People watch him, agape, as he flies past in a blur. It’s been this way all afternoon, the joie de vivre. Is he always this way? they say. He hasn’t even had any cake yet.

Unless he’s agro-energetic, which is rare, I let him run. Especially now. No harm beyond spectacle, beyond a few stiff-upper-lippers wondering when on earth I’m going to yank back on the leash.

But no, not today. Run boy run, all clammy scruff and foodie fingers. Burst up and down and hurl yourself at least once into every lap, begging MO MEAT PWEEEZE! and imping handfuls off of O.P.P. (other people’s plates) and batting eyelashes and, at the pinnacle of exasperation, saying I WUB YOU! and galumphing away, shoes on the wrong feet, and tripping spectacularly, landing in a tangle of limbs and giggles.

Having lost one son, the others will not be unhinged as though enough free rein for three has been dispersed among two.

But to see Evan so full of relentless charm, panting with exuberance… it’s like watching a horse you’ve got money on. I’m on my feet in the stands yelling Go! Go! Go! and as long as no harm is done and manners are loosely interpreted as best as a two-year-old can, I am his mama, mindful of more revelling and less propriety.

++++++++

People watch him, agape, as he murmurs on my chest curled up like a kitten. It’s been this way all afternoon: he nurses, he stretches, he farts, he sleeps. Is he always this way? they say. So small, so still.

Not for long, I think to myself, smiling. Not for long.

She pushes the cardboard-cutout sunshine to me and says would you like to add two dollars to your bill in support of the Childrens’ Wish Foundation? And I say sure and she hands me a pen to fill in

________________________
GRANTED A WISH TODAY

and as all mamas do I sign Evan & Ben

and then pause and add & Liam

and tilt my head and survey my work like a high schooler scribbling hopeful love matches on my binder, feeling pleased with myself and then fleetingly embarrassed and false and other murky, indefinable things.

Evan & Ben & Liam

I only came here for retail therapy and it's just a piece of cardboard. But out in the world, alone and surrounded by people, we are anonymous. Our sun could be the truth. Nobody out here knows he is gone.

I stare at it and it stares back, stuck up on the wall with all the others, and for a moment I wonder if some kind of magic will go POUF! and in some parallel universe my eldest is at playschool while I browse through the aisles pushing a double stroller.

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.

On Monday night I finally fell asleep at 4:00 AM and was back on-duty by 6:00 AM. On Tuesday night I finally fell asleep at 4:00 AM and was back on-duty by 6:00 AM. Last night I finally fell asleep at 4:00 AM and was back on-duty by 6:00 AM.

Adrenaline rather than rest is what fuels you, inexplicably, through baby bootcamp (that and plentiful grammies and grampas). By lord, the boy grunts and snorts all night. Trying to sleep in the same room with him is like trying to sleep in the same room with a 600-pound wild boar up to his gizzard in a fieldful of truffles.

After all the trash talking <smile> and pastlife lusting <sigh> of recent posts, you the chosen childfree and yet-to-be-parents must be thinking why in the name of all that’s sensible would anyone choose to procreate? a) wow, am I ever right to wait for senility OR b) wow, am I ever right to politely decline altogether OR c) perhaps I should begin making my intended sperm/egg deposit technician sleep on the couch.

If you really want to know the answer to that most justified of universal questions, you could go here or here.

Or for the short version, you could always watch this.

Many years ago I stood in front of a display of $300 jeans at Caban in Vancouver, disgusted.

What kind of frigging idiot would spend $300 on a pair of jeans?
<stares, scowling, at rack>

I mean, it’s just JEANS.
<contemplatively fingers rows of denim>

This is obscene. There’s no way — NO WAY — there is any difference between these and a pair of $40 Gaps.
<absently scans rows for sizes>

What’s this… ‘Japanese ring-spun’? Hmph.
<looks over shoulder, both ways: unobserved.>

What a crock.
<object in question leaps of its own volition from rack into hands>

I will prove — right now — that these jeans are the rip-off of the century. I will do this by trying them on.
<AAAHHH. OOOHHHH. YEEEAAAH.>

Over the following year I didn’t buy a single pair. I bought THREE. And after that I put $1000 through a shredder and knit myself a scarf with the resulting paper pulp.

Why is this relevant, you ask? To demonstrate the hairsbreadth depth of my soul? The bottomless pit that is my circa 2004 credit debt? No, friends: no. It is anecdotal proof that I was once One Of Them.

I know, intimately, the jealous affection for the lifestyle of effing pussies such as myself, circa 2004. You may be child-free and not be shallow and not drink $10 cocktails until 4 AM and not test the validity of $300 jeans for the good of all humanity. But I was, and I did.

A quick note, by the way, about effing pussies.

A few of you have said this is your space, and you can say whatever you want. While I appreciate the sentiment, I don’t quite see it that way.

This has turned from a mere outlet to a community of friends, and you’re all mind-blowingly candid and thoughtful and inspiring. You give back so much. While I’ll never censor myself, I owe it to you to give some words context. To make sure they don’t land on you with the grace of a cast-iron pot to the head.

Especially ones with ‘f*cking’ in front of them.

When some of you said your words felt like a slap I was instantly horrified, and realized something: many of you only know me as The Mama Who Lost A Baby from the writing of the last few months. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to drum up the usual facetiousness. Blogging (gag) is tricky that way. Some of what you write as if laughing or ranting in the kitchen with a cold beer in hand can come across on-screen as severe, as condemnation or manifesto.

Such as clearly, as is obvious to every parent, every person without children has:

1. Chocolate and red wine for breakfast
2. Trapeze-aided bedroom relations ten times per day
3. Toilet paper folded into hotel triangles after every tear
4. Two-seater sports cars with plates that read 2KUL4U
5. 100% dry-clean-only wardrobes
6. Narry a care in the world

And every parent has the polar opposite for eternity and beyond.

Please don’t ever make me disclaim, after something like that: I AM MOSTLY NOT COMPLETELY SERIOUS.

Besides — we were pussies, compared to now. We had no idea how easy and how carefree our lives were. That’s not condescending. That’s the truth for us.

I’m proud that we lived that way, had just-us time. The memories are so rich that I can honestly say I wouldn’t run back into our burning house for anything material (except for those jeans). Yet I’m also proud of how far we’ve come, abandoning the just-us days in favour of our gorgeous boys, all three.

I’m only judgy about certain things. Eggplants and the people who eat them. Two-stroke dirtbikes. Pancakes that are fluffy rather than dense. Religious fanaticism. Bugs. Beekeeper suits. Jellyfish and the people who don’t mind them. Raggedy toenails.

Do I think I’m somehow more entitled or enlightened than sans-kid folks? Abso-fricking-lutely.

For about ten seconds.

Then, reflecting on the Toyota 4Runner and the kayaks and the ski trips and the acrobatic love life and the kitten heels and pedicures of pre-2005, I change my mind, and decide that I am entirely nuts.

I haven’t talked to her in ages, this friend from high school. She calls and says Howthehellareya? I’ve been thinking of you, and wondering how you are. You popped into my head, so I had to call and see if you had any news!

My stomach sinks at her cheer. Does she think I’m still pregnant, wondering if the babies have come yet?

I say Uhh... that depends on what you already know.

Well, she replies, I heard you had them, and one of them’s okay and one of them’s not.

Right. Well, one of them died, I say, feeling suddenly awkward and adding unnecessarily, the sick one.

Oh! she says distantly, the perkiness of her voice unbroken. Well I’m sorry to hear that.

I’m not particularly keen on filling the silence that follows, but I’m obliged to, stumbling yes, he was my son, and he’d had brain damage, and he died. And it’s been a horrible couple of months, and now here we are.

She says did you have, like, a funeral or something?

And I say no, we did it. His ashes, I mean. We found a place.

And she says oh.

The conversation stalls, suddenly unwanted by both of us. Like being at a Bill Lynch fairground and getting to the front of the Scrambler lineup just in time to see a kid puke at the height of the spin cycle. The instant deflation of ugghhh… nevermind.

Ben stirs and so we hang up, saying okay, well, we’ll have to go out for lunch sometime, and I am struck by the vastness of the gulf between me and her.

I did check out your ahh… blog, she’d said. I don’t understand it. I just wanted to see what happened, without having to ahh… read it all.

Good, then — I doubt she’ll read this. I hope not, because her unaffectedness is prompting this post, in which I’m about to use the word ‘pussy’ in a derogatory manner. And in a way which might piss you off a bit too, make you think me a blowhard. Consider yourself warned.

At the risk of being tiresomely ‘us and them’-ish, she got me thinking about The Footloose, the Voluntarily Child-Free Camp. Those that go on wine-tasting tours and who don’t eat supper (a.k.a. microwaved fishsticks and frozen corn) at 4:30 and who don’t have cesarean muffintops and who must think us breeders and our snot-nosed rabble as nothing more than sweatpant-wearing, poop-obsessed frumps.

Pleased with themselves in their tidy, sexy void, in which nobody does the “WE DID IT, WE DID IT, WE DID IT, YAAAY!” song and dance number after success with a trusty backpack and companion Boots the Monkey.

F*cking pussies.

You think you’re living, really living, revelling in a life that’s all about you. Sure, you’re living my momentary fantasy: perky tits and sleeping in and jogging and international travel and sharp-edged coffee tables.

But you’re still a bunch of pussies.

Now Kate, squeaks my near-inaudible, microscopic-sized inner rational self. Everything is relative. Get a hold of yourself and your inferiority complex. Be cooler than this.

But no. I need you to hear how intense this life can be, how immense it is, this vertigo, how blindingly terrifying it is to love this much, to hold pure human energy in your hands. To have it evoke such frantic wanting in you, and hope, and fear, and joy.

You don’t just say Well gee, ya lost one, that’s too bad! with all the weightiness of Betty Boop.

You’ll be hit by the mack truck of mamahood, if you’re fortunate. And during some endless, nightless night your child’s eyeballs will roll back into his head in milky bliss and you might remember me, your old friend from high school whose baby died, and you might remember talking to me on the phone and feeling like, totally weirded out.

And suddenly, you’ll understand.

++++++++

This is not intended to provoke heckles towards the unnamed. She really is lovely, and lively in that infectious way. Today, it didn’t fit. But I can’t fault her for being unable to grasp the loss of something she has yet to experience. And I don’t mean to invalidate the life paths of others, chosen or not.

I hesitate with this post — for the above reason and also because some of my favourite people are in this camp, child-free by census but not lacking in empathy.

It’s just strange to fail to relate this to someone, the intensity of the past two months. And I have to come here to you, my comrades, to say and she’s like blablabla, and then I was like, yadda yadda and she was like, SHUT UP! and she, like, TOTALLY didn’t get it, and doesn’t that seem, like, kind of effed-up to you?

++++++++

Ben is on my lap as I write this, and he just tooted, and I am totally whipped.

And my muffintop is wearing sweatpants.

Just an FYI.

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?

On the cabin deck in an adirondack chair with this view: a clear, amber-brown lake rich with life and tannin, wind in the poplars, a jewel sky and our artisan’s canoe, its maker so legendary that some have argued it should be in a museum (how we fortunate saps came to adopt it is another story). Most honourably, in this its second incarnation, it took us through everglades past friendly turtles and blooming lilies and beaver dams to the gnarly old twin-trunk maple that now stands watch over the resting place of our son.

Looking down into the glass-flat water at the forest’s reflection I saw the mirror world where Liam lives, the place I’ll always see in puddle and ocean alike. Wondering if he’s looking into it from where he is, looking for the flip-side, waiting for us.

I didn’t think I could watch, but I did. Full of morbid, panicked despair that this grey-white dust is all that remains of him. Then calm, resigned as his specks swirl around us, the same faint seeing as when you have to look away to see distant stars in a thick, black sky. We left the urn there, a marker, watched as bubbles glugged to the surface, swallowed by the creek.

The vessel of his soul, given a home more significant to us than to him. I am already everywhere, he whispers to me. But if you want to come here, do. I’ll be here too.

++++++++++

Eating my last hospital breakfast in the crapeteria. Have never been so nostalgic for imitation scrambled eggs, chewy, pre-cooked bacon and swampwater tea.

I think I’ve got it all handled but then contemplate walking that hallway for the last time, saying goodbye to our nurse-mothers and the scrubbing sinks and the godforsaken beige.

We were supposed to leave here with two babies. And now, only…

My heart knows to never talk that way, not ever, for what it implies to Ben. But my mouth runs ahead, immature.

This weekend our cabin’s housekeeper noticed the pumping paraphernalia and asked if we had a baby, and I said yes, but he’s in the NICU, he was early.

Oh my, you sweet dear. And I say he’s great, and we hope he may come home early this week, but…

Ohthankgoodness she cries with gusto, flapping her palms to her bosom. Thank goodness it all worked out for you.

I hesitate and smile, and Justin sees, and before we know it she’s off down the forest road, peppering the air with cheery congratulations more and more loudly through the car window as she drives away.

Justin grasps my hand and says I know, I totally know. I’ve had the same conversation. I don’t know what to say either.

Do you heap this tragedy on unnecessary strangers? Is it denying Liam to gloss him over, pretend he didn’t exist to spare others the discomfort of our loss?

No, and yes. Not much help, those answers.

++++++++++

<looks over shoulder sneakily>

Psst. Guess what?

We may make our escape from the NICU today, to home. My knuckles are black and blue from knocking wood, but that’s what they tell us.

A pre-emptive note to passerby: pay no heed to the exceptionally large and heavy suitcase accompanying our departure. The one from whence comes the muffled screams. Mind your own beeswax. Nothing to see here.

Want to make yourself useful? Get the nurse-in-charge to count to a hundred before doing a staff headcount. That should give us enough time to get clear of the building.

Already an ancient joke but one I can’t quit out of sheer nervous energy.

To live here is to live inside a hive of bees. Constant vibration, unresting urgency.

Breastfeeding in bed in the middle of the night, the wall literally shakes at my back. In this living place, this dying place, systems and ducts and fans and machines groan and heave, mechanical innards inhaling and exhaling.

The single, long alarm rings across the paging system. NEONATAL TEAM TO ROOM 311, STAT. NEONATAL TEAM TO ROOM 311, STAT. NEONATAL TEAM TO ROOM 311, STAT.

Said once I could pretend not to hear, drift back into uneasy sleep. But echoing three times in the space of my own private darkness, I’m left boggle-eyed. They said that for us, once. Strength to that mama, to that dada and baby. Strength.

Ten minutes later a familiar thrum approaches in the skies, grows louder. The helicopter lands on the roof above my head, deafening then slowing, and I imagine the running footsteps and stretcher wheels and yelled instructions, and bewilderment, and fear. Another family, another test of mettle.

I am buried in this maze like the smallest of solid centres in a Russian nesting doll. Surrounded by people like me, keeping our eyes on our shoes, thrown together to unwillingly witness one another’s heartbreak.

Religious or not, you resort to almost constant prayer in here. The humanity of it all just runs so impossibly thick.

The air is both stale and stirred up, pulsing electric like the blades of the medivac.

To all of you who have shone such bright light into our darkness, and gone and squeezed your own snotty-nosed, peanut-buttery, oblivious objects of mama and papalove in recognition of your blessings: thank you, from all of our hearts. Liam would think it most fitting.

+++++++++

He would squeeze my finger with such eerie intent, again and again. Knowing he was never meant to stay but hanging on as long as he could, giving us time to fix him onto our souls. Reflex schmeflex. Ben still doesn't grip like that. Compared to his old-soul brother, Ben is shiny new, a face-value boy. A puppy among babies, unabashedly peeved or curious or hungry or zonked.

Everything Ben has done is one more thing that Liam will never do. He breastfeeds, moves from incubator to crib, has the last remaining tube taken away until he is just mine, fleshy and pink. Then he will walk, talk, run, gaining momentum while his brother remains a still-life, never able to move beyond what he was.

+++++++++

I linger out here longer than I should, at night. Sometimes seeking Liam in pictures or words, summoning him, but mostly wishing I could just go to bed, escape from such vivid loss. Wishing it would leave me alone, just for a while. The false hope of rosy cheeks. His bare rump in my hand, growing cold.

I’ve heard it said of other mamas who have lost babies: Every conversation steers itself towards The Baby. It’s getting… tiresome. She really needs to move on. It’s not healthy.

Perhaps you’re thinking that right now, even with the best of intentions. If you are, I’ve got no defense nor offense. It is what it is. It follows me everywhere, this dark cloud, the resting state, the default. I don't choose to wallow in it. It is overcome with sheer effort, like swimming against a channel tide. I dance and sing and zerbert, roll in the grass and hide-and-seek and all-fall-down. I give them both the gift of innocence as well as I might.

And then I come here to skim off the crud that floats to the top.

I’d probably say the same thing, reading me. I’d be sympathetic but a little drained, wanting her to move on not only for her own sake but for mine as well.

I don’t want to be a melancholy mother. I don’t want Ben to catch me looking at him longingly as though he’s not enough. Or staring into space, stuck on continuous replay. For him, and for Evan, there should be no bitter. Only sweet.

But free of audience the tears find me again, on this day two months since they were born, because it all just went so wrong.