My daughter and I made an advent wreath, decked out with branches and pine cones. Our wreath looks pretty and peaceful and apparently delicious, because our cat is now eating it and throwing up pine needles all over the house. Which means our hand-crafted best is now increasingly found in half-masticated clumps of kitty kibble. If that’s not a perfect metaphor for 2020, I don’t know what is. 

It’s only a little bit of an exaggeration to say this year has upended all our expectations for everything. Of course I never expected the cat to ingest my hand-made Christmas decor. Touché, 2020! I never expected to lose my job or obsess over whether to send my daughter to hybrid first grade either!

Now here we are at the most tradition-bound part of the year. We can’t visit. We can’t have parties. We can’t carol (except maybe from the street and standing 6 feet apart??) One of the things we can do, thankfully, is give gifts. And knowing this full well, I am strangely unable to click to “Add to Cart” button. Here is my total holiday shopping thus far:

You may notice these gifts are all targeted toward a particular kind of person – say, an elementary age child who is obsessed with extinct animals. You would be spot-on, and I think we can all agree that despite my other gift-procuring challenges my daughter is set for a bountiful morning under the tree. 

What about my wonderful in-laws? What about our extended family? What about the teacher gifts and the neighborhood sanitation crew fund and the political contributions, which don’t seem terribly Christmasy but are a thing since my state is in a holiday-season double runoff that will decide the direction of the country and kind of the world for the next two years? What about my husband, for God’s sake? Like Casey at the bat, I am striking out all around.

(Notice I did not say “What about my parents and my side of the family?” because we have a marvelous tradition of giving each other gifts randomly or not at all. Most of our efforts go into physically being together. Which is obviously a wash this holiday season, but it does give me one less gift-giving expectation to fail at.)

And yet. As a mom friend and I were recovering from a sticky parenting moment the other day, she told me how much she appreciated my husband and me for our ability to stay calm and reasonable in dicey situations. That’s not because we get up every day and meditate on an intention to bring calm and reason to our little corner to the world. It’s more like we have been through so much ridiculous and difficult bullshit, it’s got to be some really ridiculous and difficult bullshit to rock us. 

I was not this person eight years ago. Eight years ago I was saying hello to my thirties with a newly minted grad degree, ready to buy a house and have a baby with my husband and reveling in a job that I loved. Happiness was spilling out of me and onto the kittens we fostered. That dreamy little era got cut short the day I came home and my husband told me he was going to lose his job. 

The happy-dreamy days gave way to a snowball of stress and anxiety. A year and half later, in a new city with a new job and a brand-new baby, I broke under the weight of it all and got sent on what we refer to as Mommy’s Vacation. My doctor ordered me to check in at a retreat for some much-needed put-me-back together time. The retreat featured group cognitive behavioral therapy, restrictions on whereabouts and belongings, and staff who shone a flashlight on you in the middle of the night to make sure you were alive, and that’s because this retreat was a psychiatric hospital.

People are taken aback when I tell them I’ve been to a psych hospital. The usual reaction pattern is something like surprise to concern to curiosity. We’ll talk more about it later, I promise. But for now, just know that:

1. It’s not like Clockwork Orange.
2. Or Girl, Interrupted.
3. You almost definitely know other people who have been. I’m not unusual because I went. I’m unusual because I’m telling you.
4. I am grateful that I went.

Very grateful. For years leading up to Mommy’s Vacation, I’d been holding my feelings together with duct tape and getting away with it. My lows were flattening. My anxiety was palpable. My drive for universal perfection was absolutely ridiculous. And all this time, I was a fully functioning, sometimes happy, sometimes utterly hurting human being. 

After my brain had the spun-out crash that led to hospitalization, l woke up in the rubble and faced the reality I’d been dodging for years. The core of that reality being, I had to stop chasing the ever-changing aspirational mirage of what I thought I needed to be.

Out in the world now, I am kinder, and slower to judge. I’m calmer now, a tugboat where once I was a kayak on the ocean. I understand that sometimes life absolutely falls apart, and that it can be put back together, guided by the hands of people that care for you, with the cracks sealed up by their love and your own resiliency.

The moral here is not that I should be exempt from gift-giving. I don’t think there is a moral, since this is neither Aesop nor the Bible. Just a story, and a thought, that in this time and season when there is so much emphasis on gifting things, not to ignore our gifts of passage. Not to ignore the gifts like helping each other through. 

Photo credits: cat stalking wreath and extinct animal gear by me. Umpire by Keith Johnston, face by Sarah Richter and tree by Gerd Altmann, all for Pixabay