Understudy

She’s had me up and out the door before sunrise for the past four mornings, barely able, despite my insistent imploring, to suppress her growls of excitement as I get dressed in the sleeping house. The blast of cold air out the door threatens to take my breath away and the first few steps up the incline get my heart beating. I’m moving briskly in hopes of warming from the inside out.  When I realize she’s lagging and I don’t hear the tinkle of her tag on collar, I turn around, catching the view down the sweeping hill of the street, our bright orange port-a-potty a beacon in the early morning light. It’s a Christmas card moment, not really.

   

Our home this year is not what anyone would call a Hallmark image. We’re surrounded by the mud we pulled out of Mother Earth to carve a new foundation.  We’re locked solidly behind the confines of an unwieldy construction fence, lovingly referred to as our gated community. I did consider a wreath for the port-a-potty, planted right next to the dumpster on what’s left of the front lawn. Our highlight reel is slim because the messiness of real life is leaking out everywhere.

Transformation is painful; there is very little shiny and sparkly we can hide behind. Up until two days ago the house was devoid of anything resembling Christmas.  We couldn’t even dig up an ugly sweater from the depths of our overstuffed closets.  This is the second consecutive December my carefully curated collection of ornaments and adornments remain incarcerated in a storage pod. Now I’m wondering if I will ever need them again?

I’m grieving the old ways while at the same time taking steps to move forward.  The line between tradition and nostalgia can be a fine one. Somehow exchanging gifts in my son’s home, watching my grown children unwrap slippers and socks moved from easy laughter to awkward theatrics in the span of a year, my cheek stinging from the slap of reality:  These aren’t the gifts the mom gives anymore. And, I’m really not the mom anymore; I’m the grandma.  I don’t know how to do grandma.

It hurts to bring the fixings for ice cream sandwiches with the boys’ favorite homemade chocolate cookies and leave the gathering without enjoying them, but it’s not my kitchen and I am a polite guest now, not the host. Even if I were the host, the family home the boys knew and loved is now inhabited by the strangers I sold it to and any place I choose to live going forward will never be the hearth for them.

We are, very publicly and literally, creating a new home for ourselves with this construction project; and the ah-ha moment for me over this holiday is that my boys are doing the same, just more subtly.  How the holidays get celebrated isn’t up to me anymore.  And I will make more than one blunder, disappointing myself in the process, before I come to terms with the new normal.

I realize this is all goodness. I am very blessed to have grown children who are bold enough to live life on their own terms, moving out of state, having a baby. These are proud moments, and at the same time crushingly humbling.  The choices they are making for their own lives inevitably put me in new roles I didn’t ask for and am potentially unprepared to take on. But I guess I need to jump in, too.  The only alternative is unmet expectations and perpetual disappointment, and I won’t have that. 

  

We walk in the door to my son’s home Christmas Eve, and she is so excited to see us she can hardly contain herself, the morning walks of the previous few days fresh in her mind.  She jumps up on the loveseat, wedging herself between us, reveling in the displaced love I compulsively shower upon her to excess, while at the same time she shoots the evil eye to her parents and the newborn babe on the couch across from us. She’s struggling with the change, too.

This is part of my new role, to be ready to step in at any moment I’m needed, to make sure the tried and true, those who have come before feel as loved and attended to as the shiny and new. And I'm more than qualified. Motherhood is the training ground for every grandma, in more ways than I could ever have imagined.

Olana

Oh, girl, you are so wanted. She is coming to us in the autumn of our lives, later than we had hoped for, but maybe earlier than we could ever be ready for.  She’s been the twinkle in our eyes for a few years, an unspoken dream we’ve been afraid to pursue. I’ve carefully and quietly turned over her features in my mind, falling hopelessly in love with her imperfect beauty. As I allow this genie to slip out of the bottle inside my head and onto paper, I’ve surprised myself with how cleaved I am to the vision I’ve created, so quick to roar my objections in heated debate when he shares his equally earnest passion. His vision of her size, her shape, her prominent and delicate features doesn’t always match mine.

She is our house, and she’s proving to be as difficult to birth as a child, with the gestation period of an elephant and a due date we can’t quite pinpoint. Fraught with tangled, contradictory emotions and physical challenges, she is a huge leap of faith for us, a cliff we’re jumping off with hands clasped tightly together, a journey on an untraveled path full of unexpected events we can’t plan for, unforeseen conditions we don’t know how to allow for. This new alliance is transforming our lives:  On our worst days we can be awkward and hurtful to each other, on our best days we celebrate our violent agreement and express gratitude for such unfathomable abundance. Most days we are fumbling.

I’m learning that designing and building a home addition does not mean you get everything you want.  There are limitations everywhere; structural, financial, relational. There are code restrictions to meet, lot lines to stay within, and the realization when you stand on top of a tall ladder overlooking your property that the view you’re afforded won’t net an ROI that makes a second floor deck a good idea.

 

We’ve both compromised and sacrificed, behaving badly in the process. I’m not proud, but I’m pausing to consider how I show up differently in these situations. Neither petulant child nor selfless martyr look good on me.

What do you do when the truss factory scheduled to ship your materials on Monday burns to the ground three days before they are due to arrive on site?   You could lash out in panicked fear because it’s December and snow came early this year and you’re already behind the unwritten schedule you’ve set in your head.  Or you could choose to feel extreme empathy for the business that lost so much; you could pray everyone got out safely; you could wait patiently as a new supplier is sourced.

 

I’m not sure where we are in the process, as it all has taken longer and been far more complicated than I anticipated, but if I were a betting woman I’d say we’re starting our middle trimester, that place where morning sickness should be letting up, ushering in the return to more even temperament. We’re beginning to show. 

And we’ve picked out a name. It means “house of treasures,” after a beautiful song by Marc Cohn. We heard it for the first time together, played live in the intimacy of the Wentz Center by the songwriter who treated us to the story behind his lyrics.

She’s the masterpiece of an artist who turned to building when he could no longer hold a brush. He was lost until he found her; she was his north star, his one safe place. And she sheltered his most important treasures, not material possessions, but his family that lived inside. Olana.