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.

This happens every time that I visit British Columbia, where I grew up, where all of my remaining family still lives, where I am happy, where I feel like I fit into the landscape organically, naturally. Where I feel at home. Every time that I visit, I wonder, what if we came back? BC is expensive, sure, but couldn’t we sell our house in Ontario and move into some teeny little place, somewhere out in the desert boonies, somewhere like my dad’s place, maybe, and just become hippies? Go rafting and rock-climbing and grow ginseng or raise goats and I’d write books and Kyle would build his straw bale house and we’d drink wine and make Saskatoon berry pies and just be together, seizing the day, not worrying about upward mobility or balancing schedules or finding the best Montessori daycare for Jasper, just being.

Being home.

I really kind of think I’d like that.

(The trip that I’ve been on was sponsored by GM Canada. We drove Buicks, which were awesome and comfortable, of course, but I appreciated them mostly as nostalgia caravans, transporting me from long-loved locale to long-loved locale with a few winery and rock-climbing stops in between. Which is what a good vehicle is, no? Anyway, for all of that, I’m so profoundly grateful.)

(Now I’m off to Silicon Valley. I’ll hold my hippy ambitions in check there.)

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.

My heart stopped when I saw Heather Armstrong’s tweet that Katie Granju – who I don’t know personally, but admire and respect from afar – had lost her son. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. My heart stopped, and when it started again, it beat with a different rhythm and I thought, it is not possible to go through that, it is not possible; one cannot survive, one simply cannot.

One’s heart would stop beating, would it not? How could it not?

It wouldn’t – it doesn’t – of course. The heart does, as the song insists, go on, even after the worst griefs. It restitches itself, it mends, it requires none of the king’s horses and none of the king’s men, just time and love and, I imagine, faith. But it always remains scarred. It is transformed.

My family is losing a child. You know this story. It is a slow loss. The ticking of the clock has been louder, faster, of late, but still: the loss will not be sudden. It will not be unexpected. We have watched its approach for a long time now. We see it coming. This monster is not under our beds or in our closets or in the woods. It stands in the corner, in plain view, tapping its feet. We have come to know it. Knowing it does not make it any less terrifying. I have wondered, sometimes, whether it would be better to not see the monster, to not know. My sister and I talk about this, a lot. It’s better to know, she says. It changes your heart in advance; it strengthens it, readies it. It teaches you lessons, the monster. You cannot ignore those lessons.

You hug your children more.

There are days when I question this, when my own grief about Tanner and my sorrow for my sister become overwhelming. When I’m forced to confront questions about life and death and heaven and love and the soul. When the monster is too hard to ignore. Don’t ignore it, my sister says. Accept it.

I can’t, I can’t. I look at Katie, suddenly facing the monster, and my heart shudders in terror, and I know, I know deep in my bones, that when the monster steps forward for Tanner, I will curl up in a ball and shove my fingers in my ears and sing LA LA LA LA and I will deny it, deny it, just like I did when it came for my dad, just like I still do when I think of my dad, and I will not be able to look up, I will not be able to move, I will not be able to help. I am ashamed, knowing this. I am so ashamed. I am struggling to get past it, but today, I am failing.

It remains, as always, to say the usual things: hug your children. Hug them hard. Hug everyone you love. Know that you will lose them, or that they will lose you, and conduct yourself accordingly. Acknowledge the monster. Let your fear drive you to greater love. Let love be your soul-armor. Trust it to protect you.

Even though you live in doubt, trust it. It’s all you can do.

(You can find out about helping the Granju family through this terrible, terrible time over here. Please consider doing so. And then hug your children, again.)

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.

I was at Disneyland last week, without my kids, which you would think – given the company of hordes of children and giant chipmunks and dancing teacups – would cause anyone over the age of, say, 24 to be hyper-conscious of their adultness. But not me. I giggled and skipped and squealed and might have knocked over a twelve year old or four running to get in line for Space Mountain. I cried during our special guided walking tour – there’s no Journey To Inner Space ride anymore! My Dad took me on that! – and told anyone who would listen that I wanted to be an Imagineer when I grew up. I ate Mickey Mouse shaped cookies and – please don’t tell anyone about this, okay? – wished, fervently, that the princess dresses came in my size and that I could spend an hour or two in the Bibbity Bobbity Boutique getting fitted for a tiara and having glitter sprinkled on my cheeks. (Every time I saw the sign for the Bibbity Bobbity Boutique I shouted Bibbity Bobbity BOO-YAH, and more than one adolescent girl rolled her eyes at me, so it’s probably for the best that they wouldn’t let me in there, but still.) I wanted to move into Sleeping Beauty’s castle. I wanted to spend weeks in Tarzan’s tree house. They had to pry Katie and I out of the Zephyr after letting us ride it four times in a row.

Mickey ears are almost as good as tiaras, but also, totally not.

How can I possibly be considered a grown-up? How can I possibly be forty?

I was about six when my parents took my sister and I to Disneyland – we drove from Vancouver to Anaheim in our camper, camping our way down through Washington and Oregon and Nevada – and what I remember most about that trip – other than getting the mumps on the way back – is that Mom and Dad seemed to enjoy Disneyland more than we did. We loved it of course, but my parents loved it, they reveled in it, and when my sister and I started to lag at the end of each day, my mother would crouch down and say, let’s just go on Pirates of the Caribbean one more time, okay? Okay? I can still see the anticipation on her face. She didn’t seem a grown-up to me then. She didn’t seem a grown-up to me for a long time after.

I think that she started to seem grown-up sometime around the time that she turned forty. Which was when I turned thirteen, so it’s possible – it’s likely – that that was a function of my adolescence, of me entering the stage of girlhood wherein one’s parents begin to seem impossibly old, but still. I remember when my mom turned forty, and when my dad turned forty, and the fact that I am turning forty – and that my youngest child has just turned two, and that my oldest will soon graduate junior kindergarten, and that I have my own little family now, and that my mom is so far away, and that my dad is not here to see any of this, that my dad is gone – seems impossible, impossible, as impossible as magic wands and pixie dust and relocation schemes involving a Goofy moving van, Sleeping Beauty’s Castle and a sub-prime princess mortgage.

I suppose that I imagined, that I always imagined, that as I grew older I would carry my childhood with me, and my family, too, and that we would someday all go to Disneyland together, children and parent-children and grandparent- children, and that we would all ride Pirates of the Caribbean together and laugh until our sides hurt, but time has moved too quickly for that; time has moved too quickly to make those dreams come true, time might continue to move too quickly to allow for so many dreams to come true – will we get to Disneyland with Tanner before he dies? will he get to introduce Emilia to Buzz Lightyear, as he’s asked, or take Jasper on the submarine ride? – and I suppose that it’s that that has me drinking deep from the cups of melancholy this morning, rather than feasting on birthday breakfast cupcakes. I am a grown-up: I know this because I have felt the passage of time blow by like the coldest and most merciless wind, and I feel it blowing still, and I know that no matter how closely I hold my inner child, no matter how desperately I cling to her, neither she nor I will escape the sting of that wind.

I am a grown-up. But I’m also a child who loves Disneyland, who has lost her Dad, who fears losing others she loves, who believes in fairies but worries that sometimes, the fairies fade, no matter how hard you clap your hands. And I’m not sure whether I should just keep clapping and believing and wishing the hurt and the fear away on clouds of pixie dust, or whether I should just do whatever it is that grown-ups do to not be sad and afraid, like drink more coffee and take more Ativan, which can be almost as effective as pixie dust, if my own experience is anything to go by, but far less magical. Or can I do both? Can’t I please do both?

I don’t want to stay in Neverland forever. I just want to visit once in a while. Is that too much to ask?

*That was a rhetorical question. I’m closing comments, because I need to go off the grid for a day or two to eat cupcakes and pretend that I’m still in Neverland, albeit a Neverland with good espresso.

*Oh, also: my mom wrote me a birthday letter at her blog. It didn’t make me cry too much and has nothing to do with the fact that I will need five cupcakes to perk me up this morning instead of two.

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.

My sister and I have never spoken in terms of hope. There’s no cure for Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy, and even though research goes forward, and clinical trials are run, Tanner has never been eligible for any experimental treatments, largely because of the nature of his genetic condition (he lacks the relevant gene entirely, and most research investigates the mutation of the gene. They refer to the lack of the gene as a deletion, which I’ve always found interesting and sort of sinister, like the gene was there at some point and then was taken away, erased, as if, when God was creating Tanner, he was plugging away at the code, tapping on a keyboard, and then was overtaken by some malicious whim, and hit backspace-backspace-backspace just at the chromosomal locus of Xp21, where the dystrophin gene is created.) So we’ve never spoken of hope, beyond the general hope that whatever years Tanner had would be good years, fulfilling years. But those years are dwindling, too quickly, far more quickly than we ever imagined – most boys with DMD make it at least into their early teens, but it will be a miracle if Tanner makes it to 12 – and the quality of those years is ever-declining, as Tanner loses his ability to do the things that he loves, the things that have sustained him since he lost his mobility, things  like drawing – trains and rocket-ships and dinosaurs – and plucking at a guitar and playing Nintendo.

And holding his own fork, and swallowing his own food, and keeping himself upright in his wheelchair.

We don’t speak about hope.

We speak about what we can do, what we can give him, how we can fill what remains of his life with joy, and we cry as we do, because there is so much that he wants to do – to take his cousins to Disney and introduce them to his favorite characters (that he could not join them at DisneyWorld was hard for him), to take a trip on a train, to swim with dolphins, to meet an astronaut – and so little time and so few resources and, always, the terrifying prospect that, soon, we won’t even be able to give him home, because as his condition worsens the harder it is for Chrissie to look after him on her own – the harder it is to lift him, to move him, to monitor him while trying to survive as a working single mom – and the more likely it seems that he’ll have to go into care and we cannot let that happen, we cannot, but we do not have magic and we do not have fairy godmothers, we have only our hands – and our feet – and our hearts and hearts, for all their worth, cannot work miracles. I don’t think. I don’t know.

All I know is, I have to try. I’m not sure how or by what means, but I have to try.

*I am still doing my 100 Miles For Tanner and I am still wearing tutus, although I am struggling against the inefficiency of it, and, yes, the seeming futility of it – there is hope to be drawn from raising awareness of DMD and helping raise money for research, but these days, for us, are dark, and hope for other boys feels – and this terrible, terrible I know – like such small consolation. But it is, still, hope – and raising awareness in Tanner’s name is something that will provide consolation as the days get darker still – and I will continue to pursue it, and hope that you will join me. But I need to do more, and I need to figure out how to do that, and it’s going to keep me up at night – it does keep me up at night – and so bear with me if I seem a little dark and cranky – darker and crankiER – in the coming days. Virtual hugs – and for Tanner, whatever kinds of prayers or good wishes are comfortable for you – appreciated.

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.

Some stories I don’t tell here. Many stories, I don’t tell here. Between the stories that I do tell there are interstices, some shallow, some deep, and in these interstice lay the stories that I do not, for one reason or another, tell. In the interstices of last summer’s stories about death and loss and more death and loss there was another story, one that I did not tell, about another loss, about the loss of – the destruction of – family, about trolls, the real kind. I didn’t tell it because it was one more hurt piled upon a tower of hurt and poking at it might have brought that tower crashing down upon my head. I didn’t tell it because I didn’t know how to make sense of it and there were other, deeper hurts requiring the attention of my confusion. But mostly, I didn’t tell it because it was not my story to tell.

It wasn’t my story to tell, even though it hurt me deeply. It took the ragged edges of my grief and yanked and tore until nothing was left but shreds, but that, that was nothing compared to what it did to my mother. It tore at her understanding of who she is and who she was and what our family was and everything that she thought it always would be. It tore her. It’s her story.

She’s telling it in her own words, in her own space. Please give her some love.

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.

The night before the race I had a series of dizzy spells, the last resulting in a nasty fall while carrying Emilia – herself a little broken from falling on the monorail off-ramp – across the resort grounds. I wasn’t badly hurt by the fall – just sore knees and neck – but the fact that I’d been dizzy enough for black spots to distort my vision and skew my balance and send me careening to the ground, child in arms, was enough to sound the warning bells. “You’re not running,” Katie said, as she helped me back to the room. “I will stop you.”

So. I did not run the Disney Princess Half-Marathon.

In hindsight, I can speculate that my dizzy spells and my fall and my consequent failure to run was due to a lot of things that were more or less beyond my control. Doing a week-long long-distance road trip with small children who do not sleep prior to running a half-marathon is, perhaps, something that I could have controlled – simply by not doing it – but then we wouldn’t have had our adventure, and who’s to say that it was the seven nights without sleep that brought me down? It also might have been the Florida sun, or the food (Mickey-shaped waffles have been proven to cause light-headedness in tutu-clad lab rats), or the fact that I’m only about a month past a bout of pneumonia and have bad lungs and ignored all of that when I resumed training a few weeks ago and didn’t pay any of that any mind while carrying a 35 lb toddler through the Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom and Epcot Center under the decidedly un-Canadian sun for two days. It could have been due to a lot of things, most of which were almost certainly my fault.

Which is why I’m having a hard time clinging to the joy from this weekend. The smalls had a deliciously wonderful time, chasing Space Rangers and splashing down mountains and racing race cars and goggling at pixies zipping through the sky, and their joy was contagious but still: we were supposed to do all this – we were supposed to be pursuing joy and chasing pixies and princesses – for Tanner. I was supposed to do this for Tanner. And I f*cked it up before I even got started.

It’s kind of hard to not hate myself for that.

(I ordinarily close comments for this kind of post, because I hate being sucked into the temptation to seek reassurance and back-pats from the Internets for my own twisted issues, but you know what? This shit sucks so bad that it is taking all of my limited self-restraint to not out-and-out beg everyone, everywhere, to tell me that I am not, in fact, all total fail and a disappointment to humanity. So. If you feel like telling me that I don’t suck, I will totally take that. Please excuse my neediness.)

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:

Please enjoy. And pass it on. The husband doesn’t ask much of my Internets, so it’d be nice to indulge him.

(We’re road-tripping right now – this post comes to you courtesy the free Wi-Fi at the Hampton Inn in Louisville, Kentucky – and to say that my attention span is crunched almost flat is to understate things dramatically. So.)

(We’re road-tripping because I’m going to run the Princess Half-Marathon, aka the Tiarathon, at Disney World this weekend. I’m doing it for Tanner. You can read more about here.)

(Also, puppies.)

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?

It won’t, I say. Because we’re always looking. Because we value what we have too highly to let down our defenses. Because our love is our defense. And so on and mushy so forth. But I understand his concern. We live in an age wherein the opportunities for undermining one’s relationships are more numerous and more varied than ever before. There is more to be distracted by, more to be tempted by, more to cause one to forget – for a moment, for many moments, for far too long – about what really matters.

I’ve seen, in the last few years, too many marriages crash on the rocks of the Internet, too many relationships suffer because there is so much else to do and so many others with whom to do it. I’ve listened to peers complain that their partners don’t want them to write about this or that private matter; I’ve read the e-mails attached to countless submissions to the Basement, cursing the fact that a husband or wife or significant other doesn’t understand their need to share. I’ve seen far too many friends and acquaintances take their sharing elsewhere, away from the person with whom they share their offline life, to someone else, someone online, someone who better gets them and their deepest, innermost thoughts, the ones that they publish online. I’ve watched, and lent a sympathetic ear, and understood – this world, this virtual world in which we finally, finally get to tell our stories, uncensored, often seems so much more vibrant and more real than the world in which we change bedsheets and diapers and argue over who will drop the kids at school and who will make the doctor’s appointment and who will pick up the milk. In this world, we are writers. Artists. Activists. In this world, we are noble, we are fascinating, we are awesome. We get to project our best selves onto a virtual screen and see ourselves – and see others see us – as our best selves, as the selves that don’t change diapers or bedsheets, or that make the changing of diapers and bedsheets funny and interesting and – maybe, if we’re really on our game – poetic.

It is so easy to be seduced by those selves, by the idea of those selves, by the idea of being received and understood primarily on the virtues of those selves. It’s the dream of anyone who is a geek or has ever been a geek, anyone who feels or has ever felt misunderstood; it is the high school dream of having your secret poetry-and-sketch-filled notebooks discovered and seeing everyone realize that you are, underneath your Sex Pistols t-shirt and ironic barrettes and black fingernail polish, really a genius! And so funny! And then they all want to be your friend, or fall in love with you! Or both! The difference, however, in the age of the Internet, is that we put the contents of those notebooks up on Blogger or Twitter or Facebook and wait to be adored and when – if – the adoration comes, whether from one person or one hundred or one thousand or more, we sit back and tell ourselves that we always knew that this could happen, that we always expected this to happen, if we only had the opportunity to show ourselves as we really are. And we forget, some of us, in the thrall of this lived dream, that there are people who have always adored us for who we really are, only they don’t say so on Twitter.

This, I think, is the dangerous thing, the monster, that can creep up on us: this forgetting, this unvaluing or undervaluing – when held against the sparkle and glitter and heat of the virtual world – of our real, ordinary worlds, and the relationships therein.

There are corollary dangers, of course – the dangers attendant to finding ex-lovers on Facebook, the dangers of e-mail flirtations, the dangers of cultivating any virtual relationships that might supplant the one that is the basis of your real-world home, the danger of placing greater value upon one’s life in the virtual world than upon one’s life in the real world, the danger of simply being distracted. Such dangers are not, of course, restricted to interaction in the virtual world, nor are they new: Helen’s desire to pursue a new and more interesting life with Paris launched the Trojan war; Emma Bovary’s attachment to romance novels prompted her to seek romance outside of her marriage; Anna Karenina, of course, followed her unfaithful heart and ended up – broken and broken-hearted – underneath the wheels of a train. And so on. It’s an old, old story. But it’s one that, I think, becomes more common the more that we embrace opportunities to speculate upon and indulge the fantasies of what if? What if my spouse were more dashing, more romantic? What if I had a partner who loved discussing philosophy in the middle of the night as much as some of my Twitter friends? What if I were married to someone who truly understood my obsession with Glee?

The Internet – taken in the larger context of a mass media that assaults us, constantly, with images and stories about how much better our lives could be, if – has, arguably, become the postmodern, poststructuralist, interactive equivalent of Emma Bovary’s romance novels: it tempts us with the possibility that there could be something or someone better out there, that we might be happier with that something or someone else, that everything that we have here, right in front of us, is so much less interesting, so much less sparkly and fascinating and fulfilling than that those other possibilities, and then it invites us and gives us the means to explore those possibilities from the safety and security of our kitchen tables or home offices.

We don’t all do this, of course. And not all relationships that founder these days do so because of social media, and not all relationships that do founder for any reason related to social media are relationships that would have otherwise survived. It just seems, though, that this – this phenomenon, this thing – is so much with us, and that it carries so much potential for harm where harm mightn’t otherwise have occurred and it just makes me so sad every time I hear about another relationship being shattered after battering against the hard, glittery edges of new media. I tell my husband, when he voices his concerns, that these relationships probably would have shattered, anyway – any relationship that is so fragile that it could be disrupted by the Internet, or by what its participants see in magazines or on television or in movies, could not have had long to live, I insist – but is this true? I read another Basement submission or talk to another friend or hear another rumor and my conviction wavers.

I’m secure in my marriage, but still – I’ve set some ground rules. I won’t publish a story against my husband’s express wishes (just as I would expect him to do, were our situations reversed), I don’t seek out exes online, I don’t cultivate intimate relationships with members of the opposite sex, I don’t bitch about him online, I don’t share with others – confessions, secrets, grievances – anything that I wouldn’t share with him. Not because I believe that our marriage would be in mortal danger if I did any of those things, but because I don’t want to take any chances. What I have is too valuable, too precious. It wouldn’t be worth the risk. It just wouldn’t. I want to hold hands with my husband when we are in our very old age and the Internet and blogging and Facebook are so much far-distant retro bullshit and say, we have been together forever…

And then we’ll turn to our hologrammatic communication avatars and have them Twitter that directly into the post-electronic hive-mind, and we’ll high-five each other with our wrinkled, iPhone-bent hands.

This post was prompted, in part, by last week’s Basement post about a Facebook-fueled affair. It was not the first such post of its kind, of course, but came in a week wherein it seemed that every magazine and news feed had stories about infidelity and after a weekend during which I sat on a conference panel about memoir-writing and fumbled over questions about how and why I share or don’t share certain stories online and what my husband and family think about all that sharing. Which, you know, prompted some reflection. But am I overthinking this? Am I overexaggerating the dangers? Do you keep your real-life relationships front of mind when you’re deciding what to reveal – or to whom to reveal it – online? When you’re cultivating relationships online? What would you do if your marriage and your Internet came into conflict? Are you certain that your marriage would come first? What do you do – do you do anything – to make sure that it does? Could I have come up with a better topic with which to harsh Valentine’s Day?

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.

It’s a visceral, irrational thing, this feeling – a little bit like thwarted puppy love, like an unrequited crush – I know that I don’t need to have this desire fulfilled, I know that it’s probably better for me to not have this desire fulfilled, I know that the reasonable thing, the rational thing, is to reject this desire and put it in its place, but that knowledge is powerless, in those moments when that knowledge doesn’t stop the desire from pulsing and aching and drowning out everything but the want.

(I think about what we would name this child, I ruminate over whether Emilia and Jasper would prefer a little brother or a little sister or whether they’d care, I push aside the anxieties around another difficult pregnancy and birth and think about that feeling of fullness, I think about how we’d need a new vehicle, perhaps a new house, and then I think about how we couldn’t really afford it, anyway, and about how hard the depression was, this time around, and, really, we had a vasectomy, so it’s moot, this issue, and it’s all for the best anyway.)

And I have another moment, and I think: Beatrice. Oliver. Olivia. Alice. Theo. And my heart flutters, a little sadly.)

I don’t know whether, in those moments – and they are only ever just moments, sometimes protracted, sometimes not – what I’m yearning for is another baby, or just for the possibility of another baby, for fertility and promise and the experience of knowing that my body can do this, that it can grow and nourish and bring forth and nourish new life. I don’t know. I do know that when I look at my children I feel grateful and whole; I look at them and I don’t feel any lack, I don’t feel that anything’s missing, I know that we are complete as a family and that everything about us is good.

But then I have these moments, these utterly destabilizing moments of want and I’m confused. Just, confused.

Does this ever happen to you? How do you make it stop? Do you want make it stop? Or do you just keep your running list of baby names and make it a little game make-believe where you pretend that you have infinite abilities of baby-making and infinite resources for baby-sustaining and you can have as many or as a few babies as you like and you never wreck your body and you never get depressed and your boobs are glorious, resilient fonts of nurturing liquid gold that never ache or scab and you just get to live out the fantasy of motherhood as it never, ever is and then you have a shot of vodka? Or what?