Walk This Way

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?)

One Kiss Breaches A Distance

"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

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.

To Jasper, On His First Birthday

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.

Needful Things

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.

Clockwatching

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.

Three

How did we get from here:


...to here:



...to here?


These three years have sped by so quickly. These three years have been an eternity. I miss the baby that she was. I long for the girl she will become.

I adore the amazing being that she is, and I am grateful for this day, for every day, with her.

Happy birthday, baby.

The Future By Thirds

"What would you think," my husband asked, "if I got a vasectomy?"

I put down my magazine and stared out the window. "I think," I said carefully, "that I wouldn't know what to think."

"We're done, though, right?"

"I think so."

"But you don't want to get pregnant again, right?"

"I don't want to be pregnant again, no. Or at least, I don't think so. I think. No. I don't know."

That wasn't entirely true. I do know. I don't want to be pregnant again. And I certainly don't want to go through childbirth again. And I could do without ever going through another exhausted-depressed-anxious-boobchafed tour-de-newborn again. But do I want to ensure that I never get pregnant again, that I never have another child? I don't know. I don't think that those questions are the same. Do you want (or not want) to go through the process of having another child? is a different question from do you want (or not want) to have another child? in the same way that do you like the work of motherhood? is a different question from do you like being a mother? or do you love being mother to your children?

I don't like pregnancy. I don't like childbirth. I'm not super crazy about the work of motherhood, and I'm especially not crazy about the 24-7 boot camp nightmare that is the work of being a brand new mother to a brand new baby who stays up all night and chomps boobs and shits everywhere. But I love my children. I adore my children. They are the most precious, most delightful, most amazing things in my life. So if you ask me, do I want more mother-work, the fast and firm answer is no. But if you were to ask me whether I'd want another one of these incredible little beings, I would say that I can't bring myself to say, firmly and finally, no. And if you were to ask me whether I'd accept further burden of mother-work in order to have another one of these little beings, I'd have to say, I just don't know. I don't think so, but I don't know.

All I know is that I don't want to say no. Not with any kind of finality. Not in a way that closes off any possibility of yes. Or even, oops. (Because oops is a yes of a sort, is it not?)

(yes is a world/and in this world of/yes live/(skilfully curled)/all worlds)

(feel free to roll your eyes at me here)

My hands are full. Emilia is hell on wheels, a brilliant and beautiful tempest that blasts her way through every day, wreaking full havoc and leaving us, her parents, stunned and enchanted and weary in her wake. Jasper is a great, hulking, grinning cherub of a baby, big and strong and determined to catch up to his speedster-demon of a sister. They thrill and delight and exhaust me. I adore them more than I thought it possible to adore any other living beings, but they keep me at the very razor's edge of my wits. I don't know that it would be humanly possible for me to manage another child. Ever.

But the idea of closing off any possibility of that third child... that seems, somehow, inexplicably, wrong. I'm not a big believer in destiny - that is, I don't think that I am - but if there's a future for us in which a third child figures, do I want to refuse that future? I think of those friends of mine for whom the third (or fourth) was unexpected, a shock even, and I know that if they had it to do over, they would not want to turn back the clock and refuse. But turning back the clock to change the past, and settling upon certain choices for the future are two different things, of course. I have already made innumerable choices that have closed off innumerable futures; I do not, for the most part, mourn the loss of these futures. They just simply are not to be.

Am I ready, though, to close off entirely the possibility of this future, of a future in which our two are our three, in which we four who once were we three become we five?

I don't know. I just don't know.

(How did you know? DO you know?)

Duodecade

Twelve years ago, today, we married. Twelve years ago today, we were only two, but we held our future in our hearts and we knew that it was bigger, so much bigger, than we two.

Twelve years later, we hold our future in our arms; we clutch our two to our chests and marvel at how we have grown, how our hearts have grown, how our life has grown, how it continues to grow.


Our future is so much bigger, so much bigger than we can know.

(This is the only photo in existence of the four of us together. Which, I know, is shameful. We need, I think, to get our asses to Sears Portrait Studio. Otherwise we may need to resort to this again.)

That's Me In The Corner

Two years ago, after BlogHer '06, I wrote this:

I left behind something that I think that I am going to miss... the me who was happy and fulfilled in the absence of the loves of my life. The me who could assimilate the quiet ache that is that absence, the pressing ache of those missing limbs, into another kind of energy and move, happily, despite that ache. The me who felt both quieted and stimulated alone (sans child, sans spouse) in the company of other women, other writers, other mothers who, for a moment, put the activity of motherhood or whateverhood aside and said, now, what about me? What about us?

That experience? That was missing for me, this year. Because I did not and could not put those other parts of me aside. I did not attend BlogHer this year as the me who has a passion that extends beyond and away from her family, the writer, the friend, the woman who can compartmentalize her manifold selves and carry on, and flourish. I attended BlogHer as a mother, with babe-in-arms and lactating boobs and head fuzzy from lack of sleep and heart sore from guilt and anxiety and all that tremendous and challenging mother stuff that distracts one from the business of being anything other than a mother, full stop. And that was hard. Really hard.

And so I felt, for much of the conference, as though I was watching from the sidelines, from the other side of the curtain, from behind my locker door, my baby clutched like so many books - my vulnerability, my shield - to my chest. Which is to say that, yes, there were moments, some moments, when my experience reminded me a little bit of high school, albeit the kind of high school experience that you see in low-budget after-school specials about how having a baby at sixteen means that you'll be left out of all the parties and your cute-girl clothes won't fit and you will feel like an outsider and omg why did you not cross your legs like your mother told you?

But those were only moments, and they had nothing to do with anyone or anything other than me and my own issues and insecurities. It was hard for me to expose myself as a mother at BlogHer, because being a mother in real life is not the same thing as playing one on the Internet, and all of the vulnerabilities that roll onto the screen so easily don't play so comfortably on a real life stage. No matter how exposed we are on that screen, no matter how bravely, fiercely naked we allow ourselves to be, we are still, end of day, behind the screen, sharing fragments of our whole selves, preserving whatever other parts need to be preserved as private in order to protect our self-regard. So while it was one thing for me to bare my breast and nurse my child in front of the audience attending my panel - because, of course, I knew that everyone would be glad to see it - it was quite another to attempt and fail to soothe my child in public spaces, or succumb to a panic attack in the presence of friends and strangers, or to admit to exhaustion and frustration and sadness when everyone else was trying to party. And so I kept, mostly, to the sidelines, and observed.

And what I saw was this: friendships being formed, friendships being renewed, friendships being celebrated and revelled in and enjoyed. I saw love and tenderness and warmth; I saw women cheering each other on, and men cheering the cheering. I saw all of the things that I'd seen that first year - "women who are, like me, trying to use found moments of lived fearlessness to navigate the murky waters, the frightening waters, of womanhood and motherhood and writerhood (here be monsters, here be monsters. We know this. Still we fly our sails). Among women who are willing to say, out loud, that they don't know how to always be fearless. Among women who walk with fear, but who carry wit and intelligence and charm and strength as rods and staffs for comfort" - and more.

But I also saw insecurity and anxiety and nervousness and reserve. I saw another mom with babe-in-arms keep to the sidelines, like me. I wish that I'd done more to connect with her, beyond waggling my baby at her baby (an effort that made her baby scream, which, you know, can really make someone feel like a fuck-up), because I wanted to ask her, is this as hard for you as it is for me? I heard a woman crying in the bathroom, and another woman soothing her, and wanted to say something, but I didn't, because I was embarrassed, having been soothed myself the night before, and still feeling awkward about it. I saw, many times, women sitting by themselves, and sometimes I approached them, and sometimes I didn't, because I didn't want anyone to think that I was working the room - don't laugh, it happens - or demanding attention (oh mah gahd have you seen mah BAYBEE?!?!) or, sometimes, just because I felt stupid and awkward and who knew when the baby was going to start crying again or the front of my blouse go wet and what would I say then (oh, hai, I'm HBM, pleez to excuse the sloppy mammaries and squalling infant)?

I saw a wonderful woman, anxious and hurting, defending herself in front of a crowd of a thousand. I saw a crowd of a thousand wonder, some of them - wrongly, wrongly, so wrongly - whether it was all an act. Actually, I didn't see this, because I was on the other side of the doors, tending to my baby, my heart, wondering what was up, what was going on, what was I missing now? only hearing the details after the fact, and watching the video, and wanting to wrap virtual arms around my hurt friend, too late to help her in the moment that mattered, because my attention was divided, and while one hurt woman stood up to another (because, yes, it all had to have come from a place of hurt, it just did, and that sucks for everybody, for real) and the conference fell into a hush I was outside the room, in the corner, ruminating on being on the outside, lost in myself.

We all feel on the outside, all of us, sometimes; even the biggest and brightest of our stars feel their distance (let's mix metaphors and wonder whether, if you prick them, stars bleed their brilliant light and burn holes in the sky. Is this what happened?) Whether we know a hundred people in the room, or one, or none, we feel, in certain moments, lonely. Misunderstood. Lost. Alone. We're women, we're human. We can be surrounded by love and still feel isolated. We can project love and still feel empty. We can be friends and make friends and still yearn for friendship. We can be inside and still feel completely outside. We're internet geeks, girly ones, some with babies, some without, most with vaginas, all with hearts. We're complicated.

I love us for that. I love this weekend for that. I love BlogHer, and BlogHers, for that. But there is still the ache. So please, can we be gentle with each other, forgiving of each other, this week, next week, and in all the weeks and months to come?

Thank you.

Grover knows. He did the whole conference with a hand up his ass. He gets us.

(THE LOVE. I do not do this exclude. I really, truly, do not. But I can't and won't censor my impulse to send warm hugs to the people who really took care of me this weekend, and/or who just added a special degree of awesomeness and oh god I am going to forget somebody really important I just know it but here goes: the spectacular lady who offered the loveliest, most welcome haven from the fray, the wonderful, baby-whispery heart-breakingly sweet man who snuggled J and cuddled J and crooned him to sleep with baseball stats, the lovely, lovely guy who stretched his arm to the breaking point swinging an infant-laden car seat on multiple occasions, the gorgeous young woman who snuggled the babe until his need for boob overwhelmed my entire session, the beautiful pregnant lady who stole my son's heart - while he was still on the tit oh god - I may now have to call him Jasperalah - and who I was unable to rescue from partum faintage because I have no life skills - and who always makes me laugh even when my head is about to burst from anxiety, THIS beautiful woman whose very presence with her even-more-beautiful daughter made me cry, and the amazing, truly amazingly big-hearted woman who rescued me from my corner and insisted that it was okay for me to cry it out and OH GOD I cannot even refer to her in the third person without tearing up, and this super-smart chick who I wish I could spend way more time with in Canadaland and the amazing women that I hadn't met before but now will be stalking relentlessly and her and her and her and her and her, oh lord, my girls, my bosom buddies, my heart-friends, my (oh sob) total BFF comrades-in-arms, my hearts... *collapses in tears and smiles*)

Let's just all cling to the love, kay?

21 Days

Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing...


nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.

She

I do it every night now. When it's dark, when the rest of the house is asleep, or almost, I untangle my tiny newborn bundle from my arms and lay him down in his nest and ease my birth-battered body from our bed. I make my way - gingerly, gingerly - around the bed, supporting myself on furniture, against the walls, down the hallway, to her door.

I open it slowly, holding my breath against the creaks, and slip inside. There, in the dark, is she, my first baby. Rumpled and tangled in her blankets, her breathing slow and deep, strands of fluffy blonde hair stuck to her damp, pink cheeks, she is every inch the baby. A big baby, but still. A baby, my baby. In the quiet, in repose, she is no longer toddler, no longer little girl, no longer big sister - she is just she, my first born, my first baby, always a baby, always soft and vulnerable and in need of me, always in need of me.

I bend over the rail of her bed, and kiss her cheek, and stroke her hair and whisper nothing, everything, about how I love her so, how I adore her, how I miss her. How every nuzzle of her brother's cheek brings a memory of her; how every clutch and suck and moment of skin pressed against newborn skin makes my heart burst for him and yearn for her; how my love for him has made my love for her grow and stretch and strain and ache.

How I love her, how I love her.

In the morning she will wake, and run past me, blowing a kiss as she clambers into Daddy's arms, waving gaily as she embarks upon the great adventure of a new day, while I sit, constrained, restrained, by the injuries of childbirth and new motherhood (shredded nethers, ravaged nips), my new love in my arms, my new love demanding everything of me and yielding himself to me, pressing himself to me, in return. I will drink up his love, bathe in his love, as she speeds away, leaving me in her wake, grasping at droplets, holding back tears.

But it doesn't matter, because, always, she will stop again, however briefly, and rest, and she will allow me to bend over her bed, in the dark, and stroke her cheek and tell her how I love her, my first, my girl.

How I love her.

Fear And Loving In The Mother 'Hood

I don't know about you, but I've never in my life felt more more fearful, more anxious, less brave, than I have as a mother. From the moment that the lines on that stick turned pink the first time around, I've been afraid. My pregnancy with Wonderbaby, Wonderbaby's birth, Wonderbaby's life thus far, the second set of lines on the second stick... I have lived and continue to live through these with the sharpest sense of fear, of awareness that there is so much to lose now, of myself, of all that I love, of all that I live for. I carry my heart around outside my body now - soon I will carry its beating, bloody weight times two - and because of that I am vulnerable in ways that I never thought possible. Because of that, I am afraid.

I do not mind this fear.

Not so much, anyway. Because the trade-off - for love, for love, for love and for so much heart-bursting, belly-aching joy, more than seems possible or even bearable - is worth it. But it's hard to explain, this schizophrenic state of mind and heart and soul wherein the greatest of all loves and joys is accompanied, always, by the deepest of all fears. Wherein the greatest confidence is coupled with the deepest anxiety; the greatest pride, coupled with the deepest humility; the greatest bravado and ambition, coupled with the deepest insecurity. A condition of ongoing paradox - of heroic paradox, but paradox nonetheless - which is, as I said, so difficult to explain.

But Rebecca explains it. Rebecca, who most of you know as Girl's Gone Child (and who I know as much-beloved, much-admired, oh-so-proud-to-call-her-friend FRIEND) (that was a disclaimer, by the way, to let anyone who reads this know that yes, I am entirely biased when it comes to Rebecca Woolf, but that that bias is based not only upon my deep affection for and shrieking fangirl devotion to her, but also upon my critical esteem for her as a writer) (where was I? oh, right...) Rebecca explains this paradox beautifully, perfectly in her book Rockabye, in the most beautiful narrative prose that traces her journey from unexpectedly pregnant wild child to wild child with child with heart-scraping honesty. Heart-scraping honesty that lays bare the kind of deep-seeded fear and anxiety that accompanies nearly every moment of pregnancy and motherhood while making perfectly clear the fierce hope and love that accompanies that fear. Heart-scraping honesty that allows for a vivid and visceral expression of the exhilaration of motherhood, of the feeling - both terrifying and thrilling - of being flung into the abyss with no bungee cord, only the hope of soft landing, or flight.

I can't do it justice, of course. She writes the experience of exhilarated fear and fearsomely fierce love and hope ("There's no such thing as messing up if you go with your heart") through the story of her own unexpected pregnancy and unexpected motherhood and all the unexpected moments in between and beyond. It's what's called momoir, I suppose, but it's so much more than that. It's more like Fear and Loving In Los Angeles: A Savage Journey To The Heart Of The Maternal Dream, which is to say, it's more like a great wave-speech ode to motherhood, a beat-epic-meets-gonzo-storytelling-meets-The-Confessions-subverted, all wrapped in love and hope. Which is probably the only medium though which such a story, the true fear-and-love-addled story, of motherhood can effectively be told.

And I admire her telling of it so much that there's no space in my heart for the even slightest smidge of envy - which there should be - because if anything, her work here is just the best possible evidence that this kind of storytelling - our kind of storytelling - is amazing and heroic and that the world needs so much more of it.

XOXO Becs. Thank you for this.

Fear is just a four-letter word for BRING IT ON.

(You can find more reviews here this week, and you can purchase her book - which, really, you must, and you know that I would never, ever say that in this space if it weren't 110% TRUE - here. You can also read the first chapter here, at Smith Mag. Which, you totally should. Then buy it.)

(I'm really sorry that I keep closing comments. I'm just super emotionally and physically exhausted and kinda not up for dialogue. Which isn't fair to you guys, I know, but it just is. I just want to close my computer and sleep more.) (You could always go visit Rebecca's blog and talk about turning fear into awesome writing there. Or, again - shameless charity plug - check out the muscular dystrophy links that I included in my last post. Every little bit helps, yanno?

I'll be back to my happy chatty self soon, I promise. xo)

Seconds

In four weeks, give or take some days, I will give birth. To a baby. Another one.

At this point in my first pregnancy, I was totally prepared for the arrival of the baby and for any and all potential natural disasters and had already moved on to alphabetizing the boxes of teas in the tea cupboard. I had purchased and assembled (okay, had husband assemble) a stroller (carefully selected after extensive research) and a crib (examined and re-examined and re-examined again for possible defects and potential baby-head-mangling gaps.) I had outfitted the crib in organic cotton linens and stocked the dresser with impossibly tiny onesies and receiving blankets and diapers and diaper ointment and baby jammies and wee socks and booties and even some of those creepy little fingerless cotton mittens that I never did use. I had stocked the bookshelves with baby books, and put pictures up on the walls, and put little stuffed toys on the daybed. If that baby came early, I was ready. If that baby came late, I was ready. If a tornado hit and shut down the city and we were suddenly faced with an extreme diaper cream shortage? I was ready. If the ice caps melted and the streets flooded and we were suddenly forced to float south on a crib made bouyant by a thousand Pampers Swaddlers and some teething rings? I. WAS. READY.

This time? I am not ready. Not even close.

I have one new onesie for this child - one - and that was a gift. I haven't even gone through Wonderbaby's baby things - the stuff that I didn't give away in the weeks and months during which I was convinced that I would never go through that new child thing again, HELL NO - to see if there is, by chance, one or two onesies or pajama sets that are not a) pink, or b) irretrievably shit-stained. The bassinet is in storage, as is the infant car seat. The BabyBjorn was given away, loooong ago, after Wonderbaby rejected it. And the nursery? Looks like this:


Those are bins of laundry - washed, yes, but unfolded, because who has time for that? - in the foreground. And a vacuum cleaner. And while there are books and magazines on the bookshelf, they're all old New Yorker magazines, Penguin Classics paperbacks and Martin Amis novels. Not a single work of Margaret Wise Brown to be found.

I tell myself that it doesn't mean anything, my inattention to the details of preparing for the arrival of this child. I tell myself that I'm slacking because I learned from the last one that all the organic cotton onesies and stocks of diaper cream in the world can't prepare you for the onslaught of mess and noise and love that a baby brings. I tell myself that what's different this time is that I know that money can't buy me baby-love. Or peace, or quiet, or security from fear. I tell myself that I'm not nesting, that I'm not feathering the nest, because I know that the feathers don't matter. That only my love, and his father's love, and his sister's love matter.

But still I worry. Isn't there a fine line between acknowledging what doesn't matter, and not caring? Mightn't I be perched on the slippery slope of devoting less care and attention to this child? This second child?

When I first found out that I was pregnant this time around, I was gripped - along with the joy - with fear and anxiety and ambivalence. I worried that while I was providing Wonderbaby with a wonderful, wonderful gift in a new sibling, I might also be depriving her of me - my love, my devotion, my attention, all of these things, undivided. I don't worry about that anymore. She has been and will always will be given enough love and attention and adoration to last lifetimes. Now, instead, I worry that I am bringing her brother into a life where everything that he is offered - love, attention, adoration, onesies - is divided. Handed down. Seconds. Even if what he is being handed down - even if what is divided - is in quantities that can only be measured by infinities, doesn't it matter that these are still seconds? That whatever he has - kisses, hugs, baby socks - will have been had by his sister, literally or figuratively, first?

That my love for him - although perhaps more the sweeter for coming from a calmer, more mature place - will not be my first, most intense love?

I will love him - DO love him - to the height and depth and breadth my soul can reach, etc. There will be no gaps or shortages in that love; there will be no further distance that that love could travel, no greater height that love could climb. It is, and will be, complete.

But it will always be the love that came second.

Does that matter?

From The Bottom Of My Squished-Up, Fetus-Kicked Heart

Apparently, it was Blog Reader Appreciation Day yesterday. As might well have been expected, I missed it.

I've been a terrible blog citizen these past months. I still visit and read blogs - old ones, new ones (all the new ones that spring up like so many lovely flowers in my comments inbox, actually. Am like bumblebee; cannot resist the nectar of new stories...) - but I've rarely commented. It's not that I'm not moved or inspired - words simply can't express how much those stories move me - it's that there have been just too many days since last fall, since the first difficulties of the pregnancy, since the anxieties that followed, since the subsequent relief turned to exhaustion, that I've felt unable to participate in the discussions. I read the posts, and then spurn the comments section, because I think, I haven't the energy to jump in here, to make my voice heard, to cry or laugh or rage or love more than I have already done in the reading, I just can't do it. And so I click away, making a mental note to e-mail the writer, or to Twitter their link, or something.

I rarely do.

There have been a great many days since last fall that I've considered shutting down this site entirely - retiring the personal stories and anecdotes and confessions that have so sustained me - and limiting my online writing to the paid gigs and other projects that this blog made possible for me. Just because I was so tired, and because I felt that I wasn't holding up my end of the bloggy social contract. I crafted numerous posts like this one, apologizing, explaining, and then tucked them away in draft, not wanting to turn my feelings into an exercise in public self-flagellation. (I asked a dear friend over the weekend, how does one talk about not wanting to talk? how does one say sorry for that? *should* one say sorry?) And so I just kept returning to this space, my space, for the comfort and release of storytelling, of sharing, knowing that you were always still here, reading, listening, no matter what. And so I will keep returning, because I need this.

Yesterday, I received a card in the mail from Muscular Dystrophy Canada, thanking me and what they termed 'my supporters' for raising the third highest amount of money for MD in the marathon/charity walk last September. My supporters. My family's supporters. You. All of you. Those of you who contributed, those of you who walked with me, and those of you have just always been there, listening and caring. All of you, who are so, so, so much more than just 'supporters' or 'readers'. All of you, friends. Sounding boards. Welcoming shoulders, warm hands, open hearts.

I cried when I read the card, from gratitude, and from a keen sense of having not expressed that gratitude enough. I'm so fortunate, and so not sufficiently demonstrative enough in my gratitude for the good fortune that you all have helped me create and sustain. I want to promise that I'll be better at it, that I'll be a better friend, that I'll comment everywhere, always.

But I can't. I really am doing the best I can, and times are getting more challenging 'round here, and I may in fact become worse with this before I become better.

I just wanted you to know that I think about these things. That I think about all of you. That I way-so-more-than-appreciate-you. A lot.

xoxoxoxo

(Am closing comments because this post is just for you. I want you to just read it, and not concern yourselves with reassurances or back-pats or oh-no-thank-*you*s. I'm just laying this very small flower at your feet and stepping away. It's yours. That is all.)

The Truth, In Twelve Words Or Less

The truth about motherhood:

The sum of all universes, shat upon, but ever-wiped and diapered.

(Spare and obscure, I admit - and meaningful, perhaps, only to me - but I was simply incapable of even beginning to ponder the question, what is the truth about motherhood according to me?, without either writing a six-volume epic, or a koan. I went with the koan.

If you're reading this Sunday, you've still got time to answer the question, put forward by PBN. You might try to do it as a koan, in one shortish sentence. Be sure to link PBN and Discovery Health if you do it before midnight tonight. Let me know, though, via linkage and/or comments, if you go the koan route - which is, really, just a concise sentence, usually one that articulates contradictions, but it can sound however you like. Your truth about motherhood, twelve words - or so - or less. I'd love to compile them. )

(Look! SusieJ did it! So did Ali-RN! You can too!)

My universes, summarized. (Soon to be universes, squared.)

Lady Of The Rings

When I was pregnant with Wonderbaby, I lost my wedding ring. It was late in the pregnancy, and my fingers were swollen, so I removed it and (I thought) tucked it safely away, with every intention of putting it on a gold chain or something so that I could keep wearing it.

I never saw it again.

It was something that I had hoped never to lose. My mother had it - and my husband's matching band - handmade from gold from my great-grandmother's collection as her wedding gift to us. It was the only thing that I had of my great-grandmother's, and the most precious of our wedding gifts, not to mention, you know, the crafted symbol of our undying love. And I lost it.

I wore a cool Frank Gehry-designed Tiffany ring in its place until very recently. It - the Gehry ring - was explicitly not a conventional wedding band; it was just a pretty, shiny placeholder for the treasured ring that my husband kept assuring me we would find. When we moved house, shortly after Wonderbaby's second birthday - more than two years since I had lost the ring - we finally gave up looking. It was gone.

My husband bought me a replacement ring for Valentine's Day this year. It's very pretty, a simple white-gold band with a sparkly row of diamonds across the top. Conventionally wedding-bandy, without being too traditional, and evocative of the simple gold band that my mother had crafted for us. If you put my husband's left hand alongside my own and noticed our rings, you would think that they each had probably been purchased or made with the other in mind. That they weren't - that there are years and histories that divide these two rings - would only be apparent to someone who knew the saga of the ring that formerly dwelt upon my left ring-finger. Even then, they might not notice. A ring is a ring is ring, after all, and one band - whether it be treasured hand-me-down gold or jagged high-design silver or brand-new and sparkly - is not all that different from another.

A ring is a ring is a ring. And the loss of that first, most precious ring - the first piece of jewellry that I ever really treasured as something whose whole value was greater than the sum of its market-evaluated parts - taught me that what was precious was not the ring itself, but everything that it symbolized. Which, I know, trite, but still: I was able to lose that ring and not feel that I'd lost some part of myself. My marriage, my love for my husband, my mother's love for me, the memory of my great-grandmother: those were, and are, all things that live and breathe and flourish beyond the ring. These things cannot be lost.

Someday, I'll pass along my wedding ring - my shiny, pretty, circa-2008 ring - to my daughter, and I will tell her its story and I will tell her that it means everything - love, memory, loss - and nothing. That its importance - before it comes into her possession, while she carries it with her, and long after she loses it - resides only in its idea, in the thought of it as a symbol of all those things that I will tell her about, that she will learn about, and that that idea, that thought, those things, can be carried in her heart, their weight beyond gold.

I have no picture of that ring, and this was supposed to be a photo-centric post, so. In lieu of, I inserted pictures of some of my other favorite things. My antique Lopburi monkey oil painting, my library table, one of my two cats, a photo of my grandma on her wedding day, the squirrel who's been suntanning outside my kitchen window. You know, stuff I love.

None of which I love as much as this, though:

***********

As I noted yesterday, instead of a straight-up Friday Flashback, today is a kind of Friday Flashback/Friday Foto Frenzy combo - a photo-centric post that may or may not involve a flashback (although bonus points are awarded for keeping it flashback-y.) The topic: "My Favorite Thing," or "These Are A Few Of... etc" (in case you have more than one.) Self-explanatory: what object (or objects) in your home is your favorite thing, the thing that you would be most likely to grab first in a fire, the thing that you gaze upon and murmur, lovingly, MINE? Bonus points if it's something from your youth or childhood. (Inspiration from Mama Tulip, who was probably inspired by someone else, which is how this stuff usually works.) Let me know if you do it, so that I can come check your stuff out.

Other posts this morning (note - this list is NOT comprehensive - I'm limited in my capacity to update links these days, tho' I'll try to add more as I can, but anyhoo: this baby's round-robin, which means follow the links for more links and more links and so on and so forth):

Sweetney
Girl's Gone Child
OTJ
Mrs. Flinger
Whoorl
MuthaBumpa
Izzy

You Are The Cheese

We're, what, only two and a half weeks into Lent? And WonderBaby has already broken her vow to abstain from imitating the Pope.

In the hungover fog that was yesterday, I completely forgot to acknowledge the wonderfulness that is this whole Thinking Blogger Award thingie. I mentioned it the other week, when I thanked OTJ, Mom-NOS and Kyla for their awesometasticness in naming me a Thinking Blogger. But then came the ever-fabulous Punditmom and my good friend Mad Momma with more thinky-linky love, and I realized that I have been woefully, unforgivably remiss in not paying this forward.

For this, I apologize. To the entire parent blogosphere, and beyond, because the whole damn thing - the whole damn lot of you - make me think. Which is saying something, because after more than a decade of studying philosophy, a few years teaching philosophy, and two and half years practicing the mostly (mostly) unphilosophic art of wrangling a WonderBaby, you'd think that I'd be pretty much mind-numbed. But no, far from it: every evening, after the nightly post-structuralist deconstruction of the works of Margaret Wise Brown, and after setting aside my dog-eared copies of Machiavelli's la Mandragola, Rousseau's Emile and Vanity Fair (Graydon Carter, not Thackeray), I turn not to the sweet oblivion of reality television - I turn to you. (Okay, most nights I turn to you.) And you always, unfailingly, make me think.

I've lost track of who has or hasn't been tagged with one of these awards. You all deserve one, and so I hate narrowing it down. But it seems to me that the men of the mom'n'poposphere have been seriously under-represented in these awards, and so I'm going to direct my attentions to them: AdventureDad, MetroDad, DadGoneMad (whose original post at the Blogfathers about his daughter's turbo-shit started me thinking early and often about the joy that is the shit of our offspring and remains, for me, the gold standard of potty philosophy), Laid-Off Dad and, of course, Dutch of Sweet Juniper. These were the first dad-bloggers on my bloggy reading list, and they remain on that (ever-growing, ever-crowded) reading list, because they never fail to make me laugh or think or - best - both.

Thanks, guys. WonderBaby salutes you:

You are the cheese.

(Don't think too long about that.)

Because Every Day is Valentine's Day 'Round Here...

Man of my heart; girl of my heart; loves of my life. Happy day of love to you, every day and always.

The Gift

New links are being added to the Great Mommy Blogger Love-In daily. Keep checking out those posts (I'll put a permanent link in my sidebar, soonish). And keep sending them in, if you haven't already done so. No deadline. Each Friday, I'll be doing a post about these posts, a few at a time, so that they can be properly celebrated, until we've gone through them all. Enjoy.

*****

Since WonderBaby was born, I have been keeping a journal about her. Not this one; a proper, bound paper journal with ink-smeared pages. It began as a poo diary (how many poos today? what color? runny? yes my friends the life of a mother dazzles with its glamor), but it quickly evolved into a detailed record of the minutiae of WonderBaby's existence. When does she sleep? For how long? When does she nurse? How long? Which breast? Did I read to her? What books? Did she smile/laugh/roll-over/grasp objects/sit up? Everything.

This detailed note-taking has not wholly been an exercise in record-keeping (every notable moment has been recorded in every conceivable medium - notebook, baby book, digital photo, digital video - short of ass tattoo. And that may still be coming. That? That's graphic representation in ink of my daughter's ass on a toilet. Commemorating the moment of liberation from the tyranny of the poo bag. 'Cause that'll be huge.) Instead, it has been, for the most part, anthropological research. Detailed note-keeping as part of an embedded participant-observation case study. Subject: WonderBaby.

When she arrived - November 14, 2005 - and was placed in my arms, it felt as though she had always been there. It felt as though the weight of her - the delicate, delicate weight of her - was and always had been part of me. That I would always need to feel that weight to feel complete.
But she was a stranger. She was new. She was part of me - my body ached with yearning for her if we were separated for more than a moment - but she was still unknown.

So I set about getting to know her. Primally, we acquainted ourselves through our bodies: tit to hungry mouth, hand to shit-smeared bottom, kisses kisses kisses to beautiful little head, and the constant embrace, skin to skin. This stretched and strengthened my soul, coming to know this other being so physically, this other being who is herself the creation of the most intimate physical knowing, this being who is both of my body and of her father's and so bound, always, physically, to both of us. But my mind struggled to keep up. Who is she who is she who is she who is she?

The poo provided no answers. Consistently mustardy, arriving with appropriate frequency, sometimes with inappropriate force and volume. But the record-keeping... ah. That appealed to the academic in me. I could know her by studying her habits, by taking careful notes (and, not incidentally, checking those notes against so-called Expert Texts, a practice that I abandoned early on, once I realized that they were all full of shit - and not the benign breastmilk kind - and that the very idea of baby expertise is absurd.) So I kept careful notes. I studied my baby. I satisfied my mind's desire to understand her in rational, quantifiable terms. Naps two hours once a day if swaddled and put down in dark room. Nurses every three hours. Resists afternoon naps except in stroller. Responds to nightly ritual: dinner bath cuddle nurse cuddle bed. Sleeps seven hours. Growth spurt? Five hours. Everything that my heart and body told me about her, I double-checked against my notes. But that was the thing: every note that I took, every behaviour that I observed, every conclusion that I arrived at, had already been viscerally noted and imprinted. I already knew her.

I realized this some time ago. But I clung to my book. It served me well; it was something to cling to when I felt confused or out of my depth, which was often.

WonderBaby turned 6 months old this weekend. Yesterday, she had her six month well-checkup. When I took out The Book to note her weight and other particulars, I realized that I hadn't recorded the morning's routine beyond the time of her rising. Nor had I done so for the last two days. I had been mothering beyond the book. I no longer needed my notes. I knew WonderBaby through my flesh, through my bones, through my blood.

So yesterday, after recording the details of the visit with the doctor, I put the book away.

But before I close the book entirely, I thought that I should post its last, incomplete entry here, for posterity.

6:20 Up and nursing.

Dawn, and we hear her happy voice, cooing matins with her bunny. Daddy goes to greet her good morning, and to bring her into bed. In she comes, smile as wide as sunflowers, arms outspread. Down to the breast; she suckles and snuggles and then turns to reach for her Da. Chest hairs are plucked, groins are kicked, fingers probe eyes, noses, mouths. We play, we cuddle, we doze...

2:20 Down in carseat. To doctor; 1 dropper Infant Tylenol 30 min. before shots.

Clutching sides of carseat as it is swung into car; eyes wide as saucers but smiling always smiling.

Doctor's Appointment. Weight: 16.5 lbs.

Chubby little legs that kick and push. Soft round belly and proud high chest.

Length: 27.5 inches

Tall like her Da. Long, long legs that stretch, stretch, stretch. Straining to stand, to bounce. Striving for her height, reaching for the sky, the stars, our embrace.

Head circumference: 17.75 inches

Noble baby head, big and round and full of firing brain. Sparsely haired, built for hats and for sniffing and for kisses for kisses for endless kisses.

Developing well. Sat up early. Babbling. Responds to name. Taking solids.

Growing, learning, living and loved, so loved.


And that was all. That is all.

That's all that matters. She is loved, beyond all measure, with every fibre of her parents' beings. She is loved. And, so, she is known.

I know her. She's my baby.