No Presents, Just Presence
What can my spirit afford to give right now?
I don’t have presents for my kids this year. And that feels like a relief.
After everything this year has held, my son’s birth in March, my toddler daughter being taken from me in May, the daily mental fight to remain patient, prayerful, steady, hopeful enough to believe regulation would return to my world, I had to ask myself a quieter question than usual. What can my spirit actually afford to give right now?
The answer came back soft and simple. My present self, fully available. The gift of just myself.
That sentence carries more weight than I expected. It keeps brushing up against old memories. My mom used to say that the lights being on were a gift. The rent is paid. Food in the fridge. Survival dressed up as a celebration. Back then, it sounded like a joke. Now I understand how serious she was.
We sometimes measure ourselves by holiday cheer, how much money we save or don’t save, how happy we can make my babies with how much we can put under a tree. This has been tradition and yet, not always. I went many Christmases presentless. My mother coming into our rooms to say, “Maybe next year.” And sometimes there was disappointment, but most of the time, I would not care. I knew my mother was struggling, even when I was my daughter’s age. I was aware of how impossible my mother’s job was each day. And I would find myself yearning less for presents, and more for a breakthrough.
We don’t have much right now. Just enough. Just love. What we do have is going toward a lawyer, toward keeping our footing after a year that rearranged everything. Trauma has a way of turning time into rubble. Rebuilding is rarely festive. It is paperwork. It is court dates. It is learning how to regulate your nervous system while still nursing a baby, still mothering, still showing up.
I am trying to steady my life, not decorate it.
This season insists that love should look like wrapped boxes and visible proof of provision. But what I am offering my children is continuity. Safety. The lights are on.
For those of you who are new here, a brief truth about me. I am a domestic violence survivor. I am also a mother surviving state violence. My daughter was taken from me by an abusive partner, and I carry the familiar weight so many women know, the weight of being labeled a baby mama, of mothering without protection, of having motherhood turned into a battlefield. I live with the knowledge that loving a child outside of safety changes you. And still, I am here.
I am learning that this was never meant to make me small. Only precise. Only honest about what love actually costs.
Maybe this is the gift this year. Honesty. It may be too abstract for my five-year-old and my nine-month-old to understand right now. But it will live in their bones. When life asks them hard questions, when love costs something, they will remember that hard times can hold soft moments.
Maybe that is the antidote.