It was even more vivid than last time: the very day Ben stopped breastfeeding, some kind of hormonal veil lifted and I went from raving straightjacketed maniac to unshakable stepford wife.

The other night I said to Justin “You know what?” and he said “What?” and I said “I think I might be myself again. I think I might be back to normal.” and he said “Normal? What, you mean THIS wasn’t normal?” (sits upright in chair clutching imaginary safety bar)

“Tck-tck-tck-tck-tck-tck-tck-tck isn’t this lovely! tck-tck-tck-tck look at the view from up here! tck-tck-tck wait, what’s going on? tck-tck-tck what’s that peak up ahead? tck-tck-tck-aaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHH!!!!!! UUUUUGHHH I NEED NEW PANTS WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIIIIIEEEEE!!! tck-tck-tck-tck-tck-tck oh phewph, thank god that’s over… WAAHGGGHHHUPSIDEDOWNAAAARRGGGHH!!”

I guess that means he’s relieved.

+++++

The end of breastfeeding marks the end of gestation, the sideways promotion of what I’d affectionately call a parasitic love. And yet another goodbye to the boy we left behind, the last of Liam's mark on me.

Summoning him can be like arriving at a summer home already warm with company. As soon as I walk up the driveway he yells she’s here! and runs to me through the scents of woodsmoke and cinnamon and mystic. He might embrace me eye-to-eye, gruff and scratchy and with his own stories and adventure. Or he might crawl to me with a dirty bum, grasp the hem of my jeans with sticky fists grinning broadly to say up! then wrap koala arms around my neck. No matter what his form he meets my eye so deliberately, as Ben does, and says in his own way hello again mama, I missed you, and look, look at all this.

Or I arrive to see grass grown to hay, windows boarded up for winter, mothballs and plastic sheets. I try the door just in case, call through the porch hello? are you here? and get no answer. It is not abandonment, just vacancy.

That’s how it is now. He is not with me. I don’t know where he is. Maybe his next, a place or calling that might give him the chance to run to me again in some way, just now and then, I hope.

+++++

1979. At the top of the paper, saved all these years by my parents:

WHAT I WILL BE WHEN I GROW UP.

First up, and most important, when you are six:  to be A TEENAGER. With CURLY HAIR. And mascara, and lipstick (a.k.a. FAST AND EASY).
 

Next, I would be a roller derby star. Of course. DUH. Apparently an Amish one.
 

In addition to all of the above, my life’s ambition? To be TANNED. sigh.
 

The last and final option was the only one in which it was acceptable to have straight hair. And I don’t even know how to say this, in case the publisher falls down a well and emerges with amnesia—but I'm told it’s going to happen, although it’s not what you might think. It’s an adventure novel for kids, and in about 18 months, it will be born.

(What you might think might happen too, if I can pull it together. We’ll see.)

!!!

It’s a good thing I was at the bottom of my fourth rum drink when we saw them wake up. Bats don’t eat pickles.

“What the…”

“DUCK!”

“Holy shit. HOLY shit. HOLY SHIT!”

Roaring fire. Plaid. Moose antlers. Giant rock fireplace. Rum. The friendly, whooshing hiss of a coleman stove. The best frigging supper ever eaten in all of frigging christendom (papardalle, asiago, garlic, garlic, garlic, butter, asparagus, and scallops, which, handily, have no faces). More rum. Bigger fire. Drunken interpretive dance. More rum. Cozy slippers. A clock that strikes midnight. A COVEN OF RABIED BATS HUNGRY FOR BLOOD.

ONE! One wide-awake bat! A-ha-ha! TWO! Two black bats! A-ha-ha! THREE! FOUR! FIVE! SIX! SEVEN! Seven wide-awake black furry swooping bats! A-ha-ha-haaa!

My instincts? Sharp as a tack. 1) Pull sweater up over gaping mouth; 2) Say ‘holy shit!’ fourteen times in quick succession; 3) Lay immobile thinking if I don’t move they’ll think I'm sofa if I don’t move they’ll think I'm sofa if I don’t move they’ll think I'm sofa.

Meanwhile Justin stood frozen solid as three of them circled his head almost too fast to track and said this:

“In french they’re called chauve-souris. You know, there aren’t many things that really give me the queebs. Mice are one of them. (FLAP! FLAP! FLAP!) Mice with wings are another. I think… (SHRIEK! SHRIEK! SHRIEK!) …yes. I think I’m about to lose my shit.”

Ten seconds later we were in the car headed home, these particular bats having been bred in Sauron’s evil lair to be unafraid of light. Thankfully, Justin had only sipped at a lone beer so as to enjoy the drunken interpretive dance unimpaired, and was able to drive home at mach ten screeching like a little girl until we made the shore.

(confession: that last bit may have been me.)

+++++

We returned the next morning to paddle to Liam’s eddy and I felt strangely blank.

Here is a mother whose baby died, and here she is paddling a canoe, and there she is standing under the tree where the beavers have been busy, and it’s all different now, everything shifted, and look, she’s hungry, and it’s time for rice crackers.

+++++

As we tied the canoe to the roof for the second drive home this trip, a large butterfly coaxed to me

Look! Look! Come and see!

And so I followed, lying on my side on the beach, admiring as it preened and sunbathed on the sand.

I am all joy! My wings, they are mine! They catch wind and eyes! I am beautiful.

We sat together for a while, me and the butterfly, and I cooed to him how lovely he was, how proud he must be of his wonderful yellow. He agreed and then went on to find adventure, and I wondered if in some deep recess he might harbour a speck of my baby and I thought to myself onward, onward, brave son!

+++++

Two hours later we pulled into the driveway. As soon as I opened the door I saw another on the grass, a different butterfly but identical to my preening friend, this one injured and fluttering pitifully. Half a wing missing from some misfortune, he told me

I was all joy, but now I am done

and I picked him up in my hand and cooed to him how lovely he was, how proud he must be of his wonderful yellow. He agreed, and I found a soft, broad hosta leaf in the shade where he went still and I thought to myself onward, onward, brave son!

LALALALALALAAA CAN’T HEAR YOU my brain singsongs, its fingers stuck in its ears as the throbbing, whimpering thing in my chest emotes and aches.

LALALALALAAAA let’s think about HAIR MOUSSE! and MEN! and VODKA COCKTAILS! and A NEW SUMMER SKIRT! and MOUNTAINS! and BUSINESS TRIPS! and THAT WAD OF PRIMAL GOO THAT’S BLOCKING THE BATHTUB DRAIN!

My brain has given itself Chiclet veneers to cover the rot underneath.

I fell apart a few weeks before their birthday. Then that day came and went and in the past six weeks I’ve lamented everything except Liam. What to do with this life. What to do with an unwanted minivan. How to ease off on paying work in the interest of making time for possibly dream-fulfilling work. How to possibly ease off on paying work after losing ten thousand dollars on a minivan that is apparently unwanted by everyone else, too. How to get my mojo back. How to shake this angry pallor.

<BZZZT>

Scratch that last one.

I’ve got grief exhaustion. I haven’t got any more profound left in me.

I’m tired of being honourable. Not as-in ‘sick of it’ but just plain tired. Tapped. There’s the first day he died, then the second day he died, then the six weeks in between: the day of his heart surgery, through his steroid-fuelled bloom, the day his brain began to flood. And one year ago today: the day they tried to fix it and he said that’s it, world. I think I’ve had enough.

Likewise.

++++++

This weekend we go to be with him, just the two of us, to see if we can spot his urn in the creekbed again. We’ll take our red canoe, paddle through the everglades that lead to the gnarly, twin-trunked maple that canopies over his gurgling eddy.

I’m bringing rum.

And after that I’m going to try and honour him by allowing myself to be human, not just some shadow of a human.

His soft, floppy body lies pressed to your skin and no matter your own heat, you can't keep him warm. From the inside-out, he is the still coolness of the end of life. Then his spirit is lifted into mystery, and it is done. And forever after that you take your own breaths under pressure: pressure to be in a state of constant spiritual vigilance, of love, of gratitude.

It’s impossible. I can only be so serene. It’s just not in my nature, except in fleeting moments. So I hope for one, just one, sometime tomorrow night.

Evan:  Mommy, where is the other baby, the baby like Ben?

Kate:  That was Liam, sweets.

Evan:  Is he in the hospital? Can I see him?

Kate:  He’s your spirit-brother and he lives with the stars, and in your heart.

Evan:  I don’t have a heart. I’m a big boy.

Kate:  You do, goose. You are a big, beautiful boy with a big, beautiful heart. Liam watches you all the time and when he does, he’s with you right there in your heart.

Evan:  But I don’t see him. Why can’t I see him?

Kate:  Because he was a sick little baby, and he couldn’t stay with us, so he went up to the stars where they made him all better.

Evan:  Mommy, sometimes I can’t remember Liam.

Kate:  Oh sweetie, that’s okay. Daddy and me will help you remember him.

Evan:  I miss Liam mommy.

Kate:  I know love, we all miss him.

Evan:  What is daddy going to dream about tonight?

Kate:  Mountains. Big mountains with snowy peaks and scraggly trees and black bears all dripping with blueberry juice.

Evan:  What are you going to dream about tonight?

Kate:  Fishotopia, the place where the fish walk around on the land and the people walk around underneath the water and they come out in boats to try and catch us but we’re all too quick.

Evan:  What is Evan going to dream about tonight?

Kate:  Monkeys on ferris wheels.

Evan:  What is Ben going to dream about tonight?

Kate:  Ummm… let me see. How about… friendly tugboats?

Evan:  No mommy. Ben is going to dream about dumpsters and excavators.

Kate:  Oh. Okay.

Evan:  What is Liam going to dream about tonight?

Kate:  You, sweets. Liam dreams about you.

+++++

Justin (whispers to me):  the hook was stuck and then he got hold of it and it was too much time and so we didn't throw it back but I don’t think he knows about l-i-v-e and d-e-a-d and he keeps asking when it’s going to start jumping again and I think he wants to take it into the bath tonight.

Justin (turns to fisherson):  Are you ready to go and get some ice cream?

Evan:  YES.

Justin:  But you have to leave the fish here.

Evan:  NO.

Justin:  But he belongs in the fridge.

Evan:  NO HE DOESN’T. HE WANTS ICE CREAM.

Justin:  But you can’t just walk around everywhere with a fish.

Evan:  OH YES I CAN.

I’m here, muddling along.

I haven’t got much to say, but feel the need to bump that last one down the line.

It's been blowing the dog off the chain here lately, literally and figuratively, and I'm dishevelled and turned inside-out. Thank you, huddle. Your words make me feel normal.

+++++++

On May 12, 2007 we lay Liam and Ben side-by-side for the first time—Liam with ventilator tubes and tape obscuring his face, Ben with his oxygen, and we took a picture, terrified, desperate, overwhelmed. Poised to sell our souls.

Hello brave boys. Here we are.

+++++++

Liam calls for me sometimes. And sometimes I call for him, needing him to let me mother him. Needing to carve out some portion of every day to parent each of my children, living and dead.

God, how I despise that word.

Mamas like me work to reclaim it perhaps like bitch or queer, diffusing it by bringing it out in to the open, putting it in front of the word baby.

I understand why. To force people around us to acknowledge, to listen, to remember despite the discomfort. To challenge don’t you dare tell me to get over it. Don’t you dare rush me. Pretending it never happened may work for you, but not for me.

I’m just not quite ready for that word. The pitifully hopeful, whimpering thing inside me bristles, needing to hold out for parallel worlds and pearly gates and cosmic mistakes. Dead is too final, too finite. Lost at least leaves room for reunion.

+++++++

Evan: MOMMY I WANNA COOKIE!
Kate: What do you say?
Evan: MOMMY I WANNA COOKIE NOW!
Kate: What do you say?
Evan: MOMMY I WANNA COOKIE NOW, NO, I WANT TWO!

And then he looks at me grinning, bats his eyelashes and says PWEEZE!

And then Ben projectile-barfs peas and hummus and I don’t get there in time with the bowl and the moment the digestive hose is emptied he cracks himself up, spitty pea-goop dripping off his chin.

Then suddenly there’s this on the radio and Liam waits for me patiently, as he always has, and I run the dripping cloth back and forth across the white plastic with tears in my eyes, wishing I had twice the highchairs, twice the barf.

+++++++

I worked until 3:45 AM this morning on a presentation for a client. Evan climbed into bed with me at 6:30 AM and said

MOMMY!

and I said uuunnnngggghhh and he said

DON’T WORRY MOMMY, I ALWEDDY GOT MY BWEKKFIST

and he curled up next to me under the blankets, munching in a pleased-with-himself sort of way, and I drifted back to sleep. By the time I woke up he’d plowed through four chocolate chip cookies and was nose-to-nose, blinking earnestly and shout-whispering

WHAT DID YOU DWEEM ABOUT MOMMY I DWEEMED ABOUT MONKEYS ON FEWWIS WHEELS MOMMY, MONKEYS ON FEWWIS WHEELS.

+++++++

Now and then I can see peace, a clearing through this claustrophobic tangle, and awash in gratitude I would do it all a hundred times over for the honour of being mother to exactly these children, all three.

Today is their birthday. 

Last night I thought I’m going to look back at those pictures, see just how small Ben was when he was born and was aghast as the rest of the world must have been. Now that I know him beyond the abstractions of the NICU—his giggles and his big brother idolatry and his koala bear hugs—the realization of how close we came to losing him is a vice around my throat.

Last night I realized how everyone else must have seen our doom when we could not. We were too busy doing what we were told, too busy straining to see beyond the wires and the tubes and the swelling, too busy trying to give them love through the portholes of a hot plastic box. Thinking in desperation Liam is just mellow, a patient, old soul. Last night I felt like a fool.

Last night I sought out Liam, mute and still, his limbs and face buried under an impenetrable web of wires and ventilators and sensors, tangled up next to Ben. Pulled magnetically to fish beyond the highly edited flickrstream for the outtakes, searching for something of my son that perhaps I hadn’t seen before. All I am given is undiscovered angles of horror and heartbreak.

Last night it occurred to me just how gravely injured he’d been. Always grimacing as if in pain or at least in purgatory, his face relaxed only when he was in the deepest of medicated sleeps. When his eyes were open his face was screwed up into an expression of frustrated shock as if to say why am I still here?

Last night I hated my body, hated it so much.

Last night I vaguely considered a tattoo for the first time in my life. Earlier in the day I’d opened the sailmaker’s chest to see a few snips of Liam’s hair in a tiny zip-lock bag. It’s darker than I remember and it dawned on me that I was looking at the hair of a dead baby, cut from him after he finally stopped breathing.

Then I looked at Ben who sat in his highchair grinning broadly with one solitary cheerio stuck to the spit on his chin and with Liam’s hair between my fingers I went to the car to get the camera and Oh lili, isn’t this lovely, you’ve never been outside before. It’s sunny and the birds are chirping, and soon the peeper frogs will start to sing, and doesn’t that breeze feel wonderful and I felt pathetic, standing there in the grass holding a zip-lock bag containing all that’s left of my baby, holding it up to the sun so that he could feel that the winter’s grip is gone, that the warmth has come back.

I wonder if they could put his hair into some ink and brand him onto my skin somewhere, somewhere secret, so he would always be with me. I hope it would hurt like a sonofabitch.

Last night I stood in the bathroom with Liam’s ceramic hole-in-heart. It has started, so I’ll put his heart on a new string and I’ll wear it for his six weeks and that will give me something to hold on to but the new string didn’t fit through the hole and I thought well shit, maybe not, and maybe that’s just silly anyway and I put the heart back inside the sailmaker’s chest and went back to bed and just lay there next to Justin’s breathing, goggle-eyed and clipped short like a hunted animal hiding in the dark.

I'm often amazed that you're still here. I'm going to try and be myself again, I am. I've got other stories to tell you, if you care to hear them, about pirates in the forest and 10-foot swells and fetish parties and aliens and past lives and the smell of gunpowder and the deserted farm up the cove that we skulk past, eyeing hungrily with financial hopelessness and unrequited love. But today I have to cry. So thanks for your patience and your presence, strangers and friends.

Mamas of lost babies see them coming and duck into alleys, slam the front door, take cover until they pass.

All pudgy cheeks and weeble-wobbling and snotty-nosed playground scrambling, they are the shadow babies—the fruit of neighbouring wombs. Gestational acquaintances and nearly-cousins and almost-playdates whose ages echo our should-have-beens, our phantom children who itch like lost limbs beyond the stump.

Despite the fingers in our ears they broadcast through the channels of souls in magically amplified singsong nonnie nonnie nonnie, I am here, I’m my mommy mommy mommy’s darling dear.

Their existence is proof that life tends to chug along uneventfully for 99% of the rest of the world: ordinary babies for ordinary mothers in ordinary ways. From our bunkers we spy on them covetously through slivers of blackout cloth, directing muttered profanities at them and at ourselves.

Split neatly down the centre, I am cast out of both camps. One baby died, one baby lived. Furiously bitter among the usual folk, sheepish and humbled among the medusas.

He is my blessing baby and my shadow baby. He saved my life by filling my arms, calling for me in the no-man’s-land between midnight and dawn for contraband giggles, drinking my milk like a dog with a bone as I sobbed.

As Liam left this world he called to Ben mirror-brother, shine bright. Shine so bright you blind mama’s blackness.

And so he does.

+++++

During random laptop housekeeping I see this

and step back a few feet from the screen, transplanting myself into some parallel universe where I chuckle oh, that’s okay, no one can tell them apart but me… the one on the left’s Ben, and the one on the right’s Liam, silly goose. They’re going to be up to so many tricks this summer, I’m going to need to grow two more arms.

+++++

The love affair with Ben has magnified the gravity of Liam’s absence. His snaggletoothed delight both lightens and darkens, rescuing me while serving as evidence of the sort of third boy we might have had.

Broadcasting to me through the channels of souls in magically amplified singsong the voices of Liam and Ben ring out in a tangle

nonnie nonnie nonnie, we are here, we’re our mommy mommy mommy’s darling dears.

(6:21 PM. Justin opens door, walks in with armfuls of work stuff and groceries, closes door behind him and places the toes of one foot across threshold)

Kate: OHMYGOD the clock has been moving one minute ahead and two minutes back all day and I can’t get anything done and he won’t pee but he needs to pee so he’s been running around squealing and holding onto his crotch and he was tearing books and yelling at me so I called him a bossy boiler and then he grabbed onto my leg and wouldn’t let go for three frigging hours and then he was running rampant all over the Kiwi and he doesn’t listen to a thing I say and I think he’s from another planet and he keeps taking his pants off and all he’s eaten is three crackers and two brownies and he kind of stinks and I’m not sure why and JEEBUS, all he did was whine and complain, like, ALL DAY.

Justin: Gee. I wonder where he gets that?

+++++++

I am a porcupine, prickly in advance of the next unknown, of this first anniversary of gains and losses.

I don’t know how I’ll feel, what I’ll do with myself. I hesitate to make plans, promises. The only instinct I have is to avoid company, curl into a ball in a dark room and drink myself into oblivion for six weeks until it’s over.

I’m kind of kidding, but kind of not. I did it once, you know. It worked like a charm.

It was my last day working for a software company with $37,500 in annual revenues despite $10 million in venture capital. The inevitable implosion landed me pink-slipped, but only after three months of the kind of trickle-down angst that brings out the very worst in people.

No, I wasn’t by myself (point for being social: Kate). Yes, I was the only person getting drunk (point for being a spectacle: rum). It was some random Tuesday after I arrived home and declared, “I just lost my job, and I’m about to get completely plastered. Feel free to join me if you like.” (point for hospitality: Kate). Justin and his brother and his brother’s eventual wife spent the night watching me become increasingly self-entertaining, for which I still feel sheepish (point for finding myself hilarious as crickets chirp: rum).

I remember hearing a knock on the bathroom door and muffled whispers asking from the other side if I was, you know, umm, okay.

The door opened a crack and through the steam she would have seen me passed out in the bath with my clothes on, head tilted back, underwater except for a breathing hole, the lower half of my face forming an island of what I’m sure was boozy, open-mouthed snoring through a fjord of suds.

Are you BLIND? I remember thinking in some distant corner of a brain newly occupied by two orangutans picking nits from each others’ fur. I am PERFECT.

An entire evening of precisely orchestrated stress relief culminating in horizontal, zero-gravity, amnesiatic, thoroughly medicated heat?

I woke up hungover, embarrassed and COMPLETELY CURED.

+++++++

On their birthday I may be all cupcakes and dancing, lightened with blessings, or maybe not. Ben was saved but the Liam that might have been was lost, the day he was flooded and then died and then was born and then brought back to linger for us for as long as he could.

This first year, I don't know if I've got it in me to pretend that May 5th wasn’t the most catastrophic day of our lives.

I want to wake up to a kick in the head from my three-year-old as per usual and tap my barometer and make the calls to say “Why don’t you just come over for some tea and something sweet and I might even have some little candles in the junk drawer and we’ll see…”

Or maybe nothing but a walk in the woods with the boys. Maybe I need to be alone or send Liam a letter or leave him a piece of cake somewhere secret or just be angry without an audience, promising to myself and concerned family that I won’t be this way next year. That Ben won’t remember me sobbing over a bowl of chocolate batter, left with the impression he’s half of a whole.

This first year, I just don’t know. I won’t know until that kick in the head.

+++++++

Why Husbands Should Not Provide Running Commentary of Magnum P.I. Episodes During Post Composition, exhibit #14-d

Justin: (enviously) That’s one hell of a moustache. Only Tom Selleck can pull off a moustache like that.

Justin: (ten minutes later) Christ. Check out that package.

Justin: (five minutes later) Seriously. Did you see that? He’s got a cow’s knuckle in his pants.

Justin: (three minutes later) Look at those SHORTS! How is it possible that his junk doesn’t dangle out the bottom?

Justin: (ten seconds later) They are pretty tight, I guess. It wouldn’t so much dangle as it would be squashed out the crack of his leghole like a balloon animal.

(self-portrait '26 weeks with twins', 12 days before crash c-section. April 23, 2007)

Last night I dreamed my babies were born too soon. They were from another planet. They had acorns for knees, and elastic legs, and didn’t cry. I stared at them and they stared at me with the giant, almond-shaped eyes widely reported by abductees.

They knew everything there is to know.

Then I woke up.

On the long, winding descent of the country road I would gear up, invigorated. I’d fly by farms and cattle, ending up on the edge of the city at the software company I worked for to start the day feeling righteous and substantial—for a marketer, anyway.

On this hill was a manhole, the halfway point. For a year's worth of days it was my ritual to ride over its cover with that satisfying kathunk-thunk.

One morning, the familiar dark circle came up fast.

At the last second I startled at the sudden presence of my grandmother, a cyclist until her eighties who had died a few years back. Not a voice exactly but I knew it to be her, and two urgent words:

TURN. NOW.

I heeded the warning, thinking to myself why not? and swerved, missing the manhole by inches, looking down to prove my own silliness as I passed at the speed of a car.

It was uncovered, unmarked.

The gaping hole would have swallowed the front end of my mountain bike, pitching my face and neck into the asphalt edge at a high velocity.

Squeezing the brake levers hard I slowed, jumped off and walked back, gaped at what might have been my doom and rode the rest of the way to work to call the municipal road crew, thoroughly rattled.

++++++

I lay in bed awake and it came to me as it sometimes does: I still can’t believe I had twins, that they came early, that I have this scar, that my babies were in incubators, fed through tubes, cut open by surgeons, that one of them died in my arms.

The dark bit that feeds off the sadness says look at what happened, look and amplifies the memory of a lifeless Liam on my lap, forces me to replay and recoil and wrap myself around the ache.

But last night a soft, affectionate voice cut through like the ringing of a bell.

Stop it, mom.

I hesitated, toyed with pretending it was real. The voice said again, firmly:

No, mom. Not tonight. Just sleep.

and the unwelcome vision was blocked as though a figure stood in front of it with arms crossed.

Sometimes he is a grown man and he walks with me, full of patience. Or he is Ben’s parallel, gurgling and sighing contentedly, letting me know he rests without words. Or he is a teenager, lanky and full of promise. Sighing affectedly, newly sure of himself, protective beyond his years as he was last night.

He comes to me as everything he should have been. Or sometimes he doesn’t come at all and there is just silence and memory, and I am shaken, scolding myself for being hopelessly romantic.

But when I do hear him, I listen. Why not?