Second Christmas

Being present with my family

I don’t think my mom meant this as a commentary on heaven, earth and hell

Many of my favorite writers on Substack have been writing about tonic masculinity, and I’ve been very encouraged by that. I want to encourage that conversation. So I want to say a bit about what being a man means to me, right now, today and this weekend.

In from the Cold

Recently I moved back in with my parents. My dad is 78, my mom is 76. I chose to sell my house in the city and move back here; this is the house I grew up in, my bedroom is the basement where I used to play as a kid. It has been going well, better in some ways than expected. I like my parents, I didn’t anticipate any great difficulty getting along. In fact I would say it has been healthy for all of us, they are both glad to have me here and I am happy to be here.

We are having our second Christmas, this weekend. My sister lives in the city, she and her kids were planning on coming up for real Christmas but they were only going to be here for less than 24 hours, it’s 120miles and the weather was -15F and windy. My sister won’t be here this weekend, but my niece and nephew are coming, and my niece’s boyfriend, who has never been here. My mom decorates the house for every holiday, never more than at Christmas. She left the decorations up for the kids.

The entire main floor of the house looks like this

The weather is almost as bad as it was around Christmas, we are expected to go from -18F to 32F in 24 hrs, but not until after they are planning to arrive. I hope they make it. It would be really good to see my niece and nephew, and I have never spent that much time with my niece’s boyfriend. He had a baseball scholarship to a university in North Dakota, but turned it down, works in a warehouse and lives with my niece. He told me he gave it up because he didn’t really love baseball, but I think it might be a confidence thing, both about baseball and academics. His Dad is a chronic alcoholic who is an abusive drunk, and his mom is a narcissist. His Grandma who was the only sane adult in his immediate family died recently. He’s a good kid, I like him and it will be good to spend some quality time with him to get to know him better.

My mother has been busy this week preparing the house. I’ve been helping with the dishes, cleaning the utility room and the finished basement, I helped her make her bed precisely as she wanted it, as she was preparing it for niece and boyfriend. My mom got tears in her eyes later, when I informed her the kids want to sleep in the basement, not in the bed she made. It didn’t matter that nephew misses his sister and her boyfriend, he is alone in his house now with my sister, his mom (Dad is gone gone, an addict, dealer and maybe a pimp), he wants to spend as much time with his sister as he can. (I didn’t say maybe the kids want to sleep on the air mattress in the basement not in Grandma’s bed.) My mom got over it, to her credit, and helped me prep the basement for them.

Yesterday though, she thought it was Wednesday, the kids are arriving Friday evening, she thought she had another day, and then she got a little manic. I had to stop her, get her to look me in the eye, what do you mean when you say the stairs have to get done? Can I vacuum them for you? Then an hour after I vacuumed the stairs to the basement and the basement, she thought it was Wednesday again.

I washed the dog in the tub, and broke a glass container just outside the tub, I had been using to pour water on the dog. I cleaned it up and threw it in the garbage. My mother reached into the garbage to pull the broken glass out of the garbage to put the broken glass in a different garbage. She cut her finger, dripped blood around the house and sat in the sunroom with a paper towel in her hand with her hand in the air periodically for an hour. I guess I should have put the broken glass in the kitchen garbage or the recycling. She at least agreed with me when I told her next time just pick up the small garbage container and pour the broken glass in the bigger garbage.

At one point I was seated on a wicker love seat in the sun room, watching Tucker Carlson, my father on my right side exasperated that we haven’t shot down that Chinese spy balloon “and how many hundreds of thousands of Chinese students are there in our Universities!”, my mother on my left realizing for the second time that it’s Thursday not Wednesday. (I try to keep my conspiratorial talk to a minimum so as not to encourage my father’s exasperation, so I didn’t suggest it could be a false flag to stir up anti-Chinese sentiment. Though I will surely bring it up at some point to tamp down his anti-Chinese exasperation.)

My dad got exasperated then at my mom, because my mom was asking for us to pick up fried chicken for dinner Friday, but she couldn’t seem to grasp that the kids might be here well after dinnertime and they might just stop on the way and is that what you want for dinner? But I made it too complicated, I should have just stopped sooner and said yes I will pick up some fried chicken and some potato salad for you to spruce up, no problem.

But my dad gets exasperated about a lot of things, partly because he has nerve damage in his back which feels all the time but especially at night like someone is sticking needles in his back but not for acupuncture. That exacerbates his exasperation about Democrats, Biden, most of the federal government, the weather, the pillow guy, the Spectrum guys, Balance of Nature, Sleep Factor and half of the rest of the commercials and my mom (he watches a lot of Fox News.)

That’s part of why I am here. My dad’s exasperation plus my mom’s cognitive decline could get progressively worse, build on itself and gain momentum if they were alone together. I am like an easy going, relaxed mostly joyful ground for them, my dog too, who my dad gushes over.

That is what manhood means for me right now. Simply being a solid, quality, tonic presence for my family. One thing I am sure of, I am not going to regret spending this time with my parents.

It’s February already, I’ll be starting summer vegetables soon, I have some logging at the 80 to do, for an orchard fence, I have a garden and an orchard to plan (I purchased 50 bare root fruit trees), and I have a dock and a swimming hole to build. But this weekend, hopefully, me and my family are going to open some presents and pretend like it’s Christmas.

I hope you have a great weekend too.