family

grumpy about marriage (guest blog!)

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I’ve been super busy last couple weeks, and there’s been sickness in the house, so I haven’t had time to write anything. Also I haven’t had anything to say that I think anyone would find even remotely interesting. So my friend Elizabeth wrote a grumpy guest blog! Yay! I’m not alone in my grumpy!

Let me say this without Elizabeth’s permission: Elizabeth is a most excellent lawyer I worked with some years ago. She’s really bright and snarky and sweet and cynical, with a wicked sense of humor, which is a beautiful combination of qualities. Like me, she came to parenthood late. Like me, she has a daughter who faces some challenges in the years ahead, but hers are probably more significant than Jesse’s. Unlike me, the challenges of parenting a child with unique needs don’t seem to be breaking Elizabeth. Instead she seems to be becoming even more resilient, more peaceful, and just plain better because of it. Woulda coulda shoulda. But hey, that’s why I’m in therapy with Jesse.  Anyway, here’s what Elizabeth has to say this week about her mate, providing further proof for one of my new inspiring inspirational inspirations: Everyone farts in the same language.

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Hi! My name is Elizabeth and I’ll be your guest grump today! I really can’t hope to equal the excruciating grumpitude that is Carla, but I will try to whet your appetite and keep you somewhat satiated while she is recovering from flu, missing An-ton-ee, or just busy.

I have to free associate a bit here to get my grumpitude up to speed. I just had my wedding anniversary on January 8. So I will be….GRUMPY ABOUT MARRIAGE? Yes? Okay. Disclaimer: I love my husband very much, and our life together is good. We have a partnership, he’s a wonderful dad, he respects me, blah blah blah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When I first got married there was a reality tv show on called “Things I Hate About You” that I liked to watch (in secret, because I didn’t want Max to know that I watched reality TV — I guess I thought I was only supposed to watch PBS or Wall Street Week or something). Anyway, this show consisted of couples airing to their gay boyfriend Mo Rocca their various gripes about the other spouse — the spouse was messy; the spouse sang in the car; the spouse complained a lot; the spouse never cleaned up. At the end of the show someone won a major household appliance or trip, I can’t remember why.

Okay, I’m right on the cusp of getting to my point now. Here’s the thing that’s insane: When I watched this show as a newlywed, I really and truly believed that if Max and I went on this show (okay I’m starting to snort with laughter), he would have a list of things about me that were annoying, obviously– but, but — I would not possibly come up with even a single quality about him that was unacceptable. Yes! I actually believed him to be perfect! OMIGOD! And I was so lucky that this perfect being was willing to co-exist with my clearly imperfect self.   Can you imagine?

Well, times have certainly changed! Let’s see now, do I only have to pick ten things that annoy me about him?

  1. He farts constantly. I’m not talking about a little gas and maybe that was a fart, maybe it wasn’t. I’m talking about gas that ruins furniture, that makes you drop to the floor and moan “Oxygen!”
  2. He won’t drive. Ever. I do all the driving.
  3. His idea of a healthy meal is pork fried rice with extra broccoli. The broccoli cuts the fat, you know.
  4. He can’t hang up a towel without smooshing it so that it takes maximum drying time.
  5. He is incapable of throwing anything away, including any little piece of artwork our daughter does. Believe me, she’s no Van Gogh.
  6. He answers every phone call. Every phone call.
  7. He doesn’t understand the concept that one buys new clothing just because one likes the clothing.
  8. He will talk to anyone. See #6. I think every telephone survey person hits us up.
  9. His idea of a great night of entertainment is a vampire zombie slasher film featuring Nazis on skis.
  10.  He only ever wants to go the Jersey shore on vacation.

(I have to admit I was sort of scratching a bit for the last few there. ) Well, it’s too bad that show is off the air!

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[Carla here: It sounds like love to me.]

Grumpy about the holidays – day 23 (counting my blessings)

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Yesterday some peeps who matter to me lost a brother and a son and an uncle and so on, in a car accident. They are such decent and good people, and there’s nothing I can do for them except to keep on keeping on. It’s a senseless and untimely death, but for that matter, what death isn’t?

I find that it’s easy, in the face of death, to forget about the silliness and joys of the world, or worse yet, to decide they need to be set aside for a time so that one can devote one’s full energy to, well, suffering. Sometimes grief is so utterly overwhelming you have no choice but to give in to it.

The horrible reality of life is that it’s full of death. And yet here we are, bearing children who are destined to die, and even making the best of it. We live on both sides of it all.

Last week Nick asked me, “Mommy, when I die will I not be real anymore?” It was a gut-punch. I had to catch my breath and dig deep to stop the tears, and I wasn’t even sure why they wanted to come. I answered best I could. You will always be real, forever, no matter what happens to your body, or this world, or this galaxy, or this universe, no matter what else is real and what is myth. The dinosaurs died 60 or 70 million years ago. Most of them returned to stardust long ago. But they’re still real, as real as the mountains we climb and the lakes we swim in, and they’re still shaping our world.

To myself I added, you’ll always be real to me, as real as the extraordinary love and pain and guilt I feel right now, feelings that are bound together in a strange dance as I watch my children awaken to mortality and suffering, as they learn to live on both sides of this journey we’re all on.

Jesse once sat on the can taking a dump, pondering death and heaven. I don’t recall her words exactly, but she put two ideas together as she bore down:

Mommy, you always say that a piece of your daddy is in your heart, even though he’s dead.

That’s right, I answered. He’s always with me.

She continued. My friend at school says when you die, she believes you go to heaven.

That’s right, I replied, a lot of people believe that.

Then, said my beautiful, magical little child, since your daddy is in your heart, it’s like heaven is in your heart.

Right. That’s where I think the people we care about stay, after they die — right here with us, despite all the mistakes, the failures, the fights and regrets, and despite all the love.

Grumpy about a heart attack (a sibling tale)

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I learned yesterday that my brother Mark was taken to the hospital the night before. He had a heart attack. He seems fine, but it’s early in the evaluative process. So far all indicators are that my family is still completely ridiculous.

I heard the news after we finished a pretty strenuous 4+ mile hike with the kids in the Shenandoahs. We’re still on our 3-week vacation. There’s very little cell coverage in this part of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but the hike ended at an overlook where we had a few bars of coverage. So on a whim I unlocked my phone. I was greeted by a text from my brother Eric, filling me in briefly on Mark’s attack. It was a terrible emotional jolt, and I blurted out an exclamation.

My bad. I got about .4 seconds to process the news before Jesse stepped into the fray. “WHAT?? What’s wrong??” She’s already been in full-throttle jackass mode for a couple days, so this came easy to her.

Uncle Mark seems to have had a heart attack, I answered.

“What does that mean??” She yodeled. “WHAT’S A HEART ATTACK??”

Deep cleansing breaths as we looked for kind ways to tell her to shut up.

Standing on the overlook, I called Eric. He was at the hospital. He started to answer my questions but there was noise in the background, and in exasperation he said, “here, I’ll just let him tell you himself.”

Mark got on the phone. He spoke in a gravelly, sickened whisper. “Hey Carla, thanks for calling…” Then he started cracking up and spoke in his normal gravelly voice. “I’m just kidding, sis!” Sooo funny.

I hit back. “What happened, Mark?? I got Eric’s message and almost had a heart attack!!”

He answered with more. “Hey don’t worry, sis. You know most FATAL heart attacks happen in women. So I’m fine.”

There’s nothing like stupid joking around to mask deep, painful feelings of love and fear.

Here are the essentials of what I understand happened, based on what Mark and Eric told me:

For two days, Mark experienced pain in his left shoulder and severe heartburn. Also he couldn’t stop sweating. Finally Mark called Eric, who lives about 3 hours away, and asked him to get on the internet and look up the symptoms of a heart attack. Bingo. Eric also called a doctor friend, who suggested Mark take an aspirin and get help. Now. Eric passed this along.

Meanwhile, at my mom’s home (where Mark was hanging out)…

Mom’s husband John also called a doctor for advice. He called Dr. Kim, who’s something of a family doctor. For the dogs. He’s a vet.

Mark realized he didn’t want Mom or John to drive him to the hospital. Mom doesn’t drive since her stroke. John’s driving would have just given Mark another heart attack and finished him off.

John promptly pulled out the yellow pages. He was going to find an ambulance company, presumably under “A”. Mom decided this wasn’t the right approach. She called 911. But her English has gotten so bad since her stroke that she couldn’t articulate the situation to the operator. Also she gave the address of one of her rental properties, not her house. Mark, recognizing that all of this was problematic, took the phone from her and cleared things up.

Mark made it to the hospital in one piece, they did something with a stent, and he’s alive.

I learned most of these details from Eric, who shared them with me in a tired, wry voice that told me he had moved past anger straight on to humor as he tried to manage the situation and keep me and our brother Ted (currently in Malaysia) in the loop.

Some time after I spoke to Eric at the hospital, I called Mom’s home number, hoping to find her there. A male voice answered in Korean. “Yoh boh seh yoh?”

“Hi John, it’s Carla.”

There was a brief silence, and then, “Helloo?” piped the voice in a Korean accent.

I was irritated immediately. I didn’t need this shit right now. I spoke very slowly and carefully, as I’ve done many times before. “John. It is me, Carla.” I prepared myself for more confusion.

The voice started laughing. “Carla, it’s Eric. I’m just messing with you.”

Sigh. We both made fun of me for getting grumpy so quick. We chatted about Mark, Mom, John. Without my asking, Eric gave me the data points he knows I need. BP, O2 sats, heart rate, status. We told stupid jokes, made loose fun of the situation without really meaning it, gave each other a few laughs.

As my brothers and I held each others’ emotional hands, my heart broke and healed and broke and healed. If I’m the princess of grumpy, then Mark and Eric are the crown princes. We grew up under the same duress, grumbling and yelling our way through the days. But in a time of crisis and fear, Mark and Eric are both coming through, as I hope I’m doing, turning that grumpiness from ugliness into a head- shaking acceptance of the comedy that shapes our world. If Ted weren’t in Malaysia, I know he’d join us in this essential, life-affirming self-mockery.

I’d probably break if it weren’t for the laughs. Mark is an anchor in my life. He keeps me grounded when I get uppity; he picks me up when I’m down on myself; he face palms me when I get too grumpy. I can’t imagine this world without him. So I’m afraid right now.

But good news: Eric just told me that Mark has now achieved full volume and grumpiness, and he should be going home soon. Mom and John are going to visit Mark at the hospital today anyway. He isn’t all that thrilled. “They’re just going to stand there and stare at me.”

Yeah I know. It’s annoying. But it’s probably what I would do too if I could be next to Mark right now instead of 3000 miles away, because I’m so grateful that he’s still alive.

Grumpy about marriage (happy anniversary)

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I’ve been married 21 years as of today. Anthony and I are finally street legal. He’s a keeper for sure. I feel like we’ve had a storybook relationship. Ups and downs, good times and bad, suffering and decay, yadda yadda. But I can honestly say that there hasn’t been a single day I’ve regretted the choice I made. The only regret I have is that someday it’ll end. We’ll separate, because death. It’s a bitter pill, but one worth swallowing for the (hopefully) many years of love and happiness preceding it.

We’re celebrating our anniversary the old fashioned way. Anthony had to go out to a work dinner. Someone is leaving and it’s good bye, so it didn’t seem right for him to skip it. I’m leaving in a few minutes to go to a friend’s house for drinks. They’ve had my kids all afternoon, so now it’s time for me to impose myself on them even more.

Anthony will be home about when the kids fall asleep, and then we’ll drink together and watch MI5 re-runs. Or maybe we’ll get crazy and watch the silly parts of BBC’s now-ancient Pride and Prejudice. Either way, it’s romantic enough for me these days. I’m just happy to have Anthony by my side at the end of the day, even on the grumpy days.

Grumpy about love: marriage proposal

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Anthony asked me to marry him on New Year’s Eve, over a 750 ml bottle of Jack Daniels. NYE is amateur night, and we’ve never gone out to celebrate it. There are a lot of people drinking and driving who rarely drink and drive, and who therefore don’t have as good an idea when not to drive because they don’t have as much experience endangering their own and others’ lives. Also there are inexperienced drunks around, more likely to lean toward bellicose and vomitous. Anthony and I are happy to get drunk at home on NYE.

So there we sat in out tiny apartment on Swann Street, near Dupont Circle in DC, at the little table we bought with a year’s worth of change we collected, slurping happily at our Jack. Life was simple, complicated, broke, and good. Anthony had a funny look on his face. He was obviously thinking about something heavy.

What is it? I asked. What’re you thinking about?

“So I’ve been thinking,” he started, and then hesitated. What? Go on then. “I’ve been thinking we should get married.”

From 18 to 26, I was never going to get married. I came of age as the planet Reagan ascended, followed by the hypocrisies of Newt Gingrich and Ralph Reed and the “family values” crowd. I used to rant at the TV and newspapers as we drank up all that inside-the-beltway political chatter. We’ve been together and “living in sin” longer than most couples last from first date to divorce! I don’t need a piece of paper to know that I’ve made a lifetime commitment to Anthony! Marriage is a social construct and false institution that adds no value to a relationship! I know gay couples who will never marry but they have plenty of family values! Couples use marriage to cover up unresolved flaws in their life together! No wonder divorce rates are so high! I would never abandon my mate while he was dealing with cancer! Hypocrites who’ve been married 3 times and had extramarital affairs shouldn’t lecture me about family values! I’m never getting married! EVER! F#@* MARRIAGE!!

So Anthony proposed anyway. Later he told me he assumed I would leave him, given my point of view.

I handled it well. I chewed him out for even considering dragging me into such a broken, biased, sexist institution. I ranted at him about failing to pay attention to me, ever, because how else could he ask me to do something I PLAINLY had such a strong moral opposition to?

Okay not really. I don’t remember that emotional moment clearly except for this: I cried and said YES YES YES right away and was overwhelmed by an unexpected feeling of happiness that came out of NOWHERE, all the while deriding myself inside for being such a complete hypocrite. So really, when I’m being straight with myself, I have to admit that agreeing to get married was sort of a humiliating moment.

Not satisfied with my own emotional dissonance over being so happy about this marriage thing, I called my mom the next day to tell her. She used to have a special knack for putting beautiful moments in a negative light. She had three specific things to say when she heard about the looming nuptials.

“Mom, Anthony and I are getting married!”

There was an inappropriately long silence.

“Are you pregnant?”

Gah! This was a cheap shot. Mom never could accept that I Lived In Sin with Anthony. It horrified her. I was exasperated that pregnancy was the first place her mind went. She knew me better than that.

“No, mom! I use birth control! Jeez!”

There was another inappropriate silence.

“You’ll get married in Stockton.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yeah, I know. Anthony and I already talked about that.”

Another pause.

“You’ll wear a white dress.” Now she was grim.

At the time, I thought this was about her knowing what a slob I am. But maybe it was just another cheap shot about my Living In Sin. It doesn’t matter anymore. By the time Mom issued the dress edict, I was rolling my eyes so thoroughly I was giving myself a headache. I was ready to hang up, and I was a little pissed off.

I used to think of this conversation with dismay, a perfect example of my mom’s disfunction — a general opposition to letting others’ happiness just be, without criticizing or putting down. But I also recognize that, wittingly or not, Mom gave me exactly the cynical, comic relief I needed as I struggled to understand how I had been flipped off my anti-marriage stance so easily. And now as I write this, it occurs to me that my mom — sharp-witted and insightful about people — probably was also just plain mocking me. I deserved it.

I don’t think I’ve ever come to grips with what happened in my heart when Anthony proposed. My conversation with Mom filled the slot where I should have fitted in a conversation with myself about the why’s of marriage. Why was I so moved by Anthony’s proposal, when I already knew he was committed to me for life? I still don’t know the answer.

Grumpy about diplomacy

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I’m on day 4 of a pretty long visit to my mom’s house with the kids. I haven’t posted anything since I got here. Today my brother Ted mentioned that he was surprised not to be reading some stuff about my visit.

I’m surprised too. After all, I’m home. I’ve descended into the maelstrom of grumpy. Grumpy winds whine through this house when we all get together, a perfect storm of grumpy waiting to happen if we all vibrate the right way at the wrong time, like a choir of Tibetan monks droning on just the right frequencies.

Is that enough inane metaphors and analogies for now? (I sometimes have to think to assure myself of the difference, and right now I don’t have time to do that, so I’ll assume I have both just to be sure.)

Anyway, I’m hypothetically right where the best material resides when it comes to my inner grumpy. But grumpy isn’t the same as mean, and I’m not sure I could muse about my family in close quarters without just being mean or hurting feelings, however unintentionally. We’re all ridiculous — I mean all human beings, not just my family — but most of us don’t want our noses rubbed in this fact.

My family has had some doozies of collective grumpy meltdowns over the years, and we’ve also had individual hissy-fits. As a result there have been long periods of absence for various reasons, for one or another of us. Traditionally, we have at it with each other – a gift of battle-ready gab bequeathed to us by our parents. But we don’t do that so much anymore, and I really don’t want anyone to bug out ever again. There aren’t enough years in a life for it. Some years ago my mom and I talked a lot about how we could all get along better. Love is pretty constant. Mom liked to tell me that breaking a family is like cutting blood with a knife. But sometimes, we concluded together, love asks more of us than just love. It requires diplomacy, and of course respect. Love is the easy part.

So here goes: I’ve really enjoyed seeing my brothers and sisters-in-law and nieces and my mom and her husband and all the blessed shedding dogs. Awesome visit. I dearly love my mildly insane, mildly grumpy family. My kids are a good fit here. Diplomacy demands that I leave it at that.

grumpy about aging

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My grandma, Lee Nak Soon

My grandma, Lee Nak Soon

A few weeks ago after a couple extra trips to the swimming pool with the kids, I developed a painful itchy rash over much of my body, including my face. A gift of Wisconsin’s arid winters, I suspect. First I looked like I’d spent too much time in a tanning booth. Then the skin became extremely dessicated and wrinkled for about a week as it healed, especially around my eyes. One night as I stared at the strangeness in the mirror, it occurred to me that I was seeing myself in about 20 years. Since I live in please-don’t-let-me-grow-old America, I’m sure I was supposed to say EEEEK and start googling local providers of face lifts and acid baths. Americans think aging is ugly, and we’re obsessed in the ugliest ways with not growing old.

But looking in the mirror, that’s not how I felt. I pictured myself 20 years in the future, and I thought I looked pretty good for 67. I even thought I looked beautiful as I laughed at my image. I’ve always thought old women look beautiful.

When I was very small, I believe I spent most of my waking hours with my grandma. I have photos of her, but they’re nothing to my memories. She was beautiful beyond the dreams of little girls who’ve seen too many Disney fairies. She was my binkie. I have simple and happy memories of her. I remember learning to read in Korean with her. She took me to my piano and dance lessons. She sang children’s rhymes and hymns to me. We’d walk through the streets of Seoul — in my child’s memory they were either scary alleys surrounded by massive concrete walls or scary multi-lane roads filled with insane drivers — and stop for treats from street vendors and small shops. She took me with her to the rice miller, where we watched the rice flour come out the end of the mill. I loved sleeping over at her home, an old-fashioned little two-bedroom place with floors heated by coal, Korean-style. We’d walk there from my parents’ house. She made me rice and eggs with soy sauce, and we drank barley water. We cuddled up together and watched Korean variety shows on her tiny TV. We played funny little kids games, and she told me stories and myths on demand, mesmerizing me like a Royal Shakespeare thespian. She kept a coffee can in the bedroom for a chamber pot in case I had to pee during the night. For real. I remember using it.

By around the time we moved to the United States in 1976, when I was 10, Grandma was living with my uncles in Seattle. I don’t remember whether she came here before or after us. I just know that it meant I didn’t see her as much. She would fly to California once in a while to stay with us. She slept on a futon on the floor in my room, and I felt like we were reliving some very good times. I remember her sitting one night at bedtime, putting on lotion and looking at the skin on her arms. She said to me, “I’m getting old, aren’t I. Look at my wrinkles.” She must have been somewhere in her 60’s at the time. At 11, this idea startled me, but my reply came easily and honestly. Not to me, grandma. I think you look young and beautiful. She chuckled and nodded. Now I think back and it seems that she was rueful, or maybe (I can hope) she was grateful to have me with her in that moment.

Shortly after that conversation, maybe even on the same trip, Grandma had a massive brain aneurysm that sent her to the hospital. She had two life-saving surgeries that took many hours, she was hospitalized for days, and she was severely incapacitated as a result. My memories of what followed aren’t clear, except I know my mom was emotionally incapable of handling the situation, filled with grief and rage and guilt. Grandma regained speech and bodily control eventually, and she went on to live another 20-plus years. Her thinking and behavior were obviously altered by the aneurysm and surgeries, and there was a sort of sunken spot on her forehead where they must have had to do something to her skull to get to the clot quickly, but she never stopped being utterly beautiful to me. I always thought she aged wonderfully. She wasn’t mean or bitter, and it seemed to me she had a simple faith that made her not worry too much about things; and so there was a clarity to her face and eyes, and her mouth didn’t turn down in a way that spoke to a lifetime of unhappiness or misery.

In the last years of her life, I barely saw Grandma. I was a busy lawyer in Washington, D.C., and I had lost most of my Korean so I couldn’t communicate well with her. I sent her flowers now and then, I showed up for her 90th birthday party. It wasn’t much, but I hope she knew how much I loved her anyway. One spring, I flew to California with Anthony. He had a conference in the Monterey area, so we doubled up a short vacation with a visit to my family. It so happened that just then Grandma fell very ill with pneumonia and was hospitalized. Since I was already in California, it was a small thing for me to grab a couple plane tickets and fly up to Seattle with my mom to visit. So, a week or so before she would die, I was able to spend a few hours with my grandma in the hospital.  She was well under 5 feet tall. I remember the nurse coming in to check her feet for something.  She lifted the covers gently and found nothing. Look higher, I told her dryly. We giggled a little, but the situation wasn’t funny. Grandma was suffering. She was about 91 years old, ground down with age and illness, skinny, her breasts shrunken to nothing. But she was still so beautiful, and not even the cloudiness in her eyes could hide it from me. I felt like a little child again. She patted my hands, petted my head. She sighed occasionally, backed by 90 years of experience and feelings I couldn’t possibly fathom, murmuring “ooh-lee eh-gee” and “ah-gah-shee”, my baby, my little darling. In a lucid moment, when she wasn’t hurting too much, she held my hand and, in mild exasperation over my uwillingness to conceive yet, blessed me. It’s okay, Carla, she told me.  You can just have two kids, a boy and a girl. That’s enough. Have a good life.

And indeed, Grandma’s blessing is my reality today. In my opinion, anyone who thinks growing old or being old is ugly, anyone who thinks wrinkles are ugly, has lost touch with a lot that matters. When I looked into my grandmother’s beautiful, wrinkled face, I never saw age. I saw who she was, my sweet grandma who would pretend my stuffed animals were peeing on her and give me airplane rides on her feet. I saw love, right to the end. I hope someday I can also be a wrinkly, grizzled old lady laughing with my grandkids. If you think I’m ugly when you see me then, I really won’t care.

A joyful Carla and her loving grandma

A joyful Carla and her doting grandma

Christmas is my miss-my-dad holiday

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This year we delayed the onslaught of Christmas in my home, in an effort to shorten the time of heightened anxiety for Jesse. It turns out it also thankfully shortened the amount of time I spend around this time of year missing my dad.

Dad was the King of Grumpy, but when it came to Christmas, I really have only fond and cheerful memories from my childhood. Dad loved Christmas kitsch, and in hindsight I see that he lifted my mom’s spirits with it. The house used to vibrate with the cacophony of noise-making Christmas gadgets–trains, snoring santas, musical clocks, a weird Mickey Mouse singing thing, music boxes, stuffed animals that sing when you punch them. As a child, my Christmas mornings were the stuff of Hollywood movies, full of plenty and laughter. Dad had serious Santa mojo.

As I got older, Christmas got even better because I didn’t get grumbled out of the kitchen anymore. Instead, Dad and I did a lot of cooking together. I have early memories of him giving me some pie crust scraps and, with a twinkle in his eye, wasting precious time to make cinnamon sugar so I could sprinkle it on the crust and bake “cookies.” We didn’t share them with anyone else. I helped with the stuffing the night before, I peeled potatoes, I washed dishes (mostly so that I didn’t have to listen to Mom complain about the mess) — little things. He shared his tricks with me. Over the years he entrusted me with more, including stuffing and pies, and then at some point in his waning, on the rare years I was home for Christmas, I just did the whole meal for him. And really, in my heart it was for him and not for the rest of the family.

These days I think Dad and I spent Christmas time together in the kitchen because we were both loners and lonely. We were each lonely because we needed some more human connection; but we were loners even more. Faced with the messy reality of what human connection entailed, I think we each prefered to avoid it most of the time. With each other, we didn’t need to try very hard, and the kitchen got us away from the scrum of humanity in the living room. We could potter about quietly, chatter about memories and music and family stories, and not worry. Somehow, we could laugh together most of the time even when things went wrong in the meal. I even liked his pineapple cottage cheese lime jello mold. This is no small thing, because it also contained horseradish.

Dad loved to watch White Christmas around the holidays. He adored Bing Crosby and he loved the story in the movie. It’s only recently that I begin to understand how much the story resonated with him — about an elderly, forgotten man wasting away in a pretty corner of the world, too proud to ask for help and largely unaware that anyone cared about him. And of course the music is delightful. Many years after Dad died, I finally got Anthony to sit down to the movie, and it turns out he loves it too. We try to watch it every year. I don’t know why that’s so dear and painful to me. I suppose I wish Anthony and I could have sat down with Dad to watch it together.

In fact, I just wish I could share another Christmas with my Dad, one where my kids are there. I missed so many Christmases with him through the years, for all sorts of lame reasons, mostly involving my self-absorption and pride. Every Christmas season, for each of the 12 years since he died, I’ve spent hours and hours grieving and weeping for those lost chances, those lost days I should have spent with him. I can barely type this for the wretchedness that’s pouring out of me on this Christmas Eve. It’s pathetic.

All I can do is make it up to him in this living world. So I’ve spent the better part of my free time for the last month getting ready for Christmas morning to happen for my kids, who weren’t born until after my father died. As I go through this process every year, I imagine that Dad’s Christmas spirit watches over my shoulder and guides my hand. He would have valued my kids’ insanity. He would have forgiven Jesse her challenging personality and behaviors, without reservation. He would have chuckled away at Nick’s loud silliness on Christmas mornings. He would have been proud of me for giving my kids a splendid, magical Christmas, even if they act like jackasses. But I wish he was really here, so that I wouldn’t have to just imagine it.

And now to bed. I have to wake up in about 5 hours, find my happy place, and deal with two kids experiencing maximum sensory overload. I can’t wait. If they’re crazy enough, I won’t miss my Dad as much.

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