Dark Remedies
Weaving threads: Making Magic in Isolation, Winter Holy Days, More Work for Moms
Update: my plans for December’s 15th of the Month piece on the Land Back movement, which is going to include perspectives from some local Native American friends, is alas pushed back again. I’m on week three of being sick- I’m fairly certain RSV that turned into bronchitis - I haven’t had full hearing in my ears due to inflammation from the bronchitis, and it’s definitely affecting my mood, spirit, my ability to cook dinner and interview people about a big topic.
AND I very much enjoy my self-imposed writing schedule for this newsletter, and having gone from 0 paying subscribers to 7 of you now, and close to 40 subscribers, there’s real incentive in that added accountability piece to stick to that schedule, knowing some of you read this and wonder over some of the very things I’m aiming to wonder after. Thank you for being here.
Holy Days
Do you celebrate Christmas or other winter Holy Day traditions? Or are you more of the bah humbug type? Or perhaps somewhere in the middle. A friend of mine recently became an empty nester to her one child who will be out of the country with his father over the winter break. She texted me, "I’m not really feeling the Christmas spirit.” This exchange got me thinking how once again the nuclear family, even the more recent detonated modern version of it- single parent-only child household, is still the epicenter for so much magic making, meaning making, spirit raising, ritual tending, tradition care, sense of belonging- that we have. It’s even trickier, I feel, when what brings people together- in this case, a former living arrangement and children who became friends, and then parents who became friends, is not tied to more apparent community held values that bring us together for anything more than we like each other. And to be clear I’m not denigrating the power in the simple enjoyment or chemistry we have with certain people, but I do feel like that can make for some slender relationships over time. For what else is holding the relationship together? I know this is what most of us are accustomed to, but I can’t help but believe there’s more to relationship making. Am I making sense?
Thus, I am continuously burdened by the very real questions and work of how do we keep going when so many of us are the sole keepers of tradition? The main magic makers in our families days? Why do I, like so many women I know, feel like very little magic, cheer or holiday color will come to pass if I don’t make it so?
Mothers Make Magic for Free
I texted a friend - "I hate delegating.” She asked why? I never got around to answering her, so I’ll try to answer now. Delegating to me is yet another form of unpaid emotional labor that women, more so than men, take on. It also comes down to this- there are people who see what needs to get done and do it without asking. Often this is because there is a baseline of shared understanding on how to approach the thing- postpartum care is a great example- there are people who understand that new parents need pre-cooked nourishing meals brought to them for at least 4-6 weeks, housecleaners, help with childcare for older siblings, gift certificates for massage for the birthing peron and to limit visit time and don’t dare to ask to hold the newborn baby or ask "how are they sleeping?” before doing any of the former. There are other people who remain consistently oblivious, unwilling, or incapable of stepping up to the tasks at hand, or more accurately, have very little skill in collaboration and communication, and though they know how to use the interenet search engine for anything else how to plug in "how best to support a new person or mother in postpartum,” you may find yourself frustrated that once again you are delegating in a time when you ought to be well taken care of. Sometimes the level of goneness is so gone I don’t think most people grasp it. I know that I have been both types of people at different times. I know that I still struggle with how to collaborate and communicate well. Such is the legacy of American pull-yourself-up-by-yer-bootstrap prosperity gospel ethos. The struggle I feel on an everyday basis is thus exacerbated in this dark holiday season by the very real fact that I do not share cultural, ancestral, or spiritual understandings of what needs to be prepared or sung to or burnt offerings for. In many ways I feel more adrift this holiday season than ever before- I don’t know what exactly to celebrate and I have no one to tell me what or how to celebrate, yet I feel like there is a very real cost to NOT celebrating anything, and it all falls on me.
Mothers everywhere in this country are typically responsible for making Winter and Holiday Magic. The homesteading artsy Instagram influencers sew their own stockings, make garlands from old chocolate foil wrappers, and host parties where their woolen glad children romp in the snow next to a table adorned with hand dipped beeswax candles and charcuterie boards that could feed a small army. The rich wives get their hair and nails done and only decorate in shades of ivory and use white light; well they naturally, hire help yet never make that labor visible to their followers, so you are left with the impression that they have been blessed with some super power you did not get. The aspirational Mothering content right now is off the charts!!! And I’m not even on Instagram regularly anymore and yet spend enough time on it, especially as a Millennial Mother who enjoys a side of organic living or interior design and you know what I’m talking about. While I still on occasion fall into the trap of “compare and despair,” i.e. my children would be so much happier, my life would be so much better, I would be so much more fulfilled, if I could just get my act together to stay up til midnight hand embroidering stockings I sewed by hand, instead of my preferred method, scouring the thrift shops for a unique secondhand stocking, I now cannot see the act of social media motherhood through the lens of capitalism, monogamy culture, and Motherhood falsely sold as an innate thing we do- as opposed to the actual unpaid fucking labor Motherhood truly is. Motherhood is a job point plank.
It’s not that Dads or other care providers don’t help out, but when you understand that Making Winter and Holiday Magic falls under the realm of care work, and statistics tell us time and time again that we have a massive gap between genders in who does more… (regardless of who is working outside the home) Women are taking on a lot this holiday season. We trim the tree, we plan elaborate menus, we buy the gifts for all the family members, we help the children choose the gifts, we go through the photos to sort out which ones- just-so to use for the Holiday card; we wait in line at the post office to weigh letters, and mail packages, we sort through the ornaments, make sure there are stocking stuffers, organize any and all holiday events, order and return gifts, pull out the holiday linens (of which we are responsible for procuring in the first place), buy the candles, make the wreath, the garlands, compare prices at the local U-Cut tree farms, gather the cedar bows to adorn the hearth (which I don’t have). I’ve been told I’m good at these things; I say I enjoy doing these things, but this holiday season I wonder- do I? Am I? Or am I running, in great part, on fear- the fear that if I drop a ball, do very little in the way of holiday magic making, what traditions will my children be left with? What will be missing from their lives without holiday magic making and Christmas cheer? And why does this season feel so important to get right?
Women already perform the bulk of emotional labor ― the psychological phenomenon of unpaid, often unnoticed labor that goes into keeping everyone around you comfortable and happy. But during the holidays, this work ramps up. There are more mental lists to juggle, more commitments on the calendar to keep track of, more tasks to delegate. There is more pressure to make things magical for those around you. It takes a lot of unseen and underappreciated effort to keep everything humming along smoothly. - Gemma Hartley for The Guardian, 2017
In another piece of writing by the same author I quoted above, she talks about how even the very act of wanting a certain gift for her birthday, again required more work on her behalf. I relate so much to her struggles because, on the one hand, like I do, she has a good husband, one who helps share the load of childcare care and domestic duties, no amount of shared work, can make up for the fact that they way we have been socialized as Man and Woman as Husband and Wife and as Father and Mother- are radically different.
Even having a conversation about the imbalance of emotional labor becomes emotional labor. It gets to a point where I have to weigh the benefits of getting my husband to understand my frustration against the compounded emotional labor of doing so in a way that won’t end in us fighting. Usually I let it slide, reminding myself that I’m lucky to have a partner who willingly complies to any task I decide to assign to him. - Gemma Hartley
https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a12063822/emotional-labor-gender-equality/
Last year there was an Instagram account of video after video of a Mother teaching her son how to wash dishes, cook, do laundry, etc. all with titles and captions boasting how she was going to raise a feminist son, and take the weight off her future daughter in law etc., raise a good man- that sort of thing. Many many friends of mine shared these videos. The account has thousands of followers, of which, these videos are wildly popular, and when you scroll trough the hundreds of comments they are all glowing in their support. I watched several of these and my jaw dropped- "What the fuck??!!?” All I could see was how yet again the MOM is being positioned as the sole purveyor of domestic care education. But care work is not gendered. I repeat- care work is not gendered. Contrary to what most of us have been raised to believe, Women do not posses an inborn ability to nurture and think ten steps ahead of everyone so everything that needs to get done in the institution that is the Home, will get done. Humans are biologically wired to nurture one another. As bell hooks reminds us time and time again in classic pieces like this 2010 piece, revolutionary parenting.
As long as women or society as a whole see the mother/child relationship as unique and special because the female carries the child in her body and gives birth, or makes this biological experience synonymous with women having a closer, more significant bond to children than the male parent, responsibility for child care and child rearing will continue to be primarily women's work."- bell hooks
Get it Right
I think the inclination, the drive, the desire, the holiday pressure we Mothers especially put on ourselves to “get it right” stem from yes, the culturally and generationally sanctioned mores of what and how we, as Mothers have been led to believe are what measure our worth, but I also think it does stem from a very real and old memory, longing, and sense of coming together in intentional deep ways to honor this dark time. For what human in their right mind would choose to be alone in this season? We are, above all else, communal and highly sociable creatures, though our modern conditions are wreaking havoc on our abilities to belong together.
Somewhere I read that it was not uncommon for the ancient Celts to celebrate the winter holidays until well into February! I love this! And it makes sense right? Pre-industrialized land and sea based peoples relied on much slower forms of transportation so gathering for a few days to celebrate and then disperse wouldn’t have been feasible. Old Yule logs were often 12 feet long from what I’ve read and would be burned for days not just your standard 12” log burnt in an evening. Not that I even have a wood stove or fireplace to burn a 12” long log.
On a popular blog for liberal-leaning- white-ladies-my-age, a recent commenter on a post about holiday rituals protested the picture of the writers’ choice to top their Christmas tree with a bagel (they are from NYC)! The commenter bristled at such a disgrace, but made it a point that she is not, in fact particularly religious, but was raised to understand that only a Star or an Angel would suffice as tree topper; needless to say a bagel of all thinsg is sacrilege! I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, and responded with something to affect of, "you do know the Christmas tree was co-opted from pre-christan Evergreen worshiping celtic people right? And that adorning the tree with an Angel or Star comes from Christianity??!?!”
Sigh…..
AND don’t get me wrong… I LOVE CHRISTMAS!
I love the cheer, the holiday bustle, the classic Christmas songs, the over the top light decorations, the Nutcracker (Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker is one of my favorite classical pieces of music), the smell of evergreen green trees. I like sparkle and wearing red, and waking up especially to stockings and the joy of wrapping and unwrapping presents and lounging altogether in pajamas. I loved dancing all night by a massive bonfire when I celebrated winter solstice with the 40 year running Winter Solstice Long Dance, a kind of hippie/Earth Lovers community powered ritual where we danced all night until the Sun or the grayed out version of Sunrise in the Pacific Northwest rose and we celebrated with a campfire potluck. I like the small gatherings as well as the large gatherings. A winter solstice fire with just 5 of us one year, a New Year’s party behind our barn in our muck boots in slushy snow and we each offered herbs to the fire -letting go things and setting intentions.
I like excuses to feast and open my home and host gatherings because frankly, I rarely get invited to big potlucks or dinner parties or parties of any sort these days, and my home is way too small to host more than say 10 people at any given time (and 10 people in 650 square feet is a feat). I want to cook all these foods or have someone cook them with me or cook them for me.
But I’m tired, and for sure there’s a slew of things in my personal life that are adding to that tiredness- This is when my real longing for people who get my particular desire for magic and ritual making would show up and do it with me.
I recently started church dating because I am so starved for community spaces where there are values held in common that far reach beyond personal affectation, self growth/self work etc. I can no longer take the rhetoric and formality of the Episcopal church, the church that raised me from baptism until high school graduation. Thus, I have settled on the local Unitarian Universalist church. Yes, a church still very much rooted in Christian values, but widened to release the emphasis on sin, and rooted very much in an ethos of Peace and Justice. So far I have attended two Sunday morning services, the most recent one, a wonderful Holiday service highlighting their choir which included some Southern based hymns, which quite appropriately elicited woops and amens and hand claps from the majority white and 55 plus congregation- letting me know these white social progressives maybe aren’t as numbed out as so many in their generation appear to me. As Resmaa Menakin writes in his popular book My Grandmother’s Hands, we all suffer under white supremacy, and one of the main ways it shows up in our bodies is as numbness. I think about this piece of writing a lot and this hilarious piece that explores the stereotypes around race and dancing.
What does Mother dread or Motherwhelm or musing on white people not knowing how to dance have to do with Christmas? Well when we talk about Motherhood, when we talk about Mothering we are talking about so much more.
"Motherhood,” to boot, is a ridiculously loaded term that we use to reference so many things. What do women dread after all? The criminalization of pregnancy? The difficulties of navigating childcare? Marriage and domestic inequity? Reproductive violence and an absence of postpartum care? Racism and environmental disaster? Financial precarity and dependence? A loss of identity and career and social status? When we say “motherhood,” what we are really talking about is a range of social, economic, political, personal, emotional, psychological, and physical issues. No wonder it makes people so anxious!”
-Amanda Montei
Fingering the Beads of the Rosary
I’m not Catholic, but Episcopalians are sometimes referred to as “slack Catholics.” I’ve attended my fair share of masses though and have owned a rosary more than once. The practice of fingering beads in prayer is not isolated to Catholicism though, in Hindu there are Malas, in Islam, subha. The beads help us have a tangible place in which to place our prayers, and dependent on the religion, the number of the beads as well as order of the beads have their own significance. Sometimes that’s how it feels to be a writer - alone at a desk, fingering one bead and then the next- a bead of loneliness, a bead of maternal dread, a bead of Holiday cheer, a bead of illness, a bead of loss, a bead of thanks for the larder, a bead for readers, a bead for unexpected mercies, a bead for visitations we’d rather not recall, until around the full length of the rosary we go. That’s what is alive for me this season from my corner of the world. It’s made even more bewildering by global headlines, of which I can only dip my toe in here and there; the privilege of my days some would say, but also the very real constraints of my own day to day mundane work.
What is speaking to you this holiday season? How do you continue on making magic when you have few to make magic with? How have you cultivated antidotes to the loneliness of this season? Do you have aligned standards with your spouse or family on how the magic making of this season will roll out?
Additional Reading
History of the Christmas Tree
https://www.whychristmas.com/customs/christmas-trees
Bill the Patriarchy- how much are you Mama really worth?
That Darn Chat on IG - so many great break downs of gendered care gap in straight male/female couples