One day the blackness just lifted.

My family said Oh! Good. Everything is alright now, you’re better and well, I don’t know about that.

An anvil fell from the sky, pinned me under its weight for a few weeks. And one night someone came along and hauled it away, and so I’ve gotten up and kept walking. But I can’t promise there won’t be another anvil, or a grand piano, or something else equally disheartening to look up and see hurtling towards my head, all with YOUR BABY DIED spraypainted on it in sloppy block letters.

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Despair comes in two flavours, did you know? There’s the ever-popular Rage, the anger that makes you want to rip the heads off anyone and everyone you meet. Then there’s Self-Pity, the woe-is-me that’s even more crippling than the rage.

Standing there peering through the window of someone else’s trauma, you whine friggin’ lightweight. This person thinks they’ve got it bad, but THEY DON’T KNOW BAD. They haven’t had a baby die.

I am medusa. Not you. So THERE.

But here’s what you don’t know.

Someone else is peering through your window, whining  friggin’ lightweight. This person thinks they’ve got it bad, but THEY DON’T KNOW BAD. They haven’t <insert impressively horrific event here>.

Every now and then, kind but qualified words arrive via email: “I’ve had (miscarriage/sickness/infertility/loss of spouse/loss of parent…) and it was nothing compared to what you went through, but it broke my heart, and I’m sorry your heart’s broken now too.”

Technically, I could say a miscarriage is less intense than the death of a six-week-old baby. But I don’t say that, because I’ve got this really handy thing called a functioning brain.

Most of the time.

I’m not you. You’re not me. We all see the world through this one set of eyeballs, despairing regardless of how our lives compare on paper. There's just no point to saying what person A went through is more worse/less worse than what person B went through.

We can't heal until we stop competing for who's got the shittiest luck. All we can do is be company to one another, hold hands in the face of the most ancient of human conditions: birth, love, loss.

Because heartbreak is heartbreak, no matter its source.

+++++++

Before all this, I’d shrink away from trauma like cooties. Oh isn’t that terrible and get me outta here was pretty much my instinctual response to anyone pinned to the concrete under an anvil. Not that I didn’t care, or wouldn’t listen, or wasn’t moved.

I was simply clueless and oblivious, and preferred to stay that way.

To a point, we all saunter through life like doo de doo and lah di dah until an explosion blows the blinders off our eyes and we realize that all along, we’ve been sauntering along the edge of a precipice.

Then, we can hardly move one foot in front of the other. We whimper with backs pressed against the wall, the one misstep that will send us to our doom playing over and over again in our heads. From time to time the pathway narrows so that our toes hang off the edge, and we are paralyzed.

For some of us, that explosion is the slipping of an embryo, the loss not of a formed being but the potential of one. We can now see the precipice and we tremble and wail for intervention, for our blinders.

For others, that explosion is the NICU. Or the death of a six-week-old son or two-year-old daughter or fourteen-year-old son or thirty-five year-old wife, or any other number of unfair events that give us sudden vertigo.

What’s the point in keeping score if we all win eventually, in one form or another?

Yay us.

+++++++

Recently someone asked me how has the death of your child affected your understanding of what it is to be a strong woman? and I had a hard time answering after the decidedly blubbery past couple of weeks.

So I wrote to her I suppose strength is seeing peace even after seeing the precipice. To surrender to its inevitability, and to be grateful despite it.

+++++++

Liam’s soul was purposeful. He chose to be ours, just as he was, just for as long as he was. He had gifts for us, love for us.

bo·dhi·satt·va (bō'dĭ-sŭt'va) n. Buddhism.
An enlightened being who, out of compassion, forgoes nirvana in order to save others.

Liam made me into the mama I’m supposed to be: more compassionate, more attuned than before. More able to see light like his.

Thank you sweet lili, my bodhi-baby.

I had only said, “babies in the hospital…” but got no further.

My son, he was hit by a car when he was four, interjected the man at the wood mill in that proud, defiant way that foretold the miraculous punchline. And the doctors at the hospital said “Unplug him because he’ll never live!” and we said “No way hosay! We LOVE our son and he’s a FIGHTER and he’s going to BEAT this!” and so we didn’t and he graduated last year and he’s a hockey star and so there you go, everything will be okay.

I stood there with a length of kiln-dried hackmatack in my hands, flooring for the three-kid addition we’d broken ground on the day I’d gone into labour, absorbing each word in the same way they tell you to chew each bite of food twenty times, to slow down, to be aware.

Sado-masochistically contemplating love and fighting spirit and flawed medical opinion a couple of short weeks after having unplugged my son.

++++++

I drive a minivan, look in the rearview mirror at the definition of unneccessariness, at Liam’s gaping void. With the third row permanently folded down the back is like a cube van knee-deep in runaway groceries and spare-diaper flotsam and half-eaten, fossilized snack remnants that all roll from port to starboard like rats on an 1812 battleship.

++++++

In a couple of weeks we take Ben in for his first NICU followup clinic in four months: physio, nephrology, nutritionists, developmental testing. And since we’re there already, we’ve been given a meeting with a neonatologist to review Liam’s autopsy report.

Autopsy.

A file or a binder or a stack of papers that quantifies the spent flesh and blood of my baby. Just how extensive was the mush of his brain? How full of shrapnel was he, exactly, from the explosion of my placenta?

Or as I hear it in fitful sleep: We were wrong. He didn’t have hydrocephalus and the bleed was correcting itself and you wouldn’t have had to suction out his airway every day and we told you he was dying on life support but as it turns out, his lungs weren’t collapsing after all. Oops.

The day we got the call that he was failing after the brain surgery, a kind neonatologist told us, “Don’t ever think of this as a decision, whatever you do. This is not your decision. Liam is telling us it is his time, and we are helping you to support him. We need to make him comfortable now, as much as we can.”

And so the nurses peeled away every sensor, unplugged each wire, freed him for the first time in his life.

You’re supposed to help your kid.

You’re not supposed to take away the machine that helps him to breathe.

You’re not supposed to do nothing but wait for his heart to stop.

++++++

As we passed dildos and girl-on-girl pervy movies over the heads of our babies she looked at me straight in the eyes and quietly asked “How are you doing?” in that loaded, I-care-to-hear-the-answer way not many people tend to.

After a stunned moment I said to her I don’t know. I really have no idea how I’m doing and I’ve been pondering the question ever since.

I don’t cry every day, but that’s only if you count body-wracking sobs like Evan’s when he doesn’t get Kit-Kat for breakfast. If you count the times when my face drips in silent sheets like a shower curtain and I stare into space for ten minutes straight, well, then maybe it is every day. Maybe I’m not doing so well.

The suggestion of anti-depressants gets tossed around from time to time which I hear as the way you feel is not appropriate, and must be fixed, for you cannot be sad for the dead and useful for the living at the same time.

But I am not a zombie. Or if I am, I am a high-functioning zombie.

I play with Evan and nuzzle with Ben and smile and tickle and cook and socialize and work and make money. But what makes me want to scream is imagining myself chemically numbed and sipping fragrant tea with one pinkie finger in the air, chirping neatly, “Oh, yes, 2007 was our annus horribilus, because our son died you know, and what’s done is done, and this is the dignified way, because tears make the rest of the world squeamish. We are Moving On.”

++++++

I am a spelunker hearing a faint mewing from the depths of a bottomless cave as the rest of the crew says We’re running out of time, we have to climb out now and I’m arguing We’re forgetting about him, and I can’t leave him here and everyone else says Baby? What baby? and I’m panicking in the dirt as they pull me away, reaching for something soft and familiar in the dark, for a very small baby boy, because he needs me, and he is lost.

++++++

It’s rare that I’ve ever hesitated to post. I hesitate now for all kinds of reasons—not just because the last post included the words ‘vibrating butt plug’. Heartfelt apologies for the whiplash, and to everyone in my real world who’d rather not know quite so much.

SexyGirl^TM : "…and, like, this is totally awesome, this book. It's 101 sealed envelopes, and you give one to your boyfriend every day, and he gets to open it and then you have to do whatever's inside. Like this one: 'Take one ice cube and one hot beverage. Put ice cube in mouth and…' "

(Mother #2 says meekly to no one in particular: every day?)

(Mother #6 snorts)

SexyGirl^TM :  "…here’s something, like, super-yummy. It's our exclusive Sambuca Girl lipgloss, and it comes in a cute little case that says DRINK 'TIL HE'S CUTE. Ha. Or there's always our Vanilla Surprise lipgloss, and it says I F*CKED YOUR BOYFRIEND. Ha ha."

(Baby #4 throws up)

(SexyGirl^TM hesitates, mumbles something about birth control)

SexyGirl^TM : "Now, something that's really important to remember when investing in a butt plug is to get one with a wide base, or else you could lose it, which would mean a trip to the emergency room, which would be, well, embarrassing."

(crickets chirping)

SexyGirl^TM : "…and here's the harness. It comes in purple and it's got built-in feathers, and it's for what we like to call 'Bend Over Boyfriend'." (waggles eyebrows meaningfully)

(Baby #7 farts twice)

(Baby #2 reaches, fascinated, for vibrating neon-green dildo with Wiggling Wabbit clitoral stimulator as three of nine mothers lunge simultaneously)

SexyGirl^TM : "Here's our Tingly Turn-On Motion Lotion. You just take a pea-sized amount and put it on your clitoris and it gets either hot or cold, depending on the person. I left some by the sink for all of you to try. I HIGHLY recommend it."

Fifteen minutes later, Mother #4 reappears from routine bathroom visit and feels conspicuous.

After every product SexyGirl^TM surveys the room and says with great authority, "I've tried it, and it's (sigh) AMAZING," or "I can promise you, you won't last long with this…" or "…and after it's rubbed in you can eat it, and it's MINTY."

We all stare blankly at this twenty-two year old with the dumbbell piercing through her tongue that makes her say "PENISHH" and "G-SHHPOT", mystified like we're at the zoo in front of some rare specimen of female except I can't figure out who's in the cage: us or her.

SexyGirl^TM retreats to the next room and as moms take discreet turns at purchasing, the air of collective "Oh Yeah, We Totally, Like, Already Do All This Stuff" is vaccuumed out of the room like WHSSSSSHHHT.

Mother #1:  "I've told him we can have sex, but the shirt stays on. There's NO WAY the shirt comes off. Or the bra. No way."

Mother #2:  "I had sex last night for the first time in four months. It felt weird, but by the time we were done I'd finished my grocery list in my head, and I usually fall asleep too fast to do that. It was great."

Mother #8:  "Before I had a kid I actually thought being milky would be kind of… sexy. Then I accidentally sprayed him in the face and changed my mind."

Mother #4:  "Why can't they make all pants like maternity pants? (room erupts into chorus of agreement) I mean, REALLY?"

Mother #9:  "What I'd like to know is why you can't buy lube in bulk, like at Costco, with a palette and a forklift."

Mother #3:  "When she said 'for two hours', was she for real?"

But then after she'd gone and we'd all unbuttoned our metaphorical flies for comfort one of the moms said, "You know, my husband, he's amazing. He does everything. He loves our baby so much. And he doesn't mind about the hiatus — or at least he says he doesn't. He's so patient. That's how I know we'll be ourselves again someday."

True love = that which transcends the temporary absence of vibrating butt plugs.

+++++++++

Usually, Evan tiptoes into our room in the morning and I open my eyes to see him standing there, nose to nose, whispering "MOMMY, MOMMY, ISSA WAKE-UP TIME!" but this morning I woke to squeals of "EASTOOBUNNY PWESENTS!!!" as he scampered away clutching a frilly, pink shopping bag.

I have never moved so fast before 7 AM.

It’s official. Bon, Thordora, Hannah, Mad and I have teamed up to host an informal drink-too-much-wine-and-stay-up-all-night-talking-out-our-asses gathering, a.k.a. Maritime BlogHer—or Blog'er if yer local—want to join us?

The invoking of the hallowed conference is entirely tongue-in-cheek—for expert panels, powerpoints, a hotel banquet and celebrity sightings, go to San Fransisco. For the best fish cakes in the entire universe—and maybe the odd bonfire or two—come to the village of Chester, Nova Scotia for the May 16-18 long weekend.

For transportation and B&B details, find us on Facebook (Maritime BlogHer ’08)—plans are still in the works. Drop me an email by the end of March if you’re keen, and we’ll help you get here. We’ve even got a few coming from as far as Toronto and New England—so don’t be shy, and bring your own marshmallows.

For sale, cheap: One 3 year-old boy, not housebroken. Special this week only: 25% off due to argumentative defects. Does not come when called. Talks back. Does not eat. Refuses to blow nose, preferring instead to snort snot into the back of his throat at least fifteen times per minute. Smells like crotch. Whines incessantly. Ability to vomit at will.

Also this week: 75% off one worn out, ineffective, unwashed, self-loathing, androgynous half-woman, half-rottweiler blend. Comes with door-slamming prowess, relentless abdominal pooch and complimentary nightmares.

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PLEASE BE NOTIFIED the fire sale of aformentioned small boy and growling she-dog has been retracted due to temporary relief as provided by: 1) one medicinal ‘It-Was-Staring-At-Me-Longingly-When-I-Opened-The-Fridge- Seeking-Carrot-Sticks’ Sleeman’s Honey Lager; 2) two hours of comfortably toddler-numbing SellMySoul-o-vision; and 3) one hour-long “family adventure” on sheets of near-rink ice in a torrential freezing rain downpour.

Duly noted: therapeutic alcohol WORKS.