it's here.

sydney mines, vol. 1

We're too much of laundry and past-date sour cream and power bills and the broken camera and the abandoned yoga practice and the sneaking suspicion that we are, in fact, a 72-year-old recluse trapped in a 36-year-old body.

Did you know

says a friend

all the old ladies in nursing homes drink nothing but tea, because who says no to tea? and they end up dehydrated, and they're put on tea rationing.

I pause for mathematics.

Six teas in one day, each with two heaps of sugar. One bottle beer. Zero glasses water. But the house is peppered with a string of forgotten mugs, a trail of tepid Yorkshire Gold that represents nothing more than scattered sips. Adding up to one, maybe one and a half. Reasonable. No need, yet, to begin playing bridge.

Still, such a rash of mug misplacement can't factor well in the reckoning of senility.

+++

We trudge. God, how we trudge. Each of us forgets to look sidelong at the person next, the person behind, all trudging souls.

Woe!
but for more hours, more started, more finished
more of what I want
more of what I need
more of what I deserve

And there we are, caught in the snare of our own trickery. Restlessness seduces.

What is it to feel unrealized, other than strangely exquisite? It is the soul's plea to matter. It is the exhausting submersion of caring for others, sometimes at the expense of our own creative spark. It is age and mortality settling upon us like a kneading cat, prodding us to Hurry up and do something. Make something. Be something, before they start rationing my tea.

What do you see?

I see a kid whose every adventure is already written. All his loves and words and chance encounters carved into each and every bone, waiting for him to notice.

I see the force that made him, and it smiles.

You have everything you need. You have fortitude. You have stories. Be quiet, be still, until they slink out from underneath forgotten freight to sniff around your ankles like feral cats.

Never mind the trudge. Everybody trudges. Just keep going. But be sure, as you do,

to listen.

+++

Sydney is on fire. He illustrated The Dread Crew (due to arrive any day now from the printers for shipping to retailers, and then to you) and he's been uploading new stuff and I accosted him and said oh my god please let me brag about you and he replied only if you mention the private jet.

He said okay. And so every now and then I'm going to sit here with a glass of wine and stare at one of his drawings for a while, something wholly unconnected to what he did for the book, and I'm going to write a bit.

Swear to god I am not on the doobage.

It's better than doobage.

It's Sydney.

fire flies from the crater

One of them swayed as she stood there, one hand on the tiny rump slung round her torso. pat- pat- pat. She was tired and hobbling a little but glowed with exertion, production.

She was one of three mothers, all having given birth seven days ago, thirteen days ago, eleven. Friends of mine, halloween party invites and playdate companions and sandpit watchers. Two mei-tais, one sling. The last time I saw them, all three were round. Now they are two. four. six.

I feigned a need to catch the last of Nelson’s eggs and weaved through the crowd to the sound of a fiddle and a guitar and a box-bass, of people ordering organic coffee and ooohing at fresh olive baguettes, and greenhouse raspberries, and earthy portobellos, and babies so new they do nothing but sleep where they belong, safe and enfolded, always the one escaping hand, fingers splayed, cheek squashed up hot and down-deep against familiar breast.

It’s raining.

I contemplated standing next to the fire, an old metal drum that yawns a lazy column of ash into the air, but it was occupied, even in drizzle. I saw the path into the woods and kept walking. I saw where the path turned over the creek. I kept walking.

They’re not going to know where I’ve gone.

+++

Ingiddboogoomin.

Ingiddboogoomin, mommy.

In the dark just after lights-out I sing a song about a drifter, Woody Guthrie, who fell in love with a movie star. Every night for weeks now, months, they want the same song. He offers her his seed rather than his pennies. He is a mountain. She treads upon him, and he awaits the touch of her hand upon his hard rock.

Ben helps.

Ingrid Bergman, yer so…

PURDY!

You'd make any mountain….

QUIVAH!

You’d make fire fly from the…

KWATEH!

A horny drifter teaches my sons the arts of both wanting and drifting. It’s a more authentic romance, after all, one free of platitudes. It is human. Urges and blackness and aches and sidelong glances and parked cars that double as refuge from gold standards and rain.

Sometimes, contentedness is poking a finger into our wound and giving it a wiggle. For sheer sensation. For summoning. For a beginning, a balm, an unlocking key.

We yearn and mourn and scrape calloused heels in unbecoming ways. We covet. We hardly ever say what we mean. We disrespect a perfectly honourable and universal dark. We pretend despite instinct. We grip white-knuckled to precious truth with one hand, whipping ourselves with the other as though we should somehow be more enlightened than the animals we are.

I need you. I don’t need you.

We are unaware that even at our most absurd, there is no need to apologize. We wander, dreaming like meat of the sweet, hot breath of a siren.

one day in a life

Your birth is the most important event in shaping your life as a mother.

Is it? Really? Let me chew on that again.

…
…

Your birth

is the most important event

in shaping your life as a mother.

Important distinction: you call it my birth. But it’s not. It’s my kid’s birth.

Still chewing.

…
…

Sometimes, motherhood is destined, and yet the experience of birth is not. Are those women lesser mothers?

…
…

Are women who are indifferent to method lesser mothers? Lesser feminists? Or just unenlightened and pitiable, even if they’re content with their experience?

…
…

There are birth advocates in my life whom I love and adore, even though it took me too long to figure out I wasn’t supposed to say isn’t it more about having a baby than having a birth? with such coarseness. Which is pretty much the same thing as walking into a tabernacle wanting to know, with genuine earnestness, why any of us should mind if someone else's bum isn’t just an out-door.

These friends and I have pretty much agreed to talk about other things like high heels and muffintops, because for a while there, I was an unintentional cannonball. But today I saw this declaration and it broke my heart.

Then it made me cranky. Which makes me unfashionable. But I have to stand up and raise my hand, even if it means I risk looking like I stand against them, which I don’t. It's the discourse—the language used and what lies implicit in it.

Your birth is the most important event in shaping your life as a mother.

So you’d better make it beautiful and serene and victorious and on your terms. Because if it gets screwed upside-down and sideways, you will be forever marked as having been robbed—and your baby, too, who will never forgive you for not being more like a goddess and less, you know, unconscious.

+++

Birth is absolutely not the most important event that shapes my life as a mother. It’s just not. Allow me to elaborate.

IMPORTANT EVENTS THAT SHAPED MY LIFE AS A MOTHER

1. The day I let down and my toes curled and I went YEEEEEEOWCH and Evan started to drink and his eyes rolled into the back of his head, and I transformed into an eminently useful mutant.
2. The day I found those sneakers with the flames on the sides. Also: the corduroy shearling vest, and the famed paperboy hat. Revelation: little banker haircuts are not a given. Neither are velcro Spiderman shoes. Not that there’s anything wrong with velcro Spiderman shoes. Some of my best friends wear velcro Spiderman shoes.
3. The day I figured out that Evan was making himself throw up for the pure spectacle of it, and realized that if I nonchalantly stuck a barf bowl under his chin and loudly proclaimed it to be a BARF BOWL like I couldn’t care less if his intestines came out his nose, and he looked up at me, huffed, and went back to bed.
4. The day Liam died and I snuck a look behind the curtain of the universe.
5. The day Ben realized that cupcakes were actually EDIBLE.
6. The day I watched Justin tussle with his sons, and his sons were clearly winning, and I saw him loving that they were winning.
7. The day Ben said SHIT in a context-appropriate manner.
8. The day after Evan was born and I had my first shower, and my crotch was ground beef, and all that blood ran down my legs and I felt clean but strange, and I realized I couldn’t go back to bed and sleep, as much as I needed to, because Evan would be hungry soon. That was the first time I couldn’t rest of my own free will. And lo! I couldn’t wait for him to wake up and need me.

I don’t mean to scorn the birthwork-inclined. They want to keep birth as serene and as natural as possible, and they do it passionately, and uphill. This is important. This is required to counter a history of c-sections prompted by imminent tee-offs.

The problem is the flip side.

Birth cannot be controlled. Or promised. Or unfailingly protected, or made reliably miraculous and beautiful. It can be nudged, and sheparded, and prepared-for, and supported, and informed. But sometimes, birth is just a gong show. When that happens, it is imperative that we do our best to shrug at the mechanics and hope for better luck next time.

Because I can’t carry any more guilt. I don’t need birth idealists piling themselves upon my thoroughly buggered psyche like a well-intentioned rugby team, calling me or any other woman a warrior for delivering one way as opposed to another.

They’ve got the best of intentions, but the wildly overstated significance some people heap onto birth in order to steer more women towards labouring self-actualization is just too heavy a weight. This weight doesn’t make everyone feel empowered and guttural. It makes some people feel anxious and pressured and damaged and unfulfilled.

I was not a warrior in the operating room. I was a warrior in the pumping room.

My motherhood is not defined by catastrophe. My motherhood is defined by love and magic and talking trees and waning butterflies. My motherhood is defined by how I live my life in an effort to balance the woman and the writer and the nurturer I want to be. All that and the quality of my whoopie pies.

My motherhood is no more misshapen than anyone else’s, except for how it’s been touched by death. And so that declaration makes me want to say Come with me, right this way, into the NICU, won’t you?

Then look at my kin and look at how fierce and how brave and how wounded they are. Tell them that the mechanics of birth will be the most important thing that shapes them as mothers. Tell them the catastrophic births of their children—their loss of control—forever marks them and renders their babies (if their babies survive) poorly-bonded basketcases.

Does our experience of birth matter that much? Does it, really, given everything that may or may not follow that makes us into mothers?

Is birth the everything? Or just one thing?

Come with me. Right this way.

+++

My edits, below.

Birth is one of countless important events and encounters that all mash up together to shape your perception of your life as a mother.

Birth is one day in a life that will give you all kinds of chances to become much more than a birther. It can heal and inspire and give cause for delight and awe. It can be medicalized or marginalized. What determines one or the other is not your skill, nor the divinity of your preparation, nor your stamina, but random fortune or misfortune. In the case of the latter you’ll have to let it go and find your pride again, and trust that your kid won’t remember it. Because she won’t. Or if she does, she’ll only remember it in an unconscious kind of way such that her innermost self, which is more worldly and less delicate than we all know, says Yikes! That was a friggin’ startle. Hmph. (kid’s innermost self shrugs)

+++

A friend has an anonymous confessions board now and then and I read it and swear not to read it and read it and swear not to read it. It’s where people say stuff like this

My husband wants to have kinky sex. I'm not so sure.

and this

I pretend to like dogs but really i can't stand them. Too sloppy and smelly. Why would anyone want to have one in theire house?

and this

I used to know a really spooky girl who had a twin sister who died at birth. The girl said she could communicate with her sisters spirit. All us kids were terrified of her and we wouldn't ever sit with her at lunch.

and so I said this

I used to know a really spooky boy who had a twin brother who died at birth. The boy said he could communicate with his brother's spirit. All us kids thought he was a goddamned superhero. He was swamped with admirers at lunch.

I feel the same way about birth as I do about death.

I need perspective, and adaptability, and beauty in chaos.

So I choose it.

the dread crew meme: stories that stick

Roald Dahl made an impression on me as a kid. His books were so compellingly black, so unafraid of weirdness and twistedness, I wondered about the mind that made them up. The good kind of wonder. If I’d ever met him, I would have found something to hide behind. And he would have waggled his eyebrows at me. He would have moved elsewhere in the room. And I would have moved from behind a large plant to behind the buffet to behind the fat man with the tuba in order to be close to him in case he waggled his eyebrows at me again.

Starting today at my other blog, share the stories and characters that have moved you.

On Halloween night, I'll randomly choose five participants to receive their own signed copy of The Dread Crew: Pirates of the Backwoods a few days before it hits stores. Go check out the questions. My answer to the first one?

James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series for naughty backrubs, Phillip Pullman’s subtle knife for passage into alternate worlds and Willy Wonka’s glass elevator for transportation. As long as I can get it customized to accommodate a heart-shaped jacuzzi and a mirrored ceiling.

C'mon. Play along.

thanksgiving

On a perfectly clear night, the plane took off at dusk and flew over the city towards the north shore, straight overtop the lodge at Cypress Mountain. A cluster of gold at the base of a bowl, one liftline and then two, and the skychair to the peak. And the line for a new chair that Justin had cut, lugging a chainsaw up the mountain to clear a new face of trails. We went up there one new years’ eve on snowmobiles, armed with food and beer, and slept mummified in down after stomping a clearing for tent-igloos. The next morning we skied down that new liftline, straight down a narrow strip of untracked north shore snow, heavy and wet.

There wasn’t a single day I lived in Vancouver and didn’t feel invigorated by something. By the conversations in boardrooms, by the constant push that contrasted with being one of a few mascots welcomed inside the sanctum of the patrol hut. By kelp forests undulating beneath my kayak, giant waving palms that stroked my hull with jeweled fingertips.

I stared at my past from a thousand feet up, gazing through the window at those lights with my chin in my hand, unsure of what I felt. Was it a sadness, a wanting to live there again? I paused, searched, concluded. I’m too sensible. Vancouver doesn’t add up to who we are now. Or, rather, we don’t add up to it.

It’s a ghost, that whole place, and I walk through it as the only living thing. Every vision I see is an imprint of our unhindered selves, of eleven years of fulfilling modest, spontaneous wants without much in the way of obstacles. An old truck, a basement apartment, sprayskirts drying in the backyard.

It makes me smile, what we had. What we have. For what is now a Friday night in a place that allows for dead houses and dreams, rooted by familiar boots, our children steeped in salt.

We are every place we’ve been.

Can you believe that was us?

Yes, I can.

$948,000 could totally self-manifest like weighing six pounds on another planet. All I need is an alternate gravity and I could turn my savings of $52.95 into a home in Vancouver.

This city's playing tricks on me.

It's making itself look all... plausible and shit. Everywhere I look I see kids in sushi restaurants and packs of fathers on mountain bikes and I think could we? never minding the fact that once you're IN at a fire department you're pretty much IN until you're unable to pee without assistance, because opting out would mean probationary status once more and Justin would be back down to a bi-weekly paycheque of $52.95. Plus, as a probie, they'd make him rub down the calendar guys with baby oil every Tuesday. Again.

So anyway.

Quit it with all those batting eyelashes, Vancouver. I know what you're up to.

DAMMIT.

Oh sigh.

Note to self: refrain from looking out the window. Even more so, request from clients horse blinders to affix to head so that all I can see is sidewalk. Beautiful, awe-inspiring sidewalk. In Vancouver, even the discarded butts are painted to look like totem poles.

All this to say that I'm here, and I'm swooning, but don't worry, mom. Well, maybe worry just a teeny bit. Maybe spend, like, 14% of the day worrying. But not a moment more.

And also to say that me and Kristin D of Better Now are meeting you tonight at Steamworks Pub in Gastown at 8 PM for pumpkin beer. Right? RIGHT? I'm expecting friends from Phoenix. And Daphne's flying in from Ottawa. And Lauranne and Bon from Charlottetown. And any minute now, $948,000 is going to tap me on the shoulder and I'll turn around and it'll be standing there without any clothes on except for a sandwich board that says TAKE ME NOW. And after rolling around on the bed with $948,000 I will buy a house in Lions Bay. No wait. More like a Special at 28th and Fraser.

But that's cool. Will I see you at Steamworks tonight? Please say yes.

Especially if you're $948,000.