The spirit of Chri$tmas

Our son Malcolm is money obsessed. It’s not just the acquiring and spending of cash that concerns him, but the entire cycle. The history of paper currency, the minting process, credit cards, mortgages, and the stock market. If you’ve ever struggled to imagine Alan Greenspan as a five year old, struggle no more.

Alex Keaton vs. Malcolm Courchesne

One morning a couple of weeks ago, Malcolm greeted me thusly: “Good morning, Mom. Are you feeling bullish or bearish today?” We often refer to him as Alex P. Keaton. Though Malcolm claims he voted for Obama in the school’s mock election, I have my doubts. Like the hippie parents on Family Ties, we are frequently at a loss to explain this situation. One day, while I was teaching, a student of mine who also bears a strong resemblance to Alex Keaton, both in dress and in political views, asked me, “How would you feel if your son was gay?” “Unfazed,” I told him. “OK, how about if he wanted to be an artist and live off free food restaurants were throwing away?” “As long as he’s happy,” I told him. “OK, what if he grew up to be a lawyer for oil companies?” He had me. Gulp.

Malcolm brings home a lot of papers from school reporting on the kids’ news, wishes and fondest hopes. When most of the kids say things like, “I love my mom and dad,” or “I wish our dog wouldn’t die,” Malcolm reliably reports on his liquid assets.

For their Christmas wishes his classmates wrote such things as, “I wish my Uncle Michael could come see us this year.” “I wish I could have a bunny to snuggle,” and “I want to wish the Baby Jesus a Happy Birthday!” My son? “I wish I could have a Nintendo DS.” Like most of his avaricious classroom declarations, this one reads embarrassingly cold and venal. But when I thought about it some more, I realized that he’s not wishing for video games instead of time with a beloved uncle, or snuggling with a bunny, it’s because he doesn’t have to wish for those things at all. We are grateful everyday that my extended family, all the uncles and aunts, and the maternal grandparents too, are within 5 miles of our house. We have a huge Thanksgiving level feast courtesy of my mom with almost everyone every Sunday night. And we not only have a bunny, but 3 parrots, and 9 chickens too. What’s this kid got to wish for but stuff we won’t buy him?

I’m glad that Malcolm watches his every penny. He knows to the cent what every item he wants costs. He has to buy his own candy and little toys, so he knows how long it takes to save up. He’s entrepreneurial too, instructing me to send emails to his friends’ parents reading, “I am starting a comic stor thay r $1 If you want 1 let me know.” And then he draws up comics and pays to make copies of them at the library. I have to admire that.

So, I’m not going to fight it. I’m embracing it. And this year, the coolest gift I found for him was an old, cast iron mechanical bank that fires coins from a cannon into a fort-like stronghold. It may not be a DS, but I suspect this mechanism is more durable.

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Sweat, tears or the sea.

I am excoriated. I expect everyday to begin to feel better, and I suppose I have, by tiny increments. There are fewer crying jags, less foggy-headed staggering through each day. But most of the time, I can feel half my mind trying not to think about what happened in Connecticut, and the other half of my mind creeping over to it, compulsively probing the sore spot.

We had planned weeks ago to go away for our anniversary this weekend, and by Friday, I was dreading it. I didn’t want to leave my kids, and I foresaw only a miserable pageant of carefree escapism. But I knew canceling would be absurd. Why stay home? So I could continue to intermittently crawl under my desk and sob into my hands when blindsided by another detail on the radio news? To creep into my kids’ room after they were asleep and lie on the floor between their beds for an hour while nauseous waves of dread pass through me?

So, we went. And of course, it was good. I am not generally a fan of the kind of quotations that end up on inspirational posters, but Isak Dinesen’s line comes to me often: “The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.” It’s taking all three to keep me upright these days, and our two days in Maine gave me a heavy dose. Each day, I went out running by myself by the mostly deserted beaches. Running too fast, the mark of a heavy heart for me, I went slamming along the shoreline where the winter ocean and the winter wind were roaring so loud they obliterated all human sound. It happened that I reached the water just at the instant in a cold run when all the tiny capillaries in my clenched fingers simultaneously open and flood my hands with warmth. Sidelong, I watched the waves furl themselves into fists and pummel the rocks there and then recede.

It’s not relief I feel, or comfort on these runs. It’s an anesthesia of exhaustion, a hit of weariness and depletion that gets me through one more day, or half of one. Then I can go to sleep and hope not to wake up in the desolation of 3am, heart pounding and traitorous imagination manufacturing scenes that I have studiously avoided in the newspapers or on tv.

I have shielded my kids from all that too, including my own grief, and they are blissfully untroubled as they round into the straightaway to Christmas. I feel such a heightened intensity of love and gratitude for them, it’s just that it’s braided together with all this pain. It makes a thick rope–a cable of all the most intense emotions a human is capable of feeling. I have begun, like all of us, to haul myself up by it, hand over hand, with a eye toward nothing but the step immediately before me. How long it is, or where it may be anchored somewhere, or what it may pass along the way, I am trying not to concern myself over. And I am trying to open my eyes and see everyone else here too, gripping this same cord, gripping though our hands are raw.

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Eighteen years on

Driven by pressure from recent horrific events to declare my gratitude for what I have, and also by the impending end of the world on Friday, I must take this opportunity to express my gratitude for my husband. It was eighteen years ago that my angsty 14 year old journal began to fill with references to Christophe. It was 1994, and I was watching a lot of Claire Danes in “My So-Called Life.” How fitting, then, that we now watch her in multi-hour viewing marathons of “Homeland” on DVD. Back in 1994, like most teenagers, I believed fervently that the whole world revolved around me. What a revelation it was, then, to discover that I somehow had come to place Christophe’s happiness ahead of my own. For he was not so taken with me as I was with him, and had his eye on some other chick. And then another. I had to wait a couple months.

I remember very clearly a night in December when I went to get a glass of milk during a commercial break in “My So-Called Life,” and as I did, I was stunned to realize that if he would be happier with someone else, then that’s what I wanted. Setting one’s ego aside? This was a lightning bolt from above.

Children! We were mere children!

Fortunately, it did not turn out that way, and the impending apocalypse on Friday falls on our 10th wedding anniversary. By January 1995, we could not be separated, and could not be rattled. We were like most teenage couples–overly intense, maudlin, and very cheesy. We communicated our mutual affection, at first, via intermediaries, in middle school fashion. We were fourteen; it’s what we knew. Looking at this picture, it’s hard for me to quite believe that we were so utterly certain so early. I didn’t even need glasses then–even my eyeballs weren’t fully grown. And yet, we weren’t wrong.

We did endure some mild mocking from our peers, about our future children and all that, but really very little. And looking back now, the adults around us, for the most part, seemed to accept us too. I was talking to one of our high school teachers a couple of years ago, joking about how ridiculous we must have seemed to them all. “No,” she told me. “We knew. We all knew you were in it for life.” Who knows what it was that they detected, but it’s still working. So, just as the purpose of a wedding is a public declaration of commitment before the world, this is my 10 year rededication. With gratitude to Christophe, and to everyone who held us up, even more than half our lifetimes ago, and who still holds us up today.

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Suffer the little children

In all of their names: our living and their dead.

Today is a day after. The universal feeling of a day after comes when we wake up and a forgetfulness of the day before spans a few breaths before it all comes down again. I know that I am grieving this massacre of elementary school kids harder than our usual, run-of-the-mill mass shooting for selfish reasons. It hits, as they say, close to home. While those kindergartners were dying on an their alphabet rug amid the book bins and tiny tables and chairs, my own five year old was not 200 miles away in a classroom just like it. Christophe showed me a picture of the gun reportedly used, and a cold bayonet of horror slid through my heart, to think that was the last thing those kids ever saw.
We parents have no monopoly on suffering this one, of course, just like New Yorkers were not the only ones suffering through the September 11th attacks. But when we hear the news, we do feel the sudden, almost overpowering urge to run to where our kids are and seize them up in a fierce and desperate clutch. We aren’t just mourning for those other little kids, but seeing, for a moment, our own sons and daughters in a spray of blood under a chalkboard.
I have never found it hard to conjure such visions. It is a relic of my now well controlled obsessive-compulsive-disorder. My obsessive thoughts were constant, vivid imagery of my children being maimed, killed, tortured. So my mind is still a warehouse of film reels of these horrors too dread to share with anyone. And because of it, I have a reel devoted to “being the mother of a mass murderer.” It’s some sort of mercy that this shooter and his mother are both presumably dead now. Because you know the other thing that should hit close to home for all of us moms in the Northeast who thought it couldn’t happen? This young man that did the killing was the suburban son of a kindergarten teacher. He was her baby once, her little boy. And I can’t help seeing my son in that too. We’d all like to think that’s impossible, but the truth is, the parents of these boys almost universally report not knowing anything was wrong other than the usual sullenness and angst of a boy between the ages of 13 and 25. So it could be you or me hearing that news, and praying that someone kills our own son before he can kill one more 1st grader.
I hear all these cries “not to politicize their deaths.” I’d like to say I understand, but I don’t. If a kid dies of cancer, we rail for more funding for research. If a child is run down by a drunk driver, we shriek for tougher drunk driving laws. Only on this do we insist on demure silence, pretending we don’t know why these babies died. I am a believer in science, and if there is science to be had on the right way to fix this, I want to see it, and I want it to be the basis for legislation. Because what happened yesterday, it means we’re doing something wrong. Guns DO kill people, and yes, people kill people. Most people, when polled, agree that the mentally ill should not have guns. But how do we find and treat the mentally ill without a robust public health system? And most people also seem to agree that civilians should not possess semi-automatic weapons. Had this man been forced to stop and reload, we’d have at least a few parents sobbing beside the bedsides of their terrified but still living children, and not at the side of their dead ones in the morgue.
Now is exactly the time to be political. Not for the parents who have to go bury their children. Let them mourn. But when they look up from their grief, let them also see that we were working for them. That we vowed not to stop working until this stops. So yes, hold your own babies tight to you, but then get to work. Because, as my wise sister wrote yesterday, “grief is not prevention.”

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Giving offense for the holidays

I admit to being a little overly fond of facebook. That little dopamine surge I get when I see the tiny red dot signifying a comment or a like…captivating. But I can quit anytime I want. There is just something strangely compelling about seeing the publicly posted thoughts of people outside one’s immediate circle of friends. Many of these people may actually have wildly divergent political views from oneself, which is typically not the case among close friends. So, in my politically divergent friends’ posts, I have noticed a great deal of posting about the giving and taking of offense. On Independence Day, it’s usually something like a picture of the American flag with the words, “If this flag offends you, you’re welcome to leave the country any time.” On Veterans’ Day, it seems to be mainly “If saying the Pledge of Allegiance offends you, let me introduce you to a wounded Marine.” and now, at Christmastime, it turns into, “If you’re offended by my Christmas tree, too bad. I won’t be ashamed of my Christmas celebration, and I WILL wish you a Merry Christmas, NOT a ‘Happy Holiday’!”

Am I “offended” by a big, giant Christmas tree at the White House? No. You’re being ridiculous.

I know of whom they speak. This chronically offended person is a probably a “white liberal elite”, possibly an atheist, and likely a supporter of the ACLU. And while I would posit that this person who is always in high dudgeon over everything red-blooded Americans do doesn’t really exist, I understand from whence the myth arose. Here is a conversation that happens not infrequently among white liberals: “So, who’s Tony again?” “Tony’s about 6 feet tall, brown eyes, dark hair, with attached earlobes and moderately wide set eyes.” “You mean that guy over there?” “Yeah, that’s Tony.” “Well why didn’t you just tell me he’s black?” “I don’t see people in terms of race.”

This is your quasi-imaginary white liberal who deeply fears giving offense and may indeed take offense over a great many things. But honestly, we real white liberals mostly don’t care what you do. That’s what Civil Liberty is really all about. Have a Christmas tree, give Christmas presents, hell, you can stage a tableau vivant of the Nativity in your living room every night of Advent if you want. It’s YOUR house. But why is your enjoyment of the season predicated on wishing every damn person you meet a “Merry Christmas?” Even if we assume every non-Christian is walking around in a bristling state of high alert for offense this time of year (unlikely), if you don’t even know someone well enough to know if they’re Christian or not, why would you want to risk offending her? I mean, if she’s wearing a battery-powered light up Santa theme sweater and is buying a lifesize baby Jesus doll with manger, by all means, wish away. And if she’s wearing dreidel earrings and buying bulk menorah candles, wish her a Happy Hannukah. And if you just can’t tell, is it really that horrible to just say, “Have a nice day?” After all, wishing someone a happy holiday of any sort is not about you, it’s about them. Just like wishing someone a Happy Birthday is about his birthday, not yours. If you wished a stranger a Happy Birthday on the anniversary of your own birth, I suspect he wouldn’t be offended, but he would probably think you’re weird.

A “living nativity:” Christianity’s own Civil War re-enactors.

So that’s what it comes down to then: all this “In your face, sucka! I’m wishing you a Merry Christmas whether it pisses you off or not!” just seems like it’s not quite in the spirit of the season. I may be an atheist, but my Nana was probably the World’s Greatest Catholic Who Ever Lived. And while she prayed every day for Jesus to come into the hearts of everyone she met, and for the benighted believers of other faiths to be shown the light, she never tried to make anyone feel uncomfortable. So let’s put the Christ back in Christmas, after all, and stop being jerk wads about it. Let’s stop pretending it’s about people taking umbrage. Let’s reevaluate the idea that all these blue-state Democratic smarty-pants snobs are trying to deprive you of your right to be patriotic, or Christian, or to pray, or whatever else this paranoia is about. Christianity is not under attack. I’m an atheist and in surveys, we rank way down on the list of trustworthiness with rapists. I’m not exaggerating; here’s the study. We come in behind “Muslims, Jews, feminists and homosexuals.” I’m basically in an oppressed minority! In any case, I don’t think I’ll live to see the day an atheist is elected President. So don’t worry, we ain’t runnin’ the place. By all means, enjoy your Christmas, Christmas-celebrators. But enough with the disingenuous “offended” talk. It’s not what Jesus would do.

Also, God bless the United States of America.

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