Not that I don’t love being an academic librarian, and, importantly, academic librarians tend to 1) make more money, 2) have better health insurance, and 3) get more/better leave options than public librarians.

But, if money and job security weren’t as necessary as they currently are, I’d run away to help kids find stories (and non-fiction books!) that speak to them. And I read quite a lot of literature written for an audience that is much younger than I am, and I keep track of quite a lot of the literature being written. I usually feel, when I read these books, like a kid myself – I toss my brain into that world with a certain amount of abandon and become a teenager again, though a much smarter, more together teen than I actually ever was.

This isn’t because I don’t like being middle-aged. My thirties have so far been happy and fulfilling, with the great exception of Teddy’s death, which doesn’t feel to me as though it had much to do with my age, really. My teens and twenties were difficult because I was figuring out not just who I was, but who I wanted to be. I like knowing who I am. Even though I am a bit jealous of people who get to know who they are without wondering who they might have been if their kid hadn’t died. Even though some days I feel old and sad and creaky.

So, when I’m reading books written for adolescents I get the best of both worlds – a kind of youth in retrospect. My reading brain gets to be young, but grounded and toughened by experience. It has pithy comebacks and a cool, non-committal shoulder shrug. And, perhaps because I was the opposite of cool when I was, you know, actually a teenager, this is a lot of fun.

One of the most talked about YA novels to come out in the new year is The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green, about whom I’ve written before. I read it, even though I knew its protagonist was a girl with cancer and even though I knew that there would be death in the book. I read it, knowing that I wouldn’t have been able to read it in 2008, or 2009, or even 2010 when my grief was more raw.

There’s a lot to love about the book. The humor and courage and humanness of the main character, Hazel Grace, and her friend Augustus Waters, the insight into family relationships, the descriptions of Amsterdam, the reflections on love and the meaning of life in the face of the imminent dissolution of human accomplishment and memory. It’s funny and sad and thoughtful and memorable. If you are in a place where you can read a novel about kids with cancer, I recommend it. And it’s full of lines I love, like the following:

“Easy comfort isn’t comforting.”

And, “But I believe in true love, you know? I don’t believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.”

And at the end of reading it, the character I felt closest to, most wanted to talk with?

Hazel’s mom. Hazel’s mom, who has to live with the knowledge and uncertainty of her child’s diagnosis, who is strong because she has to be, who hovers and nudges, who isn’t named in the book because, while we get glimpses of who she might be outside of Hazel’s story, inside this story she is primarily (and staunchly, and fiercely) the mom.

One of my favorite things about reading is that you go into a story with your own set of experiences, thoughts, and beliefs, and when you emerge from that story, you are someone else. Books affect who you are, sometimes profoundly, and sometimes only in very small ways. And I don’t know if this is profound or not, but reading this book made me realize a truth about myself: I am the mom. I have been the mom since Teddy was born. It is sweet and bitter, and while I am many other things at the same time, I will be the mom until I die.

It feels strange, to pick up a book written primarily for young adult readers and discover your middle-aged, mom self in it. This may be the first book I’ve read where I’ve felt like a mom the whole time I was reading. It’s different, and a little strange – I kind of miss my young reading self with the pithy comebacks – but I think I know myself a little better now, and I like that.

Wikipedia has a very good overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more. They explain quite well how devastating it could be for web site owners to be legally responsible for policing content, for search engines to block blacklisted (or potentially blacklisted) sites from searches, of the ways that these pieces of legislation will damage the effectiveness and stability of the internet while making adding content to the internet scarier, less collaborative, and more difficult. For a more personal look at all of this, Shreve Stockton’s brief but poignant explanation of how SOPA would have affected her blog, writing, and life, is worth reading and can be found up over at The Daily Coyote.

For my part, well, I hate to think about what would have happened to me if I hadn’t been able to read blogs from around the world – the people and support that would have been lost to me. I wonder if glow in the woods would have been available to us under SOPA and PIPA. I wouldn’t have been able to write so freely about my boy. I wouldn’t have felt so supported. I wouldn’t have met all of you.

What to do? If you’re a U.S. citizen, call or email your representatives. Wikipedia makes this easy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CongressLookup. Calling is more effective, but if you have a longstanding fear of telephones like I do, know that emailing makes a difference, too.

And now for the best advice I have:

Like what you like.

The world is full of people telling us what we should like, what is beautiful, what is worthy, what is noteworthy. And in many respects, these messages are good things; they help us to situate ourselves in the world and they help us discover new and wonderful things. I notice this especially in the world of literature, where awards often lead to increased exposure and recognition for deserving authors and books.

Where this becomes problematic is where all of these messages about what is good, about what we should like, make us feel like there’s something wrong with us if we don’t like the Mann Booker prize winner, or don’t have the supermodel body, or don’t enjoy the beluga caviar. I used to make covers out of wrapping paper for the novels I loved to read on the bus. “Moby Dick,” I would write on the outside, and on the inside would be the latest Laurel K. Hamilton novel, full of vampires, were-things, and improbable sex. I loved those books even though I didn’t want to. I felt like I should be loving literary giants instead. It took me a long time to realize that loving genre fiction doesn’t mean I’m unintelligent or uninteresting.

After Teddy died, I no longer had the emotional energy to pretend. When my heart was full of aching void and each day seemed to drag on gray and dull and sad, books gave me some ease and comfort and relief. I read what I wanted and needed to read. I read to take me out of myself and to find new perspectives. I read to remember that laughter was possible. I’m much better at liking what I like now, especially when it comes to books. I will never consider this a silver lining, but it’s something I learned,  something I learned that doesn’t completely suck. And now I’ve re-discovered romance novels and unashamedly read them. I read fiction written for adolescents and enjoy it whole-heartedly. I read other things, too, but I will never again pretend that I only read great works of literature. I respect Saul Bellow and Faulkner, but I’ll never love them as I do Robin McKinley.

This holds true for more than just books. My mom bought me a pair of jeans and mailed them to me this month. They are well-made and comfy, but they are baggy at the thighs and have tapered legs, and after trying them on once, I was reminded of all the times I spent with Mom in dressing rooms, listening to her explain that I should find pants with pleats to flatter/camouflage my hips. I never liked pleated pants, or thought I looked good in them, but I tried to since she told me I should. It was years later when I realized that generally accepted fashion advice wasn’t in sync with the advice coming from my mother. The lesson here isn’t that I should have listened to Stacy and Clinton rather than Mom, it’s that I should have trusted what I liked. I’m sending these jeans back and getting some curvy fit, boot-cut ones instead, jeans I know I’ll wear comfortably, jeans I’ll really like.

It’s okay to like Cheetos and avoid caviar, or to like people, and places, and things that aren’t (or are!) in fashion. It’s okay to like yourself and respect the things that you like. The fact that you like something is a big hint that it has value, no matter what other people say; what you like is important, because you are important. It sounds easy even though it isn’t, but it’s worthwhile.

Like what you like.

You see, yesterday I finished a full draft of an article about some library survey data and what one of the trends means for academic libraries. It probably sounds boring as hell, something common to most academic writing unless your own work/research is related to said writing. It isn’t the article I dream of writing, the one that will have a major impact on library services and make me an instantly recognizable figure at fancy national conferences. But it’s a fully drafted article. I wrote it with a colleague and after we hear back from some other colleagues who’ve volunteered to give us some feedback, we’ll submit it to a journal.

The journal will publish it, because it’s already good. By the time we submit, it will be better.

I can write, you see.

It’s something I do often at work. I advise on system-wide emails, take others’ ideas and my own and create policy statements or guidelines, put together web pages so library users will (hopefully) have some online resources that are helpful and clear and readable. I translate tech speak to human speak. I like doing this, these forays into language, into this deeply important aspect of what it means to be human. I like that this is part of my work. I can conduct rigorous research and incorporate various theories, the brain children of others, into my own work and words. This little article, it is good. It may even be moderately important. I’m pleased with it.

And yet…

The article I really want to write, the one incorporating years of research, is the one I’ve been putting off and putting off. I stared at my notes. I took more notes. I did something else. I beat myself up about not writing it on a daily basis until my interesting article idea became a nightmare, a stone around my neck, and a clear indication of how badly I’ve been broken.

Because after my administrators sat me down in their offices and told me that they like me, like my work, but that I needed to write and publish or they wouldn’t be able to hold onto me, procrastinating that one thing I needed to do, especially since that one thing was something I’m generally interested in and good at – well, that’s something I can only explain by being broken. Every time I tried to piece together some writing that would, well, save my job and grant me some security, I came face to face with how much harder writing is for me after Teddy’s death. I saw the breaks and cracks and holes where my talents and ambition and fortitude used to be.

Writing this other article, this article that wasn’t as important to me as my own pet research project, this article that I wrote with someone else and therefore had small deadlines for which I needed to be accountable, it helped me fix part of myself.

I didn’t know I could do that. Last month, I was thinking along these lines – Hello, my name is Erica and my son died and now I am broken. Also, my family is broken. Also, the world. And now I suck at things I used to be good at.

Today, I am thinking like this – Hello, my name is Erica and my son died and now I am broken. Also my family is broken. Also the world. And now I need to work extra hard to do some of the things that used to come easy to me, and I hate that and may never stop resenting it, but I’m getting better at it, at fixing parts of myself, at bringing bits of myself back or making new bits of myself to fill in holes that need filling.

I’m writing that pet article. Right now, today. I grind the words out and they hurt, but they’re good words. I’ll have it drafted within 10 days, even with beginning-of-the-semester business.

It only took me three and a half years to get here.

By the time I’m 60, perhaps I’ll be fully functional. Maybe I’ll stop thinking of myself as broken. For now, though, it’s a huge relief to realize that I’m not broken beyond all usefulness or repair.

I want to know – where are your broken places, the things you used to be good at that were/are hard or impossible to do? Have you been able to fix any of these places or find ways around the brokenness? Do you think being broken will ever, well, suck less? Or do we just learn better to deal with it?

I want snow. I long for snow, yearn for snow, crave it like Rapunzel’s mother craved rapunzel. It is gray and brown and muddy, bare and drizzly here, and I want winter to come and blanket us in white, to hide the mud and muck and soggy leaves and turn the world into magic again.

We visited my parents in Montana for Christmas. A good time was had by all, but I discovered that while you can go home again, it’s much harder if you take a significant other and/or child. Dot had a stomach bug and N was worn out by end-of-term grading and driving over the mountains and spent a lot of time napping. My parents are early-riser, get-to-doing sorts, so I found myself braced to defend N’s napping even though I didn’t need to. It was good, but I was constantly thinking about N and Dot and trying to make them comfortable, so it was not the relaxing change of pace I’d envisioned; nor did I get any time for myself unless Dot was sleeping and because of the tummy bug she slept rather poorly. I took a shower on Christmas Day, and N brought Dot to see me in the shower, thereby shortening my shower rather effectively – I’m not sure that this is legal, but it probably shouldn’t be.

I am facing down the fact that, while Teddy would have only been three and not-quite-a-half right now, this is the fourth new year I’ve begun without him. I’m having difficulty making my peace with that bit of math – I don’t know why it so surprises me, but there it is. A new bit of puzzlement to add to a life complicated by grief, I guess. Like the fact that three years is a long time and yet no time at all, or that Dot is my second child, though she’s the first I’ve ever watched grow into a crazy-daisy chatterbox of a brave, adventurous, highly opinionated little person. Puzzles I’ll never sort out on the math and measurements front.

And don’t get me started on grammar – I have a son (except I don’t really have him) or, I had a son (which seems to relegate Teddy firmly to the past, and feels a bit like abandonment). Dot has a brother, or had a brother – though she wasn’t around when he was born, so neither, grammatically speaking, is correct. Dot would have had a brother if he had lived. If he had lived and we’d then decided to have had Dot. Too sad, too wistful, too reliant on too many factors I can’t wrap my head around. I reject you, you would have had; even if you are the most appropriate and truthful tense, I don’t like you much. I need better words and tenses, better tools for grappling with the uneven territory of grief.

N and I stayed up past midnight watching The Lady Eve (Oh, Barbara Stanwyck, how I adore you!) and sipping prosecco. As ways of welcoming a new year go, this one was pretty wonderful. I recommend it.

The trailer is decidedly dated and rather awful, but the movie transcends it.

Wishing a kind and generous 2012 to all of you.

I smell good.

And my legs are shaved.

Wishing you something like this – whatever your own 15 minutes in (decidedly earthly) heaven is – in this week in December.

Look away.

I put out fires at work. Soothe egos, attempt to soothe egos that are, frankly, beyond my soothing. I modulate my voice. I project calm. I make sure the printers are full of paper, the staplers are full of staples. I sit in on meetings with upper administration figures and try to maintain a sense of sanity in the face of what seem to me to be defensive and disruptive petty disputes. I sit in on meetings with upper administration figures and feel relieved when those previous disputes are banished from the forefront of the discussion. I help panicked students find their last-minute research sources and help them calm down in the face of finals week.

I keep my box of tissues in my office. I sneak in and out during the office party so no one knows how bad my cold is. I speak extra clearly to mask the snuffles and snot and sickness beneath my surface.

I plan a spot in my day to wrap presents, box them up and send them to Dot’s wee cousins. Of course I can do it all during my lunch hour. I have to.

I work on two articles at one time, work to meet the end of the year deadlines, to help secure my tenure. I talk about my research intelligently, calmly. I know my stuff.

And underneath all of this, I am rough, choppy, a swirling mess of conflicting tides.

I complain – Why do I have to do all the damned Christmas shopping? Why can’t I have a present that’s just for me instead of something for me that’s really for Dot? Why don’t I have my own fucking space in my own fucking house? Why can’t I breathe through my nose, and why doesn’t someone make me some chicken soup and send me to bed with a pile of novels and some 7-up and orange juice?

I panic – I’ll never get all of this done over my lunch break. Where’s the damned Scotch tape? Why didn’t I write more this summer? There’s so much to write and fact-check and mix together and I know what I want to say but how do I make other people see that it’s important and meaningful? What if they don’t think I’m smart? What if I’m not actually smart? God, this writing is all crap. I suck. How the hell are we going to get all of this done in time to make an eight-hour drive to my parent’s house? An eight-hour drive over the Rocky Mountains, no less.

I worry and grieve – I edit the paragraph about Teddy in my holiday letter down to one line. Don’t want to depress anyone. Well, don’t want to depress anyone more than I absolutely have to. I worry that N won’t like the mention of Teddy even if it’s only one line, but I can’t leave him out of our family, out of Christmas, out in the cold. If I weren’t so worried about other’s feelings, he’d get a whole paragraph, too.  And I may be very unfair to N here. He hasn’t seen the letter yet. He may like it. He may say, this is good, what you said about him. This is perfect.

I need a good romance novel. I need a stiff drink. I need my 18-year-old self’s metabolism back, and a hot bath, and at least three gallons of black coffee.

In spite of all this, I know the holidays will be okay. I’ll get done what needs to get done because that’s what I have to do, and next week I’ll be in my childhood home, letting my mother cook me dinner, and Dad will put a good glug of Bailey’s Irish Creme in my coffee, and I’ll feel my vertebrae slowly un-stiffen. Till then, though, I hide behind this mask of calm and wish for more time to get things done while paradoxically praying for less time to have to deal with this muddle.

It’s coming on Christmas
They’re cutting down trees
They’re putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
Oh I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

Okay. That’s out of my system. For now, anyway.

I have a cold. N has a cold. Dot has a cold that will probably turn into another ear infection within the week. I’m still reeling a bit from that conversation N & I had in the kitchen last week, and I’m also feeling insecure about my holiday letter and generally discontented with my lot, for a variety of reasons, most of them petty. I’m rather mad at myself about all this, too, which isn’t improving my mood.

I am the Grinch.

Books are usually the river I prefer to sail away on, as it turns out. And since I seem to be almost irredeemably cranky today, I’m going to attempt to overcome my own Grinchiness by talking about books. Here’s a selection of some favorite holiday-time reads, with annotations:*

Miracle and Other Christmas Stories, by Connie Willis: This is a book of short stories, written by someone who really loves Christmas stories. The stories all have some elements of humor to them, but there are romances, mystery, and stories that defy my descriptive abilities. Also the best holiday letter ever. And the word “miracle” is in the title and I don’t hate it, which is saying a lot these days. Willis includes her own list of reading and viewing suggestions at the end of the book, and they are good lists; she knows her stuff.

The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper: This is a book about an epic battle between good and evil, but it’s also a book about snow, Christmas carols, holly, a big family, and magic. The atmosphere of winter is conjured up brilliantly in this book – there menace is truly menacing and the warmth is truly heartening. One of the things that keeps me coming back to this one is the way Cooper weaves mythical and magical elements into an everyday world in ways that never seem overdone or new-age-y. I used to come home from college, check this one out from the library and read it by the fire with a cup of tea – it’s the perfect book for that. One warning – there’s a very tender and very brief mention of a baby who died a few days after he was born.

Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett: I’ve written about this one before. I love the way it explores belief and what it means to be human and what it means to be a family. Also, it’s just hilarious.

The Blue Castle, by L. M. Montgomery: A gentle romance about Valancy Sterling, long-suffering captive of her prominent family and their stuffy expectations, and what happens when she finds out she hasn’t long to live. A friend gave this to me one year for Christmas (I believe we were in Junior High) and I’ve loved reading it at this time of year ever since. A warning should go along with this one, too, though. One of the characters, Valancy’s friend, Cissy Gay, is dying and also mourning her baby. There are a few passages when Cissy speaks about her baby that still make me curl up in a corner and cry.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever: You’ve read this, or encountered some version of this already, right? Right? The Herdman family takes over the Christmas pageant. Meaningful chaos ensues. What’s best about this book, to me, is the way it talks about expectations and how, sometimes, the best thing that can happen is for them to be completely overturned.

Bellwether, by (again) Connie Willis: This isn’t fantasy or science fiction, in spite of what you may think when looking at the cover, but it is one of the funniest workplace novels ever to be written, with commentaries about fads, libraries, research, paperwork, an exasperating office assistant, and sheep sprinkled in along the way.  There’s a cold weather element, but really I  put this on my list today because it’s as reliable an antidote to my doldrums as any book I know.

*Links go either to the independent bookstore where I used to work or to a very large, freely accessible online catalog, OCLC WorldCat, but if you have the titles and authors, none of them should be especially elusive.

I suppose I shouldn’t regret that too much. It would have been some action flick that a student of his gave him – interesting and entertaining, but nothing I’d really wanted to watch.

Dot went to bed early, very early – before 8:00, which happens maybe once every three months. Dot went to bed early and we were going to touch base at 9:00 and watch a movie, and sit on the futon together, and hold hands, and maybe make popcorn. I do regret the loss of the handholding and popcorn.

But, as we were talking in the kitchen about what we’d do this weekend, I brought up the thing I’ve been dreading and needing to bring up, the question of when and how we talk to Dot about her brother. I want to do it now. I want to do it last year. I want his name to be part of the fabric of her life. He is her brother, too. She has some claims to him and to his story. She has claims to our honesty and openness.

N looked at me as though I were some alien creature, and I started to realize how very differently we feel about this, about Teddy. He thinks that telling her she had a brother would be traumatic and scar her for life, that she’s too young to have to know about death and loss. It’s clear, from his tone of voice and the way he looks at me, that he thinks I am an unstable person who will damage my child’s psychological development to serve my own needs to remember.

“When did you envision telling her?” I ask. “When she’s ten? When she’s twenty?” He thinks I’m mocking him, and certainly I could have put that more gently, but I want to know.

“I hadn’t envisioned it,” he says.

It’s clear, as I look at him, that he is an emotionally stunted person who will damage his child’s psychological development to serve his own needs to forget.

I can’t marshal the points of my case – that children have the ability to ask for and process the information they need, and while it may not be easy, it isn’t necessarily scarring; that it is important with me that we be honest with her and that hiding this part of who we are may make her fear death more, trust us less; that his birth and death have shaped us and that she’ll pick up on this even if we don’t tell her and maybe feel like she’s missing a piece of the puzzle; that he’s her brother, too.

I do tell him that I remember Teddy every day, think of him every day.

Later, after I quiet a restless Dot and N emerges from his basement office, he looks at me, shakes his head, and says “You think about Teddy every day?” as though it’s some terrible thing. As though I’m doing this wrong.

I see the chasm opening up between us, right there at my feet. It’s been there all along, even though I’ve only just now seen it, and the shock of it nearly knocks me to my knees. I catch the words, “You don’t?” before they leave my mouth and instead I tell him we don’t have to talk about it any more that night. I apologize for darkening the evening. I take out my contact lenses, curl myself around the sleeping baby in my bed and try to remember when it was, precisely, that we stopped talking to each other about anything real.

I won’t talk to Dot about Teddy behind her father’s back. I can’t do that to him. I feel like I have a choice of betrayals ahead of me – betray N’s trust and need to forget, to not dwell on hard memories, or to betray Dot’s need for honesty and trust, her right to know about her brother. Her right to not be traumatized by a “serious discussion” that comes out of the blue when she’s fifteen, or 25, or whenever N is ready.

I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if this is something we can bridge. I never expected that the person I’d be most reluctant to talk with about my son would be his father. I’m pretty angry about that, really. And, today, I hate N a little. In those few moments he looked at me and at what I thought was a reasonably healthy grieving process and I think what he saw was depression, abnormality, weakness.

He’d probably be horrified to know that I’ve seen myself as the strong one for a long time, now.

We need to talk more. I dread it, but we do. I need to see if he really does want to forget. I need to see if I can explain to him that when I remember it isn’t all bad, that, for me, there is beauty and love in those memories, too. That I will always think about and miss my boy, and that this isn’t a bad way to react to the loss of someone so dear.

I dream of Christmas cookies I’ll never find time to bake, and make a short list of the ones I have to bake: peanut butter cookies with chocolate kisses (N’s favorite), chocolate crinkles (my brother’s favorite), thumbprint cookies with walnuts (my favorite).

I play music and sing carols. Dot now has the first verse of “Away in a Manger” down by heart (Mom taught it to her months ago, and now she keeps asking to sing the “Lowing” song). But I often turn to” The First Noel,” or “Little Town of Bethlehem,” or “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” as a lullaby. You’d think “Silent Night” would be the obvious candidate, but 1) I’m still recovering from seeing that damned holiday diaper commercial the first Christmas after Teddy died, and 2) Dot doesn’t seem to like the way I sing it, and often requests that I stop by waving her arm at me and saying, “No. NO!”

Dot has a Fisher Price nativity set. I had no idea such things existed, but my parents found one for us. I have mixed feelings about it. I do not approach the Christmas story with the pure (if largely untested) faith of my youth, and I do not want to approach it with disrespect. I do want Dot exposed to it, but I’m not sure what to tell her about it all yet. It helps that she’s not yet two years old and that she is mainly interested in kissing owies on the faces of Joseph, Jesus and “Murry.” Murry also seems to go on a lot of long walks with the sheep, leaving Joseph and Jesus to fend for themselves. I try to tell myself that this isn’t a reflection of anything worrying. And, by all accounts, Murry has a lot on her mind. Maybe long walks are just what she needs.

……..

It’s a beautiful time of year in so many ways. One of those ways is the way that missing Teddy rises to the surface. Not like August, which is still just a month I want to get through. I think of Teddy when looking at the tree, when wishing for snow, when writing cards, when considering what to bake, when talking to family on the phone. He’s on the tip of my tongue, the tips of my fingers, the top of my mind. I call to him constantly, little boy, little Huckleberry, how I love you, love you still, love you always. I wish you could see this – can you see it? I wish I could save some of this holiday warmth for you – I hope you have your own.

It’s not all beautiful, of course. There are tears and stress and yelling. Sadness because no one mentions him in their holiday letters any more, because people are afraid to talk about him, and because sometimes I’m one of those people, afraid to talk. Because I still think that mentioning my dead baby boy shouldn’t stop the party, and it almost always does. But for the most part, I feel closer to Teddy in December somehow.

……..

Grief Girl nearly charged howling into a Face.book thread on angels started by a friend of hers who is a pastor. Fortunately, maybe, Grief Girl’s alias was able to channel her energies into another venue (my toilets are really, really clean!). My problems with angels, or the stories of angels that you tend to hear on Fac.ebook, are much the same as miracles, and boil down into three main points, two of stabby, stabby rage (as per usual) and one that’s more philosophical:

1) If angels flit around saving lives, well, where was Teddy’s fucking angel? Where? ‘Cause if that fucker was on a coffee break, then I need to talk to his/her/its supervisor. You know, when I’m on speaking terms with the Supervisor again.

2) I can’t think of a good reason for angels to flit around and save some people, children, babies, disaster victims, and not others. And if you buy into free will as the source of all evil in the world (argh, grumble, grumble, argh) then why would you believe that some people aren’t subject to it after all? And there seems to be an element of at least potential self-righteousness (there was a plan for this person/my baby, or this was a reward for his/her faith and good works) in all of this that makes me want to pull hair and kick things.

3) I don’t really believe angels flit around saving people. Usually, from biblical accounts, they tend to do the opposite and get people into massive heaps of trouble. Job probably would have been happier if angels had stayed well away from him. And the Virgin Mary was a very good sport about it all, but how would you like to have to explain to your husband-to-be that you were pregnant by God? Before angels moved into popular culture, angelic intervention seems to have been reserved for people of phenomenal strength, courage, and purpose – people who come along rarely, and a good thing, too, if angels tend to leave paths of chaos, destruction, and disruption in their wakes. I’m not sure I’d cross the street to shake hands with an angel if the opportunity presented itself. Assuming it had hands to shake.

I know enough to know that many people do take great comfort in stories of angels, in the idea of angels, and I don’t want to belittle them for that, or diminish that comfort. But I prefer my angels at a safe distance, singing in the skies over Bethlehem in my favorite carols, or as sombre statues on tombstones in historic cemeteries, or making strange truces with demons in my favorite novels.

Grief Girl makes more appearances this time of year. I should probably mend her cape and get her a fresh box of tissues. And maybe one of those little reindeer antler headbands to wear to parties.

……….

I had a really great conversation with my brother last night. He’s a typical man of my people, and typically not very talkative, so a good long talk is something to be cherished. We talked about work and medical billing procedures and family and the upcoming holidays, about cooking and decorating. And, for the first time, we talked openly about the struggle he and my lovely sister-in-law are having with starting a family. My heart aches for them, aches that the same diaper commercial that stabbed me in the heart years ago will probably be replayed and stab them as well.

I think, like me, they had thought it would be easy. Entry into parenthood is such a perilous thing. I wish, for them, it could be easy. And safe, and certain.

I wish so much for them to be able to be parents that my wishes start to feel like prayers.

Perhaps because the smell of the oncoming Christmas holiday is in the air (and to me, this year, it smells sweet, but I realize to many it’s something to dread), I wanted to share this video, which I think is brilliant. It’s a video essay on family, about how we talk about family, and about holiday cards. It’s smart, wry, and quietly powerful, and it will definitely be helping to shape my thoughts and words as I put together my own holiday cards this year.

One of the things that causes this video essay to resonate so deeply with me is the fact that it is created by someone I know and am lucky enough, occasionally, to work with. I work with her husband quite regularly. I didn’t know about this aspect of their lives until I stumbled on this essay. That shouldn’t be surprising, that I didn’t know. It’s not really the sort of thing you sit around discussing at the water cooler or throw into the small talk that takes place at the beginning of meetings. In spite of all that, I’m surprised.

Another instance of how many hidden griefs are out there, of all the things we don’t know about others and of all the reasons we have to be gentle with each other. Another reason to think more deeply and inclusively about what we mean by family.