Her Bad Mother

Movin' On Up

2009-06-17T12:08:00.005-04:00

Oh, hey, you hear that? That is THE SOUND OF SILENCE.

It's pretty quiet around here, and might be for another day or so. Because? I am - wait for it - moving shop! Finally making the move away from Blogger and onto to more sophisticated blogging platform pastures. Which, I know! SO AWESOME. Also, terrifying.

Anyhoo. If you're starved for the pathos and pedantry and total lack of humor that only I can provide, you can amuse yourselves by reading my other blog. Or by checking out what we're up to over at MamaPop. Or by puttin' on the beaver over at Canada Moms Blog. Or by reading whatever it is that you read when you're not reading me. Which, yeah.

You better promise that you're coming with me on the move, got that? Otherwise, I will be sad. And we don't need anymore of that, now do we? Right?

Good.

Because nobody likes teh sad.

Peace In A Dyson

2009-06-15T11:41:00.004-04:00

I vacuumed.

I didn't know what else to do, so I vacuumed.

We knew last night that something wasn't quite right about the bug bite on the side of Emilia's face. It was a little swollen, a little bruised. We debated what to do. It was late, the clinics and pharmacies were closed, and it didn't look that bad. A bad allergic reaction would be pretty immediate, right? It wouldn't be a slow swell, right? I wrung my hands and worried; my husband soothed: we'll check on her in the night. We don't know that it's an allergic reaction. We'll check; she'll be fine.

We didn't check.

When my husband went to rouse her this morning, he found a nearly unrecognizable child, a wee thing with a swollen and misshapen face, her cheek and neck grotesquely bloated, her right eye a purple, bulbous slit. My heart stopped.

And then - while my husband gathered clothes and prepared to hustle us all out the door to the hospital - I vacuumed.

I told myself, the floor is dirty and that's just not helping things. The floor is dirty and it should be cleaned. Somebody needs to do this. Somebody needs to be on top of these things. Somebody needs to pay attention to these things. I told myself, the floor is dirty, it's dirty, just do this, now.

Because the floor was dirty. But more because I couldn't look at Emilia without my heart stopping, because I couldn't speak without berating myself, without berating us, for not getting help for her last night, because I all could do was do something, anything, that felt like it might make some minute bit of difference in the universe. Because my little girl was sitting there, clutching her Toady, whimpering a little, asking why is my eye shut, Mommy? and because I knew that if I hugged her again, I would cry.

And I didn't want to cry. So I vacuumed. And now my floor is clean.

But my cheeks are still streaked with tears.

---------

Emilia is going to be okay. She had a bad allergic reaction to a bug bite, and the good news is that antihistamines are bringing down the swelling and returning her poor face and neck to normal. The bad news is, we don't know what bit her, and so we don't know what she's allergic to.

And no, I didn't take a picture. I thought about it, once I'd calmed down enough to stop vacuuming. But I didn't. I don't want to remember it. It was horrible. She looked horrible. I'm still sorting through my feelings about that - my heartbreak not only at her pain, but at the fact that her outer beauty had been so distorted - but I do know that I'm not keen to revisit them. I wouldn't have shared the picture, anyway, so. So.

Wonder Girl Rides Again

2009-06-12T11:35:00.007-04:00

I've been trying all week to craft a post about my sister and Tanner, about how they're struggling right now, about how they keep taking blows, about how they keep taking blows but never stop moving forward, never stop pursuing happiness, never stop pursuing life. I wanted to craft a post about how my sister recently made the most difficult decision that a parent could ever possibly make, the decision to allow Tanner's life to be shortened, probably significantly, so that it might be a better life. But the words just don't come, because I just don't know how she did it, how she found that courage to do what is absolutely certainly the right thing, but also absolutely certainly the hardest thing. And so I don't know how to talk about it, write about it, make sense of it. Not without crying so hard that the tears blur my vision and make my head ache. Not yet, anyway.

----------

Today is one of those days when I just love my children so much that my breath catches in my throat and my stomach hurts and tears prick at the corner of my eyes and I just feel all, you know, clenchy and overwhelmed by the feeling, the conviction, that this, this is what people mean when they talk about miracles and wonder.

Because they fly, they really do fly, and they take my heart with them when they soar.

Ecce Mater

2009-06-10T12:10:00.007-04:00

Okay, look - and I feel called upon to address this because there are some people out there who are not getting it - when I call myself a bad mother, I do not mean that I condone the neglect or abuse of children. I do not mean that I neglect or abuse my kids. I do not mean that I or anyone should celebrate these things. I mean, seriously.

What I mean is this: I do some things, many things, that would, when held against dominant (mainstream, media) narratives and representations of the Good Mother, appear to be bad. I do some things that are by any measure bad. But I am human, all-too-human, and my inability to be perfect is part of my make-up. And I believe that my quirks and foibles and imperfections as a mother - as a human being - are what make me a wonderfully flawed, perfectly imperfect mother for my children. And I also believe that sharing the stories of my quirks and foibles and imperfections does some small service in encouraging other mothers - other parents - to accept and embrace their own flaws and imperfections, their own quote-unquote badness.

Which is to say, by celebrating badness I am not celebrating a race to the bottom of the parenting barrel. I am not suggesting that it is 'cooler' to give your children cookies for breakfast or to let them watch three hours of television or to publicly proclaim your need for Ativan. I'm not trying to conflate cookies-for-breakfast with failing to provide care for your children or use of anti-anxiety medication with drug or alcohol abuse. I'm simply describing my reality, and struggling to accept myself as the wonderfully flawed parent that I am, not despite my flaws, but because of my flaws, because of the total package that I am. And I am calling that package bad because that is what I have been called by some and would be called by others and I want to seize it and claim it and redefine it as my own and apply it to my own particular, quirky brand of flawed wonderfulness. I want to take the power of judgment and labeling away from anyone would use it against me, so that I can say, whenever someone points their finger and whispers, bad, BAD, I can cry out, loudly, I know I am but what are you?

And I want you to do the same. I don't care what you call it. That's the point, after all: if we all refuse to acknowledge the supremacy of the Good (good with a capital g, good in scare quotes) Mother and the imperative to pursue 'Good' at all costs, then we liberate ourselves to model ourselves however we like, to celebrate ourselves according to whatever measures we choose, and to call ourselves whatever we want.

I choose to call myself Bad. Proudly.

(And then I go steadfastly forward and post a - cleverly edited, but still - picture of my child peeing. Standing up. In the park. WIN.)

The Bad Mother Manifesto

2009-06-08T10:16:00.008-04:00

There is a spectre haunting the parenting community - the spectre of the Bad Mother...*

My name is Catherine, and I am a bad mother. I (mostly) do not have my tongue in my cheek when I say that. I am a Bad Mother.

I am a bad mother according to most measurements established by the popular Western understanding of what constitutes a good mother. I use disposable diapers. I let my children watch more television than I'd ever publicly admit. I let them have cookies for breakfast. I let them stay up too late. I don't follow a schedule. I don't go to playgroups. I stopped breastfeeding because I was tired of it. I co-slept with my son. I didn't co-sleep with my daughter. I have been treated for depression. I stopped my treatment for depression. I am entirely too attached to Ativan.

I have left my children alone in the bathtub. I have spanked my daughter. I have turned my back on my crying son. I have had intrusive thoughts. I drink. I curse. I have put my own needs first. I have thought that I love my husband more than my children. I have had moments of resenting my children. I have thought that motherhood is boring. I document all of these things and lay them bare for the world to see. I have been called an exploitative mother. I have wondered whether that might be true.

I have thought that perhaps I am not at all cut out for this motherhood thing.

I have thought that I am a bad mother. I know that I am bad mother, in so many of the ways that matter to the people who worry about how and why women should be good mothers, and in most of the ways that don't matter to anyone at all other than me at three o' clock in the morning after a particularly long, ego-smashing day.

But:

I reject entirely the idea that I should be a good mother in any manner other than those that matter to me: that I take care of the basic needs of my children, that I love my children well, that I make certain that my children know that they are loved well, that I ensure that a day never passes in which I do not not hug or kiss my children or tell them that I love them, and that I ensure that a day never passes in which they - and I - laugh out loud at least once.

I reject entirely the idea that there can be any community consensus about what - beyond the provision of love and care - constitutes a good mother. I reject entirely the idea that we can or should judge each other as mothers, beyond the obvious and most basic standards of care, and even then, I reject entirely the idea that any one of us is so perfect that she could throw the first stone without hesitation.

I reject entirely the idea that mothers should worry about what it means to be a good mother in any respect beyond loving and protecting and providing for their children.

I reject entirely the idea I should worry, and yet worry I do. I worry because everywhere I look, at every turn, at every corner, in every magazine and on every television show and in every discussion, everywhere, about the what-why-how of motherhood, is the Good Mother.

The Good Mother - the idea of the Good Mother, the theoretical and aesthetic model of what it means to mother well - is the true spectre, the spectre that has haunted mothers since God first smacked our hands for being too graspy and ejected us from the Garden and hollered at us to go forward and to give birth in pain and alone and to mother in anxiety and alone and to basically just angst out for every second of our lives. The idea of the Good Mother has kept us in our place, has kept us cowering, alone, behind the veil; our important work - our critically important work - kept hidden behind the walls of the household; our lives and our stories and our history kept secret, kept quiet, because Good Mothers are private, are modest, are pudicae, because Good Mothers tell no tales. Devoted Good Mothers listen only to community edicts about what the Good Mother looks like and then devote themselves, silently, to the work of emulating the Good Mother. They do not share their failures. They do not share their struggles. They do not tell stories about the dark and the difficulty and the anxiety and the impossibility of keeping one's cool in the dead of night when the baby is shrieking and the toddler is crying and one hasn't slept in weeks. They do not talk about shutting the door and ignoring the cries. They do not talk about intrusive thoughts. They do not talk about repeating the words fuck I hate this fuck I hate this like so many Hail Marys, like a meditation upon frustration, like a mantra of failure. They do not talk about these things, out loud.

They keep their silence, and look to the Good Mother, hoping that she will provide guidance, hoping that in her lays the way of all maternal truth and happiness. They look in vain.

The Good Mother is everywhere, all at once, and she looks like everything, and nothing. She stays at home; she goes to work. She attachment-parents; she's Babywise. She home-schools; she Montessoris. She vaccinates; she doesn't vaccinate. She follows a schedule; she lets her kids run free-range. She co-sleeps; she wouldn't dare co-sleep. She would never spank; she's a strict disciplinarian. She's an Alpha Mom; she's a Slacker Mom; she's a Hipster Mom; she's a Christian Mom; she's a Hipster-Christian-Alpha Mom who slacks off in the summers. She's Everymom; She's NoMom. She brooks no disagreement: if you argue with her, you start a Mommy War. But the wars are futile and pointless because the combatants are all fighting on the same side, her side, which is no side, and in the end we just batter each other until we are dumb and we give up and retire to our camps, bloody and bruised and determined to just keep it to ourselves next time and so it ends as it always does, in silence, with none of us saying what we really want to say, what we really need to say, which is this: who the fuck cares?

Who is anybody to tell us whether we are good mothers? Who the fuck knows what a good mother is anyway? And why can't we say this out loud, why can't we just live our motherhood out loud and proclaim our diversity to ourselves and to each other and to the world and declare the idea of the Good Mother - the all-encompassing, do-no-wrong, one-size-fits-all perfect model of the Good Mother, the Uber-Mom who has been witnessed by none of us - dead? We do not need her, we don't, we really don't.

The only persons who can measure our mother-worthiness are our children, and even they are unreliable.

All that we have, then, is this: the measure of our hearts and the measure of our eyes and our ears and our good sense. Do we love our children as best we can? Do we keep them, as best we can, healthy in mind and body? Do we make sure that they laugh? Do they smile in our presence?

That is enough. That must be enough. And if that is not good enough - if there remain those who would insist that there is more to mothering well, that I must do more, that we must do more, that the community must do more to police, to enforce, to uphold the rule of the Good Mother - then, well, I shall remain - loudly, proudly, publicly - Bad.

Are you a Bad Mother? Which is to ask - regardless of whether or not you identify with, or struggle with, the idea of being 'Bad' - are you a regular old ordinary flawed-but-awesome REAL mom? Are you just tired of the pressure to be 'Good'? Then join me. We'll unite and take over.

*(with apologies to Karl Marx, and, parenthetically, to Friedrich Nietzsche and Niccolo Machiavelli, all of whom would doubtless regard my appropriation of their modes of argument for the purposes of defending the liberation of mothers from old modes and orders of virtue as terribly, terribly amusing and, I would hope, somewhat charming, in a contrary sort of way.)

And Then There Was That Time He Played With The Balls...

2009-06-05T08:00:00.004-04:00

From Emilia's preschool progress report: We very much enjoy Emilia's storytelling, especially the stories she tells when she first gets to school in the mornings.

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"Guess what everybody, guess what!" She raced into the main play area and confronted two of her teachers. They knelt down, and nodded expectantly. What is it, Emilia? What?

"My Daddy has" - she took a deep breath - "NEW NUTS."

For a moment, the silence was deafening.

And then she opened her hand to reveal two almonds.

Not shown: nuts. The other kind.

-----------

Once you've finished smiling - and I hope that that made you smile - go read this. My mom is wringing her heart out - and yelling and smashing things - over Tanner and my sister and the general suckage of life. She could use some support.

(I'm sorry that I keep closing comments. It's just, some days I'm not up for talk. And others, I'd rather direct talk where it's needed more. Like at the post I linked to above. Because I'm not ready to talk about it yet, but my mom is, and it needs to be talked about, and, well, you know. Please and thank you.)

Walk This Way

2009-06-04T00:01:00.000-04:00

And so your baby springs to his feet and - oops, wait! down? no! up! go! - toddles toward the flowers - wait! stop! flowers! ooh! - and then - hey! up! - toward you toward you toward you - come here baby! - and your heart swells as he pitches forward, all leg-torque and flushed cheeks, your big precious boy using all the power of his newfound mobility to race to you, to fling his little self...

... right past you, right past you, and then, suddenly - ooh, look, ball! - down he goes. And gets up again, and toddles away, not looking back.

And you are torn between two feelings: a fierce pride in your wee determined lad, who is growing so fast, so very fast, and who will no doubt speed - away from you, alone, strong - into a brilliant future, and, also, a terrible, guilty sadness over the fact that, yes, he is growing so fast, so very fast, and he will one day - too soon - speed away from you. And not look back.

And so you settle on a third feeling, another (is it? yes, it is) shameful feeling: a tiny bit of satisfaction that he stumbles, that he will continue to stumble, now and again, as he reaches for the flowers, the ball, the sky. That he needs you. That he will need you for a very long time.

Not forever, but long enough.

(Is it so wrong to want him to slow down? To want to not let go of his hand?)

Why Don't You Leave Your Name And Your Number And I'll Get Back To You?

2009-06-02T12:58:00.007-04:00

This, for those of you following at home, is called phoning it in.

I am so exhausted from a weekend visiting in-laws - during which Emilia took up drumming and basketball and other activities more ordinarily associated with teenage boys than preschool girls - and I think that I'm coming down with something and, also, probably suffering from an iron-deficiency and so I'm having real trouble summoning the creative energies to say anything profound or funny or even remotely interesting.

Shown: Hoodlum, Preschool Female v.2.0

So I am, for today, just going to have to direct you elsewhere:

1) I'm not sure, but I think that whoever is writing this blog knows my kid. Hang on: maybe it is my kid. Whichever one of you taught her how to blog, you're fired.

2) This is me wringing my hands about Bill O'Reilly. Look how much fun I'm having! My joy is almost palpable. NOT.

3) You know how you're always telling me that I never update you on stuff, like how is my nephew Zachary, the one who was so deathly ill last fall? Well, I don't need to, because my mother is on top of that. You'll be interested - or not - to know that he's well enough to be having teh sex. I'm going to pretend that I didn't just write that.

3) I didn't write this, but I wish that I had.

4) Boobs.

That's all that I've got. Sorry.

Come On Feel The Noize

2009-06-01T09:26:00.009-04:00

The only difference between these two musical performances, so far as I can tell, is that in only one does anyone burst into flame.

Which is good, because I don't, as a rule, keep fire extinguishers in the diaper bag.

Requiem For A Boob

2009-05-28T09:55:00.003-04:00

When I was a kid, my mom used to joke about her boobs. "They're tube socks!" she'd hoot. "I have to roll them up to get them in my bra."

I would cringe and recoil. "Mom," I'd hiss. "You're embarrassing me."

"Why are you so red, honey?"

"Because you're embarrassing me."

"I'm just talking about tube socks."

"You're talking about your boobs."

"Sweetie, my boobs are tube socks because I bore and birthed you and your sister, so if hearing about it embarrasses you, well, tough."

Then she'd cross her eyes and stick out her tongue at me. I'd run to my room at that point and discreetly peer down the front of my shirt and wonder whether I'd ever have any kind boobs, let alone the tube sock kind. Although I'd have preferred not the tube sock kind, at that point in my adolescence I'd have been happy with just about anything.

Ah, the deluded innocence of youth.

I grew boobs, eventually. They were never all that impressive - I was always skinny, with the type of cleavage that, in nature, attends skinny bodies - but they were there, and they were kind of cute. Perky. The kind of breasts that you never called tits or gazongas or hooters or even just boobs. You referred to them to them in the diminutive - boobies - or in the unsexed abstract - chest. So it was that when I got pregnant and, later, began lactating and those puppies grew - like, seriously, epically grew, like frightened puffer fish - I was both alarmed and thrilled. I had hooters. I had gazongas. I had BOOBS.

For a few uncomfortable but nonetheless thrilling years, I had a rack, and it was spectacular.

And now it's gone.

Gone, disappeared, deflated, defunct. It's as if, after watching me wean Jasper and my husband get his parts snipped, Nature herself gave my body the once-over and said well, you won't be needing those any more, will you? and unceremoniously removed them from my person.

They're gone now, and I miss them. I miss them, not only because they really were kind of epic - and what girl doesn't fantasize, occasionally, secretly, about what it would be like to have epic boobs? - but because Nature, in all of her douchey wisdom, did not restore my chest to its modest but nonetheless entirely presentable profile. Nature, being the stone-cold bitch-goddess that she is (the very same one who gave us menstrual cycles and the pain of childbirth and the indignity of random chin hairs), turned my boobs into tube socks. Just like my mother's.

Except smaller. Small tube socks. The tube socks of an adolescent boy with irregularly-sized feet. Because, yes, one is actually - oh, god - smaller than the other.

Which is why, when I found myself, yesterday, in the fitting room of the lingerie department, desperately trying to find a bra into which my breasts would not just disappear like a pathetic wad of crumpled tissue, I lasted all of three minutes before bursting into tears.

It's not that I want - what are the kids calling it these days? - a bangin' bod. I'd be happy with a bod that just pinged a little. I just want to not to not look in the mirror and cringe. Which I know goes against everything that I said a few months ago, but a few months ago I had boobs. Muffin-tops and extra ass-padding are one thing when you have the upper curves to balance everything out. They're quite another when your upper body looks like a deflated pool toy.

I'm straining to accept this new incarnation of me, to learn to love it as I've learned to love all the other incarnations. But I am finding, now, as summer approaches and I wrap my head and heart around the fact (is it fact? is it? I am still struggling with this) that I will have no more children, that I am still, in my way, vain, and that I want my beauty back. Maybe not the same beauty, the same body, the same sweet boobs of youth, but something, anything, that makes me swell with just a little bit of pride when I look in the mirror.

Or maybe just a tit-inflater. Anybody got one of those?

Humanity I Love You

2009-05-26T13:32:00.008-04:00

The world, sometimes, is an ugly place. A spectacularly ugly place. A place that is made all the uglier for the fact that its ugliness creeps in at the edges, smothering the beauty in its path. When you look at it through dreamy or sleepy eyes - rose-colored glasses, I think is the term - it seems unparalleled in beauty - a baby's smile, peonies in first bloom, a new Buffy The Vampire Slayer movie - until you blink and rub your eyes and look more closely and realize that in the shadows lurks such ugliness as you have never imagined. And suddenly the baby's smile fades, and the peonies wither, and the Buffy movie turns out to be a cinematic crime of such epic proportions to prevent you from ever seeing a movie again.

It's the kind of ugliness, as I said, that smothers and warps beauty, turning the world ugly for no reason other than proclaim the victory of ugliness. So it is, for example, that people proclaim that an image of beauty and hope - an image of a small child nursing her infant doll - is something sordid, in order to assert their belief that nursing is ugly and that bodies are ugly and that any practice of nurture that does not accord with their limited view of what constitutes love and nurture is ugly. So it is, for example, that people proclaim that the marriage of two people who love each other and want to love and care for each other for the entirety of their lives is a deviation, simply because the people who want to marry are not of different sex, in order to assert their belief that love is ugly and that sex is ugly if these do not accord with their limited view of the character and purpose of love and sex. And so by making these assertions, they drag in the cold specters of prurience and judgment and demand that we view these unarguably beautiful things - playful joy being derived from an act of nurture, the determination of two hearts to be joined in committed love - through a chilly hateful fog. Everything takes on the cast of ugliness through such a fog. Everything.

Such a fog creates hate where none existed before, where none should have existed before. I hate those who would make me second-guess a beautiful photograph of my daughter, who would force me to defend encouraging her in something - indulging the impulse to play at motherhood, to play at nurture, to teach herself the practices of love and care - that should require no defense, none at all. I hate those who would compel me to shake my fists at the state of California and shout words like evil and stupid and unfair, who would drag me into the ring to defend, again, something that should be beyond defense, something that should just be received as a given blessing - more love in the world, more hearts bound to other hearts, more hearts in exulting in the joy of sharing a life.

There is nothing sexual about a child pretending to nurse. There is nothing sordid about two men or two women loving each other. That I even have to draw together in a written breath the words sexual-child-nurse and sordid-two-men-two-women-loving is ugly and wrong because it just perpetuates the ugliness, it just gives it air to breathe, it just acknowledges that it is there and that fills me with anger, so much anger, and so the cycle of ugliness grinds on.

So I am choosing, now, to refuse the ugliness. I am not going to argue or rant or defend. Beauty needs no defense. It just is. And I am going to celebrate it.

This is beauty:

Let's celebrate it. Maybe, by celebrating it, we can chase the ugliness back into the shadows.

Teach your child to nurse a dolly. Tell your child that Barbie can fall in love with Barbie and that Ken can fall in love with Ken. Tell them that love - good love, strong love, love that doesn't hurt - is never ugly. Tell them, teach them, that caring for other beings, is always beautiful, no matter what it looks like. Tell them to fight ugliness by celebrating beauty. And you do the same.

Let's all do the same.

(Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down

on it)

Please.

One Kiss Breaches A Distance

2009-05-25T10:41:00.009-04:00

"Hello, sweet girl," she said, swooping Emilia into her arms. "I've waited a very long time to meet you."

"To meet me?"

"Yes, you. I've known you your whole life, and now I finally get to meet you. And give you kisses." And with that she buried her face in Emilia's neck and gave her big, sloppy, raspberry kisses and Emilia giggled and squealed and my heart squeezed and I thought, how is it possible that these are the first kisses they've shared?

She's known Emilia since Emilia was only a few months old. And I've known - and loved - her children since they were small. We've been friends since we first found each other - found each other in this odd community - over three years ago, since I first found her and her secret place of mourning and saw my family's future there and saw in her, amazing her, the spirit of grace and love and hope and laughter and demanded - demanded - that we be friends. You will love me, I told her. And she did, and I did, and it was good. (She will tell this differently. She will tell you that she found me, and that she demanded friendship of me and that she forced her love on me. It doesn't matter.) (But I did find her first.)

I have loved her a long time, and she has loved me. But she had never met Emilia.

The wrongness of this is difficult to put into words. It's a kind of fundamental wrongness, a kind of wrongness-of-the-soul, the kind that puts the universe off-kilter, the kind that makes you wake up in the middle of the night feeling that you've lost something or are missing something but can't name it, no matter how desperately you grope the shadowed corners of your heart. It's the wrongness of lack, of absence. It's the wrongness that comes with not being able to share all of your joy with the people you love. It's the wrongness that comes with not being able to keep and hold all of that love together, close.

There are so many varieties of this wrongness. There's the wrongness of Emilia and Jasper not being able to share enough of Tanner's brief life. There's the wrongness of them having long distance relationships with their grandparents. And then, too, there's this: the wrongness of the distance of friends, of heart-friends who know them and love them because they know and love me, and the wrongness of my own distance and my children's distance from the families of heart-friends. It's a wrongness that weighs heavily, sometimes, on the soul, because it imposes a kind of partiality on love, because it prevents that love from being experienced to the fullest. Or to be less pedantic about it: it's wrong that I'm missing out on such important parts of the lives of some of my dearest friends and they mine and it sometimes makes me sad.

The Internet transcends time and space and allows us to frolic together in the code and light, but it does not replace time and space and real, wet raspberry kisses. It doesn't. It just doesn't.

So we had Auntie Tanis for a while this weekend and some of the gaps in our hearts were filled. Oveflowingly filled. But abundance sometimes makes one feel more keenly the lack, and so this morning, when Emilia said where is she I miss her when is she coming back, I felt the thud in my heart resound and vibrate, thrumming through the empty parts, and I knew that today I would miss her more than ever, that I would miss all of my heart-friends more than ever, and that I would probably sit in the corner of my garden and pout and whine and maybe shake my fists at the gods a time or two.

Which is exactly what I am doing now. That, and plotting an Epic Heart Friend Tour Of Love Road Trip. First stop: Redneckville, Alberta.

I hope you're waiting, baby. J-Man and Sausage Girl and Toady are a-comin'.

After The Teacups

2009-05-22T08:57:00.006-04:00

Yesterday was my birthday. I have very little reflective to say about that because, you know, anything that I might say would probably have something to with growing old (I grow old, I grow old) and not getting enough cake. And that would just sound pinched and ungrateful and unhappy, which is not how it is, not how it is at all.

Not how it is at all.

So I will hold my words for now, for today, and just enjoy the sunshine.

(No) Money Changes Everything

2009-05-20T10:08:00.006-04:00

I've written about abortion and depression and my relationship with my psychiatrist. I've written about perineal tears and my boobs and nursing another woman's child. I've written about pretty much every uncomfortable thing that there is to write about, and yet it is this post that I don't know how to begin. It is this post that I am reluctant to write. It is this post that will, I know, make me cringe in shame.

But I'm still going to write it. Because I need to say it - write it - out loud. I need to not be ashamed, and confessing shame is the only means I know to fighting shame. So.

We are - my family is - struggling financially. I know; who isn't? There's a recession going on. Everybody is feeling the pinch. Everybody is clucking about how tight things are, how precarious things seem, how challenging it all is. Everybody is worried. But that doesn't make it any less embarrassing for me to admit that I am worried. I am worried. And a little bit ashamed. Because aren't my husband and I supposed to be grown-ups? Aren't we supposed to ensure that everything is always okay? Aren't we supposed to be able to protect our family from the dark forces of fear and anxiety and indebtedness? Aren't we supposed to be able to always, and under any circumstances, provide?

The downturn in the economy has compromised my husband's industry, an industry in which he works freelance, and in which he has, historically, done very well. Historically. He hasn't worked in well over a month. I wring a modest living out of writing - more than I did teaching political philosophy as a sessional lecturer - but it's not enough to support us. Not nearly enough. And so we scramble, and we worry, and we fret about how to explain things to Emilia, who does not understand why we cannot go to her favorite restaurant for dinner, why we cannot take a trip across the country to visit Tanner, why we have begun to sell things. We tell her, dinner is nicer at home, we'll go visit Tanner soon, it's fun to sell things!

And then she asks, so will we sell more of our things tomorrow? And, will you sell my treehouse? Because I like my treehouse, and I don't want you to sell it. And my heart breaks. Because I don't want her to worry. I don't know how to talk about this without causing her to worry. I am ashamed that we have to worry. I ashamed that I don't know how to handle this.

I know that we'll be fine, in the long run. We will be fine. My husband is very good at what he does, and although his industry might need - does need - to evolve and adapt, it won't die. Even if it did - even if the work just ran out - there'd be something else to do. There's always something else to do. And I am - all evidence to the contrary aside - not without skills. We'll manage, whatever that looks like. And whatever that looks like will be good, because we'll always have each other. Even if we're living in a trailer in the woods - which, granted, is a lot less likely now that we've had to sell our trailer in the woods - we'll be fine, because we'll have each other. Which sounds unbearably trite, I know, but it's nonetheless true for its triteness. We'll have each other.

But that's still hard to explain to a three-year old. Why we can't, right now, have extras. Why we need to be content with 'each other.' Why we need to just make do, and to find some joy in that. Why we insist that this is good, this is fine, this is fun, when the worry is plainly written on our faces.

I see the confusion in her face, and I'm ashamed. Ashamed that I can't explain it better. Ashamed that I set her up for this, by not working hard enough to let her know that her world of plenty should never be taken for granted. Ashamed that I took that world of plenty for granted. Ashamed that I am ashamed.

Which is, as I said, why I needed to say it out loud. Because maybe, maybe, if I can fight the shame, I can fight the worry, and if I can fight the worry, I can fight the confusion. For her. For us. So that it will, it truly will, all be okay.

So that I can say that, and mean it. For her.

Here is where I say, I so need commiseration. We need commiseration. Will you share your stories, or your advice? I was part of a call with Katie Couric yesterday, via the Silicon Valley Moms Group - of which Canada Moms Blog is a part - on the topic of children and the recession, and all I could think, throughout the call, was how it was easy for me to think abstractly about the recession, and talk about how to help the less fortunate, etc, etc, but that I was unwilling - wholly and shamefacedly unwilling - to talk about my own experience, and my own fear. Which meant, of course, that I had to suck it up and blog it, and it was - is - every bit as painful as I thought it would be. Anyone care to throw in her voice with mine, make it feel a little less scary? Or just, you know, tell me that I should be grateful to have a roof over my head and stop whining?

To Jasper, On His First Birthday

2009-05-18T00:01:00.001-04:00

How, my love, did we get from here...

... to here?

It is not possible that it has only been one year. It feels as though you have been in my heart forever, my dirty-faced little monkey boy, my chunkster, my Jib. It feels as though I've loved you for an eternity.

I have, and I will.

Happy birthday, little man.

Bang Bang, Baby

2009-05-14T11:34:00.003-04:00

All that worrying about guns, and I somehow forgot that I grew up in Western Canada in the seventies. With parents who collected antique rifles. You know: old guns. Which, apparently, they used as art.

I don't know. It seems to me that if I spent my infancy crawling around a gun rack, and I turned out okay, well, maybe my daughter can be exposed to the odd game of shoot 'em up and not turn into a card-carrying member of the NRA and Junior Dick Cheney Fan Club.

Here's hoping.

Janie's Got A Gun

2009-05-13T10:11:00.003-04:00

So, the other day, when I was worrying about the potentially deleterious effects on my daughter of too much exposure to princess culture? I think that I have bigger issues to worry about:

So here's the thing: I played games like Cops & Robbers and - yes - Cowboys & Indians (it was a different time) and Star Wars - complete with Light Sabers and sticks wielded as guns and sound effects - p-chew! p-chew! p-chew! - when I was a kid, and I loved it - loved it - and yet I still managed to grow to be a liberal pacifist and so I'm not inclined to a knee-jerk reaction of horror at the idea of children engaging in imaginative play that involves weapons. In theory.

In practice, when my three and half year old daughter cocks her fingers in the form of a gun and points them at me, mock-execution style, I recoil and quietly freak the hell out before telling her, in as calm a voice as I can manage, that it is simply not nice not nice at all to pretend to shoot someone in the face.

Then I debate whether or not to march down to her preschool in the morning and demand to know how and why it is that the preschoolers are engaging in pretend gun-play - because she did not learn this at home - and where the hell are all the princess dollies, dammit? Then I contemplate home-schooling. Then my head explodes.

Then I calm down and ask myself why I need to freak out over everything. Why do I freak out over everything? Is this worth freaking out over? Or, you know, do all preschoolers make a game of executing their mothers every once in a while?

She's only three. Three. This is nothing, I know, in the bigger scheme of growing up and going to school and making and losing friends and falling in and out love and - oh god - sex and drugs and gah gah gah, but still.

I'm going to need more Ativan.

(Thoughts welcome. Am I freaking out unnecessarily, or is home-schooling in order?)

I Contain Multitudes, And They All Blog

2009-05-12T19:56:00.004-04:00

Psst, hey... did I tell you? I have another not-so-super-secret mom-blogger hideaway. It's over here. Today I compared myself to Jennifer Garner, which, you know, maybe didn't come out so well for me, but still. I felt like doing it. Which is really what that space is for: mom-blogging, as I feel like doing it. Or something like that. Anyway.

Like you don't get enough of me already.

Like that would stop me.

Hello, Princess

2009-05-10T21:27:00.010-04:00

It's a photo of me on my wedding day: just me, alone, posed at an angle, looking slightly over my shoulder. I'm not quite smiling, but not quite not smiling, either. It's one of the very few photos from our wedding day that I like; I usually hate how I photograph, and the photographic record from that day produced few exceptions. This photograph was one of them. I like this photograph.

So does Emilia. "This is pretty, Mommy."

"Thank you, sweetie."

"Can I have this in my room, Mommy?"

"Of course."

"Is it your wedding?"

"Yep."

"You're wearing a big dress?"

"Yep."

"You married Daddy?"

"That's what he tells me."

"Why do you have a different face from what you have now?"

Ah. Ah.

How does one explain aging to a three year-old? That photo was taken over 13 years ago. I was in my mid-twenties. I was young, impossibly young (and yet, how old I thought I was. I was 22 when I met my husband. I thought that I was a woman of the world, well-travelled, experienced, mature. How was it that I could ever have thought that I was anything other than a child?) That photo is a photo of a much, much younger me. Of course I look different.

"I'm older now, sweetie. That was a long time ago. People change as they get older. You don't look the same as you did when you were a baby, right?"

She frowned. "But you've got stuff on your eyes." She stabbed a tiny finger at the photograph. "You're wearing make-up." She said it as though it were an accusation. She said it as though it were something that I'd been keeping secret from her, something that I'd concealed and denied and prevaricated upon - a secret past as a real, live make-up-wearing girl. A girl who bore little resemblance to the frumpy matron standing before her. I had, it seems, been withholding some very important information from my daughter: I hadn't always looked like a mom.

Not all moms are frumpy. I'm not exactly frumpy myself, strictly speaking. I get good haircuts, which I don't necessarily always, you know, brush or anything, but still. I wash. I wear lipgloss. I have really good shoes. But I don't spend a lot of time buffing and polishing and making-up. I just don't have the energy. And truth be told, I don't really care. I just don't. It's not that I've given up, it's just that in a showdown between putting on eyeliner and getting fifteen more minutes of sleep, eyeliner - or straightening irons or mascara or Crest WhiteStrips - sleep will always win. I'm simply no longer that girl, because I am, simply, no longer a girl. I'm a woman - a woman dragging out the long tail of her thirties under conditions of extreme sleep-deprivation - a woman who has had two children and no Botox - a woman who has grown comfortable in her own imperfect skin.

And yet, my daughter - my daughter, just three and a half and already exposed to the culture of Girl^TM at preschool and in playgroups and on television (why we embrace Dora in this house, and limit - though not deny - exposure to the Princesses: because Dora - with her un-belashed eyes and her little pot belly - is so ordinarily, naturally girl-like) - my daughter looks at me and sees something that doesn't accord with what she is learning about femininity. She looks at the picture of me on my wedding day, and sees someone who looks a litle bit like a Disney Princess - someone with big, thickly-lashed eyes and a puffy dress and a look of serene docility - and then she looks at me, the woman, the mother, and sees something different. And for a moment, I cringed, and was - for a fleeting moment, a fleeting moment - ashamed. And then I was ashamed for feeling ashamed.

I knelt down and took the picture in my hand. "I still wear make-up sometimes. Just not all the time. I look nice with make-up, I know. But I also like how I look without make-up."

"I like how you look too, Mommy."

I smiled, gratified.

"But I also like your make-up. And your princess dress. And maybe you could have sparkles, too. And eyelashes, and a crown. And you could wear them every day, or maybe just Saturday. And look like a girl. I like it when you look like a girl."

Damn.

Where does one go with this? I don't want to teach her that pretty is something to be disdained - I like me some pretty - but I do kinda want to nip in the bud the idea that 'looking like a girl' = looking 'pretty' = looking like a princess. Is there a place for princesses in our ideas of what's pretty, without making 'princess' the determining factor? And how do I balance that with the realities - for me - of aging and wrinkles and mascara-fatigue? How do I encourage her to see that beauty as beauty, and to recognize it as as feminine as anything that Disney can crank out?

Or should I just give up, ScotchGuard the ol' wedding gown and make like a middle-aged, Dyson-and-laptop wielding Cinderella? PRINCESS IS THE NEW BLACK.

Friday On My Mind

2009-05-08T00:02:00.001-04:00

Lo, it is Friday, and today, we shall have ice cream.

Or rather, she will have ice cream, and I will struggle to recover from whatever bizarre stomach virus is causing me to huddle under the bedcovers trying to not vomit.

(No, I am not pregnant. The husband got his boy parts snipped to avoid exactly that. That, however, is another story for another day. AM NOT PREGNANT. Am just probably dying from guinea pig flu or roostermonia or some such.)

I will struggle to recover, because it is Mother's Day this weekend, and I am determined to milk that for whatever quantity of pancakes and maple syrup it's worth. Also, I have a party to go to. When you get out as infrequently as I do, you don't let a little thing like projectile vomiting interfere with an excuse to put on dancing shoes.

While I'm recovering, you can amuse yourselves with the following:

1) My Mother Of The Year Award. Hard-won, I'd say. Most of you deserve it more than I do. Hell, you should probably just go ahead and steal the crown from me. Go ahead: do it.

2) My Letter To My Mother. It's mushy, but it's Mother's Day this weekend, so. What do you want from me?

3) My reflections on birth stories: the good, the bad and the sublime. See above re: mush, and bring hankies.

4) My new blog. Yes, really. After coming so very close to quitting blogging, what do I go and do? Build another blog! But it's a necessary thing, a pressure-relieving thing. It's a new space for me to stretch some of the mommy blogger muscles that I haven't really been into stretching here. It's a space for me to really play with topics and ideas and stories that have sort of fallen out of the narrative of Her Bad Mother. It's going to help me to be happier blogging here, because it will provide me with a there - and a their - if that makes sense. It's... well, go read it for yourselves.

5) My beautiful, beautiful boy, who gives Narcissus a good name, and who justifies, perfectly, the art of being amused and entranced by one's own reflection. Which, you know, suits me just fine.

Home Depot Is For Lovers

2009-05-06T10:00:00.006-04:00

The lesson here: the course of true love never did run smooth. That, and think twice before slipping the tongue to strangers that you meet in the Home Depot interior doors and closet fittings aisle.

Just Another (Very Possibly Slightly Less) Manic Monday

2009-05-04T09:51:00.007-04:00

This might be the most hopeful Monday that I've had in some weeks - nobody in this house has been hospitalized since Friday, and I am not writing this from a public library terminal - but still. It's Monday. Something, somewhere, sucks, and it's probably headed my way.

Public Library Terminal.

Anyhoo. Good things:

1) You know about Canada Moms Blog, right? Right? Well, the first official Canada Moms Blog Getting Ready To Launch Party is going to be this coming Mothers' Day Weekend in Toronto. This Saturday - May 9, the day before Mothers' Day - from 2 - 5 we'll be joining the Bunch gang at their annual pre-Moms' Day bash and they'll help us kick-off Canada Moms Blog all glam-like. And we would love it love it love it if you would join us. Bring the kiddies! Get tattooed! Raise a glass to Canada Moms Blog and, you know, moms! (Read more about it at Canada Moms Blog, and leave us a comment if you think you might attend.)

2) You know about The World According To Mom project, right? Right? Well, last time I checked, both Canada and the US were part of the globe, so you should totally join in. We're currently at 250 posts from parents in 41 countries and in seven languages. Which is a little short of our goal of 80 countries - we did, after all, subtitle the project Around The World In 80 Clicks - but still pretty awesome. And it would be even more awesome if you'd consider - maybe in honour of Mothers' Day - doing a post, or spreading the word. And if you wanted to say that you were writing from Narnia or Oz or Middle Earth, well, I wouldn't say anything, because fictional territories should totally count.

3) I have a computer now. It's beautiful. It's not really mine (see my postscript on this post; HP is lending it to me, because I am sad and desperate and complicated, and they are all about making things happy and peaceful and simple) but isn't that the way that it always is with really beautiful things? Like peonies and sunsets and the way that sunlight dances on ocean waves at the height of summer? And cake? Okay, not cake.

Anyone want to send me cake?

(Yes, I closed comments, again. Because I want you to go here and say that you'll join us or here and say that you'll join us or for you to just use the time that you were going to spend commenting to bake me a cake.)

A Brother By Any Other Name

2009-05-01T09:37:00.005-04:00

My brother, he has a name, a real name, a name that was given to him by the man and woman who became his true parents, a name that carried him through childhood and adolescence and high school and on into adulthood, a name that he probably learned to write by tracing its letters in pencil on lined scribblers, a name that he he probably scrawled on desktops and in the backs of math textbooks, a name that he has no doubt signed on countless cheques and contracts and letters. He has a name. It is not the name my mother gave him.

I know this name, now. Knowing this name makes feel both closer to him, and further away. Closer, because knowing his name will help me find him. Further away, because it is the name of a stranger, and sometimes I forget that it is a stranger I am looking for. A stranger who might have no idea that he has a birth sister (sisters), and a birth mother whose heart aches when she thinks of him. A stranger who might not care.

I have to remind myself that this story might not have a happy ending. I have to remind myself that, sometimes, an unhappy ending is better than no ending at all.

And so I press on.

I won't be sharing his name here. I had thought that I might, thinking that people publish classified ads all the time, looking for lost family, lost friends, lost strangers. But this space isn't a classified ad, and because he is a stranger - with name and a life that are all his own - I need to keep his name out of my story. If you have an opinion on this, either way, I'd love to hear it. The temptation to post his name was strong - someone, somewhere, knows him, and among the many visitors to this blog there must be some degree of connection to him - and although I believe that the decision to keep his name private is right, I'd love to hear what everybody else thinks. I want to do what is right. I also kinda want to talk it out.

Another question - because I am lost here, and your support and advice have done much to light my way so far - once one has narrowed down some possibilities - by name, and not just by the guesswork I was doing the other week - how does one approach a stranger with a story like this? How does one say, I found you by this name; were you once called by another name? Does one write? Does one call? Does one message via Facebook? Does one send word by carrier pigeon?

I'm lost.

(Note: if anyone is mean in the comments, like last time - and by mean I don't mean critical - you're allowed to give your honest opinion, even if you think I might not like it. I mean MEAN - I will close comments again. This topic is too sensitive for me. I want feedback, but don't tell me that you think I'm a selfish, insensitive attention-whore for telling this story.)

(Oh, and? My computer problems are soon to be rectified. HP thought that my circumstances represented a great opportunity - because they are interested in simplifying moms' lives, and I am a mom whose life became, with the death of her computer, very complicated - for me to roadtest, on a lending basis, one of their new notebooks. Which is kind of poetic, because it was an HP notebook that Jasper murdered. So it's kind of like getting a Labradoodle puppy to replace your old Labradoodle who died when the baby pushed him off the couch. Sort of. If that Labradoodle puppy were just on loan and was wireless compatible.)

Law & Order: Special Technology Victims Unit

2009-04-29T09:12:00.005-04:00

Yesterday, a murder was committed in my household. In a moment of fleeting and senseless violence, my beloved companion - let's call her Hewlett Packard PC Notebook, although I was usually wont to call her Buttercup - was brutally and fatally attacked. The perpetrator? Jasper, who in a fit of baby frustration grabbed her and pummeled her and flung her to the floor, where, with a flicker and a hiss, she died. As an infant, he cannot be held criminally responsible, but he does face at least twenty years of being regularly reminded of that time he killed Mommy's computer and Mommy had a nervous breakdown.

I am bereft, I am bereft. Also, I am living in the Dark Ages. It's quiet here. (It's a Dark Ages with smartphones and wired public libraries, but still. I AM WITHOUT LAPTOP. I might as well be without arms.)

(No, not without arms. WITHOUT AIR. I am trapped in an airless box with only teeny holes and a drinking straw through which to suck oxygen from the outside world. A drinking straw, and not the bendy kind. And its ends are all chewed up and flattened and OH GOD I CANNOT GET AIR.)

(*faints*)

So, my laptop was murdered and I am seriously, seriously limited in my connectivity. Which is, you know, a disaster, because my livelihood depends upon that connectivity and seriously, how is one supposed to make one's living as a writer in the Internet Age when one is equipped only with a smartphone and a library card? (You try battling teenagers for the Internet-connected computers in the library. They're jonesing for their MySpace, and they will cut you to get it. Or at least they have that look about them.) And in the meantime, I have articles to write, books to pitch, posts to post, and a brother to look for (I've just learned his real name, which gives me something to search for at the precise moment that I am unable to do electronic searching. Wherefore art thou, Google?) And my husband is going tomorrow to have his boy parts snipped and I'm all ambivalent and confused about that and really kinda need to write it out but gah. Am thwarted. Am thwarted and bereft and lost.

(Also can't read online commentary about Lost.)

(Shoot me now.)

*Also can't monitor comments, so. This post will have to remain a comment-free cry in the dark.

Needful Things

2009-04-27T09:54:00.007-04:00

Jasper came into the world with a bang, in a hulksmash explosion of blood and birthmatter and pain. And when they handed him to me - he, as full and round and alert as a baby many times his age - he reached for me and clung and suckled with the same ferocious determination that had propelled him so explosively from my womb.

He clung to me and suckled and grew and grew and grew. I ached, and bled, pummelled and raw from his insistent thirst. I ached and bled, and loved.

I called him Truffler, because at night he would snort and burrow, seeking out my breast with his nose and mouth, never opening his eyes, never waking, just drinking, sucking, snorfling until he had his fill. In the light of day, eyes open, he would use his hands, grabbing and kneading and pinching and gazing up at me, an adorable little beastie, ravenous and innocent and impossibly, impossibly soft, and I would wonder: how can a creature that brings such pain inspire such tenderness? Why do I not push him away?

I could not push him away. I could no more push him away than I could tear through my ribcage and rip out my heart. And so I pulled him to me, time and again, and exulted in the soft curves of his fat baby legs and his rounded baby belly and his plush baby bum, and smiled through the pain and exhaustion and wished, fervently, that this would never end. I pulled him to me and clung to him and drank in his babyness like a draught, knowing, in my gut, that someday, I would miss this, crave this, yearn for this like the parched soul yearns for cool water. And so I drank it in, in big, greedy gulps, matching his thirst with my own.

Even when the exhaustion became unbearable, I resisted pulling away. Even when he started to bite, I resisted pulling away. I tottered and spun from the exhaustion; my breasts bled from his painful nips: still I perservered, determined to preserve this, his babyness, his need for me. Even when it hurt, this need, I clung to it, I clung to it, unwilling - unable? - to let go. That he refused bottles was, in my tired mind, a kind of victory: he would have only me. He wanted only me. His need kept him young; his need kept him mine.

I drank his need like a draught.

When he finally took a bottle - a good thing, I agreed with my husband, a good thing that he be able to get nourishment from someone other than me, a good thing that I could be separated from him for a night, a good thing that he not need me so relentlessly - I recognized the moment as a victory. I could sleep through the night. I could leave him for more than a few hours at a time. I could wear a bra that did not feature clip-up flaps. I could go a day without being bitten. I could reacquaint myself with my body as my own.

I could move - I can move, now - through the day and through the night without experiencing myself as an object of need. This is good. I love it; I celebrate it; I thank the gods for it. But is it wrong to say - even as I recognize that he will outgrow that need, even as I acknowledge that he must outgrow that need, even as I celebrate my freedom from that need - that I still need him, that I am thirsty for his need of me?

Is it wrong that I cling to his babyness like an infant to a breast, that, in moments, I must fight the urge to paw and truffle and cling, to bury my nose in the sweet, soft folds of his neck and whisper, you are mine? Is it wrong that I have moments of wanting to press him to me and wish ourselves back to the first months of his life, when his need was unquenchable, indisputable? Is it wrong that I have moments of wishing that I could freeze time here and keep him as he is, or as he was a few weeks ago, my needful creature? Is it wrong that while I celebrate, quietly, ambivalently, his weaning, I mourn the growth, the movement toward his independence from me that this weaning represents? Is it wrong that I wish, sometimes, that I could keep him like this, a baby, my baby, forever?

This is the way his babyhood ends, not with a bang but a whisper.

Dress Your Family In Tutus And Sparkles

2009-04-24T00:39:00.002-04:00

Look, I`m not even going to ask you if it`s a form of child exploitation to dress one`s boy-child in a pink tutu and publish it on the Internet, because a) I already know the answer and b) I`m not interested in hearing from anonymous commenters who wish to inform me that u will turn ur boy gay with farry dresses u know! (I much prefer to collect those as e-mails, to keep in my collection with the UR A EXPLOYTER mail that the drunk Baryshnikov video prompted.)

I`ll just say this: I didn`t have a unicorn costume on hand, and he was game for the tutu. So. Judge me if you want. I`ll probably still sleep at night.

Sufficient Unto This Day

2009-04-22T08:38:00.000-04:00

Last week, I almost quit blogging. Almost.

I wasn`t going to say anything about it. If I had quit, I would have gone totally silently into that good blogless night. There wouldn`t have been a post angsting about whether or not to quit; there wouldn`t have been a post proclaiming some long goodbye. I was just not ever going to post again. Which, I know, is kind of douchey, but still.

I was not going to post again, because the imperative to post was hurting my heart and making me crazy in a week during which I felt, strongly, that I simply could not post, that it would be wrong to post, that it would be wrong, somehow, to even Twitter all the fears and anxieties that I was struggling to contain. I wanted to write, but my preferred forum for writing was closed to me, or so I felt. I ached to write, to write anything, even just 140 characters proclaiming my fear; my fingers twitched, desperate to tap messages into my phone as we circled Emilia's bed in the hospital, as we fretted and worried and paced. I am so scared, I typed, I am so scared. And then my fingers retracted their message, backspaced, deleted, and I resumed my pacing, my worrying. What could I possibly accomplish, publishing my fear? And how hollow, how terribly, selfishly, hollow to whine vacantly into the void when others were living and sharing darker fears. Realizing darker fears, the worst fears. What would I be doing, to add my own selfish anxieties to that chorus of pain?

No pain is hollow, of course. Seeing my daughter slumped and incoherent, eyes sunken in dark sockets, skin white and hot, was terrifying and horrible and I felt my anxiety in every moment as a strangling hurt, a terrible pressure against my lungs and throat that threatened to cut off my breath. But that was only my hurt, my fear, and although I know that every parent understands how terrible that hurt and how horrible that fear, it was not the time to share it, it was not the time to reach out. It was simply not the time.

Which invites the question: is it ever the time? This is a rhetorical question, of course, because, yes, yes, there is always a time for expressing and sharing fear or anxiety or sadness or all of these together. If we never shared these experiences, we would not know that they are common, ordinary even. We would not know that pain is something that we all live through. We would not know that it is something that we share. And we would never be able to find community in and through our pain, if we didn`t express it, share it.

But doesn`t sharing the pain, sometimes, just exascerbate it? Doesn't it become, sometimes, a sort of twisted indulgence, a way of lingering in an ache and prolonging the sensation of hurt, in the same manner as scratching compulsively at an itch, even though it causes us bleed? If I write my hurt, am I expunging it or clinging to it? And if I draw others into my circle of anxiety, does it serve to comfort all of us - by underlining how common the experience - or does it serve to discomfit all of us - by making the experience common, by forcing others to live it, vicariously? Do I want community, or do I want attention? Can these two desires even be distinguished?

My anxiety about writing through my fear last week reduced to these three concerns - that I wanted to write because I wanted to wallow in that fear, that by wallowing, publicly, in my fear I'd be forcing others to experience that fear (in a week when fear and pain were already in too great supply) and that my writing/wallowing might be construed as attention-seeking (look! look! I hurt too! come see my pain!) - and these conspired to shut me down. And so shut down I did: I unplugged my computer and disabled e-mail on my phone and resolved that the only writing that I would do would be with pen and paper and kept entirely private. And then I cried. A lot. Because blogging has, in the worst of times, been a lifeline for me, a way of working through the pain and fear of struggling with depression and with the challenges of motherhood and with the general anxieties and regrets of a life well lived and with the looming spectre of death. And so the thought of abandoning it - of being abandoned by it - was terrifying, gut-wrenching.

And so I decided to not decide. I would simply not write about my pain that week, and hope that I would somehow grow an ability write light-heartedly and humorously so that I might not be so often an agent for spreading dark and gloom across the internets. And then Monday came and Emilia seemed better and so there was something happy to say - Emilia seems better! - and so I opened my computer and said it and the universe didn`t collapse in on itself, so. Baby steps.

I still don`t know how I`ll handle writing about Tanner, whose condition is worsening, and about how I`m going to explain the fact of his inevitable death to Emilia (something that becomes ever more pressing with every question she asks about his disabilities), and about lost siblings and hurt parents and depression and darkness and faith and all those terrible, difficult things that seem to have become my stock in writing trade. I just don`t know. I do know that I will write about them, sooner rather than later, just as I know that I will, someday - later rather than sooner - stop writing this blog. But I`m not going to worry about those things now.

For now, I`m just going to keep writing, and see what happens.

You can tell me, honestly - is there such a thing as oversharing hurt? Do I do it? Do I need - do we all need - to bring less angst and more happy? DOES THE INTERNET NEED MORE UNICORNS? I think maybe.

And Then, There Was Monday

2009-04-20T08:54:00.003-04:00

Emilia is going to be okay. Last week was full of worry - she was so sick, and in pain, and doctors could only guess that it was something either totally mundane or wholly terrible and all we could do was keep her comfortable and watch and wait to see if the scariest symptoms would worsen or abate - so full of worry and fear and all those bad things and I could not write (I would not, I should not? The distinction became unclear) and all there was to do was wait.

So we waited. And the symptoms abated over the weekend and the light came back into her eyes and so into ours and phew.

Now I just need to give my head and heart a shake and repeat to myself like a mantra: life is good the world is good things are GOOD. And maybe tomorrow I'll be able to write again.

Flush

2009-04-15T06:25:00.001-04:00

I wrote this post two days ago, when the world seemed very slightly less dark, and then - as the moon moved directly in front of the sun and blocked its light - decided that I couldn't post it, because reflecting upon my daughter's tyrannical approach to love scraped all the wrong nerves on a day without light. But then she got sick, very sick, yesterday and I spent too many hours pacing the hospital floor, gripped with worry, waiting for her to lift her head and say anything, anything at all, anything to show us that she was fine, that she would be fine, and when she finally did lift her head she said this: WHERE IS DADDY I WANT DADDY NOT YOU MOMMY, DADDY.

And my heart leapt, happy to have her back with any measure of her imperious glory.

Which is why I post this now. In gratitude.

*****

I hear the thump-thump-thump of her little feet as she advances down the hallway toward the bathroom. I listen from my cocoon of bubbles as she stops outside the door, hesitating for the briefest moment before turning the handle and opening the door just wide enough to slip through, a wisp in pink flannel pajamas, squinting against the glare of the bathroom light.

Mommy? I have to go poo.

That's okay, sweetie. Can you manage on your own? I sit up in the tub and offer my hand to steady her. She ignores me. She yanks her pajama bottoms down with one hand and hoists her half-naked self up onto the toilet seat with the other. I slouch back into my bubbles.

She leans forward and rest her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, a thinker smaller than Rodin ever imagined. Mommy?

- Yes?

I don't love you.

- No?

No.

- Not at all?

Not all the time. Only when you do fun things.

- Did we do fun things today?

Yeah.

- Did we do fun things yesterday?

Yeah.

- When do you not love me?

Some of the other time.

- When do you love Daddy?

All of the time.

- And why do you not love me all of the time?

Because I only love you some of the time.

- That hurts my feelings.

Okay. Dramatic sigh. I love you most of the time.

I debate whether or not to press her on this. I know that if I ask for a more fulsome declaration of love, I'll get one. I also know that she'll try to extract a price.

I decide that I'm fine with that.

And if you ask me for something tonight - like maybe will I stay in your bedroom with you, and read you an extra story? - and I tell you that I don't want to, because I'm hurt that you only love me some of the time...?

Then I will tell you that I love you all of the time.

We sit - I in my bath, she on her porcelain throne - and think about this.

We have stop talking now, she says, because I'm going to do my poo.

And she did. While I sat in my rapidly cooling bath, watching the bubbles deflate around me and marveling at my little empress, setting her boundaries, defining her terms. Letting my heart feel its hurt, and then letting it go and watching it swirl down the drain in a little flush of pride.

*****

She's still very sick. We don't know what it is. Hopefully, it's only a virus and we can keep her hydrated until it works its way through. Until then, I sit on edge, waiting for little tyrannical demands, waiting for petty and imperious dismissals, waiting for my little dictator to resume power.

This Dark And Mourning Earth

2009-04-13T10:33:00.004-04:00

And so God continues to call children back to him, and I - who watch helpless as my sister lives this loss, counting down the years, months, weeks, days, minutes until her son's heart stops beating and she must make her peace with a last goodbye; I who know nothing of this pain, except from a distance, a distance that does nothing to keep me at a remove from fear - am contemplating faithlessness, am wondering whether faith makes it easier or more difficult to bear such fear, such loss. Does faith offer the possibility of meaning in loss, does it provide relief from the fear? Or does loss in the presence of faith feel like betrayal?

I have not suffered the losses that my friends have suffered, that my sister will suffer. I have not suffered these losses and so I do not know these losses. But I fear them. I fear them with an intensity that makes my hands tremble, that makes my breath draw short. I fear them, and in this fear I feel betrayed by my faith that there is something in this universe that gives our lives meaning. I feel betrayed, because I know, I know, that if I ever face this loss, I will struggle to find meaning and I will fail.

I struggle and fail to find meaning now - I recoil at the very idea that there is some meaning that I should find, that I should seek to make this better, that I should search for the thing that makes this all okay, as if this, any of this, could be made to be okay - and this has nothing to do with me, nothing to do with me at all. And I feel betrayed. By God. By life. By whatever force in the universe is supposed to make these things make sense.

They cannot make sense, of course. If these things made sense - if the world were perfectly comprehensible by reason - then we would have no need for faith, for God. For philosophy, even, although about this last I am not certain. It does not matter, though, because even philosophers quaver in the face of death, Socrates notwithstanding. It does not matter, because even if there were some answer, I am not sure that it would console. There is no consolation for the loss of a child. None.

Shale went. Tanner will go. And in the course of only a few short days, Maddie, and now Thalon ("who is that?" Emilia demanded, looking at his picture on my screen. "Just a boy," I said, fighting the tears. "Just a boy.") and who knows how many other unknown children of unknown parents, suffering unknown loss, untold betrayal at the hands of gods who, promising love, deliver death and pain. Who knows?

I don't. And I am lost.

Pitiless, The Mercy Of Time

2009-04-09T15:15:00.001-04:00

When a family loses a child, we feel it. Whether or not we knew that family, whether or not we knew that child, we feel it. We feel it because the shockwaves of that loss - that loss as felt by the mother, the father, the family, the friends, the community, that loss as felt by the world, because surely the earth itself shudders, a little bit, when one of its flowers is cut too soon - the shockwaves of that loss reach into our very souls, to the furthest corners of our souls where we keep, hidden in the dark, away out of sight, our worst fear. And the shockwaves of that loss - snapping, lashing, electric - light up those dark corners and awaken the beast of our fear and we tremble.

We tremble because we know. Every single one of us has imagined what it would be like to lose a child. Every single one of us has lived and relived this imaginary terror. Each and every one of us has held our children in our arms and felt the warmth of their breath on our neck and had a single, heart-stopping thought: what if? And then we've all squeezed our children more tightly and waited until our hearts resumed their beat before letting go, a little sadder, a little older, a lot more grateful for the time that we have.

So when someone runs out of time, when someone is forced to really let go, let go let go let go, we know. And our hearts stop for them, for knowing.

My heart stopped today. I am sadder, older, more grateful, now that it has resumed its beat.

Requiescat in pace, Madeline Alice Spohr. Your home, now, is timelessness.

(Donations to March of Dimes in Maddie's name can be made here. Online memorial to Maddie is here. If Heather's - Madeline's mom - site doesn't load when you click the link in her name, be patient; the server was overloaded and the site is being moved.)

A Story Not My Own

2009-04-07T21:57:00.000-04:00

This story that I`ve been telling about my brother - my lost brother - is not my story, not really. It is becoming my story - that is, it is becoming a story that matters to me, a story that involves me, a story that I am driving forward and that is driving me forward and so has become part of me, part of my life, mine - but still. At the end of the day, it is not my story. It is my mother`s story.

She is telling it here.

And it is breaking my heart all over again.

Mondays Are For Zombies

2009-04-06T11:26:00.009-04:00

It's Monday, it's raining and I think that my house might be haunted. It's either that or the cats are messing with me. Odds are good either way.

Yeah, Monday. What's there to say that hasn't already been said a thousand times already by the Boomtown Rats?

1.) So my mother calls me Friday afternoon and says this: "I just sent you another post to publish. You're going to kill me."

Me: "Why?"

Her: "Because it's about that time you brought home a stripper."

Me: "MOTHER."

Her: "I had too."

Me: "He wasn't really a stripper, and I didn't really 'bring him home,' in the sense that 'bring home' implies."

Her: "He said he was a stripper, and he was in our house."

Me: "STILL."

Her: "Wait 'til I tell the story about the first time that you and I talked about hand jobs."

Me: "MOTHER."

2.) Traveling around the world isn't getting me away from my mother and her blog-cum-child-torment-device, but it is providing some amazing insights into just how much mothers around the world have in common. You should join in.

3.) You know that I'm not really all that outraged about my mother's blog, right? If anything, it's a boon. There's no reason for me to write lengthy essays explaining why I'm so messed up when my mother's out there giving the world a live demonstration.

4.) I have an essay in this book. You should buy it.

5.) I also have an essay in this book. You should buy it, too.

6.) Oh, yeah, and this one too. More than one essay, actually. So maybe buy more than one copy of this one. You know, so that you can fully appreciate the breadth of my talent.

7.) I guess Monday is not all that bad when you wake up and realize that, yes, you are, kind of, a published author and that's kind of awesome. And odds are that neither the cats nor the ghosts have themselves ever been published. So. They can just suck it.

Lost

2009-04-03T00:02:00.004-04:00

I have moments when I lose the thread of the story that I tell myself about why this is so important to me. I tell myself that this - this story about searching for my long-lost brother - is a story about helping my mother. I tell myself that this is for her, and for him. I tell myself these things, and I stumble over my lack of conviction. It is these things, of course. But it's more than these things. I want to find him for me. I'm not sure why.

I never knew that I had a brother. His absence from my life, such as it was, was unknown to me. I never felt the loss, because I did not know it. It's wrong, perhaps, to even describe it as loss. His absence from my mother's life made it possible for me to exist. Had she stayed with his father, as was her plan, I would never have been born. We were never fated to share a life, he and I, so how can his absence from my life be understood, be felt, as a loss? (Also, oh god, loss. My heart aches for not being able to parse its experience of loss in a manner that makes such loss comprehensible. My heart, it aches, and is confused.) My brother was not lost to me. He was never mine in the first place.

And yet: I'm haunted by the moment, in the telling of her story, when my mother said "your father would have adopted him." They were friends, she and my father; the circumstances surrounding her giving up this boy brought them closer. My father offered to stay with her, and with him, and make a family. But it didn't happen that way - my mother didn't know that she could change her mind about giving up her son, and so the wheel of the fates turned and the boy went to another family and was lost forever to mine. Is it this that haunts me? The idea that he could have been my older brother, that my life might have been the same in every respect save for the presence of a brother? No, because - if there is one thing that Lost has taught me - history does not unfold that way. Keeping my brother would have set my mother on a different path in a different life, regardless of whether or not my father was with her on that path. It would have set her on a different path in a different life. A life without me. So am I haunted by the idea that, but for the grace of the fates, this boy, this lost boy, might have had my life? Is this why I want to know him?

I don't know. I'm still sorting this out. All I know is, I keep turning this Dharma wheel, hoping that it will project me into a time and place where I know my brother. For better or for worse.

UPDATE: I'm shutting down comments on this post. Apparently, not everyone in the world supports public adoption searches - which, fine, but some of those not-everyones are unable to express their opinion about that in a manner that is civil. My heart's too vulnerable around this. I'm putting the comments away, to keep private, for myself, and closing further commentary. Anyone who needs/wants to get in touch with me about this, please use e-mail.

The World According To Mom

2009-03-31T13:19:00.011-04:00

A few months ago, my friend David asked me if I thought that it would be possible to travel around the world via blog. "Like Around The World In 80 Days," he said, "but on the Internet. Around the world in 80 clicks. 80 mom-blogger clicks!" "I don't know," I said. "But it sure sounds like a cool thing to try." "Cool. And if you could visit, virtually, moms around the world, what would you want to talk to them about?"

This was my answer (more on our "Around The World In 80 Clicks" project after the post, below):

Once, when Emilia was 8 or 9 months old and we were socializing at a local playground, another mother asked me this question: "don't you just love being a mom?" She meant it rhetorically: of course I loved being a mom. How could anyone not love being a mom? Becoming a mom means entering a state of existence wherein you are always, at some level, deeply fulfilled. It means being adored by tiny creatures who delight at the sound of your voice. It means love, giggles and ice cream and rainbows. It also means crouching in damp sand at playgrounds and wiping snotty noses and shitty bums and worrying constantly about whether or not you remembered to restock the diaper bag and, also, refill your Ativan prescription.

"Sort of," I replied. "Some of the time."

My memory on this might be fuzzy, but I think that she physically recoiled.

Of course I love being a mother. But it's complicated. I love being a mother to my children, but there's a very great difference between loving being a mother to one's own children and loving motherhood generally. I mean, I love being married to my husband, because I love him, but I can't imagine marching around saying that I love being a wife. My attachment to my married state has everything to do with him, and pretty much nothing to do with the institution of marriage itself. Motherhood is a little different, obviously: some women really do love motherhood as a practice, as a craft, as a way of life. I don't, not so much. I'm actually kind of bad at it. I struggle with the quotidien responsibilities of motherhood: I dislike cooking, I'm constantly running out of diapers, I'm terrible at managing schedules, and I regularly send my child to preschool in mismatched socks. I hate playgroups, and my house is a mess. What I am good at, as a mother: love, and good humor. I adore my children, and they delight me to no end. We have a lot of fun; we laugh a lot. Sure, the baby sometimes ends up with paper towels shoved down his pants in lieu of a diaper, but still: he's happy. We're all happy. And I'm happy with that. I love that.

So if someone were to ask me that question today - don't you just love being a mom? - I'd answer in much the same way - sort of/some of the time/some of it - but I'd also, depending upon how nervy I was feeling that day, say this: why don't I tell you, specifically, what I do love about being a mom? And then - if, that is, my inquisitor had not gathered up her children and fled my toxic presence - I would provide her with the following list:

1) I love that there are always cookies in the cupboard, and that I can claim plausible deniability if someone asks if the cookies are mine and whether I intend to eat them all myself.

2) I love that birthdays and holidays are major events involving ridiculous amounts of sugar and gift wrap.

3) I love that, for at least some months following the births of my children, I had really epic breasts. They're gone now, but still. For a while I had the bustline of a stripper, and that - feminist correctness be damned - was kind of cool.

4) I love seeing the world through her eyes:

5) And his:

There are, of course, a thousand and some other reasons that I could give, reasons that range from the poetic (the way that it feels when tiny hands get tangled in my hair) to the profane (there's always somebody on whom to blame the farts), but then this list would go on forever, and that would very probably undermine my claim to be ambivalent about the condition of motherhood.

In any case, the whole point of this exercise was this: to consider a standard entre-mamans question from my own perspective, and to invite other mothers - mothers from around the world - to do the same thing and share their answers. In part because I'm looking for some affirmation that I'm not the only mother in the world who ordinarily raises her eyebrows at such questions even as she secretly begins composing answers, but also to find out what it would be like - how the conversations would run, what we would say, whether we'd exclaim in agreement or goggle over our differences - if we hung out in the sort of fantasy playground or playgroup that included mothers from all over the world and asked each other that stuff and got to compare notes. And then maybe had a drink or something.

Which - thanks to the Internet - is possible! Maybe! Except for the drink part!

David and I - in partnership with Global Voices Online - are launching an experiment to see if we get a global conversation going between moms who blog. We want to see if it's possible to travel the world and make friends, virtually, solely on the Vernian voyage power of the momosphere. We want to see if we can pull together a global playdate in 80 clicks.

Here's how it's going to work: this post that you're reading? Is the departure lounge. I'm going to link to a couple of other mom bloggers here in Canada, and to a couple of mom bloggers from other countries around the world, and they'll write their posts, sharing 5 things that they love (or maybe what they don't so much love - this playground doesn't force conformity) about being a mom, and then they'll tag a few more bloggers from their own country and from other countries, and so on. And you're more than welcome to join: just write a post of your own (5 things that you love about being a mom) and find someone to link to and tag - someone from your own country, if you like, but definitely someone from another country (Google is a good resource if you don't know any; google any country name and 'mom' in their blog search function) (be sure to let them know that you've tagged them!) - and link back here and leave a comment and we'll add you to the 'itinerary,' which David will compile and post and update as the tour proceeds.

Are you in? I hope you're in. This is going to be fun. No passport necessary.

So, to get started, why not see a little more of Canada by visiting Redneck Mommy in Alberta, or Sherina from Chaos Theory in Quebec. Then, travel a little further and visit Chocoholic Madness, a soon-to-be mom in the United Arab Emirates, and Fine Little Day in Sweden, and Indian Mommies (there's a tremendous blogroll of Indian moms here!) in India, and, also, Beth, who used to live in Burkina Faso but now lives in France.

(What are you waiting for? GO!)

(Oh, and? If you don't plan to blog it - or even if you do, and just want to run some ideas through the mill here - what do you love about being a mom?)

Monday: Now With More Unicorn!

2009-03-30T09:36:00.011-04:00

I promised myself that I wouldn't start this week with another weak salute to my hatred of Mondays. I mean, what's more banal than hating on Mondays? Seriously. Welcome to my boring.

But then I woke up this morning - and by 'woke' I mean, got out of bed after not having slept a wink - and my inbox was full of wondrous and terrifying things and really, how is one supposed to rally one's creative energies to write meaningful, thought-provoking prose when one is confronted by e-mail from one's mother with the subject heading GRANDMA AND VIBRATOR?

1) My mother's newfound enthusiasm for blogging is starting to frighten me. Because, you know, it's not bad enough that she reveals unflattering details about the little tyrant that I was when I was five. She also has to send me e-mails with video about grannies and vibrators (VIBRATORS) and say can I post video on my blog? Because I have a story to go along with this!

Which, upon reading, caused my inner child to curl up into a little ball and weep.

2) Sometimes, you find stuff laying on the ground in your local schoolyard and despite the fact that that stuff almost certainly has grotty, grotty teenager germs - and god knows what else - all over it you simply can't not pick it up. And photograph it. And upload it to your Flickr account.

3) Speaking of awesome: if you want awesome for your blog, you need to check this out. SWEET.

4) Speaking of more awesome: this post? Is - alongside the Shakesville post that inspired it - BlogHer's BlogHer Of The Week post. Which is awesome not because I am awesome (although I am that, sometimes), but because that post was the catalyst for the most community-affirming discussion about reproductive choice that I have ever seen, anywhere. Pro-choice, pro-life: it didn't matter. Every commenter was respectful, even kind, in considering both my thoughts on the subject and the thoughts of all the other commenters. It provided indisputable proof that discussion on controversial topics needn't be combative. It demonstrated that this community really understands civil discourse. It made a lot of the residual ill-feeling from that other controversy just melt away.

It was - what's the word? - awesome.

5) What is not so awesome: my custodianship of the Basement. I recently discovered a batch of submissions from December that I missed and therefore didn't post. AM SO SORRY. I need to learn how to use spreadsheets or something because, really, my lack of life skills sometimes gets in the way of being awesome (or, in the case of the Basement, providing a space for others to be awesome.) Also, I suck.

(They're all going up this week. And next. Daily posting until we get caught up.)

6) What is always awesome: UNICORNS.

Love Thursday, Friday Edition: The Beckoning Of The Bicycle

2009-03-27T00:02:00.002-04:00

I have trouble keeping my days of the week straight. Also, my seasons. Is it spring yet?

God, I hope so. We have some bike-ridin' to do.

(Love Thursday. Is lovely. And is beckoning lovely. Come, lovely, come. On a little red-trimmed, sparkly-streamered bicycle, come.)

Abortion Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry

2009-03-25T12:19:00.007-04:00

"She only saw him once.

Once, from behind the window of the nursery. He was wrapped in a blue blanket, and he was oh so small. They asked her if she wanted to hold him, and she said no. Just as she had in the delivery room, right after he was born, when she had squeezed her eyes shut so that she wouldn't see him, her heart, the heart that she was giving away. She said no.

No.

It would have killed me, she said. It would have killed me. I couldn't have gone on. I loved him.

So she said no. She refused to hold her son."

I was holding my own son - then just two and a half months old - on my lap when my mother told me this story. I would be stating the obvious if I said that I clutched him a little tighter as I listened to her words and watched the tears brim in her eyes, but I'll state it anyways: I held him, tightly, and my heart ached to think of not holding him. My heart ached to bursting at the thought of not holding him, of giving away any opportunity to hold him. And then my heart ached some more, because I had, once upon time, done something that, in some respects, amounts to the same thing.

When an anonymous poster made a plea, last week, for everyone to pause and consider the emotional fallout from adoption - this within the context of debates concerning the emotional consequences of abortion - I immediately thought of my mother and the gut-wrenching turmoil she experienced as a result of giving up a child for adoption. And then I thought of myself, and of the secret inner dialogue that I conducted with myself while she and I sat discussing that boy, that child that she had given up for adoption years before I was born. The secret inner dialogue that went something like this:

Me: Oh, my god, my god, how terrible, how heartbreaking, how did her heart survive it?

Myself: How did YOUR heart survive it?

Me: Survive what?

Myself: Abortion.

Me: That's so different.

Myself: It's not.

Me: The heartbreak of giving up a child...

Myself: Isn't abortion a kind of 'giving up'? Except, you know, MORE FINAL?

Me: Yeah, but...

Myself: But what?

Me: She's mourning a child that she lost, a child who is still out there somewhere.

Myself: Exactly.

I clutched Jasper to my chest and squeezed and thought about the child who is not out there somewhere. A little part of my heart collapsed in on itself.

My mother's heartbreak was almost unbearable to absorb. Her guilt, her worry, her desire to both know and not know whether he'd been given a happy life, whether she'd done right by him to give him up. She insisted that there was no regret - she'd done what she had to do, she had no choice, it was the best thing to do, the only thing to do, at the time - but regret is complicated. She didn't regret making the choice that seemed best for him, but she still hurt over that choice. She hurt over that choice because it represented a loss, for her. Because it represented the loss of an unknown and unknowable future. Because it was a choice that changed someone else's life, someone else's future. Because some part of her felt that she needed to explain that choice, perhaps apologize for that choice. Make it clear that the choice was made out of love.

The choice that caused her so much pain was not the same kind of choice that I made. There is no one to whom to explain my choice. There is no one to whom to apologize. No claim can be made that my choice was made out of love. There is no one to whom I might make that claim. Because that's how abortion differs from adoption: it means that the only person you need ever - can ever - explain your choice to is yourself. It doesn't matter whether you're sorry or not. Abortion means never having to say you're sorry. It means never even having to consider the question.

Which is not to say, of course, that we don't consider the question. I've been considering the question - of whether or not I'm sorry, of whether or not I should be sorry, of whether or not sorry matters - since I first set foot in that abortion clinic. I have agonized over this. As I've explained in these virtual pages before, I can't say that I regret having had an abortion, but I also can't say that I don't. It's complicated. Its complicatedness sometimes hurts my heart. Which is precisely why people talk about the emotional consquences of abortion. Because many women find, like I did, that their hearts hurt. Because many women struggle to figure out how to reconcile the complicated tension between regret and not-regret and find that they're unable, and because many women do so while bearing their children, their wanted children, in arms.

But that struggle - that is, my personal experience of that struggle - is one that can, most of the time, be compartmentalized, tucked away on some back shelf of the psyche and forgotten until some event - pregnancy, say, or miscarriage, or one's own mother's admission of having given one's brother up for adoption - prompts one to go rummaging around on the shelves of Buried Hurts and Ambivalent Regrets and Things That I'd Rather Not Think About Unless My Sanity And/Or Moral Stability Depends Upon It. My mother's struggle with her longstanding conflicting emotions around having given up a child for adoption is not - has never been - something that she can just tuck away on a shelf and forget about. She has never passed a day, she told me, without thinking about her lost boy - without looking at the faces of strangers who seem about his age and wondering is it him, without reading in the newspaper or hearing on the news something about any male person of his vintage and wondering is it him, without casting back to that baby in the blue blankie and wondering what became of him what became of him what became of him?

And that is so hard for her. I have seen the heartbreak on her face. Some 45 years or so after the fact, and the heartbreak is still there. I see the heartbreak on her face and I tell myself, there but for grace went I. And, thank gods for that grace, that I did not go.

But it is not so simple. It is not nearly so simple. For I know that the primary reason I am able to compartmentalize my own, quiet struggle is because it is entirely my own, and it is entirely my own because of the nature of the choice that I made. My child does not wander this earth, living another life. My child - and it is such a mental and emotional wank to even use these terms - was never born. My child never became my child. He/she/it was embryo, barely fetus, not a child. I did not have a child; I had a pregnancy. And then I didn't.

(And yet. Even as I say that - "I did not have a child; I had a pregnancy" - I want to take it back. I'm a mother. I've had a very early term miscarriage. I very nearly lost Emilia to miscarriage. I know the terror of losing or fearing to lose that embryo, that not-quite-fetus, that not-child who is loved none the less for his or her unformedness. I would never have said - could never have said - of the embryo-that-became-Emilia, this is just a pregnancy, there is no child here. For even though she was not yet child, she was the cellular embodiment of my wish that she become a child, that she become my child. In the absence of that wish... is it just cells that remain? I don't know. I do not know. I have not yet sorted this out. It is painful, trying to sort this out, this which might be, simply, unsortable. All I know is that these experiences are different, despite their similarities, and that I remain firmly committed to the rightness of having the ability - the choice - to distinguish between them. Ah, me.)

What remains: my inconstant, ambivalent hurt, and my mother's endless heartache. Neither of these would I wish on anyone, but neither would I hold them up as justifications for tampering with our rights to choose those hurts, those aches, over others. We both chose our heartaches, out of desire to avoid greater heartache for ourselves or for others. In my mother's case - in any birth mother's case, I think - a more difficult choice was made, because it was a choice that opened up another future for another life, a future that she would never be able to see but would always, always feel. I, on the other hand... I chose the road that denied other lived futures, and that has made all the difference.

The right difference, the wrong difference, I don't know. It is, ever and always and only and nevertheless, the one that I chose.

I live with that.

*Because you're asking: yes, we are - I am - still looking for that boy, the lost boy, my brother. There has been some very limited progress recently, and I'm hoping that it yields something, but I don't want to jinx things by speculating. Thank you all for caring so much.

Rainy Days And Mondays And, Also, Zombies, Get Me Down

2009-03-23T12:06:00.008-04:00

I don't have anything personal against Monday. It's not like Monday's ever done anything to me that she - oh, don't give me that, you know Monday's a she - hasn't done to every other living being on the planet - pine beetles hate Monday too, pass it on - it's just, you know, Monday. BLAH. I'm just never ready for it.

(I know. I work at home. In my pajamas. So what am I complaining about? I work at home in my pajamas, surrounded by chaos, with a baby chewing on my leg and a three-year old shrieking at eardrum-shattering volume and cats dragging dismembered Dora dolls under the sofa for further gutting. It's like Resident Evil around here, but with babies instead of zombies and no Milla Jovovich coming with a team of commandos to save me. So.)

Where was I? Right. Monday.

It is Monday and I have had neither sufficient caffeine nor B12 vitamins to kick-start anything approximating energy or will or lifeforce and so all you get from me today is what you got last Monday: weak jokes and some links.

1) CNN linked to me today. But it was about breastfeeding stuff and we all know how that goes. Wee bit of a traffic spike, but also: mean e-mails! And stupid comments! Telling me to COVER UP MAH BOOBEEZ K THX!

Can I just put this out there? Could everyone out there who is skeeved, squicked or otherwise disgusted by breastfeeding (in any and all of its forms) please find a more interesting way to express your belief that your right to not be skeeved, squicked or yucked overrides my child's right to be nourished than EW BOOBIES GROSS WHY CAN'T YOU JUS COVER THEM SELFISH BISH?!?!? Or, maybe you could, just, you know, look away?
Thanks.

2) My mother is persisting with this whole blogging thing. And now she's threatening to be - quote - 'a thorn in (my) side.' Also, she wants to tell you about the 'deep V' tanline caused by her grandma-boobs and bitch about her bifocals and, maybe, give other grandparents advice on how to torment their children by corrupting their grandchildren. This is either going to be really terrible or really awesome. Probably both.

3) The Basement. It's not a happy place today.

4) No, I didn't purchase the DVD of the movie Twilight this weekend. I wanted to, though. Mostly because I've heard that Robert Pattinson's commentary is bust-a-gut hysterical (Robert Pattinson, who is on record describing his character thusly: "When you read the book," says Pattinson, looking appropriately pallid and interesting even without makeup, "it's like, 'Edward Cullen was so beautiful I creamed myself.' I mean, every line is like that. He's the most ridiculous person who's so amazing at everything. I think a lot of actors tried to play that aspect. I just couldn't do that. And the more I read the script, the more I hated this guy, so that's how I played him, as a manic-depressive who hates himself. Plus, he's a 108-year-old virgin so he's obviously got some issues there." How can you not love this guy?) and I could totally get on board with having my gut figuratively busted.

Instead, I just read pretty much the entirety of Cleolinda's commentary on everything Twilight. And busted a gut. Seriously. BETTER THAN THE BOOKS. Almost.

5) They should do a remake of Resident Evil, but with cats. They could get a Siamese to play Milla Jovovich's role. That'd be funny.

This is the shit I think about on Mondays. It's a kind of hell.

(Closing comments because, seriously, I am exhausted UP TO HERE with debating breastfeeding. Comments are still open at the CNN-linked post, but having responded to one stupid comment there I am already spent and have given up. Reading about Twilight is a far better use of my time today.)

Good Housekeeping: Totally Slobtastic Slackermom Edition

2009-03-20T00:01:00.000-04:00

If you were ever to visit my neighborhood, I would love for you to drop by. I'd be thrilled to see you, and I would totally invite you onto my verandah, and I would fix us up a nice pot of coffee and we would sit outside and eat cupcakes - fresh from the bakery down the street - and drink our coffee and chat. Or maybe it would be, like, late afternoon or evening and I would bust out the wine and the cheese and we would sit outside and enjoy the sunset and it would be lovely, really, just perfectly lovely. But I'd really hope that you wouldn't ask to use the bathroom. Because I'd really kind of rather you not come in my house.

It's not that I have anything against you, or that I have weird bathroom issues. It's just that, you know, if you'd just dropped by? And I hadn't had enough notice to do a total sweep of the house in advance of your visit? I just would totally not want you to come inside. Because, really, it usually looks something like this:

That's what it looks like, all the time. Worse even. That room at the back? That's supposed to be the dining room. Needless to say, we don't do a lot of dining there. We actually moved the table out so that there'd be more room for things like, say, easels and chalkboards and paints. Also, giant stuffed cows and little plastic grocery carts. The piano is there, just off to the right, and it does get played, but it also functions as a toy shelf and Dora puzzle storage unit.

Oh, we try to keep it tidy. Two or three times a day I shove toys and books and miscellaneous child crap into the various baskets that you see strewn about. Then I vacuum. And then the room looks clean for about fifteen minutes before Jasper and/or Emilia begin upturning baskets and flinging toys everywhere again.

And then it looks something like this:

And this isn't even the worst room. If I, in a fit of transparency, let you in the front door, I still wouldn't let you up the stairs. That's where I hide the real mess: the piles of laundry, the unpacked suitcases (seriously), the random pieces of barely used baby equipment, the children. The bathroom is also upstairs, which is why, if you mentioned a need to use the facilities, I might suddenly suggest that we head to the cafe around the corner. For cookies! They make the best cookies! Also, their restroom doesn't have childrens' toothpaste smeared across the vanity mirror, and they probably actually put the toilet paper on the roll.

It's a losing battle for me, keeping house. I just can't do it. I have a ten-month old baby who is just starting to walk and using his newfound mobility to seek out things to scatter and destroy, and a three-year old who loves nothing more than to mark her territory by spreading toys and books as far as she can see. And I have a husband who has trouble figuring out the relationship between socks and sock drawers and two cats who have an enthusiastic affection for dragging miscellaneous crap underneath sofas and leaving it there to collect dust. It is Sisyphean, I tell you, the work of managing a household while tending to two very small children and a tidiness-challenged husband. It is impossible, and unavoidable, and necessary, and it causes me no end of stress.

Derrida and Bukowski get tossed and stomped. Not shown: destruction of the lesser post-modernists and later dirty realists.

I can look at pictures, in magazines, of skinny mom-celebs - the Gwyneths, the Angelinas - and it doesn't bother me, because, please. I know the work of a trainer and a private chef when I see it. But I see images of tidy homes - homes that are ostensibly occupied by families, by people with children - and it makes me a little bit crazy. Because even though I know that images in magazines are set-decorated and fluffed and faked, it still worries me, the idea that somewhere out there, other parents are keeping their homes tidy. I do not, and cannot, keep my own home in a state that even approximates something that even resembles a simulation of 'tidy.' And I have no idea how to change that. If I really wanted to lose my muffin-top, I would join a gym or do that shred thing and I would have some reasonable expectation of having some success. But getting my house organized? And keeping it that way? Figuring out the alchemical formula for turning cat turds into gold seem seems a more attainable goal for me.

So I'm trying to come to terms with it, in the same way that I have been trying to come to terms with the muffin-top. Embrace my outer slob, as it were. And it would really, really help if somebody - anybody - out there would stand up and to admit to some slobbiness, too. You don't have to post photographic evidence (although if you wanted to do that, I'd be really impressed. And grateful.) (Here's a Flickr group to post to, if you're so inclined.) Even just a show of hands? Anyone else out there losing the battle of the mess? Anybody else pretty much just ready to surrender?

If not, that's fine. You're still welcome to come visit me. Just make sure that you pee before you get here.

10 Things To Do Before You Become A Parent

2009-03-18T11:06:00.005-04:00

I heard a song once - one of those songs that you hear on the radio in someone else's car, or over the soundsystem at the grocery store - that had a refrain about some woman regretting the fact, in her middle age, that she'd never driven a sports car around Paris, or something to that effect. I can't remember exactly; what stuck with me, mostly, was the thought that well, I'd been to Paris. So - I thought - I probably wouldn't have that regret. Which, as it turned out, was quite right: I'm not yet in my middle age, but I can see it on the horizon, and I'm happy to report that there seem to be no travel-related regrets forthcoming.

That said, I do have some regrets, of a sort; they're just not of the bucket-list variety. My regrets - such as they are, now that I'm a parent, with responsibilities and accountabilities and very limited ability to do as I please - are more of the man, I wish I'd appreciated that when kind of regret. (Regret is a bit strong. Let's call these retrospective yearnings.) I was thinking about this yesterday, as I lay on the couch with a cranium-rattling headache, trying to amuse the baby by weakly nudging a rattle toward him with my foot. In that moment, the idea that I might ever regret something like not being able to take off to Paris for the weekend struck me as absurd. Paris, schmaris. What I regretted most in that moment was the fact that in my pre-motherhood life I did not appreciate the luxury of being able to take to my bed when I was sick. Which got me thinking: if I knew then what I know now, what would I have done more often or appreciated more before I became a parent?

1. Get sick, and like it: I know, being sick is supposed to be a miserable thing. But is it, really? Assuming that your symptoms are not too brutal, and/or that you're able to medicate yourself into a happy stupor, there is much to enjoy about being sick. You stay in bed all day, drinking hot steamy drinks and slurping chicken soup and watching bad game shows and soap operas and Dr. Phil and maybe thumbing through some tabloids and napping and just generally enjoying the Vicks VapoRub-scented experience of convalescence. If you live with someone - and especially if that someone is a spouse or romantically beholden to you in anyway - you can bitch and whine at them and they will bring you more soup.

You cannot do this when you have small children. There are no sick days when you have small children. When you have small children, you cannot take to your bed and watch television and huff VapoRub. You have to parent. So what it you're dripping snot on the head of your wailing baby? That baby isn't going to feed/soothe/change himself. You're on duty, bitch. Deal with it.

2. Take naps. Take lots of naps. The kind where you doze off on the couch before dinner, the kind where you nod off at your desk at work, the kind where you just say screw Monday and go back to bed for an hour. Because what I said above about being on duty? That applies 24-7. Which means, no, you can't just take twenty minutes to "rest your eyes." Unless the baby is having his own nap, in which case you're welcome to try to nap, but I'm guessing that you might want to shower/bathe/eat, too, and you've probably only got forty minutes, so.

3. Shower/bathe. Enjoy your showers. Take lots of them, and make them long and hot. Also, baths, if you're a bath person. Long hot baths at all hours of the day. Twice a day, even! With bubbles and oils and magazines.

Oh, sure, it's not like you're forced to stop bathing and showering when the kids come along, but you will find that your bathing/shower regimen is seriously curtailed. You'll skip days - those days when eating and sleeping seem more pressing than cleanliness - and when you finally do get around to performing some ablutions? You'll be scrambling through that shower in less than three minutes because the baby is in his crib, shrieking, or you'll be splashing briefly in a lukewarm tub because the hot water tank got drained when the toddler's tub needed to be refilled, twice, after she a) brought a roll of toilet paper into the tub, because b) her 'poo-poo was coming.'

You will miss long, hot, leisurely baths and showers, I promise you. Enjoy them now.

4. Have a drink or two at lunch. You know how, sometimes, you go out for lunch on a Saturday and someone says, why don't we order a bottle of wine/get margaritas/have a beer? and you spend the afternoon eating and talking and drinking and working up a delicious buzz? And it's, like, totally fine, because you know that you can go home and have a nap and a bath before thinking about what your evening looks like? Yeah, you can't do that when you have small children, because a) you're probably not having lunch anywhere that sells a decent bottle of wine, and b) naps? baths? Ha. See above.

5. Cultivate and appreciate a hangover. Hangovers suck, right? Wrong. Hangovers only suck if you can't take a day off to recover from them. Hangovers, properly tended to, are similar to being sick, only with a little added frisson of shame to make things interesting. When you don't have small children, you can spend your hangover day in bed, watching television and eating potato chips and warding off that buzz of guilt with Oreos and chocolate milk. When you do have small children, you can't do this, for reasons that I've already stated. But you're probably not drinking all that much, either, so it's kind of a moot point.

6. Stay up late/sleep in. See above re: hangovers/being sick. You just really don't get to spend a lot of time in bed when you have small children.

7. Have sex whenever you want. Ditto.

8. Spend a rainy day watching an entire season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There's a theme emerging here, I know: things that you do while curled up in blankets on the sofa or in bed while eating junk food. I can't recommend these activities highly enough. I miss them desperately. If you asked me, would you like to take the family on a Caribbean vacation, or would you like to spend a week, by yourself, just laying around watching DVDs and reading books and eating cookie dough? I would really have to think about that.

Because, seriously: Paris, Barcelona, Tulum, whatever. Whenever I do get around to going back to those places, I'll probably want to take the kids anyway, because I want to see it all through their eyes and I want them to see what I've seen, blah blah blah. But a day off, where I do nothing but lounge and nap and snack and just generally indulge in some lazy-assed laziness? That place, I want to go to there. ALONE.

9. Eat chocolate chip cookie dough (or guilty pleasure food of choice) without any regard for who might be watching. I love cookie dough. I think that cookie dough is better than cookies. But I would strongly prefer that my three-year old eat, say, apple slices and cheese, rather than cookie dough, and so I conceal my cookie dough habit from her as best I can, with varying degrees of success. Just yesterday I was trying to nibble a hunk of chocolate chip cookie dough, torn from the end of a Pillsbury cookie dough package, when I was confronted by my daughter, who demanded to know what I was eating. It's cheese, I told her. Spicy cheese. The kind you don't like.

Those look like chocolate, she said, pointing at the chocolate chips.

They're raisins, I said. Spicy cheese raisins. Then I shoved the rest of it in my mouth and swallowed before she could get a closer look. It kind of ruined my enjoyment of the experience, quite frankly.

10. Take more naps. Seriously. I adore my children, and wouldn't trade them for anything in the world, but really: most days, I would pay serious cash money for a nap.

Or a long hot bath. Or some uninterrupted cookie dough indulgence. Or a day off. I wish that I'd known that back in the days when I could have them all for free.

But now you know. You're welcome.

(Parents: what would you add to this list? Would you take Paris or the Caribbean over Lounge Week? Am I the only lazy-assed layabout out here in momosphere-land? Or would you one-up me and demand two weeks? You know, enough time to watch all back-seasons of Lost and maybe also Battlestar Galactica?)

Monday, Monday

2009-03-16T14:27:00.006-04:00

I have typed six paragraphs this afternoon. I have deleted them all. I have deleted them all because they all said the same thing, and the thing that they said was boring and stupid and self-obsessed and whiny and I couldn't decide whether or not I was willing to indulge in any more self-obsessed whining in this space and so I kept retyping the same blah-blah-blah-tired-malaise-blah crap onto the screen and then erasing that same blah-blah-blah-tired-malaise-blah crap because, really, who wants to read about that? Who wants to write about that?

Bah.

So I decided to spare you my melancholy. Instead, I'll just direct you to some better reading, and go take a B-complex multivitamin:

1) When grandmothers get mad: my mother, frustrated and angry with the New York Times, lets loose on her own blog. (Yeah, you heard me. She has her own blog now. She needs encouragement, so please visit.)

2) You think you're stressed out? Marital discord and sexual abuse and frustrations about babies having babies are being discussed over at the Basement. (Remember the rules over there, people: comment nicely. You're free to disagree with opinions, and tough-love is welcome, but it all needs to be dealt nicely. Civilly. Respectfully.)

3) What do Jim Carrey, Pam Anderson and I have in common, other than a troubling propensity for oversharing? We're all Canadian. So are all these bloggers. Check out our new project (it's still, like, totally in beta, but you should still visit, and cheer us on!)

4) Or, just shut your computer and take a nap. That's what all the cool kids are doing.

Shame And The Written Mom

2009-03-13T10:07:00.008-04:00

Husband: "So, that whole thing, earlier this week? That made you a little crazy, didn't it?"

Me: "Yeah. Kinda."

Husband: "Why? Why did it bother you so much?"

Me: "-------?"

Me: "-------."

I tell stories for a living. Mostly, I tell my own stories, the stories of my motherhood, and reflections on same. I do it because I love to do it. I do it because it has become, in some ways, almost like breathing: automatic, unavoidable, necessary. I do it because I believe in it: making public the lived experience of motherhood is, I think, crucial to empowering mothers, because it allows us to share, out in the open, where everyone can see, what motherhood is really like, once we've stripped away the glossy magazine covers and the laundry detergent commercials and the longstanding cultural insistence that family be private, that mothering be private, that we just hush, and not talk about how hard and how terrifying and how utterly, confoundingly, gloriously complicated this whole experience is.

I also do it because I'm vain, and because I crave approval.

Someone (actually, more than one someone) commented on the post of the other day that if I'm committed to telling my stories publicly, to mothering publicly, then I should just accept that I will face criticism and judgment. Moreover - some commenters added, here and elsewhere - since I am semi-well-known for what I do (I never know how to talk about this semi-sort-of-little-bit well-knownness. Being well known in any capacity on the Internet is, I think, kind of like being well-known in Korea for that one karaoke video that you "acted" in that one time: meaningless to anybody outside of a micro-specialized niche of aficionados, and so very probably meaningless in any broader socio-cultural context. Which is to say, nothing to brag about) it is disingenuous and/or hypocritical for me to claim to be bothered by criticism or judgment or whatever slings and arrows get hurled my way. I blog because I'm shameless, right? And I've earned some recognition for being shameless, right? So what's the problem?

The problem is that I'm not shameless. I sometimes wish that I were: Socrates described himself as shameless, and argued that any true philosopher is by definition shameless, because the true philosopher loves wisdom/truth above all else, and certainly above any concern for social approval. If you're going to interrogate social mores to the fullest extent possible, you need to be above them, at least intellectually. Shame (understood classically) is what we feel when we cower under some disapproving social gaze. It is not - contrary to what someone asserted in comments the other day - what we feel when we know that we've done something wrong (although we might feel shame under those circumstances); it is not necessarily associated with guilt. One can believe whole-heartedly that one is entirely in the right with a given action or behaviour, but still feel shamed by the disapproving reaction of some portion of one's community. We can feel shame for living in poverty, for loving a member of the same sex, for breastfeeding publicly, if any measure of social disapproval is directed at those things. It doesn't mean that we feel guilty for those things, that we feel in any way blameworthy - it means that social approval matters to us, and that social disapproval stings.

I am vulnerable to being hurt by social disapproval. It doesn't matter whether that disapproval comes from one person, or a hundred, or a thousand, or more. I'm vulnerable to it. I fell vulnerable to it earlier this week. (All please note: what follows is not an invitation to direct further opprobrium against anyone who expressed such disapproval. These are my feelings, I am owning them and trying to make sense of them, nothing else.)

As it goes, the shame that I experienced earlier this week had - at least at first - little to do with my writing or my public persona. I felt shamed (note the distinction here: I did not feel ashamed of myself - I felt that I had been shamed, effectively, by the exercise of social disapproval toward some action on my part) for an action that I took in real life, that took place in the arena of lived space as opposed to written space. I did something and was observed and my actions were held up (in a misleading manner, which, as everyone knows by now, bothered me to no end) for interrogation and judged. Which, if that interrogation and judgment had occurred in some private space, or had remained unknown to me, might have been no big deal, but it occurred in a public space and was made known to me and so I felt - in a way that was different from how I would feel, have felt, about being judged for my writing or my online persona (I usually take that in stride. I've had lots of practice) - shamed. My real-life self had been observed doing some real-life thing and that real-life self was judged, publicly, and so that real-life self felt shamed.

My online self, my written self, was, of course, not completely detached from this experience. I made public my act, by Tweeting about it. I fully intended to blog about it. I had most of that post already scripted in my head. I was a little bit in love with it, to be frank: it was going to sort through all of my complicated feelings and ambivalences and reflections about what had transpired. I was going to tell the story as I wanted to tell it. It was not going to be a story about whether nursing another woman's child was the right or wrong thing to do - there was no doubt in my mind that there was nothing wrong with it, even though I knew that it was not something that everybody would do, and even though I knew that some people, even people that I love and respect, would find it off-putting - it was going to be a story about what the experience was like, and about my complicated feelings surrounding it (for example, that it was an act that was both intimate and not intimate, that it felt both ordinary and extraordinary, that I initially felt a little afraid to do it, etc). But I was not able to tell that story, because sometime in the late hours of Monday I heard word that I had already been judged for my actions and I made the mistake of seeking out that judgment and reading it for myself and becoming upset by it and the rest, as they say, is history.

Part of my upset, in other words, was that I felt robbed of my story. It had become someone else's story, told in a different way and with different and misleading details and I no longer had any control over it. It took on a life of its own and my feelings about it changed and I felt that, in addition to having been shamed, I had been robbed of my experience and my ability to define the terms of expressing and sharing that experience. I don't necessarily have any rights to those things, but still: the deprivation of them hurt. Had I written about the experience myself and received shaming comments (by which I do not mean comments that expressed disagreement, but which attached moral judgment to that disagreement, i.e. it is wrong to do that, you were wrong to do that, women who do that are disgusting, etc.) I could have addressed them directly, on my own terms (or, yes, deleted them). I could have incorporated them into the larger story - which was not, as I originally imagined it, about mothers being shamed, but about trust and intimacy and support and community in motherhood, and also, maybe, about eros in motherhood (not in the sexual sense, but, rather, the classical sense. What of our profound physical and emotional connections to our children? How are these disrupted or affirmed by something like nursing another child?) - and controlled the impact of that shaming upon, and its place within, the story that I was telling.

That, obviously, was not to be. And so the story became something else entirely, and I struggled with and against the experience of feeling shamed and with and against the feeling of having lost control of my story, and it made me, yes, a little crazy. A little crazy and a lot exhausted. But beyond that crazy there was reflection, and reflection is good, right? I know now that I'm not as thick-skinned as I thought; I know, too, that I am - rightly or wrongly - possessive of my stories - told or untold - in a way that is much more intense than I understood. I learned more than I wanted to of the personal experience of shame, and I know that I have no desire to revisit it. But I am a writer and a woman who remains committed to sharing, publicly, the experience of her motherhood and of her life, generally, and so I know that critique is inevitable and judgment is inevitable and, probably, some further experience of shame is inevitable. The first I will embrace, as best I can; the second I will tolerate, as best I can. The third, I hope to continue to fight, however weakly, however awkwardly, however ineffectually, because although criticism is good, and judgment to some extent inevitable, shaming - when it is directed at any action or behaviour that is (and I realize that these are fluid concepts) well-intentioned and/or harmless and/or necessary and/or none of anyone else's damn business regardless of how public the action is or how well-known the actor is (Salma Hayek, call me!) - is neither of those things. And the only way that I know how to fight that kind of shame is by continuing to tell my stories as if shaming didn't matter. As if I was, in fact, shameless, in the best sense of that word.

That, and I'm going to make sure that the next time I go traipsing down the Internet rabbit hole in pursuit of stories being told about me? That I just don't.

And With This, We Shall All Move On (Also, Unicorns!)

2009-03-12T09:58:00.008-04:00

I've said my piece, and then some. Am talked out. Have been living too intensely in mah feelings for the last two days. (Oh, hey, guess what? I has feelings! Which, I know: shocking, seeing as I put my life on full display and so must be assumed to have skin thicker than a dinosaur's, but there it is. If you prick me, I bleed. And then I blog about it, and angels weep and bunnies burst into flame and it all, you know, goes kinda badly.)

(I promise to wield my feelings more carefully in the future. Or maybe make sure that they're not loaded before I start waving them around.)

(Anyway.)

I am done with hurt and defensive. Am moving on to happy! Let's all be happy, 'kay? Also: NICE.

I declare it International Nice Day Of Awesomeness And Unicorns. Go eat cake. Maybe say something nice to someone, tell them that they have nice shoes, that they're a good mom or dad, that they have great taste in unicorns. Spread sparkles and rainbows. But mostly, eat cake.

They Shoot Wet Nurses, Don't They?

2009-03-10T10:01:00.014-04:00

Her name was Laura, and I nursed her baby.

We had met, initially, at breakfast and immediately hit it off. We sat down with our coffees and immediately got swept up in a conversation that ran the gamut from the advantages of Twitter over Facebook to the challenges of leaving one's baby for a night. Which is precisely what I had done: I had left my baby to attend a symposium on parenting. And it was, as I told Laura over coffee, in some ways profoundly liberating, and in others completely terrifying. Also, my boobs hurt. Badly. I had forgotten my breast pump and an hour of hand-expressing in the shower that morning hadn't helped much. I didn't mention that part, though. I just said, I miss my baby.

She said, I know. Her own baby - a dark-haired sprite, just one year old - bounced happily on her knee. I would find it hard to leave her.

Yeah.

I liked her. I offered to help her sort out her Twitter/Facebook conundrum, and introduce her to some New York area bloggers. She invited me to a parenting event in Albany later in the month. We chatted throughout the day. The chirps and coos of her baby reminded me of my own chirping, cooing baby, who had accompanied me in the previous month to two conferences, who I was unaccustomed to being without, especially in this environment. My heart hurt, and my breasts ached. They ached. I kept my arms pressed against my chest for most of the morning.

At lunch I fled to my room and tried, unsuccessfully, to hand-express. I returned to the symposium, and sat down near Laura, and another woman that I had met that day. We were supposed to have a conversation about our parenting successes, or something like that. I said, you'll have to count me out. I'm in a lot of pain and don't know what to do. I huddled on the chair, squeezing the rock-hard contours of my chest as tightly as I could without screaming. I explained about the missing breast-pump, the terrible ache of my engorged breasts, the hours remaining before I would see my son. The other woman asked, is there a store nearby? I shook my head - the concierge had told me that there were no pharmacies in the immediate area. Laura cocked her head thoughtfully, and looked at her daughter, who was beginning to fuss. Would you consider, maybe... I know it sounds sorta weird, but... I have no problem with it, and she's hungry... She looked at me, and waited.

Really?

Really.

I paused. My head spun, a little. Would I do this, really? Would it be weird? And then I thought, no. There's nothing weird here. Boobs are boobs. Breastmilk is breastmilk, in all of its liquid gold glory. I bond with my son when we nurse, but it is not because he is latched to my breast. It is because I have him in my arms, and because I love him. Our intimacy derives from that love, and that love would be just as forceful if I fed him with a bottle. So would it be weird if someone else fed him from a bottle? No, of course not. These are only acts of nurture, whether they involve the bottle or the breast. And this is what the breast is made for.

I nodded, and reassured Laura that as a nursing mom I did not take any substances or medications that might compromise my milk.

And so. I took Laura's daughter in my arms and she smiled at me and I lifted my shirt and she happily bent her head and drank her fill.

(Was it weird? No. It was different. Describing the thoughts and emotions that accompany nursing another woman's child requires more space than I have here. It was intimate, but not inappropriately so - no more inappropriately intimate than someone holding your baby and cooing in his ear, whispering sweet baby nothings. If anything, it brought me to a deeper, more visceral understanding of my body as a miracle of biology, as a work of nature that is built to do certain things, one of those thing being - in my case; this is not necessarily true for every woman, and no woman is lesser for not being able to do it - nursing babies. My breasts are not sacred or magical objects, they are not quivers full of milk-arrows that can and must only be directed to blood-offspring. They provide milk. They nourish. They are both utterly mundane and terrifically awe-inspiring for that fact.)

I was grateful - so, so grateful - for Laura and her child; their generosity and open-mindedness and open-heartedness saved me a great deal of pain. At the end of the day, a mother was released from some considerable discomfort, and a child was nourished. Wonderful, no?

Well, as it happens: no. Not for everybody. Someone was watching, and someone did not like what they saw. Someone was watching and decided that what I had done was deviant. Irresponsible. Disgusting. Eww. So she wrote a post describing, in entirely misleading terms (we were total strangers! we had no discussion about it! a lady just blithely and irresponsibly passed her baby to a total stranger without a word! and that stranger - me, if you're keeping track - might have been diseased!) (she has since admitted to me that her representation of what happened was misleading), what she saw and explaining why she thought it was wrong. And it was wrong, from her point of view. Unsanitary. Dangerous. Wrong. Her commenters went even further: why, I might have AIDS! Be homeless! A drug user! Sexually loose! In fact, was what I'd done really any different from wandering into a bar and asking some strange man to grope my titties? Really? Also: AIDS! Or some other horrible virus. That, and my boobs - this helpfully noted by the author - were probably unsanitary, to boot. Also, I'd probably been drinking.

I can't even begin to describe how hurtful it was to read these things. This was me they were talking about. And Laura, who was as lovely a woman as I had ever met. Laura and I had just met, sure, but I think that we both hoped that we were becoming friends. And we share a belief - a healthy, woman-affirming, baby-adoring belief - that we mothers are all in this together, that we're all served and enriched when we trust each other and help each other. She had a hungry baby; I had excruciatingly painful breasts that needed to be released of their milk. We came together with our needs. You're welcome to say that you couldn't see yourself doing this; you are welcome, even, to cringe and shudder a bit in distaste. Whatever. We all have our issues. Just don't flaunt your disgust. And certainly don't use it to publicly shame mothers who make choices that you might not make. What I do with my boobs - what any mother does to ensure that her baby gets fed - is none of your business. And your public expression of disgust and alarm hurts. It hurts me, it hurts all of us. It reinforces the idea that breasts and breastfeeding hover on the very razor's edge of shamefulness, that these things on our chests are somehow, in some way, dirty and icky and bad, unless we operate them under the very strictest rules of propriety (only if they're covered up! only if it's your own baby! only if it doesn't make us uncomfortable! only if WE SAY IT'S OKAY!)

Memo to everybody: these? Are not your boobies. They are mine. And my babies? Also mine. I will nurture and nourish them as I see fit, and I will champion any other mother to do the same. Your disgust, your judgment threatens to undermine us, weaken us, take away some of our power as mothers who demand to make their own way and their own rules. Which, fuck that.

This is MY motherhood. These are MY boobs.

Hands off.

Memo to everybody: in case you missed what I said above - "You're welcome to say that you couldn't see yourself doing this; you are welcome, even, to cringe and shudder a bit in distaste" - I'll say it again (it seems that I need to): you are welcome to disagree with I did, and/or with what Laura did. You are welcome to say that you would not do this. You are welcome to voice a contrary opinion. I encourage it. I'm fascinated by so many elements of this discussion (not least, something that one commenter brought up - trust and community. Under what circumstances do we choose to trust or not trust each other, to take each others' words, or not do? Laura trusted me when I said that I was healthy and not taking anything that might compromise my milk. Perhaps this had everything to do with my appearance, or with the fact that I was obviously a nursing mother, or perhaps just with the fact that she had decided that I was simply worth trusting. I was moved by this. We need more of this kind of generosity of spirit in daily life) and I enjoy hearing different opinions. What I don't like: inappropriately expressed judgment or shaming. That's the whole point of the latter part if this post: shaming hurts everybody. If you're here to express an opinion, respectfully - great. I'll support and defend that. But if you're here to call names or point fingers or say anything that you wouldn't say to someone you loved, then maybe just turn back now.

Let's be kind.

Which means, too - and forgive me if it seems hoity for me to take this on - that everybody is very welcome to NOT direct opprobrium at the blogger mentioned here. This has no doubt been hard on her, and although I remain hurt and (yes, am juvenile) angry, I do not want her to be put through any more of a ringer than she already has. Please. Both she and I deserve some peace around this.

Comments on this post are now closed. I'm happy to read other posts on the subject - yes, even they disagree with milksharing - so if you write about it, please do let me know.

Out Like A Lamb

2009-03-09T13:08:00.004-04:00

I don't understand how this works, but for some reason, getting away by myself for one night this past weekend seems to have caused me to become even more tired than I am usually. Of course, the fact that getting away for that one night involved flying to New York and attending an event that was by some turns thought-provoking and by others head-exploding (more on that at some later date, when head-combustion is less of a threat to the structural integrity of my psyche) and, in the process, suffering near-intolerable nursing-boob-related pain (relieved only under circumstances that, again, must wait until I am considerably less tired to be explained and discussed) goes some distance to explaining why I am so tired. It does not, however, explain why I feel so emotionally fatigued, why I feel so utterly tapped-out, so completely drained of any will or energy to write/create/stand upright.

Spring is pressing upon my window, and I feel in my bones that the coming season will bring good things (a baby who sleeps through the night in his crib, who takes an occasional bottle - both causes were advanced by my night away - renewed energy for me, renewed spirit, sunshine) but at the moment I just feel limp. Lifeless. Maybe this is just late-arriving winter dormancy; maybe it is just March coming in like a depressed lion. I don't know.

Whatever it is, it requires that I sleep. And eat, maybe, and try to not worry, for the moment, about finding ways to express things that have hurt my heart or my brain. That, and watch the entire first season of Gossip Girl over the course of an afternoon while eating chocolate and popcorn. I need a day, or two.

And a little mental space to enjoy me my sunshine.

All About My Mother

2009-03-06T09:42:00.005-05:00

When my nephew, Zachary, was about four years old, my mother pulled a prank on him. This was not at all unusual - according to my mother, children only become fun once they're of an age to be messed with, and her relationships with her grandchildren are guided by this rule - but this particular prank was pretty epic. She staged an alligator attack in one of the closets in her home - complete with stuffed alligator and screaming granny and arm pulled under sleeve to simulate dismemberment - and Zachary was, I do not exaggerate in saying, alarmed by the whole spectacle. Thrilled, too - he talked about it, delighted, for months - but in the moment, mostly alarmed. And mad, in that adorably outraged manner that only small children can effect.

You, he said, pointing at my mother, are BAD. She just laughed.

She is bad, I agreed. She is very bad. She's your bad grandma.

No, he replied, stamping his foot and pointing an accusatory finger at me. She's NOT my bad grandma. She is YOUR BAD MOTHER.

And with that, a parenting philosophy was born, and a blog predestined.

My mom has always been a bad mother. Not in the neglectful sense: she was, for most of my childhood, a stay-at-home mom who baked cookies and led Girl Guide troops and did crafts and told hour upon hour of bedtime stories (and lunchtime stories, and camptime stories, and going-for-a-walk stories, and riding-in-the-car stories...) It's just that with everything that she did, she put her own enjoyment of the activity at the forefront. Childhood, as she understood it, was a time of fun and magic, and dammit if she wasn't going to take advantage of that for herself. She'd waited a long time to throw herself into motherhood, and she wasn't going to waste the opportunity by approaching the whole thing as work. Child-rearing, in her view, was just one long exercise in applied fun and amusement. So it was that the cookies were sometimes made in ridiculous shapes (don't ask) and the crafts were more often reflections of her own interests and obsessions (during the tenure of Pierre Trudeau as Canadian Prime Minister, who she loathed, we made something that she called TURD-ohs, which I'll leave to your imagination) and the stories often took perverse but fascinating turns (it was a long time before I understood that my sister had not been found in a pickle patch and that my bum wouldn't fall off if I unscrewed my belly-button.) She took delight in surprising us and startling us and making the world seem like an unpredictable and fascinating place, filled with benevolent but arm-nibbling monsters and tyrannical fairies and and friendly but overtaxed families of pickle-imps and tiny, turd-like goblins who carried placards decrying the rule of the Liberal Party of Canada.

It was awesome.

I knew, from childhood, that I wanted to be a mother just like her. And I knew from the moment that Zachary called her BAD that that meant being a bad mother.

Which is what I'm trying to be, with some success, I think. She, in the meantime, has moved on to fully embracing her role as a bad grandmother, as the New York Times reported yesterday. (Yeah, you read that right.) Which means that she's still all about the fun and the games and the perversity, but also that she's doing it on her terms. And those terms follow this principle: it is, in anything other than extraordinary circumstances (and she does, for the record, grandma-up if circumstances demand it), only about the fun. She's not interested in being an on-call babysitter (she loves to spend time with her grandchildren, but refuses to regard it as a duty), she's not interested in changing diapers (been there/done that) and she's not interested in having her grandmahood defined according to any conventional, matronly terms. The great thing about being a grandmother, in her opinion, is getting to have all of the fun with little of the labour, and she takes full advantage of that.

Which, again, is awesome, but - as I told the New York Times - it's also a little frustrating, sometimes. I love that my mom is something of an iconoclast, that she's independent and contrary and entirely forthright about who she is and how she wants her relationships to work. But I would be lying if I said that I didn't wish, sometimes, that she was the type of grandma who swooped in and gathered babies to her chest and shooed me off to have a nap while she changed diapers and made lasagna (she makes awesome lasagna, by the way), that she were the type of grandma who demanded babysitting duty, who wanted to just move in and help - or, at least, fly out regularly to help. I have, at times during my pregnancies and my post-partums, just wanted my mommy to step in and make things all better, to just take over and be the apron-clad grandma who tutors her daughter in the ways of motherhood and offers free babysitting on the side. But she's not that - she's always been more of a hug-you-warmly-stroke-your-head-and-help-you-figure-out-how-fix-things-*yourself* kind of mom - and she's always been clear about that and never made any apologies for that and I can't help but think that she wouldn't be the awesome bad grandma that she is if it weren't for that.

My tutelage, at the knees of my mother, in the ways of motherhood has always been about this - this spirit of unconventionality, this emphasis on encouraging independence, this insistence upon doing things, whenever possible, out of joy rather than duty, this celebration of being, in some ways, bad - and I do that education an injustice if I demand that my mother be, as a grandmother, anything other her own bad self.

So I'll manage without the free babysitting and the unsolicited domestic help and the demands for more time with her grandchildren, and let her get on with that bad self.

And I'll get on with mine.

(Am leaving the family for an overnight trip to New York tonight, which is awesome, but, also, terrifying. I've never left Jasper for more than a few hours - and he's never gone more than a few hours without the boob - but we figure that the break will be good for him and for me. We're right about that, right? Right? Am freaking out a little bit.)

*Photo by Arantxa Cedillo (who so graciously overlooked all the mess in my house, and who sweetly exclaimed over my copy of the Todo Sobre Mi Madre film poster, thereby making me feel a little bit as though I'd made up for being a slob) for the New York Times

Truthiness In Muffin-Top Portraiture

2009-03-04T14:13:00.006-05:00

You're going to have to see my previous post for context - or to comment, if you have anything to say, anything at all, about the Glory Of The Previously Only Seen In Soft-Focus Muffin Top - because I'm only going to say this, and I want it to stand alone as my affirmation - my own affirmation, to myself - of my acceptance of my soft, fleshy, beautiful self: this is my belly. It gave life to my children. It turns on my husband. It digests cupcakes. It could be firmer, it could be trimmer, it could fit more neatly into a pair of skinny jeans, but who cares? It is my belly.

And I like it.

(I dare you to post yours. You can do so anonymously at The Belly Project, but if you dare to do it at your own blog, or on Flickr - I even set up a Flickr group, if you're interested - or somewhere a little less anonymous - somewhere where you say hell YEAH this is me, I'd love to know. Send me an e-mail or leave a comment on the previous, less-brave post where, yes, I am taking compliments on my skills with soft-focus photography.)

What Does A Body Good

2009-03-03T10:00:00.006-05:00

This is me, nine and half months post-partum:

In which I reveal my muffin-top, my inability to properly clean mirrors, and the fact that my personal trainer is a Siamese cat.

I'm okay with how I look. Sort of. I think. Some days are better than others. Some days, I look down at the plush landscape of my body - the belly with its rippled hillocks, the mountainous breasts under snowy swaths of cotton - and I think, well, it's a mother's body. It's a new mother's body. It's the body of a nursing mother, a mother who is run ragged by a preschooler and has no time or energy for focused exercise, a mother who has learned the hard and disappointing way that preschooler-wrangling and baby-hoisting do not, contrary to expectation, tone the muscles. It's the body of a mother who is in her thirties, and who does not have personal trainers or dietitians on call. It's not the body of Gwyneth Paltrow, dammit. Wanna make something of it?

Some days, I am accepting of my body; some days, I get defensive. Some days, the line between forgiving myself for not having the body that I had four years ago and berating myself for same gets blurred beyond recognition, for the simple reason that the very idea of needing to ask forgiveness of myself for something that is in no wise a wrongdoing confounds any effort on my part to accept myself, my body, as good. (The very idea is toxic, is it not? That I have transgressed myself for allowing my body to become matronly, for having put my energies into nourishing my baby and raising my little girl instead of shredding my body back to pre-maternal form? That I need to forgive myself for something that I should celebrate, something for which I - I believe this, I do - deserve praise?) I need to move past this idea that the reality of my body is something that I need to explain/justify/forgive. I need to allow myself to just be the physical being that I am - lumpy, imperfect. And to do that I need, maybe, to find ways of thinking and speaking (and writing) about myself that are a little less accusatory (lumpy, imperfect) and a little more celebratory (soft, strong, life-giving, perfectly suited to nourishing babies and cradling children.)

(I have a nearly perfect sense-memory, from childhood, of my own mother's body: the soft curve of flesh on her back, between her breast and her shoulder blade, just under her upper arm, where my hand would rest when I snuggled against her, and the plush pillow of her belly, where I would sometimes rest my head, and the sweet-smelling skin - part Diorissimo, part flour-and-sugar, part soap - at the back of her neck, where I would bury my face to sob over some childish disaster or another, or to rest, or just to feel at peace. It was always soft and fragrant and reassuring - there were no hard edges, no unyielding surfaces - and it enveloped me and comforted me. It still does, when I think of it, of her. I want my children to remember me this way - as a space/place/body of comfort and safety and love.)

And yet... I do want this body, my body, to be my own. I want to return, in some significant way, to the relationship that I had with my body when it was all mine, when I regarded it selfishly and proudly, when I vainly primped it and polished it and when I casually disregarded it and - yes, sometimes - misused and abused it. (The days of subjecting it to diet Coke and cigarettes and all-night clubbing and all the petty and not-so-petty abuses that all-night clubbing entails are long behind me - thank god - but I do long, sometimes, to not pass on that third glass of wine, to not put my body's status as a life-giving, child-nurturing organism first in any consideration of whether to drink more or stay up later or have that fourth espresso.)

So here I am, stuck between wanting to love my body as it is, and wanting to change it, and it's so tempting to throw my hands in the air and wander off in search of another cupcake, or, alternatively, to berate myself for wanting the cupcake and then to drop to the floor and do two or three sit-ups before deciding that it's not worth the effort and getting up and looking for that cupcake anyway, after which I will just feel alternately guilty and self-satisfied. And this is the problem, right? That however much I love my body the way that it is, there's still that part of me that wants to love it more. Rightly or wrongly, I want more from my body - not for my children, not for my husband, not for my shred-happy friends (who I enthusiastically support, by the way) - but for me. Just for me.

Which, translated into a course of action, means this: a cupcake, some coffee and some gentle Sun Salutations. And then, maybe, when it gets warmer, a run around the block, or a bike-ride with my girl. And if I ever get around to shredding, great, but if not? I'll just enjoy the fact that my belly is soft, comforting place on which tired little heads can rest. I'll just celebrate being strong and soft. And then I'll have another cupcake.

And On The Seven-Hundred And Second Day, She Took It All Back

2009-03-01T14:25:00.004-05:00

What I wrote the other day? About sleep? Please disregard.

The gods, they were listening, and they did not approve. That, or you all weren't making the necessary sacrifices on my behalf. Which I understand, sort of, because good sheets (the sleep gods' preferred object of sacrifice) are a thing to treasure, but still. We're talking about sleep here, the loss of which is all the more painful after you've luxuriated in its sweet embrace for a couple of days (and after you've tossed your supply of Ativan, in premature celebration of your reunion with Morpheus and Hypnos who, it turns out, were just in it for a two-night stand, the bastards.)

I am now going into mourning, and, also, am rummaging through the trash to find that bottle of Ativan.

As you were.

And On The Seven-Hundredth Day, She Rested

2009-02-27T12:01:00.009-05:00

Sleep has come to our household.

Sleep has come to our household.

I'm reluctant to say too much about it, or even to explain it (let's just say that a combination of doctorly advice and husbandly heroism and sheer desperation and luck and blessedness probably have much to do with it.) I am terrified that if I even say the words aloud - sleep, glorious sleep, how I have missed you! - the gods will be quick to smite me for my arrogance and ingratitude. So I am reserving any commentary on this issue until I am reasonably certain that the gods are no longer paying attention, or until I have banked enough sleep that it doesn't matter if they take it away from me again.

Because, sleep. Is precious. I want to hold it close and never let it go. So, don't ask me how I accomplished this, what deity I prayed to, what divine strings I had to pull. Also, consider making sacrifices on my behalf. I hear that burnt offerings of 700-thread count Egyptian cotton bedsheets are particularly effective with the lesser Olympian gods.

Not shown: lesser Olympian gods.

In the meantime... my body has become convinced that it is going into hibernation (understandable, really: why else would it suddenly, after nearly a year of never sleeping more than two to three hours at a stretch, find itself curled up in a den of quilts, laying completely, uninterruptedly still for almost seven hours? Two nights in a row? I would make the same mistake) and I find myself wandering around in a sponge-brained, stumble-clutz zombie state, fighting off sleepiness at every moment of the day. Is this normal? Does this pass? And more importantly: is there a cure for this, other than actually, you know, hibernating, which is not option because 24 hours/day minus 7 hours sleeping = 17 hours, during which I'm still on duty. Are multiple shots of expresso my only recourse, or does someone out there have a cure for sleep-induced narcolepsy?

(Listen to me, asking for remedies to ward off sleep. I must be dreaming.)

Unicorns and Sparkles And Spandex And Rollerskates

2009-02-25T21:00:00.004-05:00

This is what you're in for if you support our bid for a Room Of Our Own at BlogHer. I promise:

You think I'm joking? I'm so not.

(Go to this page - you need to login to BlogHer - and click on the link at the top of the page that says, I Would Attend This Session. You don't have to actually attend. You don't even have to be planning to attend BlogHer at all. But if you would attend, if you could - and believe me, you should - then click. Because there will be unicorns. And sparkles.)

Good Girls (Don't) Wear Underpants

2009-02-24T10:00:00.013-05:00

My daughter is a nudist. She is an unrepentant clothes-doffing, underwear-eschewing, bum-baring, breeze-loving, parts-showing nudist. It's sort of awesome, but also a little disconcerting.

She doesn't try to leave the house naked, although she has, in the heat of summer, had more than one naked spree in the yard. She just prefers, while indoors, to conduct her day without clothing. Which, you know, I sort of understand. Sort of. If I was a compact little person and did not fear knocking over coffee mugs with my pendulous boobs, I might enjoy doffing my clothing while going about my day. But I'm not a compact little person, and I might knock over coffee mugs with my pendulous boobs and, also, frighten any passers-by who might look in the windows. So it's just not for me. But for Emilia? It's simply the best condition in which to pass one's time.

So it is that she watches television naked, plays the piano naked, paints pictures naked, reads stories naked, does yoga naked (seriously), dances naked, eats cookies naked, and discourses on the superiority of Diego to Dora and Grover to Elmo and DJ Lance to Barney naked. Which, as I said, is sort of awesome, in a Platonic perfection of the forms kind of way (anyone who has ever doubted the classical argument that there is such a thing as the perfect form of any actual or abstract thing need, I think, only consider the tiny perfect physical form of a very young human being to be convinced that there is some force to that argument.) But it's also a little disconcerting. We are - I am - accustomed to moving through life clothed, for the most part. To all of sudden be accompanied, always (in the home, at least), by a tiny little naked being is a disruption of my usual way of doing things. It is to be thrust, suddenly, into a landscape that bears no small resemblance to an all-toddler performance of A Midsummer's Night Dream, full of naked sprites wearing funny hats and masks and giggling maniacally.

It's a little strange.

I love that my daughter so exults in her physical being, that she is so unreservedly comfortable with her physical self. And yet I catch myself, sometimes, pestering her about sweaters and socks and underpants. Aren't you cold? I ask. Would you like to put on socks? And, where are your underpants? Let's put on underpants, shall we? You love your underpants!

And she rolls her eyes at me and says, no.

No, they're lost.

No, they blew off.

No, because my pachina can't breathe.

No, because my pachina gets scared in the dark.

No, because Swiper stole them.

All of which are entirely reasonable explanations for the absence of underpants, I suppose, but still: that she finds it necessary to justify her nudity to me - and that she demonstrates no end of creativity in coming up with such justifications - makes me feel, I don't know, a little guilty? When I pester her about putting something on - sweater, socks, underpants - I worry that I am nudging the boundaries of shaming. That she feels compelled to defend her choice to be naked, that she constructs ever more elaborate explanations for shunning underwear (my pachina gets scared in the dark!) - is that evidence that she struggles under the gaze of an over-anxious, prudish mother? Am I sending the wrong message (naked is wrong, naked is bad, naked is not how we live, good girls don't get naked, good girls wear underpants), even though I don't intend to send that message, even though I don't want to send that message?

I don't worry about her becoming a lifelong nudist. I worry about her getting cold. I also worry about her peeing on the couch, which hasn't happened yet, but still: one particularly engrossing episode of Global Grover and all the Scotchguard in the world won't save our off-white sofa. I don't worry about her being too fond of nudity. I don't know that it's possible to be over-fond of one's own nudity. Her pleasure in her own nakedness is, I think, lovely. I love she loves her own skin, that she is most comfortable in the raw, that she curls up like a hairless cat on the sofa and tucks her feet under her bum and snuggles against her blankie and then waves one tiny hand imperiously to demand a cookie and some milk, both of which taste undeniably better when the crumbs and dribbles can roll down one's bare chest and get caught in one's navel. I love that she loves her little self, that she exults in her physicality, that she takes joy in feeling the heat from the fireplace warm her naked bottom, or the scratch of the wool rug against her bare belly, or the soft curve of the sofa pillows against the skin of her back. I love that she is so unabashedly, physically she. So I resolve to not worry about shame or unshame and to just let her be.

But if she pees on my couch, those underpants are going on with duct tape.

Love Knows No Tact

2009-02-22T22:49:00.005-05:00

Me: So? What do you think?

Husband: Does it say, belongs to Kyle?

Me: No. It means, love knows no order.

Husband: Not, belongs to Kyle?

Me: No.

Husband: I suppose I can live with it.

Mama Went To Texas And...

2009-02-21T11:19:00.004-05:00

One thing led to another, and... well, you know.

Ink was spilled.

Dark/Light

2009-02-18T23:38:00.004-05:00

I wrote the other day that babies are hard on a marriage. I also said that babies bring couples closer together, that they create a new space of love in which a couple can really plumb the depths of intimacy and attachment and feeling. I said that my husband and I love our lives as parents, that we would not trade this for anything - but that got lost, a little, under the weight of my worry and my strain.

I hope that I did not frighten anyone who wonders what it will be like to have children, or more children. (I say that I hope, but I know, because I was told, that some were made afraid. I'm sorry for this, a little.) I hope that none of my posts cause such fear, or that if they cause fear, it is only momentary, and reflective. I've only ever intended that my writing be honest, that it tell a true story. And the true story of motherhood is that it is hard, very hard, sometimes almost too hard.

Almost.

Almost, but not quite. It is never - for me - too hard, because there is always this: the saving power of the love that I feel for my children, my joy in their beauty and their brilliance, my passion and my affection for my husband who is now so much more than husband, so much more man, so much more human, than I ever imagined he could be (and yet, at the same time, so exactly how I imagined.)

So: if the stories that I tell here are sometimes sad or dark or wistful or fearful or filled with anxiety, well, that's because that's the truth of many of my stories. But I hope that it is also clear that there is happiness here. That although I am tired (so tired) and I am fitful, I am also happy.

(Doubt it? I have this. Have no doubt that there is much happiness, much laughter, in my life.)

Most of you who are parents, you understand this. Those of you who are not parents, you might understand this, too. If you understand that all things related to love can be complicated, and difficult, you understand this. Or you will. I hope that you will.

The Amazing Survivor Race Challenge: Parenting Edition

2009-02-17T09:25:00.005-05:00

Babies are hard on a marriage.

It's sort of ironic, really, seeing as babies are so often understood (rightly or wrongly) to represent core bonds of a life partnership, but still: for every measure of centripetal force that they exert upon a relationship and bind partners more closely, babies exert a half measure - maybe more - of centrifugal force, pulling those partners away from their center. It's true. If I understood Newtonian physics well enough to explain it fully, I would, but I don't, so just trust me on this: babies bring couples closer together and pull them apart in a million teeny tiny and not so teeny tiny ways, and the yank and tug of this phenomenon can exert an uncomfortable pressure upon a spousal partnership.

Pets do not have this effect, I've noticed, possibly because you can just put them out in the yard when they start to get difficult. You cannot do this with babies. When caring for babies gets difficult, you can only turn to your partner (if you have one - I cannot begin to address single parenthood here, other than to say that I have NO IDEA how people do that. Superheroes, seriously) and negotiate some means of coping and hope to hell that you can figure this shit out together. So when the moments come - and they do come - when you realize that you are not figuring this shit out together - that you're either not figuring it out together, or you're not figuring it out, period - it can be hard. You can put it down to lack of sleep, to lack of alone time, to sheer exhaustion, but it still feels the same: you're struggling. And you're not always struggling together. And in those moments when you're struggling apart... those moments feel isolating. Lonely.

The first baby isn't - I don't think - as hard on the relationship as the second: with your first baby, the novelty of the situation can cause you to overlook or ignore the fact that you and your spouse are almost never together alone, that you almost never sleep, that your romantic dinners for two have become mac-and-cheese for three, that your bed has become the gathering place for a tangle of toddler and toys and cats. The first baby can be a great romantic quest, like backpacking together through Europe - full of all variety of trials and discomforts, but nonetheless an adventure, one that is full of new experiences that you are sharing! Together! So who cares if the hostels are crowded or you're eating bad food or the pack on your back is crippling you with its weight? You're having an adventure together, and it is awesome.

But when the second baby comes along, you've been there and done that and sent the postcards and you're just not as open to feeling romantic about this whole journey as a quote-unquote adventure. The novelty has worn off. The hostel conditions - the noise, the squalor, the bathroom shared with too many other, messy people - no longer represent adventure, and their effect on you - sleeplessness, disorientation - is harder to bear. You're still thrilled to be doing this again - you love so much about this journey - but you're older now, and more tired, and the sleepless nights and bad food wear you down so much more quickly and so you look at each other and you both wonder why the other hasn't booked you into a plush hotel already.

And this is where everything - including the extended travel metaphor - breaks down, because there are no plush hotels in New Parentland. New Parentland is not a backpacker's Europe; it's not even the outer reaches of the former Soviet Union, where at least they have beds and a limitless supply of vodka. New Parentland is more like a deserted island. It's survival conditions, no matter who you are, unless you have the means and the foresight to have brought an entourage that will attend to your basic needs and forage for your food. There's no straightforward solution to your discomfort here; there are no resources beyond what you can gather and/or jerryrig together. Neither you nor your travelling companion has it within their power to make things easy. With the first child, if you're lucky, this is like Blue Lagoon: you're so enthralled with the romance of the situation that you don't care that you are - figuratively - wearing loincloths and drinking out of coconuts. You might even find that kind of thing sexy. But by the time you're on baby number two? The loincloths are starting to feel scratchy and you're sunburnt and sleeping on the sand is making your back hurt and that other person is eating your coconut, dammit. You are on Survivor: Child Island and it's only a matter of time before you turn on each other.

My husband and I haven't turned on each other (*knocks wood*), and we wouldn't reverse the steps that brought us here to our own, personal Child Island. We find pleasure in this place; we bask in the sunshine here. But still: we find it challenging, coping with the hardship. I find it challenging. Once the chores are done and the children are tended to and this place falls silent, I am so exhausted, so spent and worn, that I want only to crawl under the blankets and escape - with a book, with some Ativan - and rest and I know that he experiences this as a withdrawal. But then I - perversely - resent him for experiencing it as withdrawal. I'm so tired, I tell myself. This is so hard. He should get that. I tell him that this is so hard and that I am so tired and he tells me that he is tired too and instead of feeling sympathy, I feel frustration. It's harder for me, I think, and the resentment starts to burble. And then I catch myself and tell myself that hard is hard is hard and just because I have spent whole days and nights on my own wrangling our two creatures and lived to tell about it doesn't mean that he can manage the same thing and in any case he gets up at night and first thing in the morning with the baby, right? And then I think, maybe if we just had some time together, just the two of us - or better, what if I had some time for me, just me, alone, and THEN we had some together just the two of us ?- but then I immediately think, why doesn't he make that happen? Why must it be ME?

And then I worry us about turning on each other. I worry about even considering the possibility that we might turn on each other, because once upon a time - in the carefree days before we embarked upon this strange and wonderful and impossibly challenging journey - I would not have imagined for a second that we could turn on each other, that we could be anything other than perfect allies. (This is the tragic innocence, to borrow another pop culture analogy, of couples on the Amazing Race; the bluster behind their bold claims, before running a single step, of being a brilliant team, of knowing that they'll work together perfectly, masterfully, that they will, as a unit, dominate the race. This bluster invariably end in shouts and tears in the empty corridors of this airport or across the field of that Road Block challenge, and we the audience murmur, from the security of our armchairs, that we knew that they would fall apart and, also, that wouldn't happen to us.) We are allies, my husband and I, we are, but that I doubt our alliance for even a second weighs upon me heavily, presses the air from my lungs.

It weighs upon me, because how could I feel any doubt? He is wonderful, my husband, really wonderful, and I love him so much and am so, so lucky to have him as my partner. But, still, also, there is this: I am tired, and I want to be carried, just for a little while, just until I get my strength back. And this is where the doubt resides: in my fear that he might be getting tired of carrying me, that although I know he will give me his last coconut, he might resent doing so. That I might resent his resenting doing so. That that resentment might build, and that we'll end up yelling at each other across the crowded airport corridor that is family life or turning on each other in our own personal Tribal Council. That I want a day off, alone, just by myself, just taking care of myself, more than I want a day alone with my husband - and that I want him to want that - hurts my heart, in a way, because I do want time alone with him, just me and him, with no children attached to our bodies and no cries ringing in our ears, time to reinforce our alliance, our team, so that we can continue to endure the challenges of this island, this race, this reality, with grace and humor. I really, really do. I just need to be rested first. I just need to be carried for a while, or allowed to stop and rest.

We've come this far together. We know that our alliance, our partnership, is the key to everything. Our alliance, and maybe a few naps, some liquor and an all-expenses-paid holiday somewhere warm, with soft beds and babysitters and, yes, coconuts.

That's all.

You Know You're A Redneck Parent When...

2009-02-13T12:25:00.005-05:00

1) You've bathed your kid in a bucket.

2) You've answered the door with no shirt on and your nursing bra flaps down.

3) You've carried your baby around Nashville with paper towels stuffed down his pants because you forgot diapers and he crapped himself in Jack's BBQ and oh god they just don't sell diapers in downtown Nashville and please, please, does anyone have a maxipad even???

4) You put your baby in cowboy boots and a Willie Nelson onesie for a New York Times photo shoot. We have MAD REDNECK CRED 'round here, yo.

(Now, go here and tell me how you know that you're a Redneck. Because we should all aspire to be like this lady.) (Yeah, that means put comments there - it's a Redneck Round-Up, y'all!)

Who's The Dummy, Mummy?

2009-02-10T14:05:00.008-05:00

Rachel Cooke thinks that I'm a dummy. Okay, maybe not me specifically, but women like me. Women who talk or write incessantly about their children and their experience as mothers. Women who, when asked how they're doing, launch into a extended narrative about sleeplessness and breastfeeding and hormones and Xanax. Women who are - how did she put it? - "boring, selfish, smug and obsessed with motherhood."

Like I said: women like me.

"Once upon a time," says Cooke, "educated women fought to separate their identities from the ideal of mother, knowing that until the two came to be seen as wholly distinct they would never be taken seriously; and, in any case, who wants to be defined by only one aspect of their life? In the past decade, however, a growing number of women have reverted, 50s-style, to identifying themselves primarily, vociferously, and sometimes exclusively, as mothers. They fetishise childbirth, and obsess about all that follows it, in a way that is almost, if not quite, beyond satire, and which makes me feel a bit sick."

Which, whatever. So she's not interested in mothers; I can live with that. I wasn't all that interested in motherhood before I became a mother, either. But there's a very great difference between lacking an interest in a subject and asserting that any discussion or celebration of that subject is somehow subversive of broader social goods. That someone, anyone, lacks an interest in the motherhood does not mean that the celebration of motherhood or extensive discourse on the subject of motherhood represent broader social problems for which mothers should be held responsible. I mean, seriously. I'm not interested in hip-hop, but would it make sense for me to say, on that basis, that pop-cultural attention to hip-hop is fetishistic and sick-making? I've certainly had the experience - pre-motherhood - of being trapped in conversations with women who went on at length about the details of childrearing and wondering how I was a) going to escape, and b) scrub my brain of the mental image of mustard poo, but I've also had that very same experience with people who only want to talk about politics (an occupational hazard as a former academic specializing in political philosophy) or cats or global warming. The fact that those subjects, in excess, cause my eyes to roll back in my head does not mean that anyone who is passionate about those things is an out-of-control fetishist. It only means that I am not interested.

Like any reflective bigot, Ms. Cooke asserts that she is not attacking all mothers - some her best friends are mothers! but they're, like, the smart kind who you don't mind hanging out with! - just the smug, stupid mothers who talk too much about being mothers. Because, you know, it's not that mothers as a community are sickening in their fetishistic attachment to the terms and trappings of motherhood. It's that so many of them are, and Ms. Cooke is starting to find it overwhelming. Can't we all just shut up already about childbirth and our children and everything having to do with our children? Don't we realize that the more we talk about this stuff, the more stupid and smug and selfish and Stepford we sound? Can't we see that we are setting women back? And, also, nauseating everybody in the process?

This is what is, to me, most hateful about Cooke's diatribe: the assertion that there is not only something unseemly and uninteresting about the discourse of motherhood, but also something fundamentally unfeminist about it. This is Linda Hirschmann Lite: devotion to motherhood is somehow not deserving of respect, because it limits - limits - women to a life experience that has been dictated, in some part, by the terms of their biology. This is biology-as-destiny, this is femininity-as-enclosure: this is what prevents us from being free, like, men, to do whatever we want. This is an old feminist argument (one, if you're interested, that has roots in Marx), that women need to be liberated from their biological destinies - from the almost-inevitable biological condition of motherhood - so that they might work and contribute to society like men, because only then do they meaningfully contribute to society, only then are they members in full, only then are they interesting.

This is bullshit. Women do not become free by rejecting motherhood, by ignoring motherhood, by keeping the stories of motherhood hidden behind the veil, the wall, the enclosures of the private sphere. Women become free, in some significant part, by celebrating motherhood - by celebrating parenthood (men love their children too, you know, and some might even choose to make parenting their primary occupation, if it were more generally accepted and recognized as important work) - by demanding that it be as valued a part of civil society as politics and business and the arts and, you know, whatever else people like Rachel Cooke and Linda Hirschmann deem to be important and interesting. Celebrating motherhood doesn't mean that every woman must choose motherhood as part of her life experience - we celebrate all variety of callings, without insisting that any of them are necessary for every individual's self-fulfillment - it only means that we all of us recognize that mothering - parenting - and all that it involves is important work. Which means, in turn, we recognize discourse on those subjects as important discourse.

This is not to say, of course, that every anecdote about poo explosions in public places or every detailed explanation of the effects of sleep deprivation on the post-partum mother is in itself a critically important contribution to public discourse. It is to say, rather, that the sum of these stories is important: that in telling these stories, and in recognizing these stories as legitimate and important, we are sharing - we are making public, we are lifting the veil on - the experience of motherhood and demanding that it be taken seriously as something that contributes to - that is, arguably, the backbone of - civil society. Not every one of these stories will be interesting to everyone; many will be interesting only to a very few. But they are our stories, the stories of our parenthood. And we are, in telling these stories, telling each other - telling other mothers, telling fathers, telling future mothers and fathers - that there is no need to be (and every harm in being) isolated in one's experience of parenthood. We are telling each other that there is community in parenthood, and that such community should be sought out and embraced.

Cooke summarizes her argument with this statement: "all this droning on about baby and toddler world is not, in the long run, doing any of us any good. For me, and many other women, it's boring and selfish, and it implicitly casts judgment on the way we choose to live our lives." I'm sorry that she feels that way. I, for one, am quite capable of listening to my husband's colleagues drone on about the TV industry without feeling like I'm being judged for not being in that industry. I am also, for that matter, quite capable of listening to childless friends talk about their careers and their active social lives and their travel adventures without feeling as though they pity me for always having a baby strapped to my chest. If she feels judged, that's her issue, not a larger social problem that needs to be nipped in the bud. Indeed, as I've said above, this compulsion to silence mothers, to insist to them that their stories are not worthy of sharing in public spaces, to demand that they just shut up already about their silly children and their silly fascination with organic baby food and sleep training and post-partum depression - this is the larger social problem. It's a terrible social problem. It does more to keep women silenced and isolated than pretty much anything else I can think of.

So if anyone should just shut up already and stop complaining and judging and holding women back with her need to control what women talk about... well, you know who you are.

/rant.

(Thanks to Karen for the tip on the story. Funny how she knew just exactly what would make my head explode.)

A Thousand Words

2009-02-09T10:46:00.005-05:00

Jasper at Blissdom Conference, Nashville, February 2009

How he looks in that photo? That's how I felt at Blissdom this weekend. Bemused, fascinated, rumpled. Bright-eyed despite the sleeplessness. Happy to be in thick of things despite feeling, at times, overwhelmed.

It was lovely. I'm exhausted and at a loss as to how to describe such a weekend of friendship - old and new - and ideas and laughter - so much laughter - and outlaw diaper changing and sleepless nights with teething babies and cowboy boots and did I mention friends?

Maybe after I nap. Maybe not. Sometimes, it's okay to be without words. And in any case, that picture is worth a thousand.

(Now, am going to sleep for hours and hours and hours and hours. And dream of cowboy boots and babies and Little Debbie's Yellow Cake and sweet Nashville sunshine. Night-night)

*Gorgeoustastic photo by the extraordinarily talented and sweet-as-pie Will.

Too Shy, Shy; Hush, Hush...

2009-02-06T08:53:00.003-05:00

I am in Nashville, for Blissdom. Nashville seems nice so far, if the airport and hotel are anything to go by. I've been here for about fourteen hours. I've slept about 45 minutes of that time.

I don't say that to solicit sympathy. I knew that I wouldn't sleep on this trip. Me, the baby, no husband to run interference, no Ativan to get me through the rough spots. I knew what I was in for.

But what I hadn't given any thought to was this: I need to be a fully functioning, coherent grown-up today. And I need to not succumb to social anxiety and that whole awkwardness in groups thing and the like because? In a barely functioning, sleep-deprived state, that shit will bring me down. (You didn't know? I am painfully shy in social situations. I am very, very good at covering it up. VERY good. Years of speaking at conferences and lecturing in a university have given me mad people skillz. But if you see me in a group and I seem to be bursting with confidence and moxy? I am, on the side, fraying the sleeve-ends of my shirt with nervous fingers, anxious as a thirteen year old at her first dance. Seriously.)

So here I am, all set to meet a couple of hundred new people, and speak to them coherently about writing or whatever, and I can barely form a sentence or put one foot in front of the other.

This bodes well.

All of which is to say, if you're not in Nashville, send me your best survival wishes. And if you are here, in Nashville, at Blissdom? Go easy on me.

The Other Side Of Anger

2009-02-04T10:06:00.006-05:00

Before I had children, I understood that parenthood would be challenging. I read a lot of books about it, actually, because I was a little worried. Would the first months of my child's life be like boot camp? Would I go insane from sleep deprivation? Was I going to be comfortable breastfeeding? Would I gag at all the shitty diapers? Could I do this? I was pretty confident that I could do it. I figured that I was about as well-prepared as any mother could be, and, besides, I was not in this alone. My husband would be right there with me, doing his share and gagging at runny poos. We would be doing it together, and together, we would be strong.

And then Emilia was born and it was, as expected, hard. And my husband was there, just as I had expected him to be, and he provided all the support that I could hope for. He provided all of the support that I could hope for, and more, and yet: I found myself feeling very, very angry. At the situation. At him. Mostly at him.

I was struggling with post-partum depression, which of course exacerbated things, but it was more than just a byproduct of the depression. It was a deep, almost aggressive, resentment that burbled up in my throat - burning, like an acid - and choked me, every time that he walked out the front door to go to work, or to pick up milk or cat food or whatever, his arms swinging freely, his keys dangling casually from his fingers. Maybe I'll just stop by the barber for a hair-cut, he'd say. Or, I'll swing by the grocery store on the way home from work. Or, I'm headed out to work; call me if you need anything; love you! The bastard.

He could just walk out the front door, just walk right out and head off to wherever, totally unencumbered, totally unburdened. He was free. I was not free. I could not even go to the bathroom without undergoing complicated rituals to ensure that the baby would not scream for the five minutes that I would be out of her line of sight (having failed to master this activity, I soon resorted to waiting until she had one of her two eight-minute naps of the day, or jerryrigging the baby carrier so that I could hold her and pee at the same time.) If I wanted to leave the house, even to venture the half-block to the bakery for a take-out cappuccino, I had to plot my outing like a military manoeuvre, making certain that my plans were in accordance with nap schedules and feeding times and stocks of supplies and the appropriate alignment of the stars. I was not free, and I resented my husband's freedom with a fury that sometimes made me tremble. I was angry. I was sometimes not sure whether I was angry at him, or myself, or the universe, or all three. Usually I settled for just being angry at him.

Last week, the New York Times reported a story - originally posted on Parenting.com, later covered by Jezebel - about moms of young children feeling anger toward their husbands. According to the original story, nearly half of all moms who took a survey about anger reported that they "get irate with their husbands" at least once a week. Fully half of them described their anger as "intense." Moms, the study concludes, are mad. Which, whatever. I could have told them that.

The story that I would tell about this anger, however, might be a little different than the one told in the Times. The Parenting.com story focuses on the imbalanced distribution of parental responsibility in most households, and their characterization of that imbalance rang perfectly true for me ("We carry so much of this life-altering responsibility in our heads: the doctors’ appointments, the shoe sizes, the details about the kids’ friends. Many dads wouldn’t even think to buy valentines for the class, for example, or know when it’s time to sign kids up for the pre–camp physical... We’re the walking, talking encyclopedias of family life, while dads tend to be more like brochures." Yes, I said to myself, reading this. YES.) But I'm not convinced that that imbalance necessarily leads - must lead, should lead, justifiably leads - to rage directed at one's spouse.

Is it really my husband that I'm angry at when I find myself trapped (yes, that's how it feels sometimes) alone inside the house with a squalling baby? When I'm awakened for the umpteenth time in the night by a baby who won't take a bottle? When my husband reveals that he doesn't know when Emilia should visit the dentist, or when Jasper should go in for his next well-visit? When he complains about being tired or overwhelmed while I'm scrounging in the medicine cabinet for the Ativan? Sure, I feel angry - I sometimes feel very angry - but is my anger really directed at him? And if it is directed at him - should it be?

My husband is not - I am pretty sure about this - acting maliciously when he walks out the front door to go to work. And he does not actively try to avoid retaining certain information about the household schedule or the children's appointments or how many Valentines Emilia needs to bring to school next week. Nor is he making a conscious effort to disregard how challenging things are for me when he complains about his own exhaustion. Sure, he'll never be as exhausted as I am - nobody will ever be as exhausted as I am - but that doesn't preclude him from experiencing his own sleep-deprivation-related discomforts. So why do I feel anger about these things? These things are not his fault. He's a supportive husband and father, but he's got his own challenges to deal with: his job pays the mortgage, his cooking skills keep us from living on soup and donuts, his ability to stay awake at night and get up early in the morning to wrangle baby is required to keep his sleep-deprived wife from going batshit crazy. This new household order isn't a walk in the park for him, either. So why do I - and, presumably, half of the married mothers in North America - blame him for the seeming imbalance in that order?

My point: it's not my husband's fault that I carry most of the burden of responsibility for caring for our kids. It's just the way that it is. I could blame him - and believe me, sometimes, in my darker moments, I do - but mightn't it be more reasonable to blame society's patriarchal hangover? Or even more reasonably: mightn't I blame the choices that we have made as a couple, that I have made as a woman and mother? We made choices as a couple that established a certain division of labor in our household, and we agreed upon those choices. I'm a stay-at-home/work-at-home mom. The children are in my care for a far greater share of the day than they are in his. If he didn't work, things would be different. If he lactated and could breastfeed, things would be very different. If parenting were just an easier gig, things would be different. I could justify my anger as rightfully directed at him if I felt - if I believed - that he just didn't take the care of our children as seriously as I did, or if he actively shirked parental duty and left the burden of work unfairly to me. But he doesn't, and so I can't.

And my guess is that this is very probably true for many women. Pressed with the question, do you get angry at your husband?, any one of us might say, "hell yeah, I get angry!" Do you feel that you work harder in caring for your children, that he doesn't do as much as you do, that things are easier for him? "Yes, yes and yes!" Does that make you mad? "YES!" But are we really mad at our husbands and partners, or are we mad at the circumstances of our parenting arrangements? Are we really a continent of enraged mothers, silently seething at our significant others, filled with justifiable rage at their failure to measure up to our needs and expectations? Or do we all just find parenting really, really hard sometimes - not to mention isolating - and so just fall easily into the trap of resenting our partners for not - from our blinkered perspective - having it as hard? When we talk about being angry at our spouses, aren't we really, many of us, talking about being angry about hard this motherhood business can be, and about what a drag it is that the larger share of the burden of childcare has, over the course of human history, fallen to women? You know, as the ones with the boobs? Is this really about our own husbands at all? Or this about long-standing, world-historical tensions concerning divisions between men and women generally?

None of this is to say that my husband doesn't f*ck up sometimes, nor that he is perfectly attentive to my every need as his parenting partner. Sometimes he's just an outright doofus about things. And so I feel completely justified in feeling a teeny bit - maybe a whole lot - pissy when he asks why I can't just go to sleep earlier, or maybe nap when the baby is napping, or when he doesn't put away the laundry or when he says oh, hey, would you mind terribly if I just went out for a while to do whatever and left the kids with you? But the larger issues, the challenges and obstacles and difficulties that provoke real anger and deeper frustration: these are not his fault, and my emotional struggle with these should not be his cross to bear. This should be our shared burden, one that we manage, in part, by acknowledging that we both ache from the strain and and that we both buckle, sometimes, from the weight.

And then he should mix me a drink and rub my feet. Then we'll be good.

Where are you at with this whole angry-at-mah-hubby thing? Are you one of the 50% of the population that's filled with rage? Would a foot-rub help? Is it just me, or does even talking about mother-rage feel discomfiting? Like, if I had a good feminist household I wouldn't even be talking about this crap because dude would have a prosthetic, lactating breast machine strapped to his chest and would be nursing our baby himself while I added a few more degrees to my CV and maybe found a cure for cancer? GAH. Maybe I get angry because I fetishize the inside of my own head. That shit's tiring.

The Science Of Sleep

2009-02-03T00:11:00.000-05:00

I think that I've said it here before, but I'll say it again: I'm exhausted. I'm going to say more about it right now, so if the topic of my slow spiral into sleep-deprived madness bores you, click away now.

When Emilia was a baby, I was pretty certain that I had the night-time sleep thing figured out. She refused, for the most part, to nap during the day, but was sleeping through the night from infancy and so I counted myself lucky. More than lucky: I was smart. I knew what I was doing, if only in this one area of motherhood. There were a lot of things that I couldn't figure out (like naps, which I bitched about heartily), but getting baby to sleep at night? I knew all about that. When I spoke to other moms who couldn't get their babies to sleep through the night, I shared my tactics - consistent bedtime routine, liberal use of loveys and binkies, a willingness to let baby fuss it out - and nodded sympathetically when they said that these tactics didn't work for them. I nodded sympathetically, but secretly, I wondered: were they doing it wrong? They must be doing something wrong. My formula worked like magic. Of course it was because it was exactly the right formula, and not because Emilia was simply disposed to sleep at night. I wasn't just lucky. I was doing something right.

I was wrong. I was lucky. Mostly. I mean, my tactics certainly helped - Emilia's bedtime routine was made all the more straightforward for its consistency and its props. She did need to fuss it out sometimes, and my willingness to allow that helped us through some difficult periods. But mostly? She was, and is, a good night sleeper.

Jasper is not. And nothing that I do seems able to change that.

I've tried everything - routine, props, fussing it out, crying it out, nursing before sleep, not nursing before sleep, swaddling, not swaddling, vodka (for me) - and then tried it all again, and none of it has worked. Sometimes he settles easily into his crib, sometimes he will only fall asleep in his car seat, but regardless of how he falls asleep, he does not stay asleep. He wakes up, always, a couple of hours after going down, and then he will not return to sleep unless he is tucked in at the breast, in bed, with me, and then he will wake up, invariably, every two hours or so to nurse or just to grab at me and make sure that I am still there. If I sneak away to another room - as I have been doing most nights, just to remove the temptation of boob and try to extend the minutes between wakings - he still wakes up, and yells Ma-Ma-Ma-Ma-Ma until I return.

And so it goes, night after night. The husband gets up with him in the mornings, when he can, which affords me a couple of hours of rest, but beyond that there is not much to be had. I stumble forward into each day, ever more tired, ever more slow, ever more blurred and bleary and dazed. I'm coping, in a way - there are worse things, certainly, than to be exhausted from caring for a beautiful, healthy, ever-happy baby - but still: I look ahead at the days and weeks and months of Jasper's babyhood and wonder whether I am fated to remain awake for the duration. And I wonder whether I will stay sane.

Of course I will stay sane. I'll be fine. Millions of mothers before me have endured sleeplessness. Many, indeed, have done it without the advantages of helpful husbands and king-sized beds and spare rooms and Ativan prescriptions. So I resist the urge to proclaim myself overwhelmed unto defeat. If my own mother could do it, so can I.

What I am having more trouble overcoming: the nagging worry that I am not just unlucky, that I am, in fact - against all evidence to the contrary - doing something wrong, that I am missing some vital resource, some work of science or art or magic that would change things, that would make my baby sleep at night. I think back to the nights of Emilia's babyhood, when I would stand outside her door and listen to her breathing and fight the urge to go in and - the mind boggles, it just boggles - wake her up to snuggle her, to have more time with her in her babyness, and I wonder whether that was a different woman, a different mother, a mother who knew things, things that I do not know, or have forgotten.

And then I wonder whether I am going crazy, and I shake the Ativan bottle to see how many pills are left and I calculate the odds of Jasper deciding to sleep through the night before they run out.

And I tell myself that I am very probably not that lucky.

Okay, maybe I'm a little bit lucky. It's just, you know, it'd be nice to look at them and not have them be blurry.

(I apologize - do I need to apologize? - for turning off comments so much recently. I've been doing it when a) I know that I need to back away from the computer - to, you know, maybe sleep a little bit - and won't be able to read comments, and b) when I'm just posting video of the babies, because that whole thing where you give way too much thought to whether people are going leave comments saying how cute they are and ohmigod what if no-one says they're cute? I don't like that. So I avoid the issue altogether. Feel free to tell me that you think that this is terrible of me. Because I worry about that, too.)

Grace In Small Things: Stolen Moment In Dark Of Night Edition

2009-02-01T00:01:00.008-05:00

It is the middle of the night. I am in a dark hotel room, my babies asleep within arms reach. I am listening to them breathing. I am listening, and I am loving the sound, the reassuring rhythm of the sound of their sleep. They will wake - sooner, later - and I will wrap my arms around them and kiss them and hush them and we will snuggle together and they will sleep and I will lay awake and we will pass the night and we will be happy, all of us. Even me, in my tiredness. I will be happy. I am happy

We have taken a little holiday, just we three. We have spent the day playing and eating and playing and swimming and eating and playing, just us, and then with good friends, and then just us again. There has been no Internet, no television, no distraction. Just us. Just us, and the untrammeled joy of just being just us.

Tomorrow, we'll play some more. And eat some more and swim some more. And then we'll go dancing. And we will laugh, a lot.

And then we'll go home and we will hug and kiss our fourth and we will wade back into the mess and busy-ness of home and work and life. Laptops will spring open. Televisions will be turned on. The buzz and hum will resume.

But we will be happy, because we will know that we can always turn off the buzz and hum, that we can always escape, even if we never step out the front door. Because we are each other's greatest joy.

We always know that. Sometimes it takes a little break to remind us, but we always know that.

We always know.

Edited, late Sunday: from the vantage point of the day following an entirely sleepless night, this sentence - "and they will sleep and I will lay awake and we will pass the night and we will be happy, all of us. Even me, in my tiredness. I will be happy" - reads like 50% nonsense, 30% delusion and maybe 20% rambling sentimentalism. The sentimentalism, fine - I do adore my children and I do consider myself happy and I am so glad to have taken a technology break this weekend - but really. Exhaustion sucks rancid cow poo, and I was not - I repeat, NOT - happy to get only five minutes' sleep last night. They are my greatest joy, yes, but they just might be trying to kill me, too.

If Baryshnikov Were A Vertically-Challenged Vaudevillian...

2009-01-29T00:02:00.003-05:00

... who was given to hitting the bottle before performances, it would probably look something like this:

I make no apologies. I mean, what are babies for?

The First Cut

2009-01-27T00:04:00.000-05:00

Here's something that I had planned to never blog about: my son's penis. Not about the novelty of having a baby with a penis (because, really: contrary to all expectation, the novelty wears off. A baby penis is just a little version of the appendage that you've seen before, and once you get accustomed to the risk of being sprayed during diaper changes, there's really nothing particularly complicated about its care and maintenance), not about the differences between be-penised babies and be-vulvaed babies (there'll be plenty of opportunity to reflect upon gender differences as these pertain to my son and daughter without considering their genitalia) and certainly not about our decision whether or not to make that all-too-significant snip. Circumcision, above all else, was not something that I was going to blog about. Too personal. Too controversial. Nothing to say about it.

I changed my mind. I still regard the topic as dangerously personal and controversial, but I do, as it turns out, have something to say about it.

My husband and I agonized over whether or not to circumcise Jasper. Actually, that's not true: I agonized over whether or not to circumcise Jasper. My husband was pretty certain that he wanted to not circumcise - it's not my place to explain his reasons, but I will say that he (my husband) is circumcised, and that he does not practice a religion that encourages circumcision - and although my inclination was to give my husband decision-making authority on this issue - he, after all, knows penises better than I do - I was, for some time, torn. I had never seen an uncircumsised penis. I had no idea - beyond the most rudimentary, high-school sex-ed posterboard kind of understanding - what might be the implications of circumcising or not circumcising. I was all, what's a foreskin? And: why cut it off? But also: but doesn't everyone cut it off? And: if everyone else cuts it off, there must be a reason. But then again: cutting. I was very confused, and more than a little uncomfortable about the whole subject.

The only thing that I knew for certain was this: circumcision meant that someone would bring a very sharp object very close to a very delicate part of my very little baby, and I didn't like that idea one bit.

I read every article, medical and otherwise, that I could get my virtual hands on. I read anti-circumcision articles and pro-circumcision articles. I read about how circumcision might reduce rates of certain kinds of infections, and about how such reductions were most likely statistically irrelevant in North America. I read many personal essays by parents who are pro-circumcision, and many by parents who are anti-circumcision. I saw many comparisons to female genital mutilation, which I dismissed intellectually, but which haunted me nonetheless. I resisted being haunted. I worried about resisting being haunted. I worried about the ethics of making such a decision for my child: what would my boy want, if he were able to ask himself the question? I asked my husband; he knew his own answer. I wasn't sure that that was enough.

I worried about how much I was worrying over the issue.

I read more articles.

I read that the pediatric associations of both the United States and of Canada recommended against circumcision. They were circumspect about it, to be sure: they fall all over themselves assuring concerned parents that it's a personal decision, a decision that only the family can make. But they still get their message across: there's no medical reason for a child to be circumcised.

That, however, was not the reason that I decided that I did not want Jasper to be circumcised. I decided that I did not want Jasper to be circumcised, simply, because I could not bear to allow anything to happen to him that would cause him unnecessary hurt. I could not bear the idea of the flash of a blade near his little body, the slice that would cause him to cry out in pain.

This was - this is - an intensely personal decision. In a way, it was a selfish decision: I made (and my husband supported) a decision based upon my feelings, my fears. It is Jasper, however, who will live with this decision. If I chose, I could weave a story, a philosophy, about how decisions such as these demand that we consider most seriously the passive option - that we do nothing that takes away from the individual that our child will become, that we do nothing that constrains that individual, that robs that individual of anything, literally or figuratively - but that would be bullshit. As parents, we make decisions every day - every hour - that shape our childrens' futures with little conscious regard for whether or not our children, looking back, would want us to consider those decisions differently. We take away little pieces of potential futures for our children with every step that we take - and with every step that we take, every decision that we make, we also add pieces, we also build possibilities into those futures. Obviously, in an ideal world, we would make all the right decisions, and our children would one day congratulate us for caring for them and protecting their interests perfectly. But ours is not an ideal world, and we make decisions under imperfect conditions, and we can be assured only that we will, as parents, achieve imperfect results.

So I didn't choose to not circumcise my son because I was perfectly convinced that it was right thing to do, because I believed that it was the thing that he, someday, would thank me for doing. I didn't make the choice that I did because I think that all parents should make that choice. I didn't choose to not circumcise because I came to the conclusion that it was the only choice that a good mother could make. I did it only because I didn't want to cut him.

It was the only thing that I could do, the only choice that I could make, for me. I can only hope that I did right, that I chose right, by him.

(I've not yet drawn a name for the Motozine from last week's giveaway; I'll do so at first opportunity and post the winner by Thursday. In the meantime, thank you all so very, very much for sharing your generosity of spirit in the comments, and, as always for your love and support.)

Grace In Small (Imaginary) Things: Day 1/375

2009-01-25T22:05:00.004-05:00

I don't know what any of these things are, but they sound wonderful:

1) Pretty sauce;

2) Honey Jolly Balls;

3) Lollipop juice.

Together, I think that they'd make an awesome meal. Hold the meatballs, though.

(Learn more about Grace In Small Things here. Thanks, Schmutzie.)

Eat More Pie

2009-01-24T11:41:00.005-05:00

Yesterday was a bad day. Another in a long stretch of days following nights without sleep, another with a teething baby who prefers nips to teething rings, another with a three-year old who is determined to seize control of this household and turn it into a socialist preschooler dictatorship in which all members of the household are equals but some certain very small members are more equal than others.

Also, it was National Pie Day yesterday, and I missed it and I was totally bummed about that until I realized that, um, hello, I'm Canadian, and National Pie Day does not apply to me. So not only do I not have a new, cool president, I do not have Pie Day. Which, you know, sucks.

So I took the day off of the Internet and did restorative things like get my eyebrows waxed and buy teething rings for the baby.

Oh, and I also set up this new project. Please go check it out. It's a work in progress, but I hope that you'll read all about it and consider taking part. If karma works the way that I understand it to work, participating will mean that we'll all of us, at some point, get more pie.

(And, thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you who left such heartwarming and encouraging comments to my last post, the post about Tanner. I read every single comment, and my heart was touched by each one. I'll make sure that Tanner gets those messages, so that his heart can be touched, too.)

The Invisible Boy

2009-01-21T10:11:00.009-05:00

He wants to be invisible, she tells me. When we're out he clings to me and turns his face into my side and it's like he wants the the whole world to look in the other direction, away from him and his weakness and his wheelchair.

She sighs. Your sister told me, when they got back from DisneyWorld, that he was unhappy in the crowds, that he was embarrassed when they couldn't get him onto the rides, that he just wanted to hang behind everyone else and hide.

He knows, now. My mother chokes on her words. He sees himself. He sees what he thinks everyone else sees. And he hates it.

I have no response. We whisper our I love yous and hang up the phone. I have no response. I just cry.

When Tanner was diagnosed with the condition that will kill him, he was four years old. He was a boisterous preschooler with a big smile and a habit of barreling at you at top speed and knocking you down, the better to wrap his little arms around your neck and wet your cheeks with slobbery kisses. His gait was a little funny - he walked on his toes, like a wannabe ballet dancer, and lost his balance, a little, sometimes, going up stairs. But nothing that made him seem anything other than the adorable cyclone of a four-year old that he was.

But then it became clear that he wasn't walking as well as other kids his age. A caregiver commented on the unusual shape of his calves. He continued walking on his toes. A physiotherapist was consulted. Then a doctor. Then the geneticists. And then, one evening, I got a phone call from my mother, telling me that they'd finally gotten the results of the tests and that Tanner had something called Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy. What's that? I asked. And then my mom burst into tears, and said something incoherent about muscles and dying and I felt a chill roll down my back, I felt it run like a stream of cold water from the base of my skull and down along my spine and, with the phone tucked between my ear and my shoulder and my mother's cries echoing across the wire, I brought my fingers to my keyboard and Googled Muscular Dystrophy, Duchennes and the chill turned to ice. He would die. His muscles would disintegrate and he would die.

No cure. No hope.

For the first year, it was easy to wrap ourselves in platitudes like live for the moment and seize the day and rejoice in the time that you have because Tanner didn't change much, not at first. His walking got a little more awkward, but he was still a rough and tumble force of a little boy who loved nothing more than fierce hugs and cuddle-wrestling. To anyone who didn't know him, he was just another ordinary child. No clock ticking over his head, no enemy within. Just a boy. But then he started undergoing steroid treatments, which affected his behaviour, and his physical condition deteriorated and continued deteroriating and word started getting out among neighbours and school-peers that he was sick. Disabled, obviously, but not only that: disabled, and marked for death. Some children started teasing him, and he began to understand.

That was over two years ago. That was over two years ago, and Tanner has since learned - we have all learned - to cope with the reality of his illness. That is, we think that we have, until we see Tanner recoil in embarassment from his wheelchair, or refuse to make eye contact with other children. Or tuck his head against his mother's thigh at DisneyWorld and insist that, no, he doesn't want to see if they can accommodate him on that ride, or this one.

This, this is a terrible heartbreak. We imagine, we believe, that all sick or disabled (no, he is not differently-abled. He is 8 years old and he can neither run nor play sport with other children. He experiences his condition as a disability, something that prevents him from doing that which he most wants to do) children bear their conditions nobly, and with good spirits. We watch the TV shows and the movies and our hearts are lifted by these brave little souls who carry their fates with dignity. We forget, however, that these are mostly fictions, that however noble are our beloved broken children, they are still children and they hurt like children and they fear like children and they cry like children and is there anything worse, really, for a child, than to be constrained in a chair - embarassed, ashamed - at the happiest place on earth while all the other children race and play with abandon?

Tanner wanted to hide. He wanted to not be seen. He wanted his weakness, his powerlessness, his sickness, his bound-in-a-chairness to be wrapped in a cloak of invisibility. He wanted - in the middle of all of the joy and all of the celebration and all of the hope (and yes, Disney does these things so well, with its spontaneous choruses of dreams really do come true, with its sudden eruptions of dance and sparkles, with its ever-present proclamations of joy, you can almost taste the hope, the magic) - to disappear.

And I don't even have words to describe the hundred million ways that my heart breaks - that it shatters - to know this. I don't have the words to describe the force of my wish that this just weren't true, that this would all just go away, that I could make the disease that is killing him not only invisible, but non-existent. That I could take away everything that makes Tanner want to hide and to bring him out into the sun and say, with conviction, see? there is no darkness here. There is nothing to be afraid of, there is no reason to hide.

There's a small part of me that wishes, sometimes, darkly, that we could have four-year old Tanner back; that we could go back to those days before the diagnosis when he was a wee bundle of four-year old fury, squeezing us with his round little arms, pummelling us with his joy, living a life of unrestrained happiness, reaching toward a limitless sky. But to have that Tanner back would be turn our backs on the Tanner who lives and loves and pummels us - with the sheer force of his heart - now. And that Tanner - this Tanner - is extraordinary, amazing, beautiful, brave. So, so brave, so, so beautiful. So deserving of being seen. Seen, and included, and loved.

It is not, however, my place to thrust him into the spotlight, to force him to bravely face the crowds and share himself. I can only tell his story, and hope that it gives you - the known and unknown yous who follow his story - some sense of the miracle that he is, this brave little boy who carries this terrible, terrible burden and who nevertheless goes forward, shyly, into the world, hoping to share in its joy. And if it reminds you to make an effort to really see somebody, anybody, who is hiding in a literal or figurative corner, to go over and take their hand and make the effort to let them know that you see them and that you think they are wonderful... well, then, that will have been no small thing.

Do it for Tanner.

Motorola - who sent me on my trip to Disneyworld (which unfortunately couldn't take place at the same time as Tanner's trip; one of his biggest wishes has been to someday have a holiday with his cousins, but this is tremendously difficult to arrange, and we were disappointed to miss the opportunity) - has offered me a Motorola Motozine Zn5 camera phone (read about it here; it is awesome) to give away. Which I'm going to do, through a random draw, BUT: in order to be eligible to win, you need to state, in your comment, what you will do to pay your good fortune forward. It can be anything - shovelling the walk of the old lady who lives across the street, or sitting down and having a talk with your kids about being inclusive of kids - like Tanner - who seem different, or making a donation to a charity of your choice (it'll be honor-system principle whether you follow up or not, but I really hope that you do.) You have until Sunday, midnight.

On my end - because I'm on a one-woman mission to turn every giveaway that hits the internets into a pay-it-forward giveaway - I'm going to make another donation, in the name of the winner, to the organization (Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy) that my sister ran to raise funds for. (If you haven't already made a donation, please think about doing so. I know that you have other causes to support, and I'll understand if you can't, but please, think about it, and maybe pass the request along.) And then I'm going to send a camera to Tanner, so that even if he feels most comfortable on the sidelines, he can share with us what he sees. So that we might, perhaps, see the world from his side, and look there more often.

(Congratulations to Catherine from PinkAsparagus, who won the draw for the Motozine camera phone! Catherine, please e-mail me so that I can arrange to get the phone to you.)

Dear America: Yes, You Can! (Can We Watch?)

2009-01-19T10:34:00.009-05:00

It's Martin Luther King Day today. Well, it is if you're American. I'm Canadian, so it's just a regular old Monday for me. Which makes me feel just a teensy bit resentful, if you want to know the truth. And it's only going to get worse tomorrow, when, fresh from the feel-good high of Martin Luther King Day, all you Americans will converge - in person or in spirit - on your nation's capitol to celebrate the inauguration of a new president. A new president that most of you seem to actually like.

We don't get really excited about stuff like that up here in Canada. When a new governing party is sworn into power in our Parliament, most of us are off somewhere else, listening to Leonard Cohen and eating bacon fried in maple syrup. That, or getting our hips replaced. Because that's the kind of stuff that we celebrate up here in the Great White North: Leonard Cohen, bacon n' syrup, and universal health care (this might vary by region - Sarah Mclachlan, wild salmon and universal healthcare if you're on the West Coast; Feist, craft beers and universal health care if you're in Ontario. Somewhere, in the outback of Alberta, they might celebrate Nickelback, Molson's and private clinics, but I'm not sure, and I'm too afraid to go find out.)

But we don't usually get all that worked up - in any positive way - about politics, nor even about public service. But you Americans, wow: your President-elect puts out a call to service for today, asks you to do something to give back to your communities, in memory of Martin Luther King, and you all actually get excited about it. So I am, I confess, a little bit jealous of your community spirit, and of your optimism. This week, you are celebrating yourselves as a nation that is capable of greatness, while we, your neighbours (yeah, we spell that with a 'u'), are standing back, feeling just a little bit awestruck. And, as I said, maybe just a little bit jealous. We Canadians don't wrap our politics in narratives of hope and greatness. We wrap our politics in narratives of prudence and restraint. Peace, order and good government is our motto. It's a bit dull, I know. Nobody ever set off fireworks to celebrate peace, order and good government. It'd kinda be like high-fiving your accountant for arranging an acceptable payment plan for all those federal taxes you owe. I mean, I'm sure he'd appreciate it, but really, that's his job, right? And if you're getting excited about tax payment plans (or, to get back to my central point, 'order and good governance'), you're not getting out much. Which, you know, is okay: we're a good country, a nice country, a sweet and sensible country that produces good music and great maple syrup and can usually be counted on to say all the right, generous things when its closest neighbour gets to play around at being awesome.

So, yeah. You're probably going to be too busy to notice, but we're over here thinking that you're lucky to be celebrating such an epic moment in history. We're thinking that it's really pretty awesome that you get to identify with and pledge yourselves to an inauguration of hope. We're happy for you, we really are. But we're also - or at least I am - a teensy bit jealous.

You'll forgive us that, right? Good. Because we're also a little bit - maybe a lot - inspired. And we are - I am - grateful for that.

Happy Martin Luther King Day, and Happy Inauguration. Do something awesome for your community, and then celebrate. HARD.

(Am closing comments - I know, I'm sorry - just because I am so far beyond sleep-deprived that I can't even be counted on to be able to decipher comments as English, let alone moderate them. Also, I don't feel like talking about politics - see last statement re: sleep deprivation - and if this post attracts any political opinionation - that is so a word - I don't want to hear about it. Not up for it, sorry. So, Baby gets the last word.)

Weekend Forecast: Flurries, With A Good Chance Of Poo

2009-01-16T11:44:00.011-05:00

Hey, baby! Could you look into your little rubber crystal ball and tell us the forecast for the weekend?

What's that?

35% chance of flurries, 78% chance of spit-up, 100% chance of sleeplessness, 123% chance of productive farts?
Just as I expected.

*******

To everyone who has been leaving their condolences for Maria: thank you. You're helping to spread a little love around a broken heart.

*******

Toronto-area peeps: interested in heading out on the town, sort of? Read this, and let me know.

*******

And... don't read this unless you're up for feeling really, really angry. Or, do read it and then click back here to have another gander at that super cutetastic baby up at the top of the page, to take the edge off of the grrr arrgh that I guarantee you you're going to feel. Cute babies are good for that, you know.

Little Beaner, Rest In Peace

2009-01-13T20:32:00.008-05:00

Hi Catherine,

Don't know if you remember me, but it's Marie. You helped me with my beautiful baby girl Beaner. I had been wanting to let you know about this, but I know you have your own stuff you are going through and well I didn't know how to say it... But I just wanted to let you know that my baby girl Mia passed away On Oct 27, 2008 due to SIDS. She was 13 1/2 weeks old and getting so big! Its so hard to believe that its going on 3 months that she's been gone. I would tell myself, "tell Catherine next week" but next week turned into well this long.... Thanks for all you did for us when I needed people there for me... I just thought you would want to know....

Always,
Marie

I never met Beaner. I never held her hand or touched her cheek. I knew her only through a story that her mother told me, pictures that she sent me, the fragments of a life that she shared and that became, somehow, strangely, briefly, intertwined with my own.

You can read her story here, and here. It's a beautiful story, the story of a child who was so loved that her mother fought back all of her fear to keep her, for better or for worse, for the sake of a life that she wanted to nurture as her own, on her own terms. Her mother reached out to me, and to you, to all of you, for support and guidance and she drew some of her strength from that and she made the bold step of clasping Beaner to her heart and deciding to never let go and that, that was amazing. Deciding to never let go can be a difficult choice - for some, the wrong choice, an impossible choice - but she made it and she was happy and she kept her Beaner and Beaner was loved.

And now Beaner is gone, and I don't know, I just don't know what to say, because this was the story that was supposed to have the happy ending and although I tell myself that Marie had her Beaner for all the time that Beaner had on this earth, and that that is wonderful, that that is a gift, it remains that to have such a precious gift and then to have it snatched away is tragic beyond measure. So I don't what to say. And it is not, in any case, my place to say. It is not my right, to sing an elegy for Beaner, to wring philosophy from her death. Not my right at all.

I didn't know Beaner - little Mia Catherine - but she found her way into a corner of my heart, and there she remains, this child I did not know and will never know but do love, a little, from a distance, from - now - a tragic distance, nonetheless. There she remains, and there she is mourned, and there she will be remembered.

Rest in peace, Mia Catherine. You touched more hearts than you could know.

You can leave condolences to Maria in the comments. She'll be reading, and I know that the support will mean so much to her.

Then - as I insisted last week, not knowing how soon I would be confronted by the demands of my own words - hug your children. And your moms. And anyone whose heart touches yours. And be grateful.

The Story's The Thing

2009-01-13T09:45:00.005-05:00

Here's the thing about maintaining a personal blog: one sometimes forgets that one is not simply maintaining a diary - albeit a carefully thought-out diary, one that is edited for style and for grammar - but publishing, virtually, a sort of memoir or collection of essays or some combination of these. One forgets, sometimes, that one has made, is making, one's story public.

I forget this all the time.

The primary danger, here, is not that one might unintentionally reveal something that one might later regret. We most of us hesitate with our cursors hovering over the Publish Post button every time that we write, mentally reviewing what we've said and how we've said it and worrying over how it might be received. The Publish Post button reminds us, in the crucial moment, that we are in fact publishing, making public, our stories, our rants, our confessions. What the Publish Post button does not remind us, however, is that with every post that we publish we are constructing and furthering a narrative that is followed by tens or dozens of readers, tens or dozens of readers who might well want to know what became of that problem, was that issue resolved, what happens next? They follow a narrative, and our blogging platforms don't provide tools for reminding us that we're weaving such narratives as we write. And because we are not reminded, we - I - sometimes forget.

I was reminded - uncomfortably - of this the other day when I wrote a confused, rambling post that was a variation on another post that I'd written a few months ago. I knew that I had already written on the topic - whether or not I wanted to keep open the possibility of having a third child - and was just trying to sort my feelings out further. It was a post that I wrote for myself, not one that was intended to advance my story, such as that story is. And that pissed at least one reader off, a little: she protested that I was just retreading old ground and that it was frustrating and why didn't I make more of an effort to let readers know what I was doing to prevent what seemed to be my inevitable slide into whiny insanity - for example, what had I done about the sleep issues? Had I taken any readerly advice? - because, seriously, if I kept this up - and certainly if I made the terrible mistake of committing mental suicide by further childbearing - she, for one, was not going to be able to read me anymore. (She later apologized for articulating herself so harshly, and made clear that she was just frustrated because she is a fan of the blog, and I'm totally comfortable with that, so please don't smack her in comments.) Which: OUCH.

The comment struck a nerve, because a) I'm sensitive about the possibility that this blog can be, you know, angst-ridden at times, and believe me, my angst bores even me, and b) oh, gawd, I like totally can't maintain the thread on my own stories, can I? But there're reasons why I don't always (read: almost never) maintain a narrative thread: because sometimes doing a follow-up on how nothing has changed and how I'm still angsting out over the same old miscellaneous bullshit seems, I don't know, tiresome, and because - more often than not - I forget. Some other issue comes up - the girl pours canola oil on the living room sofa, or I become obsessed yet again with the finality of vasectomies - and whatever thread I had begun to weave about sleeplessness or feeding baby or finding long lost siblings gets lost.

Which is fine, in a way: this is my story, and if it's disjointed, so what? But still: I like a coherent narrative thread, and so far as coherence is possible in personal narratives, why not pursue it? I can't promise that I'll follow up on every little issue, but I can promise to make an effort to not just abandon cliffhangers (I laugh even as I write this. Who among you was waiting with bated breath to see if Her Bad Mother would ever sleep again, dun dun dun DUN?!?!?) So, to that end: the first of a series of semi-occasional, whenever-the-hell-I-feel-like-it, will-probably-forget-to-do-this-ever-again updates on stories that you probably don't care about but this blog is a narrative, dammit, and so the story must go on:

1) Did Her Bad Mother ever sleep again? No, she did not, and probably will not again, ever. She has tried most of the suggestions offered and none, so far have worked. She would just give up and look into becoming a vampire, were it not for the fact that she doesn't want to eat her baby (I don't care what Stephenie Meyer implied in Breaking Dawn about mother-love overcoming the temptation to sink one's teeth into buttery baby butt cheeks; if I were a vampire I would totally eat my baby because, my god, the deliciousness), so she'll just persist in this lovely and only slightly inconvenient sleep-deprived fugue state.

2) Did Her Bad Baby ever take to solid foods? Yes! He did! He does! But only if they're, you know, solid. As in, able to withstand the clutch of a chunky little fist. Which is to say, hunks of bread or cereal biscuits or meatballs or whole baby carrots or, for some reason, pickles. Anything mushy, anything on a spoon, anything in a bottle (sigh) is rejected with a swat of a chubby hand.

3) Did Her Bad Mother ever find her long lost brother? Has she made any progress? Not so much. Believe me, you'll hear about it when - WHEN - anything happens.

4) Whatever happened to the Phallic Lovey? He (Christian name: Toadstool) was tossed aside by the girl - who declared herself to be 'too big for Toady now' - a few weeks ago. It was like a sad Toy Story 2 sub-plot, really, and Her Bad Mother got a little weepy. Her Bad Husband, however, rejoiced. And then this happened:

And so it goes.

Any other questions on narrative threads that I may have dropped, recently or, like, eons ago? Fire away in the comments, and I'll follow up them, someday. And tell me, what are the narrative threads that you've dropped? I'm not the only one out here who can't tell a story, am I?

Also, oh, hai: yesterday was Delurking Day, and I missed it. Feel free to make up for that today.

Sunday Morning Music Show: I'm A Lumberjack Edition

2009-01-11T18:50:00.003-05:00

Urban Forestry from Her Bad Father on Vimeo.

And if at first you don't succeed...

Urban Forestry, Part II from Her Bad Mother on Vimeo.

(It's a toy. DUH.)

(She likes it because Daddy has one. We have a property with a sizable acreage of forest that we tend under the terms of a forest management plan, and that plan involves strategic cutting necessary for the forest's sustainability, and why am I explaining all this? Emilia likes chainsaws. That's kind of awesome.)

(Awesome, so long as she doesn't remain committed to the idea of deforesting schoolyards and parkland.)

You've Got Mail

2009-01-10T11:46:00.005-05:00

From: Her Bad Father
To: Her Bad Mother
Date: Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 1:59 PM
Subject: Dude...

... we're done.

xoxoxo

Let Me Know When I Am Done

2009-01-08T11:25:00.006-05:00

I think that, maybe, I am done having children.

I think.

Maybe.

Very possibly almost certainly.

I've been thinking about this for weeks. I've been thinking about the fact that our family of four comprises a tidy little unit. I've been thinking about the fact that my daughter and my son make such a lovely pair, and about the fact that even though he is still so small they are becoming fast friends and about the fact - the fact - that this is just so lovely. I've been thinking that our happy little foursome is so balanced. There is something about us, it seems - it seems - that is complete.

And that completeness is bittersweet. Bittersweet because, I don't know, who's to say that we wouldn't be even more complete with another member to love? I can imagine - albeit in only the vaguest, fuzziest outlines - a future that includes someone else, another girl or another boy who would throw her or his weight into our tidy little apple cart and knock our happy unit delightfully off-kilter, out of balance, wonderfully, joyfully askew.

But then I look at my boy and my girl and my husband - I look at us - and feel something that I imagine is a feeling of completeness and I ask myself, isn't this enough?

Of course it is enough. Of course.

I don't want to go through pregnancy and childbirth again. That is, at least, I think that I don't. Bringing Jasper into the world scarred me, literally and figuratively. You don't want to go through that again, says my mother when I say - ill-advisedly - that I'm not one-hundred percent sure that we're done. You can't go through that again. You just can't. But she's wrong, in part. I could go through that again. I don't want to, but I could. If you'd told me before Jasper came along that his gestation and birth would be so difficult, so emotionally and physically difficult, I would certainly have said that I didn't want to do it. But were I then to grasp Jasper in my arms and press his soft, chunky self against my chest and feel his little hands explore my hair, my neck, my cheeks, feel his breath on my face, hear his giggle, his coos, I would say to you, I would do it all again. I would not hesitate to do it all again.

And I would not. Hesitate, that is.

But I wonder: do I lie to myself, when I tell myself that I do not want to close off the possibility of a different future, a future with a third? Do I lie to myself when I concoct stories of some hypothetical child, some ghost child, some spirit waiting to be given life and welcomed into our family in a future that I cannot yet comprehend but am loathe to disavow? Do I hold out the possibility of that third child as a means of forestalling my own future, a future that I've lost touch with in this, my tenure as a new mom times two? Am I stuck in this identity - this identity that I both love and resent - as a mommy, to the extent that I am compelled to suggest to myself, over and over and over again, that this is who I am, all that I am, all that I can do? By which I mean: am I holding out for the possibility of a third child for the simple reason that there is some part of me - some deep and vital part of me - that is afraid to let go of the mantle of Mommy and march forward in life as me first, Mommy second?

Obviously, I haven't lost my sense of myself as Catherine - I do identify myself beyond 'Mommy;' I do have (fragments) of a life that is not defined by my care of and love for two small children - but my 'mommyness' has been a lodestone for me. It has been the thing that directs the compass of my life, that which points here, there, hither, yon and tells me where I am and where I should be headed (building a life with and for my children; building a future with and for my children; changing a diaper; looking for diapers; shopping for diapers). What will I do when I am no longer essential in meeting the minute-by-minute needs of these creatures? What will I be?

There are things that I want to do, versions of myself that I want be, all of which have little or nothing to do with being a mom. It is possible that I am afraid of leaping headlong toward these things, unencumbered by diaper bags and swaddle blankets and slings. It is possible that I am afraid of trying. It is possible that these diaper bags and swaddles blankets and slings are so much security for me: I cannot jump, see, because my hands are full. I would jump, but I can't. Oh well. C'est la vie.

(It is possible that this is what happens when you go without sleep for over half a year. You start to believe that there are no other worlds beyond this one. You start to fear that you could not not survive in any world outside of this one. You start to go a little - what's the word? - crazy, and you become attached to your own craziness. Maybe.)

I have a seven and a half month old baby and a three year old girl. I'm going to be 'Mommy' for a while yet. It is silly to be nostalgic for this stage of my life, this stage of their lives, when we are still so very much in it. And it is, very possibly, sillier still to fetishize the idea of more children as a means of clinging to this stage. I will, we will, have to be done with it sometime. I can't be Mommy forever.

So, am I done? I think so. I don't know.

How do you ever know?

******

Still hoping for contributions to this. It won't save my nephew, but it will, someday, save some other child, some other nephew, some other mother's son, and that will make all the difference.

Also, if you're so inclined, I wouldn't - as I explained here - object to nominations for one of these. If you're so inclined.

Clockwatching

2009-01-06T10:51:00.012-05:00

Last night, I curled up in bed with my little girl. She lay her head against my arm and gripped my fingers with her tiny hand and whispered, I want you to stay here, Mommy.

Yes, I said. I want you to stay here, too.

And then I rested my cheek against the crown of her head and closed my eyes and inhaled the sweet, soapy smell of baby shampoo, felt the silk of her hair, heard the whisper of her breath and I thought, I want you to stay here, like this, always, curled against me, warm, safe. And I thought, I want you to stay here, like this, for years and years to come, until the days when you and I no longer fit together in this wee bed, when you are grown and I am old and your arms are the stronger. When we will still find comfort in each other. When you will still be my baby, only grown.

I thought these things, and I looked up at the clock atop her dresser and watched as the minute hand took one deliberate click forward. I looked up at the clock and I wondered, how would it feel if I were counting these minutes? These hours? These days?

It is not possible to hold a child too close, or for too long.

A family lost a child this week. Maybe it was the famous family, the one that we are all reading about it and talking about. Or perhaps it was another family, a family unknown to us, a family in Burma or Kinshasa or the Gaza Strip or Oshawa, Ontario or Saguenay, Quebec. Perhaps it was many families; perhaps it was many children. We lose count; we stop paying attention. We stop paying attention, unless the child is lost to someone that we know, someone that we know of. Then we remember. Every hour of every day, somewhere, someone suffers what we fear most. What I fear most.

My family is losing a child. Our loss is not sudden; it will not be unexpected. It's a slow loss, but an inevitable loss; the hands of the clock tick forward slowly, deliberately, inexorably. We count on those hands ticking slowly; we measure their movements carefully, reassuring ourselves that the pace holds steady, that there is no leap forward, that this particular clock never advances an unnecessary hour, that our days hold ample daylight. It's a slow loss, but an inevitable one.

We are better off, of course, for the trickling pace of this loss. We have many days, many hours, with this child. Not near as many as we would like, but still: we have time to spend and cherish, time to postpone our goodbyes and to pretend that their place on the horizon will hold its distance. My sister can wrap her body around Tanner's and feel the beat of his heart and the warmth of his breath; she can brush her hand across his forehead and whisper in his ear and assert her love for him in the now and know, as surely as his hand tightens around hers, that he hears her, that he knows. But the clock ticks over her head - over his - and she counts these hours, these minutes, these seconds. Every movement of the minute-hand is a movement lost, a moment lost, one minute less in a cherished life that is measured by the clock.

My mother called on Christmas Eve, a thick edge to her voice, the edge of a third glass of wine, the edge of regret seeking reassurance. I miss you so much, she said. I miss Emilia, and Jasper. I'll bet Emilia's so excited for Santa. She laughed, uncertainly. I wish we could be together. I wish I could be there, I would move there in a heartbeat, but I can't be there, because I need to be here, with Tanner. A pause. He's really gone downhill. He's declining really quickly. He's not going to last more than another few years, maybe. Another pause; the clink of a glass. After he's gone...

- I know.

After he's gone...

- I know.

After Tanner is gone, time will stop, and then it will start again, without him. I don't like thinking about this. I was upset with my mother for reminding me of this on a night that I wanted to spend in thrall to the optimism of Christmas - fear not, for behold: I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people - and to the sweet prospect of waking up to tiny pajamaed children filled with glee. I wanted my own now, free of sadness, free of the prospect of death, free of fear of that black hole of timelessness opening up and swallowing us all. I wanted to not walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I resented my mother for pulling me alongside her in her stroll. And that was wrong.

It was wrong because I am so, so fortunate to be able live my life with my own children, free of the clock, free of the incessant clang of the tolling bell, free of the the hourglass, the blind sands - free, at least, in my ignorance of, my deafness to, the tick, the clang, the passage of the sands that mark the time that passes for each of us. It was wrong because I am so fortunate, and I need to remain mindful of, and grateful for, that fortune. I can hold my daughter or my son and not think, here passes one more moment, here we move one step closer to death, here is one less embrace that we will share. I have a life with them, a now with them, that is free of visible shadows. I am blessed. And I am insufficiently appreciative of this blessing.

I pay little mind to the time that passes with my own children, apart from vague reflections upon the pace of their growth and the fleeting beauty of their babyhood. I mark Tanner's time, I count it on my fingers and toes, I spend hours, awake at night, calculating how many more visits we have, how we shall spend those visits, how best we might use our time, how we might take time and wrest timelessness from it, in the form of memory. But I forget to mark the rest of time; I forget that I do not have infinite stores of time to spend with my children; I forget that the bell tolls as much for us as it does for Tanner, the only difference being that we do not know when its tolling will stop.

I do not pause often enough; I do not often enough stop and hold my children, just for the sake of holding on. I do not take as much time as I should to just hold them and listen to their hearts beat and feel their breath upon my cheek and their hands warm within my own and hear the tick of the clock - feel the tick of the clock - and be grateful for every. single. second. In ignoring time, I am doomed to lose it. I need to take time, take measure of time, give thanks for time, for whatever stocks of time that I am blessed to have. With Tanner, with Jasper, with Emilia, with all whom I love and with whom I wish to have more time, always more time.

Hug your children today; hug them, and let time stop, and then, when it starts again? Thank the heavens for it.

*******

My sister, Chrissie, will be running, this weekend, in a marathon to raise money for Duchenne's research. There's no cure for Duchenne's, but there's always hope, and Chrissie is running, as always, for this hope. With my words, I can cheer her on, and I can ask others to cheer, and to help by cheering and to cheer by helping.

You can donate in Tanner's name HERE. It probably won't change the ending to this story, but it will help the narrative maintain a recurring theme of hope. And that, right now, is all.

Sunday Morning Music Show: Comedy Edition

2009-01-04T10:55:00.008-05:00

It takes the baby a minute to get the joke, but when he does, he falls out of his seat laughing. I'm that way about fruit jokes, too.

(Sunday Morning Music Show: Music Editions are on indefinite hold until the girl retires the burlesque, no-pants version of her show, which is entirely NSFW. Nude comedy, on the other hand, can be shot waist up, so.)

********

Speaking of Nashville, which I wasn't, but still: I'm speaking at next month's Blissdom conference, and although I can't promise to be enlightening or anything, I can promise to have a baby attached to my hip and to maybe fall down if I have a glass of wine. You should totally come watch.

Ring In All Ye Angels

2009-01-01T20:47:00.003-05:00

I have spent a good portion of the last 24 hours trying to figure out how to bid farewell to the old year, and welcome in the new, but I am so, so tired and just don't have words. There's too much to say, and too little energy with which to say it.

So I'll just say this, for now: here's to a year of snow angels, and to a new year that will, I hope, bring many more.

Happiest New Year to you all.

Monday Miscellany: When Will The Holidays End Edition

2008-12-29T12:10:00.007-05:00

I'm spent. Exhausted. Completely drained of anything bearing even the slightest resemblance to energy. The holidays, they can kill you if you aren't careful.

It was a few days of highs (the girl doing her Christmas Evening Music Show clad only in a bumblebee hat and bandit-style eye mask, clutching a ride-along stick-pony and singing Jingle Bells at the top of her lungs) and lows (my mother calling Christmas Eve to discuss with me how very few Christmases my nephew has left and isn't it heartbreaking that we can't spend these remaining holidays together?) and very little sleep. So all that I am able to muster today - by way of a feeble, oh hai, am still here, somewhere, hello! - is this random list of observations and proclamations:

1) In the frenzy of Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, when the world is filled with brightly wrapped packages filled with gifts, be careful where you leave your Tampax box. Because when a small child discovers, in a washroom adjacent to that environment - a pretty, brightly-colored cardboard box filled with what look to be individually-wrapped treasures that may or may not be candy, she's going to be curious, and you're going to have some questions to answer.

2) Best to answer, in those circumstances, that it's a gift for Mommy. Santa moves in mysterious ways.

3) Depressing phone conversations with your mother on Christmas Eve can cause drinking.

4) When drinking, it's best to remember that rum is still rum even when it's drowned in a quarter-litre of eggnog, and it can, accordingly, still cause a hangover.

5) Hangovers are infinitely worse when you spend the previous night awake with a newly-betoothed baby hanging off your boob.

6) Teeth and nipples don't mix.

7) Teeth and nipples and too much rum and lack of sleep don't mix, but naked three-year old bumblebees in flight and bright yellow Tampax packages tied up with string under the Christmas tree are kind of cheery, so maybe it all balances out.

Because the New Year is pending, and I need all the good karma that I can get, I'm giving away more donations to charity - this time through CanadaHelps.org, which will provide $25 charity donation gift cards to two readers (they provide the gift card, and you can make the donation to any Canadian charity) (you don't have to be Canadian, it just needs to be a Canadian charity - so if you support breast cancer research, for example, just donate the funds to a Canadian research organization) - leave a comment with the cause - specific organization, generic cause, 'save the world', whatever - you'd like to support, and I'll randomly draw names and post winners on New Year's Eve.

(CanadaHelps is a charity that helps charities. Their website promotes giving by making it easy for donors to find Canadian charities and make a donation online to one of the 83,000 listed - and searchable - Canadian charities. Canadians - make your donations before Dec 31st to get a tax receipt for the 2008 tax year.)

Oh, and just because - there's also a $25 iTunes card for the first name drawn. (You might also consider picking up your own iTunes card and passing it along to someone who could use a little happy music, or perhaps a little Dr. Horrible. If you're in Canada, you can get them at any Sobeys, Mac's or A&P (Toronto) and Safeway, Save-on Foods and Coop (Vancouver) and, obviously, at the iTunes store online. Remember: KARMA.)

WINNERS - Christina and Stacie; Christina's was first name drawn so she gets the iTunes card as well!

Have Yourself A Merry Little Whatever

2008-12-25T00:01:00.001-05:00

However, whatever, with whomever you celebrate - do it well.

Peace and love.