Last weekened T. and I, accompanied by two neighborhood friends, went to a performance of The Sound of Music, put on by a local college. I had taken T. to one play before--Peter Pan. She was young then, about four years old, and while she still remembers the play, it's one thing to see a play at four, and quite another to see it when you are eight, and you love musicals, and you wake up each morning belting out songs from Annie, or The Sound of Music, and your new favorite book is Theater Shoes, by Noel Streatfeild.

I hadn't been to a theatrical production in ages. I might have been as excited as T., and when the lights went dark, and the curtain rustled a little in that magical hold-your-breath moment before it was raised, I had to give T.'s arm a little excited squeeze.

There were good parts, and not-so-good parts. One of the actors had clearly strained his voice over the previous days of performing (we were at the last show), and Maria seemed tired and too-serious ("Mama," T. whispered to me right before the intermission, "Maria is supposed to be happy"). But I don't think T. minded at all and, in the end, I didn't mind one bit, either.

After we dropped our friends off at their house, I pulled away, and looked in the rearview mirror just in time to see T.'s face dissolve into tears.

"What's wrong?" I asked in alarm.

She was so sad that it was over--that performance she'd been waiting for so long, that she'd scored the days leading up to it off on her wall calendar. It was done, the magic faded, and in its wake just a rainy, ordinary Sunday evening.

This one was always a favorite of mine, even if I'd forgotten I'd written it, actually, until just the other day!

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A blogger friend of mine wrote the other day about a recent study out there claiming that parenthood does not, in fact, bring joy and fulfillment,  that children are a source of misery and stress, and that raising them is a "lifelong challenge to your mental health." Where the data for this study came from is anyone's guess, actually, but I thought a lot about it yesterday--and about my blogger friend's counterpost as I sat during morning remarks at the faculty "development" workshops I attended. (I developed many thoughts during these workshops, so it was all good--mission accomplished.) I tend to think about my kids a lot when I'm at these workshops, because they're held three times/year in the same room in the same building. The first one I ever attended was when T. was a small baby, and every two hours I excused myself to go into the over-air-conditioned restroom to pump milk. I'd sit on the toilet seat with the pump attached to me and listen thoughtfully to the whirr-whirr and wonder what on earth I was doing there, perched on a toilet lid, pumping milk in a cramped stall.

Some of my most treasured posts have been the ones I wrote about my Greek grandparents, and my childhood summer days spent in Greece. I am compliing them together, and hoping to do something with them one day. Writing about my grandparents--especially my grandmother--brings me close to them again. I think I can smell my grandmother's kitchen, see her smile, bask in how good it felt to nestle into her embrace. My grandmother's body was a coming home place to me; one hug from her bridged the gap made from a year away, and all those days were swept up into one, as if no time at all had passed from one summer to the next. 

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One Saturday morning a couple of years ago, a spectacular day by all counts: cool like a March day, but with warming sunshine--summer sun, not early spring sun--I sat on the back porch with my dad and watched the kids painting. My dad brought out a few blank “canvases” for them (pieces of flat boards you can buy from Home Depot—they’re really meant to put under vinyl flooring, but my dad buys them, cuts them to canvas size, and they are perfect for painting on) and the kids were creating abstract art masterpieces. I watched L. dab on stripes of green, blue and orange paint. He gave T. an impromptu lesson on abstract art painting as he worked and she got right down to the business of creating a painting of fireworks, with one T.-turned-grown-up-woman standing in the middle of it all.

Then she changed it. It wasn’t fireworks, but a hectic and spectacular scene of her own life—projected somewhere into the future again: a life of colors, and splashes of light, and lots of sun, of course.

“And there’s me,” she said, “standing in the middle.”

“Don’t take offense, T.” L. chimed in (he used to blurt out quite bluntly just what he thought of someone’s work and we have, through lots of coaching, taught him to preface his remarks—if he must make them—with “don’t take offense but…”)

“Don’t take offense T., but I don’t see that in your picture at all.”

“That’s what makes it abstract,” I pointed out.

When the kids tumbled out of the van and into my parents' house, with the usual chaos and excitement and pent-up energy after 6 + hours in the van (I think this was the first roadtrip in many that passed so peacefully--no bickering, no meltdowns from L.!), they converged around the Christmas tree, as they do every year, soaking up the look of it, and lifting the lids of cookie and candy tins, just as they do every year. I love watching my kids rediscover all the things they savor about Christmas at my parents' house--this is the best part of the trip for me. L. especially appreciates the now-routine rhythms of the holiday around here--the predictability of what he will find. He gets his own room at my parents' house and it's an added bonus that the same room houses my mom's iMac computer, and plenty of space to spread out his visual dictionaries. 

Only one full weekend left until Christmas!  I'm trying to make good my promise to myself to make each minute of pre-Christmas preparations, baking, and excitement count for all they are worth. It's been difficult, though. We are still working through the sadness of Scott's grandmother's passing, and her absence this year at our family Christmas gathering next weekend, and I spent Sunday morning in urgent care with T., who had an allergic reaction to the antibiotic she was taking to clear up her sinus infection. As you might know (but I hope not), allergic reactions are not fun, and poor T. has been miserable.

To cheer her up, we bought a gingerbread house-making kit. I had fleeting fantasies a few weeks ago of constructing a house from scratch, homemade gingerbread and all, but that fantasy quickly vanished in the wake of Willa-dog's surgery, final exam grading, and my bronchitis. It's hard to feel like baking when you can't see straight for coughing.

We have not made one since 2008, when I became overly frazzled trying to assemble one. But this one came together without too many problems, and the kit we bought from Target came with a large bag of sticky icing for a change--enough to patch one of the walls when it fell and cracked in two. I couldn't believe it when the walls and roof pieces actually stayed upright and held together.

It will be December by the end of this week. Can you believe that? Last night, after I finished reading another chapter of this book to T., she asked if we could count the days until Christmas. "Don't you wish it was Christmas now?" she asked, wriggling under her blanket with excitement at the thought of it.

But I don't, actually. Every year December flies by in an absolute rush of grading, work-related end-of-semester deadlines, frenzied list-making, shopping, and baking. Last year I was so overwhelmed that I didn't even bake some of our favorite cookies, and the holiday cards didn't go out in time. Then, every year like clockwork, I exhale and blink and we're loading up the van to head to Maryland, and closing the door on our tree, and Christmas village, and stockings. Then I blink again and it's Christmas Eve and I'm lying awake in bed, in my old childhood room, imagining I hear the clatter of reindeer hooves on the roof above, just as I did years and years ago.

When we took out the Christmas stockings from their bin on Saturday T. pulled hers out with glee and clutched it to her chest. Her eyes were shining with transparent joy. "I haven't seen you ALL year," she told her stocking. She skipped into the family room to hang it and was absolutely, positively thrilled to discover that for the first time ever she could stand on the hearth on tiptoes and hang her own stocking. Without any help at all from me at all.

The December I was pregnant with T., L. and I headed off together to the store to look at Christmas villages. I don't know where I got the idea that I wanted a Christmas village. We never had one growing up, but I must have seen one, somewhere. I have always liked to look at houses lit from within, and sneak a look, voyeuristically, at other people's worlds. I loved my dollhouse growing up, and my sister and I would peek through the windows when the lights were on and imagine the scene unfolding in the kitchen, or the living room.

That year I was also hungry to create a new tradition--one particular just to my little family. That Christmas was the only Christmas we ever spent in our own home, since I was so far along in my pregnancy and my doctor advised me not to travel for the holidays. I had mixed feelings: I was happy that we'd have the chance to wake up in our own house on Christmas morning; that I could bake cinnamon rolls for us, and play Gene Autry Christmas music, and that L. could tear through his presents as quickly as he liked, without having to wait his turn around the Christmas tree. But I was also highly emotional, and Christmas had a flatter feel to it that year. I missed the noise and chaos of Christmas morning at my parents' house, and while I clung to every memory-in-creation that last Christmas before T. was born, they were, each one of them, bordered with a special kind of sadness. 

So I took L. shopping. We came home with three Christmas village buildings at once, and a small assortment of villagers to fill out the scene.

L. is having trouble getting to sleep again. When he was eight, he used to drag his sleeping bag to the landing and sleep there, at the top of the stairs. He hasn't done that in a couple of years, though--until a few weeks ago. Now he's back at it, bedded down on the hallway runner, his head on a pillow. When I come to bed I prod him up to his feet and help him, my hands under his armpits, into his room and up the ladder to his loft bed. We're not sure what's causing his nighttime anxiety now--what he might of seen, or thought about--a bad dream, or a scary image, or some dark, imponderable thought.  Are these school worries, surfacing when the lights go out? I worry. I've see traces of his anxiety surfacing now and again, like fine cracks. I smooth them out with my words; I wish for some giant magic eraser to rub them away once and for all. 

Those stubborn, relentless cracks.

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And speaking of dark fears...In honor of Halloween, I'm posting here one of the kids' favorite spooky tales: I told it to them again yesterday, of course, because it was the night before Halloween.

Yesterday at bedtime, T. launched into a long story about something and I was only half-listening, I admit. My brain was sorting out some other things, and lying there in the semi-dark of her room was the perfect chance for all those other things to come tumbling down into the forefront of my tired brain. But my ears pricked up when I heard her say something about a door, and finding herself somewhere else.

"What? What door?"

"The door in my Spanish class," she said. "It opened somewhere else."

A surreal picture flashed in my mind. It was like a Magritte painting--a single door opening up in an ordinary classroom wall to some other place; maybe a rectangle of blue sky beyond, or a green meadow, or--who knew?--Narnia perhaps? But before I could let my imagination run away too far with this image, T. went on to describe how the door had opened up to a hallway under the school building, instead of at the front, the way they had gone in. I still don't quite understand the logistics of it, but she worked it out for herself with no help from me, and we moved on to another topic.

Something about her story jarred my memory and took me back all the way to when L. was three years old, and had just started preschool at an established church-affiliated preschool not too far from our house. There is much about that day I remember: the sight of him kneeling on the carpet next to the teacher, stacking colored blocks; the wobbly feeling in my legs as I walked away and left him there, for the first time ever; how I sat in the van under the shadow of the tall chapel steeple and cried, and felt my separation from him as keenly as I would have if he'd been ripped from inside of me. When I picked him up that afternoon I was so eager to hear about his morning, but he didn't want to talk at all.

Then, just as we had almost reached our house, he said: