This Christmas

Friday is Christmas Eve. Normally, this time of year is seriously dread-filled for me. Everywhere I look, I see penguins (mom’s favorite animal), snow globes (something she collected) and Christmas lights (she loved going about to see everyone’s house).

I hear carols in the air, which reminds me of her singing, which was truly a thing of beauty. I see her standing at the lectern at midnight mass, leading the congregation in song.

This year is the eighth without her, the ninth Christmas since she’s been gone. By all rights I should be sad and longing for her.

The weird thing is, I’m not really missing her all that much. Or, at least, I’m not missing her in the same way as has been my wont.

I’m not spending too much time weeping, as I have in year’s past, or indulging in the whiny misery of “I Miss My Mom.”

It’s not that I don’t miss her, because I do. But this year, a dull ache has replaced the stabbing hurt that I’ve nearly always felt before.

And I feel guilty about it, but I’m not feeling *too* guilty about it. So I’m feeling guilty about that. It’s a vicious cycle.

So I’m actually feeling pretty good about Christmas this year. Getting to see my parents and Herself’s. This whole being married thing is making things a bit more complicated, but we’re working it out. There’ll be food and drink and presents and a lovely time had by all.

I’m not waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’m just going to enjoy it.

Merry Christmas, yule sona, Festive Non-Denominational Winter Gathering, Happy Saturnalia, etc.

Simply Having a Wonderful Hooking Time

Ah, yes, Christmas. That joyful time of year when kids try to be on their best behavior, when not pulling their frustrated and tired parents through store after store demanding things that Santa can bring them.

Watching snow fall, sitting in front of a merrily crackling fire (on DVD), eating too much and deciding the calories consumed on holidays don’t actually count.

Spending time with people you love but don’t really know very well, spending time with people you can’t stand but must because they are related to you.

Wrapping gifts made with my own two hands. This is a big deal for me, and one I hope the giftees in my life appreciate. Not the wrapping necessarily, because I am a big fan of the gift bag and tissue paper route, but the making of things.

I start in October or November, and I don’t stop until the last person on my list has something that I think fits their personality or their attitudes.

This is very special to me, because I put a lot of time and effort into making things. More than that, I put my heart and my love into crocheting the right thing for the right person.

This love affair is not easy to explain to most people, because most people simply don’t understand the need I have to make. To create. To pour a little bit of my soul into a yarn and crooked stick to cause something new to come into being.

And Christmas gives me a huge excuse to make a bunch of stuff, particularly stuff I want to make but don’t want to keep. My friends give me the excuse to make beautiful or silly or weird things that I don’t have room for or the inclination to keep for myself.

I can’t really explain the pride I feel when I walk into the inlaw’s house and see her mom wearing the socks I gave her last year, or when I see a very special baby wearing an Owl hat that I was asked to make for him.

I love being asked if I can make something, and saying, “Well, of course, I can,” particularly when the person asking starts with “I don’t know if you can crochet it, but…”

But I’m getting to be more selective about who I will hook for. I won’t just make something for someone because they ask. Even if they are willing to pay me. That’s too much like being in the business of making things, and that zaps all of the fun out of it for me.

I won’t crochet for anyone who doesn’t seem to appreciate the work and the love that goes into something. I create because it makes me whole and well and not a little un-crazy. But I can’t give something of myself to someone who tosses the creation aside.

I love giving something to someone whose eyes light up when they receive a gift. I love making things for people I love. And I love making things for people who love me back.

Because something made by hand is a part of the maker. I’ve been crocheting since I was 12 years old. I’m really quite handy at it. I’ve crocheted things that boggle even my mind. I’m not bragging, but I’m very proud of the work I do and the time and care I take with it.

So if someone gives you something handmade this year for your self-chosen Holiday experience, remember: they are giving you a piece of their heart. Treasure it. Use it. Wear it. Display it. Unless it’s something inappropriate for Grandma to see.

Circles

I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about the value of the people in my life.

Every person I have met has affected me in some way, whether I realized it or not at the time, whether it was produced a good effect or ill.

I have made friends and family, with love, with amusement, with ease.

I have lost friends and family, with pain, with carelessness, with heartache.

But the people in my life who matter most have traveled with me through the hard times and the easy, the sad times and the happy.

I met my girl because of my best friend. I met some of my best friends because of gaming. I stopped talking to some people because they couldn’t accept me for who I am.

Some I have let go. Some have let go of me. But the people who matter most to me have stuck.

Miles don’t seem to matter. I can live within twenty minutes of someone I have known since second grade and not make the effort to see them, or I can drive for two hours simply to be in the company of a family who have made me theirs and I them.

Last night, I spent the evening with people who have come to mean a great deal to me in a short period of time, when, in times past, I would have elected to spend the evening at home, alone.

Life is all about intersections and connections. Who knew eight years ago when I left Evansville that I’d have so many people to call my own?

I’m really starting to appreciate my own value because I’m starting to see myself through their eyes.

As Christmas draws near, I wish to celebrate the friendships I hold most dear. To friends, old and new, I say, thank you. Even if we have never met.

The Bitch of Living

When I was in the second grade, I asked my mom when she and my dad were going to get divorced so I’d be like my other friends.

Turns out, it was when I was fifteen.

This affected my brother more than it did me, at the time. I don’t know why, but it never really seemed like a big deal. I mean, of course it was, but it wasn’t. It was just one of those stupid things. I felt more alienated from my mom, abandoned by my dad. What’s new?

The real slap in the face of it was my stepdad. He was a self important bastard who treated me like a slave, a lesser, a gnat. And it didn’t help that I was a self important sixteen year old trying to prove that I was better than I was.

My junior and senior years came and went, like all of high school should. Boring mostly, with little highs and lows interspersed.

It started with headaches. And forgetting words and names. She’d go to say, “Cat.” And out would come something else, or nothing at all. This brilliant, beautiful woman that I couldn’t stand most of the time started losing her mind.

So she went for an MRI. And they found a spot. Without so much as a biopsy, her doctor told her it was nothing. “Just a benign spot.” Nothing to worry about.

Two weeks after I graduated, I had orientation at Ball State, where I was supposed to start in the fall. Then, I came home, my step-dad sat me down and told me that he had taken her for a biopsy while I was away. And he told me that it was an inoperable brain tumor, just at eye level. They would try radiation, and chemo, but with the treatment, they were giving her two to three months. With the treatment? A year, tops.

And then he walked away, after handing his seventeen year old stepdaughter a lighter and a pack of Marlboro lights.

I believed fervently in the power of denial. Ignore it and it’ll go away. That was my motto, my raison d’etre. I would go to work, I would go out with my friends all night, and she wouldn’t be sick.

I found myself trying hopelessly to ignore the fact that she never called me by name anymore. Or said much at all. They shaved her head to put in the shunts to relieve the pressure in her brain. She had to wear an eye patch to help with the double vision.

She got so sick from the chemo that she stopped. She did one treatment round and just quit. Not that I was around when it happened. I was at work, or with my friends, or doing god knows what just to be out of that damned house.

Because when I wasn’t there, I could pretend. I had a mother who was whole and safe and not married to a stupid son of a bitch who treated me badly.

But I couldn’t pretend for long.

She had her first symptom in May. She died in August.

I moved to Indianapolis on August 10, 2002. She died on the 28^th. Of course, I wasn’t there. And most of my family can’t forgive me for that. They don’t understand how I couldn’t have been by her side while she slipped quietly out of her coma and was gone.

I was so mad at myself for a really long time because I couldn’t make myself be there. This woman who was there for me every day, I couldn’t watch her leave this world. She kicked my ass out of the house while she was sick because she couldn’t remember who I was, and I couldn’t face her leaving me.

I’m going to regret it forever. Was she proud of me? Did I tell her enough that I loved her? Will love her, forever? The answer is: I don’t know. I’ll never know if she was proud of me, if she’d be proud of the woman I am, with all my faults and foibles.

I was seventeen when she died, just three days shy of my eighteenth birthday. And it kills me that my own kids will never get a chance to meet her, to hear stories of the hellion I was in my youth, the too serious and angsty teen. At least, not from her. There are others still around who knew me then. But it’s not the same.

Sometimes I wish I had died when she did. Because I’m selfish and didn’t want to deal with the pain. Still don’t, as a matter of fact. But life goes on, whether or not you actually want it to.

And if she were here, she’d slap me up one side and down the other for feeling sorry for myself, for wishing my mother would have been there on my wedding day, for wishing for so many moments we could have shared.

It’s the bitch of living. You can’t always have what you want. So, I’ll just raise a glass to my mom, Alice Marie.

Thinking Deep Thoughts

I am a swamp of emotions. Not just for my wife. She is in me and through me and all around me and sometimes I feel like I will burst if I can’t see her or touch her or tell her how much I love her.

But also for my friends. I see the face of a new parent, the love in a husband’s eyes, the simple, the complex, the need, the home.

I think I’m home now.

When did I come to know that shutting myself off wasn’t what I wanted or needed anymore? When did I realize that “my people” doesn’t have to be a small, inclusive group?

I don’t have to let everyone in, because I can’t. I have been hurt too much to let everyone see the real me, to let them have my time, and my love. But I don’t have to limit my heart and my love. I don’t have to push the wanting more away because I don’t know enough people that I can trust with me.

Because I do now. I have so many people that may only see the smallest glimmer of who I am, but there are others that see the more. While I want to share all of me with just one person, I can still share parts of me with more people.

I am who I am in large part to the friends I have chosen, or have had chosen for me. Would I be where I am if I hadn’t gone to the drive-in that June Saturday night? Would I be where I am if she hadn’t come to the theater to see that show? Certainly not. If I hadn’t opened myself more to the unknown, I wouldn’t have most of the people I love, respect, admire.

Did I wait too long to come to this? How many potential friends have I missed because of the need to hide, to fear, to wallow? How many do I have because someone wouldn’t let me?

Mostly, it’s her. It’s the need she has to be around like minds and similar souls. It’s battling the deep seated fear that they only tolerate me because they want to see her. It’s giving in to that fear sometimes. It’s holding on to the frightening because it is so familiar.

Why should it be so? Why should the negative be so easy to believe, when the positive is, maybe, possibly, true?

Because I don’t see what they see, maybe. Could it be that the people I love actually value the fact that I can quote most of the geekier movies and books I’ve devoured? Or that I say the answers on Jeopardy before Alex can finish reading the clue? Or that the happiest moments in my life come from seeing someone I love using something that I made?

It’s ridiculous. To hold on to the feeling that I am less because I’m not a size 3 or a neat freak or wealthy or an Einstein or a Mozart or a Curie or a Da Vinci or….

I’m not less than anyone else. I matter. And while I will never actually know how much I matter to some people, I know that I am loved. And, I may never been as comfortable in a crowded room as I am sitting in bed, reading a book, I still matter.

She thinks I’m beautiful, and crazy, and sexy, and smart. She thinks I’m one of the best things going. Who knows? She might be right.

Or she might be crazy. Haven't discounted that yet.