Happy enough

Is this really the most wonderful time of the year?

In some ways, yes.

Two of my favourite food groups, chocolate and gravy, feature prominently during the Christmas season. Some of the most gorgeous sacred music ever written finds its way onto radio station playlists and my DVD player in November and December - along with Bing Crosby with his soothing brand of seasonal crooning.

And speaking of Bing, the coziest old movies and the best animated specials can be found on television stations 24/7 as the clock ticks down to Christmas day. And those you can't find on TV are almost always available on DVD to watch over and over again.

And cards - sparkly, lovely, mushy, happy cards - find their way into my mailbox almost every day, giving bills and junk mail a run for their money.

Christmas is a greeting card whore's dream come true.

And there really is a gentleness about the season. People, when they're not shopping or trying to find a parking spot, just seem nicer somehow.

So yes, it's a lovely time of year. And I love it.

But I think it's important not to over-glorify Christmas. Not because the other holidays will get jealous, but because it puts entirely too much pressure on everyone to actually feel as happy as we might be pretending to look; as happy as the songs and stories and televisions specials tell us we should be.

Sometimes happy isn't always there. But because Mariah Carey is shrieking at me about a silent night over the sound system at the mall, I feel like the world expects me to be happy, calm, and bright. Right now, dammit.

Like I used to be, back when I didn't know that babies died and fathers got sick.

It's not realistic to be happy all the time. And it's even less realistic at Christmas, where there's additional pressure to be the Norman Rockwellian picture of festive bliss - no matter what's going on in the rest of your life, it seems.

Divorced people, sick people, abused people, grieving people, depressed people, lonely people - they're feeling additional pressure to be festive and happy when circumstances in their lives make just regular old happy difficult some days. Maybe most days.

Spring is a wonderful time of year. Buds, blooms, balmy weather and an end to snow boots and winter tires makes it a perfectly lovely season. Summer, although I despise the heat, is nice simply because there's no chance of snow and a good chance of a cottage vacation. Fall - also known as pie season around here - is a delight, with crisp air, cozy sweaters, changing leaves and Thanksgiving.

All the seasons are nice.

It's just good to remember that when the joy of Christmas seems a little hard to find. Or when you think the amount of joy you have isn't enough.

One of my sweetest Christmas memories is sitting alone in bed, sick as a dog, eating canned chicken noodle soup and listening to Boris Karloff tell me how the Grinch stole Christmas, on CD.

By all accounts, it was a miserable Christmas. I was too sick to stay and have dinner with my family, so I went home after opening presents and crawled into bed with some soup. It was the very first Christmas My Beloved and I were together, and he'd given me the CD on Christmas Eve.

I was sad - I'd made my mother cry when I told her I had to leave - and in addition to being devastated that I was missing Christmas dinner for the first time ever, I felt like death warmed over. But I also felt loved as I listened to the CD and ate my soup. And by the time my sister got home with a turkey sandwich and some leftover pie, I was feeling marginally better. And even more loved.

Even a little joy is more than enough, especially during times when experiencing just a little smidgen of merry is a hard-fought victory.

It's important to remember that. It makes even the smallest amount of Christmas happy, happy enough.

The days leading up to Christmas...

...look a little something like this at my house:

When the family cookie party detritus is all cleaned up and put away for another year, the dining room table is re-purposed, becoming the official home of the Christmas train. Once they're wrapped, I pile all the presents that are heading out of the house into the middle of the train, creating present mountain around which it chugs.

As Dibley watches.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Christmas is NOT just for kids (dammit!!). It's also for adults who love to revel in the simple joys of the season. And for cats who live for the excitement of watching things that go around and around and around in circles.

Christmas is for everyone who wants a little piece of it.

And I do.

This, that 'n the other

On Saturday we had our 6th annual Family Christmas Tea, a tradition I started that first Christmas without Thomas when I was desperate to make new memories in place of the ones I'd imagined we'd be creating (with a 9-month old boy dressed in the santa suit his Grandma had knitted for him).

I've been baking and prepping for the last three weeks, and at 2:00pm on Saturday afternoon the plastic wrap came off the trays of goodies, and I scooped the whipped cream for the diabetic gingerbread cake into the candy cane bowl as my family walked in the front door.

The best moment of the day was when my dad, snuggled into the comfiest chair in the family room by the fire, smiled and said, "This is exactly where I wanted to be today."

The second best moment of the day was when my nephew, giggling and sticky with candy cane face, played charades with me in the kitchen.

It is possible, as it turns out, for your heart to both melt and break all at the same time.
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A few weeks ago my sister handed me a little round paper ornament. It was a copy of one that was going to be hung on the Christmas tree at the hospital where Thomas was born, in his memory.

By coincidence (one that has made my dad's health issues all the more emotionally complicated for me), it's the same hospital where my dad spent three months this winter/spring, and where he now receives dialysis three times a week.

On my way out of the dialysis waiting room on Friday, I spied the massive Chirstmas tree in the hospital's atrium covered in hundreds and hundreds of the little round paper ornaments purchased by family and friends in memory and honour.

I remembered the ornament that's now stuck on our fridge, and thought I might try to find its mate on the tree.

The tree has to be upwards of 20 feet tall and easily six feet wide. There are, as I said, hundreds of paper ornaments covering it from top to bottom.

And I found Thomas' almost instantly, about seven feet up and facing directly into the renal unit.

So I know he's watching over his Grandpa, at Christmas and always. Just like I asked him to.
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And speaking of Christmas, I got an early present the other day when I opened up my e-mail and found I'd been given a really sweet blog award by Lady Pumpkin! This is my very first one, and I have to say I was chuffed. I really was.

As per the instructions, I'm now passing the Cherry On Top award to the following five wonderful women who always manage to say something that makes me smile, cry, nod or laugh - sometimes all in the same post:

Mrs. Spit
Loribeth
Pamela at Silent Sorority
Emily
Justine at A Half Baked Life

Here are the rules: Link back to the person who awarded you, and then pick five blogs to pass the award along to. Make sure to comment on the awarded blogs so they know they’ve been picked.

Thank you again, Lady Pumpkin! I'm glad you think I'm deserving of a cherry on top!

Don't forget...

Lately I've been carefully reminding myself to prepare for the emotional onslaught of Christmas Eve, which seems to catch me off guard every year.

The first one without Thomas I spent cleaning - manically cleaning - and sobbing. It has not gotten much better. But that's because I kept forgetting how shittastic Christmas Eve is, for some reason. It's fresh agony each year thanks to my surprising inability to retain useful information like: CHRISTMAS EVE SUCKED LAST YEAR BECAUSE I WAS VERY, VERY SAD.

As the years have passed there's been noticeably less frenzied cleaning activity on Christmas Eve (of course that would be the first thing to go...), but there's still a debilitating amount of very raw sorrow in my heart on the 24th.

It's such a little kid day - my most favourite day of the year when I was small. So much magic in the air. So much promise. So much to look forward to.

And now, of course, there's markedly less magic and promise in my life. And the sorts of things I look forward to are having a schooner of wine when I get home from taking my dad to the hospital, or knowing there's a chocolate bar My Beloved has stashed away in the freezer for me.

See? Wine and chocolate. And I was going to mention something about fleece sheets, but that's just too obvious.

So I've been reminding myself that Christmas Eve is coming, pain and all, because I think maybe if it doesn't sneak up on me, it might not be as bad as usual.

Plus this year I'll be spending some of it in dialysis with my dad - which isn't necessarily merrier, but, well, different. And different is good, I find. Even when the different is actually bad, different.

I don't know for sure if being prepared will help at all - but at least I'm doing something beside waiting to wake up on Christmas Eve to a crushing sadness I'd forgotten would come.

Surviving the holidays

When I was a kid, Christmas started as soon as Halloween was put away (which is the reason why I start playing Christmas music on November 1st now that I'm a grown-up and can make those sorts of executive decisions).

But back in the 70s when I didn't have quite as much power (but did have an alarming number of polyester pants), if the beginning of November was deemed too early to drag out the decorations, I just made my own to tide myself over. Construction paper chains and snowflakes worked well, although I callously tossed them aside for the breathtaking beauty of the plastic holly garland as soon as it made its glorious appearance above the fireplace hearth. It had multicoloured twinkle lights and everything - something no paper chain could ever hope to achieve.

My parents, whether they were conscious of doing it or not, created traditions that I still try to find a way to carry on today. The plastic garland melted in an overly-ambitious fire years ago - and our gas fireplace is too hot to allow a swag of garland anyway - but there are some things I cannot change. I will not change.

Christmas has an edge of sadness - I can't lie. I miss Thomas with an ache that sometimes threatens to double me over during the holiday season. And I miss my Grandparents, who were such a huge part of my life and of Christmases past.

But I love the season in all its tinseled glory, and I refuse to give in to the sorrow as much as humanly possible. It sits below my skin like a layer of winter fat, but I can hide it with big sweaters.

And I can ease it by indulging in the traditions that make me feel safe and cozy and loved.

I have a bourbon fruit cake in the oven right now, as a matter of fact, because my mom made it every year. She spent most of December trying to keep my dad from "taste-testing" it, but somehow enough managed to last through to the big day.

I tasted one batter-smothered, brandified raisin before I washed the mixing bowl, and it instantly transported me back to Christmas past. Kind of like my own personal Dickens-inspired time capsule.

The ornaments my Grandma gave me each year still find a way onto my tree - even the Santa Claus with the giant clown lips that we made together (I did the lips) - and I still get a brand new pair of Christmas jammies to wear on Christmas Eve.

There is comfort in ritual. And there is joy in creating new traditions, even if you don't have anyone to pass them down to.

Last year my niece said she'd visit me in the home if I promised to have my Christmas cookie party every year. It began as a distraction in 2005 when I needed to have something to do in the weeks leading up to what would have been Thomas' first Christmas - and when doing something "new" was critical to me, for reasons I can no longer really explain.

But now it's something that I know at least one little soul looks forward to. And the thought that it might become part of her cherished Christmas-past memories when she's all grown up means the world to me.

And so I bake. To distract, to comfort, to remember, to celebrate.

Christmas List

My Christmas list
By Kristin, age 40 & 1/2

1. I would like my Dad to be here for Christmas. Please.
2. I would like like them (whoever "they" are) to hurry the hell up and find a cure for cancer. For all cancers, and no matter at what stage. I would like that very much. Please.
3. I would like someone to invent a reasonably priced and 100% effective under eye cream that would make me look rested and relaxed, even when I'm exhausted and knotted up into a Kristin-shaped ball off anxiety.
4. I would like them (whoever "they" are) to make a fat-free chocolate substitute that tastes exactly like the real thing. But only after they're finished finding the cure for cancer.
5. I would like to be thin. Without trying...as if by magic.
6. I would like Justin Bieber to fix his hair. And then go away.
7. I would like our region to change its policy on backyard poultry so we could have a tiny flock of chickens in our yard, allowing us to bake and cook with farm fresh eggs. Every day, if we wanted.
8. I would like to find a comfortable pair of chubby-foot-flattering heels that don't make it appear as though I'm wearing cartoon pig hooves.
9. Oh hell, I would just like to have thin feet. And ankles that never swell.
10. I would like the fashion industry to pay more attention to round, short-waisted women so I could wear pants that aren't always two inches south of my cleavage.


But mostly I want #1 and #2. So Santa, go work your magic.

Love,
Kristin

'Tis the season

Nearly five months of silence.

So it's time for some rambling, I think. 'Tis the season, and all.

I realized, probably not for the first time, but for the first time this year, that the things I do at Christmas post-Thomas are things I do to cope with Christmas post-Thomas. The obsessive ornament buying, the totally over the top cookie baking for the annual family Christmas tea we started hosting the year Thomas died, the ornament making party, the explosion of garland, tinsel and lights all over the house.

It's all busy work. And a bit of a disguise.

Which makes me wonder what Christmas would look and feel like if I didn't try so hard to make it magical. If I didn't wear myself out quite so much. If I just took some time to sit and listen and let the season quietly work its way into my soul on its own terms.

I've been doing this - busting my proverbial (and literal) ass in an effort to prove to everyone that I am full of Christmas spirit and also just fine, thank you very much - since that horrible first Christmas without him.

And while I've been so busy trying to demonstrate my fortitude, I haven't really let anyone do anything for me. I haven't let anyone scoop me up, plunk me down and take care of me during this season when my heart feels both so full and so empty I can't fathom that it even knows how to beat anymore.

I haven't shown the people around me that I'm still vulnerable. That while I love Christmas, it also hurts. That maybe I need a little extra TLC these days, or at least a pass if they find me slightly out of sorts at some point during the back-to-back festivities (all of which I promise I really do enjoy in my own way).

I steal moments, finding empty corners of unused rooms in which to regroup. But I do it secretly. As if there's something wrong with needing a moment to breathe.

I've put an inordinate amount energy into avoiding the need for pity by proving my strength, and to my own detriment. Because now, now maybe I want people to take a moment and whisper that they remember. That they miss him too. That he is not forgotten and never, ever will be.

And now they probably won't. Because they think I don't need it.

Or worse, that I don't want it.

Because I've worked very hard to show that I don't.

Stupid, stupid me. Although, in my defense, who the hell is good at grieving? Especially this kind of grieving?

I think I've done well these past four years and nine months. As well as I knew how, anyway. But I've learned some lessons, and I'll be making an effort (because it's always about effort, isn't it?) to tone down the Christmas dog and pony show next year.

I think it's time.

Next year will be for me.

Only on the Eves

From Christmas Eve to New Year's Eve. With lots of nothing in between (save the busyness and feasting of Christmas day, of course).

But since then it's been long stretches in our jammies, chocolate in hand and endless hours of Mad Men on the tube. We blew through all 13 episodes of the first season in three days.

Heaven, I tell you. Heaven.

If, of course, you don't count what's missing. Which I do, naturally. But I'm also paying close attention to what isn't, and enjoying all that very much.

As for 2009 knocking furiously on my front door, I just don't know. I'll answer it at midnight. But I'm wary of the new guest blustering in with such universal fanfare and promise. And so I have no expectations.

I have only a plea for a kinder year. For peace. For direction. For guidance.

And for happiness that I once feared would elude me forever, and which I have worked very hard to cut and paste back into my life in a patchwork of moments and memories. I've papered over some of the badness. Replaced some of the sorrow with quiet peace. And my plan is to keep on going. To keep adding and building.

The little house of my soul might, to some eyes, always look like it's in tatters; bits torn out, patches taped over top, small cracks letting the cold in now and then. But it's still standing. And this is what it looks like as I work at the job of repairing it piece by piece.

Eventually, I hope, turning it into a mosaic.

Because even things that are broken can be beautiful again.

They can.

It's Christmas Eve...

...and I'm okay.

I hope you are too.

The three of us

Christmas looms.

And it's not as hard as it was last year, fresh from the loss of the twins. And it's not as hard as it was the two years before that (time has given me distance and an effective arsenal of coping mechanisms).

But still, amidst the happy bustling and the busyness, there's a sadness that I suppose might always be there.

Because there's no little boy to rush down the stairs on Christmas morning, tousle-haired, bleary-eyed and all excited to open his stocking and see what treasures Santa has left him under the tree.

We have quiet, sweet Christmas mornings, My Beloved and I. Our cozy time together, just the two of us, is one of the things I treasure most about Christmas. Next to unbridled chocolate consumption, of course.

But I don't think either of us forget for one second that there were supposed to be three of us.

That there should be three of us.

Sometimes I look at the tree for Thomas. I try to see it through his eyes. The twinkle of the lights, the ornaments new and old, the shiny bows on the presents beneath. I imagine his wonder. The questions he'd ask. The stories we'd tell. The glow of the lights bathing his sweet little face in red and green as he took in every sight and every word.

My imaginary Christmas.

The real one isn't so bad. Truly. I have love and family and friends all around me. And I am happy. For real.

But my heart also longs for the imaginary Christmas it will never have. And the boy.

The three of us.

'Tis the season

We have our annual Family Christmas Tea on Saturday - an event also known as "the cookie party" because really, that's what it is. I bake as many kinds of cookies as I can in the weeks leading up to the big day, and we spend the afternoon eating them up and washing them down with wine, eggnog and coffee. With my family and the in-laws, of course. It's not a two-person gorge fest. I swear.

It's a tradition I started in 2005 - the first Christmas without Thomas.

I needed everything to be different that year. I refused to put up red and green lights outside. They were blue and white that year. I refused to have a real, red and green tree inside decked with all of our old, cozy ornaments. We adopted my parents artificial tree, pre-lit with white lights, and covered it in all new white and silver ornaments and balls. I refused to open presents Christmas morning in the living room by the tree. My Beloved and I carried our stockings and presents into the family room and opened them there.

I was simply unable to bear the idea of seeing Thomas missing from the Christmas picture I'd had in my head while I was pregnant. Without him there, I had to change everything.

And I did. With painstaking attention to detail. I changed it all as much as I possibly could.

I have no idea if it really helped or not, but because I believed it would, I did it anyway. I suspect that having red and green lights outside wouldn't have added to my pain or made me miss my baby any more than I already did, but the busyness of changing everything was like an addictive salve. Once I started, I couldn't stop. I felt productive. And healthy. And smart.

I fooled myself good.

The lights outside are red and green again, and now we have two trees every year - the artificial one in the living room with the white and silver finery I bought to mask my sorrow, and a real one in the family room heavy with the weight of our treasured old ornaments and trinkets.

But the cookie party tradition has stuck. I started it because I needed to create a new memory - I needed that first, lonely Christmas without Thomas to be about more than just the first, lonely Christmas without Thomas.

So I slapped on a happy face and baked my heart out.

They came. We ate. And a tradition that I now find cozy and sweet was born.

Today, in between the chocolate marshmallow meltaways and the magic cookie bars, I paused for a moment and admitted to myself that even though the motivation for having the event isn't fully therapeutic any longer, it is still a salve on an unhealed wound.

I know part of the reason why I'm still doing this four Christmases later is because it keeps me busy and gives me purpose during this season that is sometimes so hard on my heart.

Christmas is for children, I hear over and over and over again. But for people like us, it's also about survival. And making the most of a difficult situation. And finding sweet moments wherever you can.

Even when you have to bake them one by one.

Something's missing

In the midst of the construction I suddenly felt him missing. Suddenly noticed the Thomas-sized hole beside my chair in the kitchen.

I stopped, looked out at the gray sky drizzling cold rain down onto the freshly fallen snow, and told him, for the millionth time, that I miss him.

Sometimes, despite my best efforts, this is what Christmas looks like in our house.

2008

I've never really liked New Year's Eve. I'm so gushingly sentimental about everything that even the turning of a new year easily makes me misty eyed and melancholic.

The past two New Year's Eves - when I've been more than happy to leave the old years behind because they held broken dreams, grief and hopelessness in their clutches - I still felt twinges of sorrow as the ball dropped. I didn't want the dying years back, but the passing of time and the changing of the calendar made me feel so much farther away from Thomas.

Everything seemed so connected to him.

So I fully expected this year to be the same. But, like Christmas, it tricked me.

This year was easy. I've never in my life been so happy to bid an old year farewell. I felt no sorrow as the countdown began. Not even the tiniest bit. I just clutched my glass of sparkling Shiraz and waited for the relief of a fresh start.

I know today really isn't any different than yesterday. Not really. Yesterday was last year, but it was also just Monday.

However, as I lay in bed with my tiny Shiraz buzz on and my body unclenching just a little bit, all I could see stretched out in front of me was a brand new, sparkling white year.

As unblemished as they come.

I have no idea what the year holds for us - and I'm loathe to hazard a guess because life has this funny way of doing the unexpected and unthinkable - but right now, at 10:20pm on the first day of this impossibly young year, I feel good. Not necessarily hopeful, but not drained of hope either.

This year holds no evil for me. It's pristine. Sorrow hasn't wiped its bloody paws all over it yet, and there's every chance it won't.

Yes, yes, there's every chance it will. It is me we're talking about. But still, right now it's good. It's all good.

Minute to minute. That's the way to go.

Happy New Year!

Decompression

I suppose I'm slow. I kept wondering why I was having such a hard time with Christmas this year. Last year, after all, was so much better than the year before - the first year without Thomas.

I enjoyed virtually everything about Christmas 2006. I missed the boy, yes, but I truly enjoyed all of the festivities in a way I had been completely incapable of the year before, lost in deep haze of grief.

So I stupidly assumed, without giving it much thought really, that this Christmas would be even better. Even easier. Two Christmases under my belt had to make this one even easier.

Except that it wasn't.

This was a hellish year in many slow, quiet ways. It started in January with the suggestion that we entertain the notion of exploratory surgery because all else had failed. Spectacularly so. Surgery was in March, a few weeks after Thomas' second birthday. It nearly broke me, if you'll recall - the lead up, pure terror. Then a third failed IUI. Then twins. Then a month and a half of torment and uncertainty while we waited for confirmation that the twins would never come. Then a D&C, hemorrhaging and an overnight hospital stay.

And, at long last, the onset of the Christmas season followed almost immediately by the onset of therapy.

Why I thought a year like that would gently wind its way down to a sweet and peaceful Christmas season is beyond me. Maybe I just hoped it would.

But I know better now.

Gotta love the usefulness of hindsight.

Counting down

Christmas used to be merrier once upon a time, but I'm doing my best. I am. I swear I am.

But if I'm being honest (and it seems like I should, just in case Santa's paying attention), I'm kind of looking forward to boxing day more than anything else at the moment.

I can't help it. It's been one hell of a year and I'm just missing too many little people.

Sometimes peace doesn't come when you want it to or when you think it should. In fact that's when it can be particularly elusive. Just because Hallmark says I should feel merry doesn't mean merry is necessarily going to find me.

It might. There's still time.

But if all else fails, there's always boxing day.

Ah, the Christmas letter

Here's the thing. I've always maintained that I absolutely do not want to be treated differently by the successfully child-bearing among us. And I still maintain this to be true.

However, I do kind of think people should use a modicum of tact and sensitivity when dealing with the bereaved, especially around this time of year. Especially with a still-fresh loss compounding the sorrow of the three behind it.

Which is why I nearly burst a vein last night when I got a Christmas letter tucked into a Christmas card from friends of our. It was a sweet letter, but it was 98% kid-oriented.

I can't necessarily cope with hearing about all the milestones your 9-month old son has reached, especially when that son was born on the day Thomas was due nearly three years ago. I don't want to hear about how his big sister (born four months after my first miscarriage) dotes on that tiny boy.

This probably sounds cold. Mean, even. I love children. I love all my friends' children. I love holding them and making them laugh and cooing at them.

But I do it when I can. When I choose to. When I'm capable.

When a letter barges its way into my quiet, empty house and regales me with tales of life in a happy, child-filled home it makes me ache with emptiness and longing. It makes my house deafeningly silent. It makes the tree lights burn my eyes. It makes me cry quietly while I'm watching The Grinch with My Beloved.

I know my sorrow and its magnification at this time of year isn't top of mind for most people, particularly those we don't see often, but my God, how does it not occur to people (who, by the way, know about the twins when many people don't) that we might not want to read a "look what my kid can do now" letter?

How does it not occur to them that it might hurt us? How is it possible not to realize that a letter like that shouldn't be sent to people like us?

Just, how??