I keep thinking I should break the pattern. You know. Write about circumcision. Or those wacky attachment parents. Or how vegetarianism is the handshake drug of complete moral breakdown.

But death is here again. It keeps asking, sheepishly, for fresh tea. It drinks half, then misplaces the mug. The bottom half always cools.

+++

I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, rattled. A roller coaster with bright orange rails. A row of empty cars except for the front one, which arrives at the endstation with Evan on the left-hand side, screaming hysterically.

Where is Ben? My god! Where is Ben?

He fell out! He fell out!

The tape rewinds like in an editing suite. It makes that zipzipzip rewind sound. And again the cars arrive with Evan wailing, and a blank space where Ben had been. Horror. Horror. Horror.

Motherhood makes you nuts.

+++

Kate:  I’m not afraid of you, you know.

Death:  I know.

Kate:  I’ve seen you before.

Death:  I know.

Kate:  I just don’t like it when you hang around my family.

Death:  Not many people do.

Kate:  You’re just so fucking arbitrary.

Death:  Am not.

Kate:  Are too.

Death:  Am not.

Kate:  Oh christ. Stop that.

Death:  Oh christ. Stop that.

Kate:  Quit copying me!

Death:  Quit copying me!

Kate: (glares)

Death: (snickers)

Kate:  You’re like that miserable fuck who hands out parking tickets all day. Isn’t that, like, totally toxic? Again and again you ruin days, every day. Is that really how you want to spend your life?

Death:  (pauses, confused)

+++

On the way to the hospital I stop for flowers and sushi, the same place as always. I glance across to the table by the window and I see me there, pregnant with Evan and staring terrified at a newborn in someone else's stroller. Zip ahead. It is my newborn, my stroller. Zip ahead. I am newly unpregnant with Liam and Ben, walking through those doors in a daze.

"Congratulations!" the woman says. "When are you due?"

Fucking empire waist.

"I'm not pregnant," I am too tired to be merciful. "I had twins a month ago. My babies are in the hospital."

Zip ahead. I scan the case and choose swedish meatballs, chickpea salad, a block of mac and cheese, strawberries, yop. I bring them to my grandmother's apartment and lay out a plate for her, then for Evan and Ben.

"Oh!" she says, watching me change Ben. "I haven't seen him since he was a baby."

We saw you last week. I smile. "It's been a long time, Gram."

Nothing has ever been so good as this Fentiman's Victorian Lemonade. I sip and grimace. Victorians were sour. I don't think I like it. I sip again, and grimace again. Victorians were sour. I sip again.

I look across the atrium at other people and feel more gently towards them than I have in the past. Instead of cruel obliviousness I see, right there, twenty-three journeys. Twenty-three burdens of fear and defiance, each of them different and identical.

I leave a little in the bottle, a beer drinker's habit. I start off for palliative care and imagine wearing a radioactive suit that makes me invisible to the hospital's insatiability. It's not about me or my history. I am there to sit with my grandmother. But still. To abide with someone in their death is to abide with yourself in your own.

+++

I wonder if she can see the clock. I hope not. I don't like the way that clock stares at her. But I do appreciate how it reminds my mother to pass the honour of mothering her mother to the nurses. That she should go home to her kitchen to stir something that smells delicious, to smile through glass as cloud biscuits rise.

Cloud biscuits will always rise. They make home into home, a warm and buttery scent that embraces you the moment you walk through the back door. Cloud biscuits are my mother.

+++

I stroke her hand and tell her she doesn't need to stay awake. I'm not going anywhere, Gram.

She sleeps, heavy but haunted. I wonder what she sees. She answers, her eyes fluttering open.

"They're dancing in Italy. They're dancing in the streets."

"Are you wearing a pretty dress, Gram?"

"Oh, of course."

And she is away again.

+++

Please don't express condolences. It doesn't feel quite right. I'm sad, and we all are. She's the last of four grandparents, all of whom were fixtures my whole life. We can only hope to have such a life as she has, both in length and quality. Death is work, and waiting, staring at clocks, and replaying all we might have done.

Please do this instead. Tell me memories of your mothers. Doesn't matter if they're still here, or if they're estranged. Tell me stories of ghosts and cloud biscuits. Tell me the opposite of arbitrary. Tell me what you'll always remember so that I'll know, and my mother too, that motherhood, as nutty as it makes us, endures through everything.

Even death.

See, in nine months I am supposed to will submit my second manuscript to Nimbus.

The blinking, my god, the incessant blinking. I …

I am …

Laundry. Groceries. Flickr. A paper for a client on social media and branding. Twitter, to share news of my third Tunnock's 1887 milk chocolate mallow tea cookie. Invoicing. Flickr. Researching root canals for preschoolers. An urge to hear Underwhelmed. Tax receipts. Flickr. Twenty abdominal crunches followed by five bicep curls and three minutes of jumping jacks. Or at least three minutes of considering it, from the couch.

I've been anywhere else but here.

Missy is unimpressed. She’s not one for fussing, nor for waiting. She sees a cuff of porcupine quills on a master welder. She wants to tread on permafrost moss and crash a flying beast and engage in illegal sabotage and write to Eric on coded postcards and it’s all stuck at the bottleneck of me.

She tries to help, but I'm thick as bricks.

On a crummy it’s always the broken driveshafts. Has to be put on a flatbed. If the driveshaft breaks the whole thing drops into the mud and the wheels can’t spin.

Don’t ever get stuck behind a moose. They’ll just trot along for twenty minutes in a straight line.

Blackflies wiggle and crawl. Gotta duct-tape your sleeves and shirt collars. Bandana around your ears. You get used to it.

Gil Croteau, too. He's the Crummies' navigator. Lâche pas la patate! Tout le kit!

But how do you start? With the blink, and resigned to a soft stomach.

+++

One hiding place in particular has been a thrill. A distraction, yeah, but a thrill. I'm selling a limited run of fine art photography prints now, here, and holding them in my hands is mind-bending.

I don't tend to make pretty things. I string words together and I can cook well enough, but I'm not crafty or arty as long as you don't count my font fetish and kink for the labels of British foodstuffs. But look! Tactile gorgeousness on cotton rag by a German company that's been making artist's paper since 1584.

Put a sheep's ass on this stuff and it's the prettiest thing you've ever seen. So have a look through. Every six months or so, I'll retire the existing series and replace it with a new one. I'll start shooting as soon as my book editor turns her back.

+++

The other day, Penelope and I sat at a vegetarian restaurant while the peanut butter balls eyed us nervously from behind the glass. First we dealt with the housekeeping of the second edition of The Dread Crew. Tweaks, continuity, special features. Then I gave her the next book, or at least the verbal skeleton of it. And she nodded and interjected with questions readers will ask, because she knows how to nudge, light fires. We knocked ideas around. She told me what she saw as she listened. Then I got home and she sent me an email that said OH MY GOD JUST WRITE IT ALREADY. WRITE!

sweetsaltykate to Penelope  Giant moths instead of butterflies, maybe? Nocturnal, bumping up against windows? will think about it. I'll take a crack at the 2nd edition today, then you can. Will send you another version tomorrow, okay?

Penelope to sweetsaltykate  Perfect, thanks. Tingling about moths.

sweetsaltykate to Penelope  Yeah. I figured you to be that sort of girl.

Penelope to sweetsaltykate  Goddamn it, you hacked my livejournal.

And there, just there, at that moment: I know it. I can do this. We can do this, she and I. For the first book we were foisted upon each other by fate and process, my manuscript unpolished but already complete. This time, we are collaborators. She cracks me up and I'm filled up with this... rush. It's already in there. I just need to start typing.

Every creative thing already lives inside. Every photograph, sculpture, poem, sketch, painting, story.

That's how it always is, you know, for everyone. All we need to do is find the right space, and the will, and facilitate the stretching of creative legs.

And get the hell off twitter.

Sometimes I'm sad about Liam. But I really wish we could go to Thomas and Oliver's house because I could bring my knights and we could play knights cause they have A REALLY COOL CASTLE. And I can yell up to the sky like this:

HAAAAAAAAAAA!

...to Liam. So he can hear. Can we get him down again? WAIT. I know how. I will go to Atlantis in my LEGO NEPTUNE SUB and I will unlock the secret key and then I will travel up into the sky and I will bring him back down again. After I fight the giant squid. I will bring him back here after I get the giant squid with my laser. I will bring Liam TO THE EARTH. So I can talk to him. Okay. Good.

I shrink from 'dead' because death is not the extent of my son. It's too small a word. It’s just something that happened to him. And so I don't tend to pass it on, trying instead, feebly, to plant seeds that open possibilities rather than closing them. It’s not that Evan doesn’t know that Liam died. He does. But 'he died' is not an answer. 'He died' is only more questions.

+++

On sad days I've broached our history, afraid of what I might incite. I've feared indulging my grief at his expense. And so I've only asked this twice in as many years, and in a strange, hesitant mumble.

Do you remember Liam?

No.

You had another brother.

I'm hungry.

He was only two. The NICU was averse to tasmanian devils and steam engines. And so we always said when he's ready which is parental code for I just don't know how to go there yet. And so it was randomly, through bedtime gloom, Ben already purring softly in sleep, when Evan proposed the Atlantis route, and when we settled on our answer.

Where did he go?

Look up.

Not for gates strung with righteous pearls, but for one of nature's most plentiful and accessible sights. Stars, sapphire blue, wind that drags fingers through trees. Clouds of February, plain and grey.

Are clouds hard? How can he walk around up there?

I don't know. How do you think?

He must be really light.

He is a river and the eel that slips through it. He is an eagle and a mouse. He is not afraid. He is united, all together, safe. He is not in that plastic box anymore. He is elsewhere, and nowhere, and everywhere.

There's all that, or there's just

Look up.

Six months ago our dentist said that Evan had a "tiny" cavity, and instructed us to come back in six months or so to get it fixed. Today, it took a mirror on a stick and all of fourteen seconds for her to step back from him, pull me aside and tell me that she suspects he is a werewolf. A werewolf who drinks too much Pepsi.

Then she told me what she saw in his mouth, other than half-chewed accountants.

Five large cavities so far gone that one tooth is half lost. A referral for two root canals, two stainless steel crowns and three fillings. For a boy who just turned five. Heavy sedation at best. Hospital and general anesthesia at worst. For a boy who JUST TURNED FIVE.

Two root canals. He's five. I can't even joke about it.

+++

The lady across the road dropped a can of Mountain Dew into his bag at Halloween and he pulled it back out and gave it to her and said, "Thank you nice lady, but I don't drink beer."

"It's not beer!" she replied.

"Oh. Thank you nice lady, but I don't drink wine."

Yeah I know. Move along. The point is, Evan doesn't know what pop is.

We are unfun (see exhibit A: video game meltdown). We don't buy ice cream or sweets or Sugar Crisp cereal (dammit, Justin) because if you don't have them in the house, they don't cause tantrums. It's easier that way. The kids get dilute juice, if at all, except on special occasions like Christmas or birthdays or Parliamentary prorogue parties.

Alright. So I guess I can joke about it. Mostly because I don't want you to think we're prissy and due for comeuppance. We're responsible, but not uptight. We're cautious, but not unfair. So I show you evidence of Evan's one and only slushie to prove... what, exactly? That we're neither better nor worse than any other parent? Maybe. That I can take my preschooler's two root canals in stride? That would be a lie. I can't relay the news to anyone without crying and asking to be tied up to the nearest whipping post.

Most of the time, we're beyond unfun. We're demented. We pour All-Bran onto yogurt and call it Stick Soup and bring it over to the table singing and ooohing and aahhing like it's gold-leafed croquembouche. They think it's dessert. We slap five and cackle behind our hands.

We brush no less diligently than anyone else with the exception of that family in Blue Rocks that has three sumo wrestlers living in their upstairs bathroom. We do marginally less well than they do at enforcing oral hygiene. Fair enough.

My story, the one I'm still trying to sell to myself? As a rural kid, he's never had a drop of fluoride. We're on a well and always have been. Combine that with naturally soft or cavity-prone teeth and you end up with a kid with a stainless-steel grill who can bite through electrical cable if required. In case that pesky British spy shows up trying to seduce an almost-37 year-old mother of highly dubious performance, we have an in-house villain.

From here we go to a specialist, and urgently. Then the possibility of the hospital to fix it, and then what? I know. Carrot sticks and water until he goes away to university. Clothes made of styrofoam popcorn. Payouts to witch doctors and the mafia. Jesus Christ himself nabbed in one of those Holy Ghost traps that you bait with marshmallow fluff, then tethered to my kid with velcro like an inhuman shield.

+++

This is just the beginning, isn't it?

Doesn't matter if you're babylost or not. Come over and watch Lhasa laugh, and watch her sing, and hear her words. See those people in the audience who brim over with love for her. Like me, you might wish you'd been there to know her. Then listen to Lhasa share a story from her philosopher father—a sensible, sublime bit of thinking that feels like a home.

Because we all wonder. Don't you?

I imagine every person within a fifty-foot radius weeping for the future.

These visions translate into the current-day as for every fifteen minutes you spend sprawled on the couch playing Pokemon’s Revenge, you’ll spend three hours splitting wood, reciting French conjunctions, and hosing out the compost bin.

Not that my kids don't sprawl. I'm a little ashamed to admit they both know that the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. But television's different. Television is big. Heavy. Not pocket-friendly. Only operable by grownups. Almost always accompanied by lego construction and crayola art. Television is pot. Pot makes you relax. Video games are heroin. Heroin makes you think you're a rock star. Then it makes you a ward of the federal government.

Game-addicted kids bleed time, plugged in at the expense of formative input. Screw fresh air and conversation. Those things get in the way of… what? You tell me. I can't imagine how anyone articulates the perceived value of video games other than it's awesome, all I do is charge up the PSP and the kid won't eat or speak for a week.

Actually. That does sound kind of awesome.

+++

Wait. That's not the right one.

Christmas morning. He saw this and became an instant addict. I was busy lolling with my pants unbuttoned, because that's what Canadians do on Boxing Day, and my conviction followed suit. By the time I snapped out of it, ready to take it into the woods for ritualistic drawing and quartering, it was too late.

I hid it in the car. He broke in with a crowbar and disappeared with it for three days. The police picked him up slouched against a construction site on Agricola Street at level 27 of WALL-E's Axiom Adventure. So I set a timer for fifteen minutes or twenty or five. After the beep he would convulse and wail and post-extrication, there was a mushroom cloud above our house and a toxic stench. Tantrum fallout.

For Evan, there is no such thing as justified moderation of what he thinks is fun. Not this kind of fun. So we hid it again. We are officially on pause, not knowing how to proceed. Ban it outright? Hope he forgets? Let him have it and hope the novelty wears off? A video game built to ensnare five-year-olds—and marketed with the tagline 'MAKES KIDS REAL SMART-LIKE'—is buried in my underwear drawer. But it smells a five-year-old. And it wants to return to its master.

+++

DISCLOSURE: circa 1986. It's how I learned to type. Doesn't matter that this is the most recent video game I've ever played. I've seen enough to know it's NOT THE SAME THING. If today's gaming is heroin, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was ketchup.

+++

My kids can have blue hair and moderately discreet tattoos as long as they're not I LUV KAYLEE 4 EVR or I AM A TOTAL KNOB in ancient Mandarin script. They're welcome to explore who they are in any flavour or colour they prefer as long as they're healthy and kind. They're in the living room right now moshing to Stiff Upper Lip. But if they turn out to be chronic gamers I will send them on a Yukon gulag and I will send the bill to fucking Disney.

+++

DISCLOSURE: With the exception of anything that simulates blood-splatter, no ban applies to the arcade in the basement of Gepetto's restaurant at Sugarloaf Mountain, Maine. Because they earn it with sore muscles and rosy cheeks. Because it's totally skunky and vintage and gloomy. And because you can't fit the ride-on Miami Motosquad Racers into the palm of your hand and take it with you to play while you're sitting on the frigging toilet.

+++

Just before he falls asleep, Evan whispers up a perfect balance of sweetness and defiance and OH MY GOD evil has taken root and all is lost and would it help if we became Mormons? Or hippies? Or Newfoundlanders? We will move to the wilds of Labrador. That is what we will do. In the wilds of Labrador there is no such thing as blipping electric green. Only brown.

"I might not have my Leapster, mommy, because you took it away, my Leapster. But you know what about my Leapster, mommy? I still have my Leapster IN MY HEART."

(My own, my only, MY PRESHUS...)

+++

If you're bristling at this because you let your kid(s) play video games, let me be completely clear. Yes. I do believe that you are equipping the next generation's parking lot attendants with everything they need to be productive and interesting people. KIDDING.

I waver, both hysterical and justified. Video games are probably not as bad as I think they are. Video games are probably not as okay as some think they are.

Does everybody do it? Will his friends in grade five talk of nothing else? Will we make him feel excluded? Are principles doomed by osmosis? Am I too fucking prissy? Does this amount to me presuming to dictate his interests? Is it ever okay or fruitful to do that, or at least to try and nudge? Am I wrong about ketchup and heroin?