In the Bleak Midwinter

-26.

It seems we are on the underside of things. The arctic belowness, the cold howl under the stairs. We should have fangs. We should have special powers against frigid bigness and bone cutting sun. If the sound of a saw blade on an armored car were translated into a temperature it would be this. No meal is warm enough. No sound quite calms.

You are in a monkey suit. Four month crankiness trailing its muddy cape into today. Last night, between breasts, you screamed while I changed you. The room was dim, perhaps you could not find my face. Perhaps you were teetering between dream and truth and finding the humidifier's air too cool and real.

There is a barista here who claims he likes every kind of weather. "Even this?" I said to him darkly today.

He swirled a leaf into my latte's foam. "Yep. I get to wear my boots," he said, raising his leg to show me, "and my other cold weather gear."

This is the kind of attitude it would be good for a mother to have. One who, given lemons, is already grating their zest onto a cake. I am a mother who, given lemons, complains about their weight and the space they are taking up in the refrigerator.

In church today we sang "In the Bleak Midwinter." The last line never fails to make me teary. But church does that to me often, makes me feel soft and tender even if on the outside I'm all iron and bite. Today we listened to John's birth story, the one that contains no birth. No angels or oxen or swaddling clothes, no mother or father or baby. Just the Word made flesh.

And there are times, my sweet darling daughter, where you are words made flesh for us, too. Words like joy and grace and love. And I am being sentimental here, I know, but it is true. You are the embodiment of the abstract for me, the imagined made real, hope made palpable.

You poop and you cry and you spit tiny chunks of milk. And Jesus did too. And so the Word became complex and unpredictable; smelly and staining; uncomfortable and unrelenting. Humbled and humbling.