This?

This makes me cry. With joy. With grief. With gratitude.

(You can join in too. I’d love it if you would. So would Tanner. Because it’s silly, and happy, and fun, and because it’s for him.)

Emilia wants to know what happens when we die. She asks a few times a week, on average, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on whether or not we’ve spoken about my dad or about Tanner or about dinosaurs. Today, she asked because they’d been talking about the Easter story at school. She wanted to know why Jesus got to fly up into the sky, and Grandpa didn’t.

You burned him, didn’t you? she asks. How could he fly after that?

Explaining death is one thing. Explaining the cremation, the afterlife and Divine resurrection are something else entirely. (more…)

I don’t quite know what to say about Joannie Rochette. I’ve been stunned by her bravery, humbled by her strength, amazed by her determination in the face such terrible sadness. When my father died, it was days before I could even walk in a straight line, weeks before I could hold myself reliably upright. After losing her mother, Joannie Rochette strapped on her skates and competed for an Olympic medal. Incredible. Courageous. (more…)

Yesterday, Emilia brought home her very first report card. Emilia is four. Just yesterday she was in diapers and nursing and the only thing that anyone ever reported about her was quantity and quality of her bowel movements. How did we get to report cards?

For the longest time, I couldn’t open it. I’m not sure why. The reasons that I gave myself – that reading others’ evaluations of my child would be awkward and challenging; that the report card was a symbol of school and so a symbol of her moving ever further into a life of her own, a life apart from mine; that I just couldn’t bear to see anything other than the highest praise for my child – were not, in themselves, convincing. They just landed in my psyche and fell limp, like drained water balloons, or banana peels, or something else more figuratively appropriate that I can’t think of right now. I was anxious for all of these reasons, and for none of them, and for a thousand other reasons that I probably wouldn’t understand until sometime around her high school graduation, and as I sifted through these known and unknown and entirely inscrutable reasons for my anxiety, I thought, this is the problem. This. This worry. Not the reasons for the worry. The worry itself. (more…)

Jasper goes to playschool a couple of days a week. He loves it – loves it – and he knows exactly what days he’s scheduled to go. He toddles down the stairs on those mornings and heads straight for his coat and boots, which he tries to tug on over his pajamas.

SKOO! (School!) he yells. RUSSELL! ELLA! (friends) GO! GO! GO!

Yesterday was a school day. He’d been up throughout the previous night with a cough, and he’d felt a little warm at times the day before, but there are always bugs going around this time of year, and he seemed okay in the morning, and in any case, there he was, clutching his coat and boots and yelling skoo!

I hesitated, for a minute, maybe two. He didn’t feel warm, but he did have a cough, and he had been so, so sick before Christmas… but no, he wanted to go. And I wanted him to go. I had work to do. So I took him to school.

Some hours later, my phone rang, and the voice on the other end was a little panicked. Could I come right away? Jasper wasn’t well, he was hot, really hot, sweating through his clothes, his temperature 105 and climbing, and obviously in pain, and coughing, badly. I dropped what I was doing and ran straight there, not bothering to put on socks or scarf or hat or gloves, not stopping to lock the door, not stopping for anything. I just ran. And as I ran – the very short distance from where I was to where he was – I berated myself a hundred times with every step. I should have kept him home. I shouldn’t have taken him to school. I shouldn’t have let what was convenient and easy trump what was right. (more…)

Friday’s as good a good as any for promoting a cause, right? How about two?

Cause #1: If you’re a Canadian woman, and you’ve had surgery, you might have been been given – while you were under anesthetic, without your knowledge, without your consent – a pelvic exam by medical students in training. It is, apparently, standard practice in Canada, and no, they don’t actually want to ask for your consent, because you might not give it. So they’ve settled for insisting that when you go in for surgery, you’ve implied that you consent to letting them do anything to your body that they like. You know, just like that time you accepted just one more glass of wine and got a little too drunk: you implied that you were just fine with whomever doing whatever to your body while you were passed out.

Gives new, sinister meaning to the phrase, trust me, I’m a doctor.

I ranted about it over at the Bad Moms Club yesterday, and posted an open letter/petition there in the wee hours this morning. Please leave a comment in support (and pass the link along!) – we (all women, and everyone who supports women – not just Canadians) need to raise our voices and say loudly and clearly that NO CONSENT means NO.

Cause #2: Most of you know about Tanner. Tanner is my nephew, my sister’s son, and he’s living with, but dying of, Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy. He’s really begun to decline in recent months. Our hearts are breaking while his stays strong – in love and hope, if not in muscle – and I’ve been feeling a powerful need to honor his strength and to meet his strength and to use that strength to move and to act, now, while he’s still with us. So I’ve decided to run for him, in the hopes that I can, by the end of a year, run in a marathon with his mother in his honor, to celebrate him – and, of course, to raise money and awareness for Muscular Dystrophy. I’m calling it 100 Miles For Tanner, and it starts with the Tiarathon at Walt Disney World in March (GM Canada has graciously lent sponsorship support so that we can make a road trip of it and really make it an adventure for the cause.) Find out more about it at Their Bad Mother, where I’ll be posting about my progress. And maybe think about clicking through the links to support the cause.

Thank you, always, for your awesome.

When I was pregnant with Jasper, I asked my doctor for a c-section.

Can I have a c-section?, I asked.

No, she said.

I had been going through early labor for weeks. It was three weeks or so before my due date, but bio-physical ultrasounds were logging me at well over a week overdue based on Jasper’s size. Jasper, according to ultrasound measurements, probably weighed close to nine pounds. And I still had three weeks to go.

I was a little freaked out. (more…)

Emilia is in love.

“Mommy, can I make a present for Josh? Because I love him.”

– “You LOVE Josh?”

“Yes. But it’s not love like getting-married love. And it’s not kissing-love. It’s FRIEND-love.”

– “Oh, good. Wait… what do you know about kissing?”

“That it makes your cheeks go red.”

OY. (more…)

I think that I’m stuck in the denial stage of grief. It’s not that I deny the fact that my father is dead – his ashes sit in a box on my mantle, surrounded, at the moment, by a few Christmas ornaments and my kids’ picture with Santa and Emilia’s bardo-drawing – it’s that I can’t wrap my head around the fact – is it a fact? – that his death is the end, that his life is over, that I’ll never see or speak with him again. The absoluteness of it all, the finality: I’m having trouble accepting this. I can’t accept this. My heart aches from its stubborn refusal to accept this.

(more…)

The question was: what story are you telling yourself right now? (And, can you give yourself permission to change the ending?)

The answer was: this year, this decade, is ending in sadness. This year, this decade, is ending and my heart is wrapped in grief.

But: I can give myself permission to change the ending. I just need to figure out how.

A start: reflecting on the things that have made me happy this year. To wit: traveling across the country with my children and with dear friends; having a few lovely, brilliant days with my father before he died; my husband, who is my joy and my rock; my children, my children, my children, my children; overcoming fear; overcoming greater fear; facing fear and calling it to account and demanding that it reveal itself as something more, something better, something beautiful.

This is the ending that I want for my year, an ending that celebrates all the joy that circumnavigated the grief, and ending that finds the bravery in the fear and the beauty in the darkness and the wonder and greatness and living and loving that was in everything.

And I want this ending to be a beginning, an opening-up, an opening-towards new fear and new beauty and new wonder and new confusion and new dark and new light – because all of these need each other, each of these requires the others – and all of this as it folds back into the old and becomes greater-than and more.

And it can be. It will.

Happy New Year.