There's this friend I've never met. She's acerbic, witty, opinionated, emotionally charged. She's a veteran of heartbreaks of an entirely different origin than mine.

I don't get it, she wrote yesterday. Not only do I not 'get it' -- it pisses me off when people say there's a God. People who would ask for intervention, who would put more stock in some imagined higher power than in real people. If God's so great, why did Rwanda happen, and why did Hitler happen, and why does random tragedy strike good, honest people when they least expect?

(acerbic friend: one. God: zero.)

Bullshit, she continues. There's no heaven, and no hell. There is only now. As I age, I grow more sure of this, that my life will end when my body expires, that I will live only in memory, that I might support a tree or a berry bush when I'm gone. I find comfort in the continuity of my atoms.

Proximity dictates that we may meet one day, assuming we can find a place that makes poutine with miso gravy. I hope so. I'll leave it up to her to raise her hand here, or to stand at the back of the room as she likes -- I absolutely respect her atheism, share bits and pieces of it, and would only, if ever, subscribe to a God who would value her especially for her questions.

I'm not a believer, not a non-believer. The dinosaurs trump any literal interpretation of the bible, but that's not to say the book doesn't have worthy lessons to contemplate. I don't like it when churches condemn, but I don't condemn churches.

So I said Don't you think there's just too much in the world that can't be explained? Too much mystery to reduce it all to life-as-atoms?

And she said nope.

And I said I was a cynic. Then the morning that Liam died, something was in the room with us -- something so profound, I could almost touch it. So I'm left with my own crisis of faith, of sorts. A reformed cynic. I don't recommend the method, but it's left me open to the possibility of a God that's a hell of a lot more complex and more sensible and more sad and more full of love than any religion would ever allow.

And she said Not to dishonour that night for you, but don't you think that was just your heart?

And I said nope.

There were other voices in this conversation, all grace and respect and interestingness, and I signed off only because I didn't have anything else to add, and it was time for teeth-curling family errands.

But then all day I've wanted to punch something. And it wasn't just the Wal-Mart.

I've always wondered if I'm just a little bit crazed, inventing magic where none exists. If the presence in the room that day was merely the intensity of the moment, then Liam's life was a blip.

Then he was just an egg and a sperm that divided and gestated into one of two human babies, and who was betrayed by his mother's placenta, born sick and then died to be turned to ash and set loose on a lake because his parents are sentimental morons, thinking it would somehow make him free to come and go as he pleases.

He did not watch our red canoe weave back through the everglades on that sapphire-sky afternoon. He does not come to me in that special kind of light, sitting behind my eyeballs with his legs crossed, indian-style.

He was not patient and brave. His brain was simply so damaged that he was numb to the ophthalmologist who propped his eyelids open with wire spiders to prod his retinas while Ben screamed throughout the same procedure, as healthy babies do.

He was not my resolute protector. He was just a baby we called Liam because that's what popped into my head at finding out we'd need two names, not one.

Dirt, cells, atoms. They rob me of my lost son's grace. They pull me into darkness, hopelessness. They make me feel like a fool, make me doubt the most profound experience of my entire life. An experience I did not manufacture, I'm sure of it.

Or did I?

++++++++

For the six weeks of his life I didn't explicitly pray. I didn't even consider it. Praying is foreign. It's not in my nature, my history or my heart. Faced with dire straits I only thought of God as a drowning woman thinks of a lifejacket.

Please, please, please let there be some meaning, some light, some redemption, some help, anything.

It was just after dawn, seven o'clock in the morning. I could hear the construction crew in the parking lot below, see the shadow of them passing our window through the curtain, hear their boots as they climbed the scaffolding carrying bagged lunches, tools, coils of wire.

And for the first time in my life I spoke aloud to God, the one I'd invented, the one my imagination found most palatable. I gave that being permission to take my son.

There are 43,200 seconds in twelve hours.

Liam died that second.

The very same moment I asked for him to be freed of that horrible place, that beaten body. Not a moment sooner.

++++++++

I don't want to look behind the curtain. If I did, it might be empty except for a reflection of myself, of atoms and cells and the electrical impulses of my own desperation. And I'd see that Liam has not passed, as if he's gone somewhere -- but that his body and life has ended completely, evaporated into nothingness.

That's just too fucking bleak.

That's what makes me want to punch something.

And I can't live with that rage. Because I have to smile with my eyes as well as my mouth, or my living children will see.

And so I subscribe to the magic of souls, chew on the gift given to me on that night. Because I'd rather be a sentimental moron than be consumed entirely by despair.

Despite having one foot in each camp, I find comfort in the continuity of spirits, because I must.

++++++++

Thordora has raised her hand and no matter how she protests, I'm slipping some miso gravy onto her fries at Maritime BlogHer 2008, and SHE WILL LOVE IT, and I will NEVER LET HER FORGET IT.

In case you're curious, her post that sparked all this is here.

They sit together on the ferry, one smiling and peaceful and the other rocking and blank, eyes rolling wildly in sockets.

They may have been twins, once. Now they are more like one man standing in front of a funhouse mirror, some mockery of two—whole on one side, a shell on the other.

He holds his rocking brother’s hand, an anchor for his injured reflection who twitches and lolls. I watch as his thumb gently strokes his brother’s, his wrapped fingers pat-pat-patting reassurance where little is likely to register.

The ferry lurches as it pushes away from the terminal and I finally manage to look away, having learned a little bit more about love.

Kate: C’mere. I’ve got a secret.
Evan: A SECRET!?!?!
(trips over sock feet, runs to me squealing)
Kate: Hurry up, close close close.
Evan: YES?!?! WHAT IS IT?
Kate: (whispers in ear) Tonight, a lion will be born in Africa.
Evan: (gasps)

This age is manic, lows and highs, both him and my degree of tolerance. Early-morning cuddles, tub-tinkling, family dance parties. Hearing him talk to himself. Watching his face light up in delighted surprise. Swelling with pride at how he swaggers through the world with all the easy confidence of Ferris Bueller.

Flash-forward thirty seconds.

He talks back and yells defiantly BECAUSE I WANT TO! and escalates without warning from that to floor-flailing, spectacle-making. I am an unending stream of threats and bribes, bribes and threats, alternating like mixing dry and wet for crazy cake. A hundred times a day I transform from pied piper to shushing, snapping, scowling, growling battleaxe.

"BWAAA HA HA! Ben is AWAKE!"

And presto-bingo, dammit.

But then in the rearview mirror he grins, and I am high.

++++++

These days, I’m drawn to FLAT BELLY FAST! 447 WAYS TO LOOK GREAT – INSTANTLY! 60-SECOND TOTAL HEALTH FIXES! SEE HOW YOUR SEX LIFE STACKS UP! BELLY-BUSTER BLOWOUT! like a magpie.

Aware distantly that it’s all insidious old-skool magazine bullshit but overcome with "OMG, like, I can EAT my way to washboard abs? WHERE DO I SIGN UP?"

So I did.

"Any history of heart disease?"
"No."
"Diabetes?"
"No."
"Seizures?"
"No"
"Okay, we’re almost done. Can you tell me the last time you felt happy?"
(silence)
"I mean, when was the last time you felt content, and slept well, and didn’t have anxiety issues like breathing difficulties or mood swings?"
(laughs)

I joined a gym.

And when I did the incessantly perky girl at the front desk smiled kindly and asked, "And what would the family of squirrels that lives in the fold of your c-section scar prefer? Step aerobics or freeweights?"

I'm just hoping it will feel so decadent to have time to myself that the fact that it's exercise will go unnoticed by my brain.

See, I was born in the Chinese Year of the Banana Slug. Me and exercise? Oil and water. But driving Evan to playschool three times a week brings me halfway there. And they look after Ben. And there are classes and workshops and extremely motivating packs of snarling rottweilers personal trainers.

Even if it takes effort thanks to the declined metabolism and gravity of 34 years and three mostly-gestated children, I just want to walk tall again.

Progress so far—

1) Noted: you can’t breathe and suck in your pooch at the same time.

(to be continued...)

It replays in my head over and over again like those America’s Funniest Home Video montages when they rewind the guy getting kicked in the nuts OOF! and let’s see it again OOF! and let’s see it again OOF!

Except in this case it was a kid projectile vomiting, wailing, vomiting, wailing, the room in suspended animation as everyone stood there, stunned for the world’s longest split second, gaping at the digestive carnage.

Barf splattered on the table, on the floor. The daycare workers leap into action, grabbing a garbage can, donning rubber gloves, insisting that it’s because he’d been crying about wanting his mother, and not flu, or parasite, or bubonic plague. But as I leave I turn back to see him bent over the bucket, poor thing, just barely tall enough to get his head over the lip of the black plastic, and I wonder just how much half-digested food a stomach can hold and think yep, that’s it. ‘Bile’ is my least favourite word.

Meanwhile Evan is collapsed in a heap on a lego mat crying mama, mama, I don’t wanna. Hands full, the kind souls at daycare (we call it 'playschool', a more palatable word) were unable to peel him off me as per usual. I’m tired this morning, hell warmed-over, dismayed at some new distinctly Three-ish behaviour.

I SMACK you on the head! he’d said as I lifted him from the carseat, testing this new bratty-brat-persona. Bossy and insensible and dropping to his knees like James Brown, writhing and kicking on the floor over broken cracker or the wrong underpants or unwelcome hummus.

Thank the fracking stars today is playschool day I hissed under my breath as we'd rolled into the parking lot, tapped and selfish and just plain done. Relishing the ability to leave him there and drive away, go home with just the one baby, simple, easily placated.

Carrying him under one arm like a sack of potatoes, we enter the room just in time to witness the spewing. I deposit him in the opposite corner, snap at him to let go, to stand up, to be anything but the worst possible combination of Raggedy Andy and Mad Cow.

His cries fade as I walk up the stairs. Unfortunately the retching does not.

Walking away feeling the most intense cocktail of appreciation, guilt, relief, revulsion. Thinking how can anyone stay at home with a toddler without a couple of days a week to decompress? at the same time as I can't believe I'm walking away. Just tired, so tired. Working late at night, and just writing to let off steam, not seeing enough of Justin, feeling like a terrible wife. Only hurculean self-control keeps me from writhing and kicking on the floor over broken hormones or the wrong number of pounds or unwelcome saddlebags.

Lusting for playschool days, for sanity. Knowing he loves it there, really and truly. When it’s time to go home he has to be peeled away in just the same fashion, hands full of crafts and artwork and new songs and stories.

As I pull away, Ben snoring in the backseat, Liam finds me as he always does, forever perfect, forever unblemished by stink and tantrum. Don’t be stupid, says the voice. Ben will drive you nuts sometimes, and Liam would have too. How would you have coped? You would have been a snapping, snarling mama. Maybe even still, just with two.

I cried all the way home.

+++++

When there are mamas out there who went home from the hospital empty-handed, I feel obnoxious to vent about what’s ordinary. The rage at losing Liam is distracted by the blessing of Ben. Standing next to those women I am grief-lite. I am a twit, unhinged by barf and daycare.

I’m sorry about that.

A few months back, in the beginning, tofu and I had a kitchen throwdown.

Steeling myself in front of an extremely un-foodish, colourless block that looked like it had been transmogrified by a spaceship replicator accompanied by a wheesh and a beep and a robot voice saying HUMANOID-FOOD-UNIT-AFFIRMATIVE.

Hesitating, knife in hand. I can’t do vegetarian without tofu. Not healthy-vegetarian, anyway, without floating away all blown up on nonstop cheesy beanpower. So I’m gonna cook it and I’m gonna eat it and it’s gonna be DIS-KUSTING.

And no buffer, either. No sauces or marinades or intravenous tastebud bypassing. Just. plain. tofu. Cut into slices, thrown in a pan with sesame oil. Indoctrinating myself on the basest of the base.

If I can’t force myself to eat it simply, this isn’t going to work.

I was turning vegetarian, after all, the sum of my transformation reduced to the following:

meat = gross.

Why, though? Where did this revulsion come from, after 34 happy years spent noshing on sausage with breakfast, bacon on my sandwich and any random yet absolutely necessary slab for supper?

I knew, foggily, that it had something to do with what happened in between the before and the after of meat=gross: losing Liam.

People would say Why would you want to go and do a thing like that? and I would mumble about maybe being a little crazy, about distraction, about needing to exercise some control over my life where so much had been taken away from me.

They’d stare at me blankly and I’d hear the words come out of my mouth and think this isn’t making any sense. So I’d fall back on what I figured was the most obvious evasive action: because it’s better for you.

Oh yeah? they’d reply, bristling.

—Do you feel any better? You don’t look any better. You look the same.
—My grampa lived til he was 95 and he ate meat.
—Vegetarians can’t get it up.
—I only eat meat from animals that were happy. Happy until… well, you know.
—But WHAT ABOUT PROTEIN!?!
—I hardly eat any meat. (burp)
—I only eat meat so rare I have to tell it to quit twitching 'cause I’m hungry. Stick that in your carrot juice and drink it.
—All the vegetarians I know look… weird.
—You’re a pain in the ass.

At this point I’m usually burying my face in the nearest ANYTHING. I’ve never been a symbol before, a walking counterpoint. I really, truly don’t care if you eat meat. Not only do I not care—I don’t mind.

(My only real purpose is to be a pain in the ass.)

So then how did I end up here, alone on this other side? Better schmetter. We believe whatever we need to believe.

++++++++++

One day, driving in the car, I was Jean Luc Picard and Justin was the Borg.

I hit him with the thing about lutein and then blammo! he zaps me with iron. So I stump him with heart disease and he gets me with the classic But-What-About-The-Cavemen bit. And we both feel the way we always do, each of us attacked.

Exhausted, the real reason tripped out.

It’s just… it’s just… we know death. We saw it up close and we smelled it and held him through it. I never want anything to do with it ever again. Not if I can help it. Meat is something that’s died. And if I don’t need to eat it, why would I?

I feel peaceful every time I eat because there’s no carcass. I don’t need it, I don’t miss it. I never want it again. The fact that it is (or isn’t, depending on how tightly you cling) healthier is a bonus. I just want peace. It just feels really, really nice to get the fuck away from death.

Oh, said Justin. Alright.

And then—not a word of a lie—we rounded a corner to find ourselves driving directly behind a half-ton truck loaded with slaughterhouse scraps for a solid two hours. This was in Maine, our beloved Maine, where The Gays can’t marry but your vehicle can OOZE BLOOD.

Kate: Look. I see snouts.
Justin: Ugh. Stop it.
Kate: Do you think that’s legal, a load like that, uncovered? I bet he can’t see out the back. Are those… are those hooves?
Justin: Looks like it might snow.
Kate: Vegetarianism is ten million different kinds of awesome.
Justin: He must have… dogs. Hungry dogs.
Kate: What’s that say on his truck? ACME Hot Dogs?
Justin: Now you’re just being mean.

++++++++++

I can’t get enough of the stuff—and I’ve not even gotten past the straight up.

I feel like the proper Scotsman who, when asked what he’d like with his Scotch, replies scornfully I’d like Scotch with my Scotch, instantly making every other icecube and soda-swishing man in the room check between his legs to see where his balls went.

Six months ago, the notion of me having to moderate my indulgence of tofu cravings would have been about as unlikely as, say, me having to moderate rampant jogging.

But lo! It’s a staple. It makes being vegetarian easy. And so I can count on feeling peaceful, at least in some small way, three times a day.

Or more, depending on the traffic.

I look at the stats now and then to see who’s coming from where, a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

Sitting in the second-floor manager’s office, peering through a one-way window overlooking the grocery store, watching as shoppers wander in, pick stuff up, squeeze it, put it back, contemplate what looks good and what’s limp, pay, leave.

Yesterday somebody in Plano, Texas spent seven minutes and thirty seven seconds reading through from the boys’ birth to Liam’s last day, every post. It happens from time to time and I don’t mind, not at all, but I’m compelled to reach out and touch you on the shoulder so you swing around so I can say Hey, hang on, who are you? That was my life, and it happened to me, and I can hardly believe it. What are you doing now, after that seven minutes and thirty-seven seconds? Are you watching American Idol, or did you flip over to eBay or Perez Hilton, or did you go to poke around in the fridge? Can I be you for a while?

Maybe I’m envious that browsers get to leave the store when they feel like the offerings are more bitter than sweet, close the laptop and think to themselves Phewph. Yikes. I’m gonna go make some popcorn.

You’re walking through the parking lot and I’m chasing after you yelling But you know that I cry, and you know about Liam, and you know about the pumping rooms and what the doctors said and about the canoe trip with his ashes, and where the heck is Plano, Texas, anyway? Doesn’t this strike you as kinda weird? Wait! Come back!

I don’t know what I want from you, the play-by-play recapper. You’re welcome, absolutely.

It’s just that the Interweb, it’s a weird place. And keeping a public journal is even weirder. It saved me, and yet there’s the nagging sensation of airing what’s sacred. Exchange and intimacy, both one-way.

At least it pays well.

+++++++++

Ben turned nine months old yesterday, or six months old by full-term reckoning. His feet are finally big enough for newborn Robeez.

When he wakes up at night I giggle with him when I should be remote and unengaging for the sake of sleep. I can’t resist.

+++++++++

When does it go away, the pining for the past or the hunger for some bigger, better, shinier future? Someday, sooner than I realize, Evan will stop asking me to cuddle and Ben will shrink in the passenger seat when I drop him off at school in my bathrobe.

And I think then, it won’t matter that I once wore shoes like this.

It won’t feel like such a shock, compared to the country life of a stay-at-home-mama—the absence of a swanky, hip job, an office with one brick wall and vanilla steamers and swanky, hipster colleagues and dinner parties and weekend mountain epics. Not measured against the shock of my children having grown to belong more to themselves than to me.

They’ll roll their eyes and I’ll shrug and say What’s so bad about socks with sandals? No one wants cold toes.

Life moves on whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestionably. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one—even those moments spent wearing elastic-waisted 'comfy pants' with three-day-old sweet potato baby vomit on them.*

 (*slightly edited with apologies to Henry Miller)

+++++++++

Shout out to Plano: Really, honestly, cross-my-heart—you are welcome here, and browsers and drifters and skimmers of all sorts.

Blogging can be tricky in the same way email can be, translating the intended tone of voice. This post came off as more melancholy than I'd intended, and more big-brothery too. Sometimes the stats jump out at you, that's all. And it's surreal to see how long it takes, to the second, for someone to absorb the most profound time of your life.

But that's okay. It's just a blog. Popcorn is allowed, so long as you pass the bag around.

Exactly nine months ago there was a rush on romantic, all-inclusive getaways in the Poconos. Everyone I 'know' in the blogosphere (urp… mmm, my own barf) teased bangs and donned polyester high-hipped teddies for Lionel Ritchie-accompanied shenanigans in champagne-glass hot tubs and heart-shaped beds with mirrored ceilings.

Because not only are they all pregnant at the same time, they’re all dilating at the same time (cervixes and eyeballs, the women and the men respectively).

In the midst of it all, awaiting news and pictures, I’m sulking like a petulant child. After all, didn’t anyone tell you? Your births are ALL ABOUT ME.

I want to grow up and out of this, this high-pitched internal whine that every run-of-the-mill contraction in the history of the world exists for the purpose of reminding me of my own body’s shortfalls. I'm tired of it. It's illogical and self-pitying and ridiculous, but it persists.

The voice snides they were stronger, more zen, less affected, more prepared. They were made of tougher stock. Their husbands say they’re badass, proud. And you, you had to be strapped down both times by surgical teams, babies wrenched from you while you were pinned to a specimen board, frozen solid. You’ve never been able to just do it on your own. You’ll never.

It’s not easy for anyone, I know. But every labour that progresses more or less as it should stacks up against me, demotes me further to an increasingly extreme percentile of intervention and disaster.

The bootstrap-puller in my brain mutters shit happens, and that’s true enough.

I have had three babies. Two are so happy they almost never stop smiling and one is lost. Many people have been through so much worse. I sit here in my warm, cozy house thinking myself enlightened by grief, by catastrophe, and yet I’m oblivious to scores of other brands of heartbreak, envied by others who are helpless, right this second, trapped at the bottom of their own entirely unexpected black holes.

Birth. Some wear it proud, a tattoo, a badge. I envy them, mystified. I’d never wish another woman anything less—I’d rather be lonely in this minority, branded, owned, herded like cattle.

And just moving the heck forward.