Every holiday season, there are a few things that get to me — Holiday movies, Christmas cards, and fudge. This triad of seasonal onslaught have the ability to reduce me to a weepy, facial twitching, shaking addict in stretchy pants to the point of, well, let’s just say I become more Gaga than Lady.
Of course, as all good mothers do, I blame the children.
Well, I suppose I can’t really blame the children for the Christmas cards. Or the fudge. It’s not their fault I pour over “the chosen list” of Christmas card recipients as if I am Herr Schindler and only those who receive a Christmas card with my children’s smiling, photo-shopped faces will be spared from Nazi oppression. I suppose it’s not the children’s fault I am too cheap to just pay the additional money for more cards and stamps so I don’t spend the first two weeks of December pouring over “the list” with pans of fudge in my lap as I decide if Great Aunt Aurelia or the mailman will make “the cut” this year. And facebook. I can’t blame the children for the way I am now in touch with hundreds of friends or the way friend requests completely muck up my list causing me to break out in hives. Of course, it could be the twenty-eight pounds of fudge giving me hives. I blame facebook for making me fat.
The weeping over holiday movies really is the children’s fault though. Because before I became a mother, I could watch “The Grinch who Stole Christmas” and not sob over the sight of Little Cindy Who and her fantastic eye lashes, or blubber as the Grinches’ pea-sized heart grew three-sizes. I could watch Charlie Brown’s Christmas and not cry over Linus’ recitation of the Christmas story, my maternal bosom heaving. Prior to becoming a parent, I was a stoic fortress of emotion when it came to Angel’s getting their wings, or Tiny Tim blessing one and all. Now I bawl like a guest on a Barbara Walter’s special forced to chop onions when I watch Clark Griswold’s attempt to string Christmas lights. I’m pretty sure I’d have to be admitted if I tried to watch Miracle on 34th street, which is why my husband has had to ban the Velveteen Rabbit and LL Bean catalogues from our home for the entire month of December.
I am positive the reason for my uber-active holiday emotions lie with the children, because it all began the first holiday season upon their arrival. My triplets were born right after Thanksgiving and, as is the case of most triplets, ten weeks early. Weighing in at two and three pounds, they were born “not quite cooked” and therefore took up residence in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit where they could grow in incubators and receive their breakfast through tubes down their throats. In theory the dimly lit NICU with its eerily hushed and sterile environment was supposed to mimic a womb-like atmosphere in which babies could finish gestating. But the smell of iodine and disinfectant soap, the strictly enforced visiting hours, the mechanical beeping and hushed whirl of machines, the needles and cords and IV’s inserted into their little uncooked heads and translucent skin betrayed the fact that my babies were not so much in a womb, but on set of some sort of Alien Sci-Fi movie. I have never been a fan of Sci-Fi movies. I was also a hormonal mess.
But really, the reason for my emotionalism was my heart had transformed into this water-balloon-organ in my chest with a perpetual pin-sized leak. And no one told me this is what happens to your heart when you became a parent — this soul puncture — and so I spent the month of December wearing sanitation gowns, hovering over isolates, pumping breast milk and crying with my heart leaking all over the place. And although I couldn’t voice it out loud to anyone, I was praying for a Christmas-blockbuster-biblical-sized-miracle. I wanted my babies home with me by Christmas, because I wasn’t sure how my heart would not just completely seep out otherwise.
But there was no industrial-sized Christmas miracle. By Christmas Eve my babies were still too fragile, too busy healing brain bleeds and too little to take bottles. And so on that cold and rainy Christmas Eve, I was alone with my aching water-balloon-tear in my heart as I drove home from the NICU, and my husband was away on a work trip with his own heart leaking all over a Philadelphia hotel room, when I was in a car accident.
The accident was minor—there were no ambulances or emergency vehicles. It was the kind of accident where insurance information is exchanged and Christmas Eve spirit calms nerves and tempers. And it wasn’t until after the fact — when I was tucked into my father’s passenger seat — I realized I had, for the first time, managed to plug my water-balloon heart-hole. Maybe it was adrenaline, but in the aftermath of the accident, I had stopped crying for the first time in a month. And as I looked over at my father, who had driven two hours in the dark and rain to get me, I could see how parents must keep their hearts from completely collapsing: you learn to keep one hand on your heart… to plug the hole.
I now know my leaking water-balloon heart is a gift — it’s this emotional, soppy, wonderful mess that I spend a lot of time and energy keeping plugged. But during the season of lights and awe — during the sappy holiday movies — I let my hand down a little and release the plug for a bit. Because really, it’s a miracle I can plug it at all.
Thank God for fudge.
