Thursday, December 26, 2013

and merry christmas to all

my husband turned the tree off about an hour ago and headed to bed, but i can't quite get there. the house is a wreck, Christmas paper strewn everywichway, presents crowding the corners of the living room. the garland that drapes the banister is losing needles, and remnants of last night's post-church dinner party still linger on the kitchen counter. the Christmas plates and glasses sit on the dining room sideboard waiting to be put away until next year. but i am not quite ready.

it was a good day, a heart-wrenching day, a happy day, a poignant one. all wrapped up together like the best present you've ever gotten. and the worst one, too. my father was not here. and my mother was here alone.

 but it was a good day, too, because it was a day (or two, exactly) that we got to spend with the very people who have taken this year on with us and helped us feel our way out.

i am happy to report that my mother, who was wheelchair bound in April, has walked up and down the stairs of my house in the past two days slowly, but without incident. this is amazing in and of itself. she has moved her home and her life to a new town and though she is not quite happy, at least she is trying. my mother, as my father told me on the eve of their 60th anniversary, is tough. 

yes, when the need presents itself, she is tough. and aren't we blessed by that. but she is fragile, too, and we need to be mindful of that. 

she always worries about Christmas. what to give everybody that is not too extravagant but means something to each member of the FAM. This year she may have topped herself: a 35-minute video of slides my father took when we were children.

readers of this blog know i am the third child, and the photographs of the tiny me are few, but hidden within this treasure is are jewels: shots of my parents in the hospital the day after i was born, and of me, in the nursery bassinet — photos i had never seen until yesterday. other slides mark years at Easter and Christmas with our grandparents. there are dogs. a cat. a rabbit. a tree fallen on the house. trips to see my grandmother in florida. my mother and her hats. my grandfather's garden. my grandmother's sunday table. again, most of them never seen before.

kids today don't know about slides. they think they are something you slip down on your way to someplace else, a zip, and onto the rest of your day. when i was a kids we buffed our slides with wax paper, just so they could slip us more quickly into the next run.

but i want these particular slides to stick to me as if i were trying to slide on wet paper. to stop me in my tracks, at least for a little while, so i can take my childhood in again, through my father's eyes.

my brother stands with my dad on my grandmother's jacksonville, florida front porch. i have no idea who took the picture, because my mother stands in the background in her favorite hat, her hand so close to her heart that i can feel what she is thinking. we didn't visit florida very much, but here we are at her mother's home, and she is happy, watching her husband and son stand in the place where she grew up. i know that feeling well. she is beautiful.

i wish i could show you these pictures now, so you can see, but it's the fact of them that matters, not the pictures themselves. you have your own pictures just like them. you have all stood on that front porch, grinning for the camera on days when maybe you didn't feel like it, but 50 years later, on a random Christmas morning when you see yourself there, you are glad you stood and smiled. it means something. and it is important. 

i came across a letter recently that my father wrote me when i was about to graduate from college. i won't belabor you with the details, but he closed it with an important point: the importance of history is that people lived it every single day. lived it. real people, doing regular things, some whose regular things ended up just in regular things, but some of those regular things ended up changing the world. and though we can't be really know about life after death, we can be assured that one day, we will be someone's ancestor. and that matters to those who come after us. 

we are more than Kodachrome captured on a random afternoon in the middle of a sweltering august day in the 1960s. or 70s. or 90s or now teens. we are built of story. and the pictures matter. because behind the pictures is where the story lies.

take a look at your old Christmas pictures, and tell your family the story of that day. of all those days.

a gift. to all.

sbr

 writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Doubt, and then Joy

Thirty years ago in mid-December, I sat, staring at the dying Christmas tree. We’d bought it at Thanksgiving, tying it to the top of our tiny Ford Escort and hauling it the 300 miles from Birmingham, where my brother lived, to Perry, Ga.

My husband growled when I told him I wanted to do this. Surely there were Christmas trees in Perry, where we lived. looking at my eight-months swollen belly, he knew he had better comply. By the time we got it into the house, neither of us admitted how badly the tree had been beaten on the trip. We wound the lights around its branches, hung our meager ornaments, wrapped the small number of presents and put them under the tree.

And then the needles began to fall off.

I tried not to think about my parents’ tree, filled with bright white lights, the small bells that had belonged to my grandmother, the glittery birds we had given my mother one Christmas. I couldn’t travel, fat with baby as I was. It would be my first Christmas away from home.

How had this happened? How had I found myself just four short years our of college, hundreds of miles from home, married and expecting a baby, when I was clearly a baby myself?

Oh we were ready for the baby, who was not due until January, but still. The nursery sat, freshly painted, the crib filled with borrowed bumper pads, pillow and soft blankets. The small dresser had been carefully filled with powder-scented drawer liner, itty bitty diapers and tiny t-shirts, the few footed things I’d bought that could dress girl or boy.

I was tired of waiting. Tired of the body and the swollen feet, the back aches and the indigestion, and I was ready for it all to be over.

But I was not yet ready, to be a mother. How could I mother anyone, when I still so needed to be mothered myself?

Each day, I waited, pacing the five rooms of our tiny house, fingering the blankets, folding the tiny clothes, imagining the kind of mother I would be. Silently I admitted only to myself that when this baby of mine started to cry, I would likely cry louder myself.

What kind of mother?
Would I be patient and kind like my own mother, or more true to who I already was — insecure and overly emotional. Would I bring laughter into my child’s life, or would my incompetence at the job bring only pain?

I wasn’t very good at trusting God, even though in these last three years He had flat out filled my life with joy and grace. Why couldn’t I understand that God would equip me with what I needed to care for this child, even if I didn’t yet know how? 

Had my own mother wondered these same things herself? (Probably not one minute when she was expecting me, third child that I am. But maybe with the first two.)

Before church on Christmas Eve, we took our picture in front of the tree, the room lit only by the twinkling lights. My large red maternity dress blocks most of the tree, so it’s hard to tell just how dead it really was.

I kept a journal while I was waiting — the only time in my life when I have done so faithfully, and five days before Christmas, 1983, I was at least ready for the holiday: “waiting, hoping, crying is all there is left to do,” I wrote. I’m sure I cried myself to sleep that night, my poor husband probably wondering just who he would have to parent when the due date came around.

At church that night, I’m certain I thought not one thing about Mary. My prayers were likely about asking God to keep my childbirth experience relatively pain free and short. My petite sister had a few months earlier given birth to a nine pound baby boy, and had sworn to me that she would never do THAT again. (She did, just three years later.)

But if I had, that year, thought more about the Christmas story and less about own Christmas away from family, I would have seen a certain kinship with Mary. Swollen body, surely, but both of us mothers-in-waiting, hopeful of what our children would come to be.

Christmas morning turned out to be one of the happiest in my memory, even still. I picture our tiny family — husband, dog and me — listening to Christmas music, sitting on the sofa, covered in blankets. We cooked together (well, the dog didn't... he just ate) — something we have rarely done since — so happy we were, knowing that Christmas would come again, with any luck, within a week.

The next day, we threw the tree out. The weather turned so cold that our washing machine froze. The cleaning lady didn’t show up, so I spent the next few days on my knees, not praying, but trying to get the house clean enough for my mother to visit.

I know for a fact that I went to bed crying on Dec. 29th, telling my husband that I was sure he wished he’d married that girl, the artist he knew in college, instead of fat, miserable me.

Within hours, Christmas started coming again, and the present was a healthy baby girl. Beautiful and wide-eyed. Ours. And we could hear the angels singing. Don’t they sing at every child’s birth?



What joy God filled our lives with from that day to this. I learned to mother. And though there were days I knew I made mistakes, I look at my daughter now and know God gave me the tools I needed to raise her up right. In a couple of weeks, our post-Christmas baby will be 30 years old. 30. I have no words, except thank you, God for filling my life with such indescribable joy.

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.