Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Next Year's Words




“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.”
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets 


A couple of years ago, I posted this as my status on Facebook: "I love the new year--it's like waking up to a fresh blanket of snow that no one has disturbed. Yes, it will get messy when you start to move around in it, but there's also the chance to make snow angels and snow men, watch dogs and little kids play, and look forward to the life that will sprout once the snow is gone."

In the last few years, I've realized that, as much as I love Christmas, the New Year is my favorite. Not New Year's Eve, so much--I'm not really one to go to big NYE celebrations, although there have been a couple of memorable ones over the years. 

When I was in high school, my friend Lisa and I, along with our younger sisters, went to an all-night skating party. We skated for a while, but then we left (and left our sisters) to go to another party at the house of some boys we knew. We got caught, and Lisa's parents took us home--and we spent the rest of New Year's Eve in her basement listening to Casey Kasem count down the biggest hits of 1982.

And then in college, I was in Amsterdam over New Year's, and a couple of friends and I went dancing at a club called Zorba the Greek and drank champagne at midnight.

That was 25 years ago, and since that one, the only other actual New Year's Eve I remember specifically was when it turned 2000. My son was 5, and he had asked us to wake him up a little before midnight so he could see the fireworks. We got him up at around 11:45, and he stood on our dining room table so he could see the fireworks--and in the morning, he didn't remember it and was upset that we hadn't gotten him up like we promised.

So that's three memorable New Year's Eves out of 47. The others have been very nice, I'm sure--but mostly they run together. But the New Year--that's something different entirely. That's clean slate, throw your arms open wide and march into the unknown kind of celebration. Not an event so much as a feeling. Hoping there are more snow angels than slushy mess.

Then, of course, my son was born right at the beginning of the year in 1994. I tease him about the fact that he was so late--he was due before Christmas--and made me wait, but the truth is, I love that each year starts with his birthday, and by the time the year is over, he's completed (almost) another year of his life. It's one more reason to love the beginning of the year.

But ten years ago, my year started out with my world being turned upside down. Not a beautiful snowfall, but a destructive storm. My marriage ended--no, that is putting it so mildly that it's almost comical. What it actually did was explode with such a fiery vengeance that debris and wreckage were falling for miles around. And one of the large chunks of debris that fell down and knocked me flat was that I also lost my job.

It was such an awful year that I was just in survival mode for most of the time. I had moved in with my parents (temporarily, which turned into nearly three years), which alleviated a lot of the financial pressure, but I had a fourth-grader who still needed to get his homework done and go to his friends' birthday parties and go trick-or-treating and be reassured that the world wasn't ending because his parents weren't together anymore.

Somehow I got it in my head that if I could survive to the end of the year, everything would be OK. It was like a finish line that I struggled towards, dragging my battered and bruised self towards it as if my life depended on crossing it.

And I did it. I got to 2005, and although everything didn't magically get better as soon as the old year was over, there was definitely something about closing the door on that awful year that felt really, really good. It was like in the movies, where someone is running away from a monster or an axe murderer, and they manage to get through a door and lock it behind them, and they lean against it with an enormous sigh of relief that they managed to escape.

Of course, I always want to scream at them to get a little farther from the door because, hello! An axe can chop through a door, and you're only safe for now! Keep moving! Get through the next door and close it behind you too!  I very much felt that sense of temporary safety too, and I kept moving.

It was only symbolic, I know--but everything after the New Year that year felt like progress. I was that much farther from the Worst Year Ever. And the next couple of New Years after that were really celebrations of that survival and being even farther away. The scars were healing--fading, even.

At some point I reached a tipping point where the New Year once again became a looking forward more than a celebration of surviving another year. Getting married again had a lot to do with that, of course. Now life is a lot more about enjoying the present and looking forward to the future than about trying to distance myself from the past.

But this year, since it's 10 years since the big explosion, I'm finding myself very reflective about my journey over these 10 years. When I look at the good things in my life, I know I wouldn't have them without having survived that terrible year. Of course, there's no way to know that when you're just putting one foot in front of the other.

Even if someone had had a crystal ball and could have told me that I would end up happy, I don't know that I would have been able to believe it--or, if I'm totally honest, I don't know if I would have wanted to know. The truth is I had to go through the hard years to get to this place, and I love this place so much that it was worth all of that to be here.


A friend introduced me to a poem recently that so exactly expressed how that year felt that it seems fitting to close with it.

Hurricane
by Mary Oliver

It didn't behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn't stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn't
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
which is what I dream of for me.

Saturday, December 21, 2013

Christmas Remembering




“The Herdmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world.”


If you don’t know what that line comes from, I’m a little sad for you, honestly. But for those of you who don’t, it’s the first line of the book, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, and for me and my son, the reading of that book became The Best Christmas Tradition Ever.


My first exposure to the book was when I was a senior in high school, and our English teacher, Mr. Patman, read the book to us. The Herdmans in all their spectacular awfulness, the squeaky-clean sanctimonious Alice Wendelken, and the gradually enlightened narrator held our attention for the three class periods leading up to the Christmas break.


And then, as he was nearing the end of the story, Mr. Patman choked up and had to pause to collect himself before finishing. This was a side of him we hadn’t seen before, and I think we were all a little shocked. We were teenagers, so there was some nervous giggling. But there were those of us who choked up right along with him.


I read that book to my son every year from the time he was four (about to turn five right after Christmas) until the year he was about to be 17. That’s 13 Christmases, and every single time, I would start crying in the same spot.


Everyone had been waiting all this time for the Herdmans to do something absolutely unexpected. And sure enough, that was what happened.


Imogene Herdman was crying.


In the candlelight her face was all shiny with tears and she didn’t even bother to wipe them away. She just sat there--awful old Imogene--in her crookedy veil, crying and crying and crying.


The first time it happened, my son looked at me, concerned. “Mommy? Are you OK?”


But in later years, he knew it was coming, and he would start watching for the moment I would have to stop and collect myself, and we would laugh because I just couldn’t help it. Much like the way I jump every single time Fezzick throws the rock at Westley in The Princess Bride, regardless of the fact that I know it’s coming. (Yeah, I just did that last night, and my husband laughed at me. It’s ridiculous.)


We’ve stopped reading the book together every year now that he’s older and he’s not always with me for several days in a row leading up to Christmas, and I really miss it.


It’s not so much that I want to keep reading it with a young man heading into his twenties, but I miss those little boy years. Am I the only one who has recurring dreams of earlier versions of her children? Sometimes I just miss that little six-year-old version of him, or the four-year-old, or the nine-year-old, although I love the 19-year-old version of him just as fiercely and know that all those earlier versions are still there and make up who he is today.


But also, one of the quirks that make up my oh-so unique son is that he has very few childhood memories. There’s no reason for it that I know of--no head trauma or anything--it’s just how he is. He just seems to need the available storage in his brain for what’s going on right now. I don’t understand it, and it makes me a little sad for him, because I have such vivid memories of the sounds, smells, places, and events that made up my childhood, and I wish he had that.


I used to wonder what his memories of his childhood would be. We would be in the middle of doing something--and it didn’t have to be particularly important--and I would find myself thinking, I wonder what he’ll remember about this. And then came the divorce years, and I hoped he would still manage to remember the good stuff more than the bad stuff. But as it turns out, mostly his memories are very scattered and vague.


He does remember The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, though. I know because I asked him specifically about his Christmas memories before I wrote this. He came up with two things: being allowed to open one present on Christmas Eve and reading The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. And that made me so happy I almost started crying.


I suppose, for someone without a lot of specific memories, the repetition was important. Even though I didn’t set out to create a tradition, and I had no way of knowing that his memory would be like this, it seemed natural to continue once we had done it for a couple of years.


Memories, though, aren’t something you can plan. Sometimes it’s just in the doing and the repetition and the living that memories are made. And I’m really, really glad he and I have that memory together.


Here’s to wonderful holiday memories for all of you. Just go make a bunch of happy ones!

Sunday, December 15, 2013

And Away We Go




It was a Friday. My husband and I headed out to the big city of Spartanburg, SC, for a night on the town. The plan was to have a drink and then have sushi for dinner, but apparently I was due for a melt-down, so that’s what we did instead.


It was all going fine--he had a beer, I had a glass of wine, and we were sitting there talking about the farm bill and the gutting of food stamps from it and the billionaires who get money from it in subsidies…. Well, I was talking about that, anyway, and getting a bit riled up in the process.


And then, as I had just made some brilliant and salient point, he said something along the lines of, “We need to stop talking about this--we can’t fix it, and we just get mad.” To which I responded that I’m never allowed to voice my opinions, and he said that’s not fair, which it wasn’t, and I said, “Well, I suppose I should have just been happy I was allowed to talk that long.”


Well. There went our nice sushi dinner, because neither one of us is the type to intentionally spend money on a nice dinner that’s going to be eaten in stony silence.


As we were walking to the car, I forced us to have a conversation about what it was I was upset about--because it wasn’t the farm bill--and I started crying.


Now, let me just say--I know all about the stereotype of women using tears to get their way, but I am not one of those women. Because Oprah? She didn’t invent the ugly cry. I was born ugly crying, and I am not even joking.


There is a family story about this. My grandparents, standing at the window of the hospital nursery waiting to be shown their little angel granddaughter, noticed a baby whose face was red and contorted with crying, and my grandmother said, “Oh my goodness, look at that poor child. Something must be wrong with it!” And then a nurse came in and picked up the ugly-crying baby, which relieved my grandmother greatly, because the poor child was clearly in some kind of apoplectic distress--but then, as you have surely guessed by now, the nurse brought the baby to the window and held me up for my grandparents to see. They checked my wrist to be sure, and yes, it said “Lednum girl.”


I spent my teens and twenties hardly ever crying--and when I did, trying to be sure I wasn’t seen. There was a lot of crying in the latter part of my thirties, but now that I’m in the later half of my forties, there’s almost no predicting what might bring it on.


That “conventional wisdom” about women of a certain age not having long hair? Not for me--I’m keeping it long until I’m past menopause and the crying is over. If you can plan it just right, you can be to the side of the person you’re with and let your hair fall down like a curtain to hide your blotchy, contorted face. Or you can hope it’s dark and you can’t be seen.


The last time I had a meltdown like this one, I didn’t have the advantage of darkness or having my husband next to me--I was folding laundry in our brightly lit bedroom and he was across the bed from me, and I could see the horror in his face: Good God, I married an attractive woman--what has happened to her?


Anyway, this time I had the falling darkness on my side in addition to having my husband next to, and not across from me. But that doesn’t help with the incoherent babbling that also goes along with my crying.


The substance of my meltdown was that it’s hard for me to be in the house by myself so much and how hard it’s been coming to a new town where I didn’t know anyone and I haven’t made any really deep connections, and so I rely on him for too much and I know it’s not really fair to do that.


But it came out sounding like this: “I have STUFF! In my head! And you don’t even KNOW! And I want you to know! But you don’t even want to hear it!”


In fairness, that’s not even true. There is a lot of stuff that I don’t ever want him or anyone else to know. And he really has no idea how much is there that he doesn’t want to know.


My dear husband listened and said sweet things and soothed and smoothed my hair (but not away from my face). And then he said this: “What you need to do is write a blog.”


So. Here I am, writing a blog. I have no idea if anyone will have any interest in what I have to say about the stuff in my head, but maybe it will be good therapy, and maybe I can say some things that will connect to someone else.


And honey, if stuff comes out of my head that you’re not entirely comfortable with, remember: You told me to.