Solstice Chaos

I sighed and cursed as I turned another plastic storage box over with one hand, training a flashlight on my task with the other.

What did I think I was doing? It was seven pm on Friday, December 18, and I was just starting my Christmas decorating.

Jake and I had already been to Lowe's. We found the perfect tree almost immediately - a Charlie Brown tree, I christened it immediately. A foot-long spike top like a tuft of hair wrapped around a knitting needle, and underneath a fat ball of impenetrable branches that, despite the late day, still retained some green. On sale for half price! Such a deal! On the way out, I remembered that I needed a stand too, and the store was out. Oh well - I used to have a stand before my recent years with a plastic tree -it's gotta be somewhere..

So now I was out in the storage building in my back yard, hoping that if a Black Widow had taken up residence, it was too sleepy for my search to wake it. I'd told Jake that I had a ton of plans for our 11 days together - this wasn't one of them. So far I'd found the box of ornaments, and the one filled with lights, including the half-broken bulbs from twenty years ago that I really ought to just trash. But no stand.

Well, we had a tree, and it had to go into water tonight if it wasn't to turn into brown needles before Christmas Eve. We'd have to buy one.

King Soopers didn't have one, nor did Ace. We finally found a stand at Walgreens, paid twice as much for it as for the tree, and headed home.

I hacked at the bottom of the tree for some 15 minutes before I uncovered a fresh surface to expose to water. Jake heard none of it, busy on the computer, till, furious, I struggled the tree through the front door, yelling at him about his lack of help. He held the tree while I turned the screws on the stand, then ran to get water, and I realized I'd been patently unfair. I'd given him no direction - why did I expect him to be helpful?

At this point the comic part of the evening began. Once the tree was situated in the spot I'd planned for it, there was no way for Jake to get past it to his room. Perhaps it would fit in the bed-dining room? Nope, the stand fell right off the low shelf I set it on. I carried the ficus plant, stem drooping, to another window, and moved its stand further away from its window. There. It's a squeeze, but the tree fits. I set the trunk to something close to vertical, watered it, tightened the screws as far as they would go. It'll have to do.

The house, though, wouldn't. It was amazing how much of a mess we'd made in just two hours. Jake's bag, his trumpet, my quilting, my lunchbag and bookbag, the books and toys I'd moved to make room for the tree, the outerwear we'd both discarded randomly - and over it all a thin film of potting soil from the displaced ficus. I have a house whose downstairs covers fewer than 600 square feet. My mother once said, accurately, that it's so small that one pair of shoes out of place makes it look messy. Right now, it looked hopeless.

Jake got into his bath and I started picking up. I wondered, why did I wait with decorating? Yes, there'd been that very cold week when moving away from the heat source seemed too much effort for any purpose. And daily workouts and frequent school-related training sessions don't leave much time for stringing lights and buying trees - or tree stands.

I'd rationalized, made myself think that it was because I wanted Jake to have the pleasure of preparation for Christmas, not just the big event. There will only be the two of us, and gift-giving will be limited - so if the holiday is to mean anything, the decorating will have to be part of it, I told myself. And there's some merit to that - except that Jake has never shown much interest or joy in that whole light - stringing thing. He likes the finished product, but if it happened magically while he slept, that would be fine with him.

No, the reason why I didn't decorate ahead of time is the same as the reason why I don't go up to his room when Jake's not here. I built that room from scratch, and it's not a masterpiece, but an enormous effort and some considerable part of my credit-card balance went into that space, and you'd think I'd take pride in it and want to spend time there. Instead, I perform the bare minimum maintenance and otherwise seem to pretend it's not there.

No, I'm not some monstrous Susan Smith type who wants to pretend that her children don't exist. My boys are my greatest pride I'm their biggest fan, just as they are mine. My Seattle marathon medal didn't mean a tenth as much to me as the letter Jake wrote me while I was running it. But somehow I've dealt with the fact that sometimes I'm his mom, and sometimes I'm a single woman with nothing more important to do, of an evening, than running 5 miles, by dividing my life into neat portions. There's the life with Jake and the life without Jake, and the two rarely, if ever, involve the same activities, same friends, or even the same spaces.

So after Jake took his bath and ate his grapefruit as I read Tolkien, and brushed his teeth and got tucked in, I started sorting through the mess. And gradually, the irritation of the chaos ceded to some level of contentment. After all, what did I have to do that was more important, or interesting, or meaningful, than making a nest, even if a temporary nest, for my boy and me, at Christmas?