We sit across the table from one another as two strangers, two sisters.

She had emailed me, having seen the blog, to say thank you for helping me feel like I’m not alone. I’m pregnant with triplets but we just learned our one girl is slipping away, and we’re so sad, just when we’d bought the stroller for three.

I wrote back to say where are you?

Turns out she was a short drive away in Halifax, hearing sad news from the very doctors who gave us the same.

I walked into Fred’s and scanned each table, a blind date for all intents, and saw her almost immediately smiling at me, blooming in a way that attracts public enthusiasm.

I don’t know what to tell people, she says after we’re settled. The doctors tell me to say it’s twins but I can feel her in there, kicking beside her brothers. She’s right up here, you know (resting her hand on the top of her roundness), and I want to say ‘she is here too, and we want her so much, and we’re proud of her.’ But we’re losing her and there’s nothing I can do.

I could think of everything and nothing to say to her. We sat together, Ben in my arms, and then Ben in her arms. She glowed with anticipation as he wriggled and gurgled, propped on the shelf of her beloved three.

Since then she has written me with the news that her baby girl has gone, to be born still, alongside (god tinkering madly) two brothers. She wrote to me today:

I had a dream last night. I dreamt that I was having the c-section and the two beautiful boys were there, safe and sound. And then they took a young fawn out of my belly. The fawn slowly found her legs and went away. I woke up feeling peaceful for the first time since we were told our news. I am not sure what it means but it brought me comfort. My husband thinks it means her spirit is now free.

A certain somebody sent her mama this dream, this beautiful message, with great intention, don’t you think?

Stepping into parenthood, we are all blindfolded until we come out the other side. Of every hundred, one or two of us disappear into an abyss. I don’t do too well with silence, tending to fill it with chatter. But you and I, the other one or two, we speak with eyes and mouths and heart-memory and vibration, sending back and forth to one another yes, yes, I know this, and it is mine, and yours, and we share it together through a link more powerful than what else we may or may not have in common.

After I die I will become this mama, this mama right now, crossing the good end of the River Styx with one foot up on the bow, empty mai-tai wrap around my waist, looking off to the horizon and on my way to be with Liam, to feed and burp and pat his rump and coo in his ear, to fulfill my purpose. I am not afraid anymore because I will have a job to do, breasts decades younger and ready for him, heavy with milk.

You look at me and smile. You know there’s a wondrous sort of peace to feeling this way, that it’s not blackness at all. You know what it means to be a forever-mama to all our children, even to those who never made it outside.

I’m so happy to know you, just to know you’re out there, sharing dreams.

++++++++

Since before losing Liam I’ve puzzled at this almost frantic compulsion to get pregnant again as quickly as possible. Fear, such intense fear, and dread and lack of confidence in my body as a safe vessel; guilt at what this desire implies to Ben, as though he is not enough as one; guilt for what this desire implies to Liam, as if he is replaceable.

(Compounded by the very real complication of Justin being so traumatized about pregnancy and birth that he says, quite seriously, that to attempt another I’ll have to recruit someone else.)

Even with the freshest of slates, getting pregnant requires a huge leap of faith. You may have a glorious labour and a robust baby only to have that same child become sick ten years later. Or, twenty years later, fall in with a bad crowd and become addicted to some vice and break your heart. To become a parent is to become unspeakably vulnerable, but there can’t be true joy, or discovery, or growth, without risk. Everyone knows this, senses it on some primal level — but mamas and dadas like us know it so much more vividly, having been struck by lightening.

My job as a mama feels unfinished, like there’s another soul — the one that was Liam’s, maybe — that wants a chance, wants me to try again to be its vessel. Whether I can achieve this without my husband fleeing to Mexico is debatable.

Bitter bravado, and hope, and fear, and irrational babylust tethered together. Here’s hoping they can stew companionably for at least a couple of years yet. I’m not that Irish to be up for a one-two punch, nor that nuts.

It was the same field of glaciers we’d always hike up to, our packs stuffed with familiar necessities: beer, bacon, steaks, more beer, mild hallucinogens (that was only once, stewed into hamburger helper, and it would have been rude to say no and after all, it smelled delicious, and that was the night I spotted a passing fleet of UFOs).

All things sure to attract good times and ravenous, post-hibernatory black bears alike (rocket scientists, the lot of us).

We’d hike to the top of the mountain in the heat of summer, set up camp at the base of the glacier and watch as building-sized chunks of ice would crack free of the mother like the blow from a cannon and tumble down the snowfield, ass over teakettle, to rest at the top of where the rock began.

We’d stomp up higher through knee-deep snow to where we could crawl under the lip of the ice and feel its ancient drips on our backs. Then in the midday sun we’d sometimes strip down, sometimes not, and boot-glissade down the steep, smooth snow, soak hot, stifled feet in rushing creeks, scramble atop giant boulders to take in the view of a trio of brilliantly clear emerald lakes.

We’d curl up, backs against trunks and down sleeping bags cinched up around our noses in front of a fire, experience-drunk and giggling, convinced that everything we ate — crackers with peanut butter, instant oatmeal, tuna from the can, mr. noodle — was surely the finest fare in the whole province that night.

On one trip the film advancer of my point-and-shoot broke. Unknowing, I kept snapping. When the pictures came back there was accidental art: five exposures on one frame, the print just rediscovered.

1. Left of centre there’s a back view of me, hair freshly cropped to the skull for the first and last time, peeling off sweaty clothes at the lakeshore;
2. At the centre is me moments later, crouched at the water's edge and about to jump in (followed by screaming, and flailing, and chattering back to shore);
3. To the right edge are friends Matt and Daphne, resting halfway up the trail;
4. Just to the left of Daphne’s head, faintly, is Justin glissading down the snowfield; and
5. To the far left is all four of us standing in front of the glacier cliff, which runs the breadth of the shot.

We didn’t have much money, and we lived in musty basement apartments. We were living though, living so vividly and so freely that I can’t help but smile to remember it.

Now, we’re all parents. Daphne and Matt are visiting from Vancouver and they stayed here for a couple of days, gave us (particularly Evan) ample opportunity to fall head-over-heels in love with their girl Sadie.

There’s an immense, chewy satisfaction about making this transformation alongside dear friends who were there when we were all just us. We watch each other as mothers and fathers, grinning widely, content to let our kids be cooler than us, tipsy in the thick of toddler adoration.

Indescribably happy times ten years ago, and indescribably happy times two days ago. Life explosions and upheaval and flotsam resettling in between the two, changing everything, but no one minding a bit that a cheerio-littered floor lies at our feet rather than emerald water that sparkles with glass-like brilliance.

Just now Evan looked over my shoulder at this

and said with delight, "It's-a Ben, it's-a BEN , he's-a just like Leee-am. Where is Lee-am?"

It's been a long time.

"Liam is a star in the sky, Evan. He was a very sick little baby, and he's better now, even though he's not with us like Ben is. He's in our hearts, in here." and I patted him on the chest.

"Leee-am," he said slowly, deliberately, eyes lowered to my hand.

The sky has been scrubbed clean by thunderstorm. It was one of those diamonds-on-black-velvet nights, stars so thick you’d have to brush them away from your face if you went outside.

I curled up in bed staring out the window, enclosing Ben, basking in reflection. And I felt so blessed, and so robbed, and as I do at least once a day I cooed to Liam in the dark, wished him free.

+++++++

They were our mentors, our guardians, our advocates, our teachers, the nurses and doctors of the NICU. Yet when it came time to part company, we bolted without looking back.

They’re on my mind every day. How I should have thanked them, written to them, hijacked the local television station to tell the world how incredible they are, how gentle they were with our babies and with us. But I haven’t, emotionally plugged. I run through each of their faces in my mind, conversations, milestones, long hauls. There’s the one who was there when they were born… the one who rallied for the first tandem skin-to-skin… the one who took him away. These faces are almost too loaded now, painfully evocative despite the kindness we always found there.

I don’t know if I could ever find the words to thank them — especially not within the confines of a hallmark card. But the radio silence seems unfitting, too. Someday I’ll collect myself enough to reach out, close off that chapter with the same consideration they gave to us.

In the meantime I hope a couple of them check in here to see how their charge is coming along, and pass it on.

+++++++

We were lucky, when Liam died, that there wasn’t much we had to return. It’s not as though we had a baby blue ‘li’l sluggers’ nursery ready with two matching cribs and two carseats and two of everything else. I figured I had two boobs, and at least for the immediate future, that would be enough.

But this morning I went to a local secondhand shop to drop off our extra Jolly Jumper, the one indispensable thing we had to duplicate along with fetuses. I cried all the way there remembering the day we bought it, a couple of weeks before it went wrong. I had been just starting to get past the holyshitness of twins, just starting to anticipate these two little people, imagining who they would be. Imagining them jumping side-by-side, giggling, with Evan in hysterics, egging them on.

So this morning the extra one became Liam’s, no longer needed. And as I blearily drove I couldn’t stop the he’ll never jump and he never heard music and he never breathed the air outside and tears dripped off my chin and then from the backseat Ben farted, one of those rich, healthy farts, and he mewed contentedly, and the spell was broken.

+++++++

In high school I nurtured the fantasy as everyone did, replayed again and again what I thought were emotional pellets dispensed by various objects of unwarranted affection. It was a painful, humiliating reflection, the kind I relished and resented all at the same time, that of an unrequited sort.

The time I spend with Liam is that kind of melancholy. It’s all I have, so I hold it close.

I don’t mean for every post to be Liam This, and Liam That, and Woe, Woe, Woe. If you saw me you’d think I was alright, not shuffling any more or less than anyone gladly beholden to the all-night whim of a newborn’s appetite.

I’m not drowning the way I was. And so much of that is thanks to crud-skimming, the release of getting these words out to you.

Because after that there is light to be seen, and there is love.

I just stumbled across your blog, she writes. We’ve been here in this NICU for three months with our baby, and you write about the way we feel, in this hell.

Her words on the screen stare out at me and I am instantly humbled. Because, you see, I’d just been stealing a few moments with email and such, sitting here with a slice of toasted cinnamon brioche with too much butter and a piping hot mug of tea. And Ben is complaining in his bassinette, threatening imminent needfulness.

And I think to myself just a few more minutes… I haven’t been able to put him down all morning… there’s so much I need to get done…

Her message shatters this growing oblivion, brings me back to that desperate hole when I thought if only I could hear them cry through all this intervention, if only I could feel them pawing at me, to have them need me hungrily, to need skin and warmth and rocking in a safe place that belongs to us… I would sell my soul.

Thank you, Lisa.

Love and strength to you as you’re initiated into this unfortunate sisterhood. Even though you don’t believe it now, and even if you feel it shouldn’t, life will be some version of normal once again.

+++++++++++

The day I went into labour our contractor had broken ground on an addition of two bedrooms. Since then — since early labour, a crash c-section, two babies, a NICU stay, then one baby, then a mumps scare (don’t even ask) and now a newborn — we’ve finished the addition, replaced all the windows, gutted the kitchen, tore up and replaced all the floors, built an office, knocked down a few walls, stripped off the godforsaken exterior vinyl in favour of wooden clapboard… basically rebuilt the house. Much of it done DIY by the royal ‘us’ (Justin and my dad). And I’m working again.

And in other related news, I’m still married.

You don’t know your true capacity for upheaval until it’s tested.

In the hospital I said “let’s paint it pumpkin” in a cranky fit of anti-genericism and here we are now, living happily in a house that is ORANGE! because when you live in an ORANGE! house it’s not only invigorating but entertaining to watch all the mint-green and baby-blue and porridge-coloured retirees walk past with their golden retrievers and their tilley hats and their dropped jaws.

So now when we give directions to our ORANGE! house I say politely you just take a left at the cove then stay left at the fork in the road and then I take out the megaphone to say …THEN WATCH FOR THE ORANGE! HOUSE. THAT’S US.

+++++++++++

If I have to look at one more piece of paper, fill out one more form with NAME OF DECEASED: LIAM STEWART INGLIS printed on the top, I’m going on strike. Words I cannot even utter for what they refer to, like cremation, taunt me in certificate form, swing back and knock me between the eyes like boomerangs. Insult after insult in triplicate, injustice that demands bureaucratic ownership.

As his beloved twin sprawls-eagle on my chest like a dog with a bone, pinning me to the couch on this foggy afternoon, I am in my place.

Mama: PLEEEEEASE can I have some fishstick? PLEEEEEASE pretty pretty pretty pretty PLEEEEASE?

(boy giggles, places hands over previously shunned bowl)

Boy: NO!

Mama: I’m gonna git me some fishyfish, mama’s hungry hungry huuuuungry! (roars terrible roar, gnashes terrible teeth, rolls terrible eyes, shows terrible claws)

Boy: NONONO!

Mama: YESYESYES!

Boy: NO! (shoves whole fishstick into mouth)

Mama: Whaaa! (tricksy mama cackles triumphantly inside head)

Boy: Ha! (tricksy son cackles triumphantly out loud)

++++++++++

He is The Borg. Countermeasures only work for a few effective shots: then he assimilates my strategy and once again demands popsicles over peas.

He is bossame, bossayou. Mama NO! No snack mama. I busy. Mama go over dere. I no poop. (toxic green cloud promptly fills room)

In comparison to this boy, babyrearing is about as taxing as keeping care of a chia pet. Suddenly we’re struck with just exactly how twitched up we were when we had Evan, and how marvellously straightforward infants are.

Feed. Burp. Cuddle. Sleep. (repeat)

For his new baby brother it’s that squashy sort of enthusiasm, the kind that has him playing horseshoes with his potty training toilet seat and Ben’s stationary head.

He stops strangers in the street to say I ABIG BRUDDER. My widdle brudder is ABEN. He is ABABY. He no talk. They say Oh! Indeed and Well my goodness as they should, and we go on our way, the two of us walking well above the ground.

++++++++++

As soon as it came up on screen I started to cry. Ben’s head, the faint outline of his skull and then, inside, more or less a dark-grey void. Looks good said the technician, thankfully engrossed in her work and not in me.

The last cranial ultrasound I saw was Liam’s. It was white, mostly. The remnants of an explosion, deciphering damage like trying to pick out the perimeter of a particular cloud on an overcast day. No wonder they were shocked that he was able to orchestrate a sneeze I think to myself, and loss washes over me like a pounding, the visual before and after of what should have been two identical boys.

I close my eyes and rub my lips back and forth across the fuzz on Ben’s head, grateful but thinking love, love, bittersweet forever.

A commenter on the last post drove by and with her head lolling out the window like a golden retriever she barked Lordy, this is depressing! and I’d never seen her before and then she was gone and it got me to thinking about declarations and litterbugs and a few other things.

What’s depressing? Losing a child? Well, yeah. Sure.

Among many other things, some of which I may or may not encounter in life: divorce and sickness and wasted years and squandered opportunities and addiction and falling in with the wrong sort and living uneventfully but never being brave and the soul rotting away from disuse and mediocrity and chronic lack of stimulus.

All tragic, earth-shattering, consuming fires that burn inside all of us right alongside I have GOT to start drinking more water and please tell me my nose is not as big as I think it might be and if I don’t get some exercise at some point in this life I will lose the ability to move at all and vines will grow on my stillness and pull me into the earth and that will be the end.

We’re all struck dumb with wanting more, wanting to be more, speculating endlessly on the turns of our storyline.

But this state of productive dissatisfaction is what motivates us to act on 5% of our complaints, or learn from 1% of our mistakes. And that’s something. Or to spend 90% more than we should at discount outlets in search of outfits that our better self would wear, as if that would be enough to spark that better self into being.

(For me it was sexy, clicky shoes. I was always more successful, wearing those shoes. Which is why, sidenote, we just threw out our holeysoles (a.k.a. crocs). Justin wanted to put them on the barbeque to see what would happen, to send them to the next world in a blaze of glory. But then no, because after all, they are shoes THAT MELT and what has our grass ever done to us to deserve being cursed to a lifetime of being tip-deep in coagulated croc-goo?)

A roundabout way to get to the point, croc-disposal included, of PERSONAL GROWTH and SELF-BETTERMENT. The pursuit of which is a really, really good thing: even if it just means that this year I managed to reduce my intake of alpha-getti by two cans a month.

I like seeing those words in all-caps, akin to the instant cures you could buy at a turn-of-the-century general store. McCALL’S SLIPPERY ELM ANTI-SLUG TONIC. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, be not paralyzed with the balm of contentedness!’

We’re clumsy things, humans, out here trying to dodge bullets. But you can’t, can you? As sure as you can’t dodge the weather. We’re all destined, in one flavour or another.

Accepting this isn’t necessarily pessimism. It’s a healthy sort of resignation, the kind of thing we need to get out of the way before we can open ourselves up fully to a breadth of living, as messy as it can get. To be doggedly open to mystery and beauty and possibility in spite of what conventional wisdom would call being dealt a shitty hand.

We have to plod ahead, keep putting one foot in front of the other no matter what unfairness crashes into us. To keep seeing and tasting and breathing in gorgeousness whenever it graces us, despite demons in the dark.

That’s why it surprised me, the drive-by.

What happened to us has been like the peeling of a cloudy film off my eyeballs. I see things now in such vividness, in Liam’s light. And it’s beautiful. Sometimes achingly so, but not remotely the sort of thing you could write off with one measly word. I hope you can see that. Can’t you?

The greatest gift — the thing I’m honoured and duty-bound to give to my elders and those who have passed before me (Liam included) — is to not be a source of worry. To keep exploring and appreciating and moving forward, to not be defined by passerby as drowning in rain.

Before I open my eyes I can feel the bed vibrating faintly, a constant, growing rumble that is half-real, half-dream. I curl up into a ball and fixate on it, seeking a source, letting it roar underneath me like some heartburn-suffering beast in the depths.

Liam comes to me alone in the kind of darkness that has nothing to do with night. Not him exactly but the demon of what happened to him, the caricature of memory that taunts and stings. The shaking woke me up but the demon keeps me fitful, clinging to me at night when I am unable to shoo it away with the blessed busyness of life.

See look here it cackles, holding a vision in front of me against my will.

Liam on that morning, moments after I cried desperately and for the first time prayed to a relatively unknown God to please take him, to help me let him go. And that very second the air lightened and I knew he was gone. I placed him on my lap then, let my eyes rest on his shell, the injured body that would pin him to the earth no more.

That sight is the face of my demon, the memory I can’t bear to keep nor lose.

I love you lili, I’m so proud to be your mama.

How I miss you though, how I wanted you.

I wonder how I can ever be ordinary again with this thing camped out in my soul, this thing that finds me in solitude with its horrible visions and sadness and haunting. Not the kind of warm, sweet haunting that you summon, that wraps you in light and says I’m okay now mama, I’m everywhere and I’m waiting for you but the kind that leaves me shaking long after the beast has calmed.

Sometimes I reach down and touch the incision: still painful, queeby numbness. It will never let me forget that night.

This purple bump-strip is the remains of a nightmare. But then… sacred, too.

Liam was here
Ben is here
They passed through here, their opening.

And I sigh and think well, it just is.

+++++++++++

Three months ago to right now I was shopping for maternity clothes in a fit of nothing-fits desperation. Three months ago this afternoon I came home to find an excavator in the backyard, digging the hole that would become the two extra bedrooms we’d need for two extra boys. Three months ago tonight I sat with a heating pad on my back, unknowingly breathing through contractions, crying in frustration that I just wasn’t tough enough to bear twins.

You know how the rest goes.

I just can’t believe it’s only been three months, the lifetime we’ve lived since then.

Today was Ben and Liam’s due date, and tomorrow is Ben’s birthday. His age is now comprised of an adjusted slash: three months / zero. The milestone countdown begins now. Six weeks to a smile, that’s the one I’m hungriest for.

A measly three months. And I’m ten times the mama I was before by measure of both darkness and light.

+++++++++++

After a long, long night:

Justin: Can I do anything to help?
Kate: You could lactate.
Justin: I’ll do my best.
Kate: I’d buy a ticket to see that.
Justin: Would you give my performance two nipples up?
Kate: I wish my nipples could point up.
Justin: <long, contemplative pause> I wish… I wish… I didn’t have… hair on my back?
Kate: I love you.
Justin: I know.

People watch him, agape, as he flies past in a blur. It’s been this way all afternoon, the joie de vivre. Is he always this way? they say. He hasn’t even had any cake yet.

Unless he’s agro-energetic, which is rare, I let him run. Especially now. No harm beyond spectacle, beyond a few stiff-upper-lippers wondering when on earth I’m going to yank back on the leash.

But no, not today. Run boy run, all clammy scruff and foodie fingers. Burst up and down and hurl yourself at least once into every lap, begging MO MEAT PWEEEZE! and imping handfuls off of O.P.P. (other people’s plates) and batting eyelashes and, at the pinnacle of exasperation, saying I WUB YOU! and galumphing away, shoes on the wrong feet, and tripping spectacularly, landing in a tangle of limbs and giggles.

Having lost one son, the others will not be unhinged as though enough free rein for three has been dispersed among two.

But to see Evan so full of relentless charm, panting with exuberance… it’s like watching a horse you’ve got money on. I’m on my feet in the stands yelling Go! Go! Go! and as long as no harm is done and manners are loosely interpreted as best as a two-year-old can, I am his mama, mindful of more revelling and less propriety.

++++++++

People watch him, agape, as he murmurs on my chest curled up like a kitten. It’s been this way all afternoon: he nurses, he stretches, he farts, he sleeps. Is he always this way? they say. So small, so still.

Not for long, I think to myself, smiling. Not for long.