Thursday, December 25, 2008

Christmas pondering

Another holiday, another time to hide from family.

I let the rest go out on a walk while I'm using the opportunity for a little post.

Oh, sad -- they're back. I guess it was too cold for much of a walk.

Red Stars and GreeneryWell, I'll keep it short, then. First of all, merry Christmas to you and yours. I hope your day is filled with family, friends, and cheer.

I've been prompted to indulge in a little pre-New Year's reflection, the kind of pie-in-the-sky wishfulness that makes you resolve to be an entirely other person starting January 1. I keep seeing a disconnect between the parenting I philosophize about and the parenting I practice. I can be doing both at once: holding an ideal in my head while I intentionally do something else.

Maybe that's just everyone. Maybe it's a start to have the ideal. But I'm hoping to get a little closer this year to letting go of some of the things that make me feel sad, regretful, detached -- and move closer to the parent I'd want, the parent I want to be.

Oh, and of course, there are all the other things. I'm going to wash all the dirty dishes every day, even pots. I'm going to revise my novel in a month. I'll take my vitamins like clockwork. I won't let a single junk food pass my lips. And somewhere in all that, I'll also fit in working in our business and taking care of a one-going-on-two-year-old.

Well, a girl can dream. That's what Christmas is for, smoothing over all the tensions and disappointments, imagining the distant past of a wailing child and a hurried birth and an uncomfortable bed, but converting it in our heads into a show with starglow, beatific smiles, and gossamer strands of hay. Today we see the beauty in the mundane, the potential in something as inconsequential as a baby born of a displaced person, a nobody born of a nobody.

Here's to hope. Here's to faith. Here's to becoming more than we seem.

Photo courtesy of Hilde Vanstraelen on stock.xchng

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