Irresponsible surrendering

Monday morning.  The Christmas tree is up and draped in decorations. It feels like surrender.   On Saturday evening, our house was full of some friends, carol singing in fancy dress to raise money for a kids' charity,  I stood and surveyed the donkey, the Christmas present, the elves, the Christmas and the Christmas pudding that were warming themselves by our fire and realised..... there is nothing I can do! I can't stop Christmas from arriving! So I poured another bottle of mulled wine into the saucepan and joined them!

On Friday night, one of my oldest friends from Germany phoned me to tell me that, after all these years, she has officially become a responsible person. She just got a job as a headteacher. And suddenly I was lost in memories. Meeting her for the first time  on a tram in Hannover 25 years ago. We were both about to start a year 's placement in a nursery for children with additional needs. Stepping off the tram , I took a deep breath and walked up the road towards the nursery with Urte, wondering if she was as nervous as I was, wondering if we would be friends or rivals, wondering if I was going to understand a word anyone said to me.  And a quarter of a century on, I know the answers.   We were both petrified,  we are still friends and for the first few weeks of my time in Hannover, I understood about 2 words.  But often, on our most drunken nights, Urte and I would wonder what it would feel like to be responsible people. Parent, house-owner, headteacher.  The truth is, these things happen almost without you noticing. You don't go to bed one night irresponsible and wake up the next morning weighed down with responsibility. It's a gradual.  Like the making of a patchwork quilt, each new square a deeper colour and a little heavier than the last. There are days when you wish it was still small, wish you could stop anymore patches from being added on. But there are other days when you wrap it proudly around yourself and feel like you have truly achieved something.
Perhaps Christmas is a time for swapping heavy blankets for lighter covers. Perhaps, for just a little while we can all surrender and remember what it feels like to be irresponsible and free.

In the Nursery in Germany, we would write daily diaries for each of the children in our class. We would write about what the children had done or said, What they had had for lunch, who they had played with and any other important  health information.  Which is why I told all the parents in our class to look out for rashes on their children because there had been an outbreak of saucers in the nursery.