Musing

So I was a wreck on Wednesday evening -- weepy, irrational, overwhelmed. Thanksgiving itself was very nice; the preparation was anything but. This makes me think I need a better plan for Christmas. I will be 41 weeks pregnant on Christmas Day (or perhaps newly postpartum, though I doubt it), and I have never found a state of such advanced gravidity to be in any way sanity-enhancing. Quite the opposite, in fact. And if I've had the baby, I'm really not going to be up for hosting.

When I was dating my husband I loved his mother's relaxed approach to hospitality. The more the merrier! Surprise guests are welcome! Make yourself at home! She is from a big Milwaukee Polish family where you'd come home routinely to find your cousins kicking back on the couch watching TV. "You weren't here so we let ourselves in," they'd say. "You should buy some more beer. We drank all you had in the fridge."

I grew up in a family where you'd call the police if you came home and saw lights on in a house you left dark. And I still have some trouble with the difference in our backgrounds, those bred-in-the-bone ideas about how you act in someone else's home.

I don't mind in the slightest if you come to my house and drink all the beer. I like having people over and filling them up with good things. But honestly? It makes me uncomfortable if you rootle around in my refrigerator. I worry that I'm being unwelcoming, or at least that my in-laws perceive me as unwelcoming.

"Do not neglect hospitality," the writer to the Hebrews tells me, and I take that seriously. I want to be welcoming. Forty years from now I do not want to be a sour-faced old lady with spotless carpets and no friends. But I am awfully pregnant, and my desire to be hospitable is wrestling with a nesting instinct run amok and with my introverted tendencies.

Bottom line: if I am still pregnant at Christmas, which is likely, my in-laws will come down to take the boys back to their house for a few days. I need to find a way to make that work for all of us. I'm thinking about just serving brunch, with make-ahead eggy casseroles instead of a traditional Christmas dinner. I'm thinking about posting a sign on the door that says "Tread gently in the habitat of the Giant Nesting CJ-bird -- shoes off here please!" (We have lead-contaminated soil around our home and so we never wear shoes inside. This is my #1 nesting twitch-inducer right now -- please don't track a neurotoxin across my carpet. Is it entirely rational? No -- it's a minor hazard, not a major one, and the boys' lead levels have been within normal limits. Can I shake it? No -- I honestly cannot do it right now.)

I would love some other ideas, because I do not want to spend Christmas Eve the way I spent the night before Thanksgiving. Wacky in-law stories are also welcome.