Sleeping Arrangements
Sleeping Arrangements
Sleeping Arrangements
Sneaking out from under the comforter, I pull myself away from his sweet, no longer little, ever-lengthening body to write these words that have swirled in my head since 5 am. In truth, these thoughts have occupied my mind since his dad told me he would be taking the kids, our kids, my kids to his fiance’s family’s home in a city and state that is foreign to my own experience and my children’s.
And so it will be. My children will spend Christmas with complete strangers, who will fawn over them like puppies making them into the grandparents they were afraid they would never become.
And while my children fly Eastward into the cold and dark winter of the Midwest, I am orphaned by a dysfunction that no whole, healed human can overcome. Recalling the days after our mother’s death, my sister and I slept with our father in our parent’s queen size bed. Our shared loss keeping us close.
One night I chose to go upstairs and sleep in my own bed, no longer feeling the need to spend my nights cuddling with my dad and sister. Regardless of where we slept, our reverence for one another could never be breached.
Or so I thought.
Having inherited the mantel of matriarch my grandmother passed to me just over 1 year ago, I had no choice but to walk out of the collapsing building her two sons set aflame as they stay within to ensure the other cannot leave.
And it is at times like these that I’m glad I’m a Jew. I have the ultimate hall pass to graciously excuse myself from congested airports and stuffy, overly polite dinners. I can choose to be amongst the dim sum throng, enjoy a cozy day of nesting free from expectation or graciously accept the orphan invite, bottle of wine under the arm.
New to this country and eager to assimilate to the commercialization of The Holiday Season, my parent’s purchased a Christmas tree shortly after my 3rd birthday and set about to put together a holiday decor that not even their broken English could betray.
That Christmas, when I was sick in bed and restless with a winter cold, I knocked the nightstand tipping the contents of a vaporizer of boiling water onto my little toddler body. My mother ran into the room to my screams of pain, quickly assessing the accident, wanting to hug me, hold me, but grabbed me by the upper arms so as not to further injure and inflict more pain and harm. I would spend all the days of the next few months in a hospital in traction, preparing for skin grafts to address my 3rd degree burns.
That was the first and last time we had a Christmas tree in our Jewish home.
With marriage comes the promise of new traditions. The possibilities are nearly as exciting as the feeling of young love. But as partners, we could not partner to make the holidays our own. We inherited a deficit of personal experience to craft the moments that would make memories we yearned to recreate year after year.
Before our kids were born I hosted a few Passover seders because I make a mean matzoh ball soup.
The soup was such a favorite that I prepared it regularly, the only occasion being the need for comfort on a cold night. One such evening after a busy day the kids were hungry, impatient for dinner. I had dropped the matzoh ball dough into the boiling chicken stock and blanketed the open pot with parsley when the kids demanded they eat right away. I pulled our ceramic soup bowls down from the cabinet, filled the first bowl and noted that I was unable to pick it up, the heat of the soup radiating out to the boundaries of its vessel.
Using oven mitts I moved 2 of the bowls to the center of the kitchen table, so they could cool before placing before each child. Our baby, only 3 years old himself, stood on a kitchen chair, splaying his body flat across the table’s surface, reaching for a bowl of soup, tipping it, the searing liquid flowing to his body before he could react to remove himself from the hurt that flowed towards him.
His dad assessed the situation without pause, quickly sweeping up our boy, removing his shirt and carrying him to the kitchen sink, where he ran cold water over his red blistering body. His quick actions saved our son’s skin.
And I knew then, why I loved him. This reserve of talent for trauma, that he rehearsed in his mind day in and out. But it was counter to the freeness I sought of a life in which I yearned to dance lightly.
Although I choose not to observe Christmas, there is something unwholly about my babes celebrating Christmas with complete strangers. As my own family collapses, falls away, there is another with established customs and conventions stepping in to be anointed.
The phone rings and I respond with textbook Pavlovian precision to find my exhusband is calling. I hesitate to answer. What headache will he propose to me today? His fiance is a school teacher, whose credentials he seems to have absorbed. I try to imagine how she has imparted all her knowledge to him, as though they now share a brain or perhaps it’s like a contact high. Regardless he takes ownership of her experience to talk to me as though it is his own and begins: “From a teacher’s perspective…”
As he speaks I become a student sitting at the desk between Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty listening to “wah wah waah wah wah waaah wah wah.”
I snap out of it when he asks me if our son sleeps in my bed. “He should sleep on his own” and he prattles on about proper sleeping arrangements.
And while there is no shortage of things to worry about, I am secure in trusting that our son will know when he’s ready to sleep in his own bed.