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i figure, if you tally up the days i’ve spent in hospital due to complications of pregnancy and the ultrasounds and procedures i’ve had done due to complications of pregnancy and the NICU time and attention and machinery my offspring have hogged due to their early arrivals – which in turn were due to complications of pregnancy – you’d come to two logical conclusions: one, pregnancy is not my calling and i need a new hobby, and two, in a country that provides universal health care, i’m a frigging drain on the system and a threat to freedom everywhere.

or at least, the latter is the conclusion i begin to come to every time i wade into the soup that appears to be the American electoral conversation regarding health care.  and then i get down on my faithless knees and thank the good lord – in tongues and Esperanto and whatever bad French i can summon up from the nation’s shaky thirty-plus-year experiment in bilingualism – that i live where i do, and that some semblance of universal health care survives in Canada.

not that there aren’t problems with our system.  there are.  waits for family doctors and “elective” surgeries, even long waits for life-saving diagnostic measures like mammograms and MRIs, particularly in some centres.  my local emergency room parking lot fills up some nights and people wait, listless and in pain, for hours on end.  sometimes.  other nights i’ve been seen in ten minutes.  but when you’re the one waiting, it still sucks.

however, no one is turned away, deflected to another hospital further away in a crisis situation because they cannot pay.   everybody who walks in is seen.  there are no co-pays to tally, no lists of what is and isn’t covered, no dehumanizing rejections or anxious re-applications.  you present your provincial health card – even if you’re visiting from another province – and you take your place in the line, and once you’re seen you walk out…so long as your age or medical condition don’t preclude walking.  there is no exchange of cash.  if you came by ambulance or left with a prescription, there will be a bill down the road, from the province or your pharmacy, but that’s about it.  if you need physio, you get referred, and while the wait for hospital physio can be long, it’s free.  Oscar’s asthma clinic appointments?  free.  my hearing test last year when Dave was sure i was going deaf and not just, erm, not listening?  free.  the referral last year about a possible cyst in one breast?  free, and fast.  i was seen by the specialist in less than a week.  all was well.  and none of these were even complications of pregnancy.

when it’s come to my attempts to procreate, the Canadian taxpayers have been generous.  i guesstimate – though the billing numbers can admittedly be specious depending on how governments or corporations choose to subsidize or inflate the costs of running and staffing hospitals – that most adult, taxpaying citizens of my fair nation have likely spent at least 1.2 cents each on me and my universal health care over the last three years of this baby-attempting circus.  if this pregnancy leads to further hospital bedrest and, far more costly, NICU time for wee Hughloise, those costs could rise to upwards of 1.5 cents each.  Canadians, i thank you personally.  seriously.  i am your tax dollars at work, me and Oscar and the stitched-in one and the dreams that ended in an urn upstairs and a D&C in November.   i don’t know how to tell you it was worth it, in financial terms…but i can tell you even after all the heartache, i would do it all again.  does that count for something?  is it worth a penny and a bit’s lifetime investment?  i dunno.  to me the two don’t exactly make for a natural equation, because i am not accustomed to valuing human life and grief and joy in pure dollars.  and that’s why i’m grateful for universal health care, above all else.  because it doesn’t force me to contort myself until i begin to see that equation as natural.

if universal health care didn’t exist, Dave and i would still be nearly $100,000 in debt, with no real hope of digging our way out no matter how many fancy Masters’ degrees we conjure up on our home printer.  Finn was born fourteen weeks early, only three months after we moved back home from Korea.  we were substitute teaching, working our butts off to get a mortgage, and taking short-term contracts where we could.  we had jobs, but no insurance.  in Canada, this meant we ended up on the hook for $750 of a thirteen thousand dollar airlift, which outraged naive moi…and i just missed out on qualifying for the fifteen weeks of maternity leave pay i would otherwise have gotten from the government in spite of the baby’s death, because i hadn’t worked quite enough hours.  so we spent that summer broke and grieving and i had to hustle for a new job before i was really up for it and it was hard.  but…but.  i did not spend that summer contemplating a bottomless, hopeless, helpless pit of debt in hospital bills, the weight of them crushing.  i did not have to ask myself if that eleven hours was worth the cost of the desperate machines, the specialists, the medication, the wires, the tubes.  i only had to ask myself if i had the courage to try again.

and so i sit, agog, watching the vitriol spew from pundits and bloggers and BabyCenter board posters every time the subject comes up, and i shake my head, because i just don’t get it.  freedom?  um….has the word ‘free’ in it, folks!  seriously, if you want to talk freedom and health care in the same sentence, talk about freedom to.  freedom to see a doctor when you’re sick without worrying whether you can afford it.  freedom to focus on healing after injury or loss, freedom to try again after the death of a child without worrying that it will financially cripple you.   freedom to see specialists for your child without your husband having to take a pay cut to qualify for insurance because hers was cut off and she has a pre-existing condition.

i guess i’m just slow coming to terms with how scary this whole concept of socialized medicine can be for a lot of people.  i grew up in a country where most citizens take pride in our universal health care system, much as we love to bitch about it out of the other side of our mouths – heck, we still acclaimed our long-dead Medicare founder Tommy Douglas as the Greatest Canadian ever a couple of years ago in a national contest, and not because he’s Kiefer Sutherland’s grandfather.  but i suppose, in the end, where a people’s collective sense of belonging and pride is located is a subtle, touchy thing…and it is in this one place that i see huge and real differences between the self-identified average American and the self-identified average Canadian.

so just let me say that i’m grateful to the True North, strong and free, while i sit here nursing the fishing line they hitched into my cervix last week, on twelve hours notice, gratis.  i am eating right, and working hard, and doing my best with your 1.2 cents, folks.  and if you ever need my 2 cents, well…help yourself.

home.

i’m on “pelvic rest” ’til, um, September.  no lifting Oscar.  no carrying anything over ten pounds.  no sex.  no excitement.  no laundry, supposedly, or vacuuming.  no exercise.  horrors.

ice cream is allowed.  sitting is permitted unless i feel any twinging or cramping, in which case i should lie down.  my colleagues at work will likely find sudden bouts of horizontitude a little, erm, disconcerting, as i work in a cubicle in a shared office with a bunch of computer dudes, but…i’m moving to part-time, so i’ll see if i can just keep the lying down for home.   commence devolution into whiny, frabjous couch dictator with ass the size of Alaska.

but i wanted this, and still do, so much.  this is still all perk, for me, compared to the alternative.  i was taken aback by the fact that my cervix was so weak as to need the cerclage this early, but i am perversely glad to have it, glad to have made it to the point where a stitch is advisable, an option.  it is external validation, i suppose, of the reality of a pregnancy i find it otherwise hard to believe i haven’t conjured out of utter wishfulness.  so i am trying to respect its reality and limitations, the stitch, hard as it is to adjust in the moments when my child falls and cries and i leap to scoop him up and remember, too late, that i am not supposed to…that there is fishing twine embedded deep in my most intimate bits and it is there to do a Very Important Job and tearing it through my compromised flesh would be Unpleasant and Bad, both.

confronting the diaper pail upstairs and judging its weight and realizing i have to ask Dave to take it down kind of sucks too, surprisingly. mostly because i hate to ask for things, hate incurring any karmic debt involving household chores.  i harbour a secret fear that i will be paying for the next few months well into our retirement, envisioning conversations circa 2047 that involve ancient moi wheedling “honey, can you put my polyester slacks in the washer, mon chou, as i am indisposed shining my new dentures?” and hearing “dang, woman, i washed your pants with my bare knuckles uphill both ways all the time you were pregnant with Hughloise (insert helpful name suggestion here, please) and i gave Oscar all his baths for FOUR MONTHS and got zero lovin’ and clearly you are an ingrate now go pick up my socks and, uh, sugar? i like fabric softener in my dainties.”  or something like that.  except Dave being Dave, there would be no details; more like, “i did all your laundry for YEARS.”  lordly look.  end of conversation.  i cringe.  laundry, you may guess, is usually my domain…and i am accustomed to my high horse.

and yet those are the things i hope for, really.  i hope there is a happy ending, so that all this lumpishness and helplessness can someday be something Dave lobs back at me, mock-hard-done-by, this period a memory made worthwhile by the presence of another little face that shouts “mine!” and tears about the house making us frazzled and happy and grateful.  it may well not.  but it is worth every crappy moment of the shot.

(so long, of course, as he does not leave me beached on the couch, Oscar unbathed, socks piled up about the house like mouse droppings.  which is what i secretly fear, i think, in becoming less of what i am used to being, all of a sudden.)

becoming an effective invalid is damn hard on the self-esteem, and on the relationship one conducts in one’s head with one’s love and partner, even if one’s love and partner is willing and adaptable.

the place lurks in the dustier corners of my brain, almost like a dreamscape…a warren of banally familiar rooms and hallways examined in tedious detail over months of enforced, enclosed exposure…and yet i do not think about its innards, have never even tried to connect all its pieces and the experiences they represent into any kind of coherent whole.  it is too much to try to take in.  it sits there, institutional, a monolith acknowledged only at the surface, in donations at the local Dairy Queen and testimonials of happier endings from telethons and fundraising letters.  from the first time we drove out from under the parkade barrier, new parents and childless all at once, this hospital has been an indelible, impossible temple of our past and our possible futures, both.  our first child lived his entire life here.  he died in my arms in a rocking chair nurses set out for us, a tableau wherein all but us knew their parts well.  at his death, it was decreed that any future pregnancies – those that got to the twelve week mark, of course – would be monitored here, on an outpatient or inpatient basis as required.   this hospital is the place we faithless hopeful turn, no matter how uncertain its promises or fraught with pain and memory, no matter how incessantly bad its food, year in, year out.

the first time i came here i was airlifted in, all urgency, to wait in isolation for weeks for a birth that turned out worse than we’d ever really believed it could.  the second time i came packed, warned by my doctor at home that the next regular checkup would likely result in preventative hospital bedrest.  it did.  i stared at the walls for weeks on end, grappling with fear and boredom and the assaultive power of memory to overwhelm one with something so mundane as the shape of a drawer pull, the baby blue of a ratty curtain.

and so i came this Tuesday for the standard ultrasound, at the appointed time in the expected place, and still i was struck by the utter weirdness of being there and how i felt like a sad, small child, inanely proud at knowing where everything was, which doors in the Fetal Assessment Unit lead to where.  the 7th floor, Fetal Assessment and bedrest ward combined, have seen more of me than some apartments i’ve rented.  and were looking to see more…that ultrasound’s results were not so standard after all, and so we agreed that i would return the next morning, to stitch my weakened cervix in an effort to allow this pregnancy to reach viability.

a cerclage is only minor surgery, maybe fifteen minutes.  it means two days in hospital at most.  and yet the night before i was clingy, anxious, almost desperate to get things in order. some part of me expected to stay, to be removed from my life for weeks or months, held in stasis…and i felt helpless, unprepared.  i have been expecting a stint in this hospital during this pregnancy, only later…just as i expected a stint for the last pregnancy, which – had all gone differently and November not brought miscarriage – would have come about now.  so the place has been looming large in my expectations for months…but i was not entirely ready, not at all.  the place is too much to ever be fully ready for.

i went in Wednesday morning, checked in, had blood drawn.  the admitting clerk directed me to the third floor, which took me aback, because in my mental map of the place, the third floor is the NICU.  Finn died there.  we have been back since, to see other babies…but like the college room where you lost your virginity if you were a late bloomer like me, the place remains quite singular in my mind, a stage for that one event.  i recalled, on the way up the elevator, that the convenient maze of protection my memory has put up around its unrevisited sore spots had utterly blanked the fact that he was also born on the third floor, that that’s where L&D is, too, a wing of the hospital i’d never been back to despite all the months i spent there pregnant later with O. 

he was born in room 310, i saw as we rounded the corner.  the nurse led me through the wing.  i paused for a second in front of that room i hadn’t seen in almost three years, in front of the door, compelled to look in and yet awkward about barging in unannounced on someone else’s labour.  i wanted, i think, to see if i could see some shadow of my child more clearly there, the little son i barely glimpsed at his birth; if the configuration of walls and light and machinery would trigger some gift of recall my conscious mind cannot.  but i did not.  i got corralled, instead, down the hall to a small utility-type holding cell with a stretcher in it, where i dolled myself up in a johnny shirt and spent the next two-and-a-half hours lolling about on the cot and left the past behind and forgot, for awhile, even to fret about the present.

the surgery went well.  my doctor announced three times that it had been a really good idea to do it now rather than later, which i found oddly comforting even though, really, it’s news more dire than one would hope for.  recovery was odd.  they’d given me a spinal and my hips and legs were so utterly deadened that i kept reaching my hand down to my meatlike thigh and wondered why they’d entrapped me in a fat suit.  my brain was convinced that my poor legs were all cramped up in frog-fashion and that i desperately needed to straighten them, even though they were actually sticking straight out in front of me and i couldn’t move a muscle in any case.   my nurse was kind.  the lady on the other side of the curtain had twin girls.  we listened to them, all new and healthy, and the new mother lamented that she’d been told she’d have to stay three nights with them because one was small and i bit my tongue and tried to focus on the sound of the babies, telling them apart, wishing them well.  her luck does not take away from mine, i whispered to my meatloaf frog-legs.  we are just both here.  we are just both here.  now move.  one foot twitched, at a bizarre angle.

they were supposed to move me originally to the seventh floor, the bedrest floor, to stay.  then the sixth, where Dave & Oscar had been waiting, unbeknownst to me.  then word came back that i’d be going to the one floor in the hospital that i have no association whatsoever with: the fifth floor, the nursery floor, where moms who’ve delivered normal, healthy babies go.  i thought this was entertaining.  but my room on the fifth floor wasn’t ready so they wheeled me back out to the third floor L&D ward.

i had forgotten the room, but i knew it, well.  it’s a birthing suite, not that different from 310 three doors down where Finn was eventually born.  the night i stayed in it, three years ago, was the very first night i spent in this hospital, flown in with my water broken, Dave rushing by car to make it from Charlottetown.  i remember it as low-lit, with many nurses coming and going in hushed tones, checking for contractions, to see if labour had stopped.  i remember trying to come to terms with what 24 weeks might really mean and whether i could comprehend what it would mean to us to have a child with serious disabilities and struggles ahead of him or her.  i remember trying to comprehend the possibility of death, and mostly failing.  i remember seizing, though, as best i could, on the fact that labour had stopped for the time being…and very consciously deciding that i would not let my fear overcome me, that i would love and attend to the baby within whatever might happen, that whatever time we got together, i would not turn away from.  i did that, and i never regretted it.  but i realized Wednesday, staring at the same walls, that it was not a decision i could ever truly make again.  i am institutionalized now, broken, in a sense, no longer whole enough or naive enough to be able to summon that purity of spirit without cringing in fear of the after.  i whispered an apology to the stitched-in fetus for what i wish i could give again but can’t, and waited for them to take me upstairs.

and i whispered again to my still-tingly legs, this time about the two versions of myself, there is no comparison.  shit luck does not always mean shit luck.  we were just both here.  we were just both here.

Bon is still in the hospital, she’s holding up fine, at first blush the proceedure was successful and she’ll be back online tomorrow… I reiterate. bon is good.

and there, my friends, ends the coverage of your regularly scheduled programming.

When we decided to take another walk down the road that never seems to follow any path that we expect were were a little… timid. Three tries: eleven starkly beautiful hours with our 2 pound warrior in 2005, 36 anxious weeks of waiting the O-man in 2006, and an early term miscarriage late last year. Not terrifyingly great odds when you add to the fact that I’d had two early miscarriages in my first real legal partnership.

One of the things that was obvious from the get-go was that this was going to be 40weeks + of … something. In saner moments I’ve wondered whether we really had enough left to go through the process. The waiting can be excrutiating, the potential for loss a pall over the days as they pass, the possibility of a 10 + week convalescence for bon in the same place where Finn’s short life was lived and where she spent 9 weeks with Oscar’s pregnancy. And she smiled, and we shrugged our shoulders and decided that it was worth it.

But nobody told me there’d be days like these

Two days actually. It all started yesterday, with dropping bon off at the hospital. She was going to be in for 2-3 days, and the O-man and I were going to get our chance to try out 2 full days chillin’ with each other. We could be doing it for ten this summer… so practice is nice. We’ve been staying at my sister’s place while she’s in Florida and it pretty much has everything that you could ever want to entertain a two year old. Plus, plus I say, that’s not all, oh no, plus we are in Halifax, which has much better shopping than our quaint little home town.

but then oscar got sick

For those of you familiar with bon’s literary jaunts here on the crib, you’ll realize that when the O-man gets sick, there’s about a 50/50 chance that it will necessitate a trip to emergency. But, no problem there, the emergency is in the same hospital that bon’s is staying in, no biggie. We muddle our way through the morning, the O and I, with only a seemingly short visit from

the home alarm installation team

They came by about 10:30am, we chatted, and they figured they’d be done by about 12:30pm… no promises the very effective man says, but we’ll do our best. So, they start out by doing all the installations in the room that O will be sleeping in and we head off to the grocery store.

which was a howling disaster of snot filled chaos

but we managed to get ourselves together and back to the home range in time for lunch… this is rarely a problem for O, and, true to type, he gobbles down the goodies i managed to grab while fending off the little coughing dervish. We head upstairs, he yowls a bit for mommy, for daddy, for the neighbours… but it’s with that tone that says he’s really not pleased with the whole jigger, but that he’s fine. and he drifted into a cough filled, semi-peaceful sleep

until they started testing the alarm bell

It seemed that due to some unforseen challenges they weren’t going to get done before about 2pm, thirty minutes after the alarm bell sounded and twenty nine minutes after the O explained in no uncertain terms that he was done his nap. All counted 45min – not enough for O. So we head to the hospital to bring bonnie her stuff… I had no one to send in the short term (lots of fine folks in halifax, but most of them work and the phone numbers and contact info for bon’s blogger friends are all in HER head, which i had no access to) So I arrived there and quaranteened the O man for an hour it took them to figure out where bonnie was going to be. We moved into her room to be, found she wasn’t there, got her phone hooked up, stuff unpacked, requisite chocolate and room warming present purchased and O entertained (barely) for another hour in our little room

and then they moved her

Pack everything back up, head up one floor and find bonnie… we had a pretty nice time actually, as I’d brought the computer and a video (thanks for the suggestion dad) and O watched richard scarey’s best abc ever while bon and I talk about how she’s feeling (crampy but good)… we had supper, and we went home… and home, well, we made it through. I try not to watch the clock on nights like that, but i watched the clock all the way to bedtime.

and oscar was up most of the night (not to mention the toast fiasco, apparently toasted spelt bread tastes like melba toast)

So we ‘woke’ up this morning and the little bugger is hitting the high point of his illness – and he’s really being a trooper about it, but he is ill and 2 – and tried to pull together some semblance of a morning… and I discover that I’m not really feeling well. Just kinda lethargic, which i pass off as a lack of reasonable food, sleep and stress. So we skim by the hospital, hand off some more food to bon to supplement the cinamen and sugar on white bread that she apparently doesn’t think qualifies as a nutritious breakfast (I ask you, who puts that on a menu). And we head home

to the sound of chainsaws ‘trimming’ trees in the park behind the house 

Amazingly, Oscar gets to sleep. And stays asleep. And I sit down with a banana and a beer… no joke, i figure enough food to count (it’s two fruit!) and enough of a sedative to get me to sleep. Or, potentially, to give me some kind of vicious food reaction. (not susceptable) So I crawl up onto the couch, manage to make to ill-runs to the bathroom before O wakes up…

and well… the day continued. There’s a part about almost fainting in the Subway, and curling up with Oscar while he patted my head, my father having heart fibrulations which meant they couldn’t come and a family member put into paliative care.

But that’s not what I broke into the blog talk about. 

Today, I got my parent badge. Barely able to stand, sore all over, I managed to feed and ‘entertain’ my child. It puts me into a long line, through thousands of years and millions of similar moments, of parents getting it done, of being tired, sick, starving… and finding enough in themselves to do what was necessary.

It wasn’t near the worst day of my life, but it was the day where i caught my own eye in the mirror the most. (minus, of course, my teens) I found myself looking into myself, muttering encouragement, finding clever solutions to getting O to stay in a room with a couch. I know there will be many more of these on the horizon,

but today, i know a little more about courage. watching O try to comfort me while he was sick, seeing bonnie in the bed desperate to find a way to make the day easier, and, inside me, something more fulfilling then the thousands of hockey/soccer/rugby games that I thought had tested my endurance.

I lurk, and find encouragement in all your voices, and am finding not just Oscar who is already wrapped into my life, but the ‘act’ of parenthood, swiftly becoming something that is very important to me.

we both used to live here, separately, married to other people, living other lives.

eight and ten years later, respectively, here we are again, turning a doctor’s appointment into a vacation, wheeling Oscar down streets that seem far more city-ish than they used to, teasing ourselves with notions of moving back here, spending more time on these old streets. there are more people like us here, shabby faux urbanites who get excited about Korean restaurants and Belgian beer and neighbourhood coffee shops…and in truth even after a decade gone, we have more friends still here than we do at home.

but we were going to go home today.

instead, the doctor’s appointment this afternoon turned into a four-hour extravaganza of history and questions and more questions and not only are we going with a cerclage after all but we are going with said cerclage at 9 am tomorrow morning. here. so here we stay, for a bit.

my cervix is already shorter than it was at 22 weeks with Oscar. it was my decision, ultimately, which i think i would’ve preferred it not be, but it is made.

there are risks…infection primarily, but doing it this early and while i still have some cervix left means that the risk of losing the little round-headed alien i saw on the ultrasound today is in the 1-2% range. whereas i suspect this cervix’s chances of making it even to 28 weeks without a stitch might be…um…worse. there is no certainty of this, mind you…of any of this.

but we will stay and Oscar and his father can be urbanites for a few more days whilst i revisit the perinatal bedrest floor of the IWK.

be careful what you wish for, says i.

first day of spring, and a holiday to boot. freezing rain. crocuses still nowhere to be seen on horizon.

on paper, twelve weeks today…though i suspect that auspicious jubilee won’t really roll around until Sunday or Monday, given what the ultrasounds have shown and my tendency towards longer cycles. silly, to be equivocating about a couple of days…but when you deliver preemies, accurate dating and even a few days extra gestation matter. or rather accurate dating and even a few days extra gestation can matter…they haven’t, in my own personal experience, but they can. so it’s more my doctors focusing on the discrepancy for the moment. my fingers are plugged deep in my ears, and i don’t really want to hear anybody.

maybe least of all myself.

i have been silent, absent. even in person, i find myself wanting to retreat, be left alone. Dave is living with a shell who repeats robotically, i’m tired, i’m hungry, i’m nauseous, shouldn’t that cat litter go out? i am unavailable, at any level below the surface. it’s not a lack of things to say, exactly, but a lack of things i want to say, want to hear myself saying, want to lay out on record. i remember now why i did not start this blog until just two weeks before Oscar was born…i’ve wondered, in the interim, why i hadn’t taken Dave’s suggestion months before, and blogged my way through all that bedrest? but now i remember. at some random point, i began to believe that O would really come to be…and only then was i able to construct any kind of coherent narrative to describe how i felt about him, about carrying him, about being pregnant again. until then, i felt like a balloon full with toxic waste and hope and love and fear and recoil all sloshing around together, and i never knew, if pricked, which would come pouring out.

and i am as reluctant to put my hope out there to be seen and made vulnerable, pitied, as i am to uncover the paranoia, the sludge, the scar tissue that puckers and pulls and mars my relationship to the whole concept of pregnancy.

i don’t want to hear myself when i wake at four in the morning, heart pounding, certain it’s over and this baby has died and that i will simply have to check myself into the psych ward this time because i just do not have the resources right now to adjust my sense of myself to accommodate loss and despair any further, as if that were something anyone could control or delimit by saying, um, no, no thanks, not now. and even more certain that even if i did turn myself, supplicant, on the mercy of the white coats, they cannot and will not help me there, that i will be left alone again, Humpty Dumpty, to put myself back together.

nor do i want to let my penchant for dates and seasons run away with me, and wax effusive about how the long season of advent and waiting after the miscarriage in November now culminates in my thus-far-safe arrival into something like a second trimester just at the beginning of spring, however much those treacly sentiments flit through my brain. they are there and in a sense most narratively pleasing, and yet they are false promise, all bedecked in Easter bonnets. they make me feel frivolous and foolish even for entertaining them. they make me rage at the blind innocence of the “out of the first trimester and you’re fine” discourse that makes those of us who bear its untruths into Medusas in a world where people are uncomfortable being reminded that 12 weeks is no guarantee of anything.

but oh, how i wish it were. just as i wish the snow would go, and it were really spring, and with the mud and the rains and the cruel rawness of April would come the promise of new life as sure as crocuses and the balloon man who whistles far and wee.

i want to know how to speak this. i am just waiting for the ashes in my mouth to turn to rich, red earth, waiting for time to tell. two more seasons, yet, to abide.

Oscar is pining, for the first time in his short life.

his grandparents, Dave’s parents, were here visiting last weekend. a good time was had by all, especially those under three feet tall. Grandmaman and Grandpapa treat the boy like the sun in the sky, and he rises to the occasion, demanding and beguiling their attention from the moment he wakes to the bedtime story Grandmaman weaves for him, rocking in her lap. between them and his Nannie, my mom, his is an embarrassment of grandparental riches. and this is what we moved home for, really, after all those years of vagabonding…the blessing and bounty of seeing our parents with our child, our children, seeing him loved like that. we got lucky.

’til now, Nannie, the local grandparent, has been the one who got most of the glory from O. he learned to say her name over a year ago, one of his first words, and insists that i remind him that Nannie loves him, every night before he goes to sleep. the two of them go on playdates to her place every couple of Saturday mornings, wherein my serious, proper mother apparently dons plastic fire helmets and cavorts around like a banshee. O came home a few weeks ago telling tales of “wheee!” and “Nana!” and when i asked him, disbelieving, if he was trying to tell me that Nannie drove fast, he was most earnestly affirmative. my mother, who stops three feet early in intersections and pumps her brakes in July. with her grandson, she’s a wildwoman. he adores her.

but poor Grandmaman and Grandpapa, though O’s always enjoyed them, haven’t held quite the same presence in his mind until now. Oscar sees them every month or two in person, and has since birth, and waves to them even more frequently on the webcam. they’re topics of conversation in our house, but until this weekend, Oscar’s filial love for them has been of the “out of sight, out of mind” variety.

no longer.

since the moment they left Monday morning, Oscar has been looking around corners and waking up at night, asking hopefully, “Wama? Bapa?” he had never really had a word for Grandmaman before this week, so that when he first asked for her i thought he was asking for his lovey, his stuffed rabbit…a substitution which affronted and exasperated O most intolerably. he misses them. he feels their absence, and it is new to him, and weighty. there’s a look on his face that i’ve never seen before…he’s wistful, uncertain. he knows they’re not just down the road, somehow…that this is different from when Nannie goes home and comes back tomorrow or in a couple of days. they were here, in our house, and now…they’re not. and the house itself seems as if it’s emptier, for him, no longer sufficient just to us three. i ask him if he feels sad, and he says yes, and there are hugs, and extra webcam visits with New Brunswick, but still…for the first time, i am watching my child cope with the feeling of loss, with the sadness of not having someone you love nearby.

and i know this is a gentle way to learn, and i am grateful. but the high, sweet voice that calls out “Wama!” as if he really believes that maybe we’ve just been hiding her under the cushions all week? it reminds me how much crushing it takes to make it to adulthood, makes me want to lay my body down over him and keep him safe from hurt, keep him small like this, where the saddest thing he’s ever known is that his wonderful Grandmaman and Grandpapa went home for a bit, and will be back next month.

and makes me wonder, too, just a bit, if i was ever that small, and that innocent.

to the multitude who weighed in with ideas and experiences and just good wishes regarding milk and asthma and all that mad stuff…thank you.  so much.  we saw our family doctor (who’s not utterly opposed to the possibility of a dairy connection, btw, it’s just not his area of expertise in any way) on Thursday, and Oscar’s lungs are clear and good to go once again.  the doc too was strongly in support of putting O back on the rice milk for now and then trying cow’s milk again in a month or two once cold season is over and before allergy season begins, just to see if we can establish a pattern.  allergy tests will follow, but probably not until fall.

the rice milk O drinks is organic and fortified with vitamin D and calcium, so i feel pretty good about giving it to him.  while his diet isn’t heavily meat-reliant, he gets a lot of protein and actually gravitates more to protein foods than carbs, so i’m not over-worried about him having any protein deficiency.  we do give him soy milk occasionally too but don’t want to overload the soy in his diet as kids with dairy sensitivities often have the same reactions to soy.

and mostly, yep, i’m still just kinda hoping he’ll grow out of it.  so having all of you tell me stories of siblings and relatives and cousins’ pet dogs with terrible childhood asthma that magically went away in adulthood…that was like candy.  i love you.  i like to imagine myself a realist and i do prefer to see the details of what’s coming down the road at me, but clearly…when it comes to my kid, i’m all over the possibility of magical salvation, of having him snatched from the jaws of even very small, controllable, more irritant-than-life-threatening kinds of dragons.  and in the meantime, he gets tasty organics.  god, i am such a yuppie.

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and in the off chance that you spend your nights dreaming of rubbing elbows with my bourgeois self, some of us from eastern parts will be gathering May 16th-18th in bizarrely-picturesque Chester NS for our own highly-tongue-in-cheek version of BlogHer, since San Francisco is thousands of dollars away for us and July just…well…inconvenient for most.  Maritime BlogHer will involve absolutely no speeches, panels, or experts, but probably copious amounts of wine, beer, and chocolate.  i have first dibs on the chocolate, just so all are clear.  we’re numbering a cozy 8-10 strong, renting a B&B for the weekend, and…um…plan to hang out.  invitations are utterly open. :)

however, if you do plan to come and kiss fish (hey, it’s local custom, one has to be culturally sensitive) with us, we’ll need confirmation by the end of this month.  please join our facebook group (it’s the only one entitled Maritime BlogHer, easy to find) and let us know your travel plans so we can try to coordinate rooms and drives and all that good stuff.

and i can regale you with all the exciting things i learn about dairy and asthma in the interim.

Oscar had to go back to the emergency room the other day, when his breathing suddenly bottomed out again after almost five months without an ER trip.

he’s been using an asthma inhaler twice daily since the last ER visit in October, and we had a consultation with the local asthma clinic to discuss how to manage symptoms if they began to appear again…and he’d fought off a number of colds with no sign of impact to his lungs, so really, we thought all was going well.

so well that we put him back on dairy…which we’d dropped, at least in the form of milk, after that same last visit back in October. though formal medical channels made no peep about any connection, Dr. Google had most kindly informed me that a lot of kids with asthma symptoms have dairy sensitivities, so we started soy milk and moved to rice milk after a visit to a naturopath in November. the naturopath was a bit of a bust really – all about evangelizing veganism and making presumptions that any child not currently taking wheatgrass suppositories must be living off Cheetos and Coke (which, um, thanks but could we talk about my kid? the one right here with the tofu smeared on his face?) – so we dumped his willfully deaf self and fast…but still cobbled a few of his lofty dietary prescriptions into our own big picture of what may be going on inside O’s little body.

plain, unsweetened yogurt and rice milk and lots of protein in the form of soy and legumes and eggs it’s been, through the winter, with cheese here and there without incident. plus noodles, avocado, fruit, the usual.  O seemed, January ear infection and the spate of runny noses aside, pretty healthy. at least his lungs were great.

so great that i decided last week that really, i’m no freaking dietitian, and it was a snake oil quack of sorts who got us started on this rice milk stuff – which organic and whole grain and fully of fluffy unicorns though it is, has no protein in it, you see – and oh my god what if i’m causing beriberi or something by not giving my child the milk of friendly cows? so out i trotted and bought a four litre jug of local, farm-fresh-ish homo, and by the time we got to the bottom of the jug, O was in the emergency room with blood oxygen sats of 88 and it all just came on overnight no matter how many puffers we pumped into his little lungs.

now, i realize this could just be coincidence. one event does not a scientific trial make, and all that. but for the moment, i’ve restocked the rice milk, and think we’ll go back to what was working at least for another month or so, and then when i’ve wrapped up the big project at work and we have a little more time for hanging in the emerge, maybe we’ll try those happy cows again. all the while watching very carefully.
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what i’m wondering, though, since the traditional medical community here seem largely oblivious or resistant to the idea of any link between dairy and asthma symptoms and thus i don’t really have anyone to ask except Dr. Evangelivegan (the other naturopath, the one i really want to see, is on maternity leave), is whether any of you have experiences, anecdotes, or knowledge to share about kids and dairy sensitivities and breathing “issues”? just curious. and grateful for anything you’ve got to add to our pastiche of a picture.
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this province has the highest asthma rates in Canada. we’re by far the smallest and one of the most rural provinces in the country. high levels of pesticides due to mass farming practices are suspected…and yet, we ourselves live dead smack in the middle of the (admittedly teensy) capital city, and O’s only ever driven by farmer’s fields a couple of times in his life, never even during spraying season. the cows, though…i dunno. they’re probably living a little closer to those pesticides, if, indeed, the assumptions of a link aren’t specious. or maybe Oscar just has problems because he was a 36 week baby, or maybe the five rounds of experimental prenatal steroids i got as part of a study while i was on bedrest with him have actually backfired and weakened his lungs, or maybe he’s allergic to the cat or the dust mites that likely party in his room at night despite my semi-diligent HEPA vaccuming…all these things are possible, are part of our picture. and it is probably too early to tell, definitively. and he may grow out of this. if he does not, it does not worry me overmuch…there are worse things. but it interests me, fires my mind, you see.

and so i wonder if you can help, if you can tell me what you know, too.

awhile back, Julia tagged me for the book meme, where you grab the nearest tome that happens to be lying about and post three sentences from page 123. it’s taken me some time to get around to actually honouring the tag, in part because the last couple of times i looked around all i could find to hand were books like Baby Duck and the Fuzzy Blanket, and Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever, neither of which can boast a page 123…but over the weekend i actually picked up a couple of the serious, heady pieces of non-fiction from our dusty bookshelf and started – gasp – reading. i’m not sure why i suddenly felt like i had the time, let alone the brainspace, to tackle scholarly fare…and i secretly suspect i don’t and have simply forgotten something very important that normally sucks up all my spare hours and i will shortly be catapulted back into the reality of my drudgery, but in the meantime, i’m reading.

what i’m reading – or at the nearest selection of what i’m reading, because i have a habit of starting three books at once and finishing none – is the Edward Said Reader. and page 123, specifically, in terms of the tag, comes from an – ahem – provocatively titled and controversial little essay called Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims, with the fifth sentence on the page reading:

“On the one hand, it is associated with debauched and paupered conquerors, an arena lent by the Turk to fighting beasts, a part of the despotic East: on the other, with “the brightness of Western freedom,” with nations like England and America, with the idea of neutrality (like Belgium).”

light stuff. of course, as i’m reading the essay entitled Orientalism and not the one above, at the moment, i can glean that what Said’s talking about above is Israel and the discourse surrounding it, but am uncertain about the era, the context. and wonder if perhaps i ought to have stuck with Baby Duck and the Fuzzy Blanket, at least for public consumption.
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the hangover, of course, of a weekend spent reading Said and Derrida in small interrupted increments, is that i cannot quite shake the pull to speak what cannot be tidily spoken, to inscribe it here and thus make space for it, give it shape in all its ambiguity.

the story happened three years ago, to the day. if i were making a conventional narrative, i suppose i would call it the beginning of the end. it foreshadowed tragedy, certainly…but i did not know it as tragedy at the time, was utterly oblivious, like the character in a silent movie who is unable to see the piano careening down from the fifth-floor window towards her head. it felt more like debacle in the moment, grandiose in its awfulness, but not tragic, not truly. later, i thought – and looked forward to reshaping it as – comedy. reclamation in humour. only when i discovered too late that it was not a part of my story but someone else’s, did it become too sad to ever speak of again.

when Dave and i moved home from Korea i was three months pregnant and it was January and there was a hiring freeze going on in government in my little economically-unimpressive hometown and so i took a lowly part-time job at the local university to get my foot in the door at a third the hourly rate i’d been accustomed to and started substitute teaching the rest of the time, taking all the calls i could. because in Canada, the government, bless it, offers a year of moderately-waged maternity leave to parents who have worked 600 hours in the year before their child is born, and i figured six months was more than enough time to get 600 hours in and pride be damned and i would make it happen. and so it came to pass that on a Wednesday morning, the 9th of March, i found myself (nineteen-week belly still half-hidden under an ugly polyester blazer that declared little about my maternal status but screamed “i’m pudgy”) staring down a class of rabid bears grade 10 French immersion students.

there is a trick to successful substitute teaching. it is, i imagine, a profession rather akin to that of the lion tamer, who must enter the den of the animals fearlessly, always fully believing in his or her own control…except that for the substitute, the illusion of control must be relinquished. power is what a substitute cultivates. not blind power, either, accorded by mere status…if you walk into a class of students expecting that you will be automatically treated as powerful, or attached to the idea of your own power, you will be eaten up and spit out and burped on before you ever get to the roll call. but if you can walk in with your own personal wattage turned up as high as it will go, and demand just by that presence a moment of the students’ attention, then you have a chance by which to establish real (momentary) power, if you offer respect and a fair exchange. eye contact helps. humour helps. sarcasm, if they’re old enough for it…though not unkindness. substitute teaching is above all else relational, and if you go in clear that you are, after all, the sub and not a doormat or a dragoon, most classes will allow you to be a reasonable version of your better teaching self.

but they can smell fear. and on March 9th, 2005, i was fearful, because the class i was teaching were not only the first class i’d had at this particular school, meaning that i had no reputation to precede me, but they were a French class. and i do not speak French. barely at all. Dave had actually gotten the call for this class but was already booked at another school – we were both subbing, then, an awful whirlwind of disconnected days as we tried desparately to get on our feet in a new country that we’d almost forgotten how to live in – so he’d handed the phone to me. i’d been clear with the teacher that i really didn’t speak French. he’d been clear that he had absolutely no one else to ask. Dave had had the class a month or so before and declared them a wild bunch, used to eating subs for breakfast. i was clear in my own mind that we needed the money and the hours towards my mat leave. and that was how, on that morning, i found myself in front of 30 sixteen-year olds trying to stand as tall as i possibly could.

it started well. i opened in rehearsed French, introducing myself, checking out the room, pausing, waiting for the inevitable parries and heckles of kids trying to exert a little control over the institution around them…then surprised them, switched into English, got them on board with the idea of it being a “translation” day and was actually riding a rising tide of what in adolescents counts almost as enthusiasm when it happened.

five minutes into a day teaching a language i don’t speak, standing directly in front of 30 teenagers with no desk or door within ten feet of me and with absolutely no warning, i felt a distinct, warm surge of wetness down my leg, like i had peed myself. not a gush, but no trickle either. enough that i knew my underwear were soaked and very possibly, visibly, my pants.

i did not look. my first instinct was to grab at my crotch in horror and prance to the door like it was grade 1 all over again and i’d just had an accident, but…my self-preservation instinct caught on to the fact that no students appeared – as of yet – to be staring at my nether regions and howling and pointing. so i stopped my fluttering hand as it crept to my ass and i pulled down my best teacher mask over what must have been my momentary look of horror and i kept on speaking and i stood there without moving, legs slightly apart like a boxer’s. and when i thought they had a reasonable understanding of the task they’d been set i asked if there were questions and then, as their heads dropped to work or stare or doodle, i verrrry slowly crab-walked the fifteen feet across the front of the room to the door and said i’d be in the office for a minute and backed out and ran like hell to find a bathroom in that utterly unfamiliar school.

and i thought, thank jesus i’m wearing black pants. and i thought, my god, isn’t it early to lose bladder control? and for a second i thought, could it be my water broke but it wasn’t that much, see, maybe a half-cup and no blood, no mucus, no nothing, and i thought i vaguely smelled pee and was mortified sitting there on that strange toilet, trying to wring out my panties so i could get back to class because i was still only eight minutes into what was looking like a very long day.

so back i went, to French class. i called my doctor’s office at recess but she was on call at the hospital and so they could only fit me in for the next day, unless anything further happened or it looked like an emergency, which, except for my pride, it didn’t.

and the next day i had a scheduled ultrasound in the morning and the tech was unconcerned and uncommunicative and apparently saw nothing wrong, and i saw my doctor in the afternoon and she was concerned but swabbed for fluid and found no sign of any, and so i swallowed my shame and the sheer awfulness of that moment in front of 30 kids, torn between childhood nightmares and very adult fears, and i accepted that my bladder must just have gone on me and decided, this is going to be a funny story someday and i was proud of myself, see, proud of myself for handling it and not running screaming from that room like a little girl and never going back.

and just for a minute, for the briefest span, i finally had it, the perfect narrative, the Most Embarassing Moment to beat all embarrassing moments, just suitably humiliating but due to the excuse-all of pregnancy utterly safe for work and with the perspective of distance, funny as hell, to be trucked out at all slightly drunken events with a “yeh, well, i peed myself flat out in front of an entire class of grade ten students in my first five minutes as a substitute teacher in a language i don’t even SPEAK!” and yep, i swear, it’s all true and i know, wouldn’t you just die?

except we were all wrong, the ultrasound tech most of all, and it was not my bladder but fluid after all, and that early loss of fluid was what compromised Finn’s lungs enough that even though he was plenty big to survive when he was born seven weeks later he did not, and that was, to me, a tragedy even if the start of it all felt like it had to be comedy because what else could it be, standing there wet-pantsed in front of all those staring eyes?

of course, they are a false dichotomy, tragedy and comedy, the seeds of the other always inherent in either.
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and it feels almost like sacrilege to even lay this story out here, a story whose narrative reads like it ought to have a punch line, and yet on a subject so sacrosanct, so recoiled from, that the discourse does not allow for funny stories. but i have no other way to tell you what day it is, how it marks the beginning of a fifty-day personal Lenten journey that does not end, my friends, in resurrection…at least not for the character whose voice the story silenced, the one i still miss, the one i bear witness to.

you can carry a baby for twenty-six weeks and laugh at all the wrong things and not know. and years later, maybe, you will mark the date and realize that there is no room in the language to say what you want to say. and maybe you say it anyway, because even if it is unspeakable, it is yours to tell and there is perhaps more harm in the silence.