Tangled yarn

Such a busy week... I'm not used to getting dressed like a grownup every morning anymore. Clients crawling all over the place, breathless with needs... deep angst about my looming dissertation committee meeting (I've been suspiciously silent with them for months)... tedious shopping (my mother telling me last week "I'd like one of those funky scarves talented people make for their friends" -- um, where do you BUY something like this, and wouldn't it be nice if I'd been able to look for more than the 17 minutes I have alloted between various gigs this week? ) Still no gift of significance for mom, and I head southwest in about a day and a half... with my ex... and my sis.... after we drop my ex's girlfriend off at the airport.

Swirly life, spirals and well-lived-in stories. Christmas is such a tangled ball of yarn, this constant pull between "do the family thing because that's what you DO at xmas, and why hurt mom needlessly?" and "what do I *get* out of it??" It's always so very very very stressful because it comes right before my bi-annual trip to CA for school, and I'm always *exhausted*. Mom wants us there but doesn't seem to enjoy us -- or me, anyway. My presence is a neutral force but my absence would be hurtful. Double bind.

My friend Amy and I were talking the other night about how to navigate this time of year when we don't give any credence to the religious part of the holiday, but want to somehow mark the changing of the year, depth of darkness, pull to add light. Trying to cobble together what feels right for me, but never quite hitting the mark.

I was thinking about Christmasses past -- the too-often-retold moment when I was 4 or 5 when all I wanted was a Walking Thumbelina doll, and I crept out in the night to see her under the tree -- oh, so magical! Santa! -- and could barely sleep the rest of the night with excitement... and then somewhere in the tumult of the next day, heaving mass of aunts and cousins and uncles and grandparents, Dad got too enthusiastic in his playing with me and yanked the string out of the back of the doll, rendering her unable to walk or wriggle. I wept, howled, so disappointed, he got mad, told me I couldn't have another one. Mom tried, they were all sold out forever. (Until the time travel of ebay).

That's Christmas -- all that yearning, and the inevitable combustible moment that blows it to bits. Occasional moments of deep peace -- a palpable sense of serene, meditative well-being falling over a church at midnight mass as the last strains of Silent Night trailed off -- and the complete inversion, my mother desperately angry at me when I finally refused to continue accompanying her to church anymore, completely unable to even temporarily tolerate an institution that was actively persecuting my basic civil rights.

The only really resonant note for me is the undercurrent of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas -- the yearning to connect across distance, to have the people you care about warmly connected into one place. It's why I still send cards, and why I relish accidental encounters.

I had a lot of those today, unexpected trippings over people -- mostly because of the solstice festival of lights in my neighbourhood. Some were serendipitous -- like the guy who just adopted the little boy from the orphanage in uganda, with his new son -- and one was jarring -- my friend of more than a decade who recently decided, basically, that she doesn't like me anymore. Instead of a warm greeting, a weird grimace and a hurrying past. Other welcome hugs. More interpolations, new possibilities, frayed wires. The constant interplay between a grim miming of connection, reminders of losses, and transitory moments of peace, deep knowledge of and gratitude for each other.

That, and some very crass decision making. Turns out my amazing neighbour is one of those talented people who makes funky scarves for their friends. She delighted me with a gift of one today. But I'm keeping it for me, continuing to look for something for mom. My own little balancing point.