{written in January of 2024 but accidentally unpublished until January of 2025!}
If I had sat down a month ago to write some of my thoughts over the past month, it would have been pretty dark, I'm afraid. But now Nathan has been home for nearly a week, and he's doing his level best to help us dig out of some of the chaos around here, for which I am infinitely grateful. Day by day, I feel a little bit brighter, like perhaps even if December is the absolute worst, there's a chance January will be better and 2024 will be survivable.
I have vague memories of Decembers I enjoyed, Decembers where I felt the peace and joy and read the good books and even experienced the occasional piercing epiphany of the deep and lasting meaning of it all. But the recent Decembers have all felt more like chaos and stress no matter how many things I try to eliminate, now matter how many boundaries I try to set.
My facebook memories in recent weeks reminded me that Decembers have been challenging for our family for at least a few years. In 2020 (what a year that had been!) I wrote:
"It's been a weird December. I'm struggling to find some normalcy for the kids and it feels hard lately. Nathan's work has been above and beyond the usual stresses, and we all miss him. ...we've kept up our usual tradition of doing tiny special things each day to help us get ready for Christmas. Today I looked at our tree and felt, as I do every year, that something is missing. Something is not quite magical enough, not quite perfect.I don't feel the spark. And I'm beginning to think that maybe that's the point, after all. If I could make everything perfect with lights and ribbons on a tree then we wouldn't need this time of Advent waiting at all, would we? ... It's been a weird December, and if the neighbor who stopped by yesterday evening with the unexpected gift of a fresh, warm apple pie for us is right, I'll miss these very moments someday. I came to the door, embarrassed at the mess and chaos behind me. 'Sorry it's so crazy here today!' 'Take me back to those days,' she said.
I had forgotten about that exchange with a kind neighbor, who has since moved away. How many other times have people tried to tell me wise things I've forgotten in the trenches?
Last year I shared a picture of my beeswax Advent candles burning and wrote,
"This image looks like the peace and stillness that I spend the month of December struggling to find. Truth be told, I had to clear a good number of crumbs off the table and more plastic cups than the number of kids I actually have out of the frame to even take a picture. And I want to remember that part, too - that it’s nothing new, this searching for peace amidst chaos I experience every Advent.
It’s 11 pm on Christmas Eve and Nathan is still at work — an accurate microcosm of December being among the most demanding of times he experiences in his job. While he tries to fulfill his own responsibilities each December, I’m triaging things at home in between playing holiday concerts here and there. I really don’t remember the last time we had a December where I sat back and felt “Yes, all is calm, all is bright.” It’s hard to see the brightness past all the piles of laundry yet to be folded and put away, the dishes in the sink, the gifts needing to be made and wrapped, the home projects large and small needing urgent attention all around us. It’s hard to find the calm between sibling squabbles and a to-do list that keeps getting longer no matter how many things we check off. Still. We fix our eyes on him until the day dawns and Christ the Morning Star rises in our hearts."
So those were the ghosts of my Christmases past. This year, in mid-December I sat and played for a Christmas service that was glorious by any and all standards, and I was so exhausted I felt nearly dead inside. Worse than that - I felt a little bit mad. Mad at all the people I saw in attendance who looked joyous. How could they be filled with joy while I was filled with ... nothing? Why couldn't I feel the joyous things? Was it because I had just finished a total of three rehearsals and six performances inside of 72 hours and the utter exhaustion had claimed my soul as well as my body? Or was it something more?
I'm middle-aged and I'm tired, and the truth is, I can't really have any certainty that all the things I'm teaching my children, what I'm giving them as a compass for their lives, that any of it is wholly right. And it is this that keeps me awake at nights sometimes, this wondering if the Morning Star I'm pointing them towards is real and good and true, and if any of it makes any difference.
Since Christmas, Nathan and I have worked together in every free moment to intentionally establish some better systems for our home life with the "work smarter, not harder" mentality underlying it all. Nathan completely reorganized our kitchen cabinets and re-envisioned things where I couldn't, and the result is a better organizational system with fewer roadblocks to actually putting things away easily every time they are used. Life is already a bit better because of it!
We worked together on our annual "donate stuff we don't need" clean out project, and several bags of who-knows-what later, our spaces are tidier.
And last Wednesday, I woke up and declared that I intended to finally paint the upstairs bathroom so badly in need of a face-lift, and that Nathan ought not to try to stop me. Rather than dissuade me from taking it on, he did much of the heavy lifting to make it happen, for which I'm profoundly grateful.
* * *
I have noticed, over the years, that when I'm feeling more optimistic and content, I tend to reach for my phone or camera more often to take pictures and capture the moments. And when life feels overwhelming and chaotic, weeks on my phone's camera roll might contain little to nothing. Perhaps it's as simple as the fact that I prefer not to take a picture with chaos in the background, but I tend to think there's something more there, and that my phone camera actually ends up representative of my own ability to see the beauty in life's little moments.
It was a rough December, but we're staying optimistic about the rest of January, and the months to come. Happy New Year.
