restive festive

At first it felt like overwhelm, a whirl of things that my brain told me I really should do, just must get done before… Before what? Christmas Day? New Years? A clock was ticking in my head, beneath my awareness, counting down the days before Christmas.

I used to get worked up during advent even before my family went their own separate ways, back when Christmas unfolded with a decorated tree, presents, lunch and games, with a predictability I thought would go on for a long time.

I was wrong about that. This Christmas my ex-husband is living overseas, my daughter is in Canada and my son will be racing yachts. I don’t mind, or at least, until a few days ago, I thought I didn’t. To anyone who asked me what I was doing over Christmas, I rattled off an easy answer about lunch with friends and perhaps surfing. But then, a few days ago, my story started sounding less persuasive, unravelling just enough to leave me wondering whether life was unfolding faster than I could make sense of it. All the letting go I’d had to do. Leaving what exactly for me to hold on to, to make sense with?

This year, I got a smaller than usual Christmas tree from the Scouts and put it in a bucket of water in a corner of the living room, its usual place. Then, as if in silent protest, I left the box of decorations, fetched from the basement, unopened behind the sofa. Whenever I passed the room and took in the undressed tree, I told myself that I liked a naked green tree better than a festive one. While this was kind of true, really it was that I couldn’t face coming face to face with the decorations that had made so many past Christmases real for me.

Late yesterday, I cleaned out the garden shed that, for over ten years, was my ex-husband’s writing temple. How, I wondered, pulling on thick gloves at the sight of spider webs, could that many leaves and white spiders have taken over a 2mx2m wooden cabin that quickly? Where had autumn gone? And could that brown streak, a stripe across the wall, really be blood from the spider I’d just swatted?

When we bought our big old house, fourteen years ago, we inherited the lost dreams of the family who lived in it previous to us. At the time, I vowed somewhat cockily that the house was in safe hands with us in it. And it has been. Except that now, chastened by experience, I realise how easily that, without my fearless spider clearing, the house and garden could again become a place of lost dreams - my dreams.

Like every family I know, my family and I have accumulated too much stuff over the years - especially now that my kids have grown up and choose to store their must-haves in the basement. I don’t about mind this, or tell myself I don’t. In my mind, my role as a mother, unfashionable but true, is to be used by my kids without being used up by them. It’s to allow them to pass me by in becoming themselves. This, I think, they’ve done. My role is to be misunderstood by them as they sail on past me. More profoundly, my job - when I’m not cutting the grass and walking the dog - is to make a clear distinction between my various roles in life, of which motherhood is one, and my purpose in it.

At the end of each year, if we so choose, we get a chance to find our bearings, to reflect on who we’ve become and on what might have been. It’s a small window of time - advent doesn’t last long - but it’s there for the taking. And do we do this? Mostly, we do not. Hence our frantic busyness, our refusal to pause and to wonder.

Last weekend, I had friends for dinner, one of whom found herself in bed with Covid the following day. When I read her text, hot and thirsty after a spate of gardening, I thought nothing - apart from sympathy - of it. However, late that night, it was a different story. Surely the earache I felt was a sign of Covid, and a spoiled Christmas, to come? I was so persuaded of this that, when I finally slept, my unconscious produced a dream in which I came down with Covid while staying with friends in a sleepy country town. On waking early, in a sweat, it was all I could do to stop myself from doing a Covid test in the bathroom. Instead, I forced myself to stay in bed. As the room lightened, with the rising sun, the truth struck me. It wasn’t that I’d come down with Covid. It was that I wanted to come down with Covid. I wanted to be sick so that I could get out of Christmas and so not have to face the welter of feelings it stirred up in me. I wanted to stay upstairs, my own northern hemisphere, until Christmas was over.

Except that once I’d found myself out, once I realised that I preferred to be ill than to face up to Christmas on my own, staying in bed wasn’t an option. I didn’t march downstairs and decorate the Christmas tree. But I did walk my dog around two blocks, our morning habit, during which time I remembered the tail end of my dream. After I left my friends’ house, in a search for Echinacea to cure my flu, I ran into a group of young people. When I asked them where the nearest beach was, they laughed and said they had no idea. But, one of them said, there was a forest nearby where they were about to go hiking. They invited me to join them and, forgetting my illness, I accepted.

That was yesterday morning. This morning, after teaching yoga early following a good night’s sleep, I came across this Rilke quote (I won’t pretend I found it myself, thanks for which goes to Maria Popova).

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you, larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.

When I read this quote on-line, I cried. How could Rilke know how I felt when even I didn’t know I’d been feeling it? But he did know, explaining it to me across time in a way that left me feeling better, lighter.

The overwhelm I’d been feeling - the stress and the distraction - was only on the surface. Fueling it was an underwhelm, a restiveness that I’d been avoiding with my ‘I must do this and then that’. I’d been on the run from my fear of not being held, of there being nothing beneath all my doing to catch me should I fall. No wonder I wanted to hide upstairs till after Christmas.

Lying in bed, willing myself to get up, I knew that life wouldn’t let me down if I could find ways to live it on its terms. If I could look around and see what was there to see, rather than looking within and ruminating. If I could reach out and beyond myself. And until then, if I could pull on my jeans and cut the grass out the back and pick up the summer cherry plums before my dog gorged on them with dire consequences.