Is there anything more depressing than putting away Christmas decorations?

I’ve always felt a lingering sadness at the end of big events and important days–birthdays and Christmas especially. Specifically, the last three Christmases have left me in terrain bordering on despair, feeling almost breathless with sadness as the credits roll on the last airing of A Christmas Story and I glance one more time at the lights on the tree. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I’ve been a mother for the past four Christmases (the first of these four was when The Kid was two weeks old and I was too sleep-deprived to actually articulate a feeling). And for the middle two, we were preparing for TK to go under the knife: neck muscle surgery in 2012 (on New Year’s Eve, no less) and spinal surgery paired with the dreaded halo last year.

This year we are free and clear of all planned surgeries. But as I lay awake in bed on Christmas night, waiting for a few hours of sleep to descend upon me before the baby wake-up call went off, that old familiar feeling crept in. I wanted to shut down, erase all the Christmas movies from the DVR, wake up to an undecorated house. This thickening of emotions that accompanies becoming a mother, along with my already well-developed holiday grief, tempts me to feel that the end of Advent is the end of everything. The most wonderful time of the year indeed…then what?

It doesn’t help that we chose today to take down the tree (f**king pine needles everywhere and NO I DON’T CARE FOR AN ARTIFICIAL ONE, THANK YOU VERY MUCH AND STOP TRYING TO SOLVE MY PROBLEMS). Or that our end-of-year roundup includes a budget review, paired with a planning session for the twelve months ahead. (Spoiler alert: we’re going to be eating a lot of leftovers in 2015. Sorry, Chick-Fil-A.) Or that the next couple of months are cold and dark and devoid of twinkly magic. The Husband and I tried to make the most of our homebound, makeshift New Year’s Eve celebration, popping open some Veuve (definitely not in the budget for next year) and recapping how much worse last year was at this point: surgery and a hospital stay looming eight days ahead of us, and the unknown-to-us months that would follow full of spasms and pain and fear that it was all for nothing.

But there was that morning when the test was positive. And there was the day when TK stopped throwing up and started holding his head (more) upright. There was Little Brother’s middle-of-the-night arrival, and TK’s gradual warming up to him. There’s the progression toward speech (not there yet) that TK has been making, and the fact that he sings now, humming “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” like it’s his job. There’s the way he places his hand on my leg while I nurse LB. There’s LB’s radiant grin at 6 am that puts off my need for coffee a few minutes longer. There’s the garden sign I got from The Mom for Christmas, reading “Don’t Piss Off the Fairies” because I wrote that into my novel and she remembered and I don’t have a garden or a publisher but I have that sign–I have hope.

There’s also the tilt of LB’s head to the right, mirroring his brother’s just like his dimple on the opposite cheek, and the PT sessions we’ve already been to which you think I would be used to by this point but which left me in tears anyway–this again?! There’s the short-term memory loss, how I meant to think about how much harder it was the day we all had stomach viruses but how I keep forgetting to remember because, you know, life. There’s the scar on the back of his neck that is present but fading, fading but present. There’s my own scar from the two of them, TK and LB. There’s uncertainty and tiredness and sleep training and potty training and wanting time to speed up and begging it to slow down.

But did I mention…that he’s singing?

So the lights are gone (except for that overzealous neighbor who pairs his with a “Happy Birthday, Jesus” sign and I love JC too but I just can’t with that), and the tree is down and the DVR is Elf-empty and the baby is, you know, sleeping now and then…and there is the rest. There is the aftermath of Advent. There is the fact that what showed up, never left. Because there’s the sign, there’s grace, there’s Spring…and there’s singing.

I’m sorry, but no. This did not happen.