What They Will Remember
By Adrienne Garrison
@adrie.garrison
After two years of fashioning Christmas memories from Zoom-call trivia with cousins and FaceTime gift-openings with uncles and aunts, it feels important to get this holiday right. I’ve penciled in a local production of Elf just after a neighborhood cookie exchange. There’s Caroling and Cocoa, the Christmas Cantata at church, and Breakfast with Santa—all events that felt too complicated or weren’t even available in years past. I find myself saying “yes” to too much, piling my schedule high with all the special moments my kids have been deprived of.
In the meantime, I miss the quiet. I miss long afternoons in the early dark with a child snuggled under each arm, Jan Brett and her mitten giving way to Tomie dePaola’s Legend of the Poinsettia until we reached maximum cozy capacity, at which point we would throw off the blankets and build pillow forts, dancing around to Mariah Carey in the pajamas we’d stayed in all day.
Why, oh why does everything look rosier in hindsight?
***
When I was nine, my parents realized there was some kind of rodent trapped in the wall of the hundred-year-old farmhouse we lived in. I think it was the smell that tipped them off. The fridge was pulled out from the wall and bricks were removed one by one until, sometime in early November, my father had inadvertently begun a full-scale kitchen renovation.
But that is not what I remember. I remember the way my mom set up an electric kettle, a toaster oven, and a microwave on our octagonal table in the living room. She placed them there, just so, with a lace doily beneath and that is how we lived without a kitchen for eight-weeks during my childhood. Suddenly, DIY snacks and meals were within my reach. I experimented, improvised, and burned countless Bagel Bites. I can still remember the taste of buttered toast dipped in hot cocoa. Weeks went by and the novelty did not wear off. In one corner of the living room, the television played VHS tapes we borrowed from the library, and in the other corner, the multicolored lights of the Christmas tree imprinted a feeling of delight deep into my memory.
My parents, meanwhile, were trying to do life without a kitchen in a farmhouse with a wood-burning furnace during winter. When he wasn’t at work, taking classes, or cutting wood, my dad disappeared behind a veil of plastic sheeting into the room that was once our kitchen. My mom, when she was not working at the hospital, nursing the baby, or caring for my brother and me, would spread oversized books of wallpaper onto the dining room table and flip slowly through the mauve and blue samples, imagining a piece of this old house—passed down through generations—that looked and felt like her.
Thanks to the kitchen reno, we spent Christmas at my grandpa’s house that year. My mom rummaged through his attic and found a tabletop tree, which she decked with an extra roll of multicolored lights. On Christmas morning I unwrapped a matching set of nightgowns as soft and white as snow—one for me, and one for my brand new American Girl doll. I kissed my dad goodbye wearing my long-coveted fake glasses from Claire’s, completely unconcerned about his drive home to an empty house and gaping hole of a kitchen.
I didn’t think about what the experience cost my parents at the time, but I have wondered since. I have slowly filled in the details of the stress load and the weight of responsibility. My dad has told me some, and the rest I have viscerally imagined.
***
These past two Christmases, my husband and I toggled between concern over exposing elderly family members to the virus he interacted with daily during his work at the hospital, and worrying about how increased exposure from holiday gatherings could impact our little family. As Dan took on extra shifts to cover coworkers sick with COVID, we insulated ourselves to keep him well, knowing firsthand how understaffed the hospitals were. Selfishly, with the weight of solo-parenting nearly crushing me at points, I drew in protectively, feeling ill-equipped to handle the additional neediness of sick children.
I understood the pull my parents had faced from every direction, the sensation that things could not possibly get any harder until, of course, they did. My life has felt like that sometimes. And I have wondered what my children will remember about our lives during the pandemic.
Will they remember the day I broke down when my daughter refused to put on her own shoes and, between the morning sickness and the needs of her three-year-old brother, I could not handle one more thing?
What about the words we spat at one another, Dan and I, as we tried to navigate disrupted childcare and work that never stopped? Did they even know when his days off felt like outrunning a steamroller, and the weight of it all seemed to nip at both of our heels?
Will they remember the countless canceled plans? The sharp swirl of swabs up their noses? The reminders to put on the mask, pull up the mask, pack a mask, remember your mask?
What will they remember?
Perhaps their memories will not be the fear or the stress—just as for me, it was never the smell of the rat in the wall. Perhaps it will be the long afternoons skipping stones in the creek, or the way their father taught them to catch crawdads. It may be the countless quiet mornings, stacks of books on the couch, and a mom with no escape beyond the next story.
They’ll never know about the birthday trip to Disney that never happened, or the tickets to the Polar Express we endlessly debated over and then decided not to buy. They won’t remember how heavy, how very weary all of us were when the holidays ushered in a peak of new cases and countless unknowns. But they may ask one day when we started the tradition of baking a birthday cake for Jesus, and I will recall the pandemic and all we lost, and also the ingenuity we used as we tried to keep the magic alive in the dark unknown of those years.
Like the multicolored bulbs of my childhood Christmas tree, the light we make as mothers is just enough. A rosy flicker of hope illuminating everything good that cannot be taken from us.
This is what I hope they will remember.
Adrienne Garrison lives in Bloomington, Indiana with her husband and their two little ones. Her essays have appeared in Coffee + Crumbs and New Millennium Writings, and her short story “No Longer Mine” was recently featured in LETTERS Journal. Adrienne believes magic takes the form of heart-to-heart conversations, petit-fours, and walks in the woods. You can find more of her writing on her website.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.