Winter Recess

The end of two eras

On December 23, I stayed out most of the day doing errands, along with, it seemed, pretty much everyone else in our city. I had awakened with a splitting headache after drinking a lot at Jean’s house the night before and staying up later than I’d planned. Coffee and even Advil failed to knock out the headache, which lingered all day, a moody layer. The errands took me to Mom’s Market, Giant Food, the Turnover Shop, the Margaret Cleveland in Bolton Hill, Second Chance, H Mart, the Margaret Cleveland in Northeast Baltimore, the wine store, and finally to Good Neighbor, where I sat down to do some writing.

The Margaret Cleveland in Northeast Baltimore is a posh gift shop in a far-flung neighborhood I don’t often visit. The store (compound? concept?) is sprawling and disorganized: several buildings on a corner lot, once an old farmstead, reimagined as an emporium for Christmas trees, Sno-Cones, and elegant tchotchkes. This spread was staffed by a trio of superlatively preppie older women (weïrd sisters?) who seemed as confused as I was, or more so, by the inventory. When I had—somewhat amazingly—found the very thing I was looking for, the woman ringing me up started to comment about the Christmas music that trickled from the stereo.

“Can you believe I used to own this album?” she asked.

“What is it?” I didn’t recognize the music.

She kept on talking as if she hadn’t heard me. “Half of these people are dead now,” she said. “George Michael is gone.” She flicked her eyes skyward.

“I didn’t know that,” I murmured.

“Is Dionne Warwick gone?” she mused, before continuing, “Tina Turner’s gone.”

“That was this year,” I put in.

“Yes.”

“You know the one from this year that gets me?” I offered. “Sinéad O’Connor. They’ve been playing her stuff on the radio all week.”

“I’ll have to look up the album cover,” said the saleslady, with an uncertain look. I wasn’t sure if she meant Sinéad’s album or the still-unidentified album currently playing; it was clear Sinéad’s name was ringing precisely zero bells.

This loopy conversation made me glad for one reason, which was that it served spontaneously to confirm my belief that the winter holidays are, hands down, the most morbid time of year.

If nothing else, the holidays are morbid because they mark time. The winter holidays of our youth formalized our trip around the bases of childhood. And now that we are grown there’s the double whammy of holidays plus the Gregorian calendar: Christmastime is here, another year gone, what has happened, what have you done.

“Is this your first Christmas without the children?” Jean asked yesterday. I’d had to pause. In a week or so I’ll cap off three years of separation from my kids’ dad. This Christmas the kids are in New Mexico with him, their grandmother, great-aunt, aunts, uncle, and cousins.

Was this my first Christmas without the children? Embarrassingly, I had to think about it.

Last year, we spent Christmas morning here in Baltimore, in my new and not yet optimized house; the Christmas tree by the window in the front room, flanked by the colorless, dispiriting grommet curtains that had conveyed. My ex came over to open presents with us and linger for a while to play. It was good—I guess. It was not good, because it was the kind of simulacrum that spotlights lack, that pokes uncomfortably at the wreck of the past and as such is better not thought about too hard, and so I didn’t—to the extent that I don’t remember much about the day. On the morning of the 26th, we got in the car and headed to Charlottesville, where we stayed through New Year’s.

Of the Christmas before that, 2021, I have fonder memories. That season, the kids and I lived in the apartment I’d rented after moving out of the marital house, a second-floor apartment with deep-set square front windows that made the main living area glow with afternoon light. It was a place with great inherent coziness as well as the cleanly feeling of recent renovation, and during my time there I often fell sway to the fantasy that I was a guest in a comfortable hotel.

The Christmas of 2020 was Christmas Zero—our last in the old house, our last as a nuclear family; some of our last few days as that kind of family, in fact. OK, so I’d deduced my answer: this is indeed my first Christmas without the kids.

*

In examining how I spent the last few Christmases, I resorted to the photos on my phone. It had been a while since I’d looked back systematically, and I’m not sure I’d ever done it before in the spirit of research.

The holiday season of 2021 fell in the honeymoon period of separation. It wasn’t a painless time but I often felt adolescent in a good way, awake and alive. I do not have to dig too deeply for memories of this time, though the phone brings them back with a unique combination of concreteness sans comment: a box of high-definition puzzle pieces.  

So, the holidays 2021. Two years ago. The Christmas tree stood in between two of the front apartment windows, bushy and not so tall. At the time, I think I only had two kid-free nights a week, but I remember it as a phase of balance and space for myself; I recall tidying up the apartment, putting decent clothes on, exploring my New Role, naïvely but with real enjoyment.

Opening the apps, where I’d achieved a pleasant degree of initiation: not totally clueless, but still wide-eyed.

Of that season, the pictures inform that on December 15 I took a series of selfies by the tree. On the 16^th, I proctored an exam at my school wearing an Indian block-printed face mask. (I remember that mask; it came in a pack from Anthropologie on clearance, and its elastic straps dig in behind my ears.) On the 19^th, a selfie in a workout swimsuit in the locker room at Meadowbrook, wearing a different mask. An altogether uncharacteristic volume of selfies.

Later on the 19^th, a plate of homemade salted chocolate chip cookies. On the 20^th, the apartment looks clean and nice. The 21^st, evening, the lights are low, the dining table clean and arranged with a bowl of satsumas, a bowl of whole walnuts, and a bottle of bourbon. Nice spread, can’t remember who it was meant for. Or was this some sort of self-ritual? That seems farfetched. It bugs me that I don’t remember.

On Christmas Eve, freshly baked gingerbread cools on parchment paper, followed shortly by children decorating cookies adorably, messily. Holding their creations up for the camera and smiling grins filled with tiny, shard-like teeth.

At 5 p.m. that day, Hannah sits on my couch with an impossibly apple-cheeked child splayed in her lap, a child almost not more than a toddler.

Christmas morning, 7:55 a.m., my kids’ dad on my couch with a cup of coffee. Pile of gifts under the tree. Faint memory traces remain of placing them there all by myself, the night before.

Christmas, 3:33 p.m., my daughter stands in front of her grandparents’ door in Virginia, wearing a sweetly tiny pair of fairy wings. Christmas dinner. Green and red placemats. Selfie wearing strangely pink lipstick.

December 26: my daughter at the playground in Charlottesville. I do remember this: it was 70 degrees outside, an upsettingly high temperature, everyone peeling off their coats. My son playing in the dirt with a toy dump truck. Are they suffering? In what way or ways are they suffering? It’s what I wonder as I look at the photograph now, as well as what I wondered many times that day, that week, that year. And what can I do to help it, besides the one thing I cannot and will not do?

On the 27^th, my sister and me at a different park, both wearing Nike dunks and knee-length jackets, mugging for the camera ridiculously.

Later that night, some pictures sent to me by a man from an app, whom I was chatting with and never ended up meeting. He is celebrating Christmas with some older people he knows in Beaufort, South Carolina. The pics reveal a genteel, tranquil, and superlatively grown-up scene: 19th-century fireplace, floral drapery, overstuffed couches, large and long-haired dog. Brindle dog on a Persian rug. This man had an unbelievably soothing, almost narcotic Southern drawl (we talked on the phone two times, I think), but something about him made me uneasy, and anyway, he lived in DC. We had plans to meet, but then I got Covid and never rescheduled.

On the 28^th, a gathering at my sister’s house; a walk in Biscuit Run surrounded by brown leaves and bare oaks; my son measures Grandma’s legs with a tape measure.

By the 29^th, we have returned to Baltimore. My son dumps out flour for pancakes: constant pancake-making, ironically, being probably the single most consistent activity linking the last several years of my life together.  

A picture of me holding a balsa-wood airplane, looming, taken from a child’s vantage. It must have been hard to come home, away from all that family togetherness and adult company, but I look good. It was my first year of teaching at my school, so I know that I was stressed, but I don’t see that in the pictures. Theory: the written journal over-reports angst, and the photographic record underreports it.

On the 31^st, another child-taken pic, from the backseat of the car, of me driving. Stained gray puffer coat, black beanie, rear crescent of face. Within the hour, a selfie video of my daughter singing “Into the Unknown” along with Idina Menzel. Her face fills the frame, and her voice floats soft, lispy, slightly off the beat. A five-year-old girl crooning privately to herself. For courage?  

There is nothing more until January 3, when we wake to snow. My son stands on the bed in dinosaur pajamas, peering on a scene of whitened boughs. I remember that day. We bundled up, went out, and sledded with friends. The new year grasped us.

*

My photos told me one other thing about the time between 2020 and now. They helped me see the last 16–18 months more clearly. The pictures suggested that it hasn’t been the easiest time, but that it’s been coherent, a time, which somehow comforts.

The first phase of separation, for me, was one of euphoria. My friends and family might not remember it that way, but I do. The joy is what lingers. The relief and pleasantness of one’s own space, own decisions, a radius to exist in, hope. I felt, as I’ve said, teenaged again. Briefly aging in reverse. I began listening to music in a way I hadn’t in decades. Loud, in the car, talismanically. Wrapping it around me like a cloak.

It's probably inevitable that the halcyon period had to end. Like the first, full-throttle months of a love affair, it wasn’t sustainable, not really. For me, the end came abruptly and unambiguously: it was when I bought and moved into this house.

“You lost your mind,” Hannah said recently, describing this time, and unfortunately I can’t disagree. As much as I had looked forward to having a house, I went about the project with a grim, freakish anxiety that I reluctantly recognize as a core potential of my personality. The home may be new, but the emotional state is a place I’ve been to before: my very least favorite place all-time.

In any case, the photo reel brought an illustrated recap of what mid-2022 to just recently has been all about. I moved in in August of 2022 and instantly returned to work for my second year of full-time teaching, which didn’t prove to be as much easier than the first year of teaching as I had hoped. I had been seeing someone, but stopped seeing him right around the time I closed on the house. I didn’t really feel like dating during academic year ’22–’23, but aloneness put its stamp on the months all the same: dreary, insular, a bit claustrophobic. The wells of bliss and wonder ran dry. The corners of my emotional triangle were defined by doubt, overwhelm, and a blistering focus on all that wasn’t right in the new house, and the ways I needed that to change. The nesting impulse, but dark. Moving again, transitioning again, even for a “good” reason, was probably harder on both me and the kids than I had anticipated. And how scary it is, to not be able to anticipate things. To have failed to anticipate.

In a word, the photos revealed that this last year-plus was a grind. It’s been prose, not poetry, head-down and yoked. I stopped listening to hip-hop in the car. I stopped listening to the radio while I was cooking. I stopped cooking, and focused instead on preparing the three tiresome “meals” my kids will eat; on nights on my own, I ate out, with a friend if possible, or if not, sushi, or a box of something from the cold bar at Whole Foods. I stopped dating, except for a few sporadic little jabs. I found it hard to stick to any routine, except for the ironclad one imposed by work and school and caring for children. How do you use a tiny slice of freedom? I don’t know; I spent most of mine fitfully glued to my phone.

In the spring of last year, we got head lice. All three of us. Over-the-counter remedies don’t work anymore, lice having evolved resistance to them. So for more than a month, my routine involved slathering heads in conditioner, sectioning hair, combing and combing with a tiny-toothed metal comb and wiping it on a pad of white paper towels until all the lice and then all the eggs as well were gone. Every couple of days for weeks. I’d all but forgotten about this, but for a while it was quite literally how I spent my time.

But then, at some point, we were lice-free. And soon I took the house in hand. I spent the whole teacher’s summer off of 2023 attacking a to-do list. Certain things had already been done: ceiling lights, upstairs floors, someone to fix the holes in the ceiling that the electrician had needed to make when he put in the lights, holes that had lingered for months and upset the children. Midsummer, had more floors done. Talked to a contractor about the kitchen. I put on a pair of dirty shorts in June and hardly took them off until August. I painted rooms, sanded down the deck, minutely caulked and then primed and painted the formerly carpeted, 120-year-old stairs, took down the hateful cheap curtains and then the curtain rods that were hatefully attached to the woodwork. Patched the woodwork. (I’m still not done.) Made multiple weekly trips to the hardware store. Watched YouTube videos. Visited the tool library. Obsessively consulted a deeply involuted blog about paint colors. Screwed shit up and then fixed it again. Considered purchasing a Benjamin Moore fan deck. Sometimes I felt frantic but the truth was, I’d always wanted to have a summer like that. I gave myself to it, and mostly, it was A-OK.

At the start of this school year, the new kitchen cabinets arrived on a pallet. They sat unassembled in the family room, and then the contractor demolished the existing kitchen, and for about six weeks I prepared all our food in the dining room and washed dishes by hand in the bathroom sink. And then, just about a month ago, they finished the kitchen. And suddenly I have a nice house. And even if I still think about houses and housing too much on the whole, even if I still run through my remaining to-do list in the moments before sleep, it soothes me to know that the place is ours and we can stay here: for as long as we want. Until such time as.

I read somewhere that it takes three to five years to rebuild one’s life after divorce. However much I might have hoped to beat the curve, this seems about right to me. I count two distinct phases down. Fist, a phase of shock and euphoria. Then a phase, less overtly pleasurable, which I have just described. A phase of hard driving, of building shit and setting shit up. It involved getting a job, entering a new(ish) line of work and returning, for the first time in a long time, to being the kind of person who has a “regular” job at all, and it involved finding a place to live that feels more than temporary, and surrendering to some deep and agitating need to impose my will on it. And what my pictures told me when I looked at them was that this second phase, the hard-driving phase, was at or nearly at an end.

I can’t say that things are back to normal—that’s the thing about life, time is always passing, we’re getting older, so “back to normal” is never back to the normal that would have been before the time-consuming incident has taken place—but there is a feeling of evening out. To put it more precisely, the feeling is that the stage is set. I have been working and working on assembling this lovely stage, this context. What kind of a play is it? Whose line is next? 

There will be a third phase. If I’m lucky, it will involve a more sustainable pace. I know what else I would like it to involve: creativity, a wider social circle, romance. How appalling it feels, to say your wants out loud.

These are my thoughts at the end of 2023.