Today is Christmas Eve. Once, it used to be one of my favourite days of the year, now it’s one of the most dreaded ones. I can still recall the hopes, dreams, lights and the magic which used to surround the whole day and evening. Until six years ago, that is. Back then, that Christmas was supposed to be a very special one, the first one for a new family, my real new family, with a small child in it, who could have seeing the Christmas lights for the first time in his life.
But for some reason that special Christmas never took place. There was only a woman with a broken heart, with all her dreams and hopes shattered into pieces, her identity lost. I was this woman, I still am. I didn’t even want to celebrate Christmas, I couldn’t. I wanted to escape somewhere, hoping that could help ease the pain. The psychologist I was seeing in that period then suggested that I should concentrate on the religious elements of Christmas, not so much on the family part. So I tried my best to follow her advice. However, it proved to be difficult advice to follow. I know and believe that today we celebrate the realization of God’s promise, the birth of hope for mankind in the birth of Christ, but I can’t not see the parallel, common features with the arrival of a child in a family who longed for the baby.
Because basically we celebrate the birth of a human child this evening, right? With the promise of a future (even though this future for Him was to be seen on a much larger scale than our humble lives), with the joy this new life brings to the parents and to all the family. Each and every single life is a gift, I strongly believe that. And it is a particular one for the parents, who can guide and protect their beloved child from the very beginning just to see him or her to become more and more independent, leading their own lives on the basis of all those values the parents gave them.
All this is there in the dim or shiny lights of this night, of the joyous choirs, all the promises, hopes and joy a new life brings.
That Christmas I could see this. I could see this together with the miserable and truly depressing state of what my life
was, perhaps still is. I could see, feel Mary’s joy as a mother, and at the same time suffer from the fact of not feeling the same, I was, I have been just a shell of a mother, with an empty womb. I could feel the peace and joy the newborn Christ brought for those around Him then, while all I experienced was torment and chaos, pain.
That day I was decorating the Christmas tree at my parents’, as always before, but that time completely alone, for some reason nobody helped. I felt the tears rolling down my face the whole time. There was one song I was listening to, at least a million times, Bocelli’s version of ‘What Child is this?’, in duett with Mary J Blige, and I could not get tired of it, I still can’t. For some reason the question has reverberated in my soul, in need of an answer. What Child is this? Or in my case, what child is this? Please, tell me …
I wish for all of us that we could find some peace in the lights of this Christmas, some strength for ourselves and the hope to be able to meet our children one day, when time, space and human conditions will no longer separate us.
- What Child is This? - December 24, 2016
- A New Schoolbag - September 5, 2016
- No Simple Path to Okay - August 19, 2016