Mothers and daughters: nativity set

Christian Century, Dec 18, 1996 by Martha Whitmore Hickman

The child sits on the oriental rug in the living room, pressing the large blue disc against the red tiddlywink. Snap. The red piece flips into the glass cup. She snaps another. And another. One misses.

She has been shooting the tiddlywinks to contain her excitement until she's summoned to dinner. There mill be presents on her chair. It is her birthday. She is eight. In two weeks it will be Christmas.

"Ready!" her mother calls.

She gets up so quickly she's dizzy, and staggers to the dining room. On her chair are the presents. A new sweater. A comb and brush set. A game of Lotto. Then she comes to The Blue Fairy Book. On its blue cover a youth in cape and jerkin and green tights kneels before a crowned lady with butterfly wings. On the back cover a club-wielding giant chases a princess fleeing on horse-back.

Another gift - it takes her a deliciously long, suspenseful time to unwrap all the pieces - is a nativity set: shepherds, a sheep, two standing wise men and one who kneels, a spindly brown camel. And the holy family. Under the yellow roof of the fiberboard manger go the seated Joseph in brown and purple garments, Mary in a red gown, blue cape and white headdress, the small wax baby with a tiny gold halo, resting on bits of straw in his gray slatted cradle.

Quickly she sets up the tableau on a side table. "Can I leave it here for Christmas?"

"Of course." Her mother is delighted the gifts are so pleasing to her - the nativity set, the book of stories.

Her family cannot get over how well she is. She has been severely ill with a bloodstream infection. She was not expected to live. As it is, she has been confined to bed for a year, listening to her older sister play in the yard outside, listening to her baby brother's infant sounds, to the family laughter rising up the stairwell to her room.

But now she is miraculously well, getting stronger. "You were saved for something special," her mother tells her, holding her close.

"More special than being a mother?" she thinks. She wants to be a mother when she grows up. Her mother has saved her from death, taking such good care of her. That is what mothers do.

She is grown now, married, the mother of children - three sons, a daughter. The Blue Fairy Book is on the desk in her study. She is a writer, a maker of stories. "It is my something special." She smiles, remembering.

In the attic, above the drop-down ladder of the stairs, is her nativity set. Every year, on her birthday, she takes it down. Her daughter helps her set. it up. It is something they do together. One year her daughter cuts little shreds of paper to replace the thinning straw. They take turns holding the tiny baby Jesus, the modeling of his wax face growing more abstracted, shallow, through the succession of hot summers under the eaves. "Look at him," they say fondly to one another, smiling.

Then, one day, her daughter dies.

Grief immobilizes her. Nudges her awake each morning, numbs her into sleep, shades her dreams. When she reaches for her husband - even then, she yearns for the child.

She looks in the mirror. Her face is scoured with grief Behind her hollow, burned-out eyes, she reads another message: You have failed. "`Something special' - this?" she wonders.

She will rescue the child. Resuscitate her, write her back into life. She writes and writes. Stories about children. Memoirs of loved ones. It is her way of keeping in touch with her child. Her writing moves through her, saying what it must.

One day her eldest son brings home a young woman. They are lovers. She has blue eyes and a winning smile. The woman becomes like a daughter. Then she, too, leaves. It is not a good match.

Other young women come - friends of her sons, lovers, in time, wives. She loves them. There is room in her heart for many loves. But one room remains always empty. In the center of that room is a keening sound, like a moan.

Often she goes steadfastly past the room. Sometimes, off guard, she is drawn in. Other times she opens the door herself. Inside is a hollowness like the hollowness of her own body, where her dead child once lived. But it is larger than that - it encompasses the whole world, where her child once lived.

A friend her own age writes her. "This year my mother died. She was 90." The friend is a psychologist. She writes, "I'm learning myself what I have told my clients for years. It is the profoundest relationship."

She has her reservations - knowing how she has loved sons, husband, father. Still, "Is it any wonder?" she thinks. "It is not surprising." And she goes to the empty room, the keening room, and notices pictures on the walls. Her daughter as an infant playing with her brothers. Holding her confirmation Bible, wearing her new dress. An adolescent, standing on a diving board, ready to jump off.

She writes and writes. It is the best way she knows to reach for her daughter, to make something of her hunger, to fill the empty room. Sometimes she wonders, "If my daughter had not died, would I be a writer?"

"You were a writer before," she reminds herself. "But you would be a different writer."