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i spent the morning today home with Oscar, a rare treat for us, his sitter off travelling, we two in the morning sunshine wandering to the thrift store for a serious pants-hunt (one pair of elastic-waist chinos, size 2T, check!) and to the coffee shop for some mother-son lollygagging and discussion of world events and trucks going by outside the window. O took to this grown-up social milestone like he’d been to the cafe born, and sat up on the chair as if he were about to expound on post-modernism or call for a revolution. he waved to every single person in the place and my heart puffed up dangerously and left me blinking back tears.

and then we visited the kittens at the pet store and walked home and i did exotic, housewifely things like vacuum and add soil to my long-suffering houseplants, and we tried exploring the wonders of Play-Doh for the very first time and all the while all i was trying desperately to keep my brain turned off, my internal monologue at a low thrum.

i do not have what, for want of a better term, one would call a maternal instinct. not that i am not maternal towards Oscar, licking his cowlicks back with spit and ever-nimble fingers…or even towards Finn, in the paltry ways available to me…but i lack a pregnancy maternal instinct, the one that enables people to just “have a feeling” that their baby is a boy or a girl or a turnip or what-have-you, the one that keeps them serene and calm and certain in their sense that everything is alright there inside the mystery of the uterus.

this is not entirely a side-effect of my history, either. even the first go-round, when all was innocent and fresh and i was shocked and delighted to find myself easily pregnant, i still had no sense about what was going on with the miracle of life inside me. bleeding bad, heartbeat good. in between evidence of either i existed mostly in the surreal in the early days of that pregnancy, a suspended state of hyper-awareness to what – when nausea was not having her way with me – felt mostly like not much at all, or at least nothing i knew how to interpret.

when one assumes that all this surreal nothing is likely to end okay, it’s still weird. my second go-round, with Oscar, i assumed only that pregnancy was a cruel, brutal joke bound to backfire on me at any minute, so it was weirder. i had no morning sickness to boot, so instead spent the first trimester grieving both Finn and what i continually assumed was the imminent loss of the clearly-nonviable second child i so longed for. only when i began to feel him kick did i begin to believe that he was even alive, no matter what the ultrasounds said. only when i brought him home did i truly, fully believe he was more than a figment i’d conjured from the proverbial broken heart.

with my third pregnancy, two years later, i’d done a lot of work to try to overcome that raw fear, that despair. i thought positively. i felt crappy, and rejoiced in what i assumed were signs that all was well. i was utter hubris; never saw it coming til it hit me square. i had a missed miscarriage.

so this time, freshly raw all over again, i am chastened, hapless. i trust neither my body nor my instincts to tell me if something is wrong. i know i am pregnant, i’m well aware of the myriad of symptoms riding bareback on my hormones, acutely conscious of each twinge, each surge of my gorge. but i have no faith that these symptoms mean anything. and hope? my hope is like this precious, skinless thing that cowers in the crook of me, shivering, waiting for the other shoe to drop and flatten it. some days i am brave enough to dress it in feathers…other days, i cannot even look at it, though i keep it close and warm and pretend i do not feel it shudder.

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they called me back to OB’s office Tuesday to re-do some swabs and talk about last week’s ultrasound. there are some things, they said, but they’re probably not a problem, they’re probably nothing to worry about…the techs here don’t do first-trimester ultrasounds as a rule, so they wrote these up as markers for early loss, as additional risk factors…but we talked to your perinatal in Halifax and she says they’re really quite common, no big deal likely, and you see her in only three weeks so, so long as you get that far we may find that both have resolved themselves by then in any case. you know, that or Dr. Google says they’re signs of chromosomal abnormality if they don’t resolve and they do increase your chances of just having that strong little heartbeat simply stop out of nowhere sometime over the next couple of weeks…but they’re pure flukes either way, unrelated to any of the other problems you’ve had so, um, all we can do is hope.

in the three days between then and now, when my bless-her-heart OB stayed after her shift at L&D so i could come out for another one of those under-the-table ultrasounds because my tilted uterus renders mere dopplers useless, all i wanted was to be living in another part of my life, a time when things are quiet and i have come to terms with whatever happens to me and this fool dream, when the brutality of acceptance is done and this thing with feathers does not hold so much of me vulnerable in its tiny hands.

the heartbeat was still there.

heartbeat good. no bleeding good. tealeaves foretell stress ahead.

of the many things keeping me awake at night these days, add one new item to the list.

why, oh world, do little kid pants suddenly stop coming with elastic waistbands once they hit the size 2T? why, exactly, does a not-quite-two year old need to be wearing narrow, slim-hipped jeans that cling just like i wish mine would an Olsen twin’s? is everyone else’s offspring sprouting into a lithe, willowy, diaper-less supermodel the minute those 18-24 month sizes start getting a bit snug?

you hear what i’m really saying here, right? is Oscar the only husky little short-legged munchkin in Canada whose cloth-diapered derriere still requires cute little bubble-shaped baby pants?

am i emasculating and infantilizing him by being blind to his need for big-boy streamlined skinny jeans?

or is the consumerist marketing fashion machine just evil? is Pampers designing for Old Navy these days? cause sending O out to daycare with half his diaper hanging out the back of waistband and his cuffs rolled up to his fat little knees seems to be the only option available to us once he’s outgrown those last wee tot rags we’re still squeezing him into.

i mean, dudes. he’s not even two. he doesn’t need tight back pockets to slip his pack o’ smokes into, now does he? he just needs some fanny in his freaking pants.

dignity, folks. dignity in children’s clothing. where do i buy that?

i got to meet Mad this weekend.

it’s an odd thing, to meet someone whose internal monologue you’ve been reading for a year, someone whose smarts and wit and unflinchingness won your respect a long ways back, someone whose life you know more about than you do most of your real-life friends. it is especially poignant, this first meet-up, when one of you is very newly “out” as pregnant and the other has very recently and traumatically miscarried a much-wanted pregnancy. it is particularly weird, if you are me, to be for the first time ever on the non-bereaved side of that equation, fearing treading on wounds you know well but are still not immune from bruising others with. so i sidled up to the hotel in the Saturday night snowstorm all a-twitter with excitement and trepidation, like a puzzled suitor. were we old friends? was it a first date? did the fact that she’s waaaaay more experienced in the ways of bloggy meet-ups make me a comparable bumbling virgin-type? would we trust each other, like each other in person as much as we do behind these pleasantly constructed versions of our best selves, with spellcheck?

um…yeh.

the play by play is probably irrelevant…the best evenings leave little to report but much to feed on. we fed on curry and chips and high ideas and low gossip and filled in the gaps left out of these online personas, or started…and she brought me a copy of the Tom Waits & Crystal Gayle album that i’ve been looking for for literally nineteen years…and i was humbled, and happy, and delighted just to be there in her company. and we were able to talk about some of the various elephants in the room and then we were just getting into the really good stuff, the scaffolding of ideas and what lives under a person’s skin when the truly awful cock-rock cover band started up and made me want to stab myself in the eardrums, so we kissed goodnight (chastely, Jen, i know you’ve got her heart) and made for home.

but not before we – in an act of shameful heterosexism which should have appalled our feminist sensibilities but was instead, erm, entertainingly ironic…maybe – set up a betrothal brunch between our offspring. M & Oscar…born for each other…with M’s sweet maturity of three and O’s youthful exuberance of 22 months, and the fact that their parents both belong to couples where the woman is the elder partner, and the fact that he willingly shared his blueberries with her (her favourite too! kismet!) and she was not only generous with her tube of funky sea critter toys but also quite bewitching with her shy but ready smiles, i think Mad & i should be procuring ourselves a nice, shared grandchild to blog about come about, oh, 2035.

i – i shit you not – frocked Oscar up in his best corduroy jacket for the occasion, and wee M was gorgeous in her red smocked dress and tights, and then, hapless creature that i am, i forgot to take the engagement photo.

so i leave you only with us future proud grandmas. she made my weekend. she’s way cool, and mad, indeed….and if any of you want to join us at the now-going-to-really-
happen-come-hell-or-sea-water Maritime BlogHer 2008, leave a comment. we’re a very cheap conference, and friendly too. ;)

(and yeh, i really do wear the hat all winter. i told you, but i know nobody believed me. just to try to keep poor Hat from getting overexposed, i even left it home for Sunday’s brunch, but then forgot to take pictures at all. sigh.)

and there i was again in that same goddam room for the third time, that room with its stark, giant clock, that room that has only ever hosted endings for me, or the beginnings of endings, bright with blood. and first the machine crapped out the moment she pulled the sensor towards me, and we waited, making awkward idle chitchat, while it rebooted and i pretended to be composed. there was a nurse there, and a nursing student, though both of them seemed out of place since i’d thought this was a clandestine affair, this visit, date almost, this secret promised viewing in the closed and hallowed halls of Labour & Delivery. ’til yesterday, i had not seen my OBGYN since the week before my D&C last November. no visits to check the drop of hcg levels or confirm the thoroughness of surgery. the followup appointment – delayed due to the holidays – was cancelled in January thanks to a storm. the replacement appointment after the storm got hijacked because my doctor herself was sick. by the time i finally saw her yesterday, it was for another maternity visit…i am nine weeks today. theatre of the absurd. and such a terrifying leap of faith, this try, this shot. so i figured this trip to L&D was a favour, a kindness slipped into her busy delivery schedule because she knows me and my history all too well, even though ultrasounds in our part of the world are hoarded and doled out like prized crumbs and better say thanks.

she laded me with blue jelly. the chitchat stumbled to a halt. i looked at the screen and saw only fuzz, and looked away. i stared at the clock, instead, that trusty abominably ugly clock that has witnessed too many minutes of me lying in that bed, fearful and waiting. she tried. she twisted, cocked her head. i looked her in the eye and realized hers are almost the exact colour of my own. and she met my gaze and said, “you know what i’m going to say. i’m not seeing what i’d like to be seeing here. but that could just, umm, be me.”

it is an in joke, of sorts. three years ago, this same kind, frank, capable doctor “snuck” me into L&D for one of these sly side ultrasounds because i’d seen her twice for what appeared to be an unfortunate, mortifying bladder issue, and she wanted to make sure instead that i was not leaking fluid. that sunny April morning, she pronounced all well with the fluid surrounding my 23-week baby, and after a little begging on my part told me she was 90% certain we were having a girl. six days later, i found myself in the room with the clock, blood and fluid all down my legs, waiting for an airlift. Finn, our son, died ultimately of the lung complications suffered because i had, indeed, been leaking fluid for a month unchecked before the sac gave way entirely. she knows this, my doctor. i know that had she caught it, there was still nothing she could have done. so we live with this between us, this sad, wry truth that she may not excel at ultrasounds and yet is the only one who has ever gone out of her way to try to give me peace of mind with them. and i trust her because she is honest, and human.

but when she said, “it could just be me,” i could not hear her, not really, because my heart had already sunk into that stark, certain, brutal helplessness of having one’s fear realized, yet again. she left the room to call down to the radiology lab to see if they could see me. the part of me that weighs and measures and never took my eyes off that bleak, institutional clock face registered what a gift it was to have these strings pulled, to actually get in for a vaginal ultrasound ASAP. most of me, though, was scrambling to hide. my brain tore through sad little shreds of narrative and metaphor wherein i tried to tell myself i could do this again and come out whole on the other side. i refused to believe myself. i would have thought that the prospect of loss, like so many things, gets easier with practice…instead, for me it becomes more intolerable, more surreal.

the nurse insisted that the student nurse walk with me down to radiology. poor little soul, all of twenty-one and chipper. they let her come in with me to the tech’s lair, when they would not let even Dave come in November, not even when we were almost sure that the news was going to be bad. she had the good sense to sit in a corner and not try to hold my hand.

belly ultrasound and the tech said nothing except that my uterus seemed tilted back and sucked her teeth and asked if i’d mind the transvaginal and i nearly leapt off the table trying to get my damn pants off, because what the hell is dignity for if you can’t shove it aside now and then for things more important? then the probe, and she sucked her teeth again and turned the screen and there it was, hiding in the back, way away in that pelvis that seems to be spreading daily, a little round head and wiggling limbs and a heartbeat, 170 bpm. and i said, sweet fucking merciful Jesus and my legs began to shake like a small dog’s and then i would have let that little student nurse hold my hand, i would have, but she was trying very hard to politely not notice me spread-eaged on the table and was instead smiling intently at the screen.

never once in my reproductive history before today have i had a doctor say, “uh oh” and had anything but the very worst case scenario turn out.

i said to Dave that maybe my luck in this department is like Brigadoon. it hides in the mists, and i needed a leap year – a moment out of the ordinary ordained calendar – to bring it out.

so badly i hope that it holds.

what you can`t see, in this picture, is the big furry red monster. the one who materialized magically, bigger than life, at the weekend`s Jack Frost winter festival.

Oscar was beside himself. the boy has a thing for Elmo. it`s not just a man-crush, it`s a shine, a full-on pure-hearted love and delight that i can`t quite begrudge him even if Elmo`s cloying over-marketedness irks me. when the Elmo impersonator enfolded him in his fluffy red arms moments after this shot was taken, i think Oscar thought he`d been transported to heaven…or he would have, if we talked about things like heaven in our house. we don`t.

but then, we never talked about things like Elmo in our house, either.

i ran away screaming the first time one of those “Elmo likes to go up up” dolls assaulted me in a toy aisle, and i`ve mostly eschewed toy aisles since. we`re a hibernatory, bookish people. we don`t watch tv, really, and the DVDs O owns are mostly of the Little People, Baby Einstein, and Richard Scarry variety. even then, i kinda feel i should flagellate when he watches more than one. so, other than a replica of his namesake Oscar the Grouch, replete with trash can, i didn`t think my boy knew Elmo and the rest of Muppetkind from a hole in the wall.

erm, okay, i was pridefully SURE he didn`t know Elmo and friends from a hole in the wall.

until the day, before Christmas, when my mom and i decided to take a rare Saturday morning shopping trip with Oscar. he was in the cart, happy. we steered through the seldom-visited toy aisles, because my mom was thinking she`d like to get him something nice and developmental and, um, smart. or something. and he lost his mind.

every time we rounded a corner, my wee darling morphed into a cart-troll, howling an unrecognizable blue streak at the top of his lungs and flailing fiercely at…something. i thought he must be tired. i thought he must be overstimulated. i thought we should find him some bloody playdoh or something and get the heck out of there. but just as we were about to flee, my mom happened to stop the cart quite close to one of the displays, so she could find her wallet.

fur flew. red fur. not one but two separate Elmos came flying off the shelves in the fat, gleeful paws of my son, who held them aloft like victory itself and crowed, “Mamie!” and i realized that that was what he`d been shouting for the ten minutes previous, each time within sight of a different Elmo toy.

what happens when a toy-snob sanctimommy discovers that, unbeknownst to her, she`s been raising not only a child who knows Elmo but a child who would clearly sell her outright for a furry piece of red plastic that sings in a saccharine falsetto?

she caves, friends. utterly caves.

over the past few months, i have come to live in a Muppet universe. we didn`t buy the singing Elmo toy, or any other Elmo items from the toy aisles, admittedly, but we started watching old Sesame Street Elmo clips on youtube. and then Oscar the Grouch clips, which seemed…welll…a natural extension. then Grover, and Kermit…and before you knew it we were sliding down the slippery slope into hardcore Muppet Love and watching Swedish Chef reruns and “Beaker sings Danny Boy” every night before bed. we sing “Rubber Ducky, you`re the one” in the tub, and “The Rainbow Connection” any time we`re feeling snuggly. we have Sesame Street stickers all over most surfaces of the house. Oscar still calls the whole Muppet crew “Mamies”, and loves them indiscriminately…though i think his heart belongs to Elmo first and foremost. and i – gasp, i, heartless cynic – have begun to think Elmo’s kinda cute. sometimes.

so when we saw Elmo – or the dude in the Elmo suit – at Jack Frost on Sunday, i didn`t react at all like i would have even a few foolish months ago. not a nose-hair did i raise in disdain. nope, instead, i did a double-take and stood there with my mouth wide open like i`d just been confronted with the spectacle of superstardom there in front of me, live and in the fuzz. because in Oscar’s world, this was like running into Elvis…and since we’ve never done any of these kid fair things before, the whole presence of Elmo stunned me just as much as if it had been Elvis in front of us. then i came to my senses, grabbed my boy, hightailed it over in front of that ersatz Muppet, and beamed like a twit at the joy on my little Mamie-obsessed rerun-addict`s face. and after Oscar had gotten his hug and was backing away from the plush wonder, stars in his eyes, i had to remind myself that the sixteen-year old kid inside the Elmo suit really didn`t need a hug from me, too.

because for a second there, the delight on that little face overcame me and i was small again too, eight or nine, trying to understand why the words to “The Rainbow Connection” made my eyes fill with tears…for a second there, with Oscar and Elmo, i almost believed.

so thank you, mass marketing…for the unexpected joy i’ve found in being wrong, about Elmo and tv shows and all the rest. now to just get that boy hooked on “Fantasy Island” and “Little House on the Prairie”…oh, yeh, and “Dukes of Hazzard” and “Mr. Dressup,” or maybe really “Mr. Dressup” should come first because Daisy’s short shorts are way more risque than Casey & Finnegan’s purported relationship…and oooh yeh, maybe some “Polka Dot Door”…nah, they were lame…

days slip by and it’s like there’s nothing i can find to say…as if all the threads of narrative got wound up like dust bunnies and shoved behind the furniture, hidden by the bulk of everyday living.

but under my skin, my busy, moving skin, i am here. wanting to speak. wanting to be heard. wanting to find space in the riot of routine to make words.

i wrote poetry when i was a kid. never reams of it, but terse, crafted experiments with rhyme and free verse and the siren song of rhythm…odes to stormy weather with titles that mortify me now, and efforts to rework what i thought of as the sheer literary perfection of Duran Duran’s “Hungry like the Wolf.” there were early forays into themes of becoming, too, and a few pieces half-remembered that i wish i still had, that dart across my memory taunting me with the idea that my career as a poet peaked at fourteen. it was like alchemy for me, this writing, a spell cast with words and ideas, woven on scraps of paper but always intended, secretly, in my emo-kid heart, for the world.

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i grew up listening to the poetry of Bob Dylan on my mother’s Joan Baez albums. we were not a radio family, and the years of 8-track passed us by. we had a big old streamlined veneer turntable left behind by my father, and a collection of perhaps a dozen records that i figure he deemed too lame to bring with him when he went away to find free love: John Denver, Anne Murray, Roger Whittaker, The original Sound of Music Broadway recording, Simon & Garfunkel, some Salvation Army lady singing hymns, and the cream of the crop, Kristofferson and Baez, two albums each. the anti-establishment soundtrack of my oh-so-ironically-conservative single parent home, where middle-class respectability was the heighth of aspiration. yet i grew up singing along to “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word” and “Hard Rain” and my mother wondered later where i’d picked up my iconoclastic strain. she is not a person overly inclined to listen to the words.

i was well into my teens when i discovered that it was Bob Dylan who’d written half the songs that had held me rapt with their stories and their power on those scratchy Baez albums. i developed an acute case of hero-worship. i threw myself headlong into the canon of post-folk Bob, meandering through the intro-level cool of “Like a Rolling Stone” and the rest of Greatest Hits Volumes 1 & 2, progressing to Big Pink and “Isis” and “Brownsville Girl” and “Tangled up in Blue” over a period of years, different rambling tales enthralling me as reflections of my own love stories and wanderings and at the same time as universal, the only universal i ever really believed in.

the one thing i ever wanted to be when i grew up, all those years, well into my twenties, was Bob Dylan, bard. it is a sad, even silly thing to long for a voice that is already taken. i wrote derivative bits here and there, but was contemptuous of their obviousness, their sub-par Dylanesque parody. i ached to be wise, prescient, conduit of a generation. but while i could see, on an instinctive level, the rawness around me in that strange early-90s recession world on the cusp of grunge, i could not speak. i wanted to reap what i could not sow. my poems shrivelled and died. i turned my back.

i learned to play guitar, instead. badly. i sang folk songs, and i made a joyful noise of other’s words.

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i come now, with age accompanied by hairs on my chinny-chin-chin, to the realization that i am ill-suited to bard status in any case. even if i were able to shed all the extraneous responsibilities that eat my time and my internal narratives, i am not that type. i am no loner, no prophet. i like company, particularly in my misery. i hate being misunderstood. i fear offending. and i always fail whenever i try to frame things allegorically. but it isn’t just temperment and talent keeping me from my original life’s goal, oh no. it’s drive. i dabble. i am not courageous nor focused enough to master the craft of poetry and metaphor, to speak broad truths in permutations unending, to be the mirror of society that people quake to see themselves in. even if i could, i wouldn’t. i’d chicken out, over-analyze, get distracted by the laundry piles and fail to practise. i would assume that vocations come with no assembly required.

this doesn’t make me sad like it would have if i’d been able to see myself in this place some twelve or fifteen years ago. because i do speak, here, even if sporadically, even if sometimes only of diapers and songs i wish i’d written and themes that get repetitive after awhile. i speak as an editor at heart, the studied one who stints out her words and focuses on minutiae and details, small truths. but i keep making myself come back and speak, trying to learn my own words, to get back to that magic of alchemy that i tasted at fourteen, and keep the furniture from taking over completely.

but i marvel at those whose voices are bigger than they are. and i wonder if the opus unborn lives in all of us, somewhere under the clutter and the words we carve out from our days, or if these collections of the mundane are enough, are opus in themselves in these ether-bound rooms of our own?

it must be that wistful time of year, Valentine’s over, the snow still lurking in the wings for another few months of gray, nose-icicling cold. i kinda want to hide on my couch until spring.

i am apparently not alone. CBC radio, that bastion of Sunday morning entertainment in our house, is playing Stuart MacLean’s collection of sad songs again today; Tom Waits and Joni Mitchell and an old early Sinatra tune and Leonard Cohen and whatever else i can’t remember though i’ve heard the show twice, now, and my brain wonders…was it last post-Valentine’s weekend they played this the first time? has a year really slipped by so fast? and i boggle, but it is an aside, because we are clotted up in February right now and it is impossible to imagine that time will ever slip again.

towards the end of this unorthodox Vinyl Cafe repeat is a trio of pieces by singers who’ve spent much of their lives in this tiny province, my home by birth and, wryly, choice…and i am overwhelmed by this triumverate, the late Gene MacLellan and his daughter Catherine and Tanya Davis, her friend. the joke goes, of course, that all we Islanders not only know each other, but are related…still, i do not know them, only by reputation. i sang his songs in childhood, his daughter is the friend of a friend, and Tanya i nearly saw at a poetry slam when i first moved back here but then i got airlifted and things fell apart and when i came home without my firstborn poetry frightened me, in public, because tears came too easily. Gene was best-known for writing “Snowbird,” the song that made Nova Scotian Anne Murray famous in the year or so before i was born…and he committed suicide one winter thirteen years ago, just as his daughter came into her teens. she had a daughter herself not long ago, in the year between Finn and Oscar’s birth, that year where i was raw and acutely aware of every one else’s successful childbirthing. i envied her, then. now, i only envy her talent.

so the MacLellans’ sad songs and Tanya’s poetry make tears come today…but i am safe on my couch, not exposed, rather just as happy to ride the catharsis of others’ sorrow. i like sad songs. they make me feel better, even about February.

i remember having one of my finest bar debates, back in the day, with somebody who was convinced that a truly great love song had to be a happy song, one that ended in the lovers’ happy ending. i scoffed and sucked on my cigarette like i was Leonard Cohen, and pronounced, bah. a real love song, said i, several gin & tonics in, is emotion reflected on in the tranquility of after, love elegized and eulogized. if the artist can make us hear beauty and poignancy in love even in the midst of sorrow and the relationship gone into the shitter, then he or she is a bard, said i…citing The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York and Mitchell’s Case of You as paragons. and, taking it further, slurring Cohen’s lyrics and blowing smoke out my nose, i proclaimed that a love song requires both the holy and the broken Hallelujah. and then i think i passed out.

all these years later, buoyed a bit by Tom Waits’ growling, i wonder if this propensity for sad songs is a bit of a Canadian thing. Leonard Cohen is, after all, a Canuck. and Gene MacLellan lived through a lot of PEI Februarys. in sunny climes, is the dissection of what’s been lost nearly so comforting, when there is no long season of endurance and sufference?

do you have a favourite love song that suits the dreary days of February?

i’ve been blogging long enough now that i’ve almost forgotten that it wasn’t always a part of my routine, my life…that once, the only audiences i had for this internal monologue of mine were Dave, my journal, and occasional mutterings to myself my imaginary friends.

but thanks to the medium of the blog, i am blessed with people – apparently not imaginary, the lot of you – who come here and actually read the things i go on about. and say stuff in return, most of which is amazingly generous and kind. fascinating. and i confess, i actually try really hard to be worthy of the audience…i edit, i ditch stuff, i try to sound less whiny. my grandiose goal falls somewhere between an attempt at authenticity and an effort to create a voice that might come off the page and connect, somewhere, with somebody. there are rough attempts at craft, here…working with the real to try to make it, somehow, literary. or literate, at least.

but there is a lot of real that never sees the light here. a lot of real that slips under the bridge, silent…or silenced. much of it is mundanity…i assume that since the detailed content of most of my days isn’t amazingly compelling to me half the time, it’s unlikely to enthrall you, either. i assume, like any audience, you’re expecting a modicum of restraint and discernment on my part, a serving up of tidbits rather than an exhaustive menu. grand. but there are other bits, total tidbits, ripe for the exploring, that i hold back, stay utterly mum about. even, sometimes, the ones i actually need to write about most…the ones that make me feel vulnerable and broken or furious and caged.

they’re the bits about other people.

sometimes i wish that back when i started this blog i’d been smart enough to tell the world that my name is Zelda, that i live in Outer Slobovia with my pet porpoise Fluffy, and that i am actually a unicorn. or something like that. i certainly wish – sometimes – that i hadn’t told anyone who actually knows me in real life that i blog.

because this is not a private blog. this is a candy-floss edition, in a sense, of my life…not all sunbeams by any means, but still sanitized. Dave’s parents are two of my most faithful readers. some friends from high school stop by occasionally, and my former mommy-coffee posse check in occasionally. my co-worker’s wife reads the blog, and every now and then i meet someone at the local Farmer’s Market – someone on whom i have never laid eyes before in all my days – who tells me they like my writing. surreal. yet, all this is good. all these people are good. none of these people comprise the Sartrean “enfer” i lifted for the title above…hell is other people.*

but not all people are good. or all good all the time, at least. i have wounds, see…yep, i know…shocking. so special. but some are old and complex hurts, tied up in family dysfunctions that baffle me and leave me feeling negated and small, tongue-tied. some are newer, raw spots, places where i’m neurotic and over-sensitive, grievances that have sat with me as part of my grief for nearly three years now and which i am too polite to ever bring up in any productive way with those who caused them. some are so new they still bleed fear. all of them are connected to or triggered by or the direct result of the actions or lack of action of others, in a few cases intentional, in most not. they are, collectively, probably not all that special as the wounds of a lifetime go. but they are mine. and sometimes i think writing my way through them might be helpful, even healing.

however, because i blog without the convenient screen of mysterious privacy over this persona i’ve constructed here, i can’t write about ’em. i feel nasty writing about other people in any way i’d be uncomfortable having them read. i don’t like conflict, and like passive aggressive attacks even less. if i know that the people i know know i have a blog, even if they’re not regular readers, and if i write what i really think of some of those people in the heat – or morose bleakness – of a particular moment, then i am, in my own mind, slagging those people on the virtual equivalent of the high school bathroom wall. taking pot shots that are neither private nor direct. and that just seems…cheap.

incredibly tempting, sometimes, though. oh god, how i long now and then to come here and unburden my little wounded heart on this audience, to say can you believe this! and have the chorus come back with intonations of judgement and brimstone heaped on the offending party, and the gentle balm of righteousness anointing my lily-white self. oooh, i fantasize. but genius that i am, i came out as exactly who i am, and so there is no mask behind which i am comfortable letting the dirty laundry breathe.

piss.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

the lovely – and i assume equally un-masked – Julie Pippert asked how we deal with the issue of writing about other people as part of this week’s Hump Day Hmmm. i’m always fascinated by the unwritten rules that govern boundaries within a community, so i’m curious to see if others, even those whose blogs are far more anonymous than my own, still have compunctions about writing about other people.

what about you? who do you allow yourself to write about? where do you draw lines, if at all? how much personal dirt do you like to read?  do writerly lamentations often come out sounding like victimhood to you, no matter whether there’s a chance of the other party ever reading the post or not?

and if you DO know me in real life, rest assured, if i ever mention you here…that’s a sign of how perfectly, benignly happy with you i, erm, am. and don’t anybody go search for a blog by Zelda the unicorn, ‘k? i need someplace to let off steam. ;)

*from No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre

every great artist finds his medium and muse in the everyday, the mundane of what is constant in his world.

ze artist considers. bah. zat ees not pretty!

ze artist repositions. stop your patronizing smiling at me, woman! i am ze artist!

ze artist causes mummy’s delicate eye skin irreparable damage.

i can’t wait ’til fingerpainting starts.

the little one is sick again.

nothing necessarily crisis-like but last week’s ear infection has morphed into a cough over the last few nights as the antibiotic packs its bags and takes its leave. his sitter’s little girl has been almost constantly sick since Christmas and so O picks up these bugs like a sponge, those vulnerable preemie lungs still lurking under the hale and husky toddler. the constant strain of illness running through the daycare situation frustrates me sometimes, setting off twinges of guilt…what kind of mother drops off her child in a pit of plague every morning? have a nice day, sweetie, try not to, ummm…inhale. but his sitter is kind and nurturing and clean and patient and he seems happy there, and thus he and wee Amelia pass their viruses back and forth while Dave and i watch inert, like flies in amber, unable to decide whether illness or change is the greater evil.

tonight, though, even with his inhalers in full force he has not yet slept for more than half an hour at a time, waking coughing and wailing, moaning in pain of undisclosed origin. around nine, i slipped into his room only to realize i was unnoticed, that this time he had not really, fully woken and was just mewling to himself. he was writhing in the bed, flailing and repositioning his body with the hopeless fierceness of the miserable. i crossed the room to his crib, murmuring sweet nothings. i reached down to pet him.

he batted my hand away, then stopped. warm little finger pads traced the back of my hand, feeling for the familiarity of silver bracelet, of rings. he noted these, declared “mama” and curled his hand into mine, settling, his breathing slowing into deeper sleep again.

and i stayed, holding his hand for awhile, through the next fit of coughs and whimpers, all the while whispering hush like i was auditioning for Goodnight Moon. Oscar’s small hand stayed in mine, and i rubbed it lightly with my fingertips, trying to soothe, to pass love and comfort through skin.

my grandmother spent seven years dying. she was the backdrop of my childhood, my second parent, the person i went to after school and on snow days and March break and all summer except when i was at camp, the person who watched my homespun one-girl-theatre extravaganzas with patience and encouragement, who took me to MacDonald’s every St. Patrick’s day for a bilious green Shamrock shake. she lived a long life, and a full one, but the end of her days was a slow and sometimes agonizing process filled with incremental losses of independence, with tears, with the physical pain of untreatable cancer, and with the indignities and loneliness of extreme old age. i lived away most of these seven years, though i did not leave the country until after she was gone. she was an anchor i would not quite pull away from. i knew there would be time, after. i feared losing her, this rock of my childhood.

what i remember now of those seven years, and especially the last two or three, the ones that stretched between hospital and nursing home and back again with the stench of urine and dying always in the air, is her hands. i cannot call her face up with any real clarity now, hard as i try, but her hands come to my mind’s eye like photographs, even still. they’d been small hands, in her day, but with knuckles swollen smooth by arthritis, marked by liver spots, the nails yellowed, the wedding rings that i wear now on my own ring finger gouged deeply into hers with the permanence of sixty-plus years. her hands were seldom rough, or sweaty…they were welcoming hands, good hands for holding. and that was what we did, whenever i came home…not often enough, i see now, my heart knows. there were visits where she did not know me, and ones where she did and cried for death and then collapsed into herself, shamed and exposed. through most, though, we just filled time, talked, in the early days doing the crossword puzzles from the paper or talking about my work, my latest move, my mom…later just sitting together, me telling stories if she was up for it. occasionally, wonderfully, she would become the lucid storyteller herself, passing on to my mother and i pieces of all our history, the women of this family. always i held her hand, rubbing it lightly with my fingertips…trying to pass love and comfort through skin, to memorize the feel of those light old bones.

tonight, with O’s hot little hand under mine, i felt my grandmother’s too.

there is a lot about mothering that i sometimes feel unequal to…a lot where i wonder if i’m lost and floundering, and if a good mother would just go ahead and find a new sitter already, dammit. but this core of it, where you sit with another human being when he or she is vulnerable and small, and where there is nothing to say but i am here and i love you dearly, hush, it’s okay and most of what is communicated is spoken tenderly and silently, through the stroke of a finger…this part i know.

someone’s child or someone’s mother, holding hands in the dark of a sick room, abiding, is when i know most surely i am blessed.