Digging For Buried Joy In 2020

With only two weeks until Christmas, Chanukah already underway, and the cold and dark descending — finding joy seems a big ask. A part of me wants to say: How dare you put up that little puffy Santa blow up on your roof! The electric waste is killing our planet! Don’t you know that people are dying out there? Don’t you care that your cheery lights just make me feel more catastrophically blue?

You know when you are broken hearted because you’ve just been dumped by that man who could scale a cliff or make the you feel like the funniest person on earth? Or your kid is twitching and the doctors still don’t know why — and the sun has the audacity to come out anyhow?

At the same time, the hanging of the twisted up Christmas lights, the ritual of taking the ornaments out of the box, each of these acts brings a kind of familiarity and comfort that is grounding when so much in our world is totally unpredictable. It’s nice to have one thing that is just the same as ever.

Last week, my 13-year-old twin boys said, “I don’t wanna decorate the tree because it’s too much work to remove all the lights afterward.” I felt saddened to hear that they’re already so jaded and cynical. Gone are my little boys who used to leap at every sparkly object. But in truth, they echoed my own sentiments exactly. As 2020 comes to a close I am completely exhausted. Another round of house imprisonment? Another day where it feels like looking at my news feed might just send me into cardiac arrest. And you want me to put up the Christmas tree?

I know that once I open the boxes and untangle the lights and find the little Mexican heart ornament along with the pretty glass peace ball and the little grey mouse, that I might actually feel a tad sentimental. When my boys were four and we were just divorced I realized that I couldn’t carry a huge tree all by myself and I had not one friend or family member near our little rental to give me a hand. I told the boys to get trees as big as they could carry, but not any bigger. I felt like a total failure as a human. I was not living in the movie with the snowflakes and the nuclear family and the warm fireplace. But the inordinate joy the boys had in picking their own tiny trees and carrying them up the stairs all by themselves was actually enough to make me crack a smile. That, I suppose, was a pivot.

I’m not Christian, or religious by traditional standards. I’m a late-blooming-Buddhist-in-Progress. But still I celebrate Christmas — the tree and the reckless materialism, mostly because it brings my sons joy — alongside a heaping of maternal exhaustion and wallet-emptying.

The thing about this pandemic is the same as the thing with parenting— just as you think Okay! I’ve got this. I’ve grieved the loss of my in-person-yoga classes, the companionship of the women I used to work alongside, the loss of hugs, the loss of my seven-hour work-day/breathing space when the children used to go to school, the loss of the ability to go outside without a face covering, the loss of the ability to feel safe at the grocery store, the loss upon loss — then we are asked to give up one more thing.

Others have faced far greater losses than I have. Some have lost jobs, homes, grandparents, parents, siblings, children. How do we hold all of this sorrow and keep from weeping into our mashed potatoes at our holiday dinner?

To top it off, all the therapists are on holiday! As the child of a dysfunctional family I am like this great big floating houseboat full of holes, rotted floorboards, barely glued together siding. I rely on an elaborate network of incredible humans to keep me afloat: my yoga teacher, my therapist, my kids’ therapist, my Buddhist monks. They’re all engaging in self-care right now (as they should) but without them I fear I might just float away.

So instead I’m supposed to do that Pandemic cliché: PIVOT.

I turn to my online yoga class. I click on the ones that only take 15 minutes and are called things like “Lotus in the Tornado” or “Holding on by my Fingernails.”

I email my funny warm cursing Irish Buddhist teacher and tell her I know it’s been seven months since I last promised to study the texts, but I really am ready to get serious, mostly because I want to hear her tell me that I’m okay and I want to hear her say “bollocks”.

I sign up for a women’s co-working zoom class and when I burst into tears half the women on the call text me their phone number and tell me they are there for me. I feel embarrassed and held.

I sweep up the dead marigolds from my Day of the Dead ornaments and put them into the compost and then I stick the pine garland over the remaining petals.

Since the strand of lights my son put on the tree is broken, I tell myself that the tree looks nice without lights. I remain on the sofa with the Chihuahua mutt snuggled up on my lap listening to the blessed drip of rain on the roof. That means no fires for today.

I buy myself a blush of red and pink roses alongside a bar or extra dark chocolate. I eat half of it and tell myself this is self-care.

How are you pivoting this holiday season?

Note: This is part of a humor, health and healing series for mothers of children with rare conditions, a collaboration between Angel Aid Cares and Mighty Kids Can. To learn more go to MightyKidsCan.com