The younger child has hit his stride with language, enunciating and emoting like an expert dramatist, in the soft and charming way that only two year olds can pull off.
He points to an illustrated pair of legs upside down in a train window and shakes his head sadly: “What happened?? We don’ know.”
And so it is with the advent season, now some forty odd days ago, and the posts I was so carefully crafting, and the abrupt way in which all posting ceased, and then radio silence thereafter.
“What happened, mama??”
What happened indeed.
The thing that happened, generally, was what we are henceforth calling: 2019, The Christmas of Paint Fumes and Vomit.
There was a living room painting project, and there was so much sickness, some of it the Thanksgiving sickness back for additional rounds, some of it fresh sickness. Children barfed everywhere, and often into my hair. Great mounds of laundry piled here and there like a topographical calendar marking out the days of illness. We ran out of sheets. We ran out of grown-up pajamas. We ran to the toilet. The in-laws ran away early from their visit. And in the midst of it all, somehow, there was the cooking and hosting of a fancy Christmas feast, far too many presents, and some good old fashioned family togetherness.
But it broke me. My 5 am morning pages meditative writing was impossible, given that some nights I only slept for a few hours between rounds of cleaning up after everyone. When the writing stopped my soul went dark, and that wasn’t remedied by the sweet sentimentality of watching small children dump their stockings on Christmas morning or hearing hymns at church. We managed to get a Christmas tree – I took the feverish child to Home Depot where he had just enough energy to be opinionated about the type of tree we should get, and also to accept the blue and green tutti frutti candy cane offered by the kindly cashier. “Go slow,” I said as we got into the car, meaning give it a few licks so you don’t puke on the Christmas tree. When we arrived home he sheepishly handed me his sticky empty wrapper.
The little guy lost nearly five pounds. And his skinny ribcage reflected to me the slight emaciation of my own soul. Not that noticeable, but definitely different. I was in a dead zone, numb, wondering if The Christmas of Paint Fumes and Vomit was also going to be The Christmas I Lost My Faith.
So I’ve spent this 11th day of February reading back over my morning pages from December, trying to find the thread of closure that this final Waiting post needs, not for any reader but for myself, a permission to move on and write about what is happening now. To let go of failing at twenty four tidy, spiritual posts, and be content with fifteen. To not care that I accidentally took January off.
Perhaps what I needed to write I did, and it’s just a matter of excavating it now.
Monday Dec 16, 6:50 am “Our house is in shambles because of a long awaited painting project. The contents of the living room are now joined with the dining room, where spherical Christmas crafts – pom pons! sequins! Rudolph’s nose! – cover every surface. You can find an unfinished knitting project in a heap around every corner and to add to the spherically shaped detritus, there are now marbles spilled all over the floor… And yet despite the chaos I’m downstairs before 6 am, sitting amidst glue bottles we forgot to close and an overstuffed bag of foam animal stickers, writing as if it’s just a thing I do. Because I guess it is. This is perhaps my first Christmas as a writer, a consistent one, and it’s nice to have seasons because there is always something to say.”
Wednesday Dec 18, 1:37 pm “…but for these evenings when the five year old is blacked out with fever, the two year old is wired and refusing to sleep til well past bedtime, and the night are a revolving door of vomiting, coughing, musical beds – it’s enough to just be dressed. I think. But it sure doesn’t feel like much. I write, therefore I am a writer. It’s all an act of self-proclamation. When I don’t write, where does that leave me? Who am I then? Questions of identity can always find thematic resonance during advent. Who is this baby? Who is this young – very young – mother? Is she loose and immoral, worthy of being stoned to death, or is she a saint in the making?…”
Sunday, Dec 22, 5:24 pm “Everyone is sleeping, maybe the god of slumber will grant me three pages. It’s like a fairytale in this house, all the men cursed with prone frames, mouths slightly agape, breathing heavily through mucus filled nostrils and burdened ear canals… A sleeping child is a not-quite-right child, especially around here. What does the body do during these long periods of rest, serenaded by soft violin on the radio and the thrum of the top notch humidifier we broke down and bought to ward off winter nosebleeds? What are the cells rearranging that they cannot manage when the body lists to and fro like a ship on stormy waters? Patching. Darning. Repair repair repair. And I too have been forced to slow down, surrender my days and my goals. This is a form of repair. This is a means of patching and priming. Behind my back the sun has gone down… but today I missed it. I watched it play in the yard while I rocked my feverish outdoors baby, the one who will put on his boots over his footie jammies in the impatience of going outside. Today he looked up at me from sunken eyes in purple tinged sockets, and coughed with a wetness worthy of the olde English poverty portrayed in A Christmas Carol…”
Tuesday, Dec 24, 7:07 am “Christmas Eve. Still fevers and now diarrhea. Not much sleep. Comfort ye my people. V has massive tumor growth in many organ systems. Comfort ye my people. Comfort ye. The rough places plain. Or is it planed? There is frost on the yard and a pink sun creeping up over the back hill. Today we survive, and bake, and prepare. Comfort the widowed next door neighbor. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed. How am I here, with these thoughts and worries, in this particular universe? Doubting Thomas, that’s who I am this Christmas. I guess there’s still room for me around the manger. The one hanging in the back.”
Wednesday, Dec 25, 7:10 am “And by some great unearthly miracle I am sitting at the table writing, sane, mostly uninjured, on Christmas morning watching the sun creep slowly into a foggy world. Of all the days I would not expected to both sleep in and put pencil to paper. Perhaps healing walks among us. Perhaps there is hope after all. Perhaps, if Star Wars can speak to me when the scriptures do not, this can be the end of my waiting story and the beginning of a new waiting, a Be Here Now… It is becoming apparent to me that what happened during advent would only be made clear after some reflection, after having survived the waiting itself. A time of terrible darkness. A season before hope. A month without direction except the marker-less guidance of doubt. Is there some great explosion of light and power? Not in a barn. Is there some tremendous swell of choir or birdsong? It’s just a regular morning. It isn’t even cold enough to be snowy… Daylight is here and with it fog, thick fog that outlines the trees’ bare branches. The fog makes the perimeter trees the end of the world. What if, this Christmas, everything past the fog line actually had disappeared? Would it be enough to know the the baby had still come, and we had each other, and future years wouldn’t quite be so hard?… And so the son of God breaks through this year, not in a blaze of glory, not in sun twinkling off of fresh crisp snow, but as a thick fog, not so heavy as to completely obscure but thick enough, as Be Here Now and as metaphor for the year to come. Fine, I’ll take it. Happy Christmas indeed.”
The final post of Waiting: An Advent Series, 2019.