Diary of a mothering worker. December 23, 2020.

Post 403.

I look back now on why I never sought to convince Ziya to believe in Santa Claus. I think I had decided that I would be a mom who always told her the truth. Also, she was always a logical child so one fanciful story would have led to several other untruths to explain how only some reindeer flew through the sky, how Santa got in past the burglar-proofing, and how come the dogs never barked at him, for pothounds are renowned barkers, even while retreating with each woof.

When my grandmother passed away, my mom told Zi that my grandmother became a star looking down at us at nights. Zi promptly asked me if all the stars were dead people. Also, if Santa could get in, so could bandits, right? She was a cautious, somewhat anxious child with a litany of questions whenever I put her to bed, and I thought honesty would always be more reassuring, and would instigate fewer unanswerable questions. So, truth and logic prevailed, perhaps sacrificing a little of the fiction that typically creates Christmas spirit.

We would still joyfully decorate a small tree, string up lights, and open presents thoughtfully chosen. Our magic became our time together and with grandparents and cousins, as we traipsed from our home to theirs, taking family pictures, sharing food, and watching the children reap a small bounty.

Now that she’s a big ten-year-old, we have been trying to think about how to continue to thread the magic through this time; how to transition her from a Christmas spirit characterised by small hands excitedly tearing open wrapping paper to one that is about giving in the way that Santa Claus does; far, wide and big-heartedly.

So, we told her a story about special knowledge that you learn as you grow up, to which all of us are one day introduced, and which she’s now old enough to learn. It’s a secret really, though it seems she had a sense of it all along. It’s true that Santa is not real, but the reason that children are taught about him is because he is a symbol of the spirit which ultimately connects us from house to house and from country to country around the world.

We told her stories of donations we had made or helped provide to those in need, without announcing it to anyone. We told her that all adults do this because they know that’s what the spirit of Christmas means. It’s something we should do all year around, but this time is a reminder to us all, just like the story of Santa is a reminder to little children of how joyful it is to be a generous person, an idea they eventually come to appreciate.

It’s only when children get big enough that the knowledge that Santa Claus is simply a symbol, who everyone knows isn’t real, is shared with them. However, your mom only wanted you to know what was truthful and what you should believe in, we told her; the spirit of thinking of others, sharing from what you have, and being giving.

That night, she pondered what she could give and the next day decided on cookies she baked, which she could package for neighbours, other children, and those to whom she wanted to say thank you. Thus followed a baking extravaganza, which we kept an eye on, but let her do on her own. Cookies rose from the oven, mixed with chocolate chips and sprinkles, and pride at her big-girl understanding. She had never believed in Santa Claus, who isn’t real and who she would outgrow anyway. Now she had a surer sense of the magic that would last a lifetime, filling her spirit again and again, perhaps not only at Christmas, but throughout the year.

These chances for wonderment go by quickly, for children grow up very fast. With each stage, parents get precious opportunities to teach truths and values, and create new memories. This year, again, we have our little pine tree, now two years old, standing taller with stronger branches. We’ve had to teach her that it’s not whether it’s big or covered in decorations or compares to others that matter. We are teaching her to cherish grandparents and cousins, and the joy of being together.

Whatever lessons you are using this time to teach your children, may their truth and magic last. However you celebrate the spirit of giving, may you have a merry Christmas.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. December 25, 2019

Entry 356.

Christmas is such an important cultural ritual. Daniel Miller, my old PhD supervisor, describes Christmas as the most global and local of festivals at the same time. It’s materialistic, but also unapologetically about family and kinship. It enables us to keep up with the newest and latest in modern products on the internet and TV and, yet, is celebrated for its distinctly historical customs.

Christmas in Trinidad and Tobago is also an unapologetically nationalistic moment for affirming that, despite corruption, inefficiency and inequality, “Trini Christmas is the best”.

If you’ve had a hard year, struggle to figure out your next step each morning and sometimes wonder at the point of life, there’s a sense of belonging that this season can provide across ethnicity, religion and geography. But, can we also see the effects of economic tightening on changing social practices of tradition, home and family?

There were probably 15 000 workers retrenched in the last four years, and it doesn’t seem possible that they have been fully reabsorbed into the legal labour market. Many were factory and refinery workers. Others were public servants and even tertiary educators.

In addition, there’s an entire tier in the public service on short-term contracts of a month or three months, with no wage security. There is also a broad informal economy affected by these lay-offs, such as those in catering or hair dressing. Only so many of these could be surviving as small-scale entrepreneurs.

Yet, the malls and grocery stores were full of shoppers. Where is all the money coming from? How are so women and men managing a time of year that relies on having money to spend?

Would these under-employed or unemployed women and men be looked after by family with more stable income, and invited to their homes this Christmas as costs for food and drink are absorbed by those with more, as part of the spirit of giving?

Would those with more time and less money help out more with preparations such as cooking and cleaning of the house, putting in greater labour as their contribution to collective sharing? Do neighbours still expect to be able to drop by for drink, and has this become more important as human connection bridges hardship at these times?

Giving toys to poor children has long been an act of generosity by a wide range of organisations and individuals. Have the numbers of these children increased? What are the shifts felt by our youngest, whose parents may be working more jobs or longer hours to earn the same income, and for whom this has become a time of anxiety and management of their self-presentation for when they return to school in January?

As social as Christmas is, it’s also deeply economic, and can tell us much about families’ adjustment to new realities. Still, keep in mind that these realities are cyclical, and another generation will remember us being here before.

Miller’s research on Christmas was conducted in the 1980s, and presents a curious mirror to now, given the downturn that characterized the early part of that decade. The Trinidad Mirror of December 13, 1988 begins, “Do you remember the time when you couldn’t get that Christmas feeling unless your home was well stocked with Europe’s best whisky, cognac, brandy and wines, not forgetting the apples and grapes that lent some colour to the joyous occasion?” The Christmas Day Sunday Guardian supplement contrasted the year to an earlier boom period when, ““It was a straight case of who could outdo who . . . who could have the bigger staff party; who could buy the more expensive gifts.”

As nostalgic as Christmas is, we are unlikely to return to our elders’ coping strategies with greater poverty.  Miller quotes Angela Pidduck,  in the Trinidad Express, 19 Dec. 1990, describing how her “grandmother pulled out the old hand sewing-machine, she cut the curtains and Morris chair cushion covers, we the children (boys and girls) took turns turning the handle . …But there was warmth, sharing and love.

Warmth, sharing and love will carry us through the day and its demands, just as it has carried the country through the financial struggles of our energy-dependent economy.

As you eat, drink, unwrap gifts and admire new curtains, painted walls and polished floors, know that many had to make difficult and creative decisions to connect to a tradition that excludes as much as it creates belonging, and is expressed by care as much as by money in a recession year.

 

 

Diary of a mothering worker. December 24, 2018.

Post 314.

Traditions matter.

One day, those will be your go-to memories to provide a sense of certainty about how things should be and what belonging to family or childhood looks like. No doubt, nostalgia for such familiarity will occupy a small, but well-kept shelf in your heart, and some of your adult practices will be best understood as cared-for pieces you’ve taken out to feel and show and share.

Amidst the chaos of working motherhood, it was Christmas Eve when Ziya and I embarked on establishing a new tradition for us. First, we needed a tree.

I have warm, soft-focus memories of a real tree in my childhood recollections of Christmas. They are vividly clear and I can see the red carpet in the living room, the carved furniture and Indian wooden screens so common in the 1970s, and a six or seven foot tall tree in a corner by the stereo.

The tree smelled like pine and shed its darkening green needles all season. It was a big deal to put up, and had to be properly potted, stood in a corner where it wouldn’t tip over, and placed where it held pride of place when the strings of lights were plugged in.

Ziya wanted a plastic tree, and immediately folded her arms at the inconceivable premise of anything else. One of my friends, who herself has her lights and years of collected decorations strung on a towering and bushy ficus, empathized. Eight-year-old kids want what their friends have, she suggested, and don’t want to feel out of place.

I tried with Zi anyway, tugged by those memories, returning to that fuzzy time when a tradition I was now passing on somehow became set in my mind like a loved, framed photo on that well-kept shelf.

As we drove past Aranguez’s greenhouses, I asked her to look for any trees she might like. Mummy I see one, she exclaimed, and I, who don’t believe in almost anything, joyfully thanked a chorus of angels. We turned off the highway and walked in, checking size, shape, and fullness, and caught sight of the perfect one at the same time. This is it, she declared, won over by the swaying branches just at her head-height. My heart sang the way angel voices ring.

Look around so you are sure, I said. She did, finding one that was a hundred dollars less and, like any sensitive child of a mom managing all the bills would, stoically suggested the smaller one would be better. We left, holding hands, in one of those too-quickly passing chances with young children, with the perfect tree for our budgetary circumstances, and our singing hearts in chorus with those angels heralding on repeat on the radio. In some decades, maybe this would be one of those go-to memories forever providing a sense of place and belonging.

It’s unique, I told her, stroking the tree’s soft needles. We should give it a name. Fern Eve Jamela Hosein Livingstone Khan, she announced. A dramatic title encompassing a not so accurate nor scientific identification, an additional name for the day before Christmas when it was born into our home, three separate family lines, plus a shared middle name that has also been handed down three generations.

I raised my eyebrows. There’s another pine tree in our backyard, which arrived a mere foot tall and now stands above the roof. This could be like that. Who knows what traditions await such a small, somewhat thin-foot plant chosen by an equally small girl?

A Christmas Eve tradition of putting up a tree means you wake up on Christmas to see it on its first morning, freshly decorated and sparkling. Even if it’s small, it’s yours. If it’s made by sun and soil and water, it has a little extra spirit. It can live in our garden throughout the year, I suggested, and come inside at Christmas, and maybe it will still be the tree you decorate when you have a daughter.

Why she changed her mind, I can’t answer, but I’ll accept that it was Christmas magic. As we hung the few individual decorations we chose, I could feel my childhood fleetingly recreated in hers. It offered me, and might offer her when she’s my age, a chance to gift well-loved traditions that renew a sense of certainty, childhood and family. For such joys in the world, framed on a well-kept shelf in my heart perhaps as now in hers, first we found a tree.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. December 25, 2017.

Post 265.

A Christmas Wish

I was wrapping Christmas gifts when I came across the BBC news story from November 3^rd on a “colossal ‘sea of plastic’ which stretches for miles’ and was found floating in the Caribbean.

Miles of garbage in the very warm body of water which defines us, holds us, connects us, feeds us and heals us across our archipelago. The images are sickening, a prophesy of the sickness to follow up the food chain, into our drinking water, and into our own warm bodies. Amidst all our gathering today in the name of love, is this how we love ourselves and our own?

 I stopped wrapping, held still by a feeling of waste of precious time and of precious priorities. What did these gifts for Ziya matter when one of our greatest gifts lay in waste? What did any of our gifts matter, all over these islands, when we are withholding the real wealth and our greatest expression of love and generosity, because it requires us to sacrifice our bad habits; be real that our connection to each other, rather than consumerism, is what actually matters; and be accountable as adults and ancestors to our children and their children’s children?

I kept wrapping, imagining today’s familial bliss of presents given and received. I could also see the bags of garbage, that would pass on from house to house and from generation to generation from our ways of cherishing each other, ending up in Beetham or Guanapo or maybe just at sides of roads, and ultimately in our rivers and seas before washing right back towards our feet.

Like many of you, I profoundly love our islands’ rivers and sea shores. There are no places more sacred, no sites of communion more capable of expanding your heart and spirit, and bringing bliss and peace. Zi and I go to feed our souls, and hers finds its little way by carefully stepping through and around garbage, some washed up by the tide, some thrown next to trails by irresponsible individuals.

We’ve seen bits of so many gifts, so many family gatherings, so many efforts at community spirit strewn for miles as signs of how much less we care about ourselves and each other than we say we do, or maybe how much better we have to be about what care and love truly mean.

I continued to cut paper and stick the ends with scotch tape, thinking how everything is a cycle. Everything thing you do, every decision, comes back to you or your children. Every act has consequence. Every piece of plastic I throw away will eventually come right back to me or Ziya or those she loves.

Stick. Dream of the joy of children opening gifts. Think of the thousands of plastic and styrofoam plates, forks, spoons, bags, bottles, wrapping and cups thrown away today. See the very happiness of Christmas just as I see its implications for tomorrow

Greenpeace has an ongoing global campaign to save seas from plastic pollution. They are specifically targeting single use plastics, arguing especially against plastic bottles and bags. There’s a key line to their messaging which is that we have to think about reducing, not just recycling. We have to think about giving to seven generations, not just for today. And, if we did, how might that change today itself in our little twin-island Caribbean state?

Greenpeace itself says: “Recycling schemes are failing to keep up. We are calling on key environment ministers to lead the fight against plastic pollution. This means taking urgent measures to eliminate single-use plastic waste at its source…The moment to turn the tide is now!”

This is my Christmas wish. That these words stick with you and make you look at love, children, giving, receiving and sacrifice a little differently, and remind us all of our real gift-giving responsibilities and opportunities.

Best wishes to you and your family.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. December 17, 2013.

Post 129.

The jump in consciousness from two to three years old is significant. Last year, thankfully, Zi didn’t even register an event called Christmas. Presents, tree and lights were all non-issues. In the way of two year olds, all she wanted was your attention, just as she did every other day. I loved that she was not yet plugged into the matrix, that she was happy no matter what, that expectations had not yet been embedded on her little brain. I felt she was more free and therefore so was I.

Not this year. Between school and her grandmothers, she’s learned all about Christmas trees, decorations, baby Jesus and presents. She’s become one of those kids that points out every house where they ‘light up’, ready to leap into the magic of blinking verandahs were it not for the straps of her carseat. I love her little Trini talk though, how she says ‘light up’ in the way that we also say ‘hug up’, ‘love up’, ‘rumfle up’ and so on.

I’ll admit to being an apathetic bah humbug about the whole thing (except sorrel!). I think consumerism is in overdrive, but haven’t become one of those families I admire who feed homeless on Christmas Day. We secured a tree, but it’s only two feet tall and her dad organized the whole thing with her while I made impressed noises, suppressing the me who thinks lights just waste electricity. She rightfully complained that there were not enough decorations, and now that it apparently and annoyingly matters, her dad had to go get more. I got her presents, but less because it’s Christmas and more because I want to give her well chosen alternatives to the usual sexism that is offered up in kids’ toy aisles every December.

Today, as we wrapped gifts for her cousins, she looked at her tree, with its one gift (from her school) underneath, and wanted to know where her other gifts were. I wanted to know where she got the idea that kids get more than one gift. She looked at me like I was stupid. She wasn’t born yesterday, or for that matter two years ago, and now clearly remembered something about presents in the plural. As the adult, I got to swing the conversation into a parent-wins moment, emphasizing that there would only be more presents if there was no fussing, no tantrums and no saying ‘no’ between now and Christmas Day. The usefulness of perpetrating the Santa fantasy I had avoided thus far suddenly clicked. Pure bribery, greasing the good behaviour wheels for a few weeks, backing up precious negotiating power against potential toddler guerrilla tactics.

Bring on Christmas I cheered, all spirit, no irony. Today, we also worked on hand-eye coordination (hers and mine) as I tried to wrap gifts shaped, I swear, like whole frozen chicken and she learned how to put scotch tape, not just any or everywhere, but in neat lines that actually cover two ends of paper. Feeling all present in the moment (pun not initially intended), and given that serious socialization is being established, I took the time to talk about how Christmas is not just for getting, but for giving.  I know this is important because when I asked her what gift she got for mummy, she looked not so much at me as through me. The idea had never occurred to her and, now that it did, had no priority.

As the three year old brings in old traditions and establishes new family rituals, fun times and togetherness are undoubtedly ahead.