If you had told me this would be me on Christmas Day...

I would have asked, "Who slipped me the roofies?" This picture reminds me of the Sweeney Sisters from 80's SNL. (Oh and, yup, that's a newborn baby in my sister's arms.)

To my surprise, I have to say Christmas Day ended up being somehow great in its way. Tears were definitely shed (photo books were gifted), but I had just enough resolve to get through the day (and just enough wine to close the evening with a "We Didn't Start the Fire" duet with my brother-in-law on my niece's new karaoke system... epic). I had a good time with my family. The thing about a big family is that there's always chaos and in this situation the chaos served to cover the massive, aching hole of my mom for periods of time (however small) throughout the day. Then, of course, it would hit---the fact that she wasn't sitting at the kitchen table saying, "How great is this, I get to just have my coffee while everyone else does the cooking?" (which was a relatively new indulgence for her on the holidays) or on the floor playing a board game with one of her grandkids---and in those moments, I wanted to collapse. We all wanted to (and did at times). But, on the whole, we made it through with much laughter and had a day I know my mom would have just loved, though there was definitely an "offness" to things, as I think there always will be now.

For me, the days leading up to Christmas and those just after were harder. After all the worry, I made it through Christmas without her but...she's still dead. And I'm wondering how long it will go on, this being stunned every time I re-remember it. Now that the big to-do has passed, a new type of sadness has settled. I missed my mom calling to make sure Dan and I were safe during the blizzard. And I'll miss her wishing me a Happy New Year. I even miss the promise of actually having a happy new year. This year will be many things, I'm sure. Significant. Entirely different than any I've known. Maybe even marked by achievement. But though I know there will be moments of it, I am doubtful happiness will be the overarching theme.

Not exactly merry and bright here, now am I? Maybe after you read this blogpost you can go and watch Terms of Endearment and really conjure that holiday spirit. Our holiday weekend viewing included not only The Wrestler (not quite as wholesome as Rudy), but also A Winter's Bone. The latter is an excellent movie, but heavy as Santa's gut. (Really, Santa's gut? No better simile I can come up with there?) We currently have a copy of The Family Stone sitting on top of the TV but I'm not sure I'm that masochistic. I can handle some pretty dark stuff and am not the type to try to counteract sadness with a Will Ferrell marathon, but I'm worried that movie will have me washing down a bottle of Ambien with a funnel of wine. Not sure I can even go there.

The past few days have been all about movies and books and I'm so digging the calm this week is offering. I'm pretending I'm on vacation (I'll be out of the office through Sunday) and with the exception of some fun organizational projects, I'm totally indulging in some at-home R and R. (Also, some C and C...cookies and chocolate). For three days in a row I've taken baths that have lasted so long the water got cold...that's what I'm talking about. Dan and I did make a reservation for dinner on New Year's Eve and that will be the only event on the calendar for the rest of the week. Word.

Writing here is sort of against my vacation rules (limiting computer time is good for my mental health, I've found) but, I don't know, I kind of wanted to check in.

Plus, a line like "heavy as Santa's gut" is really pretty time-sensitive.

Happy New Year my Family Spew!

Do you see what I see?

Photo not by me.

So, I’m sitting in a coffee shop in downtown Portsmouth (NH for you 02871ers) right now...it’s 4:15, just dark. This town is the picture of New England Christmas and from my seat by the window, not only is there a view of the huge pine tree all lit up at the town center (star at the top and all), but what I’m observing of the passersby can only be characterized as “ holiday hustle and bustle.” Lots of scarves, lots of shopping bags slung over shoulders, giant wreaths with large white bulbs woven through their greenery hanging on lampposts. In the stream of headlights moving down this main strip, I can see the snow flurries that have been falling all day. (Does the fact that I can see the window of my therapist’s office, the lamplight indicating she’s still there, take away from the Rockwellian picture I’ve painted? For the record, I’m not spying, this is just my favorite coffee spot. I started coming here long before I realized that was her office window...too long, in fact. How did I not notice that earlier? Anyway, don’t put it past me to do something like spy on my therapist, I just happen not to be doing it now...though I do keep glancing up. Should I call her and ask her to wave to me?)

Nobody’s more surprised than me to see that I’m writing again so soon but (because apparently I’m so sensitive right now that even the wind makes me cry) my heart was just so swollen with love from the outpouring (I hate the word outpouring, I’ve decided) of support that came after yesterday’s post, that I had to write. Holy shit, you guys. I thought I was done thanking you mo fos.

I’m trying not to get overly mushed up here, mostly because I don’t want to cry in this coffee shop again, but there has been no more gratifying experience since starting this blog, than yesterday. It could be the most gratifying of my writing “career.” (Though the letter from Penthouse Forum rejecting my story for its “extreme racism” and because they “don’t publish stories about yaks, weirdo” still ranks.) Between the comments on the blog, Facebook, and the ones that came in with the Owl Post especially, I was just really overwhelmed with emotion and (yes, here it is again) gratitude.

Thanks for such a warm and enthusiastic welcome back. Thanks for saying such nice things not just about my mom and family but about my writing. Jeez, you guys really made me see just how lucky you are to have me! (I kid...too much?) Anyway, I can’t remember why we even broke up in the first place. Oh yeah...well, you made even that better for a minute anyway. Thank you.

There was a time when I thought I would never share any of my writing with anyone I knew. I was much more comfortable with the idea of strangers reading my stuff, much more comfortable with strangers “knowing” me. I had such anguish over what people would think if they really knew me (and that I do things like stare up at my therapist’s window...no, seriously, it’s just a crazy coincidence that her window sits directly across from my favorite table). I feared what I perceived would be a bad reaction so much that I didn’t show anybody anything (and barely wrote for that matter) for a long time.

But, "Holy Dumbass, Batman" on me! It has been so rewarding to be received by all of you as I have and it’s actually provided the support and self-esteem to keep me going. (You haven’t bested me yet Penthouse!)

(And, by the way, for a long time I thought I knew every single person who ever read this thing...um, wrong. At my mom’s wake, a second grade teacher from my elementary school who I haven’t seen in years---who wasn’t even my teacher---told me she reads The Spew...And then she asked her friend, who also taught at my elementary school ---and who was the first teacher to ever scold me for talking; she kept me in for recess---if I was one of her students, which I wasn’t. I’ll save for another blog a description of the exact strangeness and loveliness of seeing these women in addition to my kindergarten teacher moving through the line at my mother’s wake.) (And, by the way, some people on this things are straight-up strangers. How ‘bout them apples?)

I digress (‘cuz that’s what I do), but the point was that I was just really so touched by your responses yesterday and even if you’re just acting the supportive parent to your scribbling eight-year-old, I am grateful. So, again (and for the last time of 2010...maybe), thank you and thank you and thank you.

Now, I shop...

(The light just went out in my therapist’s office...I need to catch her at the door if I plan to keep up all night.)

I'll be home for Christmas...

It was very hard for me to take the last picture off of the top spot but this one made me feel okay about it. She had hoped to see one last snow...

So, I’m going to try to just jump back in, okay? No long explanation about how/why I needed to just drop off the planet for a bit. How I needed space, privacy, time to just die a while by myself. How I’m not really out of that place and can’t promise I am back for good on this blog, but want to try because I feel like a bit of a shit for dropping off like that without any explanation (though I’m sure you got it). You should know that I’m sorry. I don’t flatter myself that anyone was losing sleep over my absence, but I don’t take it lightly or for granted that you guys show up here to read this stuff, so not writing for close to two months didn’t sit right. I’m sorry for not calling...it’s not you, it’s me.

More to the point, I really want to wish you all the happiest of holidays. You were with me through so much of this thing. There was such great support offered here and I drew so much strength from all of your words and I hope you know how deeply thankful I am. The kind of gratitude I feel for all of you---to those who wrote and followed along here, to all the people who showed up at my mom’s wake and funeral, to every person who told me a story of my mom that I had never heard, or expressed their love for her, or their memory of her laugh---this kind of gratitude is so much bigger than cursive letters stretched across the front of a note card. The words thank you feel too trite for the depth of this gratitude. In fact, the synonyms for gratitude---thankfulness, appreciation, etc.---don’t cover it. Gratitude, simple and vast, is the only word that comes close.

So please feel this gratitude and take it into your hearts while you’re celebrating the holidays with your families and friends. While you’re listening to Nat King Cole, when your stomachs and hearts are full, when you pull back from the table and feel grateful yourself for all that you have, please know that I will be feeling grateful for you. The grief is at times oppressive, the longing ceaseless, but when I reflect on all the love and thoughtfulness shown during my mom’s illness and after her death, I feel the joy of her and I thank you all for that (even though I just said I didn’t want to use the words thank you).

This season has been difficult, of course, and all month Dan and I have talked about jumping on a plane and going somewhere warm for Christmas. Just getting gone, really, it doesn’t matter where. When I think of trying to gather with my family, trying to engage in the spirit of this holiday that my mom planted and grew in all of us, the throb of her absence is unbearable (though I know I am bearing it...we all are). So I wanted to leave so that I would not feel it. So that my body would be so disoriented by foreign sights and smells that my mom’s absence Christmas morning would just be another of all these alien senses, perhaps even camouflaged in the mess. But I’ve since decided otherwise and will celebrate this year at my sister Becky’s house up here in NH, which she and her husband have generously opened up to all of us once again. (Will somebody tell Bec?)

It was a gradual shift, I guess. But the thing that really clinched it was stopping at my parents’ house on my way out of town last Friday night and seeing the long rectangular folding table my dad had set up in the middle of the living room, a roll of holiday paper stretched across it, a pile of neatly wrapped presents beside it on the floor. Alone now in a home he shared with my mom for close to 40 years (during which he probably never wrapped a Christmas gift), he set up this wrapping station where he toiled by the light of a tree he put up only for my nephew’s sake, because he felt my mom guiding him to buy and wrap Christmas presents for his family as she would have done. The sweetness and the sadness of this sight killed me and when my dad showed it to me and then turned back around to see what I thought of his little workshop, I started to weep.

I see my dad trying so hard to to do right by my mom, right by us, and though I know he would understand my going away---in fact, he totally got and supported it---something about this coping mechanism of his is just so loving that I want to try to receive it and reciprocate; same goes for all my family. (I didn’t understand this, however, until I just finished that sentence.)

(Also, I totally reserve the right to have a bipolar attitude shift about the whole thing...perhaps even later today...this happens a lot...Dan loves it and feels very secure in his home as a result.)

I suppose I’m also recognizing that I’m going to feel my mom’s absence no matter where I am and being around people who feel similarly might bring comfort. Or it might not. Part of me thinks that being around family---around women who look like her and a father who longs for her---will make the sadness that much more acute. But I’ve been swinging from one choice to the other in my my brain for weeks and a decision needed to be made. If I get to the house and suddenly feel the need to go home and return to my under-the-blanket den and watch some movie that’s deeply depressing for reasons which have nothing to do with dead mothers (like The Wrestler, which we just got in), the option is always there. So, as long as my family is okay with it (which they all seem to be), I’ll plan on spending the day with them with the caveat that if the want-to-die/cry/hide feeling becomes unbearable, I’ll head out. (Though, of course, my hope and expectation is to enjoy myself.)

I know my siblings are feeling similarly conflicted and displaced by the jarring of the universe that has occurred since my mom’s, our sun’s, death, but they all have children so the going on, particularly with Christmas, is demanded of them in a way it’s not of me. (Thank fucking god...I could no more get out a stack of Christmas cards right now than I could cure cancer.) But then it was this same childless freedom that had me by my mom’s side in the nine months following her diagnosis. I feel so blessed that I was able to be there---I would not change a single thing in that regard---but there are moments of my mom’s suffering, fear and despair that I cannot yet shake, moments of this experience that I keep going over and over in my head, including that of her death, and the fact that it's the holiday season doesn’t slow that down.

We’re all just doing the best we can is the point, I suppose.

And like that, we’re back in the game here on The Spew. I should warn you that I’m not sure where we’re headed. If you thought the shift from Neighbor Stalker Blog to Cancer Mom Blog was unsettling, I’m not sure Dead Mom Blog will be much better. Not that I’m sure that this is the direction things will take. The fact that I can write the words Dead Mom Blog suggests the return of a sense of humor, but the pit I feel in my stomach when looking at them, tells me not to expect consistency. I hope you’re all okay with this. Does it sweeten the deal if I promise no self-penned poetry? You have my word on that. On we go, okay? Maybe a little backwards at times because the recent past is so much a part of the present, but who knows? Last year at this time I had just finished my Bookish updates and vowed that 2010 would be the year I started meditating. Hardy fucking har. The point? I’m not going to even pretend that I have any idea what’s coming...in life or on the blog. (Though, here’s a little teaser: A NEW NEIGHBOR HAS ENTERED THE SCENE...and so far the relationship is entirely boring.)

So...

(I feel like I’m in one of those texting conversations when I don’t know how to end it.)

Merry Christmas (and Happy belated Hanukkah and Thanksgiving for that matter) to all of you. I hope the next couple of weeks are full of all your favorite aspects of life and that the time you spend with friends and family is rich with pleasure, frivolity and spiritual nourishment. If not, Mickey Rourke is just a ride to Blockbuster away...

P.S. Thanks to everyone who gave me the shove back here that I needed and for sticking with me. (And for those who didn’t, go screw! My friggin’ mom died...).