Everything Happened | vol. 242
Literally what is Christmas
The last time we did “big travel” for Christmas was 2021. We thought it was Nick’s dad’s last Christmas, we liked the idea of our family and Nick’s brother’s family descending on the childhood home for one final holiday. Or I should say, Nick liked this idea and I sort of hoped for some magical option where I did not have to pack up everyone and drive them 7 hours to Ohio but where we still got to be together.
My kids’ abuelo was living alone, too sick to maintain a house that was low-key treacherous for kids even before his illness, and which could not comfortably accommodate 8 extra people.
Polly was, lol, 4 weeks old, still attached to the tit all day. We’d rented a Snoo for her newborn phase but could not fit it in the van. I had no confidence that she would tolerate one second on the cold, flat mat of the pack-n-play. The notion of cosleeping with her in the guest bed, a cozy full-size mattress the approximate firmness of a ball pit, filled me with dread.
Anyway, we went.
The round belly that was shiny and tan in swim trunks at the beach when his dad visited us in 2019 was gone; he was now so gaunt that he was giving all his clothes away. Many of them we took to the men’s shelter but the suits, Nick kept. The sight of these suits all stacked together on the kitchen chairs was too visually fraught, like he was already gone, so I moved them to the back of our van, first emptying the jacket pockets of ancient hard candies and prayer cards for dead Spanish people.
His confirmed bachelor dad had kept his artificial Christmas tree up and decorated in his living room year-round for as long as I’d known him, so the house needed no extra touches to be ready for Christmas. Nick went out the first night we were there and bought presents for the kids “from his dad” and wrapped them and put them under the tree, which if I think about for too long, I’ll cry. Nick couldn’t bear the kids clocking the imbalance of grandparent gifts, the avalanche of goods from Nick’s mom and my parents, and then abuelo’s house: dusty, filled with medical equipment, not a bright square parcel in sight.
We coslept, of course, me waking every few hours surging with adrenaline at the thought that she’d either rolled off the bed or been smothered to death in a foam ravine between her dad’s body and mine.
Long story but we had been denied access to a more comfortable sleeping arrangement in the same town as his dad for our visit, and after the first night with Polly in the death bed, I told Nick that if we lost Polly on this trip in a cosleeping tragedy, I would literally die mad, my teeth ground to stumps from gnashing them in anger for however many years I had left. My remaining years would be one unbroken primal scream.
”You do good work,” my father-in-law said when laying eyes on Polly for the first time.
”Thanks,” I said, “But I’m retired.” We both laughed.
And Polly survived to 2022.
By Christmas 2022, he was in such bad shape that us going out again would not really be a “visit.” We did Christmas Day at home with the kids and then I gave Nick my blessing to go alone to see his dad for what was actually his last Christmas. I spent the long week between Christmas and New Year’s in 2022 solo parenting.
During this stretch, I had inexplicably volunteered to be caretaker for the chickens in the campus garden. It wasn’t enough to be filling all the hours of the day, I now had to bundle the kids up first thing in the morning to let the chickens out of the coop and then again at night to put them away. This is what you call an unforced error.
I should have begged off this responsibility as soon as I realized I’d be managing it alone, but I was so over feeling helpless and pitiable.
Not sure I’ve ever hated myself as much as I did while trying to capture the final elusive chicken in the mid-winter dark, as black as deep space by 5 p.m., while my eldest child failed to resist testing the ice (brittle!) on the shallow frozen pond and my baby screamed from inside the car where she was trapped in her car seat waiting for us. I hauled him out, mud up to his calves, we got the final chicken into the coop, we all went home and had cereal for dinner.
My parents arrived by New Year’s Eve 2022 and I left them with the kids to go to a party alone. At the party, I remember: talking too much about elder care, petting dogs, missing my kids as I watched my friends’ kids roll around, and also being really relieved to be free from my kids. I sabered open a champagne bottle with a sword from the Civil War and I kept the cork with its little belt of green glass as a talisman. Things have to get better, I thought.
Last month, the week before Christmas, Nick’s Aunt Dolores died, another tether to his father gone forever. Nick drove out to Ohio and watched her coffin get slotted into the family crypt beside his dad and his abuela. He drove back the next day. I didn’t clock the 48 hours that he was gone as “solo parenting.” The kids live here, and so do we, and Nick and I are responsible for their care. And sometimes either Nick or I have to be away. It’s not that deep.
The week before Christmas, we also learned that Nick was denied tenure. I didn’t know how I’d feel, and I didn’t know how he’d feel. I’m relieved that we both feel a sense of relief and almost….amusement. Welp, we really tried!!! Lmao let’s try something else??
Christmas was maybe too quiet this year for us. We don’t have family in town and through therapy, I have allowed myself to intentionally excise much of the schlepping and obligations, and thus, some of the misery I associate with this time of year. The trade off is you lose the boisterousness. The bustle. You can’t have it both ways.
I’m considering next Christmas already; I can’t help myself. Maybe we’ll do some big ambitious trip out of the country. Maybe we’ll do some automotive schlepping to see family, the thing I’ve been committed to getting out of for years.
Sometimes you weasel out of something only to find you miss it! Sometimes you get the thing you want and then you find it’s not quite right for you. And sometimes you don’t get the thing you’re supposed to want and you’re like, you know what? That’s actually totally fine.
yr mate,
Evie
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You have a great way of writing about the ineffable tomfoolery of life, both the inexplicable joys and the intense sorrows. As always, thanks for sharing a window into your particular hard phases of life: mine are different but feel like they share a universe with yours, similar animating principles.
Re the last paragraph, I felt that sense of relief when we (I) decided to stop trying to have a kid after so many years of being someone’s science experiment that I didn’t even want to be a parent any more. The sense of freedom and “okay, what now?” - I get it. Believing that you want something so badly and then realizing that you’re relieved to not get it - it feels pretty close to self actualization.