Life These Days: December Appears

The other day, at the library, the lovely place where I go to wait for someone else to do exciting and enriching and expensive activities with my children, I was casually cracking open my Fresca and was about to dive into my own exciting activities of procrastinating and doodling when a man from across the library made eye contact and raised his can of beer to me. Not knowing what to do, and slightly nervous about appearing to partake in furtively illicit library activities, I raised my can of sparkling zero calorie grapefruit juice back to him, and then buried my head into the complicated action of appearing to be busy doing nothing. I believe the man was less than half a step away from an actual wink.

December has arrived and I’m still figuring out how November works. Where are the chilly weather clothes? Where are these elusive mitten clips that these preschool teachers keep alluding to? We’re about halfway through reading the Land of Stories, which takes place in the land of fairy tales and Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and Jack from the Beanstalk are all characters, and I’ve realized that all my avoiding of those terrible fairy tales with dubious moralistic lessons—where Cinderella is turned beautiful with the tap of a magic wand and that is why Prince Charming falls in love at first sight, no need for a conversation or background check or anything, or where all the stepmothers are evil and jealous, or where the miller’s daughter is sold out by her father and saved by a weird little man and then forced to marry the king because she can(not) spin straw into gold—has meant that Naomi has no idea what’s going on in the land of stories (or on earth, let’s be honest). If all the female characters are going to be either be beautiful and useless and helpless and at the mercy of the world around them, or old hags, let’s at least have them be pigs or hippos or aliens or fruit or something a bit more interesting. I guess the old hags must have a few interesting stories behind them. Give me George and Martha! Strega Nona! Ada Twist! Miss Nelson! In any case, we’re reading the fairy tales now.

Life continues apace! As it does, and as it should, should we be so lucky.

Everyday, I shovel off various books and toys and snacks and creams off the bed and yet I still find myself rolling over onto a wooden walrus or onto some sticky popsicle stick. What bliss! Even as I groan and the kids are growing and already grown beyond what I could possibly imagine. I’ve stopped imagining! It is the forbidden forest of the future and the whomping willow is aggressive and lawless and I’m cowering under the covers with pop-up board books and the crispy corners of open floss containers.

What can one do beyond hoping beyond hope that someone will bring home fresh croissants and/or a bubble tea as a balm over the various life existential crises?

I return my overdue library books, smiling awkwardly at the librarians welcoming their well-travelled books home to them. I crack open a new notebook. I sit surrounded by my office/closet clutter and my dying cat and just enough sunlight to fill me up for another day.