No Nativity
On why you might think I am hiding
On Friday I will drive with my children to the city to attend my school daughter’s annual carol service. We will walk into a huge church in a leafy suburb and find a pew with a good view of the choir. I will watch as my daughter steps forward to a microphone to read a prayer, and she will read it clearly and beautifully despite not believing the words, because this girl likes to conform. To a point. When she sings the descant for Ding Dong Merrily I will feel tears pricking in my eyes because music does this to me, Christmas does this to me, and church definitely does this to me. It’s a bittersweet feeling, a sense that I have made it through another year, thrived in some ways, and although I have done it on my own, although I am sometimes lonely, this is still so much better.
As I sit with my mermaid daughter and her perfectly painted lips, my littlest one on one side and my often quiet child on the other, you might look and think we almost fit in. There’s a chance you might wonder where my husband is, because this is a very traditional setting and when I look around there are a lot of dads. But when you glance at my hand you’ll see there is no wedding ring and it will probably make sense. You’ll almost certainly be confused by the sunglasses one of my daughters is wearing inside the dimly lit church, possibly you will comment on them which will be unhelpful, and my daughter will cling to me even harder so that I try not to wince as she crushes my hand with her own. You might wonder why I have brought my children at all, because it is not yet the holidays, and there are hardly any other children in the church apart from the students attending this school. But you don’t know me, so you probably won’t ask. I’ll be ready if you do, because my children get asked all the time why they are not at school, and after years off being unsure how to respond, now I simply say ‘they don’t learn at school’ and politely move the conversation on. Or walk away.
I will enjoy the service because I love to be around people. But at least two of my daughters will have to throw all of their energy into attending, and there will definitely be a fallout. One of them will lose her words and another will probably become upset because she feels so keenly the not fitting in. She knows that, while she has been deeply traumatised by her time at school, a little part of her would like not to appear different. There is a disconnect between her stunning originality and a teenage desire for anonymity. It has been hard for this one to find her tribe.
These fallouts are why we often don’t attend events or go to busy places or spend much time with friends. When you have parented children who need to do things differently, children who have sometimes become very unwell because society doesn’t meet their needs, there is an obvious reluctance to put them into situations that will increase chances of distress or discomfort. There are the occasions like the carol service that we must attend, because we must support their school sister who has to leave the house when it is dark every morning and carry the flag for conformity. And we want to support her, we are proud of her. But there are a million other optional occasions that just feel like many little straws on a camel’s back.
You might think I am antisocial. Rude even. You will probably become tired of asking me to do things with you because the answer is invariably no. You might not realise that I want to grab you with both hands and shout YES! I want to run out of the house and breathe in people’s words and laughter and tears and know there is a big world out there. It’s easy for me to feel that because I know how to fit in. When it is just me I can tolerate the noise and the smells and the strangers and the wind smacking my cheeks. I can read expressions on faces and instinctively understand how to respond to unexpected comments. It would be easy for me to say yes. I want to say yes. But I often say no because I cannot see my children crumbling any more. It is rarely worth the fallout. Instead I am trying to learn to create a bigger world out of something smaller. Carve magic from the soft breath of children floating around the room. There are no slips of paper stuck clumsily onto my fridge telling me my child is an angel or a sheep. I no longer place orders for packs of cards that were coloured in October so they could be sent to the printers. And we don’t have the annual scramble for something to wear on Christmas Jumper Day. But the up side of not fitting in is that every day can be a Christmas Jumper Day.
Whatever the reviewers said about Twelve Moons, this is not Little Women, but on a good day it can come close. These days fringed in darkness are spent teaching daughters festive duets on the piano, cutting out snowflakes and painstakingly gluing coloured tissue paper to the gaps, writing stories about rainforests. Before the children come down for breakfast I light candles in jars they have decorated, and in the middle of the morning I stir hot chocolate into bubbling milk. Everyone knows that life is not a film (though it can be a book), so in between these flashes of cosy joy there will inevitably be a leaking roof, a difficult phonecall or yet another trip to the chemist. It all merges together - tribunals and tinsel, scrutiny and starlight.
So I hope you will understand that I am not hiding. This is what not quite fitting in looks like. Sometimes it is isolating, often it is challenging, but always it is life. We are here.