Time has stopped today. Diapers on the line, near-frozen, bleaching in the sun. The backyard woods are a mess of twigs as once-lively, supple plantlife stiffens to a brown-grey crisp, fossilized until spring.

It's almost noon and the house is quiet.

A couple of hours ago I showered (!) but was commandeered back to bed by Ben, a.k.a. Latchimus Von Suck-a-Lot. Later he popped off like a swollen leech, rosy-cheeked and thick with milk, satiated. In a deep sleep as he lay, face squashed up against the flesh of me with cherub lips, slack and plump. Nowhere to be, nowhere expected.

On some days this is suffocating, these hours punctuated only by one meal and then the next. On other days I slip into it like a nubbly old sweater, unruffled by frump and solitude.

++++++

Sometimes I get in there with you, respond to you, but after the last post I felt blocked up and spent.

Often I feel undeserving of you, unable to tell you how much you strike chords, how sane you make me. And then you keep giving, and then I've missed a dozen windows and I'm as shamed as I am speechless, feeling like this one-to-many relationship is hopelessly unbalanced.

You are all such a gift. You reverberate through the day.

Do you get the same comfort from this chorus, learn as much from each other as I learn from you? I hope so.

++++++

Through all this many of you at one time or another said you're so strong, as if you wouldn't be.

But you would.

When you're in it and the doctors say follow me you follow, and when they say do this, you do. You get swept up in the system, both propelled and abandoned at the same time. You have no choice but to bear it.

When you come out the other side the world is completely different and completely the same.

You're riddled with bulletholes, but there's still peanut butter oatcakes and vanilla steamers and toddler-wrestling and folk festivals and other things that conspire to make you ordinary again, even fleetingly, to interrupt the rage and disbelief, which you eventually learn to live with.

On hearing the stories of others — some unfolding right now — I've found myself thinking in horror now that — that, I could not survive.

But I would, just as you would, and just as they will, reliant on companionship.

Some funk. And not the welcome kind, the kind that makes you break out in a cold sweat. In no order:

Mother
Wife
Woman
Writer
Entrepreneur
Cook
Vegetarian

Failing grades across the board. And that doesn't even include what I’d like to be — only what I am, at this moment (at 10-12% effectiveness). That doesn't even include able to climb half-flight of stairs without collapsing like a heap of boneless jello.

In a compromise and experiment after two no-meat weeks I ate salmon, the most inoffensive slab I could muster, and now I'm having f*$%ing fish burps and it's totally disgusting. Every foodstuff I attempt to wrestle into supper immediately takes on the properties of rubber, primal goo or post-bomb fallout shelter. I stand in front of the open fridge with a ten-mile stare, watching as good-intentioned packs of tofu grow fur, bereft of mojo. Not that I want meat: I don't. Surprisingly so. I want a personal chef is what I want.

The only words I'm able to string together — all day long — is "Hang on <offspring name>, I'll be right there! Two seconds!" which, come to think of it, is a lie 90% of the time.

This despite Justin still being on paternity leave, and being fully involved, and being from another planet, the planet upon which every man is ten times a normal earth man in competence. Which translates into If-Kate-Cannot-Do-This-And-Stay-Sane- Despite-Co-Parenting-With-a-Saintlike-Alien-She-Can- In-No-Way-Manage-By-Herself.

I drive a MINIVAN.

Ben has become the anti-swinger and doesn't want to be put down, EVER, and he could reduce even the most rabid La Lecher into suckmastic spasms with his bionic barracuda latch. I can fold my nipples into f*&#ing origami. Right now they are flying fu&*$ing canada goose christmas ornaments.

I don't even have time to empty the dishwasher, let alone accomplish anything noteworthy for the rest of my f*&$ing life.

This makes me cranky.

Crankier still because I've got no right, because one of my babies died, and one of my babies lived.

I remember being told in the NICU that it was likely that Liam and Ben may never get the hang of breastfeeding. I remember standing with so much plastic between us, aching to have them scrabbling and pawing at me. And now having lost one of them, and having discovered that the other is quite the cheerful sadist, I am denied license to be exasperated as every other mother. The only response available to me is serenity, or else I'm an ungrateful twit.

And you know what I can't stand? Being so damn predictable, so generic. That I'm writing this post on this blog. This post that every stay-at-home mother-slash-blogger writes at some point: Where did my life go? What have I become? The days and weeks are passing and I'm going to be forty someday and THEN WHAT? I actually know somebody who was a guest on the f*&*ing Oprah Winfrey show, and not for being a shoplifting, gender-bending compulsive hoarder, but for doing something really amazing, and she has a personal brand and TV show and book deal, and she's at least five years younger than me, and I can't even empty the f*&$ing dishwasher.

But instead of spending every stolen moment perfecting fusion energy or selling my screenplay or saving Africa or training for the Olympics I am here, blogging about how I've got no time for outer space or Hollywood or the Congo or Vancouver in 2010.

I feel like this is it: like nothing bigger than this is ever going to happen to me. This is the height of what I'll ever be, within the four walls of this house. And I panic, because I'm not even doing any of 'this' particularly well.

How dare I want more, when I should just be thankful for these two living sons, and this one steadfast husband?

Or maybe it's just the f*&%ing mastitis.

We're home, grateful, exhausted. We knew it wasn't a major surgery, but the hospital is no longer a place of wellness for us.

Once again trying to sleep despite several neonatal emergency alarms, knowing that two floors above someone else's nightmare has come true. Fighting the 2 AM urge to wander the empty halls in my sweats, press UP on the elevator, go to room 702, hold her hand.

I will my spirit to do so, curled up in the dark.

++++++++

Thank you for thinking of us, for your energy and goodness. Ben is just fine. A bit off, but fine.

We walked out into the crisp sunshine away from sick children and mournful parents. Once again the lingering need to pray, or wish, or send love to those who remain inside those walls. Semantics.

We are so, so blessed.

Ben is on an operating table at this moment. Maybe the same one that held Liam? Maybe.

Down here on the third floor faces seem vaguely familiar, scents and industry and stacks of johnny shirts, blankets. Vacant cribs and ventilators lined up in rows through the hallways, draped in ethereal plastic that swishes as you walk past. The pre-op nurse shows me around and as she does I feign freshman appreciation like I need to know, like I didn't live here for two months.

How I hate this place, full of ghosts. Not of Liam but of varying degrees and breeds of heartbreak. I walk the halls staring at my shoes, glowering.

Passing an occupied room my eyes accidentally wander inside to see a child all spindly, bent arms and legs tucked into a motorized wheelchair so enormous he looks like a doll perched atop a giant, black robot. He gazes into nothing, mouth open, his mother staring similarly at his face. I think of Liam with horrible, guilt-ridden relief.

Two hernia repairs, that's all. Justin and I are here with a pager, waiting. The chances of anything going wrong are remote but TTTS was remote too, and so we are rattled.

They'll probably put the I.V. in his hand or foot, not in his scalp, the nurse tells me. Thank god to avoid the look of it. The last scalp I.V. delivered Liam's comfort on the night he died, bumping up against my chin and cheek with every last nuzzle.

Died. I still can't say it without my stomach turning so I substitute lost as applies to an iPod or wallet or sense of humour.

Do you have any questions? the pre-op nurse asked me early this morning as Ben wailed, denied of boob since midnight last night.

Not really, I replied. It's just hard to be back here after everything that happened. They say it's routine but bad things happened to us before, similarly remote bad things.

There was this lady, she interjects. Her nine-year-old daughter died getting her tonsils out. She came in last month for her son to get his tonsils out, and she couldn't even go downstairs to the O.R. with him. She was so freaked out, we had to take him down.

Oh, I said outloud, and then finished to myself Thank you! Phewph. So glad to hear, as you take my son away to be cut, that yes indeed, babies can die of the most ordinary things.

++++++++

He's so beautiful. I remember taking joy in Evan, of course. But the joy of being Ben's mama... it eclipses every sleepless night, every inconvenience.

His smile, so broad. It heals me, and all of us.

We sit with wooly socks, red wine and frozen aero bars, feet tucked up under us, talking about our babies and boobs and lust and irrelevance, venting at the gulf between how we see ourselves (fully rendered) and how we are seen by the world (matron-breeder-minivan driver).

Unfair, so unfair it is. It takes at least thirty years and career success and pregnancies and kids to feel confident, compelling, worthy of interest — at least it did, for me — and now, catching a glimpse in a plate-glass window, JEEBUS CRIPES. I look like I've been sucker punched. I am Trainspotting. I need Stacy and Clinton to drag me kicking and screaming from the 'Young Trendsetters' department. I'm a stringy, flaccid, overstuffed sausage. Winter's here and it's hiking boots and long johns for the next six months. I'd be, like, TOTALLY the hottest she-male sheep herder ever seen in the whole Orkneys.

I know what you mean, commented Jana on Flickr. I can store loose change in my pores.

YES! Thank you, Jana-With-The-Gorgeous-Profile-Picture. Thank you for knowing I'm not merely fishing to be told otherwise. I'm just tired and cranky and my clothes don't fit and I've been castrated by a baby and I was just told second-hand about a compliment six years late and all I can think of is that if I passed him on the street now, he'd probably wrinkle up his nose and say, "Pheewph! What's that smell?"

When we're feeling our most ashen grey, our most worn out, the fantasy is not necessarily limbo parties at all-inclusive resorts or glycolic facial peels or accidentally getting in the way of a rampage of bearded Vikings. It's stiletto kitten heels and a pair of Spanx, out on the town with girls, feeling swishy and indulgent, pretending for one night that we're the hottest things in the room. Faking it until we make it. Group therapy by estrogen immersion.

Gawd. Just writing that made my Kate Skin Suit tighten by a half-inch all over.

++++++++

I remember arriving at a bar one night in 1994 or so and thinking damn, we're never going to find them in this crowd. Then remembering hang on, Lauranne's here! Easy peasy.

From a higher perch I spotted her, a human combine harvester on the dance floor, clearing a swath through the mob with wicked enthusiasm. This girl, she wears her heart tied around her forehead like a bandana.

She is going to be my friend FOREVER.

Those were our university days. Now we sit together at the Charlottetown Farmers' Market as she wipes smears of chocolate from her son's cheek, all business.

I can't stop staring at her. Is this really us? We are mothers. Happy as we are, all we want to be is that and more.

++++++++

Then there was Bon, the second destination of me and my baby's twizzler-fuelled roadtrip to the Island.

Someone I'd never met but already knew, both of us having walked the same hospital hallways, her before me.

We have earned the fortitude to bear the sight of each other, each of us medusa.

Did you get that, too? I ask her. People ask you about what happened like they're doing a community service, because they are good samaritans, because they want you to know they care about you. Then you look over and they're gripping the arms of the chair white-knuckled, and staring at their shoes, and you realize that to them, you are nightmare incarnate. And you love them for trying, and give them a piece of it gently so they feel like they did the right thing, because they did, but you're still so alone, and you can hardly believe that you lived through this thing that makes others think they wouldn't (even though they would).

Did you get that, too?

She looks at me glassy-eyed, smiling, and I feel that way you feel when you're outside in a blizzard and come upon a small cabin nestled in the woods, windows glowing gold with warmth and light. A glow that says there is heat here, and nourishment, and solace, and lemon tart.

We don't need to talk about our lost boys but we must. We giggle at the macabre and scorn the clichés and become weepy at the everyday. She could unicycle around her living room juggling flaming bowling pins and soothe me just by existing.

Magic. Sweet female communion, and we are not alone.

There he was, a flash. We all gasped and pointed, delighted shrieks peppering the deck of the old boat. One thousand pounds of iridescent silver, a beast that slipped through the water like silk despite itself.

Look! I yelled, squinting to penetrate the glare to the depths. Look at his fins - they're YELLOW!

Duh, said my brother-in-law. YELLOW-FIN-TUNA.

Right. Well, yes. Fair enough. But still so unexpected, his back neatly trimmed with a row of dragon spikes of highlighter neon. Cresting and diving, ravaging a school of trapped mackerel. They darted in panicked unison, imminent consumption rippling through them from one to the next.

The graceful predator unknowingly stalked in turn by a team of hundred year-old dories anchoring and tightening the encircling net, hand over hand.

+++++++

I stand there in the grocery aisle with a can in my hand, $2.29, suddenly uncomfortable.

+++++++

Finally one fisherman hollered to the others Hup! and from one dory to another a loaded rifle was hastily passed. It's quickest, they'd told us in preparation for the harvesting. To harvest, a gentler verb.

The great fish breathed, his shining heft now pressed up against wooden ribs. One shot, my throat constricted in some instinct and into the water drained electric red, life. And he was then one thousand pounds and $40,000 of Tokyo-bound food.

In years past they plucked tuna from this bay like apples from a basket, dozens at a time. Life Magazine came here in the 1960s to document the bounty from the public wharf in front of what is now my parents' house and in grainy black and white, men posed stiff-backed, solemnly proud atop mountains of silver flesh.

Now, inexplicably, the tuna have retreated offshore. The lone fish we witnessed a few years ago marked the first in a long time - a celebrated local event. I remember being exhilarated, honoured to see such a glorious creature.

The fact that it got shot was forcibly diminished.

+++++++

I've always eaten meat. Heck, I wake up by dunking my face into a vat of chilled bacon grease. The slab of protein on my plate is beef, not cow. Tenderloin, not pig. Necessary semantics.

I've always admired vegetarians in the same distant, mystified way I've admired mountaineers or extreme spelunkers or Dick Proenneke. You are admirable, and interesting, and likeable, but kinda KOOKY. Thinking kooky in fascinated and affectionate defense, thinking you are most certainly from a different planet.

Thinking I could never do that.

Confronted by the history of what's on my plate, that someone had to do my dirty work. Birthed and penned and processed and canned in factory and laboratory-style.

Confronted by a desire to have more respect for life and death, ours and theirs and his.

Confronted by the simple facts of what's healthy, imagining what it would feel like to be free of meat's bodily slug trail.

Then locked-in cultural hardwiring. HA! Not gonna happen.

Like coming out or finding God I'm feeling open to something new, unsure of what it all means. Prepared for the family to take the piss out of me at first opportunity. Don't know that I'm particularly capable of living sans-sausage. Don't know that I'm wealthy or knowledgeable or driven enough to do it properly. Don't know that I can make something called tempeh edible. At least not without a whole lotta ketchup.

But damn, folks. I'm inspired. Not to be righteous, nor smug, nor to McDemonize. Just for health, for starters.

It may not be for me. It may be vegetarian-lite. It may be vegetarian Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays minus Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Perhaps a transitional label... wait, I've got it. Fairweatherish, newleafitarian cheesyeggism. 'Cause until I'm savvy enough to turn tofu, we're going to be up to our elbows in quiche.

If there's one thing bluenosers adore, it's the kind of weather that justifies commemorative coffee table books.

TIDAL SURGE! TREES DOWN! CECIL ZINCK'S BOAT GOT ALL SMASHED UP ON THE ROCKS IN THE FRONT HARBOUR! All aflutter, lining up for batteries, water, propane. Granted, it was only the tail end of a hurricane. But enough to park in front of the fire and scramble eggs on the barbeque.

Not that a power outage is so unexpected — in this province, belch too close to a pole and you'll bring down the lights from Herring Cove to Prospect.

I can't help but feel at home here. Even when I'd rather be at home somewhere else.

Perched at the edge of a meat-grinder sea. Craggy and stunted, churned up. Weathered churches and dead houses and antique barns, not froofy antiques but bashed-up old stuff from ships and garrisons permeated, to this day, with the scents of tar and gunpowder. All facing the growing swell, the angry sky. Fishing boats clinging to the leeside of wharves, battened down.

Rarely the drama that is forecast, but still — candles illuminate as wind buffets the house, and tucked in, in love, we are most fortunate.

++++++++

Happy six month / three month birthday, my smiley boy.

Ben's adjusted age is now half of his actual age and from here on out, his prematurity will be rendered less and less significant.

He pulls himself upright to sitting, with help, weeble-wobbling. Squeals with delight at his father and grocery store clerks and book clubbers and passerby, a social boy just like his brother. Giggles when tickled in the folds of his neck. Tells the most fantastic stories.

What follows is the most ordinary of scenes, but I'm happy to share it, because we've been waiting to be ordinary for what feels like a lifetime.

In a hundred years or maybe less they'll all say Can you believe people used to walk around with cellular telephones RIGHT NEXT TO THEIR BRAINS?!!?

The mortal peril of such behaviour will be as evident to them as it is to today's us to dig out a grapeshot wound with a rusty blade (and then use said blade to trim beard, spread butter, impale enemy, and pierce desired chicken leg from serving tray of buxom wench).

We click our tongues and shake our heads back and forth, marvelling at the blatantly obvious dim-wittedness of generations past. Then we clean up after PB&J assembly with an electric blue liquid that comes with a skull and crossbones and a small print warning that says DANGER: THIS STUFF IS, UHHH, POISON.

They say the average woman absorbs five pounds of unregulated chemicals through her skin every year thanks to lotions, makeup, shampoo, deodorant. Just like the ordinary guy who gets bitten by the radioactive spider and his DNA goes all crackly like lightening bolts and he can suddenly scale tall buildings. Except when our DNA goes all crackly like lightening bolts all we suddenly get is chemotherapy.

Burt, take me away.

You know that it's-just-gotta-be-bad miracle gel inside disposable diapers that makes it able to absorb 300 times its weight in pee? Listed as an irritant that requires protective gear for handling, this is the same stuff that was banned for use in tampons thanks to toxic shock syndrome. Not to mention the other nastiness hidden behind the Tigger on your kid's crotch — dioxin, one of the most poisonous and carcinogenic substances produced on earth, tributyltin (a hormone disruptor) and bleach.

Until now, I'd spent my child-rearing days thinking Us? Cloth diapers? HA! Not going to happen, seeing as I DO NOT PLAY THE BONGOS.

Thinking if disposables were really, truly harmful, they wouldn't let us continue to use them.

Right?

(silence)

Uhh… RIGHT?

(silence)

Kinda like if the war wasn't really, truly necessary, we wouldn't be there.

+++++++++

'Until now' means 'until we became unoblivious'. The event that splits the before and the after, that rendered us into who we were meant to become through pain.

Now, I'm what Justin would call a frantic hippie. Overcome with a need for action, an unfamiliar state for the oblivious me, the lazy me who would prefer to obediently gulp down whatever The Man offers (and whatever Wal-Mart sells) because being obedient requires less effort than being contrary.

A frantic selfish hippie, struck with wanting to purify our most immediate life. Selfish only because I'm not yet occupied with Darfur or melting icecaps, because those problems are too worldly compared to the individual turmoil caused by an instantly actionable, offending bottle of Windex.

I used to roast chickens purely for the aesthetic pleasure of being wrist deep in raw poultry butt. Always bubbling just underneath the skin a discomfort for the slug trail meat leaves in the body, for the heinous tactics of commercial meat production.

The fleeting thought: imagine how that would feel, to eat less meat. That would be nice.

Then the carcass wrangling would always resume, the cold slappy juiciness, because it always has, and conviction is for other more passionate people.

Then Liam was taken from us.

And I found myself sitting on the couch of the most lovely mama, patient and smiling as she walked me through the hemp and the bamboo and the prefolds and the stuffers and I said okay, show me the diapers that are for people who don't play the bongos.

And she did. And they're not only righteous, and totally effective, and easy to clean, and kind to his skin. They're ADORABLE.

I just feel so damn good putting these on Ben's bum. I hang around after the mini-load of laundry starts, inhaling a steamy cloud of good, clean baby poop and tea tree oil. When the buzzer goes I race to the dryer for the sniff 'n stuff 'n stack, giggling like an anarchistic schoolgirl with a system-bucking buzz-on.

Then I made my own cleaning spray with balsam fir and rosemary essential oils, and vinegar to disinfect, and was about to never shave my armpits EVER AGAIN when Justin walked into the kitchen and said it smells like fish and chips in here.

Some kinks to iron out. Don't like tofurky. Still stand there impatiently in front of the microwave with my nose pressed up against the glass, reversing the polarity on the flux capacitor in my brain with every beep. Fighting the urge to use the skincare equivalent of a flame thrower, in a state of shock that the lemon-poppyseed tortise wins the race.

Some starts more profound than others, but all starts nonetheless.

This is the beginning of living vividly, I think. Taking steps to be one of the passionate ones. To not waste any more time, nor blessings, nor health.

Thank you, sweet lili, wherever you are.

+++++++++

A proactive addendum: I'm far from enlightened, and I'd never want to make someone feel any lesser for not using cloth diapers or loving steak or relying on the fabulous lather of Sodium Laureth Sulfate. All these chemicals and toxicity in our personal worlds... it just quite suddenly and unexpectedly pisses me off.

I wish we could devote the same energy to coming up with safer alternatives as we do, oh, I don't know... inventing new kinds of rectal seepage-causing diet twinkie sweeteners.

Don't you?