I couldn't help but grin today at the contrast between the cozy
Advent post I wrote before the children awoke, the one celebrating the
best moments of the past week, and the complicated, messy,
full-of-friction day that commenced as soon as the first child
staggered out of bed. The thing is, every day is complicated, messy,
and full of friction. And every day has glorious or cozy moments worth
celebrating. I seldom bother to chronicle the friction and the mess
because writing time is fleeting and precious, and I'd rather capture
the small joys that I might forget—or take for granted—if I don't take
time to set them down in words.
Pondering this, something that struck me was the difference between
blogging and real-life conversation. If a friend calls me on the phone,
I'm unlikely to say, "We just had the loveliest half hour while Jane
played carols on the piano, and I curled up on the sofa with a quilt
and the laptop, and Rose was at the other end reading Betsy-Tacy, and
Wonderboy was next to me looking at family pictures on an old cell
phone that isn't a phone anymore, and Beanie was dragging Rilla up and
down the hall on a blanket and Rilla kept shouting, 'Faster, Mama
Duck!'"
All that is true; it was a lovely half hour, and I Twittered
some of it so I wouldn't forget it. But it's unlikely I'd have said
anything of the sort on the phone. Somehow that just isn't how phone
conversation works, or face-to-face chat, either. No, in person I'd
have been much more likely to tell my listening chum about how my hips
are killing me, KILLING me, to the point that by the end of the day I
can barely walk, much less stand over the stove, which is why my
children had to make themselves oatmeal for dinner tonight. And I've
got this cruel little cough which has caused a bit of cartilege (so I'm
told) to pop out of place in my rib cage, so that every time I cough
there's a fierce stab of pain, and I'm desperately hoping it goes away
before I go into labor because the thought of pushing through this rib
pain…I shudder to think of it.
Or: I figured out that the coughing started the day I brought home
the Christmas tree, so we moved it outside and I bought a tiny little
inglorious fake tree to replace the tiny little inglorious real one I'd
picked up at Fresh and Easy the week before. And we decorated the
outside tree—it's by the front steps—with a beautiful string of fake
cranberries I bought on clearance at Joann's after Christmas last year.
But then it rained. And rained and rained. And the deep red berries are
now bright pink. And mushy. They're still kind of pretty as long as you
don't touch them, but Rilla must touch them every time she passes by,
and then she winds up with smears of fuschia-colored mush on her hands,
and her clothes, and my pant legs, and anything else she can manage to
touch on our way to the kitchen sink.
Or: You know how Scott's car got hit in that parking lot last month?
Big truck pulling into the lot caught his front bumper and peeled it
halfway off? Would you believe the other guy's insurance company says
he isn't at fault?? (Though he totally admitted it, himself, at the
time of the incident: there was no doubt. Scott's car was parked. The
truck hit him.) And if we can't get this decision reversed, we're out
$500 for the deductible? Can you believe that?
Or: So I went to Confession today and of course I had all the kids
with me, and I left them in the cry room which is all the way in the
back of the church, and I was all the way in the front where the
confessionals are but I could hear Wonderboy shrieking. He was inside a soundproofed room,
but I could hear him. So I got out of line and walked back to the cry
room to see what on earth was the problem. Turned out Rose and Rilla
were playing tag. Which would be okay, more or less, since they were alone in a closed and did I mention
soundproofed room, and it's not like Mass was going on or anything, but
Wonderboy was totally shattered by this breach of churchy decorum and
he was howling at them to stop. And then after Confession
he cried all the way home because I am trying to ease him out of his
fixation on this one particular Sing 'n Learn cassette he expects to
listen to every single time we're in the van, and the rest of us are
all sick of it (though we've all got the state capitals down pat,
that's for sure). But he is convinced that the sky is going to crumble
and fall upon our heads if we do not listen to that rassafrassin' tape
every single second we're driving. And then Rose brought up the
question of how the seating arrangements will change after the baby
comes, and she was furious to learn that she'll have to move to the
back row because the infant seat only fits in the middle row, and
Wonderboy has to have the other middle-row spot because he gets into
too much mischief if he's sitting within pinching range of one of his
siblings. But Rose despises the crowded back seat, and she is livid at
the injustice of it all, disgusted that we aren't getting a bigger
vehicle, completely unswayed by such reasonable explanations as "with
the economy the way it is, now isn't the time to take on a new car
payment, and the minivan is almost paid off." "So we won't be able to
ride ALL TOGETHER as a family anymore?" Rose wailed—because the minivan
seats seven and we're about to become eight. And in case you're
wondering, a cheery pep talk about sacrifice and frugality and 'just
think of all the making-do Kit Kittredge's family had to do during the
Great Depression' is not likely to meet with resounding applause at
such a moment. I'm just saying.
Or: Is it just me, or are your kids bickering a lot more than usual
too, the closer we get to Christmas? And why, why, WHYYYY, was I ever
so foolish as to begin the gingerbread house tradition? Because every
year it becomes a giant sticky thorn in my side. There's no going back,
though, not after the precedent was set ten years ago. But at least
this year Jane did most of the hard part, the housebuilding. We're
going to decorate tomorrow but this is a kit I picked up in that same
after-Christmas sale at Joann's last year, and the gumdrops are hard as
rocks, and if you can't eat half the decorations as you're working on
the house, most of the fun is gone. So I guess I'll have to run out
tomorrow and buy some new gumdrops. Arrrgh.
So there you go. That's what you'd get if you were Alice,
calling me on the phone. And you would very satisfyingly commiserate by
firing back with similar anecdotes of your own. ("I'll see your hip
pain and raise you four sick kids, a doctor's appointment, and a car
encased in ice." At which point I fold. Because the cranberry-melting
rain is gone, and we had a gorgeous blue sky and sweater weather again
today.)
Life is messy, and complicated, and full of friction.
That stable in Bethlehem must have smelled like manure. Was the manger
clean? I had to scrub so much grime off the infant carseat yesterday,
and it had only been sitting in a closed garage for a year. Not even a
real garage—it's just a storage room, really. But the parts of the
Nativity story we celebrate are the shining star, and the awestruck
shepherds, and the singing of angels. The image of the baby swaddled
snugly, sleeping in the hay, with His mother smiling down at Him in
wonder, oblivious to the muck and the grime and the prickling straw and
the snorts of the livestock: that's the image we've carried in our
hearts for two thousand years. That doesn't mean the muck wasn't there.
It's just not the important part of the story, the thing worth holding
on to. The muck is always there, always here. But so is the radiant
star, the heavenly choir, the sleeping Child so full of promise and
hope.
My children may bicker, and I may—almost certainly
will—complain. But the bickering and the griping are chaff, and what's
left when the winds of time carry them away are the golden kernels I
want to savor: Carol of the Bells ringing out from Jane's piano; my
little boy leaning against me and laughing for joy at a picture of his
daddy; a girl-childlost in a beloved book, her fury long forgotten; riotous squeals up and down the hallway from a toddler on a magic carpet pulled by a giggling, curly-haired Mama Duck. Colored lights gleaming on a cute little tree that, if you squint just right, almost looks real, and doesn't make me cough.
Headlights in the window: that dear red car, its bumper restored,
pulling into the driveway next to a
soon-to-be-too-small-for-the-very-best-of-reasons minivan. An infant
carseat, scrubbed and ready, waiting to be buckled into place and
filled with our own little bundle of promise and hope.