Going through stuff

 Reading: American War by Omar El Akkad

Listening to: "Cozy New Year's Eve Ambience" on YouTube

Outside: Chilly and grey, but the snowdrops unfurl their leaves, reaching for Spring

Scuppered by a psychotic winter storm screaming across America's frozen reaches, our plans for the Big Apple are briefly on hold. Our luggage cases, still packed, wait patiently. In the meantime, our children holiday with their devoted and tireless grandparents, who selflessly indulge their every whim. And for that we are all grateful.

And so I have some free time. 

Here I am, in the depths of peri-menopause, moving from room to room, doing all the things that Normal Vee would do to try to make sense of her life - dust off the backs of neglected shelves, finally file those papers in our little file box, search the entire house for more laundry (pure muscle memory: there isn't any). 

But I'm doing these things in a Disjointed Vee kind of way - brain fog hampers some tasks, and I will probably forget to close the windows I have cracked briefly to air out the upstairs; indecision erodes my resolve, and I may re-shelve some children's books that I had previously intended to put on the Donate Stack. 

All around me, I'm reminded Things Are Changing. 

My daughter's youth? Disappearing. My throat clenches at a forgotten (!!!) memory box which contains treasures from the year she was four: a summer trip to Eastbourne, pebbles from the beach, an "All About Me" page she lovingly made in preparation for moving up from Nursery to Reception class: in it, she pasted a photograph of her new classroom. The very same classroom her little brother runs into every day. He's older now than she was when she drew these stick figures of herself, of her new teachers.

The stories we used to read to her for bedtime, now her little brother's - but even now, many of those are already old news. All those illustrations, all those words tattooed into my brain; many of them I've read so many times I can recite them from memory. Kneeling on his bedroom floor, I pluck this book and that from his little shelf, turning each one over in my hands, thumbing the pages, remembering. The Tiger Who Came to Tea, Small Pig, Just Like Daddy. Hoping he remembers. Hoping she does.

Many of these books, outgrown, go into his closet, safely far away from the Donate Stack, relegated to the dark. They will end up in the attic at some later date, joining the toddler shoes, baby rattles, rolled-up Crayola'd images drawn on heavy paper, their first paintings of rainbows or frogs or themselves.

I am - too soon? - gently inviting Adulthood back into our living room, bringing down the old, brick-heavy coffee table books, ones I'd brought with me all the way from Indiana - Norman Rockwell, Titanic: An Illustrated History - which I'd all but forgotten about, the ones which used to grace our table next to the couch, which I'd carefully protected for so long from peanut-butter fingers and contraband, lidless Sharpies. 

Am I putting together the pieces of who I used to be? Am I surprised that they seem so old, like forgotten antiques? 

Am I shocked that both of my kids have their own X-Box controllers, and are both so adept at using them that they're showing me how to use them? 

Am I in the middle of a transition - child becomes teenager, baby becomes child, parents become old? I'm in the eye of the storm, the only thing that's still, and I put my hands on the Operation game, or The Game of Life, or a Tell the Time flip-book, to keep them from swirling up, up and away.

The toy cars and building blocks and tins of slime putty evolve and disappear. They migrate from living room/playroom to bedrooms, where science sets and Lego and comic books and R. L. Stines replace Sue Hendras.

Today we get our living room back.

I do a 360-degree turn in the centre of it all, speechless. How empty it looks. 

A little relieved? Yes.

A little sad? Yes.

And here I am, a middle-aged parent kinda making sense of things. 

I meet myself in the mirror over the fireplace. That mirror that saw a near-empty room, a second-hand red sofa-bed, and a bag from the local chippy - our first meal in our new home - just the two of us - almost 20 years ago. 

That room has since blossomed and changed - couches replace the little red sway-backed sofa-bed, black Ikea shelves rise towards the ceiling. There's Disney DVDs and beloved leggy Devil's Ivy plants Jumanji-ing their way across the top of ever more bookcases groaning with Stephen King and Velikovsky and baby books and photo albums and colouring books too many to count. 

That mirror watched me spoon Cheesy Pasta Stars baby food into my daughter's waiting mouth, and then my son's, the same tiny spoon, six years apart, going tink against the rim of the jar. 

Watched me fall asleep with each of my babies on the couch at naptime. 

Watched my children bring me Mother's Day gifts. Watched me step on a Lego and yelp. 

Watched me show off a new tattoo, and dance when a good song came on the Alexa playlist. 

All these memories filling the empty spaces of a once almost-empty room. Filling every waiting corner of my heart with life, with every tear and giggle my children ever had, and ever will have. I've given of myself. My voice for every bedtime song and story, every hand-hold across a street, every worry that's kept me up at night. Today will be for me. 

Lego pieces are vanquished back into their box for now; a minefield swept. Maybe the greying woman in the mirror is or isn't the clueless girl who moved into this house two decades ago. Perhaps today I will sit down, crack open that dusty Norman Rockwell tome, study those beautiful paintings she so used to love, and get to know her again.

Happy Thursday, everyone.

Stay safe and warm.

To my son in the throes of youth

 Reading: You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

Listening to: "Relaxing Jazz for Autumn" 

Outside: Crows and leaves swirl in the wind

Indiana, post-hot chocolate, finds an incredible stick
October 22, 2025

The second of two, the last in line. The Pandemic baby - born and raised in isolation, finding his feet in a big, wide world. He's momentum, brightness, and intensity. I look for myself in him, gazing at his face as one would look in a mirror - this ever-changing reflection of our shared past. 

I zip him into his coat, knowing he won't need help for much longer. 

I read his bedtime story, marvelling at the size of him, how he's starting to outgrow his toddler bed, how his five-year-old gaze follows my finger when I'm pointing to the sounds that make up the words, "zoom" and "so," and knowing he knows them. Now he knows them. 

I catch myself calling him by his big sister's name sometimes, by accident, as if she's living her wonder years all over again. Perhaps, I'm wishing she could. Perhaps, through him, she is.

First trip to the Barber Shop
October 29, 2025

Dear son, lover of the colour pink, expert at "doing voices," hard worker at school and provider of laughter at home, may you always sparkle. 

Keep saving the bugs that want saving. Keep thanking the bees for the honey we put in our porridge. Yes, cry when you see someone chopping down a tree. Every time. Feel deeply. May such empathy never run out. Keep making inventions out of tape and pipe cleaners. Your inventions just get better and better. You're improving the world every day.

Bonfire Night celebrations
November 2, 2025

And just know, if I happen to stand at the kitchen door just a little too long, and the pan boils over, it's okay. It's because, while you're watching ever more fireworks from the evening's living room window - you, perched on the back of the couch, mouth agape, your face a little glazed globe of wonder - to me, that fizzing poetry, that swirling stardust rocketing across the darkness in all colours - parrot-red, electric-blue, honey-yellow, Halloween-green - all that explosive light-splashed brilliance at the window isn't the fireworks. No, not at all. It's you. 

You can never go home

 Reading: True Grit by Charles Portis

Listening to: "Someone You Loved" by Lewis Capaldi

Outside: Barbeques smoke high in the spring evening, wafting flavours everywhere

Here I am, away from the hubbub of family life: taking a short break from the constant. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about the discovery I made just recently, when I was feeling nostalgic. You know that kind of nostalgia, that pull that takes you away from whatever you were doing - washing the dishes or pumping gas, adding something else in your kids' school calendar - that love and sadness that spins together into something whole. A remembering of something you lost. 

Well, guys, I'm here to tell you. Marsh Supermarket on Fox Road in Geist, Indianapolis, Indiana, has died. 

Abandoned, the huge chunk of the strip mall where I spent a lot of my young years is an empty shell. I found out on Google, where news stories appeared, saying they closed its shutters due to bankruptcy. 

This jars me hard, not only that it's happened, but because it happened the same year my mom passed away, in 2017. 

How could it be that they both died at the same time? 

I know, I know - you can't equate your mom with a grocery store. I know. But to my mom, Marsh was a Big Deal when I was little. About the time I looked like this. 

Super Cool Me 

We went there for everything: weekly grocery shopping, where she picked up all the Kraft Mac & Cheese and hot dogs and Kool-Aid and the strawberry Fruit Roll-Ups my sister and I were so obsessed with. We went there for the deli, where I stood as a tiny kid, watching the lady in all white scoop out those beautiful big spoonfuls of mashed potato into those paper bowls, and top it with thick, rich brown gravy. The kind of gravy you can't see through. I remember how the deli lady would slap that thin plastic lid on and print a little sticker that went across the top, and hand it to my mom. Still warm. I remember the excitement of how good dinner was going to be. The clack-clack-clack of the wheels of the shopping cart over the square beige floor tiles. 

On Sundays, Mom got me and my sister to stock up the trunk of her car with paper Marsh grocery bags full of that week's newspapers. Plastic Marsh grocery bags full of empty plastic Coke bottles. A scattering of aluminum cans - Sprite, Grape Drink - jumped in and went with us on the journey to the Marsh parking lot, where she let us throw all the recycling into the appropriate big recycle bin - huge, hulking things, to me the size of train cars. (I still diligently recycle today.)

How, at the cash register, they used to scan your items over a red laser that hid under a weird star shape in the counter, and Mom would write a check (a check!) and someone bagged it for you, and took it out to your car. I haven't seen that kind of service anywhere, in any country, ever since.

Marsh is where, at age 15, I went the first time I drove my car - a boat-sized, rusted blue 1991 Pontiac 6000 LE - by myself. It was only a five-minute drive, but to me it was a thrilling voyage down the familiar road my mom had taken me and my sister countless times. Feeling the road under you when you're steering is a completely different experience, and Marsh was a landing point. And a starting point. 

It was the vector of my life. Force and magnitude. Osco Drug, next door, where my mom picked up nameless paper-wrapped prescriptions but always let us pick a sucker off of the sucker tree near the cash registers before we left. The tanning place a few doors down, where, as a teen, I went bronze on the tanning beds, and even saved one of my stickers for some unknown reason, at the blithe age of 17 - to eventually give to my 11-year-old daughter, more than twenty years later. 

It's where, at age 18, I found Geist Bear, one of the first gifts I ever sent to my future husband. The last purchase I ever made from Marsh Supermarket.

Geist Bear

Marsh was the first place I ever lost my mom. 

I couldn't been more than seven or eight, and I had been looking at something; I turned to the woman next to me, and said, "Mom?" 

But, with her dark, curly hair and unfamiliar purple coat, she wasn't my mom. Stomach pit-fall.

She took my hand and kindly led me to her, the next aisle over, and the relief was more than can be rendered into words. 

I guess, Marsh, you were my training ground for life. My mom's departure, and my destination. 

Marsh is the place I still dream about, at age 42, almost a decade after its death. In my dreams I'm still parking my old car, striding past its automatic doors that go hush-hush, wandering its aisles, chilled in its apple-scented air-conditioning. I'm heading out of its doors, waiting at the edge of a barren parking lot, waiting for my husband or looking for my children. Alone. Pensive. Always waiting for my family, wondering where they are. This dream-Marsh, of course, has no bearing on my current life; it perished 5,000 miles away, long after I sold my car. It was forgotten before I married my beloved British man, before we started our family of magnificent hybrid children. It disappeared, in a way, before I ever moved to England; way, way after I ever stopped needing it. 

Who knew a simple grocery store could mean so much? 

So, yes, you can never go home: you carry it with you. 

Marsh may be empty now, all its windows shuttered, its shelves dusty, its aisles full of ghosts. I'm glad my childhood filled at least a little part of it. I'm glad we are those ghosts. That place lived and breathed. I'm hoping my girl-self is still skipping along its empty walls, racing her sister to the toy aisle, where she'll find something to add to her Christmas list. I hoping that little girl is still bouncing in her canvas sneakers at the deli counter, watching those mashed potatoes and gravy, still hot. I would like to tell her that these mundane days, these fleeting grocery shopping afternoons, are going to be the flavour of her childhood, some of the very best moments spent with her mom. Treasured and full. These moments are going to be the rhythm of her life. The unending spool of her needs, her love. But I don't have to. I think she already knows. 

Happy Friday, everyone!

OCD Christmas

 Reading: Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life by Arnold Schwarzenegger

Listening to: "Once Upon a Christmas Song" by Geraldine McQueen

Outside: Balmy and bright

As I charge up my phone in preparation for this evening, including countless views of Santa's progress on Santa Tracker, I remain ever-hopeful that Christmas magic extends to germs. 

Yes. I have OCD. I have compulsively washed my hands since the age of ten, the instant I stepped down from the bus, walked into the house and slung off my backpack and heeled off my shoes. Touching bus doors and seats makes me feel icky. The jungle-humid air inside the school bus every winter, with each of us packed three to a seat (read: overcrowded), behind the fogging up of my glasses, was a giant Petri dish on wheels.

However, this Christmas has been especially tough. Did you know the viruses find the cracks in the armour? 11-year-old Lena missed a visit with Santa because of Chicken Pox. My dear husband, Dave, arrived home from work last week looking like death, for norovirus had taken over. Four-year-old Indiana is on the mend now, having dodged the Pox only to succumb to Dave's  tummy bug, and spent his last few days hanging over a bowl. The amount of dry toast he had to look at, let alone eat, was astonishing. I believe that child will never eat toast again.

So here I am, back in the Pandemic. Again - every surface teeming with potential germs, every door handle rife with a fresh virus. So many strains, always mutating. Little creatures, invisible to the naked eye, here to ruin our most special of days. 

Well. 

I've scrubbed. Door frames, handles, floors. I've anti-bacced. Hands, door handles, floors.  I've done load after load after load of laundry. Everything fresh. All the time. I'm pretty sure my hands do not have skin left, I've washed them so many times. 

The Christmas spirit left me somewhere between washing another puke bowl, using paper towel, disposable, so I'm not re-using a kitchen sponge, and the little tendrils of paper towel dissolved in the water, giving me more to clean. 

I worked an insane deadline day from home, with my four-year-old son alongside, reminding him regularly throughout that seven-and-a-half-hours to please stop licking the couch. Anything to keep him in isolation, anything to keep him from other members of our family, so that we can enjoy any kind of Normal Christmas. 

I have neglected social media.

I have not written cards.

I regard our Elves on a Shelf with a kind of distant familiarity, the way you might see someone at the airport that you think you might know. You do not greet them, because you might not know them.

Unlike all of our previous Christmases, no matter how tired I've been, I could let my hair down. I felt that kind of deep-breathing freedom you feel, like when you walk on a beach. Here it is, Christmas Eve, and I have yet to feel that. 

So I am hoping for Santa's magic to spark. May I have a couple days to relax, to ward off the evil, to keep the germs at bay? Can my kids enjoy their Christmases, complete with chocolates, cookies, human contact?

Are my strategically-placed travel bottles of anti-bacterial gel - in all different scents and colours - enough?

Well, Santa, you are not a therapist. But maybe you can bring me a nice scented candle. Or a fridge-freezer. Or healthy kids.

I feel I've been good enough this year.

Reader, whatever you're battling this year - let us breathe together, and Let Go, and Feel the Moment. Really look at that tree and see its beauty. All those twinkling lights, tiny bulwarks against the darkness. Let our joy happen, and radiate. With every card, every visit with friends and family, every inside joke.  Every ridiculous sweater.

I wish you all a beautiful Christmas - may it be relaxing and wonderful. 

In the meantime - I'm gonna go scrub something else.

Happy Christmas Eve, everyone!

Sí, tú puedes

Reading: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Listening to: "For the Movies" by Buckcherry

Outside: April breathes deeply, whooshing away the winter 

Travel veterans flank Indiana, limbering up for his first flight
Easter Sunday, March 31st 2024

After the passing of my dear friend in February 2022, my entire world went gray. The colours of my life's palette mixed up, all those rich purples and reds and blues and yellows swirled together into mud. Dark, murky, numb. I couldn't consume novels like I had before  - and I say consume deliberately. I used to eat them up. But the words ran together, the same sentence didn't go in. Over and over again. Instead, my train journeys to work saw me staring listlessly out the window, the way I'd observe other passengers doing that used to baffle me. Why stare out the window? What was out there? Well, it turns out - the world on a treadmill, rolling past, the same trees, over and over again. Nothing.

My favourite songs, the ones that always made my heart beat a little faster, no longer had the same effect, and I was distracted every day by those little moments that cut through, the ones that sliced: Before and After. (That book he borrowed and returned, the joke we had about Tom Waites. Before, Before, Before.) All those moments in between those Before and After ones - the ones were I held the book I was reading when he died, fanned through the pages again, rubbing salt into the wound - were me in a soundless room, where I made meals for my children without really paying attention, slicing carrots and boiling water for pasta. Placing heavy plates on a dinner table, serving food I couldn't taste. I was stuck. 

I guess it was fitting that we hadn't flown for a while. Would I have been able to board the plane? What other terrible things could happen? 

But we did it. Finally, after five years, we boarded a plane again, for a cheap holiday to Spain. My toddler son was brave through take-off, leaning into encouraging words from his big sister, who knows much about flying. Bolstered him with pro-tips throughout. Glued to the window, he and Lena watched the ground disappear. We enjoyed an uneventful flight, nice and short, and landed in Almeria just as the sun was setting.

And in the morning - colour!

If you look close - there are parrots in the tree

From our balcony, resort guests strolled around the pool below, staff in starched white and bow ties and aprons served drinks. A vast array of deck chairs shined in the sun, which reflected even further out across the expanse of the Mediterranean Sea, endless, criss-crossed with shards of sun and one or two slow, lonely boats in the distance. 

From the speakers in the restaurant, music full and fresh, as rich as the food as they served - anything you can want and more. 

The restaurant staff were as warm as the Spanish sun, always generous, muy simpáticos. By the end of the week, they all seemed like friends. One of them showed me a picture of his own toddler son on his phone, and I said, "¡Qué guapo!" (how handsome), and he laughed and pointed to himself. "¡Y tú!" I said. (And you!)

That connection. I felt that. 

Maybe I just needed some Spain to help feel my life again. Even just a little bit. I don't know where it came from, but I heard a voice in the middle of the night on our last night there, say to me, "Sí, tú puedes." Yes, you can.

For any of you grieving, remember there is always hope. There's always help. 

Remember to allow yourself to enjoy your life. It's okay to do this. Let yourself do this.

Sí, tú puedes.

In the moment -
 the world's beauty
waits patiently
for when you're ready
to see it again.

Happy Saturday, everybody.

What does the fox say?

Reading: Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant

Listening to: Relaxing Jazz Music / Coffee Shop Ambiance

Outside: 2 o'clock sun rises a little higher, holding over us a little bit longer, as the days lengthen, amen

Maybe it's the snowdrops pushing their way through the slate flowerbeds, their tiny leaves so rugged and so delicate, tenacious even in the cold, but the end of January always gives me hope that Winter Can Be Gotten Through. They are springtime yearnings, these little shoots, wanting and waiting.

I take it one half-frozen day at a time, each school day a new hill to climb, a kind of structured panic involving a gallon of coffee, trendy school-bottles of water, unzipped book bags, fleeting time, and the same run of morning cartoons that roll on in the background, offering the same comforting noises - Grizzy and the Lemmings's cheerful-if-frantic intro tune; the gruff voice of the aged grandfather in Monster Loving Maniacs. Oh yes, I know them all, and my children eat it all up happily, along with their spoonfuls of Kellogg's Crunchy Nut.

Lena and Indiana chill after school
January 25, 2024

Now that Indiana has begun school, he returns home in the afternoon with a different walk, a new kind of gaze on the world. Learned, listening. A playground veteran. An Armageddon-like Here To Save The Day stride.  He considers things, questions and interprets carefully. As a three-year-old, he still trips over his own shoes (don't we all?), but there's a new toughness about him. He cries less, listens to reason more, dusts himself off, and offers his own solutions to problems. Emotions are still there, as they should be, but they're less like a fifteen-foot wave-wall crashing into the living room when his building blocks collapse (or in the backyard, when it's time to get off the swing because I've got to make dinner), and more like a shallow eddying current, softly buffeting and then letting go. Gentle. And, even more importantly, he sits down. He actually sits still. I am amazed. 

So amazed that I caught a picture of my two children not biting each other and screaming, but sitting, nay, snuggling on the couch, one day after school, glowing like a Rembrandt painting over the blue-tinted light of Lena's tablet. Cue the heart-breakingly beautiful violins: a Hallmark moment on the TV screen of Your Life. One of those moments you actually feel. You live inside it.  This here was one of the exact reasons we chose to have a second child, hoping one day this would be possible. And, ladies and gentlemen, here we are. Yes, he's probably just worn out after an afternoon of fun and learning, but it's a good kind of tired. 

Recently, we'd put on an old YouTube playlist, starting with a song we'd listened to a lot in 2020/1: "What Does the Fox Say?" by Ylvis. And like that, our Pandemic Playlist started up again, the soundtrack of the longest goddamn winter of my life, but with an entirely different backdrop - no scribbled home-learning papers scattered like confetti on every available surface; no broccoli boiling over on the stove, forgotten by an overwhelmed and overtired mom; no rumpled baby bouncy-chair in the corner; no lady-bug-shaped Tummy Time mat on the floor. And this time, two children were laughing at it, rather than just one (and a baby's blissful coos). I'd enjoyed this music video way back then - yes, even through the stress and exhaustion, the song's hilarity pierced my sadness, a magical chord struck - but this time I actually, really listened to it. 

And it's a great song!

The kids love it! And it got Lena asking, "What sound does a fox make?"

We all looked at each other, unsure. 

"I don't actually know," I said, and Indiana shook his head. 

"Don't know," he said.

And I guess the video's silliness and its Techno dance-in-the-woods got us thinking, and we couldn't figure it out, and that's okay.  In this moment of my kids being 10 and 3, their laughter unlocked yet another piece of my heart, and I wished for them to keep that curiosity, to always wonder what a fox says. 

And so I'll close with this: I hope my kids push forth like each snowdrop, awake and reaching and unafraid while its floral cousins sleep. Keep looking for wonders, my tenacious two, keep finding what you need. Rise and shine in that hesitant sun. Sooner or later, sunlight always comes back. 

I hope we all keep wondering about the world, and who knows - maybe, if we're lucky, we'll even figure it out. 

Happy Saturday, everyone.

The tightrope of adolescence

 Reading: The Devil in Connecticut by Gerald Brittle

Listening to: "Hallelujah" by Alexandra Burke

Outside: Winter closes in with the night

A dear friend wrote to me recently, that my daughter, Lena, "walks the tightrope of adolescence," and as Christmas nears, I bolster myself for what that means. 

Lena, age 9, October 2023

At this time 10 years ago, I was waddling slow. I was still working full time, scraping the heels of my winter boots on the ground as I went from home to office to taxi and home again. I had no idea then, in the fullness of my pregnancy, how much my daughter would change my life. 

Lena, age 2, October 2016

She's gone from wrapping her tiny newborn hand around my finger, to letting go of my hand across the street, to shying way from a peck on the forehead, to questioning my every directive. We're at a stalemate over homework, her sighs heard from all over the house. Doesn't matter what room you're in. But then there's more - she towers over her little toddler brother, who drives her crazy, who drives her creativity, who brings out the best in her, who offers her a special smile every time she says "Night, night." 

Lena shows Indiana how to play Dobble, Summer 2023

Her 10th birthday approaches, and with that, her 10th Christmas. I can handle her birthday - the double digits, the foil balloons, the ever-changing request for presents. I will be staying up late the night before, breathing life into those balloons until I'm blue in the face. (The parallel of deep breathing of hard labour and the deep breathing to swell birthday balloons is not lost on me. Oh, no, it is not.) I will be arranging and re-arranging for hours, because I want everything to be just so. That I can handle. I'll be tired, wracked with perfection, but yes, I can make our tiny house a temple to Lena's disappearing youth. 

It's Christmas I can't handle. 

Image source: https://www.facebook.com/AintNothingLikeAMother

I am clinging to our usual style of Christmas, our busy-to-the-point-of-panic evening: on Christmas Eve, we listen for silence from our kids' rooms, and then we stealthily set out our children's presents, all carefully wrapped and painstakingly tagged, pretending to be the Man Himself. We'll drink the milk and take a chomp from the cookies, leaving a dutiful, recycled "Thank You" note from Mr. C. Lena, along with her little brother, will be enchanted and delighted, and will question nothing. 

But will that happen this year? Will it? 

What will happen when I have to face that question, when she looks at me with those searing blue eyes, staring right into my soul, and ask me, "Mommy, is Santa real?"

What will I say? 

I can only hearken back to what happened when I approached my mom about it. It wasn't pretty. It went something like this:

Me: "Mommy, is Santa real?"

Mom: "Santa? No, honey. No. That was me the whole time."

Me: Pause. Brain cogs turning. Stomach churning. "What about the Easter Bunny?"

Mom:  Raucous laughter

I can only put this down to the fact that I was the last in the long line of four. My mom was tired. She had already been through it three times; with me, there was no energy left for ceremony. No long talk. No gentle, comforting sounds, no letting me down easy. Emotional support, nil. I can swallow it down, now, because I can see the pains she took to create such a magical Christmas tableaux every year. Every year. And pretty much, I have to say, all on her own. (I'm sure my dad cared; his long work hours kept him from co-Santa-ing; and of course it was all of his work money which would have funded Santa's efforts in the first place.) My mom vetted our Christmas lists, budgeted, purchased, hid the loot, wrapped, bagged and tagged. She handled my questioning as best as she knew at the time. Short and to the point.

And what if I break her heart?

Will I hate myself for this myth I have perpetuated for her entire life? I don't know what I will say when she asks me, point-blank. I really don't. I balked at her asking about a toy's country of manufacture a few years ago, blindsided by a six-year-old. "Mommy, this is made in China. How can it be made in China if Santa's elves made it?" An innocent question. I don't even remember how I replied.  I blustered through something and changed the subject. That was just the beginning. 

Many parents are steadfast in their lack of Santa. Never introduced him; they don't want to lie to their children. And I can see that. I can definitely understand that. I know of parents who believe in honesty, transparency; they want their children to know that Christmas is not a free-for-all, that parents pay for it, that parents make it happen. They do not hide behind stories, or myth, or tradition.

I guess, the journey takes its own path; each child experiences Christmas in a different way, and that way is down to how the parents or carers would like to present it. 

I guess, to me, it's magic. I uphold the magic, rather than reveal - just yet - the mechanics behind it. 

I become Santa, in this story: I navigate the path, sprinkling it with candy canes along the way, hoping for the best. Call me reckless, but there it is. In my story, the child simply grows from learning about the spirit of giving in the form of a tangible person - a person equipped with reindeer and a magical ability to drop down the chimney of every home in a single night - to the spirit of giving in their hearts. They grow into that concept. Like growing into a larger pair of shoes. Uncomfortable at first, maybe, but eventually, they wear those puppies into the ground. And those puppies take them places. Wonderful places. The child learns the meaning of having plenty in a time of little, when our Northern Hemisphere is cold and brittle and unforgiving. The child learns that comfort can be had in the smallest of things - a wrapped parcel, given from the heart. The child learns the warmth that giving brings. The child learns the ceremony of giving, the beauty of it, the goodness of it. The magic of it. 

My heart broke the day my mom told me Santa wasn't real, but over time, I learned that really, in this one singular thing, my mom was wrong. Santa is real. I'm 40 years old and I still believe in Santa; I never stopped. When I was 34, right before my mom passed away, she gave me a collectable ceramic horse figurine, its snow-white mane and tail bright against its dark-blue body dotted with a snow-topped forest of pines, framing Santa's sleigh racing across its midsection. "His name is Midnight," she'd said, "He belongs to you now. You always loved Santa so much." 

Was it her way of making amends, decades later? I don't know. Maybe. All I know is, Midnight is now in a special glass cabinet I look at every day. Midnight is hope, magic, love, joy. Midnight is a light in the darkness. 

My Christmas mornings are still full of magic - even though it was my hands and my husband's hands who wrapped our children's presents and placed them under that tree the night before, by morning, some alchemy in the moonlight had rendered them unfamiliar; the wrapping paper glittered at different angles, the boxes all moved, re-stacked; it wasn't our work at all. It was Santa's. Somehow, in my crazy heart, it always was. 

My daughter is about to enjoy her 10th Christmas a la Santa. She believes, and I hope she never stops. 

Whatever happens, one thing's for sure: on this tightrope of adolescence, Babygirl, I'm here to keep you balanced, and keep you from looking down - I've been on this tightrope a while, and I might be standing at the other end, but I'm always right there with you. Baby steps, darling. We're in this together.

Lena and me, Halloween 2023

Happy Friday, everyone.