Solstice Blessings
My walk on the trail today with the sun reflecting off fresh snow, making Winter Solstice shadows brighter. I walked to our old house, honoring the whirlwind between solstices when we closed on a new home and moved out of our old one. The compact cottage that held us, unlike the one we’re in now that still feels like someone else’s.
Merry Christmas, Moon Lodge.
I whisper as I pass her. I cry; for Tiger & Belle, for us, all ghosts of a place that was ours for 10 years. It was time to go but the memories were so good there.
I’ve been unhappy the last few years. I hesitate to admit that one of my saddest seasons parallels River’s arrival into this world. I never want her to combine the two if she reads her mother’s words someday. I longed for her with an aching only mothers know. I waited impatiently for 3 years at least. Depending on her age and the state of our relationship it’s a toss-up I won’t have control over.
If happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too. Perhaps through all those years at school, or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.
— Wintering by Katherine May
However, avoiding the sadness may be more detrimental to the journey required to move out of this wintering space.
Last Christmas we were in the Moon Lodge cramming my family into the kitchen nook for dinner as we’ve done for years. It’s a quaint cottage that nudged us outdoors in all seasons. What once was quaint turned cumbersome.
It magnified my discontent.
In a home we’d long outgrown with the ghosts of our animals, coming out of isolation as a petrified stay-at-home mom when we couldn’t afford me to be one, after a horrific first-time foray into motherhood in a pandemic — I don’t visualize forthcoming decades but my early 30s wasn’t it. I was depressed. Depression is a fraught word in my family which may be why it took me this long to admit that I was.
Most challenging is that I can’t blame anyone for this wintering.
I resent the pandemic. It took the first tender moments celebrating our daughter with loved ones away from us. We can never get those firsts back, even if we have another child. It’s the cause of many strained relationships that will take years to repair. I became unrecognizable without anchors of physical support and shared wisdom.
A pandemic parent knows what I mean. Those who didn’t become a parent in the pandemic struggle to empathize with why the weariness still lingers. In return, I envy that they get to bring their babies around to be cuddled with and cooed over as all babies truly deserve. They are pure light emanating outward.
I’m surprised I didn’t turn to religion or some other obsessive stronghold, a lifeboat to keep me afloat amongst the raging seas within me. Or maybe the words I wrote and the books I read were my stronghold. Joel’s surely in recovery from being my life raft. The man is a Saint, please Venmo him for his service; $Saint-Joel.
You weren’t expecting gift-wrapping advice or last-minute gift ideas were you?! You’ve had quite the treat if that was the expectation!
Here is another truth about wintering: you’ll find wisdom in your winter, and once it’s over, it’s your responsibility to pass it on. And in return, it’s our responsibility to listen to those who have wintered before us. It’s an exchange of gifts in which nobody loses out.
— Wintering by Katherine May
I don’t have wisdom to share yet — I’ve only just acknowledged the poor state I was in — but if any of this vent sesh strikes a chord you may enjoy Wintering by Katherine May as much as I did.
PS: Did I lend this copy to one of you? I genuinely cannot find mine!
In other news
refers to her substack as a piecemeal memoir. aha! yes, that’s what I’ve been doing online for 10 years, just crafting my piecemeal memoir as I go.
How many more words I may have written, art I may have created, if I knew this:
“That’s my mom,” said Riv, clad in light-up & jingly reindeer horns, to her friend in line to go outside at preschool. I saw her mouth the words in surprise and look at me with pure happiness as I waved from the car. Proudest moment of my life.
The Nutcracker Ballet 2024 | Thanks to my mom for snapping.
I’m signing off for the year. My studio technically closed on Thursday, but there’s spillover this weekend with more tasks than time and a sick little one to boot, as well as this Voyage Michigan interview about my career.
Light mixes with dark every single day, the way nature intends. Pause to see the lessons in it. Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!
xo,
Originally sent to Substack subscribers in December 2024.
