Just because.
We still talk about New York City in 2012.
Thank goodness we were with friends, because Chris wanted to spend it in bars and I was counting my drinks. I just knew.
I mean, I didn’t know—yet—but I had a feeling…
…and sure enough, the most magical sight of the weekend blessed my eyes in the bathroom of our first apartment the day we got home: two blue lines.
Pregnant.
It was December 17th when I found out I was going to be a mom for the first time. That Christmas would be a whirlwind of figuring out how to fake-drink, wrapping my head around what’s to come and deciding how to surprise the family when we went to Ohio.
I remember thinking we better enjoy this one, because it’s all going to change soon.
The years-to-come Christmases would be the same impossible struggle that none of us anticipated. Learning how to be a mom at Christmastime is a lesson in staying afloat that only other moms can understand.
The Elf, the hiding places for those big plastic gifts. Consideration for Santa’s wrapping paper vs. all the other paper, remembering the rest of the family, the teachers, the trash man…all while trying not to forget anything at home.
All of this while missing naps, diagnosing fevers, making decisions in rooms full of clutter and screaming, waiting on people hand and foot and trying to be a bigger person than the toddlers.
In 2018, fully in the trenches with a 5 and 3 year old, I wrote about the new (terrible) attitude that had grown in me in this blog post.
The era of Facebook only exacerbates the stress, does it not? If I’m not made inadequate by the Joneses and their 12ft tree, new Mercedes and sugar-cookie-baking Elf on the Shelf, I am kicking myself for my bad attitude in the midst of someone else’s loss of a loved one. Or another mother being made to work a minimum wage job and leave her kids on Christmas morning.
And speaking of the Elf: the latest, greatest Christmas tradition which has the ability to ruin your day first thing in the morning with the simple words “why’s Elfie still over there?” My kids have taken to telling people where their Elf showed up each day, which means they also air our failings by announcing when she didn’t move at all. Yesterday OR today.
Drowning.
It’s funny to realize I don’t relate to this version of me at all anymore. I know she would be irritated that I can’t remember what was so hard about it, but they weren’t kidding when they said it would go by in a blink. (She’d also be irritated that I became a person who says that.)
Nah, today it’s the New York City Michelle from 2012 haunting me in a way that is like…
Well, I don’t know—yet—I just have a feeling.
Last Christmas, I didn’t bother to think too much like I always do. I suddenly found myself with a 3rd Grader, the age I happened to be when I learned the truth about Santa Claus, and the only thing I knew for sure was that it could very well be my last chance to pour it on.
I decided to do the backstroke instead of tread water for another year.
This last year of motherhood snuck up on me in a whole new way that is only now starting to come into focus. Pre-therapy, it really was lost on me that my own experiences in 3rd Grade brought some of the first great big shifts of my life.
After changing schools a couple times early on and moving to another state, there I was hopping off the bus in a very 1990’s iron-on + puffy paint sweatshirt my mother lovingly emblazoned with the phrase “I Believe in Santa Claus.” My new friends went to town on my outfit and my mom couldn’t play it off.
It’s hard to remember things for exactly what they are at 8 years old; I just recall being the oldest of four, learning The Secret AT CHRISTMAS, and not being able to share it with the others. We watched Miracle on 34th Street together and I cried myself to sleep, alone with the truth, Mom hugging me through it.
This must be what I was trying to compensate for when I did the Holiday backstroke and spent every last cent in our bank account to make it the best one yet for our 3rd Grader last year. I questioned my actual sanity when I asked Chris to pick up a Roblox gift card on Christmas Eve and he showed up with Fortnite instead. In slow motion, he uttered the words: “they didn’t have Roblox and I wasn’t going to drive all over town for it.”
You weren’t going to drive all over town for it?
It’s literally (probably) his last year and he didn’t write Fortnite, he wrote ROBLOX…
You had one f*&king job this entire month…
I digress.
I’m proud to report the 3rd (now 4th) Grader is still a child this year and I am less of a headcase. The thing I know for sure, though, is that I need to enjoy this one too, and all the rest for as long as I’m breathing. Because it’s true that the little kid part doesn’t last long—but actually…yeah, it does.
It stays in their body and comes back for them the moment they see it in their own kids. It hangs on at 40, urging them to safe-keep every last drop of second-chance magic for knowing: These secret acts of love by their parents never, ever left them.
Some things are inevitable, but I’m deciding this year that they really don’t have to be devastating.
This Thanksgiving, I had three stages of motherhood in my home with my mom, sister-in-law and myself. Our discussions about Santa at 3, 10, 39, allowed me to zoom out and see it as something else again.
I do remember having a three year old and a baby, not a fume left in the tank, figuring out how to shoulder the pressure of Christmas from a place of peak exhaustion. I knew exactly what my SIL meant when she said she’s not sure she even wants to get into all of it. Some days it didn’t even feel like this could be real life…
…but then Elfie showed up while they were here, and the next thing I knew our big kids were asking their 3-year-old cousin if he knew about the Elf on the Shelf.
With a foot fully back in the past, I listened to them retell our traditions to him, watched them run up the stairs to get their Santa mailbox out of storage. They showed him how to write a Christmas list and put it in the box for Elfie to take to the North Pole.
What I’m realizing in the acceptance of a version of this that is nearing the end, is: as long as I keep paying attention, I get to let them feed something back to me in the years to come. I get to observe this magic we made—on fumes at times—bubble up and pour out of them onto the smaller kids so they, too, can re-live it.
All drama aside, the magic didn’t actually die in me that unfortunate year when I was 8 years old. I learned to find it in other ways and they will, too.
They already are.
I’ve had to remind myself multiple times this year, as my kids grow into the age when all our formative trauma happens: these were my stories but theirs aren’t written yet. Their future therapy will uncover ways I screwed them up that I can’t even fathom right now; and they’ll get to work that out in the circle of life on their own poor kids.
The good and bad news is, I can’t really protect them from normal realities like this one. If all I am is their evolving mom, I really do get to calm down and just hug them through it. All I can be is a container for their hearts whether they are whole with magic or broken into a thousand pieces with a hard truth; the same as my mom was while I processed the fiction of a Miracle on 34th Street.
Finding magic in the reality of life is something they will inevitably learn to do because they have to, and I want them to.
Sometimes, we just don’t know yet. We only have a feeling and that’s okay.
Sometimes, it’s even wonderful. ✨
“Next year you never know. For now, Merry Christmas.”
— Ed Sheeran & Elton John