no worries on
her brow; no
garbage days or
grocery lists;
tanks of gas or

who reminded whom
to do what, where,
when or
why.

she sleeps,
softly.

little toes twitching,
tickling the
palm of my hand.

the smallness of her
back between you
and I; between
mother and father,

between then and
now; her breath
dividing and uniting
us.

each exhale a
celebration.

she sleeps.

Anyway, Bitty Button works herself up before I’ve even left the room because she knows it’s bedtime. I’ve been avidly reading a million mothers’ perspectives on sleep — that elusive reward. But it seems to me that she is just not wired to sleep all night. She’s certainly too busy during the day to eat well, so she needs to eat at night. The only solution offered is the dreaded Cry it Out monster. An evil invention of Western society, that is right there. I think it has created generations of self-indulgent humans, desperately spending their precious lives searching for something to fill the void they all have, never really finding the source. We don’t know why, but we know we can’t count on anyone but ourselves.

Cry it Out doesn’t work,’specially if you have a kid who knows you’re just downstairs, so who are you kidding? She also immediately flips over and turns around, pointing the UPSIDE DOWN FROWN at me and bombarding me with Don’t Leave Me rays. Is she manipulating me? Only if you apply her rudimentary ‘wants’ to adult definitions. I mean, needs and wants can’t possibly define themselves this early. She doesn’t chuckle to herself maniacally when I come to her call, she whimpers gratefully and wraps her little monkey feet around my arm.

We did set up the crib/playard though, and I’ll be putting her down for naps in there. No recalls on the Playard or Co-Sleeper in recent history, which is more than I can say for so many expensive cribs. Now that we’re starting to sign, showing her her own room and animals and whatnot can be a handy tool. My goal is to get her to light up when we go in there, like she does when she knows we’re going to the car now. ADVENTURES. (I know there’s a blog out there that’s been around longer than mine that uses caps to illustrate points. But I’ve been chastised for doing it just as long (in high school essays) and I won’t stop now. Also, I’d footnote this but I’m not getting a grade so, neener.)

The whole point of this post… oh yeah! Okay, so last night when we thought our baby had an ear infection because she was all hot and sweaty and screaming and pulling at her ear and puking all over the place, what did we do? We gave her a dose of Tempra, got her all dressed up and took her out into the pre-spring drizzle melting the snow in our backyard. I can feel the whole of Victorian England rolling around in the graves at this, but girlfriend doesn’t have a fever this morning and is perfectly fine. I know that when I feel terrible, I always seek out some water to make me feel better. A rainshower is the best, but a regular shower will do. And, sure enough, she forgot her turning tummy and turned her face up to the tiny pinpoints flitting about, trying to figure out where they was coming from.

I now have a doctor dilemma though. We’ve held onto GossipDoc simply because there are no doctors receiving new patients out here. We scoured through most concerns like schools and extracurriculars, ambulance response and summer attractions (to attract our family to us in the summer) but we didn’t think to see about pediatricians. I’d love to find a naturopath around here for checkups but none really specialize in children. I’ve considered telling GossipDoc my concerns, but I know she’d only fall all over her face apologizing and then spend the rest of her life telling everyone else what obnoxious parents we are to the most annoying baby. We’d take over the title from some others I’ve heard about, I’m sure. Any suggestions, four readers?

p.s. I read a post by an army mom who says, ‘come to find out they don’t even have a memory at six months, let alone a sense of time. They have no idea whether it’s day or night.’ WHAT? Let me introduce you to Rowan. She’ll tell you what time it is.

A resolution for 2010: treat my body as my temple and my mind as my greatest asset, because I have the luxury to do so. In other parts of the world, people have to exert maximum efforts in order to avoid starvation or violence against their person. I have been through a few harrowing experiences in my life, but only in comparison to the rest of my gilded life up to this point. We’re putting ourselves on a bit of a strict tether around here — more than we already need to because of the move. We’ll be eating mostly pulses and whatever vegetable is in season; kind of a modified version of the 100 Mile Challenge. We don’t care anymore if it sounds new age, or pious or backward or contrived to anyone. This is the time to figure out how you want to feel about life and the way you lived it. Time to take the plunge and just be as we are.

Winter food is influenced heavily by some unseen genetic force, coaxing us toward the hot, the braised, the stewed and the comfortable. Around you, the weather has locked the earth in stasis and trapped you along with it; thinking steadily about macaroni and cheese. I’ve not made that, because that would lead to a quick demise of my resolution. But I did make a squash and turnip gratin for one of our potlucks. That’s different, because I knew other people would eat it.

I have instead been working a lot with pearl and plain un-hulled barley, de puy lentils, lima beans, white kidney beans, aduki beans, red fife flour/shortcrust and puff pastries, every mushroom from every woods-floor (hen of the woods, shiitake, maitaki, boletus edifus, chanterelle and enoki), squashes, cruciferous veggies and local farm eggs (yolks like the neon orange ones from a Cadbury egg). The cost is approximately $40 a week for the two of us, but because I experiment a lot, we have to replace staples a little more quickly. Things like olive oil, sea salt, bulk spices/seasonings, balsamic vinegar, grapeseed oil (good for the under-eye area, by the way) and butter. Butter has vitamin A in it, plus it is delicious. And you can make your own for under four bucks.

I am finding it’s easy to live luxuriously for next to nothing, if your perception of luxury is altered. Reset to a closer version of ‘normal’ in the global context. The average North American home is 2500 square feet — 1300 feet more than the world’s average. Not that I’m in a hurry to give up my space, it’s just I’ve cleared a lot out of it. We’re keeping the books, though.

I look at/in a lot of books every day for various reasons. Jason has this book hanging around that his grandfather made about Charles Lindburgh. He was a famous abstract painter, but he had hobbies! I’m thinking about doing one of my own about pastry. Just to have around, you know, to look at. I think it’s imperative to read something from a physical book every day. I can’t tell you why I think it’s important, but it just seems to me that the less we do this, the more disconnected we become. I don’t think our brains are ready to leave history behind, as we are. To simply discount the lessons learned over millenia because we have come so far up above them. Are we so above literacy? There are still people around who can’t read. Shouldn’t we solve that dilemma before thinking up more sassy electronic toys to distract the general public with? On the one hand, I can’t believe the Nook (and others) took so long to be mass produced. On the other, I wonder why we aren’t allowed to pursue sustainable paper production with which to create physical books. Ones we can consider with many senses at once for generations to come.

We get ahead of ourselves in the west, I think. Our considerable capacity for knowledge and progress should be used solely in achieving the lofty goal of all BASIC human needs being met, for everyone. Right? Basic meaning food, clothing and shelter. Those are all things that can be quite costly. Exorbitant and even flippant sometimes in North America. Anyway, we had oatmeal for breakfast, and I’m having white beans boiled with rosemary, garlic, salt and pepper for lunch. With olive oil on it.

There is a video circulating of Anderson Cooper, ushering a boy who’d been hit by one cement block of a storm being thrown by looters in Port Au Prince. Not a lot of aid is getting into this city. Certainly not the obligatory ten dollars via text method that’s been going around. No phone company would send that money until all the bills had been paid first. The will to do something is a good sign though. We just haven’t decided what to do; not until we can find a reliable conduit to follow. Any suggestions would be welcome. Also, Haiti has been the poorest, most neglected nation for a long time now. I don’t think many of us were worrying about them then. Perhaps the most gauche gesture toward aid is the auctioning of celebrity Golden Globe gowns. How much is the auction house’s cut? Not even Meryl Streep could make the whole circus classy.

Anyway. There’s been a lot of baking around here with Red Fife flour and goat’s cream butter (which has this magic effect of making certain things taste deep fried. Like cookies.) Tarts and cookies and galettes and brown sugar shortbreads and whatnot. But the untimely melting of all snow around here, and the urge to unbutton the top of one’s jacket are signaling me that spring is not far off. So, it’s time to get back to humble basics. Lentils and poached eggs. Polenta and mushrooms. Braised kale, walnuts and quinoa. Maybe a squash.

Also, thankyou, to a friend of mine, who gifted me with a Pride and Prejudice cd and a sassy black elastic band notebook styled copy of Sense and Sensibility for Christmas this year. You are a keenly attuned gift giver.

My entire focus has shifted to the house we are moving to in three weeks. A complete blank slate upon which to graft and tend to a comfortable family rhythm. Much has gone into this decision, and we are all raring to go.

She can sit up for brief periods at a time, but has yet to make the connection that puts her arms out to stop her face meeting floor/couch/NOMfoot. She’s also quite disinterested in failure, and will wait lengthy periods (during the day) to try something again, purposely averting her gaze and finding something else fascinating and hilarious behind whatever you’re trying to get her to do. Unless it’s the frying pan. The frying pan is evil and houses galloping hordes of demons, so don’t bring her near it. But if it’s the cast iron skillet, that’s okay. Play her ‘Sweet Caroline’ but only if Neil Diamond is singing it. Otherwise, let her kick some stuff instead.

In between, remove her eco diaper filled with mustard and sometimes pea soup and balm her behind and put on another one. Then, let’s talk nap again. It amuses me that she chooses not to suffer through her body stretching. It’s a pattern I won’t see again for a long time until she is teenaged and has places to be that I have to force her to get up to go to, which is when she will really start resenting me first. But for now, she lets me coax squealing laughter from out of her belly and gullet with the simplest noises and gestures, wiggling for extra effect. I’m totally enjoying it while I can.

Commas. I love them.

And also, I am winning a long-raging battle between my emotional self, Rowan and my physical self. When I signed on for Baby, I knew I wanted to commit to excellence in a non-threatening sense, and throw myself fully into motherhood. Here was the burning of motivation I had yet to feel once in all of my life; the short, combustive burst being her first ultrasound. Catharsis, here I come.

Because pregnancy was a long, soul-draining war for me. And why should it be, I would ask myself, all the way over here in my developed country with my worries about extra weight and PS3 games. Women all over the planet are working and moving and talking and living just fine, all while knocked up. I got hyperemesis for the whole damn duration of it and all food was torture. I hated everyone and everything around me, I couldn’t sleep, I peed every thirty minutes, I over-analyzed, I over-researched, I passed out, I threw up ten times a day (two on a good day), I worried, I fretted, I was vexed, I was lonely, I was tired, I was in Abundant Worry Free Time remission. Then, I was induced a week and a half early.

At first, the menstrual like pains were bearable — laughable, even. They built over time, and I sang my pain management song in response like a jailbird, certain of her innocence. But then, I was taken from my bed, stripped naked and strung up, beaten and battered and stabbed through the abdomen with a two foot wide spiked iron pole again and again in a plunging motion. I wafted in and out of consciousness while still gripping the bed rails until blisters began to form under the bottoms of my fingers and I was screaming so loudly I had ceased to hear it. My husband cried, though he tried hard to maintain strength. And finally, the medicine machine wore me down, and let me beg for an epidural.

The doctor they brought in missed the first time and the scar is still there on my back. At the second piercing, a Code Blue took him away for ten minutes — needle still hanging out of my back, me asking Jason, ‘Is he serious?’ Had he jumped out from behind the curtain and announced, ‘Just kidding!’ I would have laughed.

And then she was here and I was riding the endorphins high against the ink-blue horizon of nearly six am, no thought in my head about how natural it had been or if she was affected by anything. Her voice shattered the room, which had sounded like coming up out from underwater, or awake again after passing out. Voices snapped together clearly, as I watched them sew me back together where I had been split. She looked at me clearly when I held her, called out to me when she was whisked away across the room, and was more impossible to conceive of now that she was here than when she was merely within. She had been infinite for so long, she said, and now her infinity was over. She was alone. I was alone. Except there was her, now.

In the weeks that followed, she voiced her concern at loneliness with earth-splitting shrieks and wails. Why? Why am I out here? Put me back. I could not answer and I found the old familiar bottom-out feeling of pregnancy return, hushing and shushing, rocking and walking, crying along with her until my eyes swelled shut. She refused to eat, because lying on her back was torture of the worst kind. She spent every moment in a chair or a sling, rarely being simply held by anyone. I wasn’t much solace to her. As though she could feel my shrinking womb when I held her against me, and realized her sanctuary was disappearing. Being swallowed up by my body again, playing the part of Mary Poppins’ carpetbag, tucking it away with the lamp.

An end that began a battle fought in muddy, low trenches fueled by books and videos. One that wages on today and will tomorrow. I am chipping away at her resolve now, though. Her trebuchets trampled, her buttresses felled, her front-line infantry wounded and diminishing in numbers, her stone-cold stubbornness wooed with unfailing attack after attack; my own army being fed with love and determination, she will not see the D Day coming. The day when we are two again, and working together toward the common goal of her Life. And I will stand victorious at her side, letting her wave my flag and address my army (in the course of diplomacy). Peace will come again — some day.

How was your New Year’s Eve? For the second year in a row, I was forced to do nothing and asleep by ten thirty. It was pretty awesome, because the next morning I could actually see through my eyelids and hold conversations with people without wishing their mothers had never responded to their fathers’ eye twinkles, just so I wouldn’t have to be here, now, conversing with them when all I wished in the New Year was silence.

We’re moving to Shelbyville. An hour and a half north of Toronto lies a house with my daughter’s, my husband’s and my name on it (respectively). This is because I get final stamp approval, so it reaches my desk last. As we speak, I’m surfing through vintage chesterfields for my library. Sounds grand, doesn’t it? I think the library will be the size of our current apartment’s washroom. But, still. LIBRARY. Walls of books and a chesterfield and a cup of whatever, I don’t care. LIBRARY. What on earth will I do up there, people who know me have asked the Universe. How will you stand living in the country? It’s not really the country. It’s more like the secret passageway between the City and Country rooms; my own private crawlspace wherein to hide me treasures.

What happened was the Perfect Building owners decided not to bloody sell. So, dashed were my cookie and makeup consultation store dreams! Gone were the halcyon visions of sunny apartment in the Junction, before it becomes the new Queen West. No matter, I dream a lot. There are a few options out there in Shelbyville, but, best to keep them close under coat until I’m decided on a path. I’m tired of jinxes and falling through the goddamned floor boards.

This means y’all get to travel with me on my renovation journey. Trek through the thickened jungle with me, cut down the live vines with your machete as they threaten to tighten ’round our necks and deposit us safely into the mouth of a man-sized Venus Flytrap. It’ll be fun! The web address will move, just as soon as I can figure out what on earth another person wants with the domain ‘mmoMom.com’, but it’ll be grand. We’ll have a blast.

p.s. no, I can’t decide on a theme for this blog. This particular one is called ‘Ocean Mist’, which is a perfume you can buy at Shopper’s Drug Mart.

The other day I wanted to get rid of my Facebook page. It occurs to me the social site may inadvertently encourage vulgar behaviour to which I am not immune. And also my sisters keep writing things to me that I can’t, for the life of me, understand. It’s not really that they use that many web abbreviations –there are probably other, more savvy, terms for that but effed if I know them. There’s just an unusual quality to their writing. It’s the equivalent to dialogue in 1984 on some levels; at least to me. But these same sisters were just devastated by the concept. So much so that when I jokingly said, ‘it’s not like I’ll disappear’, they vehemently disagreed! And I guess for them I would cease to exist without my avatar, likes and dislikes and photographic representation of my activities e-stamped who-knows-where. Increasingly, our immortality seems inevitable. Would that make the internet heaven? Was Ryutaro Nakamura on to something?

Christmas is coming and so is a lot of culinary nonsense. If anyone out there has a good mexican wedding cookie recipe, I’ll take it off your hands.

I get up at 5:30 am and immediately turn on the lamp settled on Jason’s dresser across the room. I have read that turning on a light battles the ensuing depression that comes with realizing you have to get up, and there’s no sun to get up with you. Rowan wiggles, and blinks like a mole. Then she skrees a few times, as I wrestle her dripping diaper from her dancing extremities. She pants and poops as soon as I remove her diaper (20 minutes earlier than she usually does), and shrieks in delight at the whole affair. The green/yellow curdy arc flies through the air and lands on my shirt, my pyjama pants and my 500 thread count sheets. I think about swaddling her again as I take her out into the living room, where I have also switched on a light after checking the clock once more. Instead we hit the living room floor and look at toys. Or I look at toys while she kicks and punches me, skreeing and babbling away; my precious little ban sidhe.

I brew 3 tablespoons of legal narcotics, purchased from a guy I know in town in our two cup-but-who-are-we-kidding french press: our most valuable wedding present. The skreeing monster calls me back to the living room, demanding interaction and praise. I turn her on her tummy, and muster up the most excitable voice I can as I desperately try to tell her that she is doing the best job in the entire history of learning to exercise one’s neck muscles. She doesn’t believe me, though she’s still holding her head high, and rubs her face into the blanket. Thankfully, she turns over, as I gingerly sip my hot security blanket and grin at her. She skrees.

I have errands to run, so I start biting a nail to help me formulate a battle plan. If I change her now, feed her in twenty minutes, burp her for an eternity, change her again, change her shirt after she vomits up half her impossible to obtain liquid life, get myself dressed, get the wrap sling tied, get my shoes on first then start with her layers of outerwear appropriate to a four month old living in Canada, put a Nuk in her mouth to shut her up from whining about how many layers she’s wearing and get the hell out the door, I can leave in about three hours. NEVER AGAIN, I think.

She enjoys the walk and I praise her love of trees and clouds, laugh at her confused inhale when the wind brushes her nose, hold her close and kiss underneath her eyes as she falls asleep from the familiar mother jiggle she enjoyed before the reality set in that This is It. I want to keep walking, but the Nursing Conundrum means I have a one hour time limit on all excursions so I beat it home and try to dismantle our excursion get up as carefully as I can. Wouldn’t want to wake The Dragon.

She sleeps for an hour, during which time I look up recipes for butternut squash, flip through a few albums on Facebook, reply to emails, look at houses and buildings for sale, eat a piece of fish and curse myself for not taking a shower when I hear her familiar grunts and fumbles for her fists. We return to the living room floor and sing her the alphabet and read her a rhyming couplet by Thomas Hood called ‘The Devil Ship’, wherein a castaway mariner is scooped up by a ship full of sooty so and so’s he takes to be devils. But they are, in fact, coal miners and have a hearty laugh at his expense. She does the same and I marvel at the power of rhythm. I go through the motions of looking at mirrors, changing, feeding, massaging little feet and hands and drinking litres of water as I dry up and my hands start to resemble that of a lich. She is tired again, but this time stubborn about it so she yells at her sleepiness from her bundled up napping spot and grows frustrated when it won’t leave her alone.

She finally drifts off and I race to the washroom without hovering around and hmmmmmming outside the bedroom door as I always do. In the washroom, I disrobe and mistakenly catch sight of my reflection. My hair can only be described as ‘hairlarious’. I look at my breasts whose size and shape change a minimum of ten times a day and I consider plastic surgery. Just a lift, I think. Then I wonder whether it would feel better to have tits in my armpits, or just tucked into my socks, giving me the pretense of flatness when all of this sustaining life directly business is over. In the end, I know I don’t have the guts to go through with surgery so, I think about where I’ll find the courage to age gracefully — just as I am.

The water pelting from the showerhead is so warm and inviting, I don’t get into it all at once. Instead I start with my toes and whatever else is poking out (including my forehead) and slowly, slowly step all of the way under. I sigh from my pores and take my time with the function of bathing. I stand around, admiring my toes and noticing the pronounced dip where my abdomen was split in two. A split that goes more places that one first suspects. Sometimes I will hop up to go get something and I feel two sharp pains encircling my girly bits, like I’m wearing a four year old’s undies and they’ve been soldered on with skin welding technology. I remember the birth, then, and wistfully run my hands through my hair at the thought of how small and wondrous, how perfectly anomalous she seemed, when handed to me after we were cut in two.

It’s then I realize I didn’t dance around to check on her eighty times before heading to the shower. The one time I did not do this, I went into the room once to get a sweater, leaned over her and found her quietly choking away. Babies do these things, I am assured, but it doesn’t make me feel better. I linger a little longer under the water and race through drying myself and redressing. I don’t look at my hair or my face and instead just quickly put on some moisturizer in upward strokes, because who wants to encourage gravity? Hint: not me.

She is not awake, so I lie down beside her and wait for the upcoming battle where she will gnaw at my nipples with her made of diamonds gums and skree and whine about how annoyed she is that these are the boobs she got. I breathe all the way in and all the way out, and I watch her sleeping face be impossibly adorable. I see her father’s face, my mother’s face, even my sister’s face. I touch her nose and she opens her eyes and reaches out to grab my face, a giant smile on her lips and in her eyes. I want so much at that moment for her to always need me that I vow to prepare myself for the day she’ll be embarrassed by my very existence and draw her close. She surprises me and nurses without argument, holding onto my fingers and I wonder what I might name her brother or sister….maybe.

Anyway, that’s not what this is about. It’s about the heaviness of my job ahead that has just now hit me: raising a woman. A woman who knows what she wants, loves herself wholly and without vanity and who goes after her dreams without too much hemming and hawing (a little hemming and hawing is okay). I’m not that woman. That doesn’t mean my parents failed or anything just that, somewhere along the way, I really lost interest in getting to know myself. My whole teen/young adult life was fraught with trying to be something for somebody else, because the reality of me is just too huge to deal with. Living this way has not only made me incredibly unhappy, but everyone who’s unfortunate enough to cross my path as well. Because I was obviously missing being myself. Of course now, weeks away from 29, baby and husband in my orbit, I’ve realized I’m not thirty yet. It’s like Scrooge waking up on Christmas morning, realizing there is still time. More on that in another entry, though.

The gravity of that realization is that I really don’t want that to happen to my daughter. I have been writing in a journal for her — I started it when I first became pregnant. I want her to know her mother as she was, not just how she seems. That is to say, when the utilitarian nature of living comes around (and it will) I want her to see that the extreme highs and lows, thrills and passions, desperations and exultations, etc. are worth looking forward to, living through and filing away. Not worth dwelling on or falling into the futile pursuit of extending a moment. Because we live in moments only, it is up to us to use them wisely and piece them together in a productive way.

I haven’t really done that. And now I find I don’t know why. It is my own mystery, one I’ll obviously be attempting to solve for the rest of my life. As for my daughter, well, I want her to use me as her example of How Not to Proceed. This is not an ‘I wish I knew then what I know now’ cry out, or anything. I have no regrets because I at least know that’s the way to move ahead. Regrets tie you down. It is, rather, a pathetic epiphany that came with the last great growing pain of my young life. Also, I have decided that being a woman is the best and worst thing that can happen to a person. An ex used to say to me, ‘people expect more from you’ when I behaved in whatever way I felt like. And he was right, I suppose — my rallying response being, ‘WHY!?’ Leave me alone, I thought, I do what I want. Because just doing whatever I wanted, pursuing pleasure, was the antithesis of what I really am.

Rowan is only 4 months old, so some people might say I’m jumping the gun with this anxiety. But I gots anxiety issues, okay? I always have. She may be my exact opposite, this little girl, and that’s okay. I would probably worry about her a lot more if she turns out to be just like me. Poor thing. In the end, I want her to love to learn, to dream and also to find the strength to turn her dreams into reality. Not just to simply watch them wander by with a complacent smirk or to jump over to something new when finishing seems too involved. I want all these things for her and more…

What have I gotten myself into?