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today was supposed to be Oscar’s birthday…but the early bird is almost four weeks old.

and he’s becoming more and more a little person every day. he’s awake more, and he peers about blearily, taking in the world. he’s a content, watchful little creature, round, downy-fuzz head on a sausage roll of swaddling. when he breaks free from his blankets, he flaps his arms like a wild thing, but always seems surprised when the appendages whack him in the face. he peeps when he first wakes up, and he snorts a little when he feeds. he weighs almost seven-and-a-half pounds, and has the beginnings of little baby fat rolls – already i can see his newborn face disappearing, giving way to the round babyface visage he’ll have in the coming months. i grieve and delight in this growth, this changing Oscar. i keep meaning to footprint him now, before his tiny baby feet outgrow the preemie-sized sleepers that get smaller every day. now, i understand all those people who said “it goes by so fast.”

in Antoine St. Exupery’s “The Little Prince,” a fox entreats the little prince to tame him. he instructs him to come at the same time each afternoon, and sit a little closer every day. “to me you are just a little boy, like all other little boys,” says the fox. “but if you tame me, you will be unique in all the world.” my boy has been taming me for four weeks now, batting his little blond eyelashes, distinguishing himself from all the other babies he might have been – teaching me to love him for who he is and is becoming.

but there are other, less Hallmark-worthy revelations in this wonder of new parenthood. the baby’s growing fast and charming me with his small self, but the 3am vigils still seem to last like timeless torture some nights, as i slump in the chair by the bed, struggling to keep the gnawing little mouth latched properly on an aching nipple and the small squirmy body balanced on the breastfeeding pillow. i look at my child, in these moments, and i don’t always see the individual Oscar, but just a baby, a needy baby like a thousand other babies. and i wonder at the survival of the human race.

in the middle of the night, it becomes blatantly, overwhelmingly apparent that this squalling hungry infant is entirely dependent on the adult who happens to be awake with him…which is usually me, though his father is a star at middle-of-the-night diaper changes. but we could ignore him, if we chose. i could sleep (maybe with earplugs). i could leave him lying in his own waste. i could scream at him to shut up already. or, at the end of a rope i hope i never run out of, i could do worse. and he, small mewling thing, could do nothing at all. he is totally, entirely vulnerable to the whims of the adults he’s been entrusted to. this realization – that we are those adults for Oscar – is bald and frightening, and amazing. i have never, ever had such power. or such responsibility.

“The Little Prince” closes the chapter on the fox and the prince with the caution, “you are responsible forever, for what you have tamed.” as a parent, i think the reverse is also true. you are responsible, forever, for the little life that tames you. and sometimes, that responsibility is immense, and exhausting. but Oscar, he of the pointy chin and grasping hands, has become unique to me in all the world. and that – only that – will keep me semi-conscious at 3 in the morning, feeding my little prince.

it has been an amazing four weeks.

she was six the last time i saw her.

the younger of two little girls, she had gold-brown hair, big gold-brown eyes. she liked storybooks and swings and made me an initiate into the world of Dora the Explorer. when i visited, she and i and her older sister drove Barbie convertibles and painted toenails and drew pictures with our fingers on each others’ backs.  she was learning English, i, French. in the language of laughter, we sang songs of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and queens.

Posey, my imp, is uncannily like her, this child i remember from a lifetime ago.

she was my niece by marriage. the November night she was born, the call came in from the small town hours away from the college landscape her uncle and i inhabited. safe birth, great joy. i smiled, raised a beer bottle across the lumpy mattress in his rented attic room with the rainbow wallpaper, to welcome Emilie.

i had known him two months. i did not think, then, that i would marry him.

but months unfolded into years and we went, we two, hand in hand into the world like children clinging to each other. not all who wander are lost, we intoned, secretly uncertain. escape artists for lack of a better plan, we spent all we had on train tickets to the west coast. a week in the smoky bar car and we came into sight of the Rocky Mountains at five in the morning, sharp and majestic, inky black against a sky bigger than we’d ever seen.  our heads tilted together, Simon & Garfunkel on the headphones stretched between them, and there were tears in my eyes but i did not know why.

we lived in basements there, slept on floors, sold magazines to the Chinatown exchange. we ventured north of the Arctic Circle, rounded back again east to within the scent of the sea, exchanged rings. we were prodigals, forever coming home to the tiny town where his parents and his sister and her children were rooted. we brought back treasures from all over, trinkets, baubles, seashells. i bought them their first copies of Love You Forever and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Anne of Green Gables and The Little Prince. i wanted daughters, and loved Emilie and her sister like promises, practicing with an open heart.

but i loved their uncle like a brother, which is the world and not enough, all at once. he and i pulled at each other, stretched apart. Ani diFranco sang in each other’s shadow we grew less and less tall, and we waltzed our slow swan song in denial and sorrow, respectively, Hansel and Gretel run dry on breadcrumbs to find their way back. and when we left for the last time to go halfway round the globe, there were tears in my eyes then too as we waved goodbye to the little girls through the car window, and i pretended to myself that i did not know why.

you lose things in divorce, no matter how little you have or how amicable it’s all supposed to be. we had no property, no furniture, one ancient Volkswagen long sold and a cat who went to live with old folks and got better dental care than i’ve ever had. but in the cloister of the expatriate lives we made in the hermit kingdom amongst equally uprooted friends, we each lost more than we bargained for. he slept with my friend, but i chose his. the first was almost expected, the other, unforgiveable. i did not know why. i do now.

for a couple of years i still sent cards and tokens to the little girls on birthdays, Christmases. but airmail takes a long time, and dates crept up and address books got away in all my transience. when i asked him for his sister’s P.O Box address, i felt unworthy, awkward. i had chosen to be an outsider.

and so, cowardly, i stopped. Ma Tante Bonnie disappeared, kin and kind.
***

they found me two years ago, or so, on Facebook. first Emilie and then her sister. teenagers suddenly, all legs and curves and makeup, Dora and Barbies long left in the dust. they wrote and i wrote back, eager, trying not to be too effusive, too cloying. i had disappeared. disappearance is unfair to children, bottom line. but i was found, and i sent love and remembrances through the ether.

if it weren’t for Facebook i’m not sure i would have recognized her Saturday, in the hot dog line at the park. we are in New Brunswick, visiting grandparents in a small town not so far from the one i waved goodbye to ten summers ago. Oscar was with me, and his cousins, boys not much different in age than she and her sister were then.

it was the look on her face that caught my attention, rather than the face itself, at first. her eyes searched mine, for confirmation, recognition.

it took a beat for me to fully connect the dots. Emilie. as tall as i, with the long, sleek hair and angled cheekbones i know only from Facebook photos. i think i said her name, and opened my arms in the same moment she did. her English was perfect. i told her she was lovely. i asked banal questions about grade eleven, and her summer job, and her sister. and i grinned like a fool and bobbed my head up and down, heart happy.

but what do you say to a girl you last knew as a first-grader? we were intimate, you and i. i taught you all the words to Quarter Master Store, you taught me Christmas carols in French. i still think of you every time i hear Le Divin Enfant. i still note your birthday every year as it comes round on the calendar. but your Barbies are all put away now. i cannot pull you in my lap and trace your name on your back and say i’m sorry i left you. i didn’t mean to.

there are things you can’t say. you don’t get to take back ten years, whatever your paltry reasons.

her gaze was cautious, after the first blush of hello. in her eyes i felt as exposed as i have ever been. she smiled at Oscar, though, bent her head down to try to greet him where he hid behind my leg. something in the movement reminded me of the tiny girl she’d been, and i saw the image of her gold-brown bob juxtaposed against the way Josephine looks today, and i gasped again at how damn fast it all goes, how easily it slips away.

i’ve known people who moved into separate homes – for years – but still didn’t tell the children they were divorcing. i know families who manage – even after fracture – to gather the clans, cousins and ex-aunties and new partners and all – for holiday gatherings. i’ve raised my eyebrows, though with a tinge of jealousy. i grew up in a family where divorce meant my parents lived three thousand miles away from each other for twenty-eight years. when i was told by my ex that his nieces were no longer mine, i acceded.

but i knew. i knew i was wrong.

my eyes said, i’m sorry. my tongue said be well, Emilie. give my best to your family. and i took Oscar by the hand and walked away from the last memories of Ma Tante Bonnie, whom i will never be again.

we don’t call her princess. but when her little feet get weary in the Canada Day Parade, he treats her like one.

happy long summer weekend, North America. we’re up to our ears in real princes & princesses here in PEI. hope you’ve got your feet up just like Posey.

i’ve never been in theatre, even if my mother used to call me dramatic. daily. but i was once – like most seventeen-year-olds of the human species – utterly and pretentiously enamoured of all things dark and mysterious and deliciously supernatural.

so when i was seventeen and my high school English class took up Macbeth and the fresh-faced student teacher told us that real actors always referred to it as “The Scottish Play” because there was A CURSE on the title itself, well! i secretly swore right then and there that i would ne’er speak aloud the dreaded syllables for fear of appearing like an ignorant sot.

of course, i then promptly went out into the world and found lots of other ways to appear an ignorant sot. ahem.

(there was much i didn’t know when i was seventeen. including how much fun it can be to drop the word Macbeth loudly and repeatedly in front of theatrical persons of the young and sincerely serious sort: they get all quivery and smug in their superior knowledge. the fool is one of the finest roles written. they will learn.)

but the curse. ah, the curse. in the long social history surrounding Shakespeare, some nervous or controlling soul became convinced that real spells were being cast by the Weird Sisters, with their catchy “bubble, bubble, toil & trouble”. everybody loves a scandalous improbability, after all. and some productions of Macbeth went awry enough to support the idea that serious bad luck had been invoked. theatre companies, running on rather thin budgets, seem prone to bad luck.

thus, tradition holds that if the play is referred to by title in a theatre, there are cleansing rituals to be performed, most of which involve lines from other Shakespearean plays. who the god of this black magic is thought to be escapes me. possibly Titania, Queen of the Faeries? maybe Caliban?

anyhoo. The Scottish Play. for twenty-plus years, i’ve thought of the word “Macbeth” as a stand-in for all things unspeakable, for that which must not be invoked.

except, of course, it’s taken me years to be able to identify my own Macbeth, my personal doom-word, bringer of the almost comically predictable foul luck that inexplicably seems to leap up exactly when it is most inconvenient. or awkward. or guilt-inducing.

this year, i sorted it out.

it is Travel.

particularly, Conference Travel. as in, whenever one of us goes away the children inevitably fall ill or hurt themselves or stop sleeping or are eaten by the cat or whatnot. you know.

we probably bring the doom of Macbeth down on our own heads, i figured, by acknowledging our travel plans.

so this most recent trip of mine, which came hot on the heels of crazy busy-ness and for which i barely had time to pack anyway got very little anticipatory fanfare in our house. i had an academic conference four hours away. i noted only that i’d be nearby but not home for a few days. i did not speak the word “conference” aloud, and i threw salt over my shoulder whenever i even mentioned i’d be so much as out of the house.

i felt smug and happy and hopeful that Dave and the dear children would escape the curse this time. i had figured it out.

while away, i had the pleasure of seeing Macbeth in a fabulous park production put on by Bard in the Barracks and Theatre UNB.

then i called home. and i laughed and laughed. and thus, even though #thehomeproject is horribly late this week and this is rather an unconventional presentation, blatantly and happily plagiarizing from both Shakespeare and from Elsie & Norm’s MacBeth, well, hell, the show must go on.
***

The Dramatick Players doth present a Truthfull Accounte
of
The Curse Which Hangeth On the Cribbe, A Most WoeFul Tragedie
Which Striketh Whenever
One Adulte Doth Go AnyWhere Else.

A Play in Three Actes:

BONNIE & DAVE’S MACBETH

(with apologies to William Shakespeare, John-Christopher Wood, and all the literate people in the universe.)

Scene I: Odell Park, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. Absolutely no thunder and lightning in sight. Cue rain.

Enter three blogger friends, gathered for Congress of the Social Sciences & Humanities 2011 and a special production of The Scottish Play.

All three women wear the slightly wild look of adults who have been Too Busy but are momentarily freed of responsibilities. Two are far from home. Babysitter has been procured for local blogger’s child.

Each of these weird sisters wears rubber boots. One is sporting the same clothes she has worn for more than thirty hours, because Air Canada lost her luggage. All three are smiling. Also, wet.

Aimée:
When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning or in rain?

Bon:
When the hurlyburly’s cold
When the conference work doth fold

Sue:
That will be when we’re real old.

Aimée:
Where the place?

Sue:
Upon the rise.

Bon:
There to eat some whoopie pies.

Aimée:
Fair is foul and foul is fair
Air Canada lost my underwear.
***

Scene II: Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. The Crib Castle, or Bonnie & Dave’s house, where Bonnie is not, because she is cavorting with bloggers and academics in Fredericton, four hours away.

The house is littered, as after a great battle, with Fisher Price Little People. Enter two small children. The smaller has split her lip wide open.

Dave:
What bloody child is that? She can report
As seemeth by her plight, of the revolt
The newest state.

Oscar:
That is my sister
Who like a good and hardy badger fought
‘Gainst our captivity. Also, the floor.

Posey:
Doubtful I stood
Upon the chair. I look’d, listen’d
Spilt!
A drum, a drum,
MacBeth doth come!
Oh valiant Daddy
I am faint, my gashes cry for help.

Dave:
By the pricking of my thumbs
Something wicked this way comes.
To bed, anon.
We have scotch’d the snake, not kill’d it:
Macbeth is in the house.
Bad luck and bandaids shall be the order of our night.
***

Scene III: Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. The Crib Castle, the middle of the night.

Dave, bleary and nearing hopelessness at the children’s third waking in the course of the night, stumbles back towards his warm bed. He encounters a hallucinatory vision of Bonnie, who appears to be eating whoopie pies. He tries to fall into her arms but bumps painfully onto the floor, where he lies spent. A faint wail begins from the other room.

Dave:
Is this my partner which I see before me?
Hand toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee,
I have thee not and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, blessed vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A partner of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the child-oppressed brain?

Yes. Thou art away.
They howl, and it is done; their cry invites me.
Hear it not, vision; for it is a knell
That summons me from heaven in to hell.

It cries ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house:
‘Macbeth hath murder’d sleep, and therefore Cormier
Shall sleep no more; Dave shall sleep no more.’

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

He rises, and exits, weeping.
***

(if, of course, this were a proper tragedy, the main character would die. but as the main character in this is the spectre of Macbeth-ish bad luck that haunts us whenever one of us goes away, and we do not seem to know how to kill that particular spectre, alas, the play ends here, with my most sincere apologies to exhausted Dave for his sleepless, bloody travails during my absence, and my thanks to my Fredericton friends and colleagues who made MY trip so (shhhhh) fun.)

((Posey’s lip is recovering nicely)).

we were rushing our way through the half-abandoned mall to Oscar’s speech appointment upstairs. he was fifty feet away at the coffee shop table, his white shock of hair sticking straight up.

everyone has a visual imprint, a way of walking or sitting, the cock of a head, the way a hand punctuates speech.

my grandfather, even at ninety-one and shrunken and far less mobile than he’d like to be, still lords over his lunchtime newspaper, shaking a paw at the ridiculousness of the world.

the boy and i ran up and greeted him. hail fellow well met and smiles, gentle hugs.

my grandfather manages lunch on his own these days, mostly at this coffee shop at the old mall. it is just down the hill from his house. his hands are shaky, the driving worries me, but he manages.

i seized the moment. do you have any dinner plans?

i do not see him enough. he has a nurse – a crew of nurses, really, headlined by a stunner whom he adores – and my father and stepmother drop in nearly daily. but not me.

well, now, he began, and this is an old deliberate routine between us, dating back to the years after my grandmother died when i’d come home from college and call him up. were you looking to ask me out, young lady?

he and Oscar and i made plans for all of us to meet at one of his usual dinner haunts that evening. lately his short-term memory’s been poor, and phone calls to make dinner plans haven’t worked out so well. but i figured that evening? was only a few hours away. i hugged him, and Oscar and i dashed away to our appointment.

love you, Grandpa! i threw over my shoulder.

from the open stairs leading up to the speech therapy clinic, i watched him rise and fumble for his cane, sunlight glinting off the white crew cut grown shaggier than he’d once have tolerated.
***

my grandfather’s ancestors down the Stewart line sailed here two hundred years ago or so, when their Highland glens were cleared for sheep and politics.

they came with the Selkirk settlers, three boatloads in the summer of 1803. hardy and self-reliant, destitute but proud and canny, the lot of them are said to have landed in the virgin forests of PEI barely knowing how to wield an axe. today, this island is as green and bare as their Isle of Skye, and far more tamed. waste not, want not, ran the strain of steel through their mantra. they wasted not an inch or a branch of the place, the lot of them.

apparently the stewardship my clan were named for did not necessarily extend to environmentalism. rather, they expanded, prospered; became respectable, if still a wee bit fey.

my grandfather had an Uncle Dan who was apparently legendary in local horse-trading circles for two things: his fits of temper, and his punctuality. you could set your watch, legend has it, by when he’d start shouting.

and my grandfather’s Great Aunt Mae, at the end of her days, was given a room of her own in the nursing home for throwing her cane at her roommate. her roommate happened to be Great Aunt Maud, my grandmother’s equally cantankerous relation. the fact that Mae & Maud’s young family members had married apparently did little to assuage a lifelong bloodfeud.

the cane my grandfather uses these days? is Mae’s.

my whole life, my grandfather has been five minutes early for everything. he can be touchy, yes, if his particular code of propriety is breached. yet with his dirty jokes and his upright resilience and his fierce loyalty, he has been, for me, a sort of rock, a stability in a family tree long cleaved by separations and silences.

my mother came from a different line of Scots from a different island in the Hebrides, who landed here on this small isle within twenty years of the Stewarts, give or take. McNevins who somewhere became MacNevins, to hide their Jacobite roots and grow more staunchly, dourly, acceptably Protestant, i assume. my mother was the last of that line to carry the name. we gave it to Finn, his second middle name. it died again, with him, and i did not have the heart to try again.

and so Oscar is Oscar Charles Stewart Cormier, with the nod to Bonnie Prince Charlie hidden there in between his Acadian-sounding proper name. on one side and the other, his heritage falls almost entirely on the losing side of England’s burgeoning eighteenth-century imperialism. Culloden and clearances and expulsion, with a stray Irish Catholic thrown in now and then in the line for good measure.

and his mother tongue is English. och aye, o ye winners of history.

but last night, as i drove him home sleepy from his first Robbie Burns night concert, i told him the Stewarts were once kings.  i told him of the Charles Stewart who lost his head to Cromwell, and of Bonnie Prince Charlie the hapless, and i sang speed, bonny boat, like a bird on the wing, like i have since he was a baby.

if you are going to identify with people who have lost, then you’d better know how to make beauty out of sorrow. waiting for the once-and-future king only sounds romantic in songs.
***

he stood us up the other night.

i bundled the kids from school and we picked up Dave and rushed to the restaurant because it is not right to keep a 91-year-old man waiting. and there was a bit of a line and so we bounced the kids and sent Oscar on a scouting mission and even before we got a seat i had a sinking feeling and i called. i got his message machine.

and so the four of us sat at our table for six and ate, all the while keeping an eye on the door for a white head and an heirloom cane.

we drove up the hill after, just to make sure he was okay. and i was relieved. his nurse’s car was there and the lights on, and i assume they went elsewhere for supper, as they do sometimes.

we didn’t go in. there is no need to remind a person of failings he can no longer control.

it isn’t the first time, but the fourth or the fifth in these months or so since he came home from the heart attack and his long hospitalization. that he is home at all is a victory.  that i keep making this mistake is my own damn fault: my failure, not his.

i need to change my strategies, start calling immediately before, or making our dinner dates through his nurse and not through him.

i know this. i accept it, and i will do it.  because then there will be dinners with all of us present, and that is what i want.

but every time i see him, and his eyes light up, and he says were you looking to ask me out? i am sure, entirely sure, that he will be sitting there at the table five minutes before our agreed-upon time.

and i wish there were a song that i could sing to Oscar, to explain.

we went away for a week and i was mostly offline and i did not die.

yes, gather round, all ye internet hordes, and quiver at my testimony. i unplugged and lived to tell the tale.

here’s the shocking part: it was easy. hell, i didn’t even flop around on the ground like a dying carp, gasping for wireless. i expected to. i was ready. Dave was under strict instructions to carry me up the hill to civilization anytime i was noted typing notes into thin air. but no signs of withering or requiring plug-in were forthcoming.

instead, we both wandered up the hill and online from time to time to connect with our magical worlds and responsibilities out in the ether. but mostly, we hung out below. played cards. walked on the beach. had a bonfire. in the early mornings, normally reserved for mobilizations that small military juntas would envy, we lounged in jammies teaching Oscar how to play Junior Monopoly. Posey stacked the little property houses and the sun sparkled on the water. only the birds tweeted.

apparently Oscar has a knack for property acquisition and his father and i had better be good to that kid or we’ll find ourselves renting our own bed from the wee robber baron oh, say, next week.

but other than the shame of being soundly beaten in a competitive arena by a four-year-old and the mortification of having Dave actually notice me care that i was losing to a four year old, i remained hale and hearty throughout.

it was too easy. i am suspicious.
***

i don’t believe in the great divide our culture tends to build around that which is technological in its origin or medium and that which is not.

living in a much-hyped “digital age” means we inevitably also live in the midst of a discursive backlash against the digital, a sociocultural conversation positioning whatever is not digital on the side of the pure and the unchanged.  i don’t buy it. no, i did not put unplug and find myself suddenly living a life to make a Disney Princess eat her heart out, bluebirds perched on my shoulders and wholeness and wholesomeness magically within reach.

both versions of that not-quite-Cinderella story are lies. the prince is not an iPad. neither is it a world with only rotary phones and singing birds.

to me, the “digital age” is not about the technology at all, but about people. we fool ourselves in emphasizing the so-called digital nature of contemporary society: we are post-digital already. we have been for years.

post-digital is not “after digital,” but “after the digital becomes commonplace.” the technology has become so omnipresent that we need to start looking beyond its novelty and allure to the human practices it enables and limits and shapes.  we are not going back, barring cataclysm, to whatever pastoral analog version of society people’s selective memories like to cling to. but so long as we remain focused on the digital trappings that mark our society as visibly different from its predecessors, neither do we move towards any cultural maturity in this new form.

we are the equivalent of a 40 year old woman still enraptured by the oh-my-golly of her training bra. it ain’t cute anymore. and it’s getting limiting. if we actually want to mature into the possibilities of this new form we’ve taken, we need to focus past the sparkly bits on the surface and invite others to do more than snap our straps.

the part of post-digital life that seems hardest for some of us enthusiasts is boundaries. we have opened ourselves to community and connectivity and near 24/7 availability and presence and persona, and in the end, there are only so many hours in a day and so many followers and friends one can do anything meaningful with. yet going offline makes us sweaty. who are we without our appendages, our screens?

then we do it and it feels…perfectly normal. occasionally irksome, sometimes pleasant, momentarily – if we are lucky – extraordinary. like life. rather like i feel if i go braless for a morning: wouldn’t want to try to go to work that way, but it has its moments. most of which are about other things, particularly those things with small hands who clamour Mommy! Mommy! and make me long – lovingly – for the civility and distance of twitter interactions. until the laughing starts, and then i’m hook, line & sinker, never known anything in flesh or screen so beautiful as them.

i did hear more birds at the beach, and their songs made me breathe deep and slow in a way i’d forgotten to for far too long. and the radio silence meant there was more time and energy for internal things. social media is performative, and it never sleeps. nobody can entertain thousands of people a day without downtime, even in very tiny increments…not over the long haul.

still, had there been wireless at the cottage, i might have birdshit on my MacBookPro right now, people. and i suspect i’d still have found balm for my soul in the journey to the shore.

i’d like to test that theory again. soon.
***

how do you pace your relationship to the online world? do you go offline? does it make you anxious to be unplugged? or does being a cyborg make you feel a little dirty sometimes? what would a post-digital society look like, for you?

they say when your children are born and placed in your arms for the first time, you become – truly, finally – aware of your own mortality, of the cyclical, revolving nature of this thing called life and the loss inherent to it.

they say this awareness comes like a thud, sad and sweet and built like a concrete block. wham. hello, it says.  behold your replacement. and the helpless, squalling bundle in your arms opens its eyes and you know, without a doubt, that you will die someday and that you’d die for this child because something as old and raw as pride has risen inside you and you understand, in that instant, that everything else you’ve ever done is ephemeral compared to this.

or so i think it goes.  in reality, that moment kind of escaped me.

it happened out of order for me, true.  my initiation was sadder than most. but it still had its joy, its wonder and beauty. but no sucker punch of oh my god i couldn’t have expected this love. oh my god life is sorrow and beauty all wrapped up.

i already knew.

i think i read too much as a kid to be properly shocked by anything that has happened to me since.

children in books have everything happen to them. they’re orphaned, abandoned, lost, set adrift into magical lands. they encounter Danger and Adversity, are tested to the very limits of their understanding and often beyond. all, in the end, to build character, in the most literal sense of the word.

in books, these lead characters are always a little different from the crowd: some quality separates them, makes their stories worth telling. usually, their differences are redemptive, sources of sympathy on the part of the silent witnesses who read the narratives and stand in judgement or outrage or sorrow at the outcomes. it is the plucky heroine and the bright little chap who shine, and in their shadows the pleasant normal children seem plastic, dull, bovine.

Mr. DeMille, i’m ready for my book now.

i grew up a defacto only child with an absent father, a great-aunt-cum-grandmother as timid and nervous as a mouse, and a mother who by 24 had lost both parents, an adoptive father, a husband, and any sense of long-term planning or agency.  between them, they made for rather stark horizons.  nobody talked about much, but subtexts of loss and betrayal and stiff-upper-lippedness and things unsaid ran under the surface of our lives like an exposed vein of acid. we were all marked by the exposure. the adults could not acknowledge their own scars. whether mine were invisible to them, i do not know.

the other kids i knew weren’t much like me. protected, perturbed by things without happy endings, they seemed to take for granted a world as friendly and secure as a 70s tv show.  by eleven or twelve, i had begun to suss out our differences, conduct a puzzled sort of ethnography on them. they went to Disneyworld and played soccer and cried when their dads went away for work for a week. i watched without jealousy, only curiosity. they were my friends, and yet when i scratched the surface, another species.

tiny megalomaniac that i was, i decided that they must be mere background characters in the great novel that got played out day by day in the trenches of junior high. i – by default – the oddball melancholic  o so attuned to the low violin strings of the human heart, must be special.

i became my own protagonist.

and so i read, looking for models. everything i could get my hands on, from the Victorian children’s classics of orphaned heroines to my aunts’ discarded 70s sexploitation novels about stewardesses and cadres of gymnast bankrobbers, most of which puzzled my ten- and eleven-year-old self. i read my mother’s Norman Vincent Peale meditations and my grandmother’s Harlequins and randomly acquired copies of The Godfather and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. i read the Doonesbury comics my father sent in lieu of birthday presents, even though i understood nothing of the political landscape they satirized.  he was the only person in my family who could have given even a three-word description of Reagan’s politics, or even Trudeau’s. i read earnestly, hopefully, trying to prepare myself to live. i tried to prepare myself for everything, just like the kids in stories.

i think i overdid it.

i’ve lived a life in which no stone of experience has been left unturned.  i’ve cleaned toilets, modelled nude for money, eaten Mr. Noodles for months on end and thrown them up anyway in a battle between economy and the waste and self-abnegation of bulimia. i’ve moved coasts and continents, been married, been divorced, had my heart broken. i’ve loved randomly and loved well, and learned that there’s only sometimes a difference but the difference? is the world. i’ve studied all i could get my hands on, drunk all i could get my hands on, tried most substances i could get my hands on. i’ve stayed up til 8 in the morning and invited the bar back to my place for breakfast. i’ve birthed three babies. i’ve held one as he died.

your protagonist, gentle readers, has cultivated herself as a character for more than two decades now. i am done. i am tired of being a protagonist.

my half-brother and his wife had a son last week. i went to the hospital to meet the new arrival, to cradle this nephew in my arms and suck the new-baby-smell of his head deep into my lungs.

his mama was in the same bed where i stayed after Posey was born, only thirteen months ago. i stood there holding the wee Griffith, my body remembering what my mind had forgotten, all the ways newborns squeak and blink and curl into you like small frogs. and something hit me that finally, for the first time, took me by surprise.

this is all behind me, my wistful dog-in-the-manger, climb-every-mountain, i’m-at-the-centre-of-every-story heart crooned.

and that is okay, whispered back a voice i’m not sure i’ve ever heard before. a voice i’d never read about. but mine. definitely mine.

then a wave of something like relief washed over me, warm and wet and i teared up and smiled at Griffith and i’m sure he thought the outburst all for him. as he should.  him, and Oscar, and Posey, their little clan of fellows and rugrats, a whole new generation to fancy themselves the characters from which stories are wrought. they can have it, that sense of destiny, that specialness.

i’ve spent the last twenty years looking for a story to be in. and now, somewhere in the rush of getting two kids out the door and folding laundry and teaching and dreaming up Ph.D applications and smiling at Dave when he plays Blood on the Tracks for the thirteenth time this week,  i notice i have one. just like that. and it is enough.

i am not Prince Hamlet, nor was i meant to be.

and like nothing else ever has, that shocks me.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

perhaps this ought to be the part where i say i’m done. that this is the swan song, the last post.  i was tempted. Dave made me a gift last week, ordered a book of the blog to date. this post – which has taken longer than any post i’ve ever written to eke out, blindly poke my way through – lay alluringly in draft like a perfect coda in waiting. why write outside the bound covers of…gasp…a book?

but it is not the blog i want to leave behind. i don’t write as much as i used to, true…but i write better. at least by my own, erm, humble estimation. and i owe that to this platform, this space, where i have – after long imagining myself a walking book – written enough to be happy to call myself, quietly, a writer.

so you’re stuck with me. in my new, terribly happily boring incarnation. now please. please tell me about YOU.  i need fodder.

one of those weeks without enough coffee in the world.

3 am, 4 am, 5 am, 6 am, and 7 am all witnessed on the clock by my bleary eyes. sleep training feels like one big irony from here, a joke concocted by sadists. training me to do without sleep, is apparently what the fine print musta read. i can’t vouch for it. i can barely see.

i was quite happy just bringing her into the bed and nursing through the wee hours, dozing and shifting, the two of us a cosleeping tangle that i never intended but found rather civilized. ’til now. apparently the regularity of our round-the-clock feedings have encouraged Ms. Posey in the belief that one must also wake up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, in regular intervals around the clock. jesus have mercy. there was a point in my life where 3am was a perfectly reasonable time of day for oh, i dunno, ordering up a round of shooters, but now that i am denied such revelries i think she should be too. so i’m trying to break her of the expectation of a full breakfast at 3, replete with cheery mommy waitress. instead, we lie in the dark, swaddled and shhhhing, repeatedly inserting the reviled – by Josephine – soother while she scratches at it and me with her baby wolverine talons. quality time, that. and she’s got stamina, my kid.

last night she actually stayed in her little sidecar bed, granting the soother a haughty acceptance. i have removed all the stimuli i can think of from the experience, all the motivation…we did not feed, we did not talk, we did not rock. there were only gentle shhhhes and the pat of my drowsy, drooping hand on fat cheeks. and still she was wide awake from 3am until 5:30.

Dave got kicked out of bed and down to the couch when it became clear that the swaddle and the Fisher Price aquarium lullabies weren’t doing anything to soothe the wee, savage Iggy Pop all a-frolic in her cot. i figured one of us might as well sleep. he in turn then got up with Oscar so that when slumber finally fell heavy on our daughter at dawn, i didn’t have to watch 8 am come round on the digital display. at 8:12, she woke for good…but at 8 am i was dreaming that i’d forgotten to get on the plane for my vacation.

vacation, ha. but small mercies, small kindnesses. love in this house.

last night, bathtime for munchkins. Posey had been retrieved wriggling from the water and primped and packed plumply into her sleeper and sleepsack and we sat nursing in the rocker whilst Oscar finished his rousing rendition of do mi mi, mi so so for his bath toys and then i heard Dave lift him out of the water and O made the very same request as he’s been making after bath since he learned to finally articulate the words months ago.

tell me a storwy about Diesel, Daddy.

Oscar has a Thomas the Tank Engine fetish. to please our young enthusiast, his father and i have for what feels like a lifetime been fabricating – and massacring – stories about Thomas. the liberties we’ve taken would make Sir Topham Hatt cringe, delightfully.

but we’re tapped out. done. saturated. we’ve drawn the line. no more post-bath Thomas improvisations. please.

which doesn’t mean Oscar’s done asking. dulcet tones for the request, and his father’s firm “no” in return. a pause. then the parry, tell me a story about YOU, then, Dada. silence. the fuzzy silence that sweeps over even the most talkative of us when put on the spot and unsure if we know any stories about ourselves that are remotely interesting yet appropriate for two-year-olds. do two-year-olds like beer stories as much as trains?

ever helpful, i piped up, tell him a story about ME. i’m lots of fun!

a laugh wafted through the door. and i heard…

once there was a girl named Bonnie. she was a nice girl. one day she found herself on a very beautiful beach where she met a handsome prince.

and i glanced down at my wool socks and thought, oooh, i could love this story even though in non-fiction i am not so much the beach heroine type.

he continued, the prince was VERY handsome. very very handsome. amazingly handsome.

i began to suspect that i was not about to encounter George Clooney in this fairytale. scrreeeeeech went the sunny Thai beach in my mind. another set snapped down in the backdrop, another beach, a humbler one on New Brunswick’s north shore, and a bonfire, and guitars, and a twenty-one year old boy with sharp blue eyes and shocking frankness and a pestilent sense of humour…a boy who would lend me his old, torn Levi’s – to keep – that first night i met him. a boy who would seem to me to be the little brother i never really had for almost five years, until the kinship swelled into something urgent and less than brotherly.

and Bonnie thought she was SOOOOO lucky to have met the handsome prince…

that they both ran off and married other people! i inserted from my perch in the rocking chair.

Bonnie was very wrong-minded, intoned the storyteller cum toddler tooth-brusher in the other room. but eventually the handsome prince found her in a land far, far away, called Korea, he continued, and she looked at him and realized just how truly marvellous he was.

she had been drinking a LOT of gin, i pointed out.

he forgave her obvious flaws and weaknesses came the voice from the bathroom, trying hard now not to laugh, and then they lived happily ever after and had beautiful babies named Oscar – yes, Oscar! – and Josephine!

Me, Daddy?

yes, you, Oscar.

Oscar’s little face, pink-cheeked from his bath, peeked around the corner into the bedroom, his curls a halo. he looked at me intently, exultantly.

Mama, you have a PRINCE! he shouted, laughing as if this were the most hilarious thing in the world. then he stopped dead and looked me straight in the eye. where is he?

love in this house, and laughter.

welcome.

this is the blog of Bonnie Stewart, educator and writer and social media fortune teller, partner and mama and daughter and lover of jellybeans.

i write to leave a mark in the snow.

i enjoy post-structuralism and a good amaretto sour. i am recovering from a codependent relationship with my couch.

i have achieved the Nirvana of my people: after a fifteen year absence from my homeland of Prince Edward Island, tamest of landscapes, i have returned and victoriously put down personal and professional roots without having to work in the Anne of Green Gables industry. ;)

i live in a pointy-roofed white house green house my grandmother once lived in, with a Dave, a little Oscar, a littler Josephine, aka Posey, and Clementine the neglected cat. Dave & i live without Finn, our firstborn, a 26 week preemie who died in my arms eleven hours after his birth. my blog is where we exist as a family, narrated into some kind of coherent being.

i’ve lived on all three coasts of Canada, and in Asia and Eastern Europe. i started a Ph.D in media and communications, once, in Switzerland. i started another in September 2010, in Educational Studies, exploring the implications of social media practices and identities for higher education in the 21st century. i am a digital subject exploring digital subjectivities. Lacan’s mirror phase has nothin’ on me.

i have a fetish for spelling and trivia, and nothing particular against capital letters. my life’s goal is to be on Celebrity Jeopardy.

some small part of me is saving herself for David Bowie, who is coming one of these days, but is not hurrying.

how is it that memory can feel more vivid, sometimes, than the present?

i am in Halifax, but not in the hospital…i am on a vacation of sorts. it feels more like time travel. i wander here in a soup of memories, bright and disconcerting and surreal, expecting to encounter former selves around every corner. these conjunctions of days and years all jumble together, knocking me off balance. the disequilibrium keeps catching me by surprise.

i am here alone. or not alone – my college roommate and i are crashing here together – but without O, without Dave, without responsibilities…just me and Susie, painting the town red. nineteen years i’ve known this girl, this woman, this friend i seldom see anymore. she’s a doctor now, which is promising if this now-31-week bebe gets any saucy ideas, but she still makes me feel seventeen again, goofy and light. and known. we pick up the common threads between us easily, gracefully, as if the time lapsed is only stories to tell. we are here for the wedding of another college roommate, entertainingly scheduled eleven years to the day after my own wedding, in this city i lived in during that marriage. i was packing to move from this city – packing up that marriage – when i first sat with Dave on my kitchen floor eight years ago yesterday and realized, hell, i am in trouble.

so i am seventeen and twenty-eight at once and yet very much the thirty-six-year-old mother and mother-to-be, as well, because the fact of this burgeoning body is not something i can leave behind for a weekend . and it is August now too and encroaching on what should have been Finn’s birthday three years ago had he not been born in this place and gone, all too soon, and so those shadows walk along the calendar with me this time of year, inescapably. and being on my own, sitting yesterday morning in the anywhere space of a Starbucks with no agenda but my journal to write in, called up all sorts of other echoes, other selves who’ve sat for hours with a black pen over an empty page, people-watching. lost in Vancouver, bewildered by the concrete and glass and the low, oppressive clouds, feeling alien and broke and hopeless. trying to make my way through weeks in Ireland on my own while i wished myself back in Korea with that troublesome Dave whom i looked for around every corner, no matter how many half-worlds separated us. Bangkok, Zurich, Istanbul. all places i’ve sat by myself in coffee shops and marked time and impressions on a page and tried to leave some trace for myself of a now i knew would never last.

i danced tonight, at the wedding, me who’s barely walked in months. When Doves Cry, Prince. because i could not stay in my seat. because when i was twelve this song was the first that gave me little flutters of what i’d someday understand as sexual awakening. because touch if you will my stomach, feel how it trembles inside brought different flutters now, as if that promise of twelve had come to full fruition and for the first time all weekend all those myriad, disconnected selves had consolidated into some, brief linear trajectory i could trace and own, and catch sight of myself in. it felt amazing to move, to rise. i was a sight, i’m sure. but i felt beautiful.

like Cinderella, i left just before midnight…to come back to an empty bed longing for the ghost of that boy who sat on my kitchen floor eight years ago to materialize, to make this vacation more than just a respite from the day-to-day our lives have become together and make the kaleidoscope whirl of all this memory less lonely, less strange.