Mad Hope

by Heather Birrell

  I got an e-mail message the other day; it arrived in my inbox with a happy ping and the subject line Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning. A forward from a well-meaning fellow mother; the type of dire instructional counsel that circulates amongst us clucking hens. I try not to open them as a rule. I know the gist: Watch out for your kids. There are strangers, spiders, poisons, tornadoes, faulty slides, baddies lurking everywhere. Save them from their own stupid kid selves. But this one I read, eyes skating across the screen without my sanction, the rapid click and the blooming text. Drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled before speech occurs.

  James could not pull himself out of the pool; I saw him gasp, then lower himself back into the water. I watched his eyes widen and his legs thrash as I scooped him – a fish tired of fighting – up and onto the deck. It’s okay, kiddo, I said, it’s okay. Let’s get your puffer. He nodded, his eyes like leashes hooked on to mine. But the puffer did nothing and once they were all dressed – the girls’ hair tangled pelts down their backs, the whining and wheezing from the back seat, the smell of chlorine and kid sweat – I drove him to the clinic at St. Joe’s and called Bruce from my cell to come pick up the girls. And then I told James again how okay it really was, as the er nurse tested his blood for oxygen, and gave me the look that said Not okay, and, somehow, Your fault, and Hate this fucking job. James had stopped wheezing then; his lips were turning blue around the edges, a terrifying resignation growing in his eyes.

  I am tired. And I allow myself, through the scrim of my despair, moment of irritation with James. There is a particular type of work that goes into achieving the harmony we have reached in my household. I remember what Bruce will not: Nathalie’s volleyball practice after school, that Sarah will eat green beans only if they are dipped in mayonnaise. This is me, keeper of schedules and child foibles. Bruce is in charge of the jolly in our house: getting us up and out, treating the children like the physical, rough-and-tumble beings they are. Pushing them over, pulling their pigtails – our very own benign schoolyard bully. They adore it, even James, who is treated differently, it’s true – gentle!

  I have no illusions regarding my relative importance. I am thirty-three years old, a part-time baker, mother to three children. Still, I don’t think it is unfair to say that it is the mother’s calendar and not money that makes the world go around. I am an ordinary person who does not believe in diesel trains (I have demonstrated), honour killings (I have written letters) or blood diamonds (we wear plain platinum bands and I have signed online petitions). I believe in bread and certain uncalled-for forms of beauty. And I believe in the potential – I do! – of every human to effect a shift, some small change in the world. I volunteer in an after-school program for at-risk youth. The program is designed to teach them real-world coping skills. I bake bread with them, which – who’s kidding who? – is nowhere near a survival skill; there are these things called supermarkets. So yeah, it’s a weird, bourgeois, anachronistic luxury, I know. But, I tell them, it makes your house smell really fucking good. That scores me some points mainly because I curse but also because they can tell that I mean it. The smell of bread baking means safety and warmth, a cocoon-like protection they have never known.

  It is possible I feel my children’s vulnerability more keenly than other mothers, although we all have dark bruised spots on our pasts that never seem to heal. Instead of fading, they pass through the colours of the rainbow, shining dully, differently, on each and every moment in our lives. In my twenties, I searched for and found love everywhere. I was an intimacy junkie, and eventually my drug of choice stopped providing comfort – those sweet, cuddly highs – and my partners, sensing my need, either left or began to hurt me, pressing, pressing, on my bruises. A therapist at the time – wiry frame, wiry glasses, patchouli, geranium scent – explained myself to me. She said I was searching for the love I had lost, a mother’s embrace like air or water, a mother’s protection that surrounds, versus a father’s more belligerent affection – the love that takes on all comers. I’ve often wondered if this is why I chose to have children, to provide that love that was stolen from me. If I could, I would submerge James in my love, provide healing through benediction, the iron clasp of my embrace.

  We call Nathalie, our oldest, The Gnat; it is her nickname, superhero moniker, alter ego. There are times when you want nothing more than to slap her away, forcefully, to make her listen instead of speak, to silence her whine with a quick backhand swoosh. She is persistent, relentless in her demands; she will not go away. And there are times when her very presence, its drone and reliability, brings the most powerful form of reassurance. When Bruce picked the girls up from the hospital, Nathalie lifted the hair away from my ear. Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, she said. James has good lungs, just broken for now and he will breathe better soon, breathe better soon, breathe better soon. She grabbed me around the neck, choked me lightly, then let go, and when I gasped with relief her eyes said, See? Sarah was already clamped into her booster, looking out the window. Crisis embarrassed her, wounded her sense of invincibility and frayed the forcefield she wore like a cloak. I knew that when James pulled through –breathebettersoonbreathebettersoon – and they were back home, lying like lizards on the floor, head to head, whispering secrets and incantations, Sarah would hurt him deliberately, a discreet pinch or tug at his hair. And when he winced, she would smile – her brother was back. She understands that the vulnerable cannot muster the energy to react to pain or feign indignation.

  The hospital room was small and shabby; it had the feel of the Third World, or one of those crowded strip malls at the edge of this city. Something provisional and patched about it. None of the slick sanitization of one of the more monied downtown research facilities. But never mind. The nurses, unlike the harried intake nurse in ER, were bosomy and matter-of-fact. I curbed the urge to follow them to their storage rooms and efficient phones, to somehow absorb the secret of their large proficiency. I wanted to be near James when he woke up. I wanted to answer his questions with my own calm truth. I wanted him to know that although his breath might elude him, I would not.

  It got worse before it got better – his lips still blue, an iv in his arm. I watched the tube carefully – for what? – air bubbles, blood, a sign. Then I buzzed the nurses, who were beginning, and rightfully so, to become cross with me. I loved them even for their crossness. James was sleeping fitfully, his breath still laboured. I have always considered my children in light of the age I was when my own mother died. It is the year – the seventh – that stands alone as crucible. Some superstitious part of me believes if they can get through that year unscathed they will make it through the rest – the fevers, the driving tests, the battered hearts, the scabs and shitheads in the playground. And if they survive, somehow I will, somehow I can also. But James! It would be a lie – and so inequitable – if I said I loved him best (oh, I love him best!).

  And now here we are, steroids pumping into his arm, oxygen mask over his little helpless mug. And I am thinking about my mother and yearning for her and so glad she is not here to see this.

  From a young age, I believed God was less Spirit than Sas­quatch, a mythical figure very much of this earth – not quite human, although possessed of wise Neanderthal-like qualities. A creature perched alone and unique on its very own evolutionary limb – what it would be to glimpse this creature! Not something you could share widely; who would believe you? And would you really want to share? You didn’t share God or trumpet him to the masses, nor did you hoard him – you acknowledged him when He emerged. And if you searched for him you were likely to be endlessly frustrated or attacked by his sham of a likeness around every corner. This was a philosophy I had arrived at mostly through my parents’ use of the phrase ‘God’s country,’ which they used to describe remote spaces – uncaring, oblivious spots on t
he globe where humans had little dominion. I understood that to visit these places was a privilege, that to even breathe God’s air, to track him by his prints and scat, was a great and awesome thing. So that when we took off from Thunder Bay in our float plane, Michipicoten Island in our sights, all eleven of us and our various gear, I knew immediately, from that first glance out the window, from the hush that fell over us as we looked down upon the impenetrable forests, their variegated greens, smoky browns, the great sky squeezing up around us, that we were entering God’s country and that to acknowledge it was both sacrilege and necessity. My mother nuzzled my head. God’s country, she said, and we nodded slowly in solidarity.

  Sarah, my youngest, is five now and, strangely, already the one who needs me least. I watch her sometimes while she is playing – building a tower or drawing castles or cats. Her concentration, her focus, would be the envy of most adults. And I think, yes, she would make it fine if I were gone. She would feel the loss as something sudden and violent – a bullet that came out clean – then she would pick herself up and carry on. There is something of the stoic cowgirl to her, in the way she has, already, learned to curse: quietly, authentically. Oh, shit, shit, shit, she mutters when the tower tumbles, when the cat’s ears have the look of odd antennae. Then she carries on.

  James is finally sleeping soundly, quietly, his breaths less rasp than whisper. We can be forgiven for believing it is angels or fairies – ridiculous, exquisite-winged creatures – who ride on rafts of air composed of children’s sleep-sighs. It took me weeks before I could turn my back to Nathalie, even while she slept. I was convinced the very fact of my gaze was keeping her alive – how easy it would be for her, so tiny, so mysterious, to be spirited away.

  I have been known to drool on and over my children – when they were infants bundled snugly in my arms, attached to my nipple like barnacles. You’re tired, Bruce would say, if he witnessed it, and, yes, the fatigue in those first weeks robs a woman of her sense and dignity, makes vanity a frill in itself. It is the kind of exhaustion that crosses over into a deep, sensual sorrow, everything leaky and askew. When I breastfed, I felt the world’s sadness in my throat. I wanted to spit it out and instead I had to swallow it. Still, I can tell you, it was not fatigue or sadness that made me drool over my kids but a slack-jawed adoration, an awe larger and more compelling than love.

  My husband is a good man. Still, sometimes in the middle of the night when one of the children has woken us with an earache or outrageous request, he will stare at me, sleep-sodden and merciless, as if I am a stranger who has stolen everything from him. And it is possible I have. Gentle is our word, our mantra and slogan and motto. It is our family philosophy and religion. But the way we have sex is the opposite: brusque, silent, its gestures brutal and sharp. Afterwards we laugh and do not speak. And then there is laundry and eavestroughs and crocodile tears and a dishwasher to unload. When we first met, and the moment arrived for me to tell this story, the story of my mother, he listened quietly, then said, Let’s not talk about this anymore. You are here. Your mother is not. And he was right; he loves me.

  I know I am fortunate. I have taken my place in the world with relative ease. My children are fed, clothed, educated. We hug them all the time. This is not the case for everyone. The school counsellor tells me things about the youth I bake with; I listen and shake my head. They have drawn short straws, it’s true. Easy, easy, easy, they say (although everything in their lives is not), high-fiving each other with great tenderness as they come through the door. I love to listen to them; the camaraderie in their shared aggression. You don’t know shit, yo, why not go somewhere like Canada’s Wonderland instead of sitting around in that shitty old shed? Oh yeah, why you got a duffel bag and not a knapsack? Low-budget, man, low-budget. They steal my phone all the time, play games and coax strange images and sounds from it. Look, turn it sideways, you gots a sexy chick. Whoa, who did that? I did it because I’m king, dog. Then, when they notice me watching, they berate me in a way that makes me feel like maybe they like me a little. Miss, why you always gotta be so in-on? Non? No! In-on! In-on! Like in on every little thing we doin’. And I think, I am so not. In-on. Anything, really. And: What would it feel like to be truly in-on. The ’hood. The world. Your head might just explode. They are the type of kids who are frightening to some people. But for a long time they did not scare me. Then one day I answered a call whose number came up BLOCKED. And someone said Hello, conversationally, kindly, even. Then, I’m gonna kill your fucking babies, bitch. And it undid me. The next session we baked a large round sourdough loaf. I brought butter and blackberry jam and we slathered it on and ate together like family. But I was watching them in a way that friends should never watch each other. My children, I thought. You little shits, you threatened my children. Still, the bread smelled really fucking good, and the way those ratty teenagers ate – their eyes surprised and glad – made me forget for a moment, it really did.

  Outside the window, I can see the highway, cars crawling along the edge of the lake. It was a room like this where I had my babies, all three of them entering the world as a line of cars streamed past below. The children anchor me, I suppose. Sarah was a Caesarean – they scooped her out of me whole, but the other two were natural, or as natural as these things get. With James I can remember a feeling of impending collapse – I was in the middle of pushing him out when I informed my midwife that I had to sleep. You’re having a baby, she said. It was a soft command and a statement of fact. She was telling me to live. Bruce was fetching a cloth for my forehead, and when he walked towards me, cloth outstretched, all concern, I did not, could not recognize him. Why have they let that strange man into my room? I thought. This is what these moments do – they unhinge us from the known, from the familiar, the family. They give us a freedom to let go, to fall asleep, to let it all fall away.

  James has regained some of his colour; his forehead is warm, so smooth, when I bring my lips down to kiss him. Soon they will be arriving – the rest of the tribe – and we will strap ourselves into our little metal box and ease onto the highway with the rest of them.

  There were eleven of us on the plane and I have always considered this a beautiful and accursed number – I was so obviously an add-on, an extra bead on the abacus. I watched her drown. I have tried to soften or mitigate this fact my whole life, but it remains: it is truth, perhaps the only solid fact I can pull from the whole story. Still, here is how I remember it: a bumpiness, as if the plane were a car going over train tracks – the three modes of transportation suddenly, weirdly, melded – then a sharp drop that made us suck in our breaths and clasp hands, then another, more dramatic drop, the wink, then a clap as terrifying as the fiercest thunder, and a blank. A shooting pain in my shoulder, the cold and the darkness liquid around me and a sick-making need to clamber my way up to surface, to her. And then, once I had seen the sky and breathed the air, a deep unease, a heaviness of limbs. The waves were large, and because of my fatigue I did not fight them, but let the swells carry me; it was if the water were inside me then, cold, so cold, forceful and roiling. I have had the same sensation only once since, standing far from the beach on the shores of Lake Erie, the undertow tugging at my shins, my family safe and sand-speckled on land. That day, I felt the sun on my shoulders and the water around me, inside me, all womb, all soft danger and unrelenting life. I felt my mother that day.

  She bobbed up two waves over, her hair slicked neatly back from her face. Did I call out to her? I feel certain that I did, but I have read that within minutes severe cold clouds rational thought. In my memory she is beautiful and strange, comical even, her lips parted in an O of surprise, the face she made when she came upon me in the back of the closet, crouched silently behind the shoe rack, smiling at my cleverness. Drowning people’s mouths alternately sink below and reappear above the surface of the water. Of course she must have known I was there! I floated, my feet barely fluttering, my clothes ballooning up around m
e. Afterwards they told me that the air in the jacket and my lack of skill as a swimmer had perhaps saved me. The cold became relaxing to me, I didn’t have the sense to panic. I saw another person, maybe two, in the periphery, and it seemed to me they were calling out, to each other and to me. Physiologically, drowning people who are struggling on the surface of the water cannot stop drowning to perform voluntary movements such as waving for help, moving towards a rescuer or reaching out for a piece of rescue equipment. I think they were counting, numbering off. Did they assign me a number? If so, I have since forgotten it.

  According to legend, Lake Superior seldom gives up her dead. She gave me up because I was not quite dead. My heart had slowed. Children’s hearts are more capable of this slowing, this playing dead. The colder the water, the better, the more effective the response. The blood concentrates its attention and its circulation on the important bits – brain, lungs, heart. The lake held tight to my mother – who would not? They never retrieved her body. Normally bodies puff up with the gas generated from decay. Then they rise like bath toys to the surface. And they are found. But, they tell me, the cold water didn’t let bacteria grow in my mother. She was allowed to sink.

  I am not brave enough to leave them. It is untrue that bravery and love go hand in hand. Love is its own form of cowardice. If I were brave I would rent a car and drive north to the shores of Superior. I would go in the summer, when the water temperatures are not immediately torturous. I am a strong swimmer now and I want time to feel the smooth cold on my skin. I would wade; I would float; I would use my arms and legs to pull me far away from safety. And once the grey waves surrounded me, I would look up into the sky, salute this worn-down world and submerge. I would join my mother.