In a hundred years or maybe less they'll all say Can you believe people used to walk around with cellular telephones RIGHT NEXT TO THEIR BRAINS?!!?

The mortal peril of such behaviour will be as evident to them as it is to today's us to dig out a grapeshot wound with a rusty blade (and then use said blade to trim beard, spread butter, impale enemy, and pierce desired chicken leg from serving tray of buxom wench).

We click our tongues and shake our heads back and forth, marvelling at the blatantly obvious dim-wittedness of generations past. Then we clean up after PB&J assembly with an electric blue liquid that comes with a skull and crossbones and a small print warning that says DANGER: THIS STUFF IS, UHHH, POISON.

They say the average woman absorbs five pounds of unregulated chemicals through her skin every year thanks to lotions, makeup, shampoo, deodorant. Just like the ordinary guy who gets bitten by the radioactive spider and his DNA goes all crackly like lightening bolts and he can suddenly scale tall buildings. Except when our DNA goes all crackly like lightening bolts all we suddenly get is chemotherapy.

Burt, take me away.

You know that it's-just-gotta-be-bad miracle gel inside disposable diapers that makes it able to absorb 300 times its weight in pee? Listed as an irritant that requires protective gear for handling, this is the same stuff that was banned for use in tampons thanks to toxic shock syndrome. Not to mention the other nastiness hidden behind the Tigger on your kid's crotch — dioxin, one of the most poisonous and carcinogenic substances produced on earth, tributyltin (a hormone disruptor) and bleach.

Until now, I'd spent my child-rearing days thinking Us? Cloth diapers? HA! Not going to happen, seeing as I DO NOT PLAY THE BONGOS.

Thinking if disposables were really, truly harmful, they wouldn't let us continue to use them.

Right?

(silence)

Uhh… RIGHT?

(silence)

Kinda like if the war wasn't really, truly necessary, we wouldn't be there.

+++++++++

'Until now' means 'until we became unoblivious'. The event that splits the before and the after, that rendered us into who we were meant to become through pain.

Now, I'm what Justin would call a frantic hippie. Overcome with a need for action, an unfamiliar state for the oblivious me, the lazy me who would prefer to obediently gulp down whatever The Man offers (and whatever Wal-Mart sells) because being obedient requires less effort than being contrary.

A frantic selfish hippie, struck with wanting to purify our most immediate life. Selfish only because I'm not yet occupied with Darfur or melting icecaps, because those problems are too worldly compared to the individual turmoil caused by an instantly actionable, offending bottle of Windex.

I used to roast chickens purely for the aesthetic pleasure of being wrist deep in raw poultry butt. Always bubbling just underneath the skin a discomfort for the slug trail meat leaves in the body, for the heinous tactics of commercial meat production.

The fleeting thought: imagine how that would feel, to eat less meat. That would be nice.

Then the carcass wrangling would always resume, the cold slappy juiciness, because it always has, and conviction is for other more passionate people.

Then Liam was taken from us.

And I found myself sitting on the couch of the most lovely mama, patient and smiling as she walked me through the hemp and the bamboo and the prefolds and the stuffers and I said okay, show me the diapers that are for people who don't play the bongos.

And she did. And they're not only righteous, and totally effective, and easy to clean, and kind to his skin. They're ADORABLE.

I just feel so damn good putting these on Ben's bum. I hang around after the mini-load of laundry starts, inhaling a steamy cloud of good, clean baby poop and tea tree oil. When the buzzer goes I race to the dryer for the sniff 'n stuff 'n stack, giggling like an anarchistic schoolgirl with a system-bucking buzz-on.

Then I made my own cleaning spray with balsam fir and rosemary essential oils, and vinegar to disinfect, and was about to never shave my armpits EVER AGAIN when Justin walked into the kitchen and said it smells like fish and chips in here.

Some kinks to iron out. Don't like tofurky. Still stand there impatiently in front of the microwave with my nose pressed up against the glass, reversing the polarity on the flux capacitor in my brain with every beep. Fighting the urge to use the skincare equivalent of a flame thrower, in a state of shock that the lemon-poppyseed tortise wins the race.

Some starts more profound than others, but all starts nonetheless.

This is the beginning of living vividly, I think. Taking steps to be one of the passionate ones. To not waste any more time, nor blessings, nor health.

Thank you, sweet lili, wherever you are.

+++++++++

A proactive addendum: I'm far from enlightened, and I'd never want to make someone feel any lesser for not using cloth diapers or loving steak or relying on the fabulous lather of Sodium Laureth Sulfate. All these chemicals and toxicity in our personal worlds... it just quite suddenly and unexpectedly pisses me off.

I wish we could devote the same energy to coming up with safer alternatives as we do, oh, I don't know... inventing new kinds of rectal seepage-causing diet twinkie sweeteners.

Don't you?

When I answer her question she physically recoils. "34? Are you SERIOUS? God."

She pauses.

"I'm an esthetician. You don't look 34. Have you had any kids?"

"Yeah, two!" yells Justin over the band as I shout "Three!"

"Hey, Steve! Check it out! He said two, and she said three!"

She giggles. Justin and I look at each other and smile, and look at her, and smile. We all stare at each other curiously and thanks be to beer, she shrugs and joggles away through the crowd, called away by Tommy Tutone.

She is 24. She had asked me where I live and I said here and she said Oh! Well then you'd know Monique DeYoung and that's when I smiled and said No, I doubt it. How old are you?

"I think we're finally getting kinda old for this," Justin had said as we limped like a couple of suffocating fish on the dance floor.

"No," I insisted. "It's not us. It's the music."

The DJ, thinking himself ironically hip, selects Toto's Africa with his tongue-in-cheek when he could have chosen this. Or this. Or this. But as it happens, the guy with the mike is among those who think We Built This City is 80s dancefloor gold.

(Whenever we go to a movie it has to be nothing short of epic awesomeness to make the baby-leaving worthwhile. Same with Justin & Kate's Annual Pump 'N Dump Extravaganza. By the time we're lathered up enough to kick it it's 10:30 and almost time to pass out and we're thinking "Dammit, we could DJ better than this with our ears stapled to the floor!" And well, we want to SUE SOMEBODY.)

Then it's Mony Mony and scores of naughty nurses and giant jellyfish and endless drunken pirates squeal in unison HEY MOTHERF*CKERS GET LAID GET F*CKED! as if they're the first 24-year-olds to do so, ironic tongue-in-cheek, fifteen years after it was cool to be ironic and tongue-in-cheek in response to that particular song.

Justin uses one finger to push his glasses up the sweaty bridge of his nose and sighs, "We were doing that in GRADE SEVEN."

God, I love Halloween. Even when over-aged and underwhelmed.

Anthony Bourdain will eat everything short of monkey brain. I'll write about everything short of this.

Then I think this is a part of post-Liam life, and I have sisters out there, sisters in loss who are steps ahead, and shared experience dilutes the isolation of one.

So here is my challenge: write about what is sacred, what is off-limits. Acknowledge the woman who has been cut, and traumatized, and lost, and figure out why she can't just dress up for Halloween and have a few beer without being overwhelmed with wrongness.

I can't heal without cataloguing, without putting this mess in its place on the shelf, neatly tied with string alongside all the rest. Without you — the ether — as clerk, rubber stamp and inkpad in hand, ready to press with that satisfying thunk RECEIVED.

+++++++++

Late at night I stay up long after I should, stalling and not sure why.

I am no longer female. I'm something else: limbo, hiatus, sexless. Evenings are spent with laptop in lap, television on, food at hand — doubling and tripling up of distraction, isolation.

It's just easier, I tell him. If we're together I'll wake you up, and I won't be able to relax because I'll be too conscious of you. Week after week we sleep separately under the guise of breastfeeding — a guise not because of untruth but because I rely on it for protective solitude. On those nights overdue for closeness or conversation I linger with Ben as he snores on my chest, plugged into the iPod. Midnight becomes 2 AM and I think he'll be up in another hour anyway, so I'll just stay here.

Then I blink and the day begins, husband and wife wordless for each other aside from the mechanics of laundry and playgrounds and dirty bums.

The worst part — the part that makes me want to shrink into nothing out of shame — is the relief. I got through another night, and after all Ben was sort of unsettled, that much is true, so I may as well have just been there with him, and we've all got colds, and Justin was thick in neo-citran sleep, and he wouldn't have even known if I went to bed anyway.

Phewph.

Why the phewph? Why? I cling to this thing, this toxic wall that is costing me, costing both of us.

I don't know how to be a woman and a wife anymore, having lost a baby.

To revel in this failed body feels inappropriate. Not sensible, I know. This is how it feels to try and wear this grief at the same time as joy and release: shallow, callous, cleavage at a funeral.

Mourning is my link to Liam, and many days I feel as though I'm not solemn enough. I can be an outwardly unaffected mother for my kids (I must be) but can't seem to also be an outwardly unaffected wife for my husband. Fumbling in the darkness my hands trip over the scar and I am transported back to catastrophic beige.

To think otherwise is delusion: best-friendship is the slow burn, but sex is the glue. Not even mere sex, but physical intimacy.

To fall asleep spooning, neverminding the sweat, the way we used to.

I still watch him, genuinely amazed that he's mine. Watch the curve of the back of his leg, the strength of his shoulder, the way the light hits his back. Then repression. I've got myself trained like a monk reaching some sort of elevated humanity atop silent mountains, denying the baser part of myself in some search for peace.

But I don't want to be a monk. I want to be base. I want to be a punk with bright blue hair and combat boots and a beer in hand, and I want to bust a move on the dance floor with Justin, Lambda Lambda Lambda nerd, neverminding anything except the mob scene at the bar when it's refill time.

Until now I'd been shrugging it off, this black hole of zest. Postpartum. Age. Breastfeeding hormones. Two kids amplifying everything, exhaustion included. Twinskin. Sinus congestion.

But now I know: it is some of that, and a lot of Liam.

Mmm, monkey brain. Tastes like chicken.

+++++++++

Bon says of her lost baby I no longer feel the same urgent, deep connection to him. Which of course, I assume I will never feel again, and my breath catches in my throat even as I type that. I don't know if there's another way, and that, in itself, I grieve, but am also trying to accept. My understanding is that it's natural, if not easy, to gradually move from something like mourning to something more like honouring. And that it is normal to mourn the move.

She knows where I am. Liam is becoming less urgent, a doused fire that has finally stopped roaring and cracking and spitting. Things need to begin growing around the burnt-out ruin now, living things, tall grasses and whispering trees and wildflowers. It will always be a sacred place, but more peaceful now that the smoke is clearing.

I resent the living things trying to reclaim him because in doing so, they cover him up. I still want to feel the scorch from that fire on my skin because it’s all that I have of him. I both crave and reject the overtaking peace, the winding and enriching and soothing green smothering the charred black.

For now, anyway. Until time and love push me forward.

Justin looks at me blankly and says "Are you serious? I loved high school. Well, not the school part, but everything else. High school was THE BEST."

This coming from a guy who was MVP three years running in volleyball, soccer and basketball, and who dated the most stacked girl in school two years his senior.

"Didn't you play ANY sports?" he asks, incredulous.

"Sure I did," I insist. "Badminton intramurals. For about a month in grade eight."

(then, not surprisingly, he pantzed me in front of everyone.)

Guess jeans with a zippered ankle. Curled bangs. Benetton rugby shirts, TUCKED IN. And try as I might I can't convince Justin that, at my school, it's what all the cool kids did: BAND. Piling geekitude upon geekitude, I played the string bass.

The only instrument you can sit on in the parking lot.

With ten of your band friends.

If you have band friends.

Which I did, more or less, miraculously, in that decidedly fickle, faintly humiliating, please-oh-please-oh-please-like-me way of junior and senior high school girls.

Year after year of fruitless curling of what is hopelessly straight, desperate to be anyone else. It took me a long time to grow up. I've only been a moderately functioning social being for… (checks imaginary watch)… well, it hasn't been long.

+++++++++

She comes over for a playdate with her little boy, a reconnection made in the initial facebook flurry. All the while I'm a little more than sheepish, overcome with past intramural awkwardness every time I meet her eyes. I felt this way coming back to Halifax, to face the same streets I walked when I was a complete dork, agitated at the comically unfunny memory of what I was.

Then as we venture into the territory of 1989 she says GOD. I was such a complete asshole. I don't even like to think about high school. It's too mortifying.

Something dissapates in the air between us leaving a pleasant, open space. And I smile to think it:

But she was, like… totally NORMAL.

The nurse strokes the old woman's hair with a rare sort of tenderness, affected as though this was the first and not the thousandth passing on her watch.

Jean dear, she whispers, nose-to-cheek for distant ears. Is there anything I can get for you? Anything at all?

Today is her last day of 95 years.

Figures stand against the wall, sit in chairs at her bedside. People she knew when they were children, and whose children now have children.

We imagine it was strange for her to leave her house, to be carried from it knowing she wouldn't be back. To be thinking Well, this would be it, then. Strange for everyone, the grand dame of the town.

Yes, there is something I’d like, forms her mouth with effort. She lifts her head deliberately and says with a weary smile: a rum and a smoke.

++++++++

Last night I sat up in bed, milkmaid, grasping to remember Liam. With each month he feels more distant, trapped down the smudgy viewfinder of a pinhole camera, fading, the memory of him breaking up and drifting in all directions.

Sometimes I squint, try to see double.

Sometimes I feel irrevocably messed up. fucked up. broken.

We spend day after day cultivating callouses, willing tough patches to spring from pain to bear the constant pressure, to maintain a grip on anything solid. I don't know why, but in recent days my callouses have gone soft. After what felt like a near-sane spell I suddenly can't think of Liam without my throat swelling shut.

++++++++

I don't begrudge Jean her 95 years to Liam's six weeks. Her funeral was today and I can't see straight for longing, for desperate unfairness, fondness.

I still like the way an old wooden church smells, polish and incense and reverence, the ticket booth of god.

Being there made me feel like I had a secret, like going to a magic show knowing by one's own witness that the man behind the curtain may actually be for real. Not in the typical bearded sense, but in the way of energy, life, spirit. It made me feel watched.

It's hard to be around the leaving of a soul — even when that soul has had its due and more, peace and prosperity and the admiration of many.

It is unfair that I am his mama, yet I don't know where he's gone. I'm supposed to know these things. I want to know why he couldn't stay, why he was ever hurt in the first place despite what should have been the refuge of my body.

It's not only his absence that aches. It's the knowing that his absence will never make sense.

…I'll most likely kill you in the morning.

The chosen course of action in flickrgate: deferral. It's Ben's five month (a.k.a. two month) birthday today, after all — and I can't quit photo sharing pre-portrait. And Evan's hair is getting scruffy again. And then there's Halloween.

All I'd hoped for from you was a chorus of familiar confusion because I know, as you do, that there aren't any easy answers. Aside from taking the usual precautions we have safety in numbers, in sheer volume, in each individual one of us being needles in the biggest haystack the world has ever seen.

+++++++++++

I'm so humbled, so proud to have readers like you. You teach me with your eloquence and thoughtfulness and wit, and the grace of interaction you have with each other. I absorb every single comment, see who you are, feel thankful and honoured for every one of you.

On a recent post (update: two recent posts) my troll-free stretch was broken. This space was a factory proud of its safety record, with the gate sign to prove it: 255 NUMBNUT-FREE POSTS SINCE 2004 AND COUNTING.

We all sit together laughing and crying and sharing and listening, sometimes drinking piping hot tea, sometimes something stronger, in front of a crackling fire by the sea. Then some pitifully transparent, frustrated soul kicks in the front door and insults you, and then me, in my space, my house, on the same pages that capture the memory of my son.

I don't mind debate. I've been so invigorated by it here, and you've often made me change my mind or point of view. But I haven't got the patience for me or anyone else to be verbally abused, drive-by-style, by those who can only express disagreement — lacking coherent, sensible words — with nastiness.

Here's the policy. If anyone like that shows up here again, we respond with deafening silence. We are an unpokeable bear. Nothing they say would ever upset me, so don't let it upset you. The only required response is chirping crickets and tumbleweeds and a lone voice whispering, Did you guys hear something? I thought I heard a squeak, but I don't speak numbnut so I can't tell for sure.

And we carry on, and they slink away in search of more infestable shores.

Can whoever goes out past the shed next grab some kindling, and bring in another plate of whoopie pies from the kitchen? I need me some cream cheese icing, twinskin schminskin, and I don't think I'm the only one.

+++++++++++

I can't seem to string together two coherent thoughts for Ben on his fifth month. I'm shaken, as I always am on the eve of the day they were born, feeling like I've been wearing my skin inside out all day long.

Justin's 95-year-old great aunt gave us an antique mirror and I stood with Ben inside of it, pulling faces. Then in the shaded murk of the old glass I was holding Liam, darker than his brother.

Sometimes I want to be haunted, and sometimes not.

It's apple pie without cheese is like... in case you're wondering.

Or, blogging without photography.

Since a photograph of Dutch's sweet Juniper was stolen last week by a parenting media outlet that should know better, I've had the sleep-depriving honour of discovering the horrors of Orkut, Google’s pedophilish home to countless images of children ripped from Flickr and crafted into fake profiles and fantastical relationships. Also last week, randomly browsing an anti-Orkut site for a total of five minutes, I found a picture of a photographer-friend's five-year-old daughter set up as a pervy profile. Of all the millions, there was one child I knew — one I've met and played pirate and blown bubbles with.

I am not a paranoid parent, imagining windowless unicorn-airbrushed cube vans waiting in the bushes to snatch my family and hold us ransom until Harrison Ford comes to our rescue with a hologram diversion and the blueprints to the evil lair of our imprisonment.

But even I am starting to get the queebs.

What are you going to do, stop going out in public? You can't prevent strangers from seeing your child and thinking whatever they think any more online than you can walking down the street.

I've always sloughed off concerns about sharing our photographic life here.

The creative challenge (and the creative distraction, particularly during our life in the NICU) has been more profound than the risk of perviness, which I felt was remote thanks to the sheer vastness of the Interweb.

Plus, I've always done Flickr as safely as possible: I never use descriptive tags or titles, rarely post to groups, block my images from public and third-party searches, click 'all rights reserved' and set download options to nil.

But so did Dutch. So does Jeanette, who even uses watermarks. And countless others who have found their toddler's 'Little Miss Chocolate' Brazilian profile, seeking 'friends + more WINK WINK LOL!'.

I am a flea's pimple to the traffic of Dooce, and she's light years more prolific than me. If she does it with 20,000 views on a single photograph, surely it's alright for me, flea's pimple.

Then BING! A Flickrmail.

"Hi sweet | salty,

You are Ghαyέb 7αßέby [QTR] يالله طلبتكـ's newest contact! If you don't know Ghαyέb 7αßέby [QTR] يالله طلبتكـ, Ghαyέb 7αßέby [QTR] يالله طلبتكـ is probably a fan of your photos or wants a bookmark so they can find you again."

Who is this? Hmm. Ghαyέb 7αßέby's contacts: 2,453. Jeebers. Smells like scam.

Ghαyέb 7αßέby's testimonial: "walllla i love u sooooo muuuuch ... ur HOT ...sexy ... etjaneeeeeeen mashaaalllla 3allich rabi y7f'9iich inshalllla BELEIIVE ME ENTY A7LA MN elissa 9iiJ TSHBHEENHA bs walla enty a7la :p ur photooooos raw3a keep on going 7ayaty misssssed u alooooooooooooooooooot umaaaaaaaaaaa7 (L)(K)(K)(K)... XxXxX :p =D.. ashooofch soooooooon qallbi .. take care qalbooo .."

Ghαyέb 7αßέby's photostream: stolen images, watermarks left partially intact to read "taken by (photoedited) GHαYέB". Some kids, some not, complimented by laughable poetry, if laughing was an option.

No offense to the folk of Quatar, but I'll eat my own head if I’ve got legitimate readers there.

There have been a few like this, just a few. I block them, stop them from commenting and linking, remove myself from their contact lists.

But with a public stream I have no control over them looking, or taking a screen capture and repurposing pictures of my sons if they so choose.

So now, what to do? I don't believe that an anonymous creep in Quatar translates into real-life danger — at least no more than the real-life danger of being attacked by killer bees in my front yard just as the crew of TLC's APOCALYPTIC INSECTS drives past.

Still, these images are sacred, these moments and visions that made me a mother.

The act of sharing them with you, as a follow-through of words, wraps up this therapy and creative discipline with a bow. It helps me to be understood, and to be understood in this state of exquisite vulnerability is to be soothed.

For an unwanted eye to break into this relationship with ulterior motives — it's infuriating.

My instinct is to lock my Flickr stream to 'Private', accessible only if you send me a contact request so I can verify that you're not akin to Ghαyέb 7αßέby. But not everyone belongs to Flickr, nor are they inclined to sign up — and to be added as a friend, you have to have an account. Even though it's free, this is an obstacle to people seeing our photos, family included.

Then there's Typepad — maybe I should go back to the old-school, static, blog-hosted photo albums. That would limit exposure somewhat, making sure that the only way to see our photos would be for people to know about the blog first. More so, I could do a photography post every now and then, embedding many fewer images on the main page for the same reason as above, to narrow the pool of viewers to readers only.

But it should be readers-only on Flickr as it is — there's no other way for people to find me without knowing me, with the precautions I've taken.

So where the frig are they coming from? Not just for me, but for all of us?

Swarms of carpenter ants, big, shiny, black, crunchy fuckers, rattling around within the walls of beloved spaces and communities, always on the edge of breaking through and making us all throw up in our mouths a little bit, knowing they'd been there all along but now seeing them and really knowing, because now they're at our party and I turned away from my pumpkin spice cookie for ten seconds and now it's scurrying away by itself.

I feel a shift, a stink in the air. Flickr is spoiling, filling up with pervs and creeps and sneaks. Is it not inevitable?

Coincidentally, I've just been invited to contribute to a soon-to-be-announced womens' photoblog and community being launched by a greatly admired mama-photographer. I'm thrilled and honoured, proud to be the Rachel Ray with a plate of cheez-whiz on celery sticks at a party of Martha Stewarts (totally kind, loveable Martha Stewarts) piping towers of cream-filled croqembouche.

But for me to come to the table all Flickr-freaked, hesitant to share? Not so cool.

Damn them. Damn the pervs and the trolls and the creeps, running amok and souring this space for the rest of us.

So I put it to you: other than stating what seems like the obvious to non-photo-enthusiasts ("Never post pictures of your children online, asshat!") — and understanding that public photos are sometimes as important for many of us as public words — what would you do?

Is there a lower-profile alternative to Flickr that allows some degree of interactivity and tracking but without all the garbage and roving Babble photoeditors?

As readers and viewers, what would work best for you — tempered by what you'd do, if you felt this way?

Do you feel this way?

Damn them. Damn the pervs and the trolls and the creeps.

I need feedback, friends, and quick. I don't want to stop, but I do need to sleep soundly.

I just forgot. I keep them in my makeup kit, and there were three slobby days in a row so I’d blown that month. Then when it came time to start another month I… I just forgot.

I’m staring at the floor and I’m not sure why.

Do you know what this is? asks my doctor. She answers for me subconscious self-sabotage. Please do not do this. She presses a prescription into my hand and I say Oh, no, I have more pills at home. It’s okay.

I’m giving you this to make doubly sure, she says, and then without speaking I am sending you to the pharmacy with a police escort and porcupine-quill panties and a sandwich board hung around your neck which reads DO NOT IMPREGNATE ME: I AM EMOTIONALLY UNSTABLE.

Fair enough.

This is not the time, she says gently, and I mumble denial that I’d even consider it. We need to let your body heal, and everything else too.

The thing that crouches in the dark place urges pregnancy as just punishment, as a gateway to a soul who tried to come through to us, as redemption. Now. Now. Now.

Thankfully my dark thing is chained to the wall. It clatters around but is not set loose to wreak havoc.

She’s right. Such a monumentous, magical event shouldn’t be triggered because the universe dared to eff with me, because I am damaged goods trying to prove otherwise. Not triggered from a place of post-trauma but of peace, if ever.