I had asked her to come to have someone to talk to that didn’t only want to talk about details of what their coins bought on their video game.
My friend, Lisa, sat next to me in the recliner.
I hadn’t even gotten myself dressed that day.
She jumped right into it, asking me, “So what’s going on?” almost as soon as she came,
and my tears fell nearly as instantly.
“I don’t know. I guess this year I’m just feeling a weight.”
A weight of life changing, my oldest daughter not around as often, two teenagers, a pandemic,
a weight of my mom going through things I can’t be there with her for because she moved far away,
a weight of self-inflicted internal pressure to make the holidays exciting and special, to make them feel right, even when nothing around me seems familiar right now;
A weight of nothing feeling the same.
I confessed about what had happened on tree decorating day this weekend, when I’d snapped at my husband and the girls.
I had curled on the bed in my 9 year old’s room, feeling like all I wanted in the whole world was for someone to just want to FEEL and DO things exactly like me.
Where I want the tree, what food to eat, how I like it all set up..
“JUST TRUST THAT I HAVE A VISION, now get in here and HELP ME WORK!”
(I was a true, delightful Christmas vision.
Please, feel free to pin this version of me)
I guess I want someone to want Christmas the same exact way that I do, where no one rolls their eyes at things like pictures taken in Christmas sweaters, or bullies me for buying antlers for the guinea pig. “He LIKES IT, thank you very much!”
I want to feel the excitement stringing a million lights up on the tree, not someone sighing and begging for this strand to please be it.
Oh my gosh the EYE ROLLS….
They should have their own stockings this year, they’re so much a part of the family.
I’m missing the little years, when the kids were small, when all there was was joy and mystery.
No one used to complain when we had a Kid Christmas…
When Santa’s footprints were made out of flour by the tree.
I bought some toys this year no one even asked for just so I could still have a sense of it.
I’m not ready to be finished buying toys yet;
Toys I guess I should write my own name on, since my martyr voice whispers I’m the only one who truly gets it.
I pulled my blanket tighter.
“This year I am aching for what used to be.”
Tears came into Lisa’s eyes, as I said it.
“I understand completely,” she said.
In the midst of a divorce, with just one child she is trying desperately to rescue from the pains of it, she said she fears Christmas won’t ever feel like she wants it to again.
She’s mourning the loss of dreams she had.
“I even miss my mantle. I know it’s silly.”
She is mourning the loss of what was with me.
Her son is everything she has now.
Her son, and some bins she can’t bring herself to open.
How, in her sadness, can she still make magic for him?
Her hand rested between her collarbones, like maybe doing that would help her to remember to breathe.
But then she told me, with a glimmer returning, that this year her son had seen her struggling, and had offered to help move the couch in their new place to make room for the tree.
She had been surprised, doubting at 9 he was big enough, saying, “Are you sure you can do that, Baby?”
He had answered yes, and then she told me,
not only had he helped her move it,
but had taken the end that meant he’d have to walk backwards while doing it.
The hardest part.
He had helped her masterfully.
I imagined him straining, then, to prove himself in a moment of his mother’s newly alone need, and how it had meant so much more than furniture.
So much more than finding space for the tree.
I imagined him as he is, taller now, but with those same, perfect rosy cheeks as he has always had, and I thought about moving things around in this season to make room for our own changes.
I thought about her,
And I thought about me.
If they hadn’t moved things around like that, a task laden with the heaviness of nothing as it used to be, trying to find new ways where things go in a new, unfamiliar feeling place,
she never would have had that moment to see that she is not at all raising one who is being broken by difficult circumstance as she fears.
She is raising a young man who truly sees.
In my mind I pictured him as a teenager, moving that couch every year all alone as she watches because “it’s his thing.”
I saw her living a life with new traditions, and hundreds of precious, happy memories,
that aren’t lacking a single thing.
New, beautiful memories are out there for all of us.
I know it’s hard to look past what used to be,
But what growth in our lives would we also witness if this year we let someone help carry something?
Maybe there is a pain, and we cannot deny it, or cover it over in twinkle lights or candy glaze.
But maybe there is someone out there willing to sit beside us through it; to take the heavy end and walk backwards with us a ways.
When my kids were small, I would go all out with my Christmas decor and itinerary,
but do you know the thing they will still all tell you is their absolute favorite tradition and memory?
That every year I mix plain Quaker rolled oats with glitter I got for .50 at the art store.
I shake them together, and place it in plastic baggies, and we all march out the door up to the edge of the driveway, when no one else is out on Christmas Eve, and we toss handfuls of that glitter oat mix up into the sky “for the passing reindeer to see.”
The girls always giggle and fight over who got the biggest bag.
Easiest thing to do, costs basically nothing, but it is their top favorite thing.
Two Christmases ago was my oldest daughter’s first with her new husband.
The first thing she mentioned of Christmas that year was asking if I’d remember to make him up a bag.
I put pressure on myself to make it about so many things…
Why am I fearing the change of this season, or any season, when I know that new life is what a changing season brings?
What if I give myself and those around me the gifts of honesty, and grace to make the changes that are necessary in this brand new space?
I don’t need to make it Pinterest worthy.
All I need is a few plastic bags and some oats,
Because when my children stand in a line with their giggles rising as steam,
I’ll have the Kid Christmas I have had forever
no matter how much they’ve grown.
Glitter and oats:
Two very different ingredients that make up the one magical thing.
The hard parts mixed with the sparkly ones.
Life is like this very thing.
This article was written by a guest blogger. The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not reflect the opinions of Bob Lacey, Sheri Lynch or the Bob & Sheri show.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
