We have a nice life, my husband and I and our little family, in our pretty little house in our pretty little town in Ontario. We have a verandah, which is something that I always wanted when I was growing up: a verandah with a pretty wicker bench and soft cushions and a hydrangea vine climbing up to the porch overhang and providing dappled shade. And Emilia’s school is just down the road, as is Jasper’s daycare and the dance academy and the karate dojo and the cafe that brews perfect lattes. It’s a perfect, picturesque, exurban existence. And one that I think I might want to walk away from. (continue reading…)

It is, of course, our greatest fear. It is the bogeyman in our closet, the monster under our bed. It is the shadow that lurks behind every tree in the wood, it is the crackle of every twig, it is the sudden silencing of birds, the darkening of the sky, the unexpected chill in the air, the thing that stops our breathing, that quickens the beat of our hearts. And we cannot tell ourselves that it isn’t there, that it is just the stuff of fairy tales and scary stories; we cannot shine the flashlight into the closet or under the bed or out toward the trees and reassure ourselves, because it is out there, it is, maybe just as a possibility, maybe just as the faintest possibility, but that possibility is what gives it air to breath and matter to take form.

We could lose our children. Some harm could come to them. They could be erased from the landscape of our lives and our hearts could, would, break, shatter into a million, billion, trillion pieces and we would never recover, not really. (continue reading…)

It’s my birthday. I’m forty years old today. Forty years old. Isn’t this the birthday where I get canes and bifocals as gag gifts and t-shirts that say things like I’m not old, I’m vintage and at least one coffee mug with the words lordy, lordy look who’s forty printed along the side?

I’m not old enough to be forty. Really, I’m not. It’s not that I fear aging or think that anyone over forty is hideously uncool – it’s that I just cannot believe that I am grown-up enough to have the numbers 4 and 0 apply to me in any context other than grade point averages. I’m not a grown-up; I’m a girl in a state of arrested adolescence. Sure, I have kids, but if anything that has only driven the point home more clearly: ain’t nobody here but us childrens. (continue reading…)

Today, Tanner goes to the doctor. This is, in itself, nothing new – Tanner sees a lot of doctors – but today, he’s seeing the doctor so that they can start fumbling toward answers to difficult questions concerning when and how and how long. How long until his food needs to blended? Until he needs to be intubated? Until he can no longer sit up on his own? Until his lungs are compromised? Until he cannot breath on his own? Until my sister can no longer look after him on her own? Until, until…

The clock ticks so much louder now. Tanner’s condition is aggressive, relentless: his muscles are breaking down quickly, and as his muscles break down, so does hope. (continue reading…)

There are trolls, and then there are trolls.

There are the anonymous trolls that live under the virtual bridges of the Internet, coming out to swat and bite and snarl. And then there are the trolls of real life, the trolls that you know, the trolls that you maybe even loved, the trolls that you didn’t know were trolls until, one day, the claws extended and the fangs bared and the shredded hem of your pants told you – if the sting from the venomous spit of the troll hadn’t alerted you already – that something was amiss. (continue reading…)

This past weekend was a weekend filled with tremendous, heart-busting joy. It was also one of the most personally disappointing weekends of my entire life. My head is spinning a little from the existential contradiction that this represents.

I took the brood to Disney World, and one of the objectives of the trip was, of course, to have a good time, and having a good time at Disney World is not a particularly difficult thing to do, what with the spinning teacups and fireworks and pirates and flying carpets and pixie dust and all, and so to say that we – and more importantly, our coterie of pixie-loving badgers – had fun is to understate things dramatically. But having fun was not the only objective of the trip, nor even the primary objective of the trip. The primary objective of the trip (which saw us drive from Toronto to Florida in a vehicle provided by GM Canada) was me tackling the Disney Princess Half-Marathon, aka the Tiarathon, as the first race in my year-long quest to run 100 miles for Tanner. I’ve been training since last year to do this run and all the other runs – runs that will cover a total distance, I hope, of 100 miles – to follow. I had my tiara and tutu packed and ready.

I never got the chance to wear them. (continue reading…)

My husband made this commercial. It’s kind of what he does, but this is a little different, because it’s something that he did on his own, with a partner, instead of with a massive creative team and production company and crew of whomevers doing everything from pointing giant cameras to making sandwiches, and it’s for a kind of competition, the result of which exactly will be I’m not sure what, but still. It’s important to him, and it’s a sweet and funny video, and so I’m going to make you watch it, and you will be grateful: (continue reading…)

My husband and I have been together for over seventeen years. That’s pretty much the entirety of my adult life, and almost half of my whole life so far. Hopefully, it’s only the beginning. Hopefully, we’ll both live long lives and will celebrate the births of grandchildren and maybe even great-grandchildren and those years of our lives that were spent without each other will seem distant and momentary and we will tell people, we have been together forever.

It seems such a rare thing these days, couple staying together forever.  My husband sometimes remarks, when we hear that yet another relationship – a relationship of someone close to us, or someone not close to us, or someone that we only know through People magazine – has foundered on the rocks of infidelity or irreconcilable differences, that it seems that everything, everything these days is stacked against lasting love. What that everything is, he’s not sure, but it worries him, sometimes. What if it comes after us, he asks? What if it sneaks up on us when we’re not looking and consumes us before we even know what’s happened? (continue reading…)

We’re sick. Each and every one of us in this house is sick, and not in the delicate, dab-tissue-to-nose-and-sniffle kind of way, either: this is lung-hacking, cold-sweating, vomiting on bed sheets plague. If I weren’t delirious from fever and drowning in my own bodily fluids, I would be kind of impressed.

And because the gods are perverse in their humor, they have arranged things such that the children are maintaining, despite their illness, extraordinary levels of energy and seem determined to prove, definitively, that plague should never get in the way of rollicking batshittery. That, or they’re trying to kill us. One or the other.

All of which is to say, if you don’t hear from me in a few days, send in the ninjas, and maybe some chicken soup.

My husband had a vasectomy last year. There was a lot of discussion around it – another baby would not have been unwelcome, and so I wasn’t eager to close off the possibility – but we both knew that it would be madness for me to risk repeating the more or less pretty awfully terrible anxieties and stresses and mental and physical health concerns that I endured in my pregnancy and delivery and post-partum experience with Jasper. “You can’t go through that again,” my husband said, repeatedly, last spring. “We can’t go through that again.

He was right, of course. The pregnancy with Jasper wreaked havoc on my mind and body, as did his birth, as did the post-partum aftermath of that pregnancy and birth. In many ways, I’m still recovering. But still, I have moments in which the loss of the possibility of another pregnancy, another birth, another baby weighs so heavily upon me that it’s difficult to breath, in which the closing off of that future feels a little bit like heartbreak. (continue reading…)