She's polished and shiny, smells delicious and has shoes that go click-click-click. She has an MBA, lives in the big smoke and has an up-and-up stock market career. She jetsets.

"Oh, it's great to see you!" I blurt. "The last time I saw you was at so-and-so’s wedding, and you were, like, ELEVEN YEARS OLD!"

And in the space of that heartbeat I transformed like POUF! into a withered apple doll with an apron and babushka, an apple doll that walked twenty miles to school uphill both ways (at least on days when the horse was too lame to pull the buggy).

As we sit pleasantly I catch her staring incredulously at Ben. He sits in my lap, eyebrows halfway to the top of his head where they always are when he’s soaking up the world, awestruck, his face the human equivalent of this:

! ! !

Every two minutes or so her head pulls away from the lecture and she gapes, feigning nonchalance but unable to resist the pull of the magnet.

When it's over it spills out in one breath, words tumbling out after an hour of staring and stewing:

"Okay, I have to be quick before my mother comes back because if she hears me I'll never hear the end of it so tell me, how do you… how did you… ahh… know what to do? I mean, with a baby, when you had the baby, did you study, or did you read books, or did someone tell you, because I think I'm not a mother, and I think I want to try and be ready, you know, so I know what to do, you know, not soon or anything, I'm thinking, like, five years out, so how did you know? How do you do… that? Shouldn't I… get some experience first, or something?"

I'm determined not to laugh with affection, for the memory of being like her once.

The wheels turn in the freshman brain, clicking and whirring, ancient voodoo springing to life. She's dogged, and whip-smart. In a state of disbelief that you simply have sex and then grow big and then push and grunt and then are sent home with THAT.

She's craving an internship, certification, a checklist that will spit her out the other end a Competent Mother.

I don't think it ever goes away, that state of disbelief.

No matter how you move through the world before you become a mother — like her, with confident strides and a straight back and the surety of hard work and street smarts — you will enter this club tripping over the threshold with all the grace of a bumbling village idiot.

What I want to tell her is

I still don't know, and when they puke it sends me into a raging panic, and every time I drive the car, errr, VAN, I get ten minutes down the highway and break out in a sweat, convinced I've forgotten one of them in the middle of some parking lot, and most days I've got no idea what I'm doing, but that's okay. That's what it is, I think, learning how to be content despite being out of control. Dogpaddling peacefully in a bottomless, sticky-sweet pool of molasses. Most days I'm totally cross-eyed, but even with the neck cheese they smell so good, pheromones that match mine, like I could sniff them out in the dark from a thousand others.

What I tell her instead is

Don't worry — when it's your own, you'll just know what to do

...which is not so much the truth as it is the truth lost in translation.

You won't know what to do, but unless you give up needing to know, you'll lose your wits completely.

+++++++

The grandmotherly type in the grocery store leans in and says, How old, six weeks? and I say No, seven months, again, simultaneously exhausted of this exchange and not minding it.

Seven months old, tomorrow's dawn. He is insatiable, and he pulls and yanks like a barbarian knawing on the leg of some fresh kill. But I remember peering through the plastic willing him to be lusty, not meek.

+++++++

Exhibit A: One of these days we're going to get banned. We go to Chapters for the THOMAS PLAYTABLE! and for steamers, and we mooch public toys and magazines, and we get out of the house, and Evan, miraculously, stays in a twenty-foot radius without the usual leg irons.

Exhibit B: Deals with the devil are always forged in plastic. We have retrieved the neglect-o-matic, figuring Ben is just about ready to be propped with a pillow to be Boy-Trapped-In-Well. I am completely mortified that we have crap like this in our living space. But he's too little for the velcro wall, so make do we must.

The question is, how will anything of Ben's — including Ben himself — survive in a house with a resident steamroller?

We're home, grateful, exhausted. We knew it wasn't a major surgery, but the hospital is no longer a place of wellness for us.

Once again trying to sleep despite several neonatal emergency alarms, knowing that two floors above someone else's nightmare has come true. Fighting the 2 AM urge to wander the empty halls in my sweats, press UP on the elevator, go to room 702, hold her hand.

I will my spirit to do so, curled up in the dark.

++++++++

Thank you for thinking of us, for your energy and goodness. Ben is just fine. A bit off, but fine.

We walked out into the crisp sunshine away from sick children and mournful parents. Once again the lingering need to pray, or wish, or send love to those who remain inside those walls. Semantics.

We are so, so blessed.

Ben is on an operating table at this moment. Maybe the same one that held Liam? Maybe.

Down here on the third floor faces seem vaguely familiar, scents and industry and stacks of johnny shirts, blankets. Vacant cribs and ventilators lined up in rows through the hallways, draped in ethereal plastic that swishes as you walk past. The pre-op nurse shows me around and as she does I feign freshman appreciation like I need to know, like I didn't live here for two months.

How I hate this place, full of ghosts. Not of Liam but of varying degrees and breeds of heartbreak. I walk the halls staring at my shoes, glowering.

Passing an occupied room my eyes accidentally wander inside to see a child all spindly, bent arms and legs tucked into a motorized wheelchair so enormous he looks like a doll perched atop a giant, black robot. He gazes into nothing, mouth open, his mother staring similarly at his face. I think of Liam with horrible, guilt-ridden relief.

Two hernia repairs, that's all. Justin and I are here with a pager, waiting. The chances of anything going wrong are remote but TTTS was remote too, and so we are rattled.

They'll probably put the I.V. in his hand or foot, not in his scalp, the nurse tells me. Thank god to avoid the look of it. The last scalp I.V. delivered Liam's comfort on the night he died, bumping up against my chin and cheek with every last nuzzle.

Died. I still can't say it without my stomach turning so I substitute lost as applies to an iPod or wallet or sense of humour.

Do you have any questions? the pre-op nurse asked me early this morning as Ben wailed, denied of boob since midnight last night.

Not really, I replied. It's just hard to be back here after everything that happened. They say it's routine but bad things happened to us before, similarly remote bad things.

There was this lady, she interjects. Her nine-year-old daughter died getting her tonsils out. She came in last month for her son to get his tonsils out, and she couldn't even go downstairs to the O.R. with him. She was so freaked out, we had to take him down.

Oh, I said outloud, and then finished to myself Thank you! Phewph. So glad to hear, as you take my son away to be cut, that yes indeed, babies can die of the most ordinary things.

++++++++

He's so beautiful. I remember taking joy in Evan, of course. But the joy of being Ben's mama... it eclipses every sleepless night, every inconvenience.

His smile, so broad. It heals me, and all of us.

The public health nurse came to weigh Ben yesterday, a bi-weekly date in addition to our visits to perinatal followup at the hospital. And — prepare yourself — he is now, at his first birthday past the zero mark:

NINE AND A HALF POUNDS.

I am mama: hear me rowrrr.

+++++++++

I want brendam docks, daddy?
Daddy, brendam docks. Preeze?
I want brendam docks daddy.
Daddy, brendam docks.
Brendam docks preeze dada now.
Dada do brendam docks.
Brendam docks preeze.
I want brendam docks, daddy!
Daddy, brendam docks?
Brendam docks preeze dada?
Dada, brendam docks now.
Brendam docks preeze.

Justin pushes ancient, secondhand Thomas Tank Engine tape into ancient VCR and says with exasperation:

“Evan, when will you EVER learn that asking for things relentlessly… (pauses, sighs) … gets you whatever you want?”

+++++++++

From the kitchen I hear Kate, get in here quick! and I grab the camera, get there in time to see Ben beaming at his dada’s face, an open-mouthed, sure-as-heck, intentional grin. Of course, by the time I power up and expose it has faded, perhaps a figment, perhaps not.

Despite not having captured the evidence yet we see flags of this approaching milestone, the first one, the carrot-on-the-stick of sleep deprivation.

Ahhh. Sleep deprivation.

I read somewhere that God pressed in the eyes of the Irish — those gorgeous, freckled, raven-haired, silky-lashed types — with a sooty thumb.

I’ve since observed that God pressed in the eyes of the new mother with a sandy thumb, a thumb first swished in vinegar and then poked into the guts of an urban beach littered with e.coli and cigarette butts and shades of last night’s kegger-barf.

Such is how it feels to stumble out of bed at 7 AM after being bolt upright since 3 AM, pat-pat-patting. Rewind: you finish nursing in the breeze of the window, burp and such, place beastfeeder in bassinette, tuck, pat, back away slowly. Then climb back into bed, pull the duvet up around your chilled shoulders, wiggle feet and swish legs back and forth, almost giddy with the feel of it. Your limbs and head and whole self sinks into the mattress with that tingly, going-to-be-asleep-in-thirty-seconds-flat-and-it’s-going-to-be-like-totally-AWESOME feeling but then in twenty-nine seconds he squawks, needing to be UPRIGHT, NOW. Repeat: 3:30. Repeat: 4:45. Repeat: 5:30.

Piping hot shower, piping hot tea and I’m fine. It’s not knocking me off my feet as it did with Evan, this 24-hour unschedule. Maybe because I know from experience that it doesn’t last forever. Still, I catch myself whisper-whining into the darkness GAWD will you PLEASE just button yourself, please so I can sink into this bed and not get up again?

And then, NICU. Oh, yes, right. I remember.

And then he spurts a stream of hot, runny yogurt that trickles down my back and I think Oh sweets, I know it’s not easy, being a baby. You tell me all about it. You just sit here with mama and you go to sleep in thirty seconds flat. I don’t mind that it’s at my expense. Truly, madly, deeply.

Sometimes I reach down and touch the incision: still painful, queeby numbness. It will never let me forget that night.

This purple bump-strip is the remains of a nightmare. But then… sacred, too.

Liam was here
Ben is here
They passed through here, their opening.

And I sigh and think well, it just is.

+++++++++++

Three months ago to right now I was shopping for maternity clothes in a fit of nothing-fits desperation. Three months ago this afternoon I came home to find an excavator in the backyard, digging the hole that would become the two extra bedrooms we’d need for two extra boys. Three months ago tonight I sat with a heating pad on my back, unknowingly breathing through contractions, crying in frustration that I just wasn’t tough enough to bear twins.

You know how the rest goes.

I just can’t believe it’s only been three months, the lifetime we’ve lived since then.

Today was Ben and Liam’s due date, and tomorrow is Ben’s birthday. His age is now comprised of an adjusted slash: three months / zero. The milestone countdown begins now. Six weeks to a smile, that’s the one I’m hungriest for.

A measly three months. And I’m ten times the mama I was before by measure of both darkness and light.

+++++++++++

After a long, long night:

Justin: Can I do anything to help?
Kate: You could lactate.
Justin: I’ll do my best.
Kate: I’d buy a ticket to see that.
Justin: Would you give my performance two nipples up?
Kate: I wish my nipples could point up.
Justin: <long, contemplative pause> I wish… I wish… I didn’t have… hair on my back?
Kate: I love you.
Justin: I know.

A week or so before Liam died I sat with one of the neonatologists next to one incubator or another, chatting. He was quite animated on this day, smiling and gesturing as he marvelled at the mystery of his tiny charges.

You know how this branch of medical science began? Tiny babies, I mean, he said, a glint in his eye.

No, how? I asked.

Coney Island, he said. They had a display, a freak show, for lack of a better word. Perhaps one day a baby was born too soon and this experimentally-minded doctor said ‘Let’s see if we can keep this fetus alive outside the womb…’ and he managed it, and then again, and then they were all hooked, trying to get them to survive smaller and smaller, and nobody had ever seen such a thing. It was one of the most popular displays. But then they realized that they were helping people to live who wouldn’t have lived before. And then it became legitimate. Isn’t that a colourful beginning?

Absolutely, I said, smiling.

So much of what little we know about the human body is sparked by accident and ego and showmanship and passionate curiosity. Medical science can be a steamroller, often lacks in street smarts and faith, can be full of itself to the point of alienation.

It is what it is: the wild, untamed west.

+++++++++

Ben is just Ben. Little, but less so every day.

To see full-term babies now, with this skewed perspective, is to see the unthinkably enormous, all of them future Andre-the-Giants.

Despite still being mobbed wherever we go he is just plain baby, positively robust on the brink of six pounds and two weeks shy of his due date.

Blood pressure and reflux meds, both more proactive than anything else. Three bottles per day of fortified breastmilk, super high-calorie turkey dinner. Productive gluttony for him, but a feeding farce for this pump-cranky mama, trying to juggle the accessories and sterilization and wheesh wheesh wheeshing of breast plus bottle plus pump.

Craving simplicity. Feeling increasingly mutinous.

Frequent weigh-ins, hospital visits, consults with specialists and physio and eye doctors. This is how it will be for at least the next couple of years until we've passed key physical and developmental milestones.

So far, all is well. Every time we go in there I feel like we’re being put to test (which we are) and every time I expect the other shoe to drop, for some newly discovered shortfall to rear its head. But still, he is a relatively straightforward boy. Never one to torment us with apneas or similar NICU drama, Ben's life to date has been spent sleeping and gaining, more or less.

His journey has been uneventful compared to that of his spirit-brother.

No oxygen nor feeding tubes nor monitors came home with us. Just him, glorious him.

We go sailing and he snuggles next to my chest and I tip forward to brush my lips back and forth across the silky down of his head, the softest thing on all the whole planet right this second, and it belongs to me. And his mouth is open, catching flies as he snores softly, each outbreath a tiny, blissful coo of content.

+++++++++

Despite lacking any particular religious affiliation I’m struck with a sudden conviction that Liam has, most definitely, gone somewhere. He is looked after.

Perhaps the necessary ravings of a grieving mother, but I’m calm as this occurs to me. Feeling that the leaves and trunks and grasses and waves are all watching us as we pass, trying to tell us something. The most eerie sensation, this deliberate, conscious presence.

I know it not because I'm desperate, but because it's been revealed to me as a truth I didn't need to contemplate before.

When the sun dapples through the trees they whisper we have him. They may be all the sum of osmosis and photosynthesis and veins and nutrients but to me altogether they are one voice that breathes, knows, keeps.

I feel like a prison escapee, the one who ran before unlocking my cellmates. Known ones, new ones, all left behind in various stages of medically-induced dishevellment.

Near to our departure another new family appeared, a regular occurrence. Magnetically drawn I watched under the curtain to see a man’s feet in flip-flops pushing a wheelchair, and a mama’s slippers, and an IV pole. They see their incubator-baby for the first time, or maybe the tenth, and are overcome with helplessness, and I hear them cry.

Everything is so relative in there. Fellow parents looked at us and thought ohmygod, they lost a baby. What we’re facing isn’t so bad. And meanwhile I looked at them and thought ohmygod her baby has been here three months and they still don’t know if she’ll ever be able to digest food and they’re doing exploratory surgery to put part of her dead intestine in a bag outside of her body and it may not work or ohmygod it was their first pregnancy and it was triplets and one of them isn’t recovering from heart surgery very well and they look so sad. All leading to what we’re facing isn’t so bad.

The NICU gave us technicolour eyes and ears and hearts. Knowing not just cerebrally but in the fabric of ourselves that this stuff really, truly does happen to people. Flooded with nonstop empathy for those crying out in the world, “why us?”

I don’t know why. But at least I can say I know how it feels, to feel that way. And that’s something to offer: company.

In this strange space, after the gauntlet, normal is completely redefined. Normal is He’s perfect, aside from the usual: a hole in his heart and a murmur and a couple of hernias that need surgery and high blood pressure and bi-pulmonary lung disease.

He’s ours, and we’re home, and he’s perfect.

+++++++++

You know the crazy thing? My due date was August 4. After all we’ve been through, a lifetime’s worth, I should still be pregnant.

+++++++++

He is a celebrity. People gape in the grocery store as if I’ve just squatted in the parking lot and then come inside to pick up a few post-placental whoopie pies.

“Now THAT’S a newborn!”

I don’t mind explaining because I’m proud to own it. To say actually he’s two months old, and if you think he’s small now you should have seen him when he was born, one-third the size of this.

The more I say it the more competent I feel, the more my feet are righted under me. They’re charmed but a little aghast, intimidated by him. Baby size and the intensity of the parental gauntlet are inversely related, you see. Ben was a quarter of what’s average but ten times the experiential potency.

He is a dream. What else to say? Having a newborn is a vacation compared to the constant chasing and negotiations of even the most beloved and well-behaved two-year-old. Nobody gives you the hairy eyeball in public, and he hampers no one, adorable and portable in his little seat. The nighttime grunting has slowed a bit, and I do get some sleep, and he burps like a frat boy. The car is once again the magical sleep-o-matic, and the laundry never stops. We’ve put off bathing him (too many thumbs between us) and he still smells delicious despite the neck cheese.

Rattled at the prospect of being at home alone with Ben and Evan at the same time, but so proud of both of them. Evan is drawn to Ben like the best friend he knew he was meant to have. He met him with such unbridled joy as if to say about time you got here!

He scrambles to the bassinette for the third time in five minutes, throws his face over the side and shout-whispers, “Bennnn! Izza WAKE-UP TIME!!” as a string of chin-drool waggles from side to side and stretches to schwick on the baby’s cheek.

“I ahhh… BIG BRUDDER!!”

“I ahhh... NICE AN’ QUIET!!”

“I a-kiss a-HEAD!!”

“Ben a-SAWEEPING!!”

“Ben izza biting a-Mama BOOBEEE!!”

I can’t stand exclamation points. But in this case, relating the thrills of Evan, I must for the sake of being true-to-life. You can hear him, yes?