drizzlin’ rain

– Bob Dylan

we do not have the usual kind of anniversary.  there is no ceremony to commemorate, barely an event that marked one day from the next to anyone around us.  we began almost in secret, taboo, old friends evolving from one life to another in a window crowded with empty bottles and full ashtrays and late, late nights that became early mornings crouched at sunrise on damp concrete stoops together, still talking, whilst a foreign country woke up around us.  and i had known you too long not to know that a part of you belonged to me, beyond faithlessness, and yet was sure the boundaries on the rest were tied in chains.  and how heady, how terrifying, to watch the chains slide, to hold the Pandora’s Box of you & i in our hands and risk opening it, risk losing it all.

we slipped in eyes wide open, staring at each other, afraid to look away.  it has been seven years.  i still remember the feeling of relief, the recognition of now, i have lived.

we have lived more than i’d bargained for, and survived.  you have remained my friend, the one who knows me, the one i trust.  you have held me up through days and years i couldn’t see my way forward. you have had the grace to let me hold you up, in my different way.  we have each become something we were not before, and there is balance in it, better.

i look for the itch.  i know it well, have lived its dissatisfaction, its loneliness, its regret and wonder and longing for elsewhere…in another life, eight, nine years gone.  but i cannot remember its contours, anymore, cannot see its shadow.  we chose well, i think, in this gravely embarked upon and most serious fling.  this life’s work.

and too i remember the way that you smiled, that very first morning.  i made oatmeal, served up in plastic bowls.  it was the fifth day of May, in the drizzlin’ rain.

all i have…and love.

i grew up as an only child, but i actually have siblings, half-siblings.  three of ’em.  all younger, from two to nearly thirteen years younger, my father’s second family.  they spent summers here when i was a kid, most years, but their lives were lived thousands of miles away.  we were more like cousins, growing up in different cultures and different houses, homes with utterly different expectations and socioeconomic relationships to the society around them.

when i left my home to traipse around the world and seek some kind of place for myself, two of them were still children…little kids i saw some summers, little kids with big eyes and squeaky voices and runny noses, kids i loved and enjoyed but barely knew.

these kids, they grow up, hey?  the two ‘little’ ones, now well into their mid-twenties, are having babies.

and they live here now, this whole clan who couldn’t have been further away all those years.   it is a strange thing, having a whole extended family where once there were none.   we float near each other’s lives, not terribly closely tied…but still curiously kin.  i feel protective of them, especially those little kids now grown to adulthood, but i also feel shy, outsider and insider both.  we have never had a lot in common. and yet, if all goes well, there will be three babies born within four months or so of each other, three little cousins.  and i wonder.  whether family ties will tighten as the younger two form families.  whether as adults we can come to be the siblings we never truly were as children.  whether the older of the brothers and his partner – who have three school-age kids between them but can have no more, and have lost – are wounded by the projected image of three little babies on a blanket next Christmas.  whether anyone knows how afraid i am that this image of the three, willful fantasy and foolishness though it is, will not come to pass.

my sister, the youngest of the four of us, had her first baby and the first of the expected three two days ago.   a healthy boy, wee Nigel,  absolutely gorgeous…and my sister a pint-size madonna with her infant, a natural, unperturbed.   he was 7 pounds, 8 ounces…bigger by far than either of my boys, and yet i forgot they came that small.  i always forget they come that small.  the new addition brings Oscar’s cousin count to six…all boys, on both Dave’s side and mine.  my father is convinced he’s getting a whole baseball team.  my brother’s girlfriend, though, is adamant she’ll have the first girl.  i look at her sidelong, trying to remember what it felt like to believe the things you want are simply the things you are entitled to, the way things will go.

i am afraid to wish for a beautiful boy like Nigel, bright-eyed and suckling.  and i am even more afraid to wish for the girl i was always sure i’d have – that wish seems so long ago and so ridiculously impossible, like wishing the baby turn out to be a lion cub, or a magical fairy.  i just wish that he or she come to exist, safely, not too early.  i’ve already lost one baby i hoped would be Nigel’s playmate…back in the fall, my sister and i were due only five or six weeks apart.  now it is not quite twenty-two…likely less, given the generally short duration of my pregnancies.  it feels like a flash and a lifetime, at the same time.

three years ago.

it was three years ago today i left the hospital for the first time after nearly three weeks of bedrest. i’d been airlifted in during winter’s last April gasp, but in my hermetic isolation in ye olde Craftmatic, the ground had transformed into a mushy carpet, spongy with sprigs of green poking through it. i felt like Rip Van Winkle, utterly out of time.

we drove out of the city, to the old tower on its outskirts, the one i’d climbed as a child every time we visited. my legs were weak and i walked gingerly. i was not in pain, per se…just timid, afraid i would break. the tower was closed, too old, too dangerous to be left open for tourists any longer. i stood in front of it, staring, as if i looked long and hard enough i might catch a glimpse of a younger me, might disappear with her into a different time, any other time than this.

she did not materialize, that former self. and i realized, viscerally, that she never would again…that there was no going back. i had stepped off the side of my own flat earth.

i turned in the rain, then, and tested my footing on the slippery bank of overgrowth there that leads up and then down, eventually, to the harbour. i climbed a little, until i was alone on a low ridge, looking down through the brush on tiny sailboats, seabirds. and when i was sure i was far enough away that no one could hear me, i spoke into the wind, and spoke his name for the first time in the thirty-six hours since he’d died.

i had a son. his name was Finn.

it was only a whisper, spoken to raindrops. but i knew it might be a very long time before i had the courage to say those words aloud again, to risk exposing the gaping wound i had suddenly become, to risk being that crazy lady talking about her dead baby. i knew too that i needed, desperately, to mark him on the world, to tell someone of my joy and my pride in him, of my sorrow, to tell that he had been here.

my tears mixed with the rain and those eight words echoed.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

it was only in the year and more after his death that those echoes found expression anywhere, for me. it was here, where i could speak without having to meet anyone’s eyes, that i began to be able to write my way through the grief and love and anger that had left me unmoored, cut off at the knees. here, for the first time, i could own the whole of my story, find a balance within it – be the mother of a dead child without only being the mother of a dead child. and here, for the first time, i found people like me, mothers mourning and keening and raging and weeping, mothers bearing witness to lives too short.

i wrote to Finn on his birthday, i am okay now. i didn’t add that this blog has had a great deal to do with that healing – not just as a space to speak, but also because you have heard me, have taken in my darkest bleatings and said in return, received, here, listening. you have offered love. and more, you have offered that love to a child you never met, a child whom only a couple of people ever got to meet, to touch. my child. i feared him being forgotten, erased; feared never being able to sing him into existence, somewhere. thank you for being my somewhere. you have given me grace i had not imagined existed.

blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

the first few paragraphs of this post have two homes, today.

i am celebrating…it is May, the end of cruel April. i am still pregnant. i am beginning to hope.  but with the same words, i am also celebrating the start of a different kind of new beginning. six of us, all of us Medusas, deadbabymamas, are collaborating on a new blog called glow in the woods…what we hope will be a warm fire amidst the bleak cold of grief, a community for families struggling to get through infant loss, stillbirth, and sorrow. it would be in bad taste, i suppose, to call it our new baby…but it is May, people, and i am feeling more cocky and flippant than i have in a long time. ;) please click over, come see us, and if you know someone who might find some solace in our company, please send ’em our way, and our welcome. our doors are open.

…did i mention it was May? may it bring real spring, finally, and blessings to all.