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I’m not a big fan of the word lucky. Believing as I do in a divine hand in our stories, I find that luck leaves it all a bit too anonymous and chance-y. But The Kid likes to describe himself as lucky, and who am I to disagree with that?

“I’m so lucky,” he said the other day after we dropped Little Brother off at school. “I get to stay home and have a surgery instead of go to school today.” Wouldn’t have been how I narrated it, but he was right on the logistics at least: he was staying home, and he was having a (minor) surgery: a tongue-tie release, his second.

Apparently the absence of a move and trans-world flights this year left some empty spots in our schedule, so The Husband decided to leave his company of a decade for a new job, and I decided to finally book TK in for what his speech therapist has been recommending for months/years, this tongue clipping. On the day he had it, the rest of the school went on excursions: LB with the younger kids to a cinema and park picnic, and the older kids, minus TK, to a local water-slide park (site of a couple of recent existential crises/birthday parties).

So he was okay with missing the slides and staying home. Okay, at least, until the fasting went on too long and the waiting rooms were too numerous and, finally, the mask came for him as I held his hands in the operating room. He fought it, and I held him, in that counter-intuitive thing we do as mothers, parents, humans: hurting to heal.

It sucks.

And, not for nothing, it’s always harder, these choices we have to enforce, at this time of year: this month when school is ending and presents are to be distributed among teachers and friends and family and emotions, high and low, are meant to be given space, and this season of Advent that means waiting turns into the busiest, somehow, of them all.

And mothers get so much of the brunt of it.

There is a pile of Christmas presents for the boys in my closet that I’ve been collecting for weeks or months or decades, not sure which, and I’ll need to go through them with TH one of these days so he’ll know what they got (that was always the joke on Christmas at my house growing up–The Dad would ask what we got). So to prevent that stumbling-in, wild-eyed, confused, “how did I get here and who are these people?” look of TH’s that makes me want to go on a murderous rampage, we’ll catalogue the gifts together. Hopefully.*

This is after the distribution of presents at the boys’ school this morning, a chaotic, rain-soaked affair that skirted (broke) Covid recommendations and left me sweating in 90% humidity, ready for a drink at 9 am. After the online orders sent to family back home that we haven’t seen in a year, after TK’s (very small) birthday party in a seizure-inducing mall arcade with a grocery-store cake (when I go half-ass, I go full half-ass). After a year that has not been quite as busy but somehow still busy enough.

After the surgery, the holding him down and the post-anaesthesia grumpiness and the five hours at the hospital, just me and him. After the resentment that I’m always the one to do these things, to bear these loads.

Then I get glimpses.

I read about the first Christmas and what could easily be written off as fairy tale or credulity befitting another age, this girl’s acceptance of an impossible message, a birth and calling defying reason, and I find that her story befits me because I can see myself, however small, within it: facing impossible moments, mine in an operating room rather than a stable, put-upon by a divine writer whose plan is hard and unexpected and, eventually and at glimpses, wonderful.

“You get to come with me,” TK said as we walked, hands clasped, through another hospital, to another operating room. “You get to see the room too.”

And I do. I have to, and I get to, see so many things I wouldn’t have, and sometimes those two words feel very far apart. But sometimes they don’t, and an operating room can be a chapel, an operating table can be an altar, and I am bent beside it, in this season that makes no sense but somehow also, completely, does.

*Jason is a great dad and husband, blah blah blah, but this look is real and y’all know it.

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