Some nights you complete a puzzle at 1 am with your daughters and you know the price everyone will pay for staying up so late

but you also know the moment is necessary and worthwhile, has value and importance.

And that’s the horse you are betting on.

Some nights you head to your bedroom and a boy and a puppy are cuddled into your space already

and you know that it is Gift Enough for the moment.

Navigating holidays in divorced families, blended families, step families, broken families, dysfunctional families is like walking across a room strewn full of Legos barefoot at 1 am in the pitch dark.  (And I guess dysfunctional describes nearly all of us, so that’s a broad sweeping statement.)

It’s not a contest and no one is winning.

You know what you need?

A friend.  A friend who can handle the whining and take it in stride.  Who can say, “Yeah. I get it.  I hear you.”  Get a friend who cusses a little too.  Sometimes trash words are the only right words when a situation is too stupid for actual words.  And you both know – this is important – you both KNOW – that all the words stay right there.  It’s going no farther.  You can’t say those things out loud anywhere else – goodness knows you cannot print or type them.  They’re too volatile.  Too in the moment.  Too much part of the process.  You know it.  But you also know that the words need to Get Out Of Your Brain.

Thank God for those friends.  Those people with gracious listening ears, quick wit, a spirit of camaraderie and an acceptance of the junk you’re wading through.

I’ve told my kids – I hate the words even.  Still.  Nearly four years later.  I still loathe the need for a conversation about shared holidays and two Christmases.  It’s dumb.  It’s hurtful.  It’s painful.  It’s a lose lose situation.  It is broken.

And yet.

I don’t hate my life.

This is not my first time saying that sentence.  My kids know well – I hate divorce.  (Still.  And always.)

But I do not hate my life.

And I guess we’ll live in this juxtaposition forever.  On earth.

I cannot even begin to imagine how heaven handles the mess we make of it all here on earth.

I’m counting on not being the one in charge of figuring out that holy seating chart for the big banquet.

But here.  And now.  This mine field of a season.  It’s a train wreck.  It’s a war, still holding hostages.  The price of divorce is always weighing heaviest in the children.  Always.

And it’s just ridiculous to pretend that’s not true.

Solutions.

I do not have a stock of them.

I do know an Anti-Solution is ignoring the problem. Pretending it isn’t damaged and poorly taped back together, stuffing spilling out.

There’s no hope in that.  Cover up. Damage control. Pretend.  There’s no hope in a lie.

All I know to do is to talk.  To laugh a little.  Preferably when it’s most inappropriate.  To say what you feel and to welcome the same from the people at your table.  To be a safe space. Here we are.  It isn’t perfect and it isn’t pretty.

But there’s peppermint patties and there’s monster cookies and we’ve got stockings and we have Today.

So let’s live it.

The gift of now.

It’s as simple and as impossible as all that.

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