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he was eighteen. it was his second week of freshman year at a good university.

you’ve probably seen the story. Tyler Clementi‘s roommate set up a webcam in their dorm room that could be operated remotely, then livecast and tweeted Tyler’s sexual encounter with another guy. three days later Tyler jumped off the George Washington Bridge and drowned himself.

diminishment. shaming. the logic of dominance, our cultural hierachy of thought where one side of any societal binary – masculine/feminine, white/non-white, straight/gay, rational/emotional  – is legitimated in its power over the other, whatever Other it may be.

we exist in a social world, and sometimes we’re able to carve out spaces where we think we’re safe to be whoever we want or need to be. and then somebody else decides – out of discomfort, on a lark, to flex muscle or gain attention…nothing so different from all the little dehumanizations we perform on each other every day – to re-educate us about how the world really works and which kind of body or desire or way of being counts as legitimate, as Normal.

to invalidate whatever safe space we’ve created by taking the social power that the logic of dominance affords, and using it against us.

you will never feel safe so long as you’re subject to that logic, that operation of power over you. if you’re lucky, there is respite, retrenchment with those of your own kind, whatever that kind may be: the ones who make YOU feel normal, and valid, and deserving of human decency. hopefully reclamation of your right to respect.

but if that logic of dominance sneaks into your bedroom at night and broadcasts you at your most vulnerable, most exposed; if it treats your privacy a spectacle worthy of shame,  you might decide you’ll never feel safe again.
***

four weeks from today, i’ll be in Toronto at Blissdom Canada 2010, contributing to a panel called Blogging for Social Action, Community, and Empowerment: The Beauty of the Butterfly Effect. the good in social media. the advocacy and change that it makes possible. the beauty of this world out here created by a million – a billion? – hands.

until last week, my only real anxiety about it all was that part of my role on the panel is to talk about the creation and birth of Glow in the Woods, and i envisioned an audience expecting the lovely Kate – who is on a different panel – throwing squishy tomatoes at me. (that, and Erica Ehm. ERICA EHM is leading my panel. when i was 14, i wanted to BE Erica Ehm. eep.)

lately i’ve been grappling with some bigger doubts.

first there was the young woman in BC whose gang rape went viral on Facebook. then, Malcolm Gladwell published a piece in the New Yorker stating The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted, or that we’re all just armchair activists out here in social media land, frothing over with our expressions of “like” for good causes without putting any money where our mouths are, or doing much at all to effect real change.

in class, in a mostly-fascinating discussion over 20th-century thought from clever people who stand on the shoulders of giants: technology is bad, technology is reductive, technology is anti-humanist. it makes us nothing more than circuits for efficient information exchange.

i think i bleeped at that one, a cyborg afraid of being outed. but i wondered, too. Jesus. am i wrong?

then i came home last night and read about Tyler Clementi. and my heart cracked in two.
***

i don’t think we have the luxury of ignoring all this. not those of us invested and enmeshed in social media. these are not innocent tools we use, no matter how transformative or empowering they have been for us, no matter what safe spaces or advocacy or butterfly beauty they’ve made possible.

but. neither are the tools themselves cruel, or diminishing, or agents of the logic of dominance. unless they are used that way. they are just tools.

any story that tells you otherwise, whether it makes of them a mythology of salvation or a dystopia, is a lie.

social media amplifies all of our communicative powers, including the power to exclude and shame and victimize others, to gang up on them in masses and make them feel worthless and violated, or beyond the pale of belonging. it is just a tool, like a pen, except what we scrawl here is always public. what we scrawl here always has human effects and consequences.

i don’t know if Tyler Clementi’s roommate really, fully understood the scope of what he might be setting in motion, unleashing the brutality of the logic of dominance and shame out here in the amplified world. the power play behind his cruelty was a blatant smackdown of Tyler’s rights to respect and decency and equality, no matter the tools. had the roommate scrawled on the dorm room door with a pen the very same things he tweeted, he would likely have still caused terrible hurt, and probably uproar, and possibly incited danger to Tyler and his parter not from themselves but from others. but would Tyler have jumped from the bridge? or would he still have had – somewhere outside that dorm hall, or perhaps that campus – space for retreat and respite, for escape from the dehumanization and Othering?

with the amplification of voice that social media makes possible comes the amplification of the human effects that voice creates. and this is where i think Gladwell – and my learned colleagues and guides at the university, some of them – get it wrong.

yes, technology can be part of the modernist efficiency that diminishes all that cannot be represent in numbers and bottom lines; it can be a direct circuit that cuts out the warmth and messiness of human touch. but i live something far more than that. the idea of social media for good is more than a fairy tale wherein technology and Twitter make us all Cinderella. social media is revolutionary in that it creates a world where the struggling, messy, complex human self – the one the humanists are so afraid has been jettisoned forever by a Fordist, corporatist culture – has voice, on an unprecedented scale. and all of those voices have human effects.

some are ugly. some are tragic. some are life-changing in the most beautiful way possible. for me, the Internet has been a place to write myself into being after a loss that the so-called “real world” tends to silence, render unspeakable. social media brought me community, the company of my own kind, respite and resiliency in all the messiness of my sorrow and my survival.

those of us who speak for the good that technology & social media can do need to take ownership of its particular capacity for harm. there may be nothing more important to the education of the next generation than teaching kids that self-expression – whether it’s writing on a bathroom wall or on Twitter – has effects, and that those effects are what we live with, all of us, so long as we can bear them.

with social media technologies mostly banned from classrooms and curricula, that’s going to be hard.

the Revolution, if it comes, will not come from activists. it may come from those who still inhabit the Other Sides of the logic of dominance. or it may come in a quieter way, a change that is barely a revolution except in its core. one where in connecting with each other out here, we connect with our own humanity and that of others in ways that our modern society has made – til now – easier to just leave to the logic of dominance.

because it is only our humanity, not any tool under the sun, that will ever prevent another tragedy like that of Tyler Clementi.

we’re in the checkout line at one of those big, sad stores that has seen better days.

the plastic crap is crowding in. the lady ahead is counting change with shaking fingers, like she has been for the past thirty-seven seconds. the five people behind – me included – are beginning to flare nostrils. i think of my grandmother, small and bent in her last years, and force my tongue to be still. i am all impatience these days, a fuse primed and twitching.

Oscar’s head turns on its swivel and he catches sight of the racks of cheap Hallowe’en decorations far to the right of the cart. his face lights and he peers round me from the front of the cart and announces to the entire line, seemingly apropos of nothing,

For Hallowe’en, i’m gonna be a WINO!!

a beat. i look at him askance. ten ears behind me prick up.

you know, mom, with a big HORN on my nose!

OH, i nod. i turn my head slightly, encompassing the crowd, and repeat, a rhino, honey. you’re going be a RHINO.
***

i feel the same.

not that i’m planning to become a wino, though the urge to dive off the high wire into a cheap bottle of Hermits in a paper bag sometimes sounds deceptively pleasant. the seedy promise of respite. just that i too need a translator, a mother, to ruffle my hair and explain to the staring throng what i’m really trying to say.

my words are a tangled mess, these days. it’s like i swallowed a cauldron of alphabet soup and can only work with what i burp up.

i snap at the kids, because suddenly all the hours are accounted for and still they are slow and dawdling, or twirling in circles rather than putting on boots. the words i find are not the ones i want.  i mean to say, i am sorry i am so rushed, so distracted. i love you, little you.

but it comes out all edges.

in the car, stuck behind timid drivers and the omnipresent construction workers at the four brand-new roundabouts on the brand-new commute to French school, i choke down the round, raging words like cocksucker and GO the fuck already, do you want an engraved invitation? but still i growl and i hear Posey in the back shout Bad Driver! at a car she cannot even see and i am humbled and shamed and i bite my tongue, my errant tongue.

i sit in class and try to find the words to dig behind what “normal” means on those Bell Curves we are inundated with like some kind of fact when i remember all too well what they mean is some children fall outside and get labels slapped on them and yes, sometimes that means funding or meds and sometimes that helps but i know too if we never interrogate this concept of normal in its arrogance and its taken for grantedness, we perpetuate the idea that we all can fit in boxes and so be understood.

i want to say, THAT is a crime no funding or meds can alleviate. i want to ask Oprah and my professor why they are so sure a good education is something you can test.

i try to dredge up the words to explain that i can learn the Bell Curve and parrot it but that i want to engage with it, but my frail newborn chicks of ideas fall helpless into the no-man’s land between irreconcilable views of the world.

she says to me, 68% of the responses will fall between -1 and +1 SD and that is normal and i nod, because the words fail me.

i write, notes and papers and presentations, trying to pull the ineffable from the sky and pin it down, to find my balance amidst methodology and paradigm and epistemology and ontology. they are big words, big ideas. just when i think i understand some other paragraph comes along to destabilize it all.

i love it. i hate it.

i am exhausted, stuffed too full. i fall asleep reading Lacan or Giddens or some sociological theory critiquing the ways reflexivity is predicated on  mobility and wake up minutes later to a small coughing human calling, Mommy! and there it is, the start of another day.

on Thursday, Oscar was sick at school. and so i left my computer screen gaping emptily at the bones of another paper and half-jogged out to campus where Dave had parked the car after dropping the kids off.

there was more construction.

it took me longer to get the car out of the parking lot than it had taken me to walk to get it in the first place. the new roundabout at the campus exit would have wheeled me jauntily off in the direction of my waiting children, except that traffic was backed up in the other direction and the geniuses on the other side kept blocking up the bleeding traffic circle so they wouldn’t lose an inch of ground.

i waited.

i noticed i was crying.

and i remembered this post, the woman i saw weeping in July, and i smiled at her under the tears, that unknown sister. i looked around guiltily, wondered if anyone was watching me. i wondered, more defiantly, if they really wanted a show and whether it wouldn’t be kinda jolly, really, to go flatout apeshit in the middle of a petty Charlottetown traffic jam.

but then i shrugged because this is not despair, only stress and frustration. and i sat in my car repeating that like a mantra, grateful for the truth of it, grateful to have finally found the right words, for a change.
***

yesterday, an English professor i’ve always quite liked but barely known came up to me at a conference.

I have a poem for you, she said. For Women Who Cry When They Drive.

she saw me! i panicked, in the roundabout lineup the other day. and just as i was about to open my mouth to say yet again the wrong thing, she saved me. That post you wrote about the woman at the traffic light, it reminded me. I need to send it to you.

she sent it today.

i read and for a second, i stopped still, suddenly one of a thousand passengers on the same road of too many words and not enough words, the wrong words, maybe the wrong choices, overwhelmed in the middle of an ordinary day.

the writer’s name is Sue Goyette. like me, she is a Maritimer: perhaps this crying in cars thing is a local specialty. but her words wove me a story in which i knew both parts. in which it wasn’t my job to find the words. Thank you, Ms. Sue Goyette. Thank you Jane.

it is Goyette’s words i lean on today, offer up in lieu of my own, so unwieldly and congealed and ungentle. today, she is my translator, the mother who knows what i need to hear, what i want to say. maybe you need to hear them too.

For Women Who Cry When They Drive

Blame it on CBC stereo if anyone asks. Blame it on
the viola. I did and it worked. I never even had to mention locksmiths

and lovers, how close the two are. I never had to name
each white-knuckle grip of his on the steering wheel. I’ll name it here, though

for you. Surrender and all its aliases. I feel at home in two places now.
One’s here, the other in the library surrounded by reference books

To the stars. Driving doesn’t help. But you already know that. Remember
when you stopped, pulled over on the Cole Harbour Road and wept,

bowed to the wheel and the long road ahead, the long road behind. I tried
signalling, pulling over, but the traffic was stubborn. If you are reading this,

I did try to stop. The passing lanes of loss and love and the speed limit
to this life. I held you for days in my heart, dear, sad woman in the dark green Volvo

next to the Dairy Queen, next to the Royal Bank, feeling like you have no choice.
And you don’t. You don’t, except to fasten your seat belt

And yield.

– Sue Goyette
from CV2, The Canadian Journal of Poetry and Critical Writing, Winter 2004

first day.

there are only six of us in the class, four new Ph.D students and two M.Ed students finishing up their final course requirements. we are there to study quantitative research methods. the words are unfamiliar, dust in my mouth.

i am early, all nerves and butterflies and shiny eagerness, momentarily eight instead of thirty-eight. i laugh at my fool self.

i have worked on this campus on and off for five years, in this building for most of that time. it should all be familiar. but normally i stride in all gussied up, in heels and grown-up clothes, a professional with the class list clutched in one paw and a coffee in the other, the next hour or two mostly choreographed in my head.

this time, i have marked the shift as best i can…on my body. i know nothing of the dance to come the next three hours except the barest structure: syllabus, introductions, vague visions of formulas. i am afraid of formulas. and so, stripped of my status as the knower, the director of the dance, i have girded my loins in comfort food’s apparel equivalent: a faded denim shirt. with tights. and new boots, flat and comfy. big socks. identity as performance; my philosophy made flesh. or at least cloth and leather.

thank you, o fickly revolving vagaries of fashion, for bringing me straight on back to my undergrad days. yes, the army boots have been exchanged for Blundstones, because if one is going to spend hundreds of dollars on a single book written in bizarre statistical formulas, one might as well splurge on boots, too. ahem. but i know myself in these clothes. this is my student uniform.

and yet, i am lying to myself. i cannot go back to that old skin.
***

it’s not that i was all passive and receptive, the mythic blank slate waiting for wisdom.

sure, i played that part sometimes, even to myself. i was a good student in the early days, a little shit through most of junior high, then a high-achieving if somewhat poorly-attending high school and undergraduate student.

but the passivity was conditional; the only mark by which i knew how to signal my acceptance and acquiescence to the system that ordered my days and my existence. School was deeply and profoundly a player in how i valued and understood myself, all through my formative years.

When i was a kid, i watched closely in classes, reading both the textbooks and the relationships unfolding in front of me. i was curious and eager to belong, and tried desperately to think of interesting things to say in class. but if ever the classroom or program circumstances in which i found myself smelled like power and structure for their own sakes, my sense of well-being and belonging would shrivel and i’d recoil as if a door had closed. no place for me here, i would whisper, and my middle-finger would rise, of its own ornery accord. i’d be outed.

oppositional. saucy. not working to her full potential.

those report cards were stark contrasts to my Lisa Simpson status quo. i realize now they should have read, “This student is challenging my power position in the classroom. This is uncomfortable for us both.”

ask my middle school math teacher. ask my classmates the year i stayed on in my little college town for a one year post-B.A. Bachelor of Education program.

one of them confessed to me that spring, just before graduation, that they called me The Bad Ass of the Class. i think i grinned, all bravado. but it was the loneliest year of my life, those bewildering days when i discovered i did love teaching, but might hate teachers. or at least Teachers’ College, with its smug and cheery conviviality, its simplifying presentation of a world i was sure was complicated. we never once talked about power.

i did not know how to name the absence. i just knew i had never before so singularly failed to fit in. and somewhere early on i had understood that on a gut level, and closed myself off, unreachable. i was protecting myself from the person that system existed to create; from becoming a teacher on terms that alienated and troubled me, that left out all that i thought was important.

but i did not know how to say any of that. and so i went through the motions at the back of the class, appeared passive and contemptuous, a rebel without a cause.

i thought i was there to belong. i thought the problem was me.
***

the incredible thing about going back to school when you are 107 older than twenty-two is that you simultaneously morph into two people at once. the opinionated adult with a confident voice, who understands that belonging is a far broader thing than any one classroom experience could possibly shape, and the younger version of yourself, miraculously resurrected the moment you fold yourself into a desk and open a binder.

you can see it, actually, your entire hard-won sense of self and authority wilts like a pansy and slithers down your leg. it pools wetly on the floor. you wonder if others can see it. you wonder if they will judge you. you wonder if you will look stupid. you wonder if you will belong.

you wonder why the professor is staring at you and then you realize she has asked your name.

you go to use the voice that you were so sure would carry you proudly through insightful explorations of meaning, and you discover that you sound like Minnie Mouse. you feel painfully exposed. you also feel stupid for feeling painfully exposed. you are an adult, dammit. ouch.

the quantitative professor then asks about your background with statistics.

you consider simply diving into the pool of your own ego on the floor and hoping to drown, then and there.

you try humour, instead. i can’t count, you quip. you notice the professor looks unsurprised but vaguely depressed by your confession. you find this strangely heartening. perhaps there will be others like you.

you give your head a shake. you swallow, straighten your shoulders. you will not play the simple role of insider OR outsider, not this time around.

it’s true that you can’t go back to the old skin of your once-upon-a-student self, the one who gave over most of her power to the teacher and then sulked at the back of the class if it was misused. but not because that skin EVER goes away. it will be there until you are, literally, 107, always a tidy fit, ever making you look and feel smaller and almost-comfortably invisible and pleasing.

you can’t go back because it doesn’t feel good enough anymore, just to feel safe. to belong.

you chose to be here, this time round. you want something, for yourself, beyond whatever the person at the front of the class may want. you are an adult. even if you sound like Minnie Mouse and you can’t count and you’re dressed like an aging undergraduate.

the difference is everything.

my Posey girl is two today.

last week, from the back seat of the car, she piped up, when i was a baby, i was CUTE!

she then rocked her back and forth Stevie Wonder-style with her surefire cute-as-a-button face on, revelling in her former status as something adorable. i suspect Oscar may have been reminiscing for her. she’s at the age where nothing is cuter, in her mind, than a baby.

in truth, her wise, sweet, chatty, constantly-in-motion little self, with her apple cheeks and her wild pique and her guerrilla hugs, gets cuter every day. she blows my mind, surprises me at every corner.

but when your baby is able to say things like, “when i was a baby…” in complete sentences, you gotta face it. you don’t have a baby anymore.
***

you started big-girl school this week, Josephine…and it has been hard on you. a classroom, for the first time, and all in French, napping on mats: it is a lot for a little soul to adjust to. it broke my heart to wonder if yours was broken, when you burst into tears that second morning.

but you bounce. it seems to be your way. i went to your classroom yesterday afternoon, early, with cupcakes, to make sure you were okay and celebrate your birthday with your new petits amis. you were lined up at the door, a party of one, hopping up and down and squealing, i want to go outSIDE! then, oh, hi Mommy! oh, hi cupcakes! it’s a SPECIAL day!

it is a special day, indeed, my girl. my big girl. my bright and beautiful smallest, my sweet wild thing.

we stayed home today, together, you & i. we snuggled, we iced a cake, we played in the yard. you made me laugh. you made me want to pull my hair out. you made me stop, in the middle of my kitchen on a mundane Friday afternoon, and sweep you up in my arms and give thanks from my bones for the gift that you are.

you’re right: when you were a baby, you were cute. but every day, you grow more lovely, more headstrong and yet considerate, more entertaining, more full of wonder. keep it up. happy birthday, my smashing Josephine.

end of summer and the days grow cool and the air opens up like a vast canvas, all possibility, whispering at me like a siren.

where do you want to go? i swear it hollers, cool breath on my neck. goosebumps rise in response. it does not bother to arch its eyebrows or its back to court me; it is too busy, too full with its own ripeness, rushing on ahead of the inevitable decay of November that we both know looms. i gasp and watch it race the horizon.

it is travelling season. i wave, limply, as it speeds by.

my travels will only be in the books and papers of my studies, this fall, and in the French worksheets my kids bring home from the new school which is only daycare but in my maternal mind probably feels more like school than real school will when they get there because they have now entered The System and this is the school building they will attend right through into kindergarten and beyond and straight on til morning and my addled Anglo mind can’t even comprend the damn “Information de votre Enfant” sheet i had to fill out so, it’s school.

the backpacks we grab in the morning are the kind with clean diapers and changes of underpants, the kind intended to come home at the end of the day with handprints and paintings. they are not the kind you have to bend to heft onto your person, the kind that you stuff until the straps bulge and beg for mercy and that you lug with you through unfamiliar streets almost as companion, your worldly goods and your tickle trunk both.

my real backpack – bright yellow, like autumn leaves – has lain unused for years now, stuffed under the suitcases that see occasional service for family trips or conferences.

in truth, it only ever made one autumn trip. my first, the virgin voyage, though i was old for a first-time traveller and virgin only in the provincialism i was as eager to shed as i had been the real deal ten years before.

a decade ago now, that first trip. i did not know then that autumn was the perfect time to travel. i know that only now, because i cannot go.

it was Ireland, the summer after, that brought the lesson home. heed my words: if you are travelling alone and you are a sociable sort by nature, keen to mix with locals and taste the culture in its less sanitized forms, do not choose high season for your wanderings.

Ireland is a tourist destination, a place that turns itself inside out come summer to present a smiling face to a world that lines its pockets in return. i do not say this with cynicism; it is simply a fact.

i should have known better because i am from one of these places too. we are all friendliness in July, here in PEI. but if you visit, you will only see our “parlour face,” our best self, all genuine friendliness and clannish closed-ness, a paradox. it is simply that we have only so much energy and there are so many crowding in to see whatever spectacle they have in mind of who we are. in high season, you will not really get to know us.

and so it was with me in most of Ireland.

i wandered streets and cobblestones, ducked into pubs, hitchhiked on the wrong side of the road. i struck up conversations with old men who lay half-prone on bus station benches, red-flowered noses far less poetic in person than in the storied romance of a nation’s manhood, self-sabotaged. mostly, i was alone. hostels in small Irish towns are not necessarily hotbeds of wild conversational nightlife. in Sligo, i had the run of the place but for one elderly gentleman in town for the night for a job interview. i settled into my chair with my tea, keen to chatter. he stared at me, took his teeth literally out of his mouth, and gummed “goo’nighd.”

chastened, i went to bed.

and so it went. all around the friendly, busy coast, i danced on the periphery of a culture i could not break into. then i got to Belfast.

if you ever need a straight dose of reality after a month of feeling like a bloody tourist no matter where you turn, head to Belfast. don’t mind the pipe bomb warnings or the grim, Dickensian buildings with their squat red-brick tops and their razor wire. go. walk. skip the Black Cab tour and take yourself up the Falls Road and down the Shankill. open your eyes to the human hands that painted the sectarian murals that decorate the brick. understand, this has been a paramilitary war zone for generations. know too, these are neighbourhoods, homes. the gap-toothed kids i met didn’t mind at all that i was taking pictures. but one wanted to know why i only saw the murals? why not take a picture of him in front of the fish shop?

there was only Kodachrome, then. the boy turned out blurry, and i felt i had lost something, forever.

Belfast, at least the summer i landed there, doesn’t have much of a tourist season.

i bellied up to the oak bar of a pub, watching the barman pour Guinness, noting the flick of the wrist, the art of the proper pour. i like watching people do what they do well.

a young man – not much more than a kid, really, smooth-cheeked – came up to me. we chatted. his namer was Conor. he had a Belfast accent to beat the band, all flattened vowels and dropped gerunds and i told him, laughing, that i was homesick for Irish music because where i am from the pubs are full of ta-deedly tunes and the long, sad ballads of the Olde Country. i had been in Asia for a year, nearly. this was as close as i could get to home.

and so he took me across the city that night, through alleys and down wide thoroughfares that were strangely empty, past the glorious Hotel Europa – the most bombed hotel in Europe, he informed me, and i asked if he’d ever been in it. he said no. and i marvelled at how we end up inside our skins. i was as seamless a visual fit here – a foot in each world, my Scottish-Irish mongrel genes marked all over my freckled, fair face – as i’d been anywhere in my life. and yet i could, with the impunity and innocence of a tourist, go places that he could not dream of setting foot.

i realized in that moment that even if i tried, i’d never see the city as anything but an outsider.

he took me to a den of a bar, nestled down low in the ground, dank and warm and strangely welcoming. there was an upright piano in the corner, and a man with that most Irish of instruments, the bouzouki. he sang, and then my friend and another man got up and sang too, an old ballad called My Bonny Highwayman, and the liquor made me brave and i regaled them with all the verses of Farewell to Nova Scotia and they were remarkably kind.

there were perhaps six people in the place.

while i was singing, a man came in, older than the rest of us twenty-somethings by perhaps fifteen years. he stood watching, and i saw Conor nod and go over and shake his hand.

he was a bear of a man, in a long, black trenchcoat. the night was humid. his hair was longish, and wild, and the beard to match and his sharp blue eyes made me think at first of Rasputin. i bowed. they clapped. and then i walked up at the very moment Conor asked the bear how he was, and the man’s face crumpled. it was no time to introduce myself; instead, tipsy and far from home, i took his arm, his giant arm.

sit, i commanded.

we sat, the three of us, in a round corner booth under a single incandescent bulb. the big man talked.

his love had died. his wife – or not really his wife, he conceded, but his partner of twenty years, older than him, his trooo luf – had died of cancer perhaps a month before. i have never seen a man so big seem so small. words and sorrow and shame spilled from him like music, about how her body wasted, and he was so afraid, and he had not known what to say and in the end it was her who lay beside him and told him it would be alright.

i did not know what to say. i asked her name. it was Diane. i no longer remember his.

we sat, and the drinks kept coming, and then as suddenly as he had come, he was off, paying the tab as he went. he enclosed me in his arms, in that greatcoat, for a moment before he left, and i think i touched his face because he had touched me, raw and deep. he shook Conor’s hand again, and he was gone.

the music was over. we sat, suddenly in silence, and i realized i had no idea how to get back to the hostel. i looked at my host, curious.

who was he? i asked. how do you know him?

everybody knows him, Conor answered. he’s a legend. he’s one of the big boys; he’s been around here since the old days. my brothers knew him.

then, with a half-grin, because my blank face must’ve given me away, he said he’s a knee-capper, girl, an enforcer. he’s IRA. IRA? you know?

i must’ve blinked. IRA. right. i knew. i’d known the whole time i was in the city that a fissure ran beneath it, one i couldn’t see. i’d walked the streets, shot my photo essay, humming Protestant hymns from my childhood when i’d noticed my raincoat was bright Republican green. but i hadn’t understood. i had been a tourist, nothing more.

and then i had sat down with a broken man, and for a minute, i’d seen the city as more than an outsider.
***

Conor walked me home. i never saw him again, or the bear of a man who did terrible things, and grieved Diane, his woman.

my life is settled now, and simpler. but when the wind comes up cool and brisk in fall, it is those messiest, rawest, most human moments of travel and dislocation that i long for, that take me outside my skin and give me wanderlust again.

part one is here.

so, my two day Ph.D orientation was September 1st and 2nd. yesterday. the day before.

i was not there.

i’d been joking for awhile about the campus tour part of the orientation, since the campus is about as big as a minute and i’ve worked there for five years, in four different buildings. but i was still looking forward to it. it’s the first Ph.D program this faculty has ever run: there are only four of us entering, and we’d spend the two days with pretty much the full faculty contingent and get a lot of the research and funding questions i’ve had since the spring finally answered. this was the fullest, most concerted access we’d have to each other just as people, stating interests, exploring options, before the race of the year got underway.

but last Friday i had a headache. Saturday, i woke up with a sore, sore throat and an overall sense of ick. Sunday, i could barely even GET up. it was like a flu on a scale i’d never had: full body aches and chills and sweats like a roller coaster. i felt 107,and a weak 107 at that . Monday, vomiting started, and i could barely swallow. Dave took me to the ER. doc said strep: i got an IV and a couple litres of fluid and a prescription for Amoxil. went home, looking forward to getting better right quick, like a bunny. because i had orientation.

instead, Tuesday morning my throat was more raw than ever and i cried each time my body spasmed into swallowing. every drop i choked down i brought back up. but i got the Amoxil down with Gravol and they stayed and i crawled into bed and waited for relief.

instead, something crawled behind my eyes.

if you have ever taken hallucinogens in your misspent youth, you will notice, i’ve heard (ahem), that there is a point at which you think these goddam things aren’t going to work. and just as you are about to give up on the excitement you’ve, say, paid good money for or crawled at dawn all over a good golf course to pick, there comes a slight crawling, trailing motion behind your eyes and you realize the Tilt-A-Whirl has just started up and you’re locked in and there is – quite literally – nothing to do but go along for the ride for the next, oh, six or eight hours.

this felt like that. which when you have a 103 fever and can’t swallow and have long left silly college experimentations behind and have An Orientation Tomorrow to get better for, is not exactly the feeling you are looking for, whatever thrills it may have conjured in the past.

i lay in the bed wondering if i was just being silly. i opened my eyes, looked around my room, nodded, and closed them again. the exact imprint of my cat, who stood staring down at me from the side of bed, popped out in white against the dark curtain of my eyelids. then the sounds started, my ears like bizarre amplification instruments out of Dr. Suess’ own torture chamber. i could hear in 3D. i could hear conversations across town. i could hear my throat, my ragged breathing.

fuck.

i carefully got up, dressed my shaking body, put the pills in my purse, and called Dave. by the time he got home i was hiding under a pillow on the couch. by the time we got to the packed ER, for the second time in less than fifteen hours, i was near feral. we didn’t wait five hours that time. i was in a lovely private ER room in minutes, courtesy of myapparently perfect mimicry of a total nutcase.

they thought i had meningitis, swelling of the brain. nobody seemed interested in my theory that i was being poisoned. possibly because i was also adamant that if they made me take my sweater off – it was a swelterish 30 degrees out – i’d drown.

i came back to myself almost exactly four hours in, about 1 pm. i remembered the events of the previous few hours, but as if through a prism. i felt wrung like a wet rag. they took more blood than i thought i possessed. a poor student nurse was the first to try, shades of the night before school twenty-four years ago, but she might as well have stabbed me with a fork and i screamed and they sent in the elder LPN instead, the one who could thread needles like butter. i babbled incoherently at her, not because i was still delusional, but because i was so damn grateful the student had stopped.

twelve holes in my arms to add to the two from the night before. i have tracks like Keith Richards in 1968.

then, after the IV took hold and the fever broke and i lay spent in the pool of my own sweat, a spinal tap. or actually four, because the very nice doctor kept saying, in a curious flat tone, i can’t seem to find any cerebrospinal fluid.

it is a strange thing, to be bent in half, mostly naked and sick, over a hospital bedside tray with the most vulnerable corners of your spine stretched like a cat to a man you’ve never met before and have him say such a thing about your white little back. it felt oddly my fault, as if i’d thrown a party and failed to ensure my guests had drinks. fluids are the hostess’ responsibility. and that silly feminine guilt was easier than acknowledging the fear that raced through the pathways of my brain, recently fried like eggs. i had a spinal tap once before, twenty years ago. i’ve had three epidurals. but in none of them has anyone ever said, i can’t seem to get this right.

he did, on the fourth try, leaving me mercifully unparalyzed though with the killer cerebrospinal headache that still haunts me to this moment. while he waited for the fluid to drain a nurse strolled in and announced Bed Twenty-two? She has a blood alcohol level of ninety three.

there was clucking, impressed though not unkind, from the faceless sea of medical professionals circled around my C-curved body. out of nowhere, afraid i would laugh and paralyze myself if i did not get the thought out, i muttered, I’ve had drinks that had alcohol levels lower than that. they skipped a beat, because they had all, i think, forgotten me as more than a back, an exposed lumbar. then they laughed, again kindly, and the doctor spoke wearily to the nurse and made sure that the woman would get all the treatment they could give, even though she was apparently uninsured for some of the extras. or something. it wasn’t clear, nor was it my business. and yet in that moment, i felt the doctor’s tired, capable, patient hands on my back, and i felt more human than i had in hours, or would again until i got home.

our local ER is new, quite lovely if understaffed, and full of state-of-the-art private rooms. so i was rolled, all taped up to multiple monitors like a neonate, to one of these glamourous holding tanks until late late, just when i’d decided to sleep, a cheery nurse named Kathy came for me and brought me inexplicably to pediatrics. i realized later it was the only private room available in the hospital. they were keeping me in isolation until the meningitis tests came back.

rooms with Disney stickers are lonely when you miss your kids.

i felt better the next morning – my throat less raw after the fourth bag of IV fluids – and my fever came under control and by 4 pm when they came in to say that it was definitively strep and not meningitis, i was feeling pretty good.

then they said, here’s your Amoxil.

i mentioned that the nice ER doctor had said i wouldn’t be having any more of that. the whole “thing” the day before might have been a reaction.

they stared blankly at me, these particular nurses in their teddy bear-print shirts. they had just come on shift: i had never seen them before. do you have a rash? they said. Amoxil reactions are rashes, one clarified, with an abrupt finality. they said the doc on call had ordered it, for strep. she emphasized the last part slowly, an equation, like i might be a little stupid.

they shook it at me. my mother was there, both of us uncertain. i understood there were no chinks for my words to get a toehold on in this particular version of the system. no way out but through.

i took it.

twenty minutes later, i asked my mother to kindly put out the bathroom light behind her, as the sight of it was suddenly searing my eyes. then the crawling started. goody.

this second time i understood what was happening, and was neither feverish nor dehydrated nor in debilitating pain. and so, with my mother patient beside me and then, team switch, with Dave, i rode it out again, watching the big black hospital clock on the wall. with my eyes open it crept around, unruly. with my eyes closed, only the stark white circle of it stood out, imprinted against the back of my lids.

four hours, i told myself. four hours.

lucky me. i have a rare neurological allergy to amoxicillin, my file now states.

the night nurse, in the absence of a rash, still eyed my nightside table suspicously and treated me like a juvenile delinquent all night long. the one who came on the next morning couldn’t have been more different, more warm, more empathetic. people. timing. random luck.

and so i walked out of the hospital yesterday morning, shaky and weak but slowly recovering from the fever and the strep, with a prescription for an unrelated penicillin and a sense of having been to another land, one out of time and body.

which i suppose, in the end, is as good an orientation for going back to college as i could have had. whatever i missed at the actual deal, i think they’ll kindly avail me of anyway. but the strange heart of darkness that can come – even for a 38 year old woman in a pediatric ward, attended by her mother – hell, that kind of exploration i’d forgotten.

i’d forgotten that reality isn’t truly the same for us all. i’d forgotten that being treated as rational, knowledgeable, human, is a privilege, not an everyday occurrence in all circumstances, something that one can be stripped of in a heartbeat. i’d forgotten that institutional systems are not always inherently benevolent, no matter how helpful nor how needed in a given circumstance. i had forgotten, from years of good luck and good health and the taking for granted that comes when one has all the privileges of race and class and education, what it is like to be vulnerable to other people’s misconceptions about your particular circumstances, what it is like to be vulnerable to the human frailty of power, even if that power ostensibly means well and has teddy bears on its shirt.

i could have taken an entire Ph.D and not learned something so valuable, so human.
***

for all those of you who kindly asked…i’m doing a lot better. throat decent, fever down, food slowly making its way back to my world. as soon as the Old Testament prophet behind my left eye stops smiting it with the lightning bolt that is my cerebro-spinal take-home present from the spinal tap three days ago, i’ll be grand. the headache still gets worse every day. i am hoping today is its pinnacle. tomorrow, we have a hurricane coming.

i walked out of the hospital today feeling almost – though not quite – as surreal as i had when i stumbled in two days ago.

almost as surreal, because no matter how flattering, 38 year old women do not normally stay in the pediatrics ward, in rooms festooned with Cinderella stickers and Mickey mouse. the pediatric nurses all waved a kind goodbye as i tried not to wobble on my way to the door. i rubbed my head. four or five days of serious fever and two hospital visits all kind of blurred together, and i counted the days as we wandered through the corridors: Thursday. September 2nd. i nodded internally, steady now. i love September: the crisp air, the boots, the socks, the sweaters, the new pens. okay.

we walked out of the hospital into the hottest day we’ve seen here all summer.

and then, oh right, there’s a hurricane coming? funny, nobody talks about that on pediatrics. it was all just how much did you pee? and here’s your tray of chicken fingers and fries dear…uh…ma’am. you know. small talk. of course, i was in isolation. maybe all the kiddies in the playroom were chattin’ it up about the weather non-stop.

i rubbed my head again, Rumplestiltskin who seemed to have slumbered in the wireless-free confinement of my little quarantine room for long seasons. or simply woken up in another latitude entirely, one where hurricanes are actually expected to make landfall. see, i live in Canada. we have cold. that’s OUR extreme weather. the rest of you get all the scary shit.

can a spinal tap make latitudes shift?

for a moment, that thought spiraled out like a kite on a breeze, and i wondered if that golden liquid treasure that runs down all our backbones is actually what centres us in the time and place we happen to belong to; if spinal taps are not the portal to time travel, to instant tropical vacations.

then my brain clamped down on itself like an iron door.

you are to make sense, it said sternly. not making sense has been absolutely NO FUN.
***

when i was fourteen, you know, i missed my first week of high school. so none of this should really have been a surprise.

i had been shopping with my best friend Jill with money earned at a little summer babysitting job and i had these strange hiccups that wouldn’t go away and i kept embarrassing her, hiccuping my way around the fancy store until she finally turned around like a little pouf-banged martinet and said, STOP! exactly the way i speak to Posey now when she insists on hitter her elder brother and i remember raising my eyebrow at her like WTF? it’s the HICCUPS, i CAN’T stop, that’s the POINT and then turning a cold shoulder so she would not know i felt betrayed.

but when i got into the dressing room with those awful 1986 high-waisted monstrosities of jeans i was dying to spend hard-earned money on, i noticed my belly was sore and bloated and tender, and i couldn’t button anything where i thought i ought to button anything. and so that was when i left Jill there and walked home carrying new pants i hoped would fit better in the morning, thrilling to the terror and uncertainty of the brave new world of high school waiting right there on the other side of this awkward, not-quite-as-i’d-hoped-for day.

i hadn’t seen nothing.

by six pm my belly was sore enough that i mentioned it to my mom. by seven she was worried. by eight we were at the hospital. by ten pm i was in an ER room with a nice young doctor explaining that my appendix needed to come out.

i remember nodding at him, most obligingly, and suggesting that anytime after about the second week of October would be good for me. we’d be getting into midterms by then. i wouldn’t mind the rest.

no, he’d said, most soothingly, in chorus with my mother. tonight, dear. it needs to come out tonight.

i had stared at the two of them, blinking, twice betrayed in the course of a single day. then, indignant. were they stupid? i had HIGH SCHOOL tomorrow, i reminded them. i start grade ten at Colonel Gray, i chirped, patiently, as if to children.

not tomorrow, sweetheart, i remember my mother saying, with extraordinary gentleness. and then the student nurse who couldn’t start an IV to save her life came in to torture me for awhile and that was that; out like a light.

in the end, it was okay. i limped back into school the following week and saw old friends and met new friends and my life took a new shape not so different from the old and until a couple of days ago i had long since forgotten that i’d even spent those first few days in the hospital and not at school.

this week, i remembered, all too vividly. i started high school a week late. and i will do the same with my Ph.D.

and in the process of being late for school this go ’round, i may have learned – or remembered? – one of the most important things the world has to teach me, Ph.D or no Ph.D. now, i need desperately to rest. but i will tell you the rest of the story.

tomorrow. or as soon as the headache is gone?

when you meet my kids, you will note – without fail – that they resemble their father. if you are like most people, you will offer a slightly sympathetic laugh, a nod that acknowledges the long months i spent carrying them only to have them pop out entirely HIS. i will nod back, smiling, helpless in the face of the truth.

the likeness is blatant, uncanny: in all the lines of their faces, the bones, the spacing of their eyes. it makes me prone to cracking snide remarks that i don’t have genes at all. or better, that i’m too stingy to share what god gave me, that i’ve hoarded my genetics all to myself. it is okay, my laugh will respond to yours. only my heart is in these children. that is all.

it’s a lie, though.

my children do look like little carbon copies of Dave and his extended family. Posey is a pint-sized Dave in a dress. Oscar and his father in open-mouthed laughter, heads together, remind me of mirrors reflecting into infinity. yes, in certain light, with my eyes squeezed nearly shut, i can project glimpses of my own ancestral clans over their laughing faces…a tilt of a nose that reminds me of my mother, a chin that seems squarely familiar. but overall, they’re Cormiers, Doucets, Guitards; Acadians through and through.

still. the older they get, the more i see myself reflected in them. not in their appearance, but their actions, inclinations, personalities and strengths and…oh especially…weaknesses.

children are a mirror for the flawed soul. and when you watch them struggle with the same self-defeating tendencies that have plagued you as far back as you can remember, you will sigh, and wish that it was true; that you really had hoarded your genes all to yourself.
***
personality isn’t inborn, i remember her saying, my first year psychology prof in the Child Development course, in some kind of disjointed prelude to Piaget. i was slouched in my seat, seventeen years old and away from home for the first time. something in the words perked up my bad-ass ears and i flew away for a moment, across the strait to my proper, earnest mother and i snorted.

a head turned and i blushed and ducked my own.

for years i had discarded, unassessed, most of the things my mother had told me. we were like magnets, the two of us in my adolescence, poles mostly turned apart and pushing. i felt caged and contemptuous: i denied her authority, rejected her range of knowledge and experience out of hand. too small, too fearful, too parochial.

even things neither of us understood, new things, processes, systems – i picked up faster and so shut her out. if the learning went awry and she dared try to step in, i was a study in impossibility. once, when my electric typewriter refused to load its correction ribbon properly the night before a high school essay was due, my mother had reached over the kitchen table to help and i’d shouted I’m doing it RIGHT! It’s just WRONG! until her hand snapped the dislocated piece into place and i seethed in humiliation.

all this, except in relation to one thing: the absent presence she unquestionably knew – or had once known – better than i. my father.

she didn’t say it often: she was careful not to label with negativity. but in moments of exasperation it slipped from her tongue, half-accusation, half-wonderment. You’re just like your father. and i’d peer into those words like they were tea leaves, scrying for belonging, for some meaningful reflection of the elusive inner self i longed to have identified for me, the one i wasn’t sure anybody could see.

my father had been gone since i was six months old. i had his chin, his smile, his nose, his temper, and apparently most of his undesirable qualities, the kind that make poor, beleaguered mamas want to rend their garments and gnash their teeth.

personality isn’t inborn, my ass, i muttered to that psych prof, slouched over my doodles and notes. you talk to my mother.
***
he is four, my son, my second-born and eldest all at once. and he reminds me daily he is his own self.

the old white laptop from 2005 has been handed down to him in the past year, windfall privilege of growing up in an over-technologized family. he is learning to use a paint program, doing his “work” onscreen like mommy and daddy. ouch, i say, to the chorus of silent condemnation in my head, the one that wonders if he shouldn’t be outside learning to catch. but he is fascinated. the beauty he creates fascinates me.

(his father built him a blog for these paintings; a small gallery, a room of his own. the artist happily fields comments.)

but the artist does not happily field the notion of being wrong.

i could pretend i do not know where he gets this. i could pretend i believe only in nurture, not nature; that my chipper soliloquies of mommy’s learning French and it’s SO FUN; mommy’s practicing her (wobbly-arsed) bike-riding and WOW! i like learning new things and mommy made a mistake and has to start all over and (grit teeth) GEE! i sure am learning a lot doing this a third time! make some ripple on the cosmic pool of his small self. maybe they will. maybe he will learn to recognize frustration far younger than i ever did, and name it and own it and master it with patience and self-regard.

in the meantime, on a Saturday afternoon while his sister naps he explores the new paint program. there is glee, mommy, hey! look at this! and the satisfying splat-splat-splat of squares of yellow landing on a red background. then growling. growling i’d never heard before, except maybe in the recesses of my own mind. growling like a furious, feral animal enraged beyond containment.

my son. four years old.

he must have inadvertently clicked on something he didn’t intend to. the program had shifted modes, so that backtracking was impossible. i said, looks like you have a little problem, huh? and then my hand – my stupid, stupid hand – reached out for the mouse. while my mouth – my stupid, stupid mouth – said maybe you clicked the wrong thing?

i rendered him, in one fell swoop, not just wrong but beyond capacity to solve his own problem.

his own hand swatted at mine like i was a mortal danger and he began to scream – SCREAM – that he had done it RIGHT and it was WRONG but he had done it RIGHT and ouch on the old ears, little man.

perfectionist much? need control much? need the world to make sense and make you feel you know everything much?

ouch, mirror mirror.

i picked up the laptop and shut it. we do not shout in our house, i said quietly. we do not hit. the computer is a privilege, and you will not be allowed to use it if you cannot learn to make mistakes and learn from your mistakes without screaming. what i wanted to do was to pull his small body into my arms and somehow scrub him free of all those heartbreaking tendencies to be his own worst enemy, to be so achingly, willfully blind to his own mistakes that all learning that doesn’t come easy is a torture better skipped.

i cannot.

but i can scrub myself. i am trying, in the late years before i turn forty and bloom into my middle years, to become someone better than nature and nurture happened to cobble together through happenstance and genes, someone who doesn’t make her mama want to rend her garments and gnash her teeth.
***
whether genes or learned behaviour, how do you see your own challenges reflected in your children?

i always wanted to be a Beat, a bohemian.

instead, suddenly i find myself  in the Business section of the bookstore, just an aisle over from Philosophy.

i hunker down, intent, studying the titles on the shelves with the rabid eyes of a shark looking to game the casino. i am giving myself a personal, experiential education in How To Maybe Write a Bestseller About Ideas and Social Media. go hard or go home, they say where i’m from.

i has me a literary agent.

i pinch myself.

all these years of dreaming of being discovered for my sizzling cool. instead, i stoop in the Business aisle, plotting the story of self as brand in the world of social media. a dissertation and a trade book. book first. with capital letters, cold hard ambition you can lay out on a table like a cadaver and dissect.

it is the story of how people with my artsy-fartsy prejudices and my humanities degrees and my bohemian posturings are – thanks to the way social media works – ending up in the Business section of the bookstore. it is also the story of how business itself is – for the same reasons inverted – becoming more literary and humanities-focused in its discourse and processes. the unholy marriage of never the twain shall meet, indeed.

it is, in the end, the story of the reputational and relational economy of the digital.

it is the story of brand as a personal rather than a corporate attribute; as a brave new world of identity. brand is not the sell, nor is it without soul. i LOVE this shit.

Allen Ginsberg, i think, would wink at me. or maybe hoist himself up on a soapbox and rail, soliloquize, erase me with the scope of his supermarket excursions. i bow to his shadow in either case, and smile.

i feel like Alice down the rabbit hole. you see that vial labelled Drink Me? hand it over.
***
i want help, though.

it’s a shameless kind of want, the same kind of shameless i always imagined would see me perched with my folk guitar outside some far-flung library strumming Dylan songs, the really long ones, with my guitar case with the embroidered Grateful Dead bears open for donations and a handwritten sign, If you Fear Change, leave it here. life takes you funny places.

instead i sit here in my hometown hoping you’ll tell me stories…yours. or those you think might resonate. i need a few case studies, poster children whose selves and brands i can explore and dissect.

i want to know, in these stories, about how the so-called real and the online self.  about how you and your virtual identity get along. i want to know if the lines between them have changed for you, over the time you’ve spent engaging online.

you don’t need to be a Big Deal to tell me about your “brand” and yourself. you don’t need to like the idea of brand at all. in fact, i might like it a lot if you didn’t.

you can email me, if you want, or leave as many comments here as you want. i may pry further. i may come and park myself on your floor and read your virtual Tarot cards like some social media fortune teller, promising the inevitable dark, handsome stranger and a future of millions of Twitter followers. i may offer my effusive thanks in the acknowledgements of something printed on paper, someday, knock wood. that something may be a Ph.D thesis or a tome you can buy on Amazon and in the Business aisles of better bookstores, or both.

either way. i am sitting, waiting for the story hour to begin.

all those years i dragged myself through Korean and Slovak and Turkish streets at dawn not looking for an angry fix but another drink, a smoke, a conversation to be in, arms or words there was something transcendental out there burning for the ancient heavenly connection, i knew it, i saw it in tatters and hollowed eyes and tenement roofs illuminated. but in the end, i came home and found it here, in the ether.

and so i laugh and burn my beret, and ask what you think it means to be a self in the world of social media?
***
edited to add: if not your story, whose? who should i be tracking down to explore success in social media and ways it intersects with personal identity? who’s your idea of an exceptional, or reluctant, or conflicted, or interesting “brand”? even if they’d never use the word themselves? and who or what (feel free to email rather than comment, as you wish) make up the benighted practices reinforcing the concept of personal branding as some kind of Amway Cult of Personality? all recommendations gratefully received.

i might even buy you a beer to keep you talking.

*In the Irish Fenian Cycle, the hero Finn McCool gains all the knowledge in the world
when his mentor, the poet Finnegas, catches the fabled salmon of wisdom. The boy is
helping Finnegas cook the fish over a fire when a drop of fat burns young Finn’s thumb.
he lifts his thumb to his mouth, and thus is the first to taste the fish. Finn
becomes the wisest person in Ireland and the leader of the Fianna.*

the summer i was ten, my father took me fishing.

i was far from home and nearly sick to my stomach with the heady out of place-ness of it all. a six week odyssey with a family who were my kin yet nearly strangers, summertime visitors i only clapped eyes on every second July. the day-to-day father i’d longed for all year, present and material but more complicated than my fantasies had prepared me for. plane rides west, then north, way north, on what seemed a tin-wrapped hot dog with a bathroom and a stewardess. on the tundra in the land of the midnight sun.

i played baseball that summer at two in the morning. i had never stayed up past nine in my life. i had never played baseball before.

change is a heady thing, discombobulating and lonesome and free. that summer laid the groundwork for my experience of every major shift period in my life thereafter: i swallowed all those giant empty feelings of being cast adrift in a sea without shape until late in the night, in my bed, they all welled up in a panic like a balloon and i heaved a little.

i was ten. i cried for my mother.

i threw up my stepmother’s pea soup through my nose that summer, and refused to let Ernie Lyall feel me up in the canned goods aisle of the Co-op even though he was a strapping thirteen and said the word “fuck” like it was a good thing. i dragged my youngest half-brother – smaller than Josephine is now – around the prefab northern bungalow on his duck blankie, and drove my other half-brother’s mini-dirtbike into garbage cans until i finally learned to do a wheelie. i learned that the map of Canada wasn’t paper but a vast span of emptiness and tiny square subdivisions all amazingly replicate from the air, like a land of tiny model houses. i saw a field of Alberta canola like neon against the sky and my father called it rape and i was mortified, puzzled, curious. i ate a Yellowknife eggroll the size of my plate. i sang The Rose until my patient stepmother threatened to make me walk the four thousand miles home to PEI.

and i went fishing with my father, on the tundra, north of the Arctic Circle, in the black-fly-infested height of midnight-sun summer. my almost-eight-year-old half-brother and i in a tent that never quite got dark. we watched a herd of muskox thunder by miles in the distance, a swarm of speeding pinpricks that made the earth shake.

we caught char, fresh Arctic char: i know this from the photographic evidence, two children in rubber boots smiling into a camera with bright, silvery fish hanging gilled and gutted from our fingers. i remember the impossibly thick fleshy weight of them, their slippery bodies trying to escape even in death. my smile, gap-toothed, wavers between pride, obligation, and utter revulsion.

for as long as i can remember, i have hated fish. i would as soon eat bugs.

and yet, that night, i bit into the salmony flesh of the char, tender and raw, because it was my duty as a daughter.

my father told us stories of the Tundra Monster in the twilit tent that night, the three of us perched at the top of the world. i remember thrilling with my terror, with laughter, with the light of my father fixed on me like Christmas in July.
+++

in the present, a weekend with old friends from our expat days. between us, five preschoolers. there is smiling, staring at each other in wonder at this bounty of children and wholesomeness and chaos from lives that just yesterday seemed so gin-soaked and littered with ashtrays.

we took the kids into the woods, on a little trail on the back of Dave’s ancestral lands. and we spun our heads back, three of us at once to see Posey in her tutu and her grandmother’s fake plastic pearls chomping heartily away on…something.

three parental mouths opened in unison to say what’s she eating? and then Dave crossed the three steps between him and her in only one and he pried the berry from her mouth. ew, she said.

he grabbed the culprit to ask the internet, once we were back at the house.

baneberry, it said, and his eyes met mine, because nothing that starts with “bane” can really be good. white actaea, a cardiac poison, and then she started to throw up as if on cue, her little body heaving and her blue eyes so much like his boring into mine and i made my gaze as calm and easy and comforting as i could, like the safest place in the world, even if i lied.

we were in the car and then there was an ambulance and for a second i thought i might start to cry and then it was okay, all okay, and the hospital pronounced her free and clear and she got a bear with a paramedic tshirt for her troubles and i realized i miss those days of gin and ashtrays. my fingers twitched.

lucky. lucky.

then, news of my father, from back home on PEI. his motorcycle, smashed.

a driver made a left turn with his head bent away, talking to his son in the passenger seat, and the bike was totalled and the car wrecked and my father, my complicated father, somersaulted over his handlebars to take out the car windshield with his back and then…bounced. he landed on his feet in the grass, a cat.

i caught my breath and felt as if i, for once, had landed myself in the safest space in the world. guilty careless mother, absent daughter, but no matter. absolved, mine house passed over. lucky. lucky.

i am wary of too much luck and i crossed myself and spat and threw salt, all in the temple of my solitary mind, because everybody knows bad things happen in threes.
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on our last day of vacation, Oscar goes fishing with his father and grandfather, his father’s father, for mackerel. his first time. the phone rings at the house. his high sweet voice pierces the line even though the wind takes most of his words. i understand he has caught a fish. his first fish.

i understand i will be eating mackerel for supper and i curse, because this, then, is my perfect third for the triad of luck. fear and catharsis, love.

i would as soon eat bugs as fish, even now. but the proud mother of the young fisherman will not let on.

i meet them on the shore, and Dave cuts the shining head from the last of the catch. i watch my son, four and innocent, observe the bloodshed and i think, this boat is your birthright and i wonder at what happens inside a little boy when he watches an animal die for the first time. i wonder at how close we all live to the old law of kill or be killed and i think of sociopaths in barns and attics torturing the four-footed and the eight-footed and i heave a little.

it is not fear. it is the letting go.

until now, i have made for my children as coherent a world as i can, one where the shapes make sense and what they encounter is scaffolded and processed aloud: where people are mostly decent and the lie of safety emanates from my arms, my eyes. they do not lie awake in panic, scrabbling for comfort, for a port that will hold them until the world makes sense again.

i still do.

i know the world is big and cold and strange and luck is a finicky friend, and every time we cast the dice we risk everything we have. i know the path of life will teach my children this eventually, and i shudder with the knowledge, because they will inevitably hurt for it.

i know too, though, that life is full of reprieve and second chances; that we are never as alone as we feel at three in the morning.

and that last night of vacation, i stare at the mackerel, barbecued in its skin, on my plate, and i bite because it is my duty as a mother, and i smile and give thanks for fish.

Oscar with his father and his father’s father, fishermen all, and his first fish