Nothing like having a pre-schooler to bring the fun back into Christmas. You can still buy a walkie-talker set for $7.99 and thrill your child. It's so fun to put window cling-ons of snow people, snowflakes and penguins on the doors. We are looking forward to decorating the tree. So nice. And such a change. I used to be in a lousy mood from mid-Thanksgiving right through to New Year's Eve. Here's a poem from a few years ago that reminds me of how happy I am to be creating a new family life now.

Christmas:Then & Now
In the loveless lap
of a stranger
I am supposed to say
I want

Pulling on the polyester beard
looking for lips
behind cotton
and words
where I will hear
“Have you been naughty or nice?”

But I had my own
fat Santa,
a bald man
with green work pants
stirring tea and eating sardines
in the kitchen

The one who grabbed
and pulled
and placed us on his lap
to ask, “Are you a good boy
or a bad girl?” while we learned
the art of squirming

Unable to say
“Not this.
This is not what I want.”


My mother said,
“If you don’t believe in Santa Claus,
he won’t bring any gifts,” and
I believed her

She wasn’t the warmth of a blanket from the dryer
but the scratch of wool on bare skin,
strings of light, not emitting
wrapped too tight -
unable to blink

My Christmas globe
shook dirty ashes, cracked
even the gel
wanted to be thinner,
transformed into a tear
that could leak
out of that place

Prayers to a red suit
a black belt
and loveless laps
that might bring barbies
but couldn’t take anything away


We dust off the candles
in early December
one for him
one for me
On a plate we place them
and begin our ritual

For a week and a day
we say
a prayer, make one wish
and state something we are grateful for

In the dark room
of our living
finger tips touching
the flames
between our lips
Eyes closed
for contemplation
and then
breath

“one, two, three”
we blow
the past away
it falls, a glacier
crashing in the ocean
making waves

we float into a future
hands holding
and safe enough already
before the switch
of light

- - - - - - -

Happily, I've come a LONG way in my relationship with my mother since I've become a mother. Things really can change!

Biological Father

I have never met my biological father. I have two pictures of him. In one, he's in a white prom suit. My mother is six mos. pregnant and wearing a blue dress. She's cut out of the photo by the photographer. She's half in and half out. My father has a wide open-mouth smile. He's beaming.

In the other picture, my mother is 18, holding me as an infant and my sister, probably not yet 18 mos. is sitting on my father's lap. He's 21 or 22. That picture is frayed on all four sides. It's the only family photo I have of the four of us.

My brother, who was born 2 years later, has a different father. Except for the fact that we have a different last name and a different biological father, I never think of him as my half-brother. His "bio dad" is the guy I called Dad my entire childhood. His "bio dad" is the guy I gave father's day cards too while I wrote about my own bio dad in my journal.

My father is so young in both pictures and my mother even younger. I have trouble picturing these kids as the creators of anyone's life. They are smiling in the picture but it's a posed smile and they look uneasy. Instead of parents, they look like older siblings holding babies, concentrating hard on not letting the babies fall out of their laps.

It's hard to imagine my father as a destroyer of life either when he is so young. He went to Vietnam soon after the photo was taken. I have two letters he wrote from Vietnam. They are my proof that he was a real person, give me a glimpse into what he thought, how he felt, how he wrote even. He was gentle and sensitive in the letters, caring and captured lots of details about how hot Vietnam was, how poor the people were, how hard it was to eat or sleep, how hard they were "hit" in "Rocket Alley" and how he wanted more photos and to come home to rest. He said the only thing he was getting in Vietnam was a good tan.

I don't know if he's dead or alive. Every five or so years I think I'd like to know and I make some mild inquiry and then usually hit a dead-end and let it go. Lately, because I feel he's probably not going to live long if he's even still alive, I feel more of a press to search. I don't want to meet him but I'd like to see his face. I'd like to know what his adult, pre-60 face looks like so I can age him in my mind. I know he's an alcoholic so the chances of him being alive, or staying alive long, aren't good. I know it in my head and yet I feel time is endless. Do I even want to know if he has died? I'm not sure.

I hate the term bio father but I don't have a term I like better. I mean, let's face it, men have a good deal to do with conception but have very little to do with birth. I've been with two women who gave birth. It's a one-person deal, a one-woman show - and that's true no matter how supportive the others in the room are.

As a kid growing up, I used bio father to differentiate him from the guy who lived with us when I was toddler through pre-adolscence, the one I called "dad" and the one I gave father's day cards too. But, since the guy I called "dad" has died, my biological father has just morphed in "my father" in my mind. The shift snuck on me. I mumble over my words if I say them out loud.

Just thinking and thinking. I think about everything in new and different ways now that I'm a parent, now that I think about how my daughter may think of her own biological parents some day, as I struggle to help her find words and name experiences she has already had but which aren't totally integrated into her toddler self.

Potty Training, Birthdays and Grief

Potty-training shrinks the world. And since my daughter wants to quit the attempts whenever she has an accident, I try to bend the world to prevent them. Accidents upset her in a heart-breaking make her hug her diapers kind of way. She pleads, "But I love my diapers. They don't have accidents," and carresses them.

I try to convince her everyone has accidents. I know by the end of the week I'm going to be peeing on the floor to prove it. She's simply not conviced. "Now that I'm theree, I probably won't have accidents," she announces before bed since her pediatrician told her, "You're ready for potty training. You're three." And I reminded the doctor to use her, I'm an authority figure voice to add, "But because you're learning something new, there will be accidents." I don't think my daughter heard that part.

"I miss my diapers. I love my diapers. But I love my underwear. You and Daddy wear underwear." And then we go through the list of her friends trained, not trainied and in process.

"I miss my old number," she says, meaning 2, her old age. "I still love my old number. Number two."

"You can love two and three," I say the way I tried to convince her I could like her friends and she could like Mommy's friends. But she wanted the adults to like the adults and would say, "But I love them all by myself."

Inside I'm thinking the question that in one form or another passes through my mind regularly, Is this adoption-related? grief-related? related to being abandoned? in an orphanage?

She's talking about the number 2 and the number 3 and part of me is thinking, "Is she going to believe she can love us and think about her bio parents?" She's feeling conflicted loyalty about the numbers 2 and 3. "I like the number 3," she says, "I don't want it to change." How do I explain she'll be 3 for a good long while, and then someday 4, but not too soon. I mean, it's been a long day. We've had potty training, a limit on t.v. and now we are grieving the passage of time."

"Everyone's number changes on their birthday," I say, "That's part of the reason we have a party." Really, I haven't thought about birthdays so much in years. And we're on to talking balloons for a while and I'm wondering if I'm explaining too much and if maybe we really shouldn't go back to watching MORE t.v. just to simplify life for a while...

Four Shows a Day

I decided my daughter was watching too much t.v. and announced to my partner that we're enforcing a four-show limit. And no, movies don't count. We're limiting the zombie-like anti-social stare to two hours a day.

Why not? As a stay-at-home feminist, I have time for Play-Doh, getting on the rug, role playing with boy dolls as nurses and girl dolls as doctors. I can push Thomas the train around te track between dealing with meals and a bath. However, feeding, clothing and early morning fun only gets me to 9am.

Now that we are potty training though this cottage-style home we inhabit is closing in on me. The four-show rule feels oppressive but I'm stubborn and I'm trying to be a good mother.

My daughter got up at 5:30am today. My co-parent, her father, brought her into the living room. I dragged myself downstairs at 7am and before I'm even my chugging my iced coffee I want to know, "Which show are you on? What number show is this?"

"The second. Maybe the third?" he says as my little one is hugging my leg.

"Yeah, yeah. Good morning and I love you too pooka doodle doo but I have to talk to your father. What do you mean you left me one show? You have to work til 9pm, which is fourteen hours from now, and you left me one show?"

It's beginning to look an awful lot like recovery as I mumble, "One day at a time. One day at a time. I know I can do this."

"It's like coffee," I tell my friends. "It's not the amount. I don't need a lot but I absolutely require two cups." en I need it I have to have it."

So, I went from no t.v., to some t.v., to well at little isn't so bad and now I have the friggin shakes.

We managed though and I'm either a genius or a horrible mother. I packed a potty in a bag and stuck it under the carriage. There is a way to do potty training and leave the house. Why can a boy take a leak in the woods on a tree but I can't carry a potty? I wasn't exactly sure what I'd do with the pee if my daughter used the potty, which she didn't, but it comforted her as she had four false alarms.

Anyhow, we got through and and had lunch followed by reading and a long nap. Later, we counted and then stuck an industrial size box of on various stuffed animals imaginary boo-boos. When I finally lost my patience, I reached for the remote and read a little as she watched the one little show I had left.

new

I've been re-reading Louise De Salvo's Writing as a Way of Healing. My writing group is having growing pains so I was reminding myself why being in a group was valuable.

The women in my group write all different types of writing. Occassionally, we're more conscious of pleasing the writing group than in improving our writing.

Anyhow, DeSalvo said something about how it's important to know if others understand what we're saying in our writing and NOT if they like what we're writing. That tiny distinction is huge. She was saying, no one would "like" a Holocaust memoir but it doesn't mean "I didn't like reading it" means it shouldn't have been written, wasn't accurate, necessary and poignant writing...

So, it helped me re-remember all I DO believe about the power of speaking/writing the truth, telling stories and how transformative that all is. And how truth changes lives.

For example, it might have been helpful to know, when I was becoming a parent, that paying attention to a little being all of the time is utterly exhausting. Sleep deprivation makes me tired. Lots of sleep deprivation makes me a basket case. But to constantly pay attention to someone else when you're a trauma survivor, introvert and have spent a LONG time in your head takes an enormous shift in a way of being. I am a better, more loving, less selfish person. And, I'm so friggin tired most of the time. Being a conscious person is not easy.

Sometimes I wished I smoked cigarettes just so I had an excuse in the middle of anything to go stand outside and suck in the air and stare at the sky. Maybe if I drank more, I'd sink into that false optimism of a good buzz. But no. Drinking makes me sleepy. Smokers are stinky. I wonder if bubble gum cigarettes could be made to emit real smoke? I could pretend to be a smoker but without the health ricks. Of course, I guess when I start chewing my butts people will be on to me or wonder.
Oh well... getting used to this blog world.