the keys inherited from my childhood teacher the hours pored into fruitless scales up and down it was never my forte but it was hers she committed herself the tireless effort the pencil perched in between her fingers and thumb the cursive reminders speed up, slow down excruciating practice and now i sit down to play reminiscent but my damaged fingers won’t cooperate with my memory and i cannot for the life of me play the merry melody she taught me
Distracted, I nearly hit a man, with my grocery cart, as he slowly made his way across the opening of the aisle, on his motorized scooter.
“I’m sorry.” I smiled — a sheepish apology. I had used this trick successfully before, so I felt unsure when he didn’t smile back. The minor accident check list always works. Admit guilt, check. Smile, check. Wait for a forgiving smile in return. But he didn’t. I studied the look on his deeply wrinkled face — like a puddle that had spent an entire season without rain. He looked perturbed. His thickly furrowed brow furrowed even further and without another word we headed in different directions.
And then it happened again.
My daughter pulled the cart along at the check out as she hurled all of the easily bruised groceries into any available space on the conveyor belt.
“Clink.” The cart hit the cart in front of us.
“Sorry,” I laughed. The lady smiled, understandingly.
And then I saw him, right in front of her, paying for his groceries.
“Hello, again.” I smiled — twice rejected.
“Do you generally make a habit of hitting people with your grocery cart?”
“Not generally, no.” I follow it up with an awkward laugh.
“Hmph.” He said before departing into the cold mist of the day.
“Good riddance,” I thought to myself as we continued checking out. We paused for a moment to pull on our hoods before slowly venturing into the rain.
I saw the man in the distance. A cigarette nestled in his yellowing fingers, fighting against the elements. He saw me too.
“No one smiles anymore.” He stated. “No one has time for small talk either.” He said as we wheeled a little nearer. The mist coated our clothing, his unkempt hair and settled into the thirsty crevices on his face. Almost pleasant out of doors — we stayed and chatted for a minute or two — there in the rain. Perhaps it was more than his skin feeling thirsty.
The five year old found a long lost tooth brush from the depths of our voracious couch — its grungy bristles splayed in protestation of years of misuse and neglect. A combination of crumbs, dust and dog hair littered the ground as her hand vibrated with every step she took, wielding it towards my face. I locked my lips, but she shouted, “Open wide!” I shook my head. “Open up!” She shouted again.
I interjected. Honestly, I’m surprised it took this long to be repaid for this beloved nightly ritual, so I unlocked my lips and prepared my mouth for the words that were about to spill out of it. “Get mine!” I generously offer. “Get mine and then you can do it.” I immediately regretted the words.
Happy with the compromise, she trotted off to prepare my toothbrush. She returned, the brush in hand barely visible beneath her tight grip and a thick layer of minty toothpaste. She tapped her foot and smugly demanded, “Open up.”
I did. She painted my teeth with it, the foamy saliva toothpasty mixture made its way across my lips and my chin and eventually up to my nose.
I smiled — a Joker-esque toothpaste grin- perhaps my good behaviour would elicit some in return.
The three year old watched with pure glee on her face, I could read her thoughts — it’s her turn next. For now she accepted her place in line, and as holder of the spit bowl — there was no way they were letting me get up to use the sink.
She recreated our nightly routine perfectly by shouting commands, tickling the roof of my mouth, prodding my tongue and giving me receding gum disease all while muttering something about getting all of the sugar bugs.
I protested.
“I’m not finished yet.” She countered, as she continued to rake my gums.
Before my jaw physically fell off of my body, I shouted, “Show time!”
It worked though. The three year old was slightly more sympathetic to my nightly endeavour and there was only a short wrestling match that night.
Our home was hit with a cold. Not the wipe-you-off-your-feet-putting-you-on-the-couch-with-a-box-of-Kleenex-eyes-barely-open-as-you-listen-to-your-favourite-TV-show-hovering-somewhere-between-consciousness-and-completely-asleep type, but the one that just barely messes with your wellness and majorly depletes your patience level. It interrupts your children’s sleep as the virus hits their little bodies a little harder, rendering you and everyone in the house in a state of utter exhaustion.
In this particular circumstance the croup cough resulting in a midnight ambulance call might not have helped things. But when your three year old wakes you up with a terrifying, panicky, wheeze hack and manages to say that she swallowed a rock and the hubby is on an out of town shift, and there’s two other kids still sleeping, you call. A false alarm, thank goodness, but then we were all awake, still stunned and on edge. Eventually the hum of the fan, the uneven snores of a croupy three year-old and the claws of an eight month-old baby, on my face, lulled me back to sleep.
They’re bickering before I even lift my head from the pillow, like really bickering complete with neck punches. I am in a fog that no amount of espresso can lift. I find myself losing my patience and then apologizing, on repeat. All. Day. Long. “I shouldn’t have yelled. I’m sorry.” None of us are our best selves, physically, mentally or emotionally and we are all simultaneously both imploding and exploding. All. Over. The. Place.
Our five year-old, while not obviously sick, seems to have the same level of irritability as myself amplified by the heat, and is antagonizing her sister and me at every turn. She pushes allllll the buttons. “Get ready!” I yell, “It’s time to go!”
I bend over to help our three year-old put on her swimsuit, she refused to take off her shoes. I’m dizzy and I feel myself slipping into another moment of unnecessary exaggerated frustration as I try to jam uncooperative shoes through a seemingly invisible leg hole. As I take a deep breath, I catch a glimpse of her footwear. Her paw patrol socks are stretched up to her perpetually scratched knees, and her mismatched shoes on the wrong feet. I take a minute to remind myself that she’s three, and she’s not feeling well either. There’s a thin layer of snot across her entire face, and wisps of her hair are booger glued to her face, I attempt a crunchy pair of pigtails.
They’re not buckling their car seats and yet for some reason the three year-old still feels the need to scream “I do it my own self!” When I reach in to help, she swats at my hands and stiffens her body — an angry, snotty, piece of defiant plywood. The harder I push, the harder she resists and it takes everything I have to stand back and watch her struggle with her badly twisted straps as her baby sister, in desperate need of a car nap, begins to loudly complain.
Somehow we made it through the day, good friends who don’t mind some venting and help to keep my kids happily occupied, helped for sure. We made it and I head to bed optimistic that tomorrow is a new day.
The baby has it now and her clogged nose makes it impossible for her to keep her beloved soother in place. All night booger sucking, bum pats and quiet shushing mean that again I got very interrupted sleep — a recipe for disaster.
Unwilling to waste even one warm summers morning I prepare them for an outing. My head is stuck in a “seize the moment” mentality and I overly ambitiously decide it is very important we head out early to beat the heat of the day. My head is spacey as I shuffle three kids, two dogs, enough snacks, water bottles, extra clothes and a blanket into my car.
Then, “Crunch!” I backed my car into our mostly opened garage door. Tiny pieces of styrofoam shoot out from the now very curved garage door and I let out a frustrated cry. My good-hearted neighbour reminded me it was an accident, a fixable one and my husband graciously laughed as I delivered my news via FaceTime.
We should’ve just stayed home, embraced a sick day and watched a movie, but the edges of wellness are deceptive and I really thought we could do it. Summer provides so much time for relaxing and yet counterintuitively adds a sort of pressure to get out there and provide our kids with opportunities to have fun, lest we waste the day. I’ve been keeping a mental summer to-do list — the last summer before our five year-old enters kindergarten — of all the great things I remember enjoying when I was young.
I often tell my kids that we all make mistakes, but it’s important that we learn something from them, to hopefully avoid repeating it. I learned it’s ok beneficial to waste use a warm summers day for rest and repair when our bodies and minds require it. The next kinda unwell day, I’m calling it, right from the get go, couch and cuddles, no matter the weather and perceived pressure to have fun.
I never cleaned under my bed. Ever. It infuriated my mom (I get it now, I’m sorry, Mom). And by never cleaned, I mean not only did I never clean under there, I also used it as a place to sweep all of the other items from my room that I didn’t want to clean up, which was mostly dirty laundry. By all appearances my bedroom was clean, but the facade quickly crumbled each and every time there was even the tiniest of inspections.
I’m sure she grew tired of repeating herself, so in some next level genius mother move, she created a horrendous atrocity of an insect that I had no idea only existed in both of our imaginations. It had wings, many eyes, long legs and it hopped, quite possibly flew and very much enjoyed dirty spaces and especially dirty laundry (well played, Mom).
I can vividly picture it to this day. So vividly, that for the next few years I peered anxiously at dust bunnies and lost socks with angst, I most certainly never swept anything under there again and anything that happened to slide too far into the darkness had to be written off, for the rest of time. I spent the next few years leaping onto my bed from a safe distance so as not to disturb what may have been lurking underneath. There was no need for further inspections, the lie eliminated the problem. I’m fairly certain she forgot about the bug, not long after the dirty dilemma ceased to exist, though I would continue to be haunted by it for years to come.
She successfully converted me (although I’ve exchanged the antiquated “cleanliness is next to godliness” adage, for a slightly more favourable and much more achievable “keep it tidy or kinda close so droppersby won’t think you’re gross” sort of motto). It was not until I had become a parent myself that I actually questioned its existence. That’s right I was 32 years old, speaking to my own daughter, and repeating myself about the importance of maintaining a state of near cleanliness, when the bug hopped into my mind and I realized it was all a clever hoax. 32. What an effective ruse.
I grew up before the Internet age, a time when parental lies went unchecked. A time when most lies were unverifiable, my mom had the upper hand, and really she had all the hands, because a parents word was irrefutable. These days we parents are dangerously close to losing the “parents are always right” advantage.
Our five-year-old daughter captured a black and vibrant yellow millipede in her grandparents garden. She lovingly prepared a home for it in an empty coffee can, and allowed it to crawl all over her hands and arms. When she wanted to know what to feed it, she asked me to ask my phone. She knows. She knows exactly how the internet works: no question needs to remain unanswered. She even fact checks her dinosaur encyclopedia against the internet, hoping to catch an error. In this circumstance we learned black and vibrant yellow millipedes are poisonous, and it now resides outside, again.
But that’s not all our parents lied about, they also told us if we dug deep enough, we could get to China and then handed us a shovel. We believed them, maybe we were extra gullible or maybe the idea that we could pop out on the complete opposite side of the world was so entertaining it was worth the effort, so we dug, real blister-popping, callous-forming, rewarded-by-splinters, digging.
My sister thought my kids thoroughly vacuuming the stairs with a play vacuum that spins heart shaped sparkles around while whirring, was painstakingly sad. She was born in the 90’s though, things must have been different then. My kids think they’re helping, and they are, it’s just not with vacuuming. Sometimes we parents need a minute, where the kids are occupied and not with fighting.
I tried it. I told a lie, at least I think it was a lie, or maybe it has actually happened once to someone somewhere and the story has been retold for generations to come, as a warning for all of us. I was locked behind u-shaped table, which limited my access to the rest of the class, which occasionally frequently strayed from the task at hand. I glanced up from the laboured reading of the yellow group and locked eyes with the new boy. Surrounded by three kids who had flipped their eyelids inside out, he was TERRIFIED. Before I had time to think, I blurted out, ”they’re going to stay like that!”
“But we’ve done it before,” they countered.
“Yes. I know.” (I had taken time to explain how horrifying this was, just yesterday.) “But that’s the thing with eyelid flipping, you don’t know when it will stick, it just does sometimes.” I raised my eyebrows, summoned an ominous voice and added, “Forever.” I had to, in for an inch, in for a mile, or something like that. For his sake, I perpetuated the messed up children’s urban legend and added a Russian roulette twist. Before you judge, don’t forget how I was raised. Bonus: they never did it again and while I wasn’t incredibly proud of how I’d curbed the eyelid flipping, it was effective. So I get it and I think I’d do it again.
I grew up in a time, when “because” or “I don’t know” sufficed as answers, but my kids are used to answers because the answers are so readily available, and they know it.
I don’t think I’ve deliberately lied to my own kids yet, aside from the usual exaggerating of the truth, like if you don’t let me brush your teeth they will rot, where the immediacy is very intentionally implied. I also often blame things on time, like it’s too late/early for candy or it’s time to go. I find it concerning that when the time for real lies, the big imaginative creative ones, does present itself, the internet has the capability of instantly and effortlessly tearing my intricate web of lies to pieces.
Has the internet deprived us parents of the chance to recirculate the lies we were once told? Or are kids still buying into the urban legends of our youth?
Seven years
since we walked
into labour and delivery,
frantically anticipating
the early arrival of our first born.
Seven years
since we walked
down the sterile hallway,
empty handed,
past the newborn photographer,
what a stupid place to take photos.
Seven years
since we walked
down the gravel road,
arms full of lilies,
past the crab apple trees,
and laid you to rest
amongst the other names
that we know.
Seven long years
since we left you there,
not one day has passed
that we haven’t thought of you.
We lost our first baby. He was born at 35 weeks 2 days pregnant, it was both shocking and devastating, to say the very least.
The hospital social worker warned us that internet groups could be dark places and to be wary of them. Armed with a handful of bereavement pamphlets, a memory box and this information, we left the hospital.
Still reeling, I couldn’t handle the obnoxiously happy weekly pregnancy updates infiltrating my inbox. I tentatively logged on to the website to delete my account. My vision made blurry from constant tear swiping, I navigated my way to the “delete account” page — a nearly impossible feat. The site, like most sites, claimed to be very genuinely sad to see me go. They begged to know why I would ever want to leave their very informative and useful site, and provided a multiple choice click option. And for once in my life, I was grateful to have to explain my reasons to a computer, because there it was beside one of the tiny check boxes: miscarriage/baby loss. The site expressed its sincerest condolences and listed several forums I might find comfort in.
But wait, the social worker had warned me about these dark corners of the internet, where grieving people wallow in their sorrows amongst the internet cobwebs — often never heard from again.
Too late — before I knew it, I was the newest member in all three of the loss groups the site had recommended for me.
I have “real life” friends, great ones, family too, they were so so good to us after our loss, but my soul longed for a kindred connection with other souls, also still reeling from the overwhelming trauma, that is baby loss.
I spent hours poring over every single post. I made posts. I commented on posts. I marked comments with a tiny heart, just to let someone, somewhere, know they had been heard. It was a safe space where I could say whatever sad or disturbing thing I wanted and I was completely understood. Some nights, long after pre-loss me would have been sleeping, I lay in bed, clinging to my phone, the screen illuminated the darkness, as I refreshed my feed, over and over again. I didn’t want to miss anything.
There was a specific group of us, that had all lost babies within a few months of each other (three of us had babies born on the same day — including our son). We frequently commented on each others posts and passed private messages back and forth. Then one of them made a Facebook group. I was hesitant to lose my anonymity by linking these two worlds, matching screen names with real names, but I’m so glad I did.
We celebrate with each other. We cry with each other. We talk each other through some of the scariest moments of our lives. We lift each other up. We talk each other down. We’ve watched each other’s families grow both in size and in experiences. But most importantly, we remember together.
When the entire world feels like it is entirely too much, we make jokes about buying a castle together, or a tropical island and escaping it all — quite possibly forever.
I was so lucky to meet one of my friends, after almost three years of chatting online. She generously invited my family to stay with hers in her home in the Dominican Republic. It was awkward for exactly one minute before we dove deep into conversation, right where our last chat had left off. We visited her sweet baby in the cemetery and celebrated her rainbow daughter’s first birthday, alongside her family and friends. We holidayed together and watched both of our daughters playing in the sand under the palm trees. We marvelled at this exhaustingly beautiful stage of life, while reminiscing about our journey here. How lucky we were to have found each other.
I casually talk about my Internet friends and I’m often asked how I met them, because they are scattered about the United States, another in Canada and my dear friend in the Dominican Republic. “Oh,” people always respond, flatly, and I quickly feel the need to legitimize our friendship, but maybe it’s not something you fully understand, until you have internet friends, who regularly check in on you.
My soul found what it needed there, in that dark little corner of the internet, I found them, or maybe they found me, all of us a little broken, all of us in need of an understanding ear, all of us connected by a life-altering, world up-ending event.
Seven years, several miscarriages, many heart breaks, personal and family traumas, countless laughs and 27 rainbow babies (another on its way), we all remain friends.
