Yet she put in all the energy of which she was capable. Everything she had.
On the morning of the first Saturday in December, she took out the stepladder, her “Ginette Reno / Merry Christmas” record and put up the big box in the cellar with all the mess inside: the balls woven with threads of all colors, the fairy lights and the artificial tree. Nothing helped. My mother’s sadness slipped into the cracks in the floor, in the silences between her voluntary gestures, in the sighs that escaped even before the contemplation of her work. “Girls, come see the tree! I was still looking at his face, more than the tree. You become a very young shrink, it’s no secret. Reading the unspoken appears to us as a way of surviving, of giving meaning to what we feel is obvious, but which does not correspond to the narrative that is given to us.
She missed the left half of her heart all year round, but December acted on my mother as an amplifier of all that was left across the Atlantic, creating a sort of crescendo that peaked on New Years Eve. She, usually so gifted for joy, bent at the same time as the trees under the weight of the snow, until at last, in the first days of January, she took it apart, this fir tree, and brought it all down again. in the basement, right next to all those things we’d rather not be aware of.
Immigration leaves holes everywhere in hearts, even when we choose it. And Christmas was that time of year, the only one, when my mother’s will wavered. The rest of the year, she stayed in tune with her choice, kissed him, flawlessly, whatever. There is also pride in immigration, the idea that we must stand up and stand up against everyone who, on both sides, judges our choice.
The “magic of Christmas”, for me, is thus always lived with the accents of this sweet melancholy, under which I learned to slip myself, as under a downy and heavy duvet. I feel it from the first Saturday in December, when, in my turn, I put the big box in the cellar and place the lights on my tree (natural, this one, for the time that remains). I cover myself with it to escape the rest; to the idealized representation of “perfect family happiness”, to the capitalist injunctions that summon me to spend my days in soulless shopping centers and that dry my eyes, to the madness that would fill my calendar from December 19 to January 4. My melancholy, like a skin, on which slide all the disembodied images of what we “should all be”.
In surgeries, right now, the flip side of Christmas magic is already starting to be heard. For children whose parents are at war (and there are many of them), the ruthless sharing of time slots which serves to satisfy the desires of adults who have forgotten they were there begins. You will have to change in the car between two meals scheduled for the same day, because “daddy doesn’t want mum’s laundry to come in”, or because “dad doesn’t know how to dress us, according to mum”. It will be necessary to respect the timed slots which divide the magic into equal parts so as not to create odds and “because it is written in the custody agreement.” “
Stomach aches and other symptoms will also happen, like final attempts at repeating words, in the midst of all these adult stories that tear each other apart, turning childhood into real battlefields. We hope that, for them, the real gifts will take on the appearance of truces, surges of maturity, of flexibility where there are only rigidities and tensions.
All the parents who will experience their first post-separation Christmas this year will also struggle to place each garland on this first tree without the other. It is hard, this time of “perfectly happy families” for all the families scavenged, the lonely people and the bereaved who inhabit our homes.
The missing of the year will inhabit all the space, in these places emptied of them, that it will still be necessary to try to dress with joy, to stay in tune with what is exploding in the streets, on our screens and on our airwaves. Existential loneliness is perhaps never felt so much as when our states do not match what transports our whole community. To hate football, during the World Cup in Europe, to be heartbroken at Christmas, same fight.
However, December can also be devoted to the genuine need to look inside ourselves, to take stock of ourselves and to inhabit our life, however imperfect it may be. The melancholy of Christmas, then, can serve as a marker of the time that has passed, as a reminder of the furrows left by what existence will have worked on in us. But, for that, we must accept to drop the “perfect photo” and dare to sit in our truth.