Christmas Heartache

This year Kevin and I are hosting Christmas Eve at our house. My sis-in-law and I are doing the cooking and I am super thrilled about it. I have never hosted a holiday gathering before and I'm sure I will have my moments (I always do!) of thinking I must be insane for wanting to hold the shin-dig. But there is that huge part of my mother in me that loves to create a "setting." The ambiance... The glowing Christmas tree, the Christmas carols playing in the background, the good food, the laughter...the perfect little details that she put time and thought into that perhaps nobody ever noticed but herself (like the fact that when she wrote the zip code at the bottom of each address on every Christmas card, it was the same length across and the rest of the address).

What I wanted more than anything for my Christmas Eve gathering was "the Christmas dishes." Probably my dad's most favorite part about Christmastime, dragging all the Christmas dishes out of our TINY storage room downstairs in our old house on Kewaunee. All the dishes had to come out, even though it was just for one month. My mom had them all; the tumblers, the wine glasses, the dinner plates, salad plates, soup bowls, even the "cookie tower." Oh, I think I forgot to mention the matching candlestick holders.

Since my mom died and my dad moved out of that house the dishes have been in storage at our cottage. This year, I am proudly hosting Christmas Eve Dinner, serving food on those dishes. When I opened the fist box of tumblers, I was overcome with emotion. If you know me, I am not a big crier. And I choose to stuff those sad emotions down deep where they cannot escape. But to see that familiar Christmas tree design I could not help feeling such loss. A loss for everything that sound have been.

I ache so much to think of my mom seeing my two children. What would she think of Dane? That makes me laugh! She only had my sis and I and for her to experience Dane's total boy personality would have truly been awesome. She would have thought he was such a "riot." She loved that world, riot. Every time he holds my face between his little hands and kisses me I think, "this is how much my mom loved me." And I just cannot believe how much she loved us. And how scared she must have been to leave us without her. Everyday that makes me so angry...that she was not ready to die and that she keep telling us she wouldn't...because she wasn't done raising Libby and I.

It is so frustrating to feel the jealousy that I do when so many friends in my life have their moms to help them with their babies. Just your own mom to show up at your house and help you with your own kids. To do the things you know only she can do. And to know she will do them the way you want them done because you do it the same way - the way she taught you.

Now to finally be able to put a bow in Glory's hair really kills me. All the years of hair bows my mom put us through. Even when I felt to old to wear them...and now I can gently clip them in Glory's few fine strands of hair. I could name her after my mom, but I certainly could not bring my mom back. I know she is proud of me and I'm sure she is looking down on my two little ones with a smile, but nothing compares to the real thing. And it hurts like crazy.