Apples.

Little moss-stalks.

Something that looks like grass but isn't. It's soft, and waxy, and all in a clump. It's greener than green. I keep wondering what's going to peek up from its middle.

Pie.

There's fairies at the creek, not rainbow-sparkles-glitters ones but muddy ones, the ones who make space under the deadfall and come out at night to scold the crows. I give this a ting-ting-tingle, like we always do, and I whisper. But not too loud. They're sleeping.

A recent Dark Rye assignment teaches me that dandelions are salad. There's lots.

Hosta, the most obliging.

Imminent scraping-cramp.

Back inside misty and flushed and nibbled by blackflies and he's still there curled up, just so curly and warm, and I pry one boot off and then the next, and I pat across the floor to him and say Right here, right on my smacker! And he puckers, and we smooch, and he smiles big and wipes his face on his sleeve, and so do I. And I put the kettle on thinking loppers; seed; rake; saw; pastry.

He is hours from five years old, the eve of meeting him and his twin. The anniversary of the last day I was that person. That echo of the upset mews of a two-pound boy in a plastic box—the good, healthy upset, a sustaining little fire.

What's this mean?

I squeeze—squeeze—squeeze his hand. He smiles.

I—love—you!

Yes, baby, my always-baby. He runs, clip-clop, and I chase, always.

Please remove me from all lists for all campaigns and clients.

Please remove me from all lists for all campaigns and clients.

Please lift your lip up over your head and swallow.

Please, just please, leave me alone. I don't give a shit about Macy's ShoeSanity! Campaign, or fighting for womens' pelvic health, or the Thank-A-Mom movement sponsored by Nabisco, or your 'Mommy Getaway' sweepstakes. I don't give a shit now and I won't next week. Not even if you offer me a new pair of slippers will I give a shit, and neither will my readers. Leave me alone and never email me again. I don't care if you're NBC, ABC, or PETA. When you email me wanting me to help you sell something—products or ideas—you suck.

The Babble thing was nice, but I'm going to need to change my email, shut down my website, and renounce my citizenship in order to get away from this unending barrage of people who think, because Babble called it, that I'm influential in a way that could sell the Swiffer Wetjet. This is not some backhanded self-congratulatory thing like <squeaky> Ooooh all these pesky awards, look at my inbox and all the hundreds of unread messages from all these unknown powersuits who want a piece of me! Ooooh this pesky popularity! because the truth is, I'm not influential, I'm not popular, and whenever a public relations person knocks on my door, I grind them into a corse porridge and stew them up with butter, cream, and figs.

That's with a public relations degree. That I have. That's mine. I know. That was a long time ago. I was tipsy.

I'm not trying to position myself as too radical for corporatization, or too 'authentic' (I loathe that word). I just think that 95% of modern marketing is uninventive, manipulative, predictable slosh that's a pox on our culture, and especially on the internet. I don't want to be a part of it. 

That's with fifteen years of experience in Marketing. I'm not just mouthing off, and I'm not talking about you and your blog. I'm just cranky. And whenever I want to feed my crank, here's what I do: I go to Pinterest without logging in.

THERE. ARE. NO. WORDS. CRYING THANK YOU!!

ANIMAL PRINT!!!

JESUS HIS FOOTPRINTS R FOOTPRINTS! YOUR A BELIEVER TOO ARNT YOU!!

PORK CHOPS!!!

I can't figure out what I want anymore. What's this story, anyway? I'm never going to live blog the unravelling (alright, fine: the restructuring) of my family. I don't feel comfortable saying all that much about my kids. I don't know why. It's been too long since Liam died to continue exploring his absence, because then it feels like I'm trying to reclaim my Bereaved Blogger membership card. Nothing feels acceptable anymore—not even being happy. It hurts, desperately. I'm replaced, thoroughly. I can literally watch them sail away into the sunset from my upstairs window, as they ought to, giving my kids what they love when I'm just here, in this house surrounded by mud and rock. I don't know how to start the mower, if I ever get topsoil and plant grass rather than just shuffling around inside and stopping every now and then to stare out a window and mutter Hmm. That's a lot of mud and rock. I did all this. I dismantled everything. I don't deserve congratulations, understanding, forgiveness, or community. I would lose a bake-off. I don't deserve to put forward my version, my narrative, when there are at least three or four other angles on me, on what I did. I don't know how to reconcile this grief, this new kind of loss, with the old grief, the first loss, and this space. I've got no interest in parent blogging. I come here and stare at a three-week-old stinker and wonder when I'm ever going to have anything to say other than 1) completely abstract, disconnected rambling; 2) non-specific regret; or 3) posts about how my blog is dying, and maybe it should. Then BING! Hi, <firstname>! Hope you're well! We're spring-tastic! First-prize winners will receive their favorite seersucker espadrille wedge pump!

I can't imagine who waits three weeks or a month to read this anymore. The internet offers attention—just a general attentiveness to your state of mind—a nod, a hand on the knee, an ear. But right now, I don't feel like I deserve it. I created this, took everything apart. Being alone and saying very little is my penance. Not soliciting ass-directed sunshine, because I know what that prompts. She's nothing special. Look at what she did. She's not a coper but gosh. She really has a lot to say about herself. They don't know how she really is.

And so I sit here scowling at horrific text art and imagining bleached smiles, cope-worthy sparkliness, and feeling like I've got nothing, at least not outwardly. Then I remember the time of year, the impending date, the grocery bags full of rainbow birthday candles and cellophane and chocolate loonies. But I don't feel compelled to ask for help with it, or to narrate through it. It sucks, and do I, and so does this, and so does Pinterest, and I don't know what to do about any of it.

I don't want to talk about why we blog or why we stop. I don't really care, honestly. I also don't want anyone to interpret this as one of those faint-swooning 'I might quit, I might quit...' posts. It's not. It's just a Tuesday afternoon. So why don't you tell me how you are? Share the worst Pinterest thing you've seen in a while. Or tell me something to snap me out of this. Whatever you like. Just don't try and convince me that PR people aren't delicious. Don't even try.

Then grappling. I was not a good wife. I was a sad, unreachable wife who sulked for a psychic. I itched around my scar and realized that I can't feel a thing, down deep, underneath it. I wonder what else is numb. That scar gobbled up my marriage and spat it out. Maybe that's what it does. Gobbles up and spits out. My belly is a venus flytrap. Beware, Seymours.

+++

Looking at pictures of my friends, weepy. University, high school, the Outer Banks, all the places between. Scrolling through so many smiles. It makes me want this house packed full of women. Women squashed up against the glass of every window with fistfuls of Lauranne's frozen aero bars and Michelle and her buddies are clearing a space to light stuff on fire, and me and Daphne and Leah are in a corner eating eggs benny and Eve is wearing a yellow dress like the human daffodil she is and Alison is ranting about how I always mix up Tasmania and a whole other country and I try to yell SHRIMP ON THE BARBIE! but my mouth is full. Then me and Daphne and Leah go AUUGGGH GOD and unbutton our pants. And Leigh and Jeanette are all huggy and there are so many others there too, and you, and it's loud. Catherine and Bon deep into it in some corner and they're smoking, jezebels. I wonder what they're talking about. I always do. They're all here, and they're all fucking scarred, and scared, and I need them.

"Yeeah. Bwains are diskusting."

"Brains are gooey."

"Yeeah. Bwains are gooey."

"But not zombie brains."

"Not zombie bwains."

"Zombie brains are green."

"Yeeah. Gween."

+++ 

Taxes and RRSPs and detangling and I serve as the counter to charmed and charming, bright and unsullied. But they're mine they're mine they're mine they're mine they're mine and it's muscular. It's got nothing to do with what makes sense. Muscles only remember shrapnel. They twitch uncontrollably with But but but. Everything is happening all at once and it leaves me curled up in Evan's empty bed either staring at the ceiling, or working until 3:30 AM again. I write pitches and press releases and brand strategies surrounded by a legion of protective bionicles. I sit frozen in front of stolen television to watch werewolves rip heads off vampires because werewolves ripping heads off vampires is better than thinking.

The sun beams through the front in the morning, from the back in the evening, and then it's dark again. What did I do today? and the voice of a doldrum yawns You waited and then the growl of a dog named Tock.

There is a finite number of times in your life you'll pick them up. One day they'll get too heavy, too distant, too cool, and you won't know it at the time but that'll be the last. There are other numbers too. All the words you'll speak, write, regret. You just used up one day of a finite number of days. You used it to figure out something to say that appeases real-life demons and imaginary responsibilities but it isn't any sort of truth because you're muzzled. You've dressed up shame and called it dignity. Facades and half-sad faces and parallel universes where no body failed and nobody died and everyone gets to sail into sunsets except there's no such thing as parallels unless you draw them with mathematics, and there are no sunsets in mathematics. And so that's a messed-up way to spend one day of a finite number is what I think.

Tock huffs and leaves the room.

+++

"I love you, Ben."

"I love you, Evan."

It always hangs there in the dark.

"I love you, mommy. You're—the worst mommy in the whole world!"

They giggle, conspirators. I stamp my feet on my way to tuck Ben into his Benvelope. I stamp my feet and bark and cross my eyes and snarl and stick out my claws and and bare my fangs and yell I AM NOT! and they shriek.

"No no mommy—you're the best mommy!"

I am Mary Poppins, patting my hair back into its tidy bun, and they giggle The worst! The best! The worst! The best! and I am hunchback, ballerina, swamp thing, fairy.

I wish it would stick, the thing I'd prefer, the way a doldrum sticks.

What are you? Why?

To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it. ~ C.C.

I am in love. That's really all it is. I just sit here going back and forth like Tidy. Scruffy. Tidy. Scruffy. Tidy? Scruffy? But it's all beside the point because I'd take either/both slightly warmed. Time travel except I'm seventeen. I'd go back and I would be corruptible but not-yet-corrupted. A little faux doe-eye. It would be 1923, when pale was still alabaster and when Charlie Chaplin was still slightly warm.

It was a downhill tumble that started with a homemade gramophone.

"What's a gramophone?" said Evan.

"A record player," I replied.

"What's a record player?" he asked.

Illumination.

"A long time ago we didn't even have iTunes. We played records. When she was a little girl, grammy didn't have television."

"NO TELEVISION?!" He blinked. "But were there movies?

"Yes."

"What were they like?"

"They were... well. Let's look." 

Why are the credits at the beginning? Why is there no talking? WAIT STOP. What's she doing? She left the baby in the car! Why did she leave the baby in the car? Is she crying? Why is she crying? The baby! The baby is crying! WAIT WHO IS THAT. Are those bad men mommy? The man took the car! A gun! The baby!

4:50. Evan reads. HIS MORNING PROMENADE. The Tramp walks on screen. A lady dumps garbage out her window. He dodges it. Another lady dumps garbage out her window. It falls on his head. I fall in love DIRTY THOUGHTS DIRTY THOUGHTS and my children meet their Everyman.

Since then we've sat rapt DIRTY THOUGHTS in front of The Kid, City Lights, The Circus, Modern Times, The Gold Rush, and The Great Dictator, my childrens' first fittingly ridiculous exposure to Hitler.

What's a Juden?

Oh baby, he's yelling like that because he doesn't like Jewish people.

Why?

Because Hitler was silly and mean, the meanest ever, and Charlie Chaplin knew it before anybody else did.

In 1940, Charlie-as-Hitler, post-speech, gets bumped and falls tumbling down a flight of stairs, then rights himself to spit enraged German at an underling. In 2012, two children erupt into giggles.

When kids watch silent films, it's not that lazy, unthinking story consumption of Pixar or cartoons or anything else we know. It's reading. When they're watching The Kid, they're pert. They're deciding for themselves what's happening. They worry for Charlie. They wonder why his gloves are torn, why his shoes are too big and his jacket so tight. They relate to his gentlemanliness. He might be the very first Good Guy, the Tramp.

Jim knows all this already and I guess I knew he knew, but I never took him up on it until The Unexpected Gramophone. He might say that Modern Times is a comment on industrialization, and the image of his Little Tramp persona as a cog in a machine makes desperation and indignity palpable. Or that silent films are a neglected and misunderstood art form. I say I'd give Charlie Chaplin a sponge bath. I want pincurls and a time machine because he's brilliant, and brilliance is timeless, and brilliance transcends minor details like death, as do crushes, and I bet he was real, real filthy.

+++

I left Twitter. I didn't like it anymore.

+++

Do you ever wonder if your soul mate is dead? What happens then? What if the universe sends you your soul mate but the universe gets mixed up and your soul mate is delivered to you as a stray cat that you're inexplicably drawn to despite intense allergy? A stray cat that burrows inside your shirt.

Is that you?

+++

Kate and Char-lie, sittin' up a tree. Charlie catches her a mouse and makes her happ-happy.

Okay. So. <rolls sleeves, cracks knuckles> Beauty tips.

...

...

...

1. THE THIEF'S SCRUB

Like in 1920s-era orphanages where there's a tin tub and the matron takes a bundle of steel wool to your pickpocketing self. And as she's scrubbing she's muttering about what's come of the world with all these runabouts and the solution involves lye and penance. So. Find something less harsh than steel wool but significantly meaner than those poufs that look like wads of cotton candy, and scrub yourself all over until you can hardly stand it. You'll come out soft as a baby and as sinless too.

2. THE 'RAZOR BLADE'

Apparently there's a thing that takes the hair off your legs and other bits. If you don't pick it up now and then, you'll stick like velcro to your sheets.**

3. EVERYTHING YOUR MOTHER TOLD YOU

Stand up straight. It's the cheapest and most instantaneous way to lose weight, look younger, earn the good cut of clothes, and feel more engaged with the world. Furthermore, quit scowling. And don't pick at your eczema unless you're alone in your car.

4. THE AGE-ADJUSTMENT

You can't mix beer and cherry vodka anymore. Consider how you're taking care of your skin -- if it's the same ritual as you had when you were 23, find someone to slap you across the cheek with a dead haddock. Then set yourself to the task of adjusting, and consistently: moisturize, exfoliate, and use sunscreen. Pond's cold cream, backgammon, Jimmy Dorsey, and lukewarm wheatlets. Whatever works.

5. THE FASHION INVESTMENT 

Oil, electricity, groceries. Details. Choose to worship one of the following: 1) lingerie; or 2) jeans. Spend the necessary money at the necessarily posh shops. Because it's better to spend $100 on one incredible, British-fitted, kickass bra that will change your whole shape and posture for a year than it is to spend $100 in the same time period on six slouchy, discount-rack, wrong-sized, unflattering floppers and loathe them all. Most of us will be able to make an investment like that sparingly -- like one new pair of jeans every spring or two. But when you do, pass on the mall. Go straight to a Queen Street boutique. Do the annual math of all those failed, worn-three-times impulse buys. Skip them all and buy one good pair instead.

6. THE PUBERTY-PERSPECTIVE

Whenever you feel like you're getting old, take a fifteen-minute wheatlet break outside your local high school. Watch how the kids in there hide behind their hair, bristling in their skin. Note the lack of autonomy, facial pustules, stumbly feet, and desperate aromas. Then stand a little taller, realizing how cool it is to know, finally, at least comparatively, who you are.

* I grabbed the title to make fun of it and then I went back and totally clicked it.

** If you equate body hair with a feminist statement or a freedom statement or a body-hair-loving statement, that's fine, but you've clearly never tried to sleep in a flannel bed, and that's all I have to say about that.

+++

Rockefeller's intern wrote back and said: Uuhhh. Do you think you could... uuhhh. Maybe more... just... tips?

I told her it had taken me three straight days to come up with those and that all I had left was the bit about not picking at your eczema unless you're alone in your car. So I added that. She said Uuhhh.

Here's the thing. Mommy or not, women in their mid to late-thirties and forties don't need hot stones or morrocan oil or sixty orgasms in two days to recapture their glow or whatever it is they imagine they had when they were in high school. If age-related invisibility is starting to grate, all you need is effort and even then, just a teeny bit. A teeny bit of makeup. A teeny bit of laundry and bubbles and paint your toes a pretty colour. There aren't any secrets and there aren't any tips.

Just get dressed. You already know how.

+++

I do what I do but none of it's newsworthy. It's just caring enough to do it. Which isn't all the time. I hardly ever dry my hair. It just kinda hangs there and I slap an acrylic toque on top and the ends freeze into little hairsicles and then I get back inside but I don't take off the acrylic toque because mmm, acrylic toque, and so I wear it all day long because it's a fuzzy blanket except it's FOR YOUR HEAD.

Sometimes I dry my hair. Sometimes. And when I do, I feel brighter. Sassy, if you will. Almost... ... ... <whispers> bitchy/fearless.

Help me out. What am I missing? Small things, big things, product. I don't care. I'd just like to know if it's weird to have been so stumped. To have no Tips. Do you?

How's your pucker?

+++

At the university gym, while our kids played in the ball room, I smelled morphine. Sudden, pungent, chemical. I smell morphine. He and Justin chatted, and their voices went underwater while the scent wrapped its palms around my head and locked its fingers, as vivid as the squirt of it through the tube in my baby's scalp. Am I supposed to know this person? Why do I smell morphine? Why does nobody else?

The man mentioned his work, a parking complaint, and I startled, and his face snapped into place and the scent loosened its grip, its point made.

He was once my anesthesiologist.

+++

I see a little boy standing by the creek, and he looks just like Ben, but he isn't. I must have called to him because he turns around with a rock in his hand, smiling. Then he is in a wheelchair, twisted and convulsing, and I can't stop his pain, and I can't stop missing him, loss upon loss upon loss, and the people around the dining room table click their tongues, smug, right about how I did it all wrong.

+++

The word is at the forefront: parallel. Lives, selves, outcomes. The woman who died on the gurney, the ghost. She is a good mother. She takes care of the boy who died too, and he runs, and he knows her, and they throw rocks into the creek beside their little house, the house filled with sunshine.

+++

Declarations echo: what I am, and I'll never forget it.

Is that it, though? It's a curious thing, contentedness. Enough-edness. The rallying cry to Be Present In The Moment. Or just Be Present. Or just Be. Why shouldn't others try? It's like The Gays. They don't run around through neighbourhoods in search of positionally vulnerable heterosexuals (SO SHE THOUGHT. MOOO-AAA HA HA HAAAA.). They're too busy coping with ordinary, regular lives. And that's all the Be Present movement is. They're not proselytizing. It's not about me at all. It's the search for contentedness - the illusion, the attempt - as a coping mechanism and sometimes, it comes out in sentimental ways. Like a showtune. Why not just let them be? Why the contempt via interpretive mime? The class clown is always the saddest. That frothy mixture of sage and self-esteem that follows a solstice bonfire: 'Inglisorum'. I hold a sign on the off-ramp: GOD HATES THE NEW AGE and there's a new-ager with a sign beside me and an arrow and it points at me and reads NOT STANDING IN HER TRUTH. I protest because a good smudging - more accurately, a faith in it, plus the renewal that might follow - is what I most fervently want, and the dreadlocked hoopers on the beach know it, and one of them runs a compassionate hand along my shoulders and I shudder.

Oooooh, thoughts. Thoughts and many more of them. Tempeh sausage with maple syrup and loosely scrambled egg all fluffy with a splash of milk and still-crispy asparagus and thickly-sliced beefsteak tomato fried with panko crumbs and small mushrooms quartered, peppered, and sauteed until brown. And heavy German bread, buttery toasted. And tea. Very, very hot tea.

*re: #15.

What do you fear, desire, and counter with contempt? Or: what's the best breakfast?