Mama's Haven

“On the fifth day of Christmas
My true love sent to me
Five golden rings
Four calling birds
Three french hens
Two turtle doves and
A partridge in a pear tree.”

Ever since I got married and more so since I had Emma, I had wanted a nativity scene. There is something about the visual and the palpable that makes Christmas more real for everyone, especially when you have little ones in the house.

Emma, like any other 5 year old girl out there, loves Frozen.She knows the songs (and begs me NOT to sing when I try to, as I “embarrass her”, haha), she has the movie, both Anna and Elsa’s dresses, a number of outfits sporting the princess sisters, Frozen bedding, blankie and cushion. Santa will be bringing her an Elsa doll to keep Anna doll (the one she got for her birthday) company.

So when we were asked to review and get creative with a beautiful Anna and Elsa art set, guess what our response was?  Oh, yeah, you guessed it! Cause a girl can never have too many Anna and Elsa items, this we can agree on!

Emma got busy right away with it, as soon as it arrived, and it was declared her favourite and best art set ever :-). We printed some Frozen colouring in pages to start with:

Emma loves drawing and recently, following her teacher’s prompting, she has started talking about “using her imagination” to create things. So, I wasn’t surprised when the next thing she came up with, following her creativity and her new art set, was a drawing of Elsa in her ice palace. Have a look, isn’t it so imaginative and cute, her interpretation:

Last night, she wrote a note to Julia, her elf in the shelf and thanked her for her recent gift of books and chocolate. Here is her drawing of Julia and our Christmas tree, the place where Julia usually leaves a wee something for Emma every morning:

Disclaimer: Just like a family holiday away and the memories that are created then, Emma’s gifted art set is a present that will keep on giving, for the weeks and the months to come. It was sent to us by the lovely people at Florida4Less but the thoughts expressed in this post are entirely our own.

I have been told this so many times in the past few days.

But I do not feel loved.

I feel that our loss has made us stranger than a stranger to those who surround us.

I am odd, a misfit, a foreigner, as in “a person not belonging to a particular place or group; an outsider.”

When Georgie died, I wanted to make sense of his death. I wanted his death not to be in vain. I wanted his death to have a reason. To have an explanation. To lead to something noble.

But then, I came face to face with the cruel reality. The reality is that death is not a subject we talk about as a society. It is a taboo. It is a nuisance. It is a too much in the face of comfort a subject.

Death is classed as inappropriate in “civilised” conversation. Pick the weather, the seasonal trends or the pets. But not death. Never death. Death is not a comfortable subject, not even in church, not even in the presence of the good news gospel. Death remains marginal a subject, even if it is the unavoidable entrance door to Heaven.  Death has become prejudiced against in church. The unexplainable, unfair, cruel death of a baby or a child, even more so.

We have become so sold to the idea of miracles and signs and wonders and the supernatural, we are so thirsty for fairytale, happy endings that death inconveniences. Even in church. And especially in the happy, clappy, “Spirit-driven” church.

Death inconveniences so much that, silence follows it unequivocally. Just like a parent teaches predominantly through body language and non-verbal cues, the church teaches its people through its silence.

And I feel that, like in The Lord of the Flies, the community of believers, in the absence of a discourse and driven by the silence of their leaders, proceed to draw their own conclusions and follow the pack instinct.

The odd-ones out, the misfits, the (eye) sores, the “depressed”, are eliminated from the community of “normals” as weaklings, as monstrosities. Just like in the olden days disabled babies would have been thrown off cliffs because they didn’t fit the norm, these days I feel Christians whose lives did not produce a miracle through prayer and faith(oh yeah, the big F word!) are pushed off the edge of the hope cliff by silence.

If miracles are the expectation, the rule, the norm, the desired outcome, then the ones without a miracle are monstrously misfitting and need smoothed out, like an annoying wrinkle on the ironing board.

I have been doing a lot of thinking. A lot of accepting. A lot of coming to terms with.

I need to say this out loud.

Death is part of life. Death will come for all of us. Death is the exit door for us all, sooner or later.

I have known the pain of death. I have thought it would be the greatest pain there ever was. But the silence is worse. I know it now.

P.S.- my baby has been dead five months today. He lived for only five and a five months so we are facing Christmas as the month when Georgie would have been in heaven for longer than he has been on earth. Please don’t be silent about it!