Sear
I feel your fever
even before I open the door –
like a room on
fire, doorknob scorched. I lift you
from the crib,
read your temperature with my cheek
an inch from your
forehead. You pour over my shoulder,
blazing through
fuzzy jammies. Your limp palm brands me.
I know this is
nothing: a two-day flu, some ordinary virus
just trying to
make a living, but I hate it for every minute
it takes you from
me. The afternoon collapses, listless
without your
insistent voice, your peppering questions.
The house a ghost
town without the clipped tick-tock
of your bare
feet, your trail of unloved socks. I miss you
even as I strain
under your weight.
I give you all
the medicine I know: the frame of my body –
Deltoid,
Trapezius, Latissimis dorsi – and You Are
My Sunshine.
Soft, off-key,
until my own throat flames.
Googling:
when to wean
The World Health
Organization recommends exclusive breastfeeding from birth to six months
of age and continued breastfeeding, with appropriate complementary foods, for
up to two years or beyond.
You talk around
my nipple like it’s a cigar and you’re Groucho:
bunny? blankie? Brown Bear, Brown Bear? Incisors testing
with every
consonant. Smile of pearled blades.
I toe the carpet,
rock our chair, and you reach over my shoulder
for the moon
through the double-pane. You insist, first, on seeing a dog
long gone from
the back lane, then the forced air rattling through the vent.
I stroke under
your chin, a reminder to swallow, of the work
we must do, and
you squiggle your fingers into the pinch bowl
at the base of my
throat, wait for what Simon Says
next.
One breast
keeling over the lip of my bra, the other dangling
and you clap it
emphatically. Mine! And even though I
see your point –
birth right,
squatter’s rights – I refuse to give
you this, too.
Diagnosing
minor illness in children
Where is the
cough, on a scale from lizard whisper
to marching band tuning
up?
And how often? I
mean, how often does she not cough?
Is anything
expectorated, such as colourful magician’s handkerchiefs
tied corner to
corner?
How many degrees
is the fever? (Are the child’s garments
non-combustible?
When was the last time you checked
the batteries in
your smoke detector?)
What best
describes the rash:
a) the infinite universe, where skin is cloudless sky, rash fine scattering of stars
b) bridal bouquet, unraveled the morning after
c) seedless raspberry jam, advancing
Does it itch?
Using the colour
wheel, create a palate
that includes all
recent stools. Next, build a 3-D model
that shows
consistency and frequency.
How long since you last Googled these symptoms?
How long since
you’ve slept,
deeply enough to
forget
what you’ve
become?
Listing
On
the New Moms Facebook forum, anonymous mama
asks about
the tooth chart in her son’s baby book.
Does ‘right central incisor’ mean his right or mine?
I
noted your milk teeth with a scar below my nipple
that
looks like it was made with a stapler.
*
I
meant the purple notebook to be a pregnancy journal,
but
you never appeared in the pages.
The
thin blue line on the pregnancy test was
a pliant rib of a small fish
caught sideways
in my throat.
My
crushing fear camouflaged by a young
Hutterite
girl who drowned downstream that summer.
One
trimester of entries and then
I
said, out loud, I’m pregnant,
and
the pages blanked.
Now
it’s filed on a shelf of dollar store notebooks
I
never open but can’t throw away, poems so old
I
don’t recognize my own handwriting.
*
I
have two volumes of my grandmother’s canning journals,
neat
Wire-O notebooks spanning fifty years. They begin
in
1942, when my father was one and a half.
On
July 22, she put up:
canned cherries
pickled cherries
cherry jam
canned apricots
crabapple and mint jelly
The
latter at a cost of 4½ cents per jar, since the crabs
and
mint were from her garden. The sugar, from ration vouchers,
she
tallied separately, all of it inked precisely
with
a slim-nibbed fountain pen.
What
happened in 1953 when a batch of dills and 21 quarts
of
canned tomatoes, mysteriously, did not keep?
The
journals end with summer 1993, shortly after she itemized
paying
teenaged me $2.50 to pick the strawberries she used for jam.
*
My
baby book is a faded Hilroy scribbler, compiled
by my
ten-year-old old sister, who scotch-taped
the
shriveled stump of my umbilical cord
to a
three-hole-punched page.
When
you were newborn, I looked to her grade five block print
for
hope, clues from my own beginning.
First turned
First tooth
First sat
First crawled
First stood
First said
At
the time, I couldn’t imagine you
would
ever sleep through the night.
*
I
have no neat keepsake of your firsts, but I logged contents
of
every diaper, minutes spent at each breast, with comment
on
your appetite as if it were a starred review of my establishment.
The
record of our early months together is a mess
of
senseless tallies, as if I expected to be audited.
Cranky appears frequently in the margins,
but
not to whom it refers.
February
25th is smudged with breast milk
or
tears. A parenthetical exclamation point
floats
hopefully over March 11th.
*
When
you were four months old, your father documented
your
sleep on a spreadsheet that only helped us visualize
why
we were so tired.
There
were no ends to those days, only short bars
of
vivid colour separated by long stretches of parental failure.
Looking
back at his frantic tracking, I see a ghostly crescent
pearling
below your gum.
*
I
don’t remember the first word you spoke or when
you
walked, but here’s proof of your birth weight in the slag
of my
belly, your thirst visible in the length of my nipples.
Here
is evidence of your early childhood: all these blank pages.
