Float On (or, the strange juxtaposition of grief, gratitude, and joy)

I sit on the couch in the early morning dark, Christmas tree lights twinkling in the living room. A neighbor wearing a reflective vest walks his dog up the street. The quiet lasts just long enough for me to read for five minutes, and then I hear my son’s bedroom door open. He pads into the living room, wrapped in his fleece Batman blanket. When he sees that I’m up, he takes a flying leap and lands on the cushion next to me.

“Morning, Baby,” I say.

“Whatcha doin’?”

“Reading the news. Looking at the neighbors’ Christmas lights.” Across the street, our neighbors, who are always up early, have turned on their Christmas tree lights as well. 

"Less than twenty-four hours until I’m eleven!” he whispers.

“How are you so old?” I ask him. I lean over to wrap him in a hug; he is tall and bony, but his cheek is still so soft when I kiss it. He wriggles out of my grasp and shoves his bare toes in my face.

“Smell,” he says, wiggling them.

“Ew. Get away,” I say, and he hops off the couch, cackling, then heads to the kitchen to toast himself a bagel.

His sister emerges a few minutes later, ear phones in, cords trailing to the phone tucked in the pocket of her robe.

“Morning,” I call to her. She pours herself a bowl of cereal and settles in at the dining room table across from her brother and eats, looking at her screen. I walk by her on my way to the shower and touch her shoulder. She takes out an earbud. 

“Sorry, what? I’m listening to a podcast.”

“Well, untangle yourself for two seconds,” I say, but I smile and kiss the top of her head.

*

Eight years ago, my son’s birthday fell on a Friday. He was three. I’d planned to pick up his sister from school, gather him from daycare, and drive north to meet my husband in West Seattle after work. We’d enjoy a cozy family dinner at our favorite family-friendly pub, and the next evening we were going to take the kids to Chuck E. Cheese and Build-a-Bear. But at lunchtime, a coworker started screaming from the copy room.

“He killed them! He killed all the kids!”

An entire first-grade class, murdered.

I couldn’t reach my own first-grader fast enough, all the way across town. The horror on the other side of the country gripped my throat until I saw my daughter safely at the door of her own classroom, standing in her purple coat next to her teacher. None of the parents lingered on the playground with their children that day.

I drove north on I-5 that evening, Sarah McLachlan’s mournful Wintersong in the CD player, my children buckled snugly into the backseat. And I wept.

*

One year ago, I wrote: My son will never again have a birthday where I do not remember this horror. My children's lives are forever linked with one of the darkest days, the day I realized that if our country could fail to respond to the slaughter of children then what hope is there? I still don't know if what I have can be called hope, because I'm mighty full of anger and, too often, despair. What I have is a crazy, incomprehensible mix of gratitude and grief.

Tomorrow morning, just after five o'clock, my boy will turn eleven, which is five more years than the children at Sandy Hook Elementary would ever see. 

My daughter started high school this year. I think of the twenty children who will never play the trumpet or clarinet on a school cafeteria stage, never get their first periods, will never get their braces off—they never had the chance to lose their baby teeth. They will never take algebra and cry over it. They will never get a driver’s license, or back into the mailbox with their parents' car.

Their mothers will never have the inexpressible, tender joy of having bony adolescent feet waved in their faces, those lanky limbs sticking out of fleece pajamas. They will never knock on their teenager’s bedroom door and say, “Come out of your cave. It’s lunchtime.” They will never open the door to an overpowering wave of too much Bath and Body Works Winter Candy Apple lotion, or the fug of unwashed socks when the room’s occupant has failed to empty his laundry basket into the washing machine. They will never threaten to remove those bedroom doors when their teenagers slam them.

*

Every year, I feel it: the gratitude and the grief. But more than that, I feel the crazy joy that my son has brought to our lives every single day of his existence. 

I write some version of his birth story every year, and often in this space. Tonight, near the end of 2020, which is universally acknowledged as a dumpster fire of a year, I think about joy. I think about how eleven years ago, Matt drove me to the birth center on Lake Tapps in the middle of the night while I howled through contractions and sang along with Modest Mouse at the top of my lungs, one of the songs he included on the mix CD he made for the moment. No soothing Enya for the hard work of birthing a baby, but something to keep me moving:

Alright don't worry even if things end up a bit too heavy
We'll all float on alright
Already we'll all float on

And less than four hours later, he was born into Matt's hands and delivered to my chest while I laughed. I laughed. And every day since then, every single day -- even on the darkest ones -- my son has made me laugh. 

(Mustache Day at school.)

Tomorrow morning, I'll wake up before he does, and I'll curl up on the living room couch in the glow of our Christmas lights. I'll remember the frosty darkness before the dawn of his birth. I'll fiercely miss sharing this season in person with his grandparents and auntie and uncle and cousin and feel grateful that we can gather over Zoom later in the evening to celebrate anyway. And I will give thanks for this sweet, ordinary life in an anything but ordinary year, because one of the unexpected blessings of 2020 -- while I'd never have wished it this way -- is this time with my family, and there's more than a little sweetness in that.