Advent Showed Up and I Wasn't Ready

Advent showed up, and I wasn’t ready.

It was the second Sunday of Advent before I got the Advent wreath out. The third Sunday before I got the house decorated. 

Our Lego Advent calendar has barely been touched (though I’ve made a practice of turning over the other two each day--and this has caused more anxiety than peace). 

I’ll be meeting all my work deadlines two days before Christmas--if I’m lucky. 

I’m battling bronchitis/possible walking pneumonia, which doesn’t help. I finally went to the doctor today after several weeks of feeling terrible--then rallying--then feeling terrible again. Then I slept until I had to get littles from daycare, to piano, etc. 

And now, at almost 1 a.m., I am wide awake. My spouse has long abandoned our bed due to my coughing--the last few weeks, it’s been me leaving, but this time I was too tired to move. 

And, don’t even ask me about shopping for Christmas.

There have been other challenges, too, the kind I can’t write about for a public audience but that are common for people like us who have chosen a life of caring for people living with trauma.

I joined an online Advent retreat and have barely kept up with reading the readings, and haven’t contributed to the forum at all.

I want to turn the clock back and start over. Go to the doctor at the first symptoms--though probably then, I didn’t have anything remotely serious yet. Bring out the Advent wreath before that first Sunday. Slow down, journal about each Advent reading, make a practice of lighting the wreath every day, even if some of the folks currently in our house are mocking this particular tradition.

With my spiritual director, I expressed sadness that I hadn’t been able to keep my Advent practice of writing each day.

Could you just be gentle with yourself, and re-read what you wrote other years? My spiritual director asked me. You can skip one year. 

She was right, of course. But I’d had the same conversation--be gentle with yourself, it’s OK to skip one year--about doing my garden this summer--and then felt a profound sense of loss.

And so, here I am. I don’t know if I will write every day. I don’t know if I’ll even write another Advent piece after this one. But writing is the way I think--to quote the late, great Toni Morrison, who answered the question “Why do you write?” with a slight exasperation in her tone with that sentence the one and only time I got to hear her read.

My spiritual director led me into a meditation to see what I would see. The last time I spoke with her, I’d literally lost my voice, so it didn’t make much sense to talk. I saw the icon of Mary and Jesus, his face pressed against her cheek, looking up--and her eyes looking right at me. She turned her face to look down at him, kiss his cheek.

What if this isn’t about you being the mother? My spiritual director asked me. What if this is about something else?

I told her, then, of a spiritual journey I’d taken a few years earlier, the drum I’d made with my own hands resting on my chest, the room silent, all of us in my spiritual direction group lying in a circle. How my mother had come to me, after so many years, and taken me to her. I’d become a baby, suckling her breast. Then a little girl, sitting on her lap, nuzzling her neck. Then the 12-year-old she’d taken onto her lap, after she’d told me she had cancer again, saying, “It’s been too long since you’ve sat on my lap.” 

And then I was me again, at the age I was at the time, and she said, “Let’s go have some fun.” She took my hand and we floated among the stars for what felt like hours, weightless, free, but still in our bodies--hers, scarred from years of cancer treatments, mine, healthy and whole and the age she was when first diagnosed. “Remember how we used to swim together like this?” I asked her, and she laughed and pulled me along in a giant spiral, the stars whizzing by.

The darkness was deep. The starlight bright. The contrast startling. I didn’t want to leave when the facilitator brought us back. 

You can go back there, my spiritual director said. You don’t have to be afraid of something being different. You don’t have to be afraid that it won’t feel so profound. Just let yourself be there.

And so, I did, and after awhile I found her again among the stars, and took her hand. This time, we found the big dipper, which she’d taught me how to spot, which I’ve taught my children how to spot, and we rested there, in that giant net of light-in-the-darkness, of drinking deep, of living into our story even when we are lost.