Since I wrote last, I tried my best to keep my Blueberry Christmas vow. I let my grandson trim the tree with me and didn’t move the ornaments he placed. Not even secretly after he was in bed. Huge advancement in fighting my OCD perfectionism. I started Christmas shopping the week before Christmas and with the help of my best friend Amazon, everyone had a present wrapped and under the tree by the 23rd. A land speed record for me.
I had my annual Christmas Eve gathering and didn’t panic when it started at five and all the food was not on the table and extra hands in the kitchen had not arrived. Overall, I hung in there, foot in cast and all, and we had a great holiday.
But in the midst of the holiday festivities, I had a nagging, uncomfortable aching behind my smiles and laughter. It started when my mother told me a childhood friend’s twenty-five-year-old son had been killed in a motorcycle accident in LA, the day before Thanksgiving. The vision of their perfect child sliding under a city bus replayed in my mind, especially late at night. With my son’s battle with cancer, the reality of someone experiencing what I fear most pushes my worst nightmare to the forefront of my mind rather than staying neatly tucked in the back behind my obsession with death by tornado where I like to keep it hidden.
The news of the December 14 shooting in Connecticut was the icing on my sad sack cake. Watching the press coverage of all those faces of anguish and horror and shock sent me back to, May 20, 1988, when a babysitter named Laurie Dann entered my daughter’s second grade classroom and shot five children, leaving one dead. For one of the longest hours in my life, I didn’t know if my little girl was dead or alive. Her school shooting, too, was a Friday. Her school was also entered around 9:30 AM. I couldn’t look at those innocent faces. The parents’ twisted expressions of unthinkable grief. I am haunted by their unopened presents under the tree and the hopes they had for their babies. A town forever changed. Lives that will have a gaping hole in every family portrait. Every uncelebrated birthday.
Yearning for a quiet place to take a deep breath, sit with a cup of morning tea, I found I had no place to do it. I stopped seeing my house as a happy, joy-filled place full of giggles and wonder. Instead it felt like a wild, jumbled jungle of two-year-old toys, two-year-old pitter patter, two-year-old constant chatter, six-month-old smiles and spit up and “cry it out” at bedtime. Booster seats and potty seats left me looking for my seat.