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the rumours are true: David Bowie and i celebrated our twenty-fifth anniversary this past week.

for Christmas 1985, i requested and received the ChangesOneBowie album on tape. in the week that followed, i played that poor, beleaguered tape over and over and over. and i fell deeply, incontrovertibly in love.

i’d already liked him, in my limited knowledge of Let’s Dance and China Girl and Space Odyssey when it came across the late night airwaves. but i liked him like i liked twenty other fleeting passions of the moment, all of them embodying some kernel of cool that i didn’t really understand but clasped to my bosom in hopes of enhancing it.

at that age, i was wide open, looking for someone to be, desperate for visions of adulthood that made sense to me. i wanted a life of art and ideas, and had no clue where to begin.

there’s a quote from Changes that opens The Breakfast Club, about children being spit on as they try to change their worlds. its presence in the film twigged for me that Bowie might know more than i’d given him credit for. and so, sans internet or mentorship, i searched through record stores and old issues of Creem trying to figure out which album would magically hold the key. ChangesOneBowie threw me head over heels into the world of Ziggy Stardust and the plastic soul of Young Americans and the queer ironic rebellion of Rebel Rebel and John, I’m Only Dancing. and i had come home.

after that week between Christmas and New Year’s of 1985, i was a one-man woman. or a one-man thirteen year old, rather. if i’d had a passport and any money and a sense of where David Bowie had actually lived, i’d have shown up on his doorstep and offered myself as concubine and songwriter, innocent of the ridiculousness of either offer.

what i wanted, really, was just to be his shadow, his partner in adventure, his doppelganger.

and for twenty-five faithful years, i kind of have, even if he’s never once called.

***
ten years ago this week i ended a marriage.

it was hot and there were cockroaches, and trails of ants drowned in the sticky stream of Southern Comfort we’d left on the night table. we sat across a Formica table in a cheap hotel in Bangkok over triangles of white toast and fake whipping cream. it was him who made the final move, spoke the decisive words. but it was me, really, who made the decision. i’d driven us to the cliff and handed him the keys, thus orchestrating joint ownership of the implosion. he played his part, because that was how the part had been written.

i think. maybe i’m misremembering.

i thought it was an amicable and sad ending. i thought it made perfect sense.

what he really thought, i’ll never know. because what i lost in the end of that marriage was the relationship that it grew from. i hadn’t expected that, which seems achingly naive and yet was the foundation of my position. i thought the relationship was forever, a central part of who i was: i thought just the marriage had been a mistake.

he won out.

ten years seems like an impossibly long time, when you look back and realize you made a life decision that big that long ago.

***
i bought Dave two books for Christmas. the other day, i read one of them, cover to cover.

it was Just Kids, by Patti Smith. rock-n-roll and a young Robert Mapplethorpe and the Chelsea Hotel in its seedy bohemian squalour and glamour. from the hide-a-bed in Dave’s parents’ rural New Brunswick basement, i lived out the NYC part of the fantasy of my adolescent dreams. i read the book half-breathless, as if it were a sacred guide and i once again an initiate, looking for someone to be.

and then i laughed at myself. i turn thirty-nine next month. and still, some small part of me is wide open, hopeful about the magic around the next corner.

mixed in with Just Kids, in the orgy of quietude that i squeezed in while the children slept and everyone else watched football and hockey, i also read from next term’s reading list, a stack of books on human identity and narrative.

according to that purdy pile of Christmas presents, different personalities and circumstances and experiences lead people to gravitate to particular imagoes (and ten bucks to the first person who can tell me how to pronounce imagoes so i don’t mortify myself in fancy company) or character types.

the maker, the lover, the sage, the caregiver, the escapist, the friend: these here are your stock characters, people. these are the stuff we mortals are made of. we come to understand ourselves through the stories and roles we cast ourselves in.

now you know. you’re welcome. drop your nickel in the “The Doctor is IN” bucket at the door.

sometimes our imagoes don’t transcend all life stages, so we get stuck, need to expand our internal narratives to include new stock characters we can incorporate into ourselves. or incorporate ourselves into. tomato tomahto, imago a go-go.

it occurs to me that some part of me has been stuck since thirteen in a rock n roll fantasy imago. that the consummated and bonded but still ephemeral Smith-Mapplethorpe friendship that Just Kids describes guided most of my life decisions up until the point i had kids myself. but i’ve never seen it overtly described before, and the recognition resonated like a shock.

if Patti Smith had been thoughtful enough to write her retrospective a couple of decades earlier, i’d have had a much clearer map to my early adulthood. i’d have understood that the boy i married and i were simply working from two different scripts: mine one where marriage was a contingent experiment aimed at giving each other safe harbour while we struggled to learn to be grown-ups; his, the cultural norm, the one in which endings are betrayals, the worst thing that can happen.

it has taken me a decade to completely understand. it has taken me twenty-five years to realize that what i’ve been looking for in my devotion to Bowie is not Bowie himself but me, a version of me.

luckily i have other imagoes or stock character guides that have carried me and my relationship with the real-life Dave through the last five or six years of our entry into parenthood. the mother and the storyteller and the teacher have sustained me as the rock-n-roll fantasy has withered in the domestic hothouse.

but this is the last day of the year, the last day of a decade that has been rich and strange and full of growth and changes.

i want more. i still want rock-n-roll, even in the midst of parenting and studying and bills and laundry. i want a life of art and ideas.

and perhaps the biggest difference between me at thirteen and me at nearly thirty-nine is i can almost see my way there. i’ve lived enough to be my own guide.

i don’t really want to be Mrs. Bonnie Bowie, even if that pesky Iman does drop outta the picture.

i want to be Bon, partner to Dave. i want to be mother and writer and thinker and witness and friend…and maybe middle-aged rebel rebel, whatever imprint that makes in the warm, impermanent sand.

bring it, 2011.

happiest of New Years, my friends.

***
who are your models, your imagoes, your mentors? what do you hope for from the coming year, and the coming decade of your life?

dear Oscar, dear Posey…

this is your mother speaking.

you won’t fully remember this Christmas, not either of you, not yet.

(hell, neither will i. in this life you never fully remember anything, my sweets. especially when you start Christmas day off with Baileys in your coffee. take that one from your old mother.)

by the time you read this – if you ever do – you’ll have figured out that the jolly jelly-belly who eats the Christmas cookies – and most of your Hallowe’en candy – is really Mommy. or your father. or whoever can get to them first. but for this year, in spite of our refusal to entirely corroborate the idea that a fat man will squeeze himself down our non-existent chimney, you’re both pretty sure that Santa’s on his way.

we exist right now in a magical in-between world, where Christmas is a wild mythical mix of Santa and Frosty and Cindy Lou Who and Mommy’s overblown renditions of O Holy Night. the fact that you like my caroling has secretly earned you each an extra present under the tree.

i’d like to wrap this time up in tissue paper, like all the precious things. but time isn’t like that, little ones. it’s now, and only ever now.

you are two and four. you like each other, mostly. and yet, the autumn has been hard. and so i write the now for you, for someday when all is different and you wonder if any of this was even real.

Posey, you’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that you used to be a baby.

sincere and earnest, as if sharing a secret, you offer up this story of yourself and time and the mystery of change, over and over. i suspect you’ll want your own blog, soon.

last night, on the solstice, you woke at 11 pm and promptly threw up all over us both. you said your neck was sore. and you were calm and strange, your sweetest self but oh so quiet, limp in my arms, and i was afraid. and so we slept on the floor in the playroom by the glow of the Christmas lights with a windstorm howling outside, so i could watch you. the longest night of the year indeed. your fever broke at 4am and you stood up and announced, “i’m feeling better.” and then i could sleep.

Oscar, all you asked for from Santa this year was Hungry Hungry Hippo. but last weekend, on an ill-advised trip to a giant store to pick up last-minute gifts for extended family, your eyes lit on a giant walking IronMan. and so it came to pass that later that evening, as i stood in front of the children’s toothbrush display at the drugstore, i found myself weighing a Diego toothbrush in one hand and an IronMan toothbrush in the other and wondering about the magic of superheroes and singing Puff the Magic Dragon, a right maudlin old elf.

for the record, you got the Diego toothbrush this year. but Santa did spring for a small IronMan transformer. because you are growing, leaps and bounds.

you teeter on the verge of boyhood, thrust suddenly into the power games, the shows of force that are both play and practice, uber-serious. you came home from school the other day with a scraped up nose and a scraped up heart, left out of playing monkeys and then pushed around under the jungle gym. and you tried to turn your face from me to hide your hurt and your confusion, and i wanted to gather you to me and hide us all in the house until you’re twenty. maybe twenty-six.

but we talked and we role-played, you and i. strategies and encouragement. such a thin armour. yesterday i talked to your teacher and sat with you at the daycare lunch, staring down les amis.

i wanted to stand up in the middle of that classroom and tell you you’re doing a good job. that i hope with my whole heart it gets easier for you, that it doesn’t take you as long as it took me to figure out that power’s just a game, and there are always other circles if some try to shut you out.

i wanted to shout Charles Bukowski from the tiny tabletop: don’t let your life be clubbed into dank submission! be on the watch! there are ways out!

Bukowski isn’t on the pre-k curriculum, of course. but i hope you hear me, somehow. i hope you feel the hands that have your back. always.

one late Saturday afternoon in December, almost dark, i watched the two of you string ornaments on the short fat real tree your father dragged home – our first real tree in the ten Christmases he & i’ve spent together. he did it for you, this funny little tree. you won’t remember, because you were too young to notice, but i shot him a deadly look when he squeezed it in the front door and announced its presence. all i could see was needles all over the floor and the fact that we’re not even here for Christmas this year and my papers weren’t done yet and i was rushed and panicked.

but the two of you gazed at that tree like it was the loveliest thing in the world. and so we opened the boxes of old ornaments – most of them relics from my own childhood, knitted monstrosities my Nannie bought me annually from the Women’s Institute Christmas bazaar – and you slung them on the small tree’s ample hips and the sight of them in your hands was good for my grinch soul.

somewhere in the mayhem, Oscar, you shot this, your first-ever photo using the big camera. perfect. the blur is your sister.

in your stockings, you’ll find letters made of chocolate, and wooden tops and an orange each. but what’s really in there is just a big jumble of love and hope and happiness and vomit-covered laundry and our own childhood fears and this deep, gutting gratitude that you two are here. just our regular lives, lit up by strings of lights.

love you. Happy Christmas.

Mommy

i made it.

the fall unfolded and i unravelled and i began to think i couldn’t do it. i started to fantasize a deus ex machina, some magical absolution which would excuse me from having to continue the round-the-clock, seven-days-weekly slog through assignments and research reports and statistics and paid work, all with deadlines squeezing into the last two weeks of November and the first two weeks of December. it was more than i thought i could finish, no matter how i ground my queer shoulder into the wheel.

but…with a bang and a thump and barely a whimper at the end, i seem to be here. all done, at least til January. and done with my required quantitative research class and the glories of chi-square testing and all those crazy math symbols that made me feel i’d slipped through the looking glass back into the bewildering hell of algebra. finito. sayonara. hallelujah.

i got an 89%, thank you very much. which, if i were crafty, i’d engrave on a fucking tiara and wear on my head.

cue exhale. i am done. feel free to keep buying me drinks until i believe it.

buy Dave a drink while you’re at it. he held us all mostly together at the seams.
***

i learned a lot this fall.

i learned a lot that wasn’t being taught, a lot that i found traumatic in the processing.

but i also learned some of the language of quantitative research, which came in handy this past week when i found myself at an Annual Scientific Meeting in our nation’s lovely capital, listening to climate change scientists and Inuit and (ahem) BP and Imperial Oil carry on a rather multi-faceted discussion of the future of Canada’s north. every time they said “standard deviation” i nodded very sagely.

i learned that 13 years working in universities still didn’t teach me much about academia. at the conference i talked with a few women my own age who hold post-doctorates at different universities across the country. one of them said, “i feel punished for having had kids, like i have to work twice as hard to prove myself, be more available than everybody else.” and i pinched myself really hard but i still didn’t wake up. because this availability thing – while i did not feel pushed or punished in any specific relation to my maternal status – was the thing that ate me up more than anything this fall. the idea that the ravenous maw that made shameless, wholesale demands on my time and agency regarding time was the thing that i found hardest to swallow. i didn’t expect to work a mere 9-5, because i’ve lived online long enough that working and writing and connecting at night, most nights, is what i expect from my days…but i did, naively, expect that nobody any longer expected other people to act like superhumans. silly old me.

mostly i learned a great deal about how i cope with crushing pressure.

i don’t.

at least…my strategies lack finesse. or make a Dr. Phil episode sound like mental health.

Strategy #1: i prayed for the rapture. i didn’t particularly mind if Jesus left me behind, so long as the ensuing fire and brimstone distracted from my unfinished deadlines.

Strategy #2: i panicked. regularly. at least weekly, i had to talk myself down from chewing through my own leg to escape the trap i’d waltzed blindly into. if i were actually a wild animal, i’d have bled out months ago.

Strategy #3: i cried. copiously. sometimes IN class.

Strategy #4: i kept going on sheer blind hate alone.

hate sounds harsh. i don’t hate anyone i worked with, or for, or near. but only hate can describe that perverse fierce energy that kicks in only when your goal is reduced to a negative, to NOT failing.

it was hate that got me through, so perhaps, in the end, it isn’t such a bad coping strategy. but continuing because you’re too invested to walk away and you want to prove yourself against someone else’s measure? is not exactly an intrinsic values compass. and when i look at my life, i’m not sure what i have if i don’t have an intrinsic values compass.

so i hope this win was not a pyrrhic victory, one that heralds me slipping away into defending what i went into education to try to break down.

for tonight, it is enough that i am done.

because i have one fuckload of Christmas catching up on to do. pass the fruitcake.

six years ago today was a Monday, just like today.

i lived halfway around the world then, in a little dot on the South Korean map that housed a million people. the end of November is crisp, there, too, though it was not snowy. the andoul – the in-floor heat that races under the linoleum to warm toes and keep life closer to the ground – was pumping. i think i wore Dave’s coat when i slipped out that morning, around the corner, but i cannot for the life of me remember which coat it might have been.

i woke up early, which was memorable in and of itself back then. my years in Korea were far more bohemian than the almost-year Dave and i eked out in Eastern Europe. we lived a life of poetry readings and ashtrays and 3ams in the Hermit Kingdom, punctuated by twenty-hour work weeks and vacations in Thailand. it was mundane and decadent, both. yet i had been keening for two years for roots, for belonging. we were six weeks away from a plane ticket home for good.

i slid out from under the quilt, off the two-inch thick mat that was our bed. i padded across the warm floor into the kitchen, then into the tiled box – replete with toilet and a shower head – of our bathroom. i slipped on yesterday’s jeans and Dave’s coat and closed the door gently behind me.

we lived on the third floor. when i emerged onto the street, a fruit truck, laden with persimmons and blaring a prerecorded barrage of fruit salesmanship and tinny organ music, inched its way loudly past. i smiled at it. i smiled at everything. i was brimming.

the yak was only next door, on the corner. it was a spartan place, nothing like the drugstores here, with their soaps and hair products and trashy magazines. the yak was more like an apothecary shop of old, particularly for an illiterate like me. a thousand products lined against the walls, in minimalist packaging. no aisles, only open space. i played mime with the girl behind the counter, then waited, patiently, while she fetched the mysterious box. i took it home, hoping it came with picture instructions.

i remember noting that it was the 29th of November, my father’s birthday.

i chewed my lip, feeling silly for even making a production out of what my rational mind told me was ridiculous. it was our first month trying. i was only a few days late…a week at most. i was usually a few days late. and yet…i woke Dave up, shyly wielding a freshly dipped pregnancy test.

you haven’t lived until you’ve waved a plastic stick soaked with your urine in front of your partner’s face. i figured he was the one who took up with a thirty-something worried about her aging eggs.

pregnancy tests in Korea turn blue, not pink. we waited the full requisite two minutes before turning it over.

two bright stripes, unmistakable. i blinked and beamed.
***

the ancient Greeks and Romans valued memory. for most of human history, ideas and knowledge and experience could only be catalogued through painstaking hand-work, and only by the rare and privileged literate. the information overload in which we swim, we citizens of Google and Wikipedia, is so new in human history that the fact we navigate it at all is a marvel.

the ancients constructed memory palaces to hold what they needed to know. a system called method of loci saw the best of them able to file hundreds of items in detailed order in their minds, using familar locations and detailed visualization. they could then traipse through the halls of memory and the wisdom of the ages would pop right out at them like the scary bits on a haunted spook ride.

i grew up before Facebook kindly took over the task of remembering people’s birthdays for me. and as an only child with a family divided, it fell on me, largely, to remember and honour the special days of the people i loved. i accidentally developed a memory palace built on the calendar.

on any given morning, if i happen across the date, a mechanism in the back of my brain will churn and suddenly blam! out pops a visual reminder of the numerical date, and with it, the useful realization that the girl who sat behind me in eighth grade math is, say, 40 today. handy, no? well, increasingly, erm, no. but there they are, the numbers, the dates. a giant 13; an italic 22; today, 29. and then, trailing along like mittens on string, the birthday list and its addenda, all those events of my own life that have fallen, mostly unrelatedly, on the birthdays of people i know.

my cerebrum is a wonderland.

i don’t know that it serves any purpose to remember, today, that this is the anniversary of the day i first found out i was pregnant. it feels strange to memorialize something so embodied as peeing on a stick. i do not remember the date i got my first period…or my last, for that matter, and may god bless vasectomies for that delightful peace of mind.

but pregnancy is far more than a physical thing. it is also a watershed, an identity experience. whether wanted or not, a positive pregnancy test forces you to look in the mirror, to confront who you are and want to be.

i wanted to be. oh, how i wanted. i couldn’t believe my luck, that morning halfway around the world, on a Monday with the same date six years ago today. it was the easiness of it all that blew me away.

you know how the story ends, and that it was not easy. five months later to the day, at 26 weeks and a little wee bit, i delivered Finn. and eleven hours later, i held him as he died. and it has taken a long time in the interim for anything to seem easy again.

but here’s the thing. the memory palace is a gift in its compartmentalization. because in the moment this morning, when i thought, the 29th of November and i remembered my father’s birthday and then that other morning in what seems like another life and yesterday all at once, there i was in that yellow room with the warm floor under me and that magic plastic stick in my hand. and it was the sheer surprise that flooded back, the metallic tang of hope, the quiet joy. i know the rest. but the memory palace does not, and i am glad for the way it plucks each day out, vivid and unto itself.

i looked in the mirror that day, and saw in myself, for the first time, someone’s mother.

for all that happened, i started this journey far more easily than many. for all that happened, i did not begin broken. i began early on a Monday morning, shy and eager and brimming, full of grace.

i can’t not remember. method of loci remembers for me, and i just hold on to the ride and nod at the ghosts.

last night i was at yoga with my mom.

(the above sentence entertains the ever-lovin’ crap out of me. part of me wants to wrap it up in shiny paper and turn it this way and that, like a spaceship that fell from the sky, because yoga with my mom sounds so pleasantly suburban and banal and normal and first-world problem-y, and i feel like i should follow it with charming antics about our trip to Starbucks after and our little shopping escapades and pedicures. which i can’t. my mother drinks tea. she sometimes buys us diapers. we have a storied history, my mama and i, but it has never involved exercise or girlfriend hobbies or shopping as therapy. and so we are rather imposters in this story. and yet, there we were, at yoga.)

we show up a little late because yoga starts at the awkward hour of 7pm and getting outta my house at 6:50pm is akin to extricating oneself from the grasp of a slightly hysterical octopus. we grab mats from the bin. my mother has not yet committed to purchasing one: after waiting 62 years to try an exercise class, she is not prepared to marry the first novelty that happens along. i just haven’t gotten to a store this crazy fall.

every week at yoga, my mother and i have set our mats down beside each other along the wall of the little pine-panelled room.  at first, she was nervous, careful and defensive and controlled, uncertain whether she was doing it right. i watched her out of the corner of my eye, whispered little encouragements or explanations. mostly i just watched. i listened to her breathe beside me, took in the shape of her back as we lay on our sides. i am like her, i thought. tiny wrists,  short waist, legs that prefer to be curled under.

it is a strange thing, to watch someone and marvel that body was where i began. it has never occurred to me before. we have never spent much time, my mother and i, just being, taking each other in. or if we did, i have forgotten. children betray their mothers’ care, oblivious.

but i catch sight of her hands beside me as we stretch. her winter hands, rough and cracking with the drop in temperature. for a moment, the 38 year old grunting through downward dog disappears. i am a child in bed, those hands on my hair.

forgotten is not the same as gone.

last night, though, when we walked in the room, there was no space for two mats beside each other. and so we ended up at opposite corners of the classroom.

and i missed her.

i was LESS CALM without her. that sentence is almost as funny as the first. when i was in labour with Oscar, and panicking, my poor mother hid behind Dave’s shoulder, hands raised to God, hyperventilating. i did not find this calming. i have found little about my mother calming in at least twenty-five years, in spite of her earnest efforts.

yet there it is. perhaps if we breathed more, talked less.
***

i know that my children will forget most of these days, this brutal frog-march into winter where i feel like i am failing everyone and everything around me. i feel powerless and inept and uncertain. too many essays churned out, sourced and tidied, sentences cropped into submission. now the words stutter from me, hesitant, timid.

in class later today, i will stand up and talk about blogging, and identity, and how digital technologies have made it possible for whole worlds of conversation about mothering and motherhood and being mothered to exist and to be shared.

i thought it would be the easiest thing in the world to research. what do i know better than blogging and mothering? what am i doing here if not trying to write myself into some kind of coherent existence?

today in class i will them that i started to write two weeks before Oscar was born. almost a year after Finn died. i will tell them i was afraid to speak the open wound of my once and future motherhood, and so i wrote it down, that in-between place of uncertainty and hope and fear that was all that i knew.

i kept writing because that place of uncertainty and hope and fear has never gone away, only changed.

i keep writing because i have no other place to tell my mother that i missed her last night.

but i am afraid.

my life as a student this fall has been a drop down a rabbit hole of half-remembered existence. blogging has spoiled me. i have built a place here where i have grown steadily less afraid to speak. i have unlearned a lifetime of being careful and defensive and controlled, uncertain whether i was doing it right…whatever “it” was. i have grown accustomed to being in a shared conversation.

what i say and write as a student, on the other hand, is graded, judged.

and to stand up and talk about writing my motherhood to a room of mostly childless people, while i swallow the guilt of yet again missing supper with my kids, is to get naked. to expose myself. to judgement that does not come from being inside the conversation of the messiness of motherhood and identity.

i hope they understand. i hope they judge with the same generosity i’ve found out here.

i hope these stories matter, these stories of writing ourselves into some kind of coherence. i hope i can find that coherence again, by opening this life to that other one.
***

do you open the Pandora’s Box of your online life with people who know you in the flesh?

one word.

i think a lot about branding. not in the skeevy marketing sense where i wonder if you’d buy more chicken nuggets if just the right charming cartoon chicken came along to sing the praises of eating her, piece by tiny form-pressed piece. for me, branding is just walking around with clothes on, the bits of yourself you project and trail around behind you. it’s what people think of when they think of you. it’s a conversation you contribute to but don’t control. but i believe it’s a conversation you should BE in.

hence this post. at BlissdomCanada, the closing keynote asked us all, what one word describes you? what’s your presence in the world?

i’m up to my ears in the theory and practice of personal branding and digital identities every day, these days. i’m doing a Ph.D in this stuff. and yet. and yet.

i still couldn’t do it. i couldn’t tell you in a single word what it is i am and am trying to do out here.

i hate definitions. i rail against pinning myself like a science fair butterfly when i am, of course, a unique snowflake, ever-evolving (TM). i thought about it, saw tweets and posts with the #oneword tag and wondered if i had a word and then slapped myself and stuck my head back down into the hell that is my quantitative statistics paper.

unruly thing kept poking up. because i’m writing – or trying to write, starting to write – about the idea of digital identities, and the ways in which being online changes how we interact with the world and see ourselves. this is the story i want to tell. my own. yours.

it occurred to me that knowing my own damn word might be important. might even be aspirational, in a sense. because hell, i’m doing something every time i post, or tweet, or hold a SeaMonkey funeral, or cut off that lady at the supermarket. maybe if i found a word i could live with, it could serve as a little talisman; a stone to keep in my metaphorical pocket. a sightline to where i’m trying to go, as a mother, a grownup, a thinker, a human being.

tonight i figured it out.

my one word is witness.

i’m not going to show up at your door to tell you about Jesus. and i hope not to be spirited away in a possibly fictional protection program for people who see what they shouldn’t.

but what i’m here for is the not looking away. giving voice. nodding to the margins and the complexities and the silliness and the sorrow and the big ideas and the hope that someday, somewhere, it will all matter. trying to figure it all out, especially the stuff our culture likes to sweep under the carpet. dead babies and unwieldy educational theory both, plus the tantrums that occur in between.

this is my life, and my digital identity. this is my branded self.

i’d like to do a better job of it all, really. this is my reminder to myself to keep trying.
***

do you have a talisman in your pocket? a one word, or two, or seven, that you hold onto to try to make sense of what you’re doing online, or off?

the plane guts and dips, sailing in through the headwinds like a drunk girl in unfamiliar heels.

i am in the twelfth row, the hind end of a glorified sardine can. out the rounded rectangle of my window, the earth lurches toward us at strange angles. my stomach tries to grab hold of something solid. my seat vibrates. i note the world carved into patchwork squares below and remember the flight path is over my house.

it is only the gunning roar of the engines that frightens me.

three feet over the runway, we coast like a glider, suspended. an engine sounds its barbaric yawp and i believe for a moment that we will rise again, a phoenix tracing loop-dee-loops against the gray sky. then a wobble, and my eyes wait for the spark and explosion of wing against asphalt.

the perfect metaphor for coming home.

after flying, landing is hard.
***

i spoke at Blissdom Canada: our panel was a big, glorious Kleenex ad. we told stories, and then so did the audience, and they took over in a groundswell. there’s good going on out here in real, individual lives. there was weeping and rejoicing and really, it was better than Christmas. less cleanup.

i watched half my Twitter stream come to life: words made flesh. i sat with people. i touched my hands to your faces, some of you. i heard you laugh. i watched you walk and take up space. i watched your eyes dart about for somewhere to hide.

and i realize now, the story i should have told: everyone is made of secrets.

i heard more secrets in two days in person than i’ve been privy to in years online.

i keep reading that we bloggers spill our guts for breakfast, that we are narcissists, attention whores.  the cruellest volley ever fired in the war between objective truth and pluralism was not that stories don’t count, but that those who tell them must be pathological.

they’re wrong.

we are all soft in the middle, somewhere. yeh, even you with the abs. but you know that. we all have broken places, hurts. we’ve all done terrible or wonderful things in the dark, at least once. we’re too old now to deny it. most of us have had things happen that we didn’t deserve. there’s no point in shame, but it’s damn hard to unlearn.

we hold our closest stories to our vests until we see the whites of your eyes. we only tell in the flesh.

maybe we’re making a mistake.

we give our secrets too much power. especially when we live our lives in the glare of the internet: we release 98% of ourselves into the wild and hold back the lumpy bumpy 2% as if it were the Real Thing and we risk making it the Real Thing by treating it like a royal flush to be played when the stakes are highest.

i landed back in my own living room like Dorothy catapulted from a sleepless tornado of polyester and blond wigs, and the grind of housework and deadlines and two children who can’t seem to share the same space without talking at once landed on me like landfill. and i stared at Dave across the expanse of our couch wondering if there was anything about me he didn’t already know and if my real secret is that i’m dull and mundane and a stress monkey who’s actually 98% lumpy bumpy bits. and then i ranted for awhile.

a little bit of freedom is a dangerous weapon.

the truth about secrets, of course, is there are only so many. we live in bodies. they are vulnerable and beautiful. and we are petty and kind, clannish and magnanimous. we are not our secrets, nor just the sum of the parts we share. i knew this when i sat with you. i need to remember, when i sit with myself.

me. not me. mileage may vary.

Kate took more pictures of me in Toronto than i’ve been in since i had kids. to the self sitting here on my couch in dirty jeans, they are the secret, the hidden life. they are also only a story, a thin veneer. they are a promise of next time, and a nod that says, i see you, in your jeans and crumbs and deadlines and pretend secrets.

i wobble like the plane, landing, then coast back into my life.

for a couple of hours yesterday, i picked myself out of the crumbs and the bookpile on the couch, and pretended to be their mother.

there’s nothing i love so much as a Hallowe’en party. i mean, i like being there. i like pumpkins and candy and especially that toffee stuff that makes your teeth feel like they’re actually stuck together and you will never, ever open your mouth again and you get just a wee thrill of scared down your spine until you think of the weightloss advantages and then crr-aaack!! the stuff gives way and your mouth goes boomeranging open just as everyone turns your way. yeh. that’s fun.

fun sorta like this:

i call it, “my children, the happy savannah creatures.”

what i remember about the actual Hallowe’ens of my childhood is the little beads of cold sweat that collected inside those funny plastic facemasks they used to let us wear, the ones with the teeny noseholes and slashes for eyes. i remember trundling round the neighbourhood half-blind, narrowly avoiding being hit by cars, freezing and sweating at the same time, magically free to roam in the dark and beg for candy. i remember losing a loose front tooth to the sticky chilly caramel of my very first mini-sized Mars Bar, and trying to convince the lady down the street from my grandmother’s house that no, i hadn’t been there once already and actually, my twin sister had the same costume on this year. i remember the burnt smell of pumpkin in the air at the end of the night, when all the candles were blown out.

those are the things that i love about Hallowe’en. but every year, i forget.

i get seduced by the getting ready. because in spite of all that i love about the crisp, grim magic of Hallowe’en, getting ready for Hallowe’en is a whole other marvel entirely. its magic is not of the senses but of the imagination. in the hour or so before you go out trick or treating or take off for the soiree or whatever it may be…why, you could turn into anything. you are liminal, in transition. by the time you leave to actually GO out, you are wearing a costume. but while you are getting ready, you are BECOMING. the fairy godmother’s wand is at your shoulder.

the year i was nine, i went to the YMCA after-school Hallowe’en party dressed in a black garbage bag with some striped socks and a pointy hat on. i have seen the pictures. i was a scary witch, alright; i’d looked like a scary witch with a bad hangover had done my makeup. but that was the first costume i ever made for myself. in the time it took to prepare my ensemble, i lived a thousand cackling lives of wicked joy. i didn’t win a prize. i was baffled.

my kids, thus far, have had equally non-Martha-Stewart-esque Hallowe’ens. we have a tickle trunk of stuffed animal costumes. we put ’em on. we prance. we transform. we trumpet our elaborate sno-orrrrts! voila! to date, this has sufficed.

but Posey’s fingers are peeking out the bottom of the sturdy, puffy elephant costume that has served us every year for the past four. i looked at her yesterday, and realized this will be the last year the elephant rides in our trick or treat parade.

we got our money’s worth.

2007

2008

2009

yesterday, 2010.

it goes faster than i thought it could. i understand now, the difference between toddlers and preschoolers. suddenly Oscar, my open wee boy, has this life, this world unfolding for him beneath the surface of everything. he has eaten from the tree of knowledge; he knows now, that the world is a naked place.  “i don’t want to tell you,” he declares, when i ask about his day at preschool. it’s partly not knowing how to collapse seven hours into seven seconds. it’s partly the complexity of realizing that his answer could – perhaps not to me, but could, somewhere in the mystifying judgement of the prosaic world – be wrong. and then we laugh and he makes up something to tell me and he cocks his funny little head and i can see him, at fourteen, twenty-four, forty-four, the man inside the boy.

i look at Josephine, my inscrutable imp, so clearly no longer a baby.

i look back at wee elephant Oscar, with that open gaze, who could have been anything. and i see. the elephant costume has been our hour of getting ready. we are leaving the liminal spaces behind.

the fairy godmother world does not survive long once words and worldliness creep in. i see my children emerging from it, hand in hand, one a little ahead, both stubborn and human, fully separate from me. mine own, yet never again quite like this.

i sniff a little sno-orrrt! behind, and then grab my treat bag and rush to head out alongside them into the real magic of the cold, crisp night, for as long as they will let me.
***

advice wanted: i need mySELF a costume. i leave for Blissdom Canada tomorrow. i am entirely unpacked, mostly dishevelled, and covered in crumbs.  i will rock the cocktail parties. luckily, there’s a Hallowe’enie karaoke night on Friday. which means i can dress up without needing to look All Fancy. i was hoping sweetsalty Kate, Schmutzie, The Palinode, Earnest Girl, and i could go as the Village People. then i realized there seem to be six Village People. still, i hold out hope. any volunteers? i call dibs on the leather guy.

if that doesn’t pan out, i own a blond wig and some striped socks. should i haul out a garbage bag and reprise my witch costume of 1981? halp! best Hallowe’en costume ever, that can be cobbled together out of sticks, lint, and leftover grant application drafts?

cause i tried the elephant costume, people. and that ain’t happening.

i dream i am on a boat, an exile. you are the shore. you are getting smaller. i pinch my fingers around the image of your head, smiling at the optics, playful in my powerlessness. i do not believe my voice will carry across the water.

i nod to the ache of it. sand swallowed, carried within me.

this is not the way i meant to go. i would have stayed…but launched, i sail. there is no swimming backward.

i trail my hand in the water when i should be sleeping, sending messages in bottles.  they all say, tell me you do not need me there. i think you try. i don’t believe you. it is too hard to hear over the waves.
***

i thought there was water between us.

last night, i listened to Jess read aloud the names of hundreds of loved and lost babies. in love. in remembrance. October 15th is Pregnancy & Infant Loss Remembrance Day…an awkward holiday, if ever there was one. even for us.

the first year it came across my radar, Oscar was eighteen months old. i was pregnant again, for the briefest of spells.

we lit a candle in bathroom while Oscar played in his bath. he splashed and laughed, and the yellow light played across the walls. in my mind i called Finn’s name.

he did not answer. but names did. a hundred names, all the babies and children and promises of babies i had come to know in the year and two years before. and i stopped, and cleared my mind, and tried again. Finn. Finn Liam Ferdinand Bug Maddy A the twins Thomas…the names began to trip again.  i could not still them, could not hold in my mind my small son with his perfect fingers and the just-so curve of his ear. into the river of names he slipped, away from me, water between us. i blew out the candle, gutted and guilty. i’d failed him. failed at remembrance.

sorrow becomes less specific with time. not less, exactly: only less sharp, less exact. and less exacting.

last night i sat and i listened to Jess, and all the names, and tears ran down my face. but i was not sad.

in the river of names, somehow, i found him. i found them all. a tide of tears that has become something bigger, something unto itself, something beautiful. for me these lost children are like Finn’s friends, his peers. this comforts me. no mother wants her child to be alone.

three years ago, in the candlelight, i was trying to remember what Finn had been, to bring him present. i cannot. he has not been that baby with the broken body for years now. if i try to hold him in that moment, he will wash from me, slip away again, over and over.

instead, last night i sat and listened, and i let them run over me until i too was in the water, no longer an exile.

and i smiled. in love and remembrance. in celebration. of all of them.

i am four weeks into grad school. again. i’m a big, galumphing dragon in a small box.

you’d think four years of writing blog posts would’ve taught me to churn out little papers like a confetti machine. you’d think fifteen years as an editor and writing teacher would make it natural to graciously receive grades on what i write.

nah.

being subject to an education system – even as an educator – is an exercise in paring oneself down.

but i’m learning. learning to remake myself to fit the parts of the box i need. learning too to bide my time, find ways to hold on to the things that refuse to be crammed in. this education stuff is a messy business.

our kids live within it every day. it norms them, tests them, grades them, then reflects them back to themselves on varying scales of worth. sometimes it’s a gentle motivating process that teaches them to believe in hard work, and in themselves. sometimes there’s violence done under the surface of all those metrics and rubrics and judgements, even the ones delivered in vague velvet language. sometimes what kids end up learning is that they cannot win, because the box was not made for them. sometimes they learn that sitting down and lining up and writing the “right” way – even if this year’s right way is exactly different from what last year’s teacher said – is what the world rewards.

in our culture, the education system – from kindergarten straight through to the highest levels of scholarship – regulates all those within it by appealing to the authority of the “this is how it is” box. our concepts of learning and knowledge and appropriate behaviour and rites of passage are all tied in part to this box.

i want to unpack it.

# 1. the first thing i know about the box is one we’ve been hearing more and more over the past fifteen years: increasingly, the world has little relationship to the view from within the box. it’s true. the box is based on industrial era values. we no longer live in an industrial society,  not really.

i am old enough to know that in 20+ years of various and sundry jobs, i have not once been subject to a letter grade. i am old enough to realize that there are many ways of writing and publishing, even within academia: that the world today rewards a very different set of skills than the compliance inculcated by the “teacher as ruler of the classroom” model. i’ve also spent enough years in education to know that most of the people who work in this system are good people, working hard, with good intentions.

but the box frames the way they see the world. it frames the way we ALL see the world. and ourselves. in many cases, for the rest of our lives. and yet we do not know how to challenge the box and its lack of fit because it is the package encasing too many things held dear. our concepts of what it means to learn are so tied to the box that we usually fail to think outside of it, when it comes to trying to “fix education.”

we need to think about the box. it’s so normalized as to be almost invisible, but the part it plays in shaping our kids is huge. and when we ignore it, we make it more powerful.

# 2. because the other thing i know about the box is this: it’s arbitrary. and, in part, irrelevant, both to learning and to eventual success in life. there is actually no other system in our culture that holds people to such an externalized and narrow frame of judgement as schooling does.

this doesn’t mean i don’t value education, or think we should throw rotten tomatoes at schools. but i do think we need to think more intelligently about them, as systems. and we don’t do that well, thanks to the box.

one of the best things i learned the last time i was in school is that everyone in our culture is an expert on education. it’s resoundingly true: you can see it each time the topic comes up in the media, particularly as regards reforms or any questions of what teachers should do. everyone and their pet dog in the court of public opinion has an authoritative perspective on precisely how schools should work. only nurses, maybe, get half as much helpful input on how to practice their vocation. but nurses are lucky: not everybody hangs out in hospitals. we all go to school, at least long enough to master schooling.

we are all experts, in our way. but what we are expert on is our own relationships to the box.

no matter how i gnash my teeth, the court of public opinion on education distills down to second-hand efficiency models borrowed from industrial-era business: testing. standardization. metrics and money and accountability for teachers, who end up wedged by the calls for total quantification of schooling into classroom manager roles more stringent and regimented than those of military drill sergeants.

this is the box at work, loosed from the control of the system and turning back on itself to attack its own maker for not being more of what people took from the system in the first place. the calls for increasingly quantifiable education are calls for a simulacra of what we think we remember of the box, of what it made us think school was about. and the master’s tools, people, will not dismantle the master’s house. (*thank you, Audre Lord*)

we need to think about what we’re educating for, and what we value, and fight for that, not replicate whatever we think education was trying to do to us.

the final thing i think about the box is the one that’s new for me.

#3. i don’t think it’s the quantifiable part that’s the problem. the messiness of education is not the fault of numbers. measuring things, even outcomes, can have value for good teaching and good education. the problem is blind belief that human systems have meaning outside of us.

for years, i had quantification, based in counting and measuring, confused with positivism and objectivism, based in the belief that some things are simply true, even when they’re human-constructed.

thanks to my forced and rather painful immersion in quantitative research, i’m learning that while measuring often reflects a belief in the absolute truth of numbers, even when there’s obvious evidence of human impact on outcomes behind those numbers, the connection between quantification and positivism is not absolutely necessary.

i’m also noticing that there’s a lot of positivism and objectivism even in aspects of education without numbers. maybe we grade kids on a scale of A, B, C, D, F. maybe the grading is important, to show how closely their work accords with what we’re trying to teach. i’m not anti-grading. but i don’t believe grading = Truth, not outside the societal conditions that construct those grades.

what happens with grading, too often, is that both for students and teachers, and then by extension for parents and society at large, the grades come to have a meaning far larger and more lasting than the deeply human process in which they originate. we amplify the subjective act of a teacher or school system choosing test questions and seeing how little Johnny performs his mastery of those particular questions – which is a process that can tell us things both about Johnny and about the system and the testing process itself – into a supposedly objective picture wherein we believe that we know something absolutely True about Johnny and his capacity and his future success, or about what his teacher was teaching. but we do not interrogate the testing process, or the marking process. and we treat the results of that testing as if they tell us something objective, something divorced from its roots in human systems and fallibility.

the box tells us we can do that, somehow. that’s how the box justifies its own meaning and existence, and how it replicates itself generation after generation.

i find it crampy. i wonder how it will shape my children. i wonder how it’s shaped yours. and you. and you. yeh, you.

i wonder if i would have done better as a veterinarian, or a hairdresser, or a poodle groomer. but i still can’t think how i’d be happier than digging away, trying to understand this strange societal enterprise we call education.

tell me what you think. do you see the box? am i tilting at windmills?