Midwinter

 Tonight, I convinced R and J to walk down to Peacock Lane to see the lights. A little fingernail moon was hanging in the southern sky, and the Big Dipper scooped up a bit of the east.The sidewalks were packed; families, young adults, toddlers, teenagers, women in hijabs and others in miniskirts and so many languages other than English being spoken and two hotdog vendors and men selling ligthed ballons on sticks.

I am not a crowd person, but we live nearby and it's a Portland tradition and because three out of the four of us are home, it seemed the thing to do on Christmas Eve. As we walked through Laurelhurst, we saw families sitting around tables eating Christmas Eve dinner, bottles of wine being passed around the table, dinner smells and woodsmoke smells drifting into the night air. 

J has been home, in his room, for a week now. It's been a hard term for him and I'm incredibly proud that instead of thinking he had to sit out his anxiety and loneliness in his apartment, he instead packed up Margaret the kitten and came home, where we've been cooking and walking and he occasionally goes out with friends home for winter break. I spent the day today making our traditional Christmas morning coffee cake--from a recipe I got out of Better Homes & Gardens that my mother sent me for decades, that first year I was alone with him at Christmas and had no family, no friends to speak of, and my therapist said gently make your own traditions, it's okay. And when I, panicked and in despair, asked how? She said simply maybe make a special breakfast. And a yule log, which I haven't made since the pandemic, and which the boys call a "gulag".

Anyway, in those years--for most of my thirties and half of my forties--I cried so much. I was singing and had wonderful friends, but this time of year was fraught (as I know it is for so many of us, I am hardly unique). My own loneliness and terror for the safety of my son were a grief I could barely swallow.

J was never home on Christmas Eve when we lived in Michigan. Instead, I'd spend the night with my dear friends at their home and then we'd drive to church and sing the midnight service, and J would come over in the morning. For a long time, he believed that Santa came to families of divorce on Christmas night, as Santa nor Christmas ever happened at his father's house, though it was of course important to his father to have him then, and on all holidays. Because i have family here, was the reason he stated when we got divorced and because I didn't, I agreed. But so many of those midnights, I'd come home sobbing, curl up in my bed alone with the dogs and cats, and J would be with his father who would abandon him at his great grand parents house as soon as the football game was turned on. Every gift his father gave him at Christmas, he left in Michigan, or at his father's house. He'd come home and would crawl into bed with me that night, tuck his feet beneath my hip, my little shadow.

Anyway, then when we moved out here, J was with us one Christmas and that prompted his father to take us to court, again. So instead, every break we'd wake up at 3 am to get on a 5 am flight east so he could spend Christmas with his father. I'd fly out there, spend the night in the Grand Rapids Doubletree Inn and then fly home the next day. I'd dye my hair purple. I'd drink enough boxed wine so I couldn't think.

So Christmas Eve R.a nd I would go out to dinner, get a drink, and then Christmas morning he'd go over to his ex wife's house and open gifts with D. and I'd go for a run or a hike, call J. and cry. R would shower me with gifts that night, hold me when I wept when we went to bed, and sometimes we'd fly out to Albuqueque to see his family, but I was so lonely.

But now, J is home. And we never have to do that again--we never have to get on a plane to Grand Rapids at 3 AM, never have to go to court again. And it has been a hard term--these years post-travel have not been easy on him, now having the space to grapple with what all of that meant. During those years, he learned to disassociate; now, safe, he's working through it. That's the simplified version, but of course it's more complicated. He hasn't spoken to his father in months, and has no plans to do so. He is reading, voraciously, which has come a surprise for everyone. He is making art. He has a little black kitten named Margaret who is a tiny terror and, unsurprisingly, loves him beyond measure. He is hurting and lonely and 20 years old in the shitshow that is Trump's America. But I am so proud of him. I am so glad he has the space, and safety, to work things out.

I love having him here. A week and a half ago, he and D and R decorated the tree (well, R. directed)  while I made all of us dinner. Tonight we walked under the stars, tomorrow we'll all be home and we'll eat coffee cake and lasagna and the gulag and will open presents and the kitten sleep in someone's arms and the rest of the cats will be angry and hissy, and there is some light coming back into J.'s eyes I think, and I'm so glad he's home.

I still wish we were the kind of family that had big family dinners. I miss that a lot--the big Christmas gatherings at my grandparents' house, the aunts slightly tipsy and singing in the piano room, the cousins all in the original dining room, throwing spoonfuls of ambrosia at the ceiling, the ceramic trees with bubble lights on the buffet, the obnoxious talking wreath my grandfather put up every year, the nativiy scene that I painted that sometimes was on their lawn, sometimes illegally (by my grandfather) erected in the middle of town, the arguments about whether we were Italian hillbillies or not that my grandfather and Nan (his--cousin? unknowable, but a terrifying woman all the same). So instead we walk through streets lit by Christmas lights, past hotdog vendors, J and  I play gin at dinner, and tomorrow we eat lasagne and salad and a gulag and we get to be safe. I get to be safe. I still don't believe it--that this is real. That we deserve it. That this is the baseline that many people take for granted. 

And then I think: but we do have family dinners, but our family is small. But we do decorate--a tree, lights outside, a wreath. We have traditions: coffee cake, R. listening the same album for 30 years while he wraps presents, some kind of a walk on Christmas day while we wait for D. to come home from his mom's house, putting the cats in Christmas sweaters, me listening to a broadcast of Lessons and Carols and weeping, believing that we could build a safe life for ourselves, and doing so.

That's a mess of a post, and I know I haven't written a lot here (actually, I've written a LOT but haven't posted any of it as I am no longer sure of what I want to share and what I want to keep to myself, suddenly deeply self-conscious who the fuck cares about a middle aged woman in Somewhere America? etc) . Aren't you fifty yet? one of my choirmates said, aghast (or so it seemed to me) at our last performance. I was taken aback--no! I said. I'm 48. I'm not 50 yet! I feel terribly old these days, though I know 48 is not old. I go to bed and panic that we, R and I, only have a limited time left (he's 62); I panic that I've become irrelevant, that I've spent 12 years at my current job and feel like blowing up my life again. Maybe I will. Maybe I won't. 

The first best thing I ever did was have my son. The second best was to get a divorce at 30. The third best was to build this little family. 

We have passed the solstice, which is what actually feels holy to me. As does motherhood. At thirty, i had an ampersand tattooed on my left arm. Why can't you end a sentence with AND?I would ask anyone who asked why I chose it. And is the most hopeful word in the English language, Ellen Bryant Voigt commented to me in graduate school, while looking at another student's tattoo. 

I love the Big Dark, because I love the light. Today, the waxing moon scraped the sky above us. Tomorrow, there will be a minute more light in the world. It is Yuletide, and I have hung evergreens outside our door, burned my intentions and regrets in the fire, walked with my beloveds beneath the ink-dark sky. The chickens will start laying again, the sky will continue to fill with birds.

Merry Solstice, Yule, Christmas, Midwinter, all.