Merry Christmas!
My junior high schoolers performed a beautiful Christmas concert last Friday. Yesterday, as I was at the front of the classroom teaching my “5-Paragraph Essay in 15 Minutes” lesson to the 7th graders, one of them raised her hand.
“Mrs. L…were you crying
last week during our Christmas concert?”
I wanted to say something like, Yeah, you guys were
so bad it brought tears to my eyes
because that’s the type of relationship we have. Instead I said, “I was. I guess you could tell?”
“A little bit,” she replied, smiling and holding her forefinger and thumb about half an inch apart.
“A little bit” is putting it mildly. I’d been bawling all over myself. My husband had been teasing me about it and had asked if I wanted a tissue, but he’d never brought me one—probably because he would have had to do that crouch-walk all the way across the gym as he attempted to snake his way to the bathroom around 300 parents catching video of their children.
You know the walk. Usually it results in 300 parents having
video of some guy doing a weird bent-over shuffle in full view of their angle.
“So instead, I snotted all over my sleeves,” I explained to
the kids, holding up my right arm. “But it wasn’t this shirt, I promise,” I
insisted over their grossed-out groans.
“Oh, whatever. AS IF YOU’VE
NEVER USED YOUR SLEEVE AS A KLEENEX.”
That shut them up because they know they darn well have used their sleeves as Kleenexes at
least a few times in their lives, so why were they making fun of me for it?
Because I’m 47 and should know better? Again I say: WHATEVER.
It’s like when one of them is caught picking his nose in
class by another, who shouts out, “GROSS, Max!
You’re picking your nose???” and I want to diffuse the situation and
spare Max a little bit of embarrassment, so I say, “As if you guys don’t pick
your noses? I do it all the time! In fact, I just picked my nose in the car on
the way here this morning!”
They will roll their eyes, laugh, and call me disgusting,
but they know they’ve done it before, too, so it usually puts an end to the
taunting of kids like Max. Of course,
I’ll pull Max aside later and tell him he’s in the 7th grade, go pick
his nose in the privacy
of the bathroom the next
time it needs to be done because I won’t always be there to save him when he
gets caught. Nor do I want
to be.
After we laughed about the snotty nose, I decided to give my
kids a side of me they don’t get to see very often: my left side.
It’s my bad side, and I usually make sure that I kind of point my face
so my right cheek is more prominent when I talk to them.
Just kidding. I finished
a satirical novella by Freida McFadden about an hour ago and it’s going to be a
little while before the goofy one-liners are flushed from my head. Excuse me.
No, I decided that instead of laughing her question off with
a silly story, I would tell them the truth about why children’s Christmas
concerts mean so much to me—especially when my own children are in them. And this year, my younger son is in 8th
grade, meaning it’s his last year of these concerts, which made me bawl even
harder.
Of course, he didn’t share the sentiment. He’s ready to be finished with forced
participation in junior high school Christmas concerts, so he made it a point
not to catch my eye as I sobbed through his concert because he was so very
embarrassed by me and wanted to pretend that I didn’t exist or, at the very
least, that I existed but I was someone else’s mom.
It’s all part of the experience, Clark.
When I was in my 20’s, I was a huge partier. I swore that I
never wanted kids; no way, no how. I
wanted to live this party lifestyle well into my 80’s with no snot-nosed brats
holding me back as I bellied up to the bar, my crinkled old-lady lips sucking
on a ciggie as I tossed back another rum and Diet Coke while all of those other
old lady saps were at home babysitting
their grandkids. Ew.
I endured the knowing looks from parents who had once said
the same thing. “You’ll change your
mind,” they would say.
Confident as any 22-year-old would be, I would roll my eyes
and say, “Wanna bet?”
It makes me laugh now because I lost that bet. HARD.
I sure did change my mind.
Sometime in my late 20’s, I realized that maybe the bar scene wasn’t all
it was cracked up to be, and perhaps kids were a huge blessing and maybe
someday I’d rather be at home being a grandma instead of a geriatric bar fly.
(Although being a geriatric bar fly doesn’t sound awful…I think a good grandma could make both work…)
But having kids wasn’t really easy for my husband and
me. Over the course of a few years, we
had multiple miscarriages, and it was awful.
We explored other options like foster-to-adopt, private domestic
adoptions, and international adoption.
All the while, I was just so sad…and insanely
jealous of anyone who had kids. We didn’t
even go visit one of my husband’s best high school friends the entire time she
was pregnant because I couldn’t handle it. Or maybe I could have, but I sure
didn’t want to.
During this time, I taught at a Catholic school in Hopkinsville,
KY, called Ss. Peter and Paul. I was there for four years before my husband got
promoted and we moved.
But man, that school was magical. Just magical. And despite what my husband and I were going
through during those years, I look back at my time at that school with such
fondness and love. It’s hard to express this emotion clearly because it’s so
confusing, but those were four of the saddest years of my life because of our
fertility issues, but they were also four of the happiest years of my life because
of that school and the people—principals, staff, students, parents, priests,
all of them—in it.
One day in December, we took the students to the church to
practice for their upcoming Christmas concert.
I sat in one of the middle pews, just behind a mom I had gotten close to
because she, too, had experienced fertility issues, and it had taken years—and many
prayers and miracles--for her to carry two successful pregnancies to term. She had given me many encouraging talks
during this time, and I knew she was praying for my husband and me and our
future children.
Her son was about 7 years old that year, and he had a
solo. He stepped up to the microphone and
as he opened his mouth and hit his first note, I started crying.
God, let me have this someday,
I prayed, tears streaming down my face. I tried my hardest to wipe them away without
anyone noticing because I can’t stand drama queens. But they kept coming as I
kept praying. Please let me have this someday.
His mom turned around and caught my eye. She was crying, too. She smiled at me and said, “You will.”
I hadn’t said anything out loud, but she knew, and I loved
her for it. This happened almost 20 years ago, and I still remember her sweet,
understanding face in that moment.
Every children’s Christmas concert since I’ve had my own kids
brings me straight back to day. I watch my own boys in awe because I had to
wait a long time for them, and they are miracles and they are the biggest
blessings I’ve ever been given in my whole entire life and I thank God every
second of every day for them, and I remember that moment in that church all
those years ago and I think to myself My
GOD I am so blessed. THANK YOU. Prayers DO get answered. Dreams DO come true. If only my former self could have gotten a glimpse
of this moment in her future, she wouldn’t have been so sad because look at our
family now.
WE ARE SO BLESSED.
If you ever see me at a kids’ Christmas concert, you are
totally allowed to laugh at me as tears drip messily down my face, because try
as I might, I’ve never been able to get them under control.
Well, maybe during the recorder portion. Holy crap that part is just awful. Dries
those sentimental tears right up.
NOTE: As I’m writing this, I have Christmas music
on in the background. Mariah Carey’s "All
I Want for Christmas Is You" just came on…and you don’t even want to get me started talking about our first Christmas with our
older son when I danced around the living room with him to this song, barely
holding back the tears because I was just so happy.
Actually I didn’t hold
them back. I cried then, too.
Man, I’m kind of a
crybaby, huh? LOL
MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!
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