On Christmas Hope

LOVE LOVE LOVE, these excited-Christmas-morning-waiting-to-see-what-Santa-brought-boys! 2008

We all have our stories; threads of experiences that when woven together make up the cloth of our character. My mother is cut from the finest weave and part of her story (the cashmere part of her character I imagine) is a story I can’t remember not knowing. In fact, it’s a story I grew up loving; one with a sad beginning, one where there is a car accident on a lonely stretch of desert highway during a dark, dark May night.  Two sisters and a brother are hit by a drunk driver, the details include a head on collision, the sound of metal ripping and suitcases being ejected from the back of a white pickup truck to land open halves on the highway; the contents forever lost, ground into the black asphalt, papery ashes.  In this story, one of the sisters dies and one of the sisters breaks both of her legs and crushes her pelvis.  The sister with the broken legs is my mother. It's a story I've heard all my life, I know it beginning to end:

After the long ambulance ride to the hospital, the doctor on call wanted to amputate my mom's legs because they were crushed so badly, mangled by the impact of a car’s motor ramming into them. (I remember my mom telling me how she temporarily regained consciousness at the crash site and thought there was a stick poking out of her leg, so she tried to pull it out, but it was her tibia). When the drunk driver’s car hit my families, it did so at an angle; my Aunt Ann, who was sitting by the window, took the brunt of the force, then my mother, then my Uncle Guy who was driving.  Miraculously, an orthopedic surgeon, (a rarity in rural communities in those days) who had moved to St.George, Utah three days earlier, was able to save my mom's legs. However, the relief in repair was tempered with the stern warning that my mother might not ever walk again and because of the damage to her pelvis and internal organs, would probably never have children.

My mother Ruth Ellis with her delicious and very kissable grandson Aiden Ellis 2013

I used to lean against my mom on the couch while she talked, wondering how it would feel to be in a body cast up to your armpits. Wondering what it was like to be confined to a wheel chair or a bed with the  phone resting on your plaster cast in case somebody wanted to call and talk to you and you couldn't get up to answer the phone. In this story, the sad beginning moves on to a sad middle. The middle part is where my mother tries to learn to live her life without her sister, which isn't easy. And it's also the part where the numbness of shock and disbelief wears off like spent Novocain and my mom starts to feel again. This is the part where she laments over trading spots with her older sister only moments before they came up on a rise in the road and were greeted by the glare of headlights rushing straight at them like a freight train; there was no time to react. They were blinded by the intensity of light. “It was so hot in the car,” my mom had said, pushing a piece of hair behind my ear. “Ann had sat on me, until I moved. We were laughing the whole time.” In the middle part my mother wonders if she'll walk again, she wonders if she'll have children, she wonders why she's still living while her sister died. But then, towards the ending of this story, things start looking up a bit. This is the part I always liked. This is the part that happens at Christmas.

When the weave of my mom’s fabric inexplicably changed from silk to wool in a flash, she was only twenty. She’d just finished two years of college, but was stuck at home that fifth semester while her legs healed. In this ending part, my mother told me how hard it was to be home with her three brothers; everyone trying to act normal and celebrate like they always did. She helped decorate the tree from her wheel chair (and in my ever dramatic mind I imagined her throwing silver icicles on the tree and missing the limb; the icicles coming apart in mid air and falling lifelessly to the ground). She listened to carols on the radio and tried not think if her sister Annie was still alive, she would have been playing the piano and my mom would have been singing. She said she tried not to think about how they would have slept in the attic painted purple together, and raced down the steep stairs two at a time to open presents in the morning. She said, mostly, she just tried to not to think at all.

Logan said he closed his eyes on purpose so he could wish extra hard

! 2008

In this ending part, my mother is still in a wheel chair. And while her legs are healing, and it's been seven months since the accident, she still can't walk. She told me, while I snuggled closer, my knees pulled to my chest, that on Christmas morning she’d sat on the couch in her plaid flannel nightgown, smiling and opening presents with her brothers. (I always asked her what she got, but she never remembered). And then, just when she thought there were no presents left, her dad said, (and this is the part where my mom always smiled) “There is one more gift for Ruthie.” (And this is the part where I smiled because I knew what the present was). There against the wall, behind a sheet, next to the curtains, was a bike, but my mom didn’t know it was a bike until her dad pulled off the sheet, and she saw it, all shiny, with wide white handlebars, and the seat with the springs under it. This is the part where my mom said, “Dad, why did you get me a bike? I can't even walk yet.” And then my grandpa told her while he stroked her hair, just like my mom stroked mine, “But you will, Ruthie. You will.”

“See, Joanie,” my mother would explain, “Grandpa had faith that I would walk again, he had so much hope, that he gave me a bike, before I could even stand.”  And as I leaned against her safe and warm, I would remember how I learned to ride my bike and how it felt to have my dad holding the seat, and running behind me. “Christmas,” my mom would say, “Is all about hope.”

 

Gingerbread house making boys (do you think the sugar is affecting Spencer?) 2008

For me, I need hope like I need air, which is why I love Christmas and the chance it offers to breathe deeply (my boys do look at me weirdly while I gulp asking, “What are you doing mom? You look strange. Are you choking? Close your mouth!”). I confess, when struggling through the middle parts of my life, I have craved the hope synonymous with Christmas even in the middle of July. And in those dark moments when the weave of my spirit seems to be coming apart at the seams the lines from “O Holy Night” have played out in my heart and given me comfort. I know I am a blessed girl, I’ve always known, but even with all my worldly comforts I sometimes think I might know something of how those little shepherds may have felt as they bleary eyed watched over their flock. Like my predecessors, I have longed for, or as the lyrics read, “pining” for “a thrill of hope” and like the rest of the “weary world” I too have been gratefully overwhelmed when night has split apart and “yonder breaks a new and glorious morn…”

For this picture alone (everyone looking AND smiling) my boys made it on the nice list. Jackson 2011

  Hope is such a precious commodity. It should be savored, shared and remembered. I have learned on those nights in mid June when daylight can’t seem to reach me quick enough; when a thread from my soul has become caught in the Velcro of my son’s shoes and I find myself unraveling stitch by stitch, to think of the Christmas bike.  To remember my mother did learn to walk again and that she rode her bike with the desert sun shining on her the whole time she pedaled. She married my dad and had five kids. And in those particularly black moments when I've felt broken and hopeless, I've thought of the Christmas bike and how when I asked my mom how she learned to walk again, she said, “First I had to learn to crawl.”