She’s a natural, you know. She is competent to a fault, emitting a swift, cheery self-sufficiency that makes people think she’s not in need of anything. But there is something she does need, especially now: you.

She needs you to come home asking for her, for the baby, dropping your stuff in a pile at the door and calling to her I’m just washing my hands! in that way that tells her without seeing your face that you're smiling, like you’ve spent the day at the office willing the time to pass so you can get back to your girls.

She needs you to trust her, to follow her lead. By virtue of time logged this child is her domain. It won’t be like that forever but it is, now. Even if she’s at a loss, pretend she’s not — for however long it takes for her to find her feet.

She needs you to know, beyond any doubt, that the isolation and responsibility of her days and nights is infinitely more draining — emotionally and physically — than how you spend Monday to Friday, 9 to 5.

She needs you be at her side in this love affair, to see you as baby-drunk as she is. Because there’s almost nothing more appealing than to hear Come quick! Come see what he’s doing! and to witness the baby you made together in his daddy’s lap, and to see concentrated joy there.

She needs you to get dirty. She does.

She needs you to be patient. She is.

She needs you to be proud of her. Most days, kneecapped by self-doubt, she’s not.

She needs you to know these two things and send them back to her, received and absorbed and agreed as sure as a reflection:

1) It is not easy to be a baby — to have no understanding, no context and no control, physical or otherwise. To feel an almost constant sensation of vertigo, of falling and startling. To be hungry for milk and to not know for sure, regardless of past evidence, that someone will put something in your mouth.

2) It is not easy to be the mama of a new baby — to have no understanding, no context and no control, physical or otherwise. To feel an almost constant sensation of vertigo, of falling and startling. To be hungry for validation and to not know for sure, regardless of past evidence, that you are not alone.

For all this: such is the mark and the duty of a good sort of man.

(clop clop clop clop clop clop)

MAMAAA! I-A IN DA PLAYROOM! DEY GOT RHINOCEROS!

(clop clop clop clop clop clop)

(repeat)

As we walk into the main lodge dining room Evan breaks into a run, eager to get to the toys, and I call out to him in my best I-love-you-but-I-mean-business voice Evan, no running please.

Yes, says the lady at the front desk, eyeing me sternly. You absolutely MUST stop these children from running. We have had complaints.

I smile meekly and nod my head, shamed, and retreat to the library to nurse Ben. As I’m sitting there, a crotchety old fart an elderly gentleman walks up to the front desk and says to the lady

Those damn kids had better not be running around tonight. I don’t like it. You’d better sort out those people, and tell them to control their children.

She doesn’t know I’m in earshot. She wags her head up and down earnestly in shared aggravation and says

Oh, I know, I just spoke with one of them, and boy, I sure do hope they DO SOMETHING. It’s not right, those kids just running around like that. Let’s hope they’re decent people and they get those children in control of themselves.

After Ben was done I walked up the desk, fuming, and said to her, "Look — we’re doing the best we can. We have six kids under the age of three, and we are guiding them constantly. If we’re not welcome, you just let me know. But this has always been a place for families, since I was their age and for longer. We have to eat, for chrissakes. It’s not like we can duct tape their ankles together. I’ve tried. They wiggle too much."

What is it, this pariah-hood that comes alongside parenthood?

The constant hairy eyeballs shot our way, the shaking of the heads, the underhanded, judging public commentary.

It hit me badly, came near to souring what was a glorious weekend.

I have left my baby son here, I almost wanted to say. Don’t you dare make me feel like I’ve made a mistake.

And defensive, so defensive right now. The inadequacy of two — feeling like I am incapable of handling the baby plus a headstrong, wandering Evan. And the guilt of the shadow of three — feeling I would have completely fallen apart trying to handle two babies plus a headstrong, wandering Evan.

And what follows from that? An implied progression to relief, which isn’t what I feel, because I’d give anything… but the proximity of the sensation disgusts me. Cue further self-loathing.

Too close to the surface, Ben joggling in the mei tai, dragging Evan by one arm as he screeches I WANT MY DADDY! in a tangled, furious heap on the ground, breaking away sporadically for the opposite direction, or oncoming traffic, or pondfuls of sharks with fricking laser beams attached to their foreheads.

(You know, whatever strikes his fancy and/or is the antithesis of what I have the time or inclination to indulge.)

On top of this, when we’re all trying the best we can, baring our souls and guts and hearts wide open in front of all the world, you revoke your welcome.

You, who were once somebody’s baby. Or perhaps not. Perhaps you sprang from betwixt your mama’s legs clutching a bottle of geritol and a bottomless well of complaints and a righteous resentment of exuberance that doesn’t include you.

Not that all seniors are fist-shaking, jowl-jiggling, black-sock-and-sandal-wearing tyrants. Joe Public takes on a limitless array of personas, clucking disapprovingly at the disturbance to his peace caused by us breeders and our snot-nosed hooligan offspring.

We’re here because I grew up coming here every summer, back when it was wall-to-wall families, raucous and loving and wild, all sandy feet and sun-kissed tousledness. This place is special to us, all woodsmokey and crisp and kitschy-rustic.

It’s where we chose to lay our son to rest, under a gnarly tree in everglade waters accessible only to canoes and woodland sprites.

This past weekend we enticed much of Justin’s extended family to come with us, four families in all, and five toddlers, and one thriving baby. We were so touched they made the trek, and the kids took to it like a dream, delighted.

For breakfasts and suppers we took over two large tables near the entrance, at the main lodge, as close as possible to a playroom ordained by the lord of fisher price himself.

As cabin neighbours appeared Evan would turn in his seat to say “Hey LADY! I gotta DINOSAUR! My name is EFFAN! I am SEVEN!” and for the most part, folk were wonderfully chatty back to him, my rollicking, panting, I-love-the-whole-wide-world golden retriever of a son.

Then “I-all DONE!” and down he’d go with his cousins, all of them wearing a trail in the wood floor between the table and the toys.

Not tantruming, not yelling, just gleeful, rosy-cheeked, back and forth, with us parents being as considerate and as mindful as we can. Just as it was when I was a kid — minus the disapproval.

Next time, we’re bringing all the cousins — and thicker skin. Consider yourself warned. Because it's our place too, more so now than we ever thought it could be, and more than you could ever possibly imagine.

+++++++++

I saw it from a distance, unsure, a flash of white.

Walked to it through the stream in my wellies, reached into the tannin-rich water to grasp the top neck of Liam’s urn, drifted. Cracked off the last time we were here by Justin’s leatherman as I looked on, and then looked away.

I held it for a while, cool and slick with water, sitting on a log under his keeper-tree as the creek bubbled and swirled around my boots. The bright openness of the urn’s mouth lay under the surface where I sat, a match to the ceramic plug that I held in my palm.

I hesitated but then placed it back under the water next to the urn, pressed it gently into the pebbles as if planting a seed. Then stood up and thought it was just something that held him for a while, that’s all. It belongs here.

As we paddled away from this beauty he followed us from high above on the breeze, watching as his mother and father’s bright red canoe weaved through the lilypads, brown and curling dry with the coming autumn.

I lay there, told the soldier to the CBC, and my legs were gone, and people were running, and screaming, and we could hear gunfire. I looked down and Afghanistan was ingesting me, the sand a sponge where a pool of my blood should have been. I’ve left myself there, soaked in. It belongs to me, and I belong to it, the place I was injured.

We are here for another checkup: hemoglobin scores, blood pressure, weight, length, head circumference, medication dosages, physiotherapy tests and developmental play. We chirp and coo: he tracks with his head, eyes wide, as I knew he would. He is beautiful, rosy-glowing and plump. He even smiles on cue. He is a rock star.

Near the elevators to the NICU I see the sign PARKER RECEPTION ROOM and remember the Parents of Multiple Births Association meeting, the welcome wagon for shell-shocked gestational overachievers. We were steeling and accepting at the same time.

I won’t dress them the same, I thought, 20-odd weeks along and gazing at the host families at the front of the room with curious anticipation. They’ll go together but they won’t match.

From the nurses’ station I can see through to what used to be Liam’s pod, now occupied anew with a mother in a johnny shirt and wheelchair, her I.V. pole, a ventilator tube and a tangle of wires stretching from the bundle in her embrace to the machines. The father next to her, hand on her shoulder.

The very same incubator space as his, the place I staggered to my feet to peer through the plastic, both of us irrevocably damaged. I watch them for a few moments with my heart clogging my throat, here from the other end of the gauntlet.

As I turn the corner I see her at the end of the hallway, walking away from me: the young clinician who put a stethoscope to my son’s heart and declared him gone.

She has a cup of Tim Horton’s in one hand and lunch in the other and seems hurried, utilitarian. She disappears through a set of double-doors and I press my nose to his head to inhale his scent, once more just the two of us, veterans of this nonstop beige.

This place is my Afghanistan.

I must say, my rear end: it jiggles like a sackful of Ultimate Fighting Champion squirrels.

This is a recent development.

I’d never had a twiddleable belly, until now — you know, the kind you can play with idly, the kind that Will Not Be Denied, the fleshy bounty that splooges overtop of your pants like bionic souffle.

For the first time, my midsection has folds (my past, perky self chirps ewww! and I stick out my imaginary leg and trip her).

There’s no relativity more potent than the relativity of self-image. My eminently practical, non-ridiculous, nutritionally and mentally balanced dearest BFF, to me as svelte as it comes, fingers her three milimetres of pinchable junk and laments, earnestly and without a hint of falseness, about her need to get to the gym (sharks, frenzy not: read on).

I fight the urge to stick out my leg, knowing full well there are people out there who would do the same to me. And people who would do the same to them. And so on. And so on. Someone else always has it better; someone else always has it worse. We all feel like shallow twits to worry about it (exponentially more so to talk about it) but we must, learning to live with and loathe this literal and metaphorical weight, all of us so profoundly changed with pregnancy and its 'hey-where-did-all-my-MeTime-go' aftermath.

Like anyone, I’ve never been overly pleased with the sum of past parts (pleased as in Hey World, Check Out My Puddy Tat!). Typical complaints bubbled benign on a typical surface, but not enough to demystify the lunchroom antics of calorie-obsessed female colleagues as they microwaved pucks of prepared diet frankenfood laden with chemicals and petroleum by-products and teeny tiny print that read WARNING: MAY CAUSE RECTAL SEEPAGE.

The gravity of thirty-plus years, a slower metabolism, multiple pregnancy: a freight train of comeuppance. I’m at the top of an unforgiving slope greased slick with inactivity and excuses and stilton and devon cream sauce. If I don’t start eating less and moving more, and soon, I’ll wake up one day to realize I’m beyond what can be reversed without drastic measures.

As in: I’d have to start running without being chased. Which would be problematic for me, born as I was in the Year of the Slug.

So here it starts. I want to get a handle on it when it’s relatively easy to do so, but I’m new to all this. I love food, and cooking, and exercise doesn’t come easy aside from yoga, which I’ve been absent from for a couple of years. A blank and doughy slate.

At the risk of being insufferably mommy-bloggish, what have all of you done (or not done) to reach some degree of peace and contentment with your post-inflation selves? Countermeasures, please.

I must fess up. We’re broke, but spoiled.

Since I don't qualify for maternity benefits (one of few freelancing downsides) Justin is on paternal leave, off work until sometime next spring to wrap us all in full-time, glorious daddyness. Another gift from Liam: even though we’ll be broke — beyond broke, just having inflated our mortgage with the ORANGE! renovation — we're both struck with a sudden conviction that (cliché #1) life is short; (cliché #2) life gave us lemons; and (cliché #3) all we need is love.

We tackle this infanthood + toddlerhood, both a trial and some kind of sweet, magical dream, holding hands. Bleary and gnawing at financial fingernails but together, elbow-deep in diapers and fishsticks and bike-pedalling, fart-promoting leg exercises (that would be for the baby, for the uninitiated).

So yes, I’m living in la la land when I speak of the second child being as easy as a chia pet. This has not escaped me.

We divide and conquer in this exquisitely Canadian, government-sponsored arrangement. Cheques with a ‘Q’, small but significant, are delivered every two weeks by a contingent of mounties who come bearing survival packs of maple syrup and poutine and La Maudite beer.

It's not much, but it keeps the power company and the credit card barons at bay while we play with trains and get peed on, often simultanously.

Yesterday, two months after we sprung from the NICU, I spent my first unassisted day with two children. Wait. Stop. Nowhere close. The first evening, better put. The first latter section of evening. After my parents picked Evan up from playschool and gave him supper, me racing against traffic to get Ben home from routine bloodwork and prescription pickup.

(I feel like the world’s most overindulged flake to admit all this, knowing so many of you out there care for multiple offspring on your own from the getgo — especially you federally abandoned, just-delivered, 6-week-crunched American comrades).

So there I was, left to get Evan to bed while also looking after Ben.

AT THE SAME TIME.

The stuff of everyday for you, perhaps, but near-Olympic for me.

Ben scrabbled for my bosom in the mei-tai wrap, scootching down while I squished myself up like when you pull up to the gas station and turn off the ignition too far from the pump. All the while fishing for runaway blind brown trout, bent over the bathtub while Evan wailed at the indignity of… well, being a toddler. And then, shortly thereafter, Ben wailing at the indignity of enduring neglect-o-matic #1 while I ran through 'If You Give a Moose a Muffin' for Evan like an over-caffeinated auctioneer.

But I did it. Delayed competence but competence nonetheless, even if it’s half-effectiveness with one and half-effectiveness with the other.

Evan down for the count, I nurse Ben into oblivion and put him in contraption #2 to cook garlic in a scoop of butter, then add super-stinky stilton, vermouth, devon cream and parmesan. It simmers for gnocchi while last night’s salmon heats up in the oven, and then I chop tomatoes and basil. And that’s supper, fishsticks be dammed. I am not a good cook but I am improvisational, and I bankrupt us on groceries, and I happen to, by complete accident, know what Japanese panko crumbs are and where to buy them. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but like so many things, you may as well try.

The effort of it makes me human again, sitting here reflecting with you, on my second glass of cheap red wine and my fifteenth chocolate animal cracker, as Ben snores next to me in contraption #3.

Crunchy, silky, passable competence.

The public health nurse came to weigh Ben yesterday, a bi-weekly date in addition to our visits to perinatal followup at the hospital. And — prepare yourself — he is now, at his first birthday past the zero mark:

NINE AND A HALF POUNDS.

I am mama: hear me rowrrr.

+++++++++

I want brendam docks, daddy?
Daddy, brendam docks. Preeze?
I want brendam docks daddy.
Daddy, brendam docks.
Brendam docks preeze dada now.
Dada do brendam docks.
Brendam docks preeze.
I want brendam docks, daddy!
Daddy, brendam docks?
Brendam docks preeze dada?
Dada, brendam docks now.
Brendam docks preeze.

Justin pushes ancient, secondhand Thomas Tank Engine tape into ancient VCR and says with exasperation:

“Evan, when will you EVER learn that asking for things relentlessly… (pauses, sighs) … gets you whatever you want?”

+++++++++

From the kitchen I hear Kate, get in here quick! and I grab the camera, get there in time to see Ben beaming at his dada’s face, an open-mouthed, sure-as-heck, intentional grin. Of course, by the time I power up and expose it has faded, perhaps a figment, perhaps not.

Despite not having captured the evidence yet we see flags of this approaching milestone, the first one, the carrot-on-the-stick of sleep deprivation.

Ahhh. Sleep deprivation.

I read somewhere that God pressed in the eyes of the Irish — those gorgeous, freckled, raven-haired, silky-lashed types — with a sooty thumb.

I’ve since observed that God pressed in the eyes of the new mother with a sandy thumb, a thumb first swished in vinegar and then poked into the guts of an urban beach littered with e.coli and cigarette butts and shades of last night’s kegger-barf.

Such is how it feels to stumble out of bed at 7 AM after being bolt upright since 3 AM, pat-pat-patting. Rewind: you finish nursing in the breeze of the window, burp and such, place beastfeeder in bassinette, tuck, pat, back away slowly. Then climb back into bed, pull the duvet up around your chilled shoulders, wiggle feet and swish legs back and forth, almost giddy with the feel of it. Your limbs and head and whole self sinks into the mattress with that tingly, going-to-be-asleep-in-thirty-seconds-flat-and-it’s-going-to-be-like-totally-AWESOME feeling but then in twenty-nine seconds he squawks, needing to be UPRIGHT, NOW. Repeat: 3:30. Repeat: 4:45. Repeat: 5:30.

Piping hot shower, piping hot tea and I’m fine. It’s not knocking me off my feet as it did with Evan, this 24-hour unschedule. Maybe because I know from experience that it doesn’t last forever. Still, I catch myself whisper-whining into the darkness GAWD will you PLEASE just button yourself, please so I can sink into this bed and not get up again?

And then, NICU. Oh, yes, right. I remember.

And then he spurts a stream of hot, runny yogurt that trickles down my back and I think Oh sweets, I know it’s not easy, being a baby. You tell me all about it. You just sit here with mama and you go to sleep in thirty seconds flat. I don’t mind that it’s at my expense. Truly, madly, deeply.