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it is your birthday, little one, and you are not here.

i made cupcakes last night anyway, and when your father and your little brother come home later we will go out into the back yard where your trees are budding, just barely, and have a little picnic and talk about you and celebrate you.  because it is your birthday, and you would be three today.

but you are not here.

i know the cupcakes are not for you.   these cupcakes are for the living.  they are an offering, i guess, a ritual, a way of honouring what we do not know how to touch.  they are a way for your father and i to tell your brother about you, now that he is getting old enough.  i do not really expect him to understand…i’m still not sure i understand, myself.  but he likes cupcakes, knows they are only for special occasions.   you liked cupcakes, too, back when you and i were a world unto ourselves: i will tell him, someday, that you two had that in common.  your little feet used to dance inside me, tapping out your sugar rush, making me laugh.  i used to tap my fingers back, in response, the two of us symbiotic and easy in our cupcake afterglow.

there is another little one there inside now, Finn, in that same fragile sanctuary, another brother or sister.  s/he too will have cupcakes tonight.  for you, for this special occasion, even though you are not here.  and s/he may dance or kick, just like you did.  and those cupcakes will be bittersweet.

there was so much i wanted to show you.  when you first died, i couldn’t look at things without showing them to you in my mind…these are clouds, little one, that’s a kitty and they’re soft, these are berries i don’t know the name of…aren’t they pretty?  i don’t know if i thought you could hear me, see through me somehow…i just…needed to tell you.  i still want to.  i want to show you the tulips that are coming up in the front yard, and the worms in the earth, and tell you how your mother loves you and just…be your parent, Finn.  because you are my child, you were my firstborn, my baby.  but you are not here.

what i can tell you is that we are not so broken, anymore, by your going.  that we are healing.  i didn’t want sheer bitterness to be your legacy, i didn’t want to honour you by becoming something less.  and yet it feels like such betrayal, for me to let go…to accept and say, it’s okay.  it was time when you went; i told you that then and i meant it, with my whole soul.  you were hurt, and hurting, and i could not help you.  you did nothing wrong.  i do not know if it will ever be quite okay that you’re gone…i doubt it…but it is easier, now.  do you understand?  and if i say, i am okay now, will you forgive me?  because even after three years, i am still afraid of losing you…wherever you may be.  i am still afraid of failing you.

i am still your mama, and proud of you.

i  love you, little one.  and down here with the tulips and the trees, we’re having cupcakes and remembering.  happy birthday.

the morning of his second birthday, last week, i trimmed Oscar’s hair.

having spent my twenties fussily tending to my own bangs (when i had bangs), various boyfriends’ hair, and the occasional drunken friend’s plea to “do something with this mop” – the last of which admittedly often turned out rather awkward and regrettable once the gin wore off – i felt reasonably confident taking nail scissors to the back of a toddler’s curly mullet. i was sober, he was sober, and he hadn’t asked for “the Rachel,” or anything fancy…what could go wrong?

in fact, little did, amazingly. Oscar, who was strapped into the long-outgrown Fisher Price recliner in which we still tether him whilst we shower, was engrossed in Richard Scarry’s “What People Do All Day” and mostly uninterested in the brief proceedings. he did protest when i had to bend his head down towards his chest at an unnatural angle thanks to the fact that i’d chosen to cut his hair in a freaking recliner, but other than that Darwin-award-worthy aside, all went smoothly. golden ringlets went cascading into the wastebasket, and mummy got a little sniffy at the sight, but overall it took about one hundred and ten seconds and Oscar emerged slightly trimmed but still with his Richard Simmons-esque baby ‘fro intact, which was what i was aiming for and didn’t trust a barber to do.

i told myself i cut it because it was getting so long that the curls were starting to straighten out. this is true. the back of O’s hair has always grown faster than the front and the top, and the back has a much coarser texture from being slept on and tangled and broken on a regular basis. it had gotten to the point where not only did his mullet stray halfway down his back in the bathtub, but where even when dry it sometimes refused to curl and just frizzed instead, leaving Oscar with a rather misshapen halo of wild fluff. i knew that the trim would remove some weight and help the curls come back, and tidy up the overall madness of his ‘do.

but motivations in mothering never get to be that pure and innocent. a few strangers had told us what a pretty girl we had. my mother had mentioned a few times that really he was due for a trim, in that tone that makes me feel about twelve and very, very tempted to let Oscar’s hair grow until the cows come home and he rivals Celine Dion’s son in hirsute bounty.

except that reaction didn’t feel very mature, somehow.

the truth is, i dislike most ways traditional masculinity is expressed in our society (no real props for a lot of traditional, stereotypical feminity here either) and particularly the way these gender conventions and expectations are imposed on children. i dislike little military haircuts on boys who are still, essentially babies. i mourn the fact that Oscar is quickly growing out of what i perceive as cute little boy clothes and into sizes that seem to leave me with the option of dressing him as a) a drunken frat boy, b) a NASCAR enthusiast, c) a trucker groupie, or d) a member of the military. the prostitot offerings that inundate the little girls’ sections of stores, and the overabundance of pink princess items over on that side of the gender divide mean that neutral, primary-colour items are harder and harder to find these days. but i seek them out. at an end of season sale this February, i bought O a beautiful red wool duffel coat with toggles, which he wore until the snow disappeared i gave up on the snow disappearing and just moved him to his yellow raincoat in disgust. with the red coat and the curls, everyone seems to assume he’s a girl. i, on the other hand, think he looks quaint, charming – a version of boyhood from Winnie the Pooh rather than the WWE. i’d dress him in sailor suits if i could find ’em.

but this line is a fine one to walk. despite a lifelong longing for a girl, i’ve found having this boy to be all the delight i ever hoped for from parenthood, and more. in the ways O is ‘all boy,’ he is joy unexpected, discovery. i see his gender as a key part of who he is, and embrace it. he is a boy, a wonderful boy. but just as i would with a daughter, i balk at the idea of his sex being the primary factor in how i perceive him, and do not want it to be the sum total of how he perceives himself. he loves trains, it’s true, and his plastic airport with its things that go “wheeee!”. he also loves to paint, and listen to stories, and at the sitters’ with her daughters he runs around in pink sunglasses and thinks they’re beautiful. and i want this freedom in his own skin to last as long as it can.

and yet i want the freedom to be genuinely his, and that’s where i’m struggling. is such a thing really possible, given the power differentials between parent and child, given the way that gender and class biases emerge at every locus of consumer choice and every decision we make about what activities our child participates in? i do not want to use my child as a freak flag to flaunt my own unconventionality, or even my snobbish rejection of North American stereotypes of masculinity. i do not want to wear his hair in pigtails just to thumb my nose at social constraints i consider stupid. i do not want to treat him like a pet poodle. yet every single choice i make regarding what clothes are purchased for him and how his hair is cut and what toys and models and interests he has access to: all these things shape the gender identity he’s developing, and the gender identity people read on to him. like all social beings, he will forever be subject to people’s preconceived notions of what his gender status should mean, and how it should be performed. as his mother, i too will be judged on how i am shaping him to conform or confound with his gender performance, until such point as he is old enough to make such decisions for himself. (and likely long after, if the unflagging currency of pop-Freudian analysis of gay men and their mothers is any indication.)

i do not fear my son being a “sissy” – the feminized male is not a role i devalue, nor one particularly threatening in our family. Oscar will be who he will be, and a Marine would be harder for me to find peace with than a hairdresser, to be honest, but the choice is his.  i do fear, though, in this vulnerable period of childhood, him being taken up somehow as overly feminized, having his feelings hurt or confused by some stranger’s ignorant comments, because of choices i make for him while he is still too young to know different.

so i trimmed his hair, taking the easy way out, keeping it long enough to curl, short enough that it doesn’t look like barettes might be in order.

and i feel dirty, and yet in this muddle of raising children in a society that claims gender equality and enacts “equal but different” every time you glance at a toy aisle or a baby layette, i am not sure there is any such thing as clean, anywhere.

outside my window, a peaceful snow is falling. tulip buds huddle tight closed against the icy blanket. we had to drag out Oscar’s winter boots again this morning. part of me thinks this is ridiculous – that after a winter this long, this laden with storms, that spring is somehow obliged to hurry up and arrive once Mayday is only a week away.

another part of me – the part that spends all day indoors, on the couch – is more equivocal. meh, says the shut-in, snow, schmoe. i don’t own a chaise lounge. what do i care if it snows all summer?

it will not, i know. but this is Canada. we’re a snow-ridden folk. i remember driving home from college for the summer one year, with my childhood best friend, in a late April snowstorm so bad we had to follow the taillights of the car ahead. the road was whited out, and at one point as we crawled along, inching down the highway, we mulled over the ironies of dying in a snowstorm on summer vacation. oh callous youth, so unfearful, so amused.

i am no longer that girl. my mind still plays the wry ponies of doom, casting narratives, but they do not entertain me any longer. they make my heart leap in my chest, make me swallow dryly. my eyes dart, seek escape. and these visions are with me always, now, no longer novelties of an out-of-season adventure. that restless, invincible, curious self of youth, with summer stretching out before her, all possibility and late night beers to be drunk…she caught the last train out of here a few years back.  i do not think we will see her again in these parts…she was young, and i am not, and will never be again.

instead, i nest inside, internalized, waiting for a summer of waiting. i try not to obsess about the disconnect of the fact that i still do not look or feel terribly pregnant, that my belly has not popped this third time around like it did the second, that i’ve only felt tiny flickers of what might be movement, that i know too many people now who’ve suffered the brutal blow of a heartbeat just…disappearing…and that i live that nightmare every time i let my mind stray near it. in a fit of neurosis this morning, i ordered a Doppler. it arrives Monday. a part of me hates the thing i’ve become, the fretter, the wretched, tied in knots by my steady stream of fears.

but i know well that spring is not really obliged to come, you see…and for some, never does. the summer stretching out wild before you disappears – forever a mirage – once you understand that it is not truly an inevitable promised land, but only a turn of luck that can change in an instant.
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of course, three hours after i ordered the Doppler, i felt it, hard under my waistband, the tap and flutter and queer twist of the small life inside. unmistakable this time, insistent. and it kept up for minutes and i lay still and laughed, hand cupped on my belly, tears streaming down my cheeks, watching the snow fall outside my window.

…or how a three-day, two-party, four-cake,  triplicate-dinner bonanza of second birthday celebrations ensured that Oscar will now expect pure sugar with every meal for at least the next month.

every little boy should have a mother on bedrest for his birthday, apparently.  parties materialize from all corners.  mamas gain ten pounds and like it.  teeth hurt.  good times are had by all.

the first cake was gelato and sorbeto, at Auntie Cindy’s, with cousins and friends and Grandmaman & Grandpapa.  all cakes are now greeted with the gleeful cry of “ice!”

the second cake, upon return to Charlottetown, sported homemade boiled icing by Grandpa Tom.

in the full swing of the party spirit by day 3 of the party circuit, Oscar welcomed guests to party number 2, hosted by his babysitter.

and downed a cupcake to boot…

to cap the festivity round-robin, Nannie dressed as a clown to surprise Oscar at her house.

but the Elmo cake was the crumb – or ze waffer-thin mint – that broke the camel’s belly…and sweet Oscar blew up like Mister Creosote in that Monty Python sketch.  i swear, he said fug off, i’m full.  then he asked for more.

he is two, and wild and beautiful, and has consumed more sugar in the past three days than in the entire rest of his life to date.  he is my joy.

happy birthday, little one.  may every year be so sweet.

two years ago this morning i woke up exactly 36 weeks pregnant, rolled awkwardly over, smiled at Dave as the sun poured in our bedroom window and the cat perched atop my enormous belly, purring, and said, “God, i hope i don’t go into labour today.”

he looked me cock-eyed.  i was almost ten weeks more pregnant than i’d ever been before…and while we’d spent most of January, February, and March silently hoping each morning that the day would bring precisely nothing in the way of labour, never before had i actually spoken the words aloud.

but he knows me.  “why today?” he inquired, with the exaggerated tolerance of one who does not expect that the answer will hold much relevance.

“it’s Hitler’s birthday.”

“yes….” and when i looked stricken, as if his lack of immediate and evident reaction was dooming our offspring to a life of wretched, hopeless flailing against an evil horoscope, he laughed.  “ummm, yeh.  but nobody knows that,” he said.

“well, i know it,” was my reply.  and then the floodgates of neurosis burst.  “…and Finn died on April 30th, and that’s the same day Hitler died, and i don’t want some weird kind of Hitler theme in my children’s dates!”  i finished on a slightly hysterical note, and then sulked righteously, feeling silly but strangely content, entrenched in my petulance and my warm spot in the bed.

i’ve always remembered dates without effort.  my fixation on them, though unintentional, was a strange, ever-present part of the way i coped with the grief and helplessness of the year between Finn’s birth and Oscar’s.  the dates were a grim truth or consequences game of life and death, a measuring out of patience and endurance: on this day last year, or when i last did this, or it has been twenty weeks since he died and in another twenty weeks this baby might have a chance at viability. but that morning, serious as i was about the whole Hitler connection and also my sneaking suspicion that it meant i’d truly turned the corner into crazy, the conversation was…light.  it assumed that a baby born that day – however unauspicious the date – would live.  it was, for the first time in almost a year, the closest Dave & i came to joking about birth.

and so we kept going.  “how do you know all sorts of other horrible people weren’t born on other dates that you have no idea about?” Dave countered.  he rolled out of the bed and picked up the laptop. he likes obscure historical information.  and before he went to work that morning, Wikipedia most kindly helped us identify not only a variety of pleasant, innocuous things which had happened on April 20ths of years past, but which famous folk had been born on each day of the following two weeks.  i set my sights somewhere in May.  and promptly went into labour about 8 pm that night.

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Oscar was born at 1:47 am the following morning.  he made it safely into April 21st, thus putting him in the fine birthday company of Queen Elizabeth II and Iggy Pop, whose sensibilities visibly compete in his cusp-of-Taurus soul.  he passed through me like a thunderstorm.  i went into labour at book club, eating trifle.  for an hour or more i sat with my secret, a Cheshire cat silently timing the increasing, regular contractions.  when i left, i don’t think anyone but me believed that i’d be having a baby that night.  i made my way home at ten, found Dave webcasting live, smiled and waved, sniffed the tumbler on his desk to see who’d be driving to the hospital, and went upstairs to pack my bag.  we took some last belly photos, laid down for a few minutes to watch the Lamaze tape a friend had sent months before, before another year of childbirth classes got cut short by my untimely admission to hospital for bedrest.  i wrote in my journal in the quiet of our yellow kitchen, posted a quick post on the fledgling blog.  and about twenty minutes too late, not long before midnight, we left for the hospital.  by the time we arrived, five minutes later, i was in full-blown, five-centimetres-dilated and hard contractions every minute kind of labour.  the second helping of trifle threatened a reappearance at every turn.  and then, without warning, when the overwhelming pain would not allow me to bend in the middle and thus sit on the birthing ball i’d been so hopefully looking forward to “enjoying,” i went into a complete, disassociative panic attack.  it was what i’ve since discovered is a classic post-traumatic-stress-reaction panic response, not uncommon in women who’ve had traumatic or ill-supported births or post-birth infant losses associated with their previous experience of labour.  but no one had ever mentioned such a thing, and it had not occurred to me to anticipate it, look it up, prepare for such an eventuality.  not until my labour ramped from zero to sixty in fifteen minutes and there was suddenly no respite from the brutal, muscular jaws of my uterus and my scarred cervix and i could not catch my breath, could not breathe at all and the fifty-one weeks in the interim were burned away as if with acid and i was animal and desperate and pleading and frightened, so frightened, and this time i knew exactly what the abyss looked like and i knew i was not strong enough for that.

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i went into labour twice with Finn.  the first time, they stopped it with drugs and they airlifted me and put me on bedrest and high doses of antibiotics and more than two weeks later i began to believe all would be well when i woke up one morning in my hospital room with a strange twinge in my belly.  they strapped on monitors and wheeled me down to Labour & Delivery faster than i could even rescue my long-distance phone card from my bedside table, so i had to call Dave’s sister, locally, and get her to track him down in Charlottetown where he was closing on our new house, our first home.  he had just set foot inside the door, had not even signed for the keys, when he turned around and hightailed it back out the door for that loneliest, scariest four-hour race to the hospital.  there was no single day where, even stuck in different provinces, we just got to celebrate being homeowners for the first time.  just like there was no single day where we just got to celebrate being parents.

i did not believe, i don’t think, that the timing could really be that impossibly bad; that of the seventeen days i’d been in hospital to date it would, it could be that one, that one with the carefully scheduled dryer delivery and the phone and internet hook-ups and all the necessary paperwork that Dave had to be there for.  i had accepted that the baby would be early, had thrilled to reach the 26 week mark the day before, representing a 75% chance of survival.  i was feeling positive, prepared to deal with altered timelines, expectations.  but not that morning.  just not that morning.  i spent the first hour or two of active labour in total denial, sure the meds would stop the increasing tide just as they had before.  when it became evident that they would not, and i knew Dave was still hours away, i moved from denial to shock.  then the pain overtook me.

when you labour that early they strap you to your back on a delivery table, because the baby must be monitored at all times.  i had back labour.  i had scar tissue on my cervix that was preventing dilation, even though my contractions came a minute apart for almost two hours straight.  i had young nurses who were competent but inexperienced, unable to rise to meet me and hold my eyes through that fog of pain.  when i broke with all my own preconceived notions and begged for an epidural, i discovered the main body of anesthesiologists for the hospital were on strike, and due to some c-sections that morning it would be close to two hours before i could expect one.  it was exactly two hours.  Dave arrived ten minutes later, and for a window all was calm.  then the baby’s heartrate dipped badly, and suddenly it was rush and bustle and there were noises being made about a c-section and i said yes, yes please but the doctor, white-haired and cold and never met my eyes said no, no we’d have to do a vertical cut and it’s just not worth it for this baby at this point and i remember blinking, yet another shock because clearly my baby needed to come out and i didn’t give a shit about me thank you very much and i was honed in utterly on the 75% chance of survival, you see, because we’d already had a bad enough day so surely all would be well if we could just get the baby out.  and an older nurse who had come in a moment before with the 3 pm shift change, curly-haired, she looked me in the eye for what felt like the first time all day and said meaningfully do you want a second opinion?  and i said yes and then there was someone else there and he wanted to just check one more time manually and i felt nothing, numb, but he said the cervix is gone – the scar tissue had torn, finally – this baby is coming! now! and an alarm and two quick pushes and my eyes locked on Dave’s, beseeching, and in a rush of blood i saw one small, perfect ear as ten people in yellow gowns and masks rushed into the room and they whisked him away, our tiny son, the baby i had just birthed.  it was 3:24 pm.  he lived for eleven hours.

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so it was that i went into Oscar’s birth, exactly fifty-one weeks later, four weeks early, assuming that it couldn’t help but be better, that so long as i came out with a live baby on the other end all would be well.  and yet the irony is that i walked out of Finn’s birth broken-hearted but feeling nonetheless amazed and proud of what my body had done, however insufficiently.  i was awed by the fact that i had borne him, made him in the first place, from that perfect ear to his tiny toes, replicas of his father’s.  in the hours before he died, i was so high from the sheer wonder of having given birth that had you handed me an ashtray instead of a baby to hold in those moments, i think i’d have cradled it tenderly, fallen in love.  for months after he died, one of the only ways i could manage to treat myself with any care and respect whatsoever, to stave off the bleakness and the craving for destruction was to remind myself, “i am Finn’s mother.”

Oscar’s birth did not leave me with the same sense of anything, except ultimately, relief that he was safely out and then bewilderment and guilt that i could not summon the same high for a successful birth as i had for the doomed one. O’s delivery was quick and dirty and out of control, a clusterfuck of interventions i didn’t want and didn’t believe i needed, and it culminated not only in a third-degree episiotomy – done with scissors i still see in flashbacks – that i begged them not to do and that caused me raw pain for a year afterwards, but worse, in being rushed off to the OR only minutes after birth to have the stitches ripped open again because the placenta did not disengage.  i had good nurses, good solid nurses, and Dave with me until the moment they took me away, but they could not reach me where i was, in the grip of visceral flashback.  i was helpless, and then acted upon, quickly and without my consent, because all was happening so fast.  i did not get to hold my baby for more than a minute.  i did not get to nurse him, to do more than glance at his small self, to breathe.  after the placenta was scraped out and the hemorrhage stopped, i was left alone in Recovery, shaking and utterly beaten by the panic and a sense of shamed, helpless violation and failure, and once again, shock, that i could have managed yet again to be so completely unprepared for what birth would bring.  and sure, somehow, that when i emerged from that dark night of the soul, that this baby too would have disappeared forever, another tiny ghost ripped away.

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he did not, bless him.  he was there, squalling and puffy, three hours later when i finally got to cradle him for a moment, hours again after that when the morning shift ultimately brought him back for me to try to nurse.  and so i landed, finally, shakily, gratefully, in the place that comes after labour, in the land of the living and of moving forward, of babies and spit up and sleep deprivation and smiles and joy and bittersweet milestones.

but labour, to me, is like another country, that only those who have been there can begin to imagine or describe, and that never turns out quite the same in any two depictions.  only now, a full two years after the night O was born, can i look back on that birth and say, with any conviction, all that matters is a healthy baby.  it does, beyond all measure.  and yet i hate the phrase, wince each time i hear it.  because being torn and broken and alienated does matter, does impact how a person experiences new motherhood, no matter how truisms may shame or belittle her experience.  birth can be a trauma and wound in and of itself that requires processing and grieving just as real and profound as that demanded by loss.  birth for me has been a profound and great and terrible thing, a wild horse that brings me to my knees.  every minute of it, both times, was worth it, to meet my babies, to watch my beautiful living boy try to blow out candles for his birthday.  i will do it again, without hesitation.  and yet i am terrified, utterly. i am afraid of more shock, more surprises.  i am afraid of a reprise of the guilt of having my body fail one child and my endorphins fail to soar at the birth of the other, afraid of what possibly could go wrong that i haven’t even thought of yet.  i am afraid of being that afraid again.

i wonder, sometimes, if it is like this for everyone, each in our own way.  and i wonder, in some small, fool part of me, if hoping that the third time’s a charm will make everything easier when the time comes around again.

hopefully it will be months and months away from April.

one of the strangest things about bedrest is that it’s never as restful as i think it’s going to be.

three springs, now, i have spent the lengthening days prone, watching the sun brighten outside my windows, imagining i can smell the warming earth.  at least this spring it’s my own windows, and they open…though we’ve barely crept above zero this morning so the breeze coming in is brisk.  Monday, we had snow.  i think spring is doing its best to delay itself in hopes of making me less jealous.

truth is, i shouldn’t dare say this aloud, but i don’t mind bedrest.  or not as much as i think i should.  it’s an excuse to lie down a lot, and i’m rather fond of lying down, if not necessarily of having to lie down.  it’s a respite from the bustle of things, and for a short period of time, it offers a window of solitude that few of us get in our busy lives unless we are sick or otherwise miserable.  i am neither.  and i am busy enough that boredom is really only a state of mind.  i’m still working from home, ostensibly full-time, plus trying to tie up external projects and commitments that have been lying fallow, and organizing our taxes – i haven’t even turned on the tv yet, in two full weeks of couch lounging.  i am not yet stir-crazy.  but i am growing lonely, as the days pass.  i miss being out in the world, interacting, making choices, being an agent – however modest – in the shaping of my own day.

the worst part about bedrest is the passivity.   one must buy into the notion of one’s incapacity, on some level, in order not to keep leaping up and doing things when no one is watching.  bedrest this early, when there is not even a belly and more than a flutter to remind one of who this is all really for, is an exercise in disassociation, in foregrounding fear, in unharnessing oneself from one’s usual responses to impulse.  truth is, i disassociate from my body quite easily, relic of years of disordered eating and internalized shame, but the process carries baggage.  i feel vulnerable when i am not free to do for myself.  i feel subject and beholden to those who have to do for me, and apologetic for the burdens my incapacity places on them.  and thus i disassociate not only physically but socially, pulling inward, conserving myself.  the isolation begins to show.

and i do not know how to break it up, to remain engaged yet still.  there is no motion here, not while Dave is at work and Oscar at the sitter’s, no coming and going except by the cat.  she brings me her measuring tape, her beloved plastic string, and sits patiently, staring up at me as if i might magically leap from the couch and race about the house trailing it like Tantallus.  i do not.  she continues staring.  i work, focusing in spells, consumed, and then drift, unmoored by the lack of routine and context.  i consider the date, count days, realize i could reasonably be doing this for another sixteen weeks.  the mind boggles, bounces.  i flit back to the date: it is the 38th birthday of my college boyfriend, my first love, and nearly fifteen years since the day after graduation when i last laid eyes on him.  gone, just like that.  i try to remember what his skin felt like, and fail utterly.  i bounce again, note that it is the 42nd or 43rd wedding anniversary of my ex-inlaws, who for a time were family…but they are gone too.  i send them anniversary wishes, from my head to theirs, and wonder, absently, if the date has any significance to anyone currently a part of my life.  i decide no.  i decide that i need some mental discipline, that i need to get back to work.  my brain trudges reluctantly to the tasks at hand.

i’d hoped for things to be different.  my full-time job was supposed to come to an end March 31st, and i was going to be working only three days a week, one at the office, two from home.   the other two days i was going to have Oscar home with me, and we were going to run errands and go to Jellybean Gym together, and take spring walks with his new tricycle and i was going to sort through all the old toys and rearrange stuff around here and shed the clutter and paint the new windowboxes and i was excited, so ready, so looking forward to spring days with my boy, doing stuff.  but i cannot do.  and i cannot have O home with me right now, not alone, because i cannot lift him, nor chase him.  we cannot go for walks.  and i sorrow, a little, at the spring i imagined – our last gasp just the two of us, you see, or so i hope with wistfulness on all sides – slipping through my fingers as i lie here dull and quiet, staring at the dust on the ceiling fan.

small and sturdy, fierce and tender, he is a study in contradiction.

he communicates his needs and his affections most effectively, but with the vocabulary of a child much younger.  his consonants are few, clearly a struggle, and he has only one or two regular word combinations.  he builds puzzles, though, that would challenge a four year old.  he claps for himself when he completes them, and turns his face to his audience, beaming.  he knows most of his letters, can spell his name, but cannot actually say it.  he is more beautiful than i ever imagined a boy could be.

he is closing in on two with a rapidity that astonishes me.  he slams doors, sometimes shutting himself in his room in the midst of a meltdown just to be alone.  when he is done, he is tearful, snuggly, ready for comfort.  he kisses his trains goodnight as he lays them down for “naps,” pounds out violent scales on his plastic piano.  he has a wicked, full-body laugh and lives at full speed.  handed a telephone, though, he is all saucer eyes, shy and full of wonder at the miracle of the disembodied voice.

his favourite word right now is “mine.”  the cat walks across his dinosaur puzzle?  an affront.  mine.  mama folds his laundered pyjamas in front of him?  what you’re touching, woman, is mine.   we spend the weekend at his cousins’ house playing with their train sets?  he’s convinced the cousins are the interlopers…and those fine toys?  mine.  he’s easy to find in a group, these days.  he is the child hugging things wildly to his chest, squawking like the seagulls from Finding Nemo.

he is an equivocal kid, though, when not protecting his worldly goods – and yours – from the preying eyes of other living creatures.  he will befriend anyone who makes an effort, eat anything from raw tofu to zoodles, depending on whether it’s me or the babysitter feeding him.  he is gentle with babies, likes to bedeck himself and other surfaces in stickers, and is taking an interest in flowers suddenly, now that pale green shoots are beginning to peek through the soil of our backyard.  he is learning to ride his new trike, though his feet don’t quite reach the pedals.  he prefers to be pushed than to do the work himself.

he is suddenly, so clearly, ours.

for the whole first year of his life, love him though i did – and deeply – he was foreign to me, other.  this blond, curly-headed male child who could not sleep in my arms, who would not sleep past six am, who was genial and yet a still water i could not seem to fathom without language…he was so utterly himself, so entirely unlike me, so not any of the permutations i’d imagined when envisioning the mother-child duo.  no more.  and he has not changed, barely at all.  he still looks like a changeling left in our dark-haired gene pool by fairies, still wakes at ungodly hours, still can tell me very little – in words – of what is in his heart.  but somewhere along the lines, somewhere in the long months of learning to tolerate dinosaur puzzles and repeat “please do not throw your food on the floor” with a smile on my face, i have come to forget all that i ever imagined of children before i had them, all i ever hoped for this boy other than that he be who he is.

when i started this blog, i had vague goals, especially timewise.  i thought maybe i could actually keep it going for a couple of months.  maybe.  if i didn’t run out of things to say.  maybe even longer, if i actually found a voice.  i thought it might be cool to try to blog through Oscar’s first year…a record, a witness to that experience.  i thought that was about as far into the future as i could commit, and as far as my ego could imagine anybody actually possibly conceivably reading.  it seemed a lifetime.

and yet it’s been two years today.  and i can’t imagine stopping, not really.  even in stretches like this where i struggle, where my internal narrative runs amok and i do not know, anymore, what is worth saying and what is just better left to die on the vine, unspoken neuroses being so much more charming than spoken.   but i think after two years, dear readers, we’re past charming.  or certainly i feel well past charming, and more in the, erm, “settled” phase of things, where toothbrushing gets a little more optional.  i think we’re in the lounge-about-and-scratch-ourselves stage around the crib.  and my neurotic self thanks you for being here anyway, even with the bloom all off the rose and whatnot.

and since two is the cotton anniversary, and we’re letting it all hang out, please feel free to don a celebratory pair of tighty-whities or something else equally uncharming, scratch, and tell me what i secretly wonder whenever i watch those weird cable makeover shows…are there really women out there who wear lacy underwear, day in, day out, year in, year out?

enlighten me.

we made it safely home, four hundred vomit-free kilometres plus a few.  my couch and i are learning to live with each other in a whole new intimate way that may actually precipitate me finally giving in and getting rid of this wretched, stained, scratched-to-shit eleven-year-old Ikea special in favour of something, um, larger than a loveseat.  and work is crazy busy and so i have not had time to be bored on the couch yet, nor to internalize much about the fact that it is April and i am on bedrest.  bedrest at fourteen weeks.

already, says my conscious mind and i know it will be long, starting this soon, and i brace for the endurance test.  of course, already, says a voice that echoes deeper.  it is April.  did you think you could just breeze through April, blithe, unbeaten, unscathed?  and i hear laughter – peals that skate down my spine – and i want to duck but i cannot tell which direction the threat is coming from.

twice before i have been pregnant in April.  twice before it has seen my children into the world, early, untimely…once safely so, once not so much.   i fear April in an animal way…warily, primally.   i have never made it into May still pregnant.  twice before, April has brought death into my house, my inmost heart…its eldest, the first who made me know i was loved beyond all else, and its smallest, the first i ever loved like that.  even in the joyfully bittersweet April that Oscar was born, the first boy i ever kissed died of AIDS and was buried just a block away from here on what should have been Finn’s first birthday.  April is a month of shadows, of stark wastelands around the crocuses. in April, i see ghosts everywhere i look, things lost: selves we all used to be in other springs that will not come again.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

i have been sitting bovine on my couch, intent on not thinking any of these things. i have been succeeding, working placidly away, hollering for water and happily confined to the present.  until, on a wander to the kitchen for a refill of my water glass, my eye caught the artist’s card in the junk dish that lives on our kitchen island gathering bread ties and old batteries and change and bits of things that would probably be better off elswhere.  the artist’s card for the bracelet Dave bought me for Christmas, the one that only came just before my birthday late in January, the handmade one, smooth blue stones set in silver with a deco fastener.  the one i loved.  the one i realized, in the instant my eye recognized the card, that i have not worn in…awhile.  that i knew was lost even before i went upstairs to check fastidiously, desperately.  the one i knew instantly i’d lost without even noticing, somewhere in the course of the last few weeks.  i only had it perhaps eight or ten weeks, altogether…and somewhere, unattended to, its fragile clasp slipped from my wrist and fell, and i did not hear it.

i hate losing things.  i can still list the things of value i lost in childhood and young adulthood – a beloved boy doll left behind in a mall on a trip to another city, a ring swallowed by a public swimming pool, unrecoverable, when i was about nine, the crisp, disappearing fifty dollar bill my grandmother gave me for new school clothes at the start of high school, a copper bracelet – my mother’s – that flew off my wrist into Montreal harbour during college.  over seventeen or eighteen years, these were the things that got by me.  i was careful, perfectionist about honouring and valuing what i had, what had been given to me to use or take care of.  i grew up poor but rich in heirlooms, only child of an only child.  every thing in my life and my world and possession had a story, a legacy, almost a life of its own.  at the very least, even the new things were carefully saved for, representing someone’s doing without.  and so every loss made me cringe with shame and panic.  every loss made me feel i’d dishonoured the giver.  every loss was immediately noted in my own internal log and accounted for and atoned for ten times over.

but never before have i lost something i valued like this bracelet and not noticed for weeks.  it’s thrown me off-balance, the fact that i was so utterly unaware, that i missed not only the moment of loss but the aftermath…that there is nothing to trace.  i cannot even remember, not for the life of me, when i last had it on.  and i do not like the way that feels.  i am wracked with guilt about a bracelet that – while it cost a hundred dollars, making it the most expensive bracelet i have ever owned – still only cost a hundred dollars.  i feel vaguely sick about it, and vulnerable in my oblivion.  it is a watershed, in my mind, you see, a harbinger: all i value could suddenly be slipping away from me and i would not know, would have no warning, no recognition, no clue.  and later, there would be no chance for making anything right…it would all just…be gone.

Freud much, anybody?  it is no wonder, whenever the heck i lost this bracelet, that i didn’t notice until April.

but…but. some other small part of my troubled little brain has the temerity to hope that somehow, somewhere, that beautiful silver bracelet is rather a ransom, that it is the something greedy April has to take from me.  that my unwitting failure to note its loss will somehow allow me to escape with the rest, with the other Christmas/January gift i am so afraid will slip from me beforetimes, be lost before my fool believing self even knows the difference.  April’s blood money.  silly.  i know.  magical thinking.  and yet i prefer it to the idea of foreshadowing, as i peer out at this long, stretching month ahead.

i don’t really believe it.  but i wish i could.

this week has not been a pleasant journey.

drowning in work after an unanticipated ‘vacation’ spent getting pretty blue thread stitched into my lady parts, i came down with Oscar’s cold on Monday. then i saw my regular hometown OB, who felt me up and could find no evidence of any cervix left at all, other than the stitch. so my pelvic rest got upgraded to real, bonafide bed rest and we got ordered back to Halifax for another appointment this Friday. and i was not to drive, so Dave booked yet another day off work. i sent copious work emails from our couch, feeling out of the loop and out of control, and tried not to over-research the failure rates of cerclages and the chromosomal risks of fetuses (fetii?) without nasal bones at 12w4d and scar tissue septums (septii?) in uteruses (uterii?), and i waited for Friday with the dread of someone who feels like bad omens are in the air. about thirty hours before we were to leave for Halifax, i woke up in the middle of the night nauseous and wretched, and not the kind of nauseous and wretched that goes with pregnancy. the kind that goes with flu. turns out when Oscar woke, with alarming screams, that he’d been having the same problem. his crib, floor, and wall were newly decorated with memories of the previous evening’s strawberries, and the whole room was pungent with sourness, dried vomit caked in his hair. his father bathed him, washed the contents of the bed, scrubbed. i lay around on the bathroom floor trying to smile at my miserable child whilst moving as little as possible.

twenty-four hours later, with no further signs of illness from O and my own day of retching behind me, Dave packed the car, and i reclined the passenger seat, and the three of us started of for Halifax, where my little family would visit cousins and i would – my doctors had cautioned – likely be admitted, either for another cerclage (for double luck) or to be deposited head-down in a craftmatic without even bathroom privileges for the coming, um, next three months.

it was a sunny morning. i ate an Egg McMuffin and marvelled at its rubbery goodness after thirty-six hours of nothing but the back and forth of juice and bile. Oscar was conducting an elaborate kissing session between plastic ponies and Thomas the tank engines in his car seat, and we were arguing with the CBC morning show. it was the high point of our week. and then, with little warning, a high-pitched squealing noise issued from the back seat, a whine that built in pulses into the gutteral, shocked, wet shriek of alarm that a not-quite two year old strapped into a car seat and throwing up most of what he’s eaten in the last twenty-four hours emits when he finds himself sick in a moving vehicle. one gush. O’s shirt, pants, and the car seat take most of the hit. two gushes. Thomas and friends are showered in half-digested blueberries. three gushes, and half the back seat of the car is awash in puke. it’s a Kia Rio. we pack tight. and we are past the point of turning back, especially since this appointment is so urgent, but we are also still three full hours from our destination.

so i swivel in my seat and try to comfort the poor child until we can stop at a gas station and Dave can lift him from the car and carry him through the cold, busy parking lot, drenched in vomit, for a change of clothes and a wash up. i scrape the reeking back seat and its contents with baby wipes, my throat revisiting my McMuffin with displeasure. Dave returns, deposits a now cheery, freshly-dressed Oscar onto my lap in the front of the car, then removes the car seat and takes it away to scrub it. i pine for the vinyl seats and sticky car seats of my childhood, with their uncomfortable but blessedly non-vomit-absorbing qualities. Oscar has a little of his rice milk from the car cooler. Dave re-installs the soaking wet car seat, covering it with a recycling bag so O won’t shiver to death. we set off again.

an hour later, same whine. i swivel again, quicker this time, ask Oscar if he needs to stop. we’ve just missed the exit, but i am nothing if not courteous. he tries to say yes, and loses his rice milk all over himself. we go to the next exit. we stop. we are less thorough this time. we dispose of pukey recycling bag, wipe down seat, change O’s clothes, place him on a bed of Irving plastic, give water, no milk, start off again. the appointment time is looming.

twenty minutes later, same story, except that this time his poor little stomach is going for the big guns, bringing up the deep, undigested bits like he’s auditioning for a part in “Stand by Me” and his eyes are big and frightened and the sun is beating in on the car and the reek is overwhelming and i am on my knees, beltless, in the front seat trying helplessly to calm him and comfort him except i am losing it myself and i start to sob and choke, half-sick, too much, overwhelmed, careening down the highway backwards in a little silver car that smells like a frat house puke party when i am not even supposed to be sitting up straight and i try to say, “it’s okay baby” except i still have a cold and i’m crying so it comes out as gibberish and all i can think is my god, this is the stupidest trip in the world and yet i cannot think of any options we had to do anything differently and this, this, is what really does me in, the utter powerlessness of it all, my inability to help my child or my unborn, to keep either safe and i collapse back in the front seat crying like a baby and then the cell phone rings and Dave, looking for an exit, picks up and says, “vomit express” and i say “no, vomit comet!” and we laugh because hell, what else are you going to do?

so we pulled in, and Dave cleaned him up again, and then the poor little creature, bless his heart, fell asleep in his wet, stinky, garbage-bag covered car seat and Dave cancelled the visit with the cousins and booked a hotel room for he and O and they dropped me at the hospital and in i went, just on time. and my doctor greeted me with a hug and a concerned, “are you by yourself?” and i explained and they ushered me in for the ultrasound and we discussed worst-case scenarios and they called in the med students because i’m special like that. but then she pulled up the screen and there it was, not only that same big round-headed baby with its beating heart but a cervix, with a good centimetre or more still above and below the stitch, not perfect but as good as they left me and fine, fine for the moment and my doctor looked stunned and measured again and there were smiles and congratulations all around the room. we did not see a nasal bone yet again but one of the med students ran to get my screening results and the Down Syndrome risk, all things combined, is that of a 27 year old mother which i most assuredly am not and so i am good with that, far more afraid of my body failing this child anyway than i am of anything else. noses are not the most important thing. and the septum – which is likely a scar tissue product of last fall’s D&C – is not likely to cause any significant problems until somewhere between 28-32 weeks anyway, which if my cervix holds til then will be a bridge we cross when we come to it.

and so i got to walk out of there, still on orders of fairly strict bedrest but not bedpan-style, not head down, not hospitalized, not yet, and i got a cab to the hotel and found my boys, still with the slight stench of vomit about them, and we got to be together and so the week, for all the wretchedness of its journey, has ended far better than i ever thought it would, even in destinations not quite planned.

though i’m not looking forward to the drive home.