I just spent a wonderful weekend in Houston, cavorting and plotting and reflecting and deep-thinking and giggling with some of the brightest and most brilliant and beautiful and bad-assed women on the interwebs. I left uplifted and inspired and more than a little in love with my community.

Then Air Canada messed up my flight connections, and I deflated a little. Then they lost my beautiful red shoes – along with the rest of my luggage – and I deflated some more.

Then I got home and Jasper started struggling to breath and had to be rushed to the hospital – again, again - and my husband raced off with him while I curled up with the girl and my heart was punctured in so many places that I didn’t so much deflate as collapse in a tattered mess and Houston and Mom 2.0 and all the glitter and rainbows and bacon-wrapped-shrimp taco awesome of that space receded utterly and – this is, of course, entirely predictable and fully banal – I felt scared and alone and I cried. (continue reading…)

This boy?

This wee, mop-headed baby boy is gone. With one careless, husband-directed trip to the hair salon, he is no more. He is now boy-boy. Again, only more so this time, so much more – I don’t know – Junior Banker, if Junior Bankers had front comb-overs, which I suppose some of them do: (continue reading…)

Jasper is feeling better. Also, he has discovered the joy of shoving his hand down his pants.

I feel much, much better – and am much more comfortable enjoying the camaraderie and awesome of Blissdom – and the Harry Connick Jr-ness of it all – knowing that Jasper is getting well, and that he finds comfort in the roomy waistband of his pants.

I’d thought that I’d had my fill of beating myself up yesterday, what with blaming myself for Jasper’s pneumonia and all, but really, there’s no such thing as too much self-flagellation when you’re a mother, is there? After a brief flirtation with self-forgiveness that lasted, roughly, the duration of the season premiere of Lost, I’ve regressed fully back into guilt and self-loathing, and it has more than a little to do with the fact that tomorrow, I’m leaving my sick little boy and flying to Nashville.

Which, I wouldn’t do if he weren’t improving and if my husband weren’t going to be around to take over the role of primary caregiver, but still. I’m leaving him. I don’t want to leave him, but I also kinda do. I haven’t had a break since my dad died, and that, well, that wasn’t so much a break as it was a giant, gaping tear in my heart-mind continuum. And the idea of a day or two of not being the Captain (and First Mate, and deckhand, and cook, and scullery maid) of the Good Ship Our House is just so, so, so compelling. That, and this is my work – work that I take much pleasure in, such that it will feel like a holiday, but still. I want to go. I’m going to go.

But I feel guilty as hell.

(Closing comments. I don’t want to crowd-source the question of whether or not I should go. I am going to go. I need to find my own way to feeling okay – as okay as I can feel – about that.) (And yes, I know that I crowd-sourced reassurance over my guilt and anxiety yesterday, and comments are still open over there if you want to weigh in on the question of whether mothers are always hard on themselves, even though I’ve just answered that very question here, in spades, and so it’s really just moot. BEHOLD, I RAMBLE NONSENSICALLY.)

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. (continue reading…)

I don’t know about you, but I think that my child makes a far slicker Horatio Caine than does David Caruso, who, let’s face it, is a hack. But CBS doesn’t care if my baby is an undiscovered Horatio Cane-impersonating genius, because CBS hates babies. Canadian babies, mostly, but also just babies, as a class, because they won’t let babies or Canadians – and certainly not Canadian babies – enter their Horatio Caine impersonation contest, which, seriously, is a crime against babies and also lovers of CSI Miami and anybody who writes baby-centric Horatio Caine fanfic. This is an outrage, you guys. (continue reading…)

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. (continue reading…)

The boy is sleeping in his own bed. The boy is sleeping in his own bed. THE BOY. IS SLEEPING. IN HIS OWN BED.

And I’m not even afraid of incurring the wrath of the sleep gods by saying so. Well, mostly not. I may need to sacrifice some stuffed barnyard creature as a precautionary measure, and I am certainly going to be knocking any all things wood-derived and I’m going to keep the victorious fist-pumps to a minimum until we’ve got this sleep thing conquered, but -  let’s all keep our voices down here – I’m pretty sure that we can conquer it, the wrath of the gods notwithstanding.

(continue reading…)

There’s really nothing much to add, here, except for maybe to point out that while Jasper does say CAKE once or twice in this video, he also says CAT – the giveaway is the fact that he meows at said cat (my mother’s) as it walks by – but I am so dimwittedly focused on OH MY GOD CAKE, HE SAID CAKE that I miss him saying CAT and disregard his cat-calls as cake-hoots, which, sure were absolutely warranted by my mother’s lemon angel food cake recipe, but still. Also, I sound like an idiot.

All that said, it’s been a hard week – weeks – and reflecting on my son’s developing language skills and appreciation for cats and cake are kind of all that I can manage today, so.

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.