I was here, then there, then here again, and I know that makes you sad.

Everything that touched me is in that old box, the sailmaker’s chest, ventilator tape and monitor leads and a snip of the fuzz from the top of my head and an inkpress of my foot, and I know you stare at that box from the outside but you don’t open it.

It’s okay, mama.

This is a strange place, but safe. I belong here. I fade in and fade out, and go places, and am taken places, and I am never alone. I am with you, sometimes, and with daddy. I talk to my twin and he talks to me. I watch my big brother as he spins.

You see my name and you cry, Liam Inglis in print. Sometimes it’s after in memoriam and sometimes it’s after certificate of cremation and you write it over and over again with a phantom pen, with the tip of your finger, imagining the permission slips and the school registrations and the passports that should have belonged to me, my name without me attached to it. And then you summon me, the hole in your chest broke open again and bleeding blackness, and I curl up with you.

Maybe this is exactly as it was meant to be. Maybe I was only ever to take that name to six weeks and then be in stasis, waiting for you. Maybe I was only ever meant to be spirit-brother, spirit-son.

When you let me go I was taken, and you felt it. It was in the room and when you asked, it answered.

The world is bigger for you now that I’ve left it. Darker, more lonely, more tenuous, and broke open, you call it gutted.

But mostly it is just bigger, for what you can’t explain.

It’s okay, mama. I miss you too.

++++++

It is Christmas Eve and I stepped off the curb into it without looking in either direction. Every solitary moment is absorbed by him, or by the vacuum left by him being gone.

Two pregnancies have evaporated all the muscle tone and physical stamina I ever had (ha!), just in time for the kind of passable confidence that ten years of free skiing can produce.

So I cheat, slopping down the hill in what the telemark-half of Justin’s ski patrol crew used to scoffingly call ‘alpinmark’, or skipping the dropped knee in the interest of walking without grunting for the next week.

One of the lockers in the patrol hut at Cypress had a snarky bumper sticker on it that read TELEMARKING: IF IT WERE EASY, IT’D BE CALLED SNOWBOARDING and of course, naturally, someone had scratched out the last word so it read IF IT WERE EASY, IT’D BE CALLED SCOTT MAGLIO but the point remained: this purist form of skiing is akin to splitting ten cords of firewood with a spoon versus electric baseboards.

On this mountain I am an Amish buggy. I need an orange triangle pinned to my jacket that stands for ‘recent pregnancy’, or a sandwich board that says KEEP TWO HUNDRED FEET BACK or HONK IF YOU LOVE TWINSKIN or I BRAKE TO BREASTFEED.

But what the heck. It’s near-miraculous to have this kind of snow before Christmas. And we happen to be here in our beloved Sugarloaf, Maine with Justin’s indispensable parents, who just so happen to not mind being spat up on by our offspring.

+++++

HOW TO KIDNAP COERCE INTRODUCE A TODDLER TO SKIING

In hotel room, ask child calmly if he would like to don snowsuit, ski boots and skis. When child definitively says “No” ask again, pretending you could not care less.

When child says “But all my trains are right here. Why would I want to go outside where it’s cold and where there are NO TRAINS?”, request the assistance of ten conveniently earplugged sumo wresters.

Apply said snowsuit.

Once outside, offer a trial run without skis.

 
Pursue runaway child.

 
In the absence of a burlap sack, use brute force.

 
Extract smiles for camera with rhino tranquilizer and smartie bribery.

When passing state trooper flags you down at the child’s screams of “Put me down! You’re not my daddy!” increase speed.

 
Despite the inclusion of Spongebob Squarepants in this milestone moment, squeal with delight as child’s first pair of skis touch snow for the first time.

Disregard child’s nonchalance.

 
Note wife making obnoxious ass of self as she yell-sings ‘Let’s Have A Race’ from Episode #47 of Thomas the Tank Engine while running backwards and flapping arms.

Ensure your helmet is properly secured.

In the case of bunnyhill pileup, use child as soft landing.

 
Marvel that he likes it — no — loves it.

 
Fall over with equal parts pride and jello-legs.

Repeat every snowday for the next TEN YEARS.

When I stepped off the train in Scotland — one of very few travelling adventures to date — the first thing I did was go to the lowland equivalent of what we'd call a neighbourhood dive and order the traditional breakfast of legend: piping hot black tea, blood pudding, baked beans, fried tomatoes, fried eggs and a steaming bowl of steel-cut (as if there is any other sort in Scotland) oats with cream, brown sugar and pats of butter melting on top.

I've never tasted porridge like that. It melted, it stuck to ribs, glistening, silky and substantial, a desert island meal. I dream of it. I try to replicate it. If I were food I'd marry it and have its gelatinous love-children.

But what, you may ask, do steelcut oats have to do with boobs?

EVERYTHING, says I.

+++++++

Say what you want about being an open mama, an accepting mama, universally supportive and non-judgmental. I'd say I'm all that, but I'd be lying.

I'm supposed to be too enlightened for prejudices like these.

Saying the following, as is required to be socially genteel:  Everyone has to do what feels best for them and their baby.

All the while thinking: Hmph. Bottlefeeders. Perhaps their nipples are insured like J. Lo's badonkadonk for six million dollars. Perhaps they're frigid at the true purpose of their own flesh and all the modesty blankets in Texas wouldn't be enough to contain their totally juvenile squeamishness. 'I tried but it was too hard…' Riiight. If it's not working, you're not doing it properly. Or you'd rather purchase your kid's first food at Wal-Mart.

(Ouch. I know. Breathe deeply, please, and bear with me.)

It came from passionate enjoyment, this secret righteousness. Breastfeeding was easy. So tactile, instinctual, fulfilling, on-the-fly. Why would anyone choose formula when they could do this?

Breastfeeding made me feel so proud, so self-sufficient.

And now for the humble pie.

+++++++

The boys were born and it was two months of NICU pumping, coaxing emotionally soured milk under duress, drip by institutional drip. It was effing hard work that was likely to never pay off, the nurses told me — preemies were notoriously poor breastfeeders, and many would never get the hang of it.

Since milk was the only healing and solace I could offer, I swore to prove everyone wrong.

I did, for a while. Now here's the trouble.

By reckoning of his adjusted age — which puts him at just over 4 months old — Ben has been right in the middle, the 50^th percentile for both height and weight. Then a couple of weeks ago, the pediatrician charted him as falling to the 25th percentile for weight, noting concern.

Give him formula! the world shrieked, or so it felt. You're not making enough milk, and he's STARVING!

After all we've been through, that pissed me off. I needed support, not stress bombs. Seven months of pumping and domperidone and Guinness and water-chugging and tugging and yanking and barracuda-cuddles, and for what? To give up? At seven measly months? Not me. Not after all that.

Supplementing, I fear, is a one-way ticket to breastfeeding's end.

Baby drinks less milk, you make less milk, you feed more formula (repeat until dry).

And I am not a bottlefeeder. Not this soon, anyway. For the sake of vanity, pride, emotions, trauma, identity and my card-carrying membership in the Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding is Not Obscene! group and the Homegrown Dairy Auxiliary and the International Association of Modesty Blanket Burners.

It's not about you or your pride, says the world. It's about what he needs, and he's STARVING.

So offensive, after so much work and commitment to try and do the right thing, to be told you're starving your kid. Eff you, world. Take a pill, world. It's just a dip. He'll come back.

But the charts… the charts. The damn charts. Yesterday at the NICU followup clinic we were told he's slipped further, to between the 10^th and the 3^rd percentile, which is not good. 90-97% of all four-month-old babies are bigger than him.

He's still happy and big-brained and bright-eyed.

But teensy, and teensier still.

So… f*ck.

F*ck.

I am kneecapped.

+++++++

Grrrrrwwwaaaargh!

He's frustrated that it's not a continuous flow, that there is a delay when the spoon returns to the cup. When he finds it in his mouth again he slurps greedily, and repeats until we reach the end of the cup. Then he yangs.

Does he want more? Or is he full and uncomfortable? What do I do?

He plows through the second cup.

I hope I'm doing the right thing. I hope my milk supply doesn't suffer. I hope it's not too early for solids. I hope it doesn't turn his gut into a pretzel. I wish I knew something for sure, anything.

Once again I am a mama simultaneously with instincts and without a clue.

After a short boobie love-in he finally sleeps, bellyful of organic rice cereal cut with formula, the baby version of buttery scotch porridge with devon cream on top.

Maybe not the best thing to have for breakfast, but damn. He sure digs it.

At least it's a shade above blood pudding.

Pride shmide.

Sometimes I go for days and maybe even a week without thinking of Liam. Not consciously, anyway.

Then digging for pictures for our family calendar I reach the end of April and think it was all about to end in days, and then May, Liam spread-eagled helplessly, purple and shiny, swollen, Ben so tiny I should have put something next to him for context like the grip of a rod next to a fish at the bottom of a boat.

Is it possible to be in delayed denial?

I feel as though Liam's magic has left me, and him along with it. I don't know where he's gone.

I read the stories of other grieving mamas, those who have dreams and visions and otherworldly visits and strange coincidences. All I have is silence, so I envy them. My sleep is a void.

Am I blocking him out, or callous, or forgetting? None feel acceptable.

+++++

Except the other night. I felt rich and blessed and near-normal and ping! the voice interrupted

I wonder if Liam would have been as smiley as Ben

and my throat clammed up with longing, envisioning them giggling side-by-side, Ben being with his identicalness a glimpse of what we have lost.

+++++

I spend a lot of time with my face against Ben's, cheek to mouth, mouth to ear, cooing, knocking up against his flesh with mine because I hope it soothes him, reminds him of shared space and company that calms.

Or maybe I'd like a little of that for myself, and I take it from him.

She's polished and shiny, smells delicious and has shoes that go click-click-click. She has an MBA, lives in the big smoke and has an up-and-up stock market career. She jetsets.

"Oh, it's great to see you!" I blurt. "The last time I saw you was at so-and-so’s wedding, and you were, like, ELEVEN YEARS OLD!"

And in the space of that heartbeat I transformed like POUF! into a withered apple doll with an apron and babushka, an apple doll that walked twenty miles to school uphill both ways (at least on days when the horse was too lame to pull the buggy).

As we sit pleasantly I catch her staring incredulously at Ben. He sits in my lap, eyebrows halfway to the top of his head where they always are when he’s soaking up the world, awestruck, his face the human equivalent of this:

! ! !

Every two minutes or so her head pulls away from the lecture and she gapes, feigning nonchalance but unable to resist the pull of the magnet.

When it's over it spills out in one breath, words tumbling out after an hour of staring and stewing:

"Okay, I have to be quick before my mother comes back because if she hears me I'll never hear the end of it so tell me, how do you… how did you… ahh… know what to do? I mean, with a baby, when you had the baby, did you study, or did you read books, or did someone tell you, because I think I'm not a mother, and I think I want to try and be ready, you know, so I know what to do, you know, not soon or anything, I'm thinking, like, five years out, so how did you know? How do you do… that? Shouldn't I… get some experience first, or something?"

I'm determined not to laugh with affection, for the memory of being like her once.

The wheels turn in the freshman brain, clicking and whirring, ancient voodoo springing to life. She's dogged, and whip-smart. In a state of disbelief that you simply have sex and then grow big and then push and grunt and then are sent home with THAT.

She's craving an internship, certification, a checklist that will spit her out the other end a Competent Mother.

I don't think it ever goes away, that state of disbelief.

No matter how you move through the world before you become a mother — like her, with confident strides and a straight back and the surety of hard work and street smarts — you will enter this club tripping over the threshold with all the grace of a bumbling village idiot.

What I want to tell her is

I still don't know, and when they puke it sends me into a raging panic, and every time I drive the car, errr, VAN, I get ten minutes down the highway and break out in a sweat, convinced I've forgotten one of them in the middle of some parking lot, and most days I've got no idea what I'm doing, but that's okay. That's what it is, I think, learning how to be content despite being out of control. Dogpaddling peacefully in a bottomless, sticky-sweet pool of molasses. Most days I'm totally cross-eyed, but even with the neck cheese they smell so good, pheromones that match mine, like I could sniff them out in the dark from a thousand others.

What I tell her instead is

Don't worry — when it's your own, you'll just know what to do

...which is not so much the truth as it is the truth lost in translation.

You won't know what to do, but unless you give up needing to know, you'll lose your wits completely.

+++++++

The grandmotherly type in the grocery store leans in and says, How old, six weeks? and I say No, seven months, again, simultaneously exhausted of this exchange and not minding it.

Seven months old, tomorrow's dawn. He is insatiable, and he pulls and yanks like a barbarian knawing on the leg of some fresh kill. But I remember peering through the plastic willing him to be lusty, not meek.

+++++++

Exhibit A: One of these days we're going to get banned. We go to Chapters for the THOMAS PLAYTABLE! and for steamers, and we mooch public toys and magazines, and we get out of the house, and Evan, miraculously, stays in a twenty-foot radius without the usual leg irons.

Exhibit B: Deals with the devil are always forged in plastic. We have retrieved the neglect-o-matic, figuring Ben is just about ready to be propped with a pillow to be Boy-Trapped-In-Well. I am completely mortified that we have crap like this in our living space. But he's too little for the velcro wall, so make do we must.

The question is, how will anything of Ben's — including Ben himself — survive in a house with a resident steamroller?

You're not strong, she says. Someone told me about your blog so I come here occasionally. My sister lost a two year-old and she doesn't blather on like you do. I bet no one in your real life says nice things to you like all these strangers do, because you don't deserve it. You need to go take care of your gorgeous husband and your babies and get over it. Get a life. You're not strong. You're just like everyone else.

She was gone so fast, I have to paraphrase her for your benefit. Sorry, suzymomof4. I've got a twitchy trigger finger.

You're what most people would call a troll. Elevating your words and responding to them is against policy. But you're a nice one, because you said my husband is gorgeous. So that makes you a troll with great taste in men.

You might be seething now, figuring yourself proved correct that I'm an attention whore who can't handle anything but gushing support. I'm too tired to try and convince you otherwise, even if it wasn't completely pointless to try.

No one should have to go through what your family's been through. You try to shame me because you've been hurt. I don't know if it made you feel better, this scolding. If that's all you've got for release, then I hope it helped, even at my expense.

Some people jog. Other people drink. Other people visit therapists. Other people implode into themselves and never speak of pain, even when that piece of themselves turns gangrenous and crippling. Other people write to cleanse, to get it out.

You don't understand how public writing can be necessary, and healing, because it doesn't do those things for you, or for your sister. Fair enough. But I hope that if she ever does need you to listen, you won't tell her to quit blathering. I hope she's got some kind of safe place she can either be heard or be peacefully silent, whatever she prefers.

For me, this is it. It always has been, even without an audience, long before our car crash. And that's in addition to Having a Life, not instead of it.

++++++

A while back, I tripped over this. Interesting, the prospect of redefining blogging and participation and the point of it all. How freeing that would be — no comments, no stats, no reciprocity. Just a screen and text that facilitates no relationship between the writer and the readers, or the ego and the strokers, if that's how you'd prefer to see it. Just pure Out There and nothing else.

And then I was pissed that I couldn't leave a comment.

I wanted to see a dialog spring from it. I wanted to see reaction from others, and then to hear more from her. I wanted to witness a conversation, not just a dead-end (like this post, which can be only that).

Still, to be commentless strikes me as some elevated form, a barefoot monk as compared to a high catholic priest with crosses swinging from his belt and incense and yards upon yards of purple velvet.

If I did that, I'd miss out on so much, and so would you. But then, at least, no one could accuse me of being a self-centred twit.

And that would be lovely.

++++++

Comments are off on this post for her sake and for mine, and because I want the Internet to be bigger than this, and not so toxic, even if toxicity is justified. That's all.

Just knowing you're out there in receipt is plenty good.