I have a hard time with Thanksgiving. The holiday. The celebration. The traditions and the expectations set up around this day. Same day every year, no matter the date, no matter the circumstance, always the fourth Thursday of November.
My year follows the same pattern, typically, and I usually consider a year as starting in September and running to the end of August. (Only when I had children and began to put together our family photo albums according to seasons did I realize that, no, a year really does run from January to December.) Still, I’ve been so inundated with the rhythms of a North American, northeastern school year over the course of my life, that it’s a rhythm I can’t shake, regardless of location or circumstance. So Thanksgiving, that fourth Thursday of November, has long stood as the first significant breath of air I’ve ever been able to get since the school year takes off. Up until that point, my breaths have been short, gasping, desperate for those random Jewish holidays and (horrible, I know) Columbus Day.
So you’d think I’d be grateful, right? Thankful, per se…
But I’m not. I’m not grateful. I’m not thankful. Instead, limited supply has collided with high demand, and I am exhausted. Exhausted by more than just tiring days.
This year, the exhaustion seems especially so. The breaking point, closer. The damage, imminent. A significant part of me even hopes for the Department of Health to contact trace a positive case of COVID back to me so I am forced to quarantine and wave goodbye to my husband and children as they depart for my mother-in-law’s…
I told Mister the other night, “I wish I got COVID, just so I could get a breather.” And even though we both saw the irony in a respiratory virus bringing a fresh breath, he winced.
“But you could die from it,” he said, and I scoffed and said, “No, I wouldn’t be that lucky.”
It’s so easy to get stuck in the middle of your mind. Paralyzed by over analysis of every day’s implications. But so often we sacrifice the moments that are life giving to focus on the darker ones.
My mister and I have recently found our groove with Boy and Baby’s bedtime routines. Around 6:30 PM, after dinner, I will give Baby her bath where the tub is filled to just her level at just the perfect baby temperature and she is allowed to lay on the bathtub floor and stretch and splash to her heart’s content. Once she is smelling like a lemon cookie, Mister will help get her pajamaed while I prep her last bottle of the day, and then she and I are off to the room she shares with Boy. I will rock her there, well past her last sip and well into sleep. Often Mister and Boy will nudge me awake to help me lay Baby down so now Boy can take his turn falling asleep with his daddy’s lullaby easing the passage.
I am grateful for having those last moments of my baby’s days to share with her, cozied together. It offers a reprieve no quarantine could promise. And it takes me out of my exhaustion and into the slumbering breaths of a baby who knows no better nor worse. She simply sleeps and trusts. And for the moments like this that give me life, I give thanks.
a scribble of jo 