This week was terrible. This past six months have been difficult, but this week before Easter felt like the climax of all that, and not in a good way.
Part of the reason it was bad is because it was bad, and part of it is because instead of letting all the feelings and experiences flow through, I let them take residence in my body.
I attended March for Gaza on January 13, 2024 with six of my kids, along with thousands of other people. Imagine my surprise and disappointment when there was almost no news coverage of the event.
Even when I searched for coverage, anemic articles a couple of paragraphs long described the protest. Longer articles mentioned the DC event, but focused more on other protests that happened around the world the same day, particularly in Paris and London. Several articles implied that the DC protest was characterized by violence.
I was at the DC protest.
I will bear witness if the media won’t.
Several years after that, I posted similar sentiments. We struggled to get a tree in a timely fashion, which meant we had to drive from tree farm to tree farm only to find all the U-cut trees sold out and the precut pickings slim. It was hard to get the holiday foods made. One year we never decorated the tree at all.
This summer I got TMS and blasted the depression out of my brain, although I hated every second of it. I’m pretty sure this is the first Christmas I haven’t been depressed in my entire adult life.
I discovered recently that there are whole playlists of sad Christmas songs. Sometimes they are actually sad (I’m looking with heart eyes at Sia’s “Snowman”) and some just sound sad (Sarah Mclaughlin’s Wintersong Album). Either way, I am here for it.
Nine days ago, a handyman came to our house. He replaced five broken panes of glass, and two broken storm doors.
Today, I got my answer to the unspoken question, how long will our house remain in one piece?
