SISTER WISDOM

5:00 on a December evening;

it’s dark outside, but all ten of us are indoors, getting dinner ready, dodging children at play, checking email, drinking coffee, talking, laughing, being quiet, being together.

I sit down to nurse my youngest; next to me, my sister is burping baby Carson, the newest member at only 7 weeks old. The other four kids are scattered around the house. Baby Einstein is on but nobody’s watching. The kitchen smells good, like gooey butter cookies and sausage balls.

My Mom would love this.

Family gatherings were her forte. She lived for these moments, loved them, loved us all being home, loved the slightly controlled chaos that followed, loved her grandchildren.

She knew my sister’s two oldest and my firstborn; I was pregnant with my second when Mom died in the summer of 2007. Before the cancer made her too sick to leave the house, she bought a blue baby blanket, confident that I was having a boy.

I did have a boy. I love that he has a blanket that my Mom bought him, even though he didn’t know her, has no memories of her.

It doesn’t matter to him where the blanket came from.
But it matters to me.

I want to feel like Mom is still part of this family somehow. Tomorrow my Dad and stepMom will arrive, and we will welcome them. We have fun together. We talk. We laugh.

But we have a different family dynamic.

There are more pieces to this family unit than there were before. It’s not easy to bring everyone together. We don’t all have the same stories.

We are a different family now, but the past is the same.

This year we celebrated our own Christmases apart from each other, and we’re all together now over New Year’s to have our family celebration.

It’s different, and it’s hard to let go of the way things used to be.

I finally realized, consciously enough to say it aloud to my husband, that Christmas morning is kind of a letdown. There’s no helping it, really, and it’s not because anything is wrong with what we do or how we celebrate.

It’s just that the reality we are in can’t compare with the memories we carry.

Memories glow. My memories are of Christmases as a child, a teen, or a young adult: all times when responsibility was minimal. My stress level was zero. Life was simple, even when I didn’t realize it, even when I imagined drama and tension just to make things interesting.

I get that, now. I get that those memories are a precious thing in and of themselves, but they’re not to be the guide post to the future. They can’t be my standard for what Christmas is supposed to be, how it’s supposed to feel.

I have to let go.

This about more than the fact that I lost my Mom and I miss her.

This is the story of every adult who looks back on a good childhood and then gets hit in the face with a reality that doesn’t always match up to the memories. Memories are great, but memories are deceptive. We have a small window into our own past, and it’s the window of childhood. It’s one-sided. It can teach us, but it cannot teach us everything.

We have to accept something different than our memories: our present.

It is different, new, imperfect. It is real. It is tangible. It is here and now and worthwhile. It doesn’t have the distance of time to soften the edges and blur the dirty, whiny, boring, messy parts.

As I rock Zeke, I think about what I want my own children to experience as adults. If I’m not around, I hope they’ll miss me and remember me. But I also hope they’ll accept the life they have without me, that they won’t waste time trying to recreate a life that has already been lived.

It’s New Year’s Eve, and we’re looking forward.