2.0, A Happy Birthday Post

It is two years since he arrived like this.
I did not plan a moment of him. I fulfill the stereotype of declining angst to his care. It has been said that my son is my heart and my patience. Each child has given me a precious insight and a personal betterment. This I never expected.

It has been said, for all I did to expel him that day in July now I wanna do as many things as I can to cling to him and keep him close. Here he is today, seven weeks two-years old. Ah, the pleasantness of what he left inside me for him, of what he puts there with each new day and the awe of all he is becoming here on the outside.




*****

I thank God that I have loved you every moment as yourself. Never a moment were you the commodity BABY. I detest the commodity "baby" and how society offers so much to make us anxious about baby minding and so little about loving and caring for Julian, or Alec or D'Qwell or whatver their names are. I love this person so much.






I do cry now it's true. A few tears of love and pleasure, a moments greed for all I have had for these two years and then collapse in every chamber of my heart for wanting it to stretch on forever. I have no proportion. I would persist eternally if I could in our ketchup splashed luncheon. Please boy-o rework my knees with your new toy screwdriver. Tally-ho! that bright green stroller, you and I. Must the sun set at the gaudy play boat in the middle of the park?

****

July 17 2006 you were late.
So late.

Not quite an image of us.
Are you ours?

Busy and loving.
Handsome. robust.

Elsewhere I suppose I am a planner.
Here, you make me love surprises.

Here. Hear.

Oh Baby

Here at June's end the times are heavy for me. I rest on the cusp of being an individual again. A bit ill at ease about it.

Every morning I drive to work past the maternity hospital and my insides wrench. I think of that June two year's ago when I thought I would give birth any minute, and didn't. I think of the June four years ago when I was so oblivious to what was ahead, my legs sticky in the hot weather, consumed with guilt that I would leave work. Just leave it. Not a whiff of a clue that I would revel in our separation.

There at BC Women's Hospital I wandered the parking lot in the early morning light of September almost four years ago. My identity about to explode. Shattering of self, or was it a cleavage? There I had those two dear births, blessing filled progress toward the rattle of bones that divided me and them. There is a part of me inside addicted to the senses of it. No doubt borne of the instrinic surprise of it all; myself completely romanced by the unknown -- all that is foreign in pregnancy and especially from two lucky childbirths.

It is over for us. We will not have any more babies and that makes this really such a strange time, this aimless June. I have for so long been 'that pregnant woman'... the mother. That is, in fact, how one new administrator addressed me last week. "Ah, yes. You. You're the mother."

What the hell?

But I am. I am the mother. A month today since I returned to work and only a few steps back towards that former self. A true worker with an innate ability for the oblivious. Will it come again?

****

I know that some comment how parenthood made them more aware... more attuned to life, involved, connected. I wonder about that feeling. I mean it has occurred. But still, I'm a bit more in the camp of parenthood has made me less oblivious.

Marketing Director

I owe a great debt to the lovely and talented notsosage for the hot hats she added to our lives a few months back. I owe you pictures. Can you dispute the cutness?

Onion Head Hat, as seen on blogger


Vying to be the West Coast Mad Lids Girl.







Come on and play along, etsy is good.

And if that ain't cute enough for you how 'bout you go see the corporeally reduced cheesefairy and her NEW BABY ... NEW BABY ... BEAUTIFUL NEW BABY!

Waiting Room

In the final weeks of my last pregnancy I was struggling to face the loss of my so-called family balance. I had visions of having my baby (NB: this was not a planned pregnancy) a little before my due date. My expectation was that we would go to hell in a handbasket pretty much right away.

I had blogged about it and go some really great advice, particularly to point out that my so-called family balance with one child was, in fact, a crock. Thanks, L! Plus on est de fous, plus on rit!

Still, I had problems moving towards birth. My antidote was to get on my birther cleats and focus, plan, strategize. My son had other ideas, in so far as a fetus has ideas. He was late. He was 'overdue'. Tho' of course he was not. We were just ill informed from the ultrasound that was looking for a baby 7-8 lbs when he was 10+. We waited. We thought we were overdue.

As I careened toward, my perceived Waterloo of parental control, I wanted one last gasp. I wanted to feel birth's imminence. I wanted to charge ahead with at least the comfort that though I knew nothing about raising siblings into people I knew how to give birth. I had done it before. It is powerful and, thus, I would be powerful at least for that while.

I had my predictions of early birth. Wrong.
I had my wait for the sweeps to do the trick. Wrong.
I had days and days of 'early labour'?? Is that it? Yeah, there. What about this???

Then I gave up. One Sunday afternoon when all the beds were changed, the cookies made, my feet had walked the block and the hills too many times in earnest... My doctors urging me to relax and complimenting my fecundity as a boon... My husband was ordered back to work the next day and I resigned myself to inducements on Thurs. Failure.

Wrong, again.

That night I must have laboured some while asleep. At four am I woke with a drip and a dribble and smile. Filip the cat my only companion and advisor. I woke papa-man first.

The labour with my daughter had been the lesson and I wanted this labour to be my thesis. I could do it, we could do it. We did, for the most part, just me and papa-man. But to this day there is something... something wrong. I will tell you here that foolish or not, sometimes I worry I almost damaged or even killed my child with the birth plan. I was so fixated on time. I thought about the due date (though I told nearly no one as much; a regular Joan Plowright of dismissiveness.) I tried to construct the birth in my mind every phase every urge as if it was an intellectual process. AS IF? I mean I know better, myself and my true confidantes (you know who you are) we know giving birth is pure surrender to the physicality of life, perpetually; only abstractly intellectual. hmmmmmm

When my son was born my husband lived the terror in those few moments as they called 'breathe, baby, breathe.' As I lay in a stupor of adrenaline and oxytocin I did not feel it. As I pushed and planned and managed, ok give birth by 11:30, no? Ok by noon at least; do the job this is your second labour -- it is supposed to be fast... I wonder if I rushed. I don't wonder this alone, but rather a month or so later had the lump in my throat when my best doctor asked if my son was stuck or if the team was just not patient enough. I knew in some manner it was the latter. I had a rabble of unassigned docs and apprentice nurses, they did rush a bit. But there will always be part of me that feels it was me. I wasn't patient. I rushed it. It might have been a danger for him.

Hubris. The evil of this mammoth giving of flesh and blood to bear them yet we cannot for one moment want it. We cannot urge it or make it so -- even as we make it entirely. As if we are possessed.

I am ashamed of that urge to manage. Disappointed in my loss of the moment for it. I look now to this closing performance I had as a birther with a bliss that you could call a drop diluted. But that is not my cause to document this. I am ponderous this sunny Sunday afternoon of the risk of giving birth. A risk which I hitherto did not fully appreciate as extending from the moment of conception to the window of our own last breaths. The risk of creating lives and the complete vulnerability to loss or damage.

This week as I am reading of the waters that are ready
to break (or dribble, or be pierced, or what-have-you) I think of my case a bit. It is from my galloping blog-fuelled sycophantic mettle that I opt to write this up. In a disjointed sidebar it is to those near, dear here who are without their little babies that I write this up.

There is no control. We cannot make it so. Randomness the limitless and blood.

Gratuitous Boob Shot

Yeah, I thought that would get your attention.

Tune in for an insiders look at the Wo Family (ain't papa man quite the camera-in-filmerer-guy. SNORT). Anyway you saw my son on this blog last week. Here is his sister visiting he and I in hospital when he was all of 6 hours old last July 17. Happy Birthday Baby, it has been "nice to meet you". It's sad sometimes to think it is all over. But as you can see, I have my hands full.


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What's Up Doc

I read Sweet Juniper. If I say nothing else about it that blog is a wicked intersection of what I like to think is the wry-est, cleverest and yet most impecably kind gang of parent bloggers. Sure we're sarcastic, I mean we put the what's up doc into the game of child rearing in a way few can resist.

But the intersection offered a turn of late. A five-car pile up really.

Last month I caught the link from Sweet Juniper to sweet|salty and began reading the diary of an amazing mother. A mother navigating something beyond sleep wars and job shares and schoolyard tears. I was in awe of what she told us and grew in a way a little sick of my own blog. Her tale so heavy, her words so true.

I know her only in words... as words. I wonder at times about how she told us. It is not an isolated thing really. There are others. Those brilliant mothers who explode the caustic myth that mothers might be authors of their children's lives. Those who faced the unfaceable and told us about it. I came late to their experiences and my respect is something, I reluctantly admit, I frame in distance.

Instead it was in this collecting of the memory for the small boy Liam that I most fully met the process(ing) of a mother. A blog is such a precribed recollection. Prescient almost. At the juncture today just after Liam's passing I need not scramble for words to share the experience with my husband or the many other readers swimming in some mist of abstraction. The words are there. They are her words. I hope the power to publish them helps Kate.

There are questions (and answers) swirling about whether blogging can empower. I don't have any answers to this question merely suspicion. Suspicion it does. That as we work behind our glowing screens we can say more here than elsewhere. That in a venue so potent for abuse and mistruths the opposite might prevail. And, that this is a route to power. Not conventional butt-kicking manly power but something else. Something precious.

The word I keep coming to is truth. I mean there is no making this up (and yes I know that's an understatement beyond all belief). Kate laid plain a wall of truth that blows me away, as I've said. Truth so sheer as to make me want to look away. But I am unable to abandon the stream of words that invite understanding. A sacrifice of privacy to gain nothing and yet something is created. Care, and that insufficient word, support. I wake today to read the words and question. I question that which seemed inalienable. That which told me yesterday that I was working to love my children as much as I could.

Then I see her words. I feel her words and know I have not loved mine as ultimately as she. I pray today and always that I never face, as she has with such eloquence, the love of mother to transcend even being. Tomorrow I face another day to love my children more than ever. In some part because of words in this machine. Bizarre.

In memorium. God Bless Liam.