New Year’s Eve was SO much fun. It was enlightening, too.
I spent it with my son at the New Year’s Eve Old Farmer’s Ball. Twinkle lights and contra dance, live music and food. No drunks (we knock those off the dance floor). It was a cold evening, perfect for a winter’s celebration, but not so cold that you had trouble getting your “groove on.”
Contra dancing is a new love of ours. We go every week. It’s how my son spells himself from the rigors of his studies at the university and it’s something we can still do together (things we can do together are getting harder to find…). So we did not hesitate when we saw the flyer for the New Year’s Eve Ball, I forked our money over on the spot. All that fun for $20 a head? A no-brainer.
The theme was “An Evening in Paris.” Lovely idea. They had the exposed beams of the historic college gym swathed in enough tulle to outfit a hundred brides and rows of twinkle lights formed the Eiffel Tower behind the band. The caller was a spry young man who occasionally picked up a trombone, an odd but delightful addition to the fiddles and guitars. We twirled, we waved, we joined hands-4. By the end of the night, most of the two hundred plus of us had danced with the other two hundred. Part of the magic that is contra.
But it was in the embraces of the night that I found an epiphany for the New Year. My son and I dread New Years. It’s a dark anniversary for us. My husband (his dad) had his first massive stroke on New Years. Out of the blue – sort of. There’s a mystical awareness that comes up in the space that surrounds that time. And it can get ugly when we wander into each other’s emotional “space.” The contra took that pain and swirled it in the air, filled our dark place with twinkle lights and music, thank you God… and yet… as man after man embraced me in the dance, my body felt strangely weepy. In between the spins and the turns an odd awareness dawned: no one had held me.
No one held me the night he stroked or all those days when he was in the ICU. Not the first time or the second time. God knows he couldn’t hold me anymore, it was like he didn’t remember how, and he couldn’t kiss me either, but that’s another story. No one held me when they said he would need to come home for rehab after the first one and I cried and said I didn’t know how–didn’t know if I could–do it. (I made damn sure our son didn’t have to. No 15-year old boy should have to do that.) I held our son, as much as he would let me.
No one held me when it happened again, the night of my birthday, 10 months later. No one held me when we disconnected him from life support. No one held me when he died or when we lowered his urn into the ground, no one embraced me at the funeral. No one had touched my pain with the strength of their own body.
But they held me at the New Year’s Ball! In the arms of the contra–two hundred strong–they held me away from my darkness and released me into the dance. As one man after the other (and a few women, too, this is Asheville after all) embraced me and held me tight and spun me to another, I found a healing I did not even know I needed. When I realized what the dance had given me, I wept.
I wept for the longing of my own body for that which only another human being can give. The hug. The simple gesture of “I get it and I’m sorry” that we sometimes hesitate to share. I wept for the loneliness of my journey and the aching of the weight that was thrown onto my shoulders. So many decisions, so many details, so many traumatic moments, so many unending duties and the seeing of our son through. I wept remembering that I drove myself to the hospital both times and drove myself home the day he died. (While an idiot nephew texted my son that his dad was dead. A crime I’ve been condemned for and probably always will be, “Why didn’t you follow the band bus into the middle of God-only-knows-where and tell me yourself, Mom?!!! I found out my dad was dead from a text!” I had begged the family to wait to tell their kids until I had told ours. A small courtesy. If murder were legal…)
I can’t give those times back to myself, it was what it was and it did what it did to all three of us. But I will be held in the loving arms of the dance itself as often as I can and find in it my healing.
May you find that which you need, too. Let me know if I can help! Happy New Year!
Old Farmer’s Ball New Year’s Contra Dance
