The Gift of Lowered Expectations

This needs to be said. Well, maybe it doesn’t need to be said, but without it, the rest of the post won’t make any sense. I am bad at celebrating holidays. All of them. We don’t have picnics on the 4th of July or barbecues on Labor Day. I haven’t attended a parade since the early 1970s. I manage to pull off Thanksgiving dinner every year because I enjoy cooking regardless of the day, but the only hint of it being a holiday meal comes from the menu itself. I don’t do decorations or special table cloths. You get the food and pleasant company and somebody to help you walk off your second piece of pie after dinner. That’s it.

My mother, bless her perpetually optimistic heart, was very good at holidays. She sent out cards, she decorated the house, we always had a tree, and the Christmas dinner table was set with red and green linens reserved only for that occasion. We’d even eat by candlelight for about three minutes until Dad complained that he couldn’t see the food in front of him. She made sure everyone had presents, even knowing that her kindness wouldn’t always be reciprocated. My mother worked really hard to make holidays special, but they were tense and often explosive anyway — because there are some things you can’t cover up with tinsel and wrapping paper. I was in my mid-20s before I experienced a Christmas without a knot in my stomach.

Fast forward a few decades. The knot is gone, but I’ve never been able to generate the excitement that is supposed to accompany this season. It’s nearly the middle of December and our lights are still in the shed, not strung from the eaves. I bake at other times of the year but specifically avoid it now, reasoning that there’s already plenty of fat and sugar in the pipeline so I don’t need to add to it. I haven’t sent any Christmas cards, and my one foray to shop for a tree stalled when I refused to pay $300 for an artificial one. From the look of things around here, it could just as easily be June, not December. I can already picture our daughter’s exasperation when she returns from college next week and finds us in this state.

I’m not completely apathetic. I’ve been knitting almost incessantly, having ignored the warning in my head that some of these projects should’ve been started in October. Unless I break my fingers in the next two weeks, it’ll all work out. Even if I do, it’ll still  work out. Everyone in the immediate family will have presents, albeit small ones. We will spend time together and eat food that we enjoy on Christmas Day. And it will be pretty low-key.

Sometimes I feel guilty for not being more — something — at this time of year. My family has learned to live with my general lack of enthusiasm and low expectations at the holidays, although it’s obvious that some of it has rubbed off on them. I worked harder to fake excitement when the kids were little, but now that they’re adults, they can decide for themselves how much energy they want to invest in the season. I am letting myself off the hook.

On the plus side of low expectations, nobody here ever feels let down because she doesn’t get the Tiffany earrings she wanted and there’s no new laptop in the heap of gifts. When the credit card bill comes in January, we can pay it. My kids have never experienced a Christmas where all their dreams came true (except maybe that train set when Sam was three), but they’ve never had any reason to dread the holiday either, and that feels like a huge step forward to me. If our expectations are low, they’re also achievable and that alone lightens everyone’s mood.

This what I wish for all of us. Not a jaded, too-lazy-to-put-up-the-lights holiday, if you really like hanging lights. But how about the ability to discern what truly matters, what you can realistically accomplish, and what you can let go of? Bake if you love doing it and have time. Skip it if you don’t. Give gifts you can afford. Trim the tree or don’t, knowing that none of this is going on your permanent record. That way, you can give yourself and the people you love the best present — the gift of a stress-free holiday.

Rotating the Cat

We are on our last cat. I like felines just fine. But several years ago, after Kittyboy was already part of the household, one of our kids developed an allergy to cat dander that sends him straight to the box of Claritin as soon as he walks into our house. Even then, he can’t stay long before his eyes start to itch. The cat is too old and weird for us to find him another home now, but since I’d like our son to be able to visit for longer than an hour, we won’t be replacing Kittyboy when he moves on to cat heaven. He’s the end of our feline line.

Kittyboy followed me home in 1997. He’s always been a little odd, even by cat standards. He’s uncoordinated and one of his eyes dilates independently of the other, probably due to some neurological damage before he arrived here. He sometimes sits in the middle of the room with his front paws crossed and falls over for no apparent reason. His leaps to reach his food dish on top of the washing machine are frequently unsuccessful, despite the fact that I’ve arranged a step in front of the machine for easier access. He may not have figured out what the step is for. He’s not very bright.

Kittyboy was terribly anti-social when he was young. He didn’t snuggle, resisted being held (as many young cats do), and would only sleep on our eldest son’s bed. He fought with the neighborhood cats, to the benefit of no one except the vet who earned a lot of money from patching up my little loser. Dogs didn’t scare this kitty, either. Unlike cats with good sense, he would walk toward any dog he didn’t know, regardless of its size, with an expression like Dirty Harry. Make my day.

As he’s gotten older, some things have changed. Because he’s even less agile than he used to be, I only let him outside a few times a week and never at night. He rarely leaves the yard but is content to scratch his claws on one of the trees before finding a sunny spot to take a nap. He’s even spacier than when he was young and will walk into a room and stop mid-stride where he will stay poised until something clicks in his tiny head. If he could talk, he’d be asking the same question we all ask as we age: “What did I come in here for?”

At this stage, Kittyboy lives for two things: warmth and comfort, a big change from his younger, more aloof personality. He isn’t allowed to sleep in our room because he likes to purr directly into my face with his whiskers up my nose. This is not as cute as it sounds, particularly in the wee hours of the morning. So the next best thing is to guilt me into snuggling first thing in the morning. If I’m already up, he will try to herd me back into bed with the same plaintive meow that convinced me to take him home 14 years ago. Sometimes it works, although he pretends not to understand English when I tell him I only have a few minutes. If he finds me at the computer, he will claw his way into my lap and wedge himself between my body and the desk as I type, soaking up warmth. I do not mistake this behavior for affection. I’m just his hot water bottle.

This morning, he got into my bed and fell asleep standing on his head. When it was time to make the bed, I picked him up, still asleep, and moved him into the guest room. That’s his favorite room in the wintertime because the sun shines onto the bed in there most of the day. But of course, as the sun moves across the sky, so does the warm spot.

So several times a day, I shift the kitty across the bed so he’ll always be in the sunny spot. Getting old should have some perks, shouldn’t it? Even for a cat.

If I’m in the laundry room when he wants to eat, I pick him up and put him in front of his food so he doesn’t have to jump. I don’t let the dogs play with him anymore because he clearly no longer enjoys it, and every couple weeks, I inject him with subcutaneous fluids to help his sluggish kidneys. We look the other way now if he gets on the table while we’re eating unless he’s standing in our food. And I rotate him around the sunny spot on the bed every day. I was telling a friend about all this at dinner recently, a little embarrassed that these accommodations might strike someone else as silly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, looking at my husband. “If you’ll do that much for a cat, it sure bodes well for Mike as he gets older, doesn’t it?”