I’m typing this out on the notes app on my phone. It’s Friday, December 23rd, 11 am. I have approximately three hundred items on my to-do list because it’s almost Christmas and we have family coming into town: trimming the tree, hanging up stockings, prepping Christmas breakfast, wrapping last-minute gifts, readying guest rooms, picking people up from the airport, calling the HVAC company because our furnace is barely, limply doing its job in this unusually cold weather. I’m not doing any of those things though because I’m trapped, and this is my view:
The baby I had in October is a lovely baby. She is, I think, as good-natured as a person can be who has just been born and is figuring out life from scratch. She smiles often and gives everyone in the family something over which to delight and she sleeps well at night, tucked into her bassinet right next to our bed. She sleeps well during the day too, as long as someone is holding her. Usually, she’s happy enough to sleep on me in a baby wrap (the Solly wrap is my favorite baby item) — my hands can be free and she can nap while I bustle around getting things done. Naturally, today — two days before Christmas and with me holding the longest to-do list I’ve had since she was born — she will only nap if I’m sitting in a dark room and she can comfort nurse while she sleeps.
Three hundred things to do and instead I’m holding a sleeping baby, at her persistent insistence. If that’s not an Advent lesson, I don’t know what is.
Anyway, I hope you all have a lovely Christmas. I’m enjoying my time away from social media, putting all my energy into very tangible caretaking. It feels good, and it’s teaching me things about the ideas that have been pulling at me lately: the Incarnation, Mary and Martha, prayer without ceasing (someday I’ll write about what it felt like to pray the Jesus prayer through childbirth), the physicality of faith, a little obsession I have with doubting Thomas and what it means to put our hands into tender vulnerable places. I’m looking forward to continuing to be very physically present in my life and not very present on the internet (except maybe here) and to see what I can learn from it.
See you in the new year,
Brittany