A letter to the Kendrinthians

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Untitled I finally recycled the Christmas cards from last year. The first one in our mailbox, like a mechanical cuckoo busting out of its hatch, gave me permission.

As I dropped the pile of cards that had been hanging like its own bunting banner in our kitchen for a full year, the arms of two places reached and held me for a moment. It was liminal. Liminal meaning the way one can occupy two places at once, on the edges of both places. I was moving from the last year's place of assurance to this year's unknowns. Last year we were well-remembered and well-loved. This year, we hope it is the same or better.

It's just paper, Kendra. It's paper and humble-brag and holly. But it's more than a steady stream of smile grams and glossy postcards. It's a letter to the Kendrinthians. It's trust that the tide will rush back in this month. It's believing that the smiles by mail will say, We remembered you. Here is a new way to remember us in your mind's eye, with our rad plaids and dandy bowties.

***

I have only learned how to be a good friend in recent years. Embarrassingly recent. I've been surrounded by a big family and endless acquaintances for my entire life. I've faked extroversion and gushed over connections and given salutatorian addresses to loud applause.  All the while I've been lonely as hell. I stood behind the Dairy Queen counter and customers told me not to smile so much. I went home and wore out my Tori Amos "Little Earthquakes" cassette and soaked my pillow with salty tears. There are places worn thin in my girlhood bedroom carpet, wear I knelt in the sad Boo Radley isolation that only a melodramatic teen could ever maintain. I've been surrounded and smother-hugged and had to pull away to get some air. For years.

I hadn't learned to embrace the good within yet. How could I let myself be embraced from without?

***

It took learning that He is Goodness and He abides in me to change the tide. Once I realized that a holy portion of Goodness rocks it on my insides, what was there not to love? It's not self-love--it's a love of a Creator who occupies broken vessels and fills in the gaps with an adhesive that is stronger than any force I know, which has flooded me to overflowing. It has been liminal space. Realizing the love that was within me was also the love I have to give. Realizing always that I am at the edge of a love so great, it can overflow without doing damage. The love spills out and for maybe the last seven years, I've learned to be the kind of good-ass friend I would want. In turn, I have been blessed and highly favored by good-ass friends. I'm grateful and wealthy indeed.

***

I'm wishing a dear lady a happy birthday today. You taught me that kindness is a prettier dress than judgypants. I thank you. 

Multi-cultural Monday: Holidays + Disappointments

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The first in a series on multi-cultural marriage/family

It wasn't until I joined an online group of multi-cultural families that I realized I wasn't alone. The pain I was harboring over holidays in my multi-cultural marriage was not isolated. So many marriages and families, whether they identify as multi-cultural or not, struggle especially around the holidays to incorporate traditions or build new ones that bring meaning to their lives. This is my experience in mourning and reinventing the holidays in a way that works for our family.

*** I was a new bride. It was our first Christmas together with my husband's family. There wasn't a Christmas tree at my in-law's house much less a trace of holly. There wasn't anything that qualified as a Christmas cookie or really anything sweet in supply. Presents weren't a big deal, nor was having a decorative manger or singing Christmas carols or gathering with a big group of family and friends. These were the accoutrements of a holiday that I had come to love and look forward to with my own biological family, in spite of the pain of divorce and the loss of family members that had placed a strain on the holiday in the past.

My mother-in-law and me, riding to a Korean new year celebration at their church.

We sat, my in-laws, my husband and me, on the floor of their living room on Christmas night, watching "Pirates of the Caribbean." I went to get the pint of ice cream I had bought at CVS. I served a bowl to my father-in-law. "Why I can't understand they talking?" asked my mother-in-law as she tried to follow the movie. "Because it's pirate talk," my husband explained. Why can't I understand this Christmas, I thought. I feel like pirates have jacked my white Christmas. *** My in-laws immigrated from Korea to Canada in the late 1970s. Christmas in their post-war Korea was not about decorating or consumption. It was, like the rest of life, about survival. In my in-laws' faith tradition, to which I had converted, Christmas is celebrated but not not as a "high holiday" as in other traditions. They were just happy to have their children home and to eat well and celebrate blessings.

The Lees and a Lee-to-Be*** I was angry, and I didn't want to feel angry at Christmas, I told my husband. As a fixer, my husband asked me what I needed. (What I needed was an attitude adjustment, plain and simple, but I wasn't ready to see that yet.) I wanted a tree and lights or just some simple marker that this was Christmas, I said. wreath.kendy.jpg

But of course, it wasn't really about the tree. It wasn't about the cookies or lights. It wasn't about watching incomprehensible pirate movies on Christmas.

I just wanted to feel that I had not given up all of my traditions in order to be a part of this new family. 

I think a lot of us feel this way, even if our marriages/families are not cross-cultural. The totems, the traditions, the reminders of from whence we come are important to us. It's not our job to impose these on others, but we get to bring strands and sprinkles of them into our new family. It's our job to do so. Frustrating though it may be, it's not our spouse's job to know what tradition is important to maintain if we don't share this with them, explain why it matters, and be willing to help institute it.

After ten years of marriage, my husband and I start thinking about the holidays, especially Christmas, around this time so we can look forward with anticipation rather than dread. We plan activities we can do with my in-laws, we think about the presents we'll buy or the acts of service we can coordinate with our church to bring more cheer to the season. The goal is not to do a museum installation of my childhood Christmas at my in-laws' house. The goal is to incorporate threads of my traditions with new moments that bring meaning to our family time which is a big fat Korean-Irish-Italian blessing in itself.

And you? Have you blended your childhood traditions with new ones in your marriage/family?

Seven feet of invisible snow in New England

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The snow was so high and stiffly packed that winter; it was impossible to trudge home from the train without collecting snowflake souvenirs in my boots every night. It was my first full year of living in Boston and the winter was kicking my tail. The sun was still setting at some obscenely early hour, and I was a desk jockey pulling long hours for little pay, so I basically never saw the sun or my boyfriend or my friends. Color me depressed. I remember looking up and seeing a sign posted on a telephone pole that someone had Sharpied in black:

I'LL PAY YOU $10 TO DIG OUT MY CAR

I remember thinking how much would be reasonable to charge for someone to dig me out of my McJob life, to be perfectly dramatic.

*** My Boston comrades are still digging out of seven feet of snow. As is their trolley/subway system. New Englanders are bandying about phrases like "ice dam" which should only ever refer to a slip-n'-slide for penguins in the Arctic Circle. Their cabin fevers are spiking to epic highs. I mean--have you SEEN it up there? The whole situation is terribly unfair.

*** We agree, you and I, don't we? That the Nor-easters that keep dumping more snow on an already bewildered geography really smack of injustice and horror? We see the pictures of (or we experience firsthand) the shoveling and the roof-clearing and the endless headaches of commuting and we all are very much of one accord: That's painful stuff. Nobody deserves that. I'm really sorry.

I'm guessing that neighborliness increases in these times, too. There's a sort of camaraderie to picking up the shovels and knowing we're all in this Us v. Winter thing together.

But we all know that eventually winter ends. The snow melts. The swan boats emerge in the Public Gardens once more. The solution to the winter problem is the reliability of the earth orbiting as it should around the sun.

*** I have to remind myself that the private pains people carry are very much like the seven feet of snow, only invisible. I have friends dealing with diabetes, cancer, the grief of losing a parent. I have students who are hungry, lonely, hyper-anxious. My husband treats clients whose secrets could ruin lives--are ruining lives. They are buried under heavy blankets of snow. The meteorologists can't forecast what's ahead. They are not sure when this winter will end.

***

I've lived through my share of winters, literal and figurative, and the invisible winters are always harder to weather.  Friends, if you need someone to help you dig out, I hope someone you trust can be there. If you call me, I'll probably send you links to cat videos on Youtube, but at least you'll know you are loved and you can keep the $10.