Having hosted a big craft show, a big Christmas brunch and a smaller birthday brunch over the last couple of weeks, my house is somewhat upended. On the one hand, in order to make room for new people and temporary accumulations of stuff, there are some clear spaces (think, surfaces especially) that aren’t generally empty or nearly so. But then, the Kitchen Aid is out. And we have to put the ornaments away and cart the tree out. And yes, we’re Jewish so we have to put the (not so used) menorah away, too.
The act of welcoming can be complicated.
Lots of essays have come out over these past weeks about the Jew-during-Christmas conundrum. The essay that spoke to me was an atheist musing about Judaism during his daughter’s Chanukah celebration at preschool. The question in terms of religion often boils down along the lines of “where do I belong?” It’s a question people ask in different ways this time of year, scrambling to figure out their place in their families, and to sort out new familial arrangements with friends, or to think about friends and community. New Year’s cusp is a time of refiguring, even wrestling. I’ve thought about how adoption shifted my sense of what belonging in a family means, because it’s expanded ours in unnamed ways—perhaps at times, un-nameable. Rather than try to define it all, we’ve focused on how much better it is to open our arms imperfectly and go from there.
Maybe, if adoption marked the only complicated aspect to family I’d have time and space to come up with something more brilliant than open arms, muddle. Daughtering while parenting isn’t always simple. Wanting to attend to one’s beloved whilst raising children—a joke, at least too often for it to be completely funny. Raising teenagers, um, just, wow. So, we’re opening our arms as best we can, setting clear boundaries—clumsily, mind you—as necessary, and muddling. I expect a theme for 2012 will be the muddle as reality, metaphor and trend.
A slightly more vaulted word for muddling might be improvising. Improvisation sounds arty, right?
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For now, it means I’m trying to figure out how long the alarm clock should beep-beep-bedeep before I go in to rouse the tenth grader and what I should put on the emptied out shelves in the dining room and whether the little girl who puked all over me a couple of days ago is better this morning and other minutiae of that sort.
I’m a person who takes New Year’s Resolutions seriously, so I am mulling how I’m going roll this year: vague, verging on lofty or super-concrete and small. I’ve done both and both have worked for me at different times. I’m just not sure what kind of time this is. Until Sunday, I guess there will be more muddling.
