It came without ribbons.  It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. 

-Dr. Seuss

How good it is for us when the Lord unsettles our lukewarm and superficial lives.

-Pope Francis on Twitter, April 2014

I started my new job on December 22nd.  They had offered me the new job on the Friday before Columbus Day weekend, but I had successfully been able to postpone starting until I had finished the semester to make a smoother transition for my students and my replacement.  I knew it would be hectic to leave an old job and start a new one with no time off in between.  What I didn’t factor in was the added stress of doing this 3 days before Christmas.

Ideally Advent should be a time of preparation. For college professors, however, the period from Thanksgiving to a couple of days before Christmas is frantic, hectic, crunch time, a time when I typically worked 100 hours a week correcting students work. With final grades due two days before Christmas, I had little time to prepare food, purchase and  wrap gifts or get the house ready.  Worst of all, as I was to find out, I was not spiritually prepared.

I had been optimistically hopeful that since it was Christmas and I hadn’t been trained yet that I would not need to be in the office much that first week; I was wrong.  My first day I commenced training in incident command systems for foreign animal disease disaster response.  I was notified of which programs I would be in charge of and was told to read as much on them as I could.I was asked if I would accompany a field veterinarian for training on Christmas Eve at a location 4 hours from my home.  I didn’t feel like I could refuse.  My husband, however, was convinced that I had taken a new job with an hour and a half commute because I was having an affair; my Christmas Eve travel plans only fueled his fears.

To add to my Christmas Eve stress, the family’s plans had changed.  Normally my sons serves as an MC at both the Christmas Vigil mass and the ‘Midnight’ mass, and I attend both services.  In between the two services, we have a quiet meal with my mom, and my husband joins us when he’s done with his barn chores.  This year one of my adult nieces was sad there was no Christmas Eve party to attend, so my mom decided to invite my nieve and her family to dinner.  And because she invited them, she also had to invite my nephew who had been staying with her on and off, so of course my brother was,invited, and so on.

I was supposed to be the woman with the desserts: the ricotta pies; Grandma’s Italian Christmas cookies made with nuts,dates, figs, cherries, raisins, chocolate, cinnamon, cloves; teh American-style cookies that the fourth and fifth generations seem to prefer with too much frosting and sugar.  In a good year, I made 30 varieties of cookies; in a bad year, only 15.  In addition I was supposed to bring asparagus as a special treat.

Needless to say, my plans didn;t work out very well.  I thoroughly enjoyed my field training, but with every new detail that I absorbed, there was a nagging voice in my head asking, “What time is it?” and “If I leave now, will I make it home in time for mass?”.  I was still an hour and a half from home when the 4:00 Vigil mass started.  I stopped at a grocery store to buy asparagus, and all they had left was green beans.  I had purchased all the ingredients for cookies, but all that I had time to make in the previous two days were four varieties.

When I arrived at my mother’s house, I was late, and stressed, but still looking forward to going to Midnight mass with my son and my mom.  My son, however, had taken ill, and our Pastor had told him to stay home from the second mass.  My mother decided that she didn’t want to go to mass if he wasn’t going to be the MC.  My husband didn’t show up for either dinner or mass because he was still hostile and sullen in reaction to my going out in the field on Christmas Eve.

I was mad at the world.  I had worked and struggled so hard in the days leading up to Christmas, and nothing had gone “my way.”  I was annoyed with my niece for pressuring my mother into having a dinner; I was annoyed with my mom for acquiescing.

I ended up going to mass alone, and that period when I was waiting for mass to begin was one of the loneliest moments of my life.  My son was ill, my marriage was in crisis, and I had utterly failed to prepare for Christmas.  I had no one to go to mass with, and i would once again not be able to receive Communion.  I forced back the tears, but one or two escaped and slid down my face.  I thought of my grandparents and how much I missed spending Christmas with them.  I felt like a failure for not having those Italian cookies that I had enjoyed every Christmas for 48 years, and I felt like I had let the family down.  I could feel the “Christmas and Easter” Catholics staring at me in my chapel veil, and I wallowed in self-pity.

Then mass started, and slowly the sheer beauty and power of the mass was smoothing the jagged edges of my loneliness.  The cantor started to sing an English version of Gesu Bambino, and it was stunningly beautiful.  I let myself feel God’s presence in His house, and I let Him calm me.

Jesus didn’t care about my Christmas cookies.  I felt foolish and silly for sitting in God’s house and worrying about something so trivial.  I would go home and get some sleep.  I would go to a nephew’s house the next day with no cookies, no pie, and hardly any gifts for the adults, but it didn’t matter.  I was going through a major life change, and Jesus wanted me to give myself a break.

There would be more opportunities to make cookies and pies.  In fact, for Catholics the Christmas celebration continues for two more weeks after Christmas Day.  I ended up baking most of my Christmas cookies in the following weeks.  I brought them to work and shared them with my new friends.  Best of all, I was able to witness the joy in their faces as they bit into one of Grandma’s cookies for the first time, something I would have missed if things had gone “my way.”

In life we all make mistakes.  Let us learn to recognize our errors and ask forgiveness.

–Pope Francis on Twitter, March 2014.

In December I changed jobs, and it occurred to me that this will probably be for the last time until I reach retirement age.  For the previous seven years, I had been an associate professor at a state community college.  I met many incredibly dedicated, hard-working, and underpaid people during my teaching career, and it was with mixed feelings that I said goodbye to my old life.  On a mid-December day, our president conducted the last all-college meeting of the semester.  A colleague said some beautiful words, and I was called to the stage to be presented with a bouquet of yellow roses and an embarrassingly generous gift.  I turned to face them and was moved nearly to tears to see my colleagues giving me a standing ovation.  I told them that it was an honor and privilege to work with them, and I would miss them all.

What I did not say was that on that very day, exactly one month and one day shy of my forty-eighth birthday, I had outlived my father.  The  irony of holding a bouquet of roses vs. my father’s dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound was not lost on me.  My father’s life had been a spiral of alcoholism, despair, narcissism, immaturity, and infidelity.  My family was pulled into a dungeon with no escape from the dragon.  I see the damage that he inflicted on my mother, my sister, my brother,,,and on myself.  There are some scars in my family that never get discussed but have colored the thoughts. emotions, and behaviors of us in profound ways.

I started down the same path as my father and easily could have followed the road of  alcoholism and despair to its conclusion.  I fully admit that it has taken me longer to grow up than average.  I have been selfish, stubborn, childish, and demanding.  I have wallowed in self-pity and suffered the effects of trying to get things to go “my way” in life:  the damage to my friendships, my relationships, my career, my reputation, but most of all to my inner peace.

Yet I still believe that I am different from my father.   I have made many foolish mistakes and learned some hard lessons, but I have been able to learn from them and alter my behavior.  I was a victim of many things in my childhood and adolescence, but if I am a victim of those things today, then I am a volunteer.

In a word, I needed to accept responsibility  for my life. No matter where I am at any given moment – happy, sad, poor, solvent, fulfilled, empty, etc. – it is because of choices I have made.  That bears repeating:  my life has turned out the way it has because of choices that I have made.  The good things aren’t luck, and the bad things aren’t someone else’s fault.

It was a bittersweet moment standing on that stage, holding those roses, and in the days that followed they were a frequent reminder of all the conflicting emotions and events that were represented that day.  Was I celebrating the beginning of a new life, or mourning the death of life as I knew it?  Would this new job really be better than the devil I knew?  The only certainty was that my life was in transition, and unlike my father, I was choosing to embrace that change.