The Ghost of Christmas Past
“Your new life is going to cost you your old one. It doesn’t matter. All you’re going to lose is what was built for a person you no longer are.”
Two Christmases ago, I left behind the mulled wine and candlelit kiosks of Europe’s storied holiday markets for my first visit back to the Pacific Northwest after beginning my round-the-world sojourn. I arrived as men in red plaid flannel, axes swinging from gloved hands, hoisted the frosty firs and pines that crowd Oregon’s forests onto their shoulders and carried them indoors, topped them with stars, adorned them with lights. Celebrated them. Like the trees, I was ushered in with no small degree of fanfare. At home, but not.
Two Christmases ago, I returned from a long walk across Portugal and Spain to the house that had once been mine but now belongs exclusively to my former husband. Our youngest child, who also returned home for Christmas from her freshman college term, asked that it be so: that she and I and the farmboy spend our first post-divorce holiday together on the farm we built. He and I were friends still so the request seemed easy enough to oblige. For her, for us. He and I missed each other, too. In the abstract, in anticipation, I felt nervous yet heartened by the chance to share the house briefly in this altered way. Him, in the bedroom that had once been ours; me, in the empty room belonging to the son who remained in Europe that Christmas. “Silent Night” wafted down the long stretch of hall between the farmboy’s space and mine. A fire blazed in the hearth.
In so many ways this wasn’t hard, for a sizeable piece of my heart still and always will abide there with him. And in other ways it was so very difficult, for the exact same reason. Some routines we slipped back into easily — curling up with the dogs to puzzle out New York Times word games as the sun set; taking turns, daily, with the opening gambit — while other habits we struggled to break. He carried in the mail as he’d done every day for nearly 14 years and I instinctively tore open the top envelope before dropping it back on the counter with a swift apology. He laughed; said he doesn’t care if I open his mail. But I do. It’s not mine anymore. It’s not my place to open it. It’s not my place in so many ways.
It’s a strange thing to come home to a home that no longer counts as home. Stranger still, to come home to a home whose door has already been opened to others. To be in the building, yet displaced from an environment that continues to reverberate with one’s spirit.
We all have consecrated space in our lives; pockets of our past that are hallowed ground for ourselves and for those who love us. For me, for our family, it’s this farm we built together.
For nearly the entirety of our marriage, the farmboy and I labored furiously as a team, the children at our side, tackling the long and arduous task of actualizing one of the many individual dreams eagerly proffered to each other in the earliest stages of our courtship. I shared with him my yearning to someday escape the dreary Oregon winters and return to the novelty of life overseas, at least part-time, once the kids were grown, while he more immediately hoped to craft a working farm and homestead out of a 43-acre patch of blackberry- and poison-oak-infested land on an Oregon mountaintop. Those early years of our life together — full to overflowing with young children, passels of pets, and nascent business endeavors — proved to be prime root-generating season, and since farming fed this city-girl’s yen for fresh challenge we aimed our intentions toward the land he already had designs on. Trespassing in what was then someone else’s vacant field, getting to know each other while hidden in the tall grass that swallowed the acreage, he told me this patch of land felt like his place in the world, and I could always see it for what we’d eventually make of it once we made it ours. In what had been a fetid mudhole off to our left that day a decade-and-a-half ago, I saw a swim pond ringed in irises, with a shaded beach and a firepit and a dock from which joyful voices would echo over the hills. Over there, on the far side of the 1970s double-wide trailer where we would reside for four and a half years while we cobbled together enough of a house to live in, the gabled animal barn rose in my mind’s eye with jaunty eaves that would eventually shelter Clydesdales, with a loft where the children could overnight and a warming paddock inside where a fawn would one day cozy up with miniature donkeys and leap with glee when I approached with her bottle. On that gravel spit up by the road I could see the covered bridge we’d erect at the entry, him swinging hammers and me scaling the walls with paint brushes clenched between my teeth, flecks of paint speckling my hair. And passing through that covered-bridge-to-be, I imagined the long driveway that wouldn’t exist until he and I walked it, hand-in-hand, then shovels-in-hand; the long drive that wends past the hay barn he’d side with knotty pine and I’d cover in dozens of outsized barn quilts that took summer after endless summer to craft; the long drive lined in profusions of black-eyed Susans I’ve always loved and maples he planted as wee things that now explode in red fireworks every October. The long drive that ends at the low footbridge built on bended knee, with reverence, over a babbling brook leading to the threshold of the home we’d construct together to shelter our family.
There’s something about homesteading that’s profoundly more personal even than having a home custom-built to one’s specifications. Something about shining light into darkness not because you arrived and flipped a switch you asked a builder to position on that wall over there but because
you cleaved the earth and dug the ditch
into which you placed the sheaths
through which you threaded the cable, snaking underground
that you manhandled and prised indoors
to obscure behind walls you’d raised but had to breach
violently
to extract the colorful strands
that you separated and twisted with bare hands
marrying live wires to fixtures and outlets
room-by-room
so that daily a dozen times over when someone touches a light switch your energy is part of the power that surges through the home. That farm and the house and outbuildings on it are my life’s finest work of art and most consumptive labor, as they are his. That homestead exists because we — individually, and as a couple — imagined it, designed it, crafted it, plowed it, nailed it, hammered and hewed and hoisted it to life. It is no more possible to extract my essence from that place than it would be to extract his, for we are infused throughout it: we raised every rafter, we sowed every seed, we bled and laughed and broke and rebuilt something in every room, every outbuilding, every acre.
“I don’t want him in this house with another woman.” It’s the first thing our youngest daughter said, the only one of our four collective children still living at home, the day we sat her down and told her our marriage was ending. Told her the farmboy had decided not to join me in chasing my long-held dream made possible, finally, by the children’s fledging: to escape Oregon’s darkest and most depressing days and infuse our lives with the fresh stimuli I so needed by overwintering in a sunnier spot abroad. My willingness — nay, my determination — to go anyway, even when he said he wouldn’t accompany me and couldn’t tolerate me going without him, represented a degree of independence inconsistent with his partnership ideal and left him equally determined I would have to go permanently.*
Grief spilled out of our daughter first, but close on its heels a desperate, righteous indignation: “I don’t want him in this house with another woman.” She understood instinctively, as did I, that he intended to retain this lifestyle and this land while swiftly seeking out another woman to join him on it. Her defensive pronouncement belied her love. I am, after all, my daughter’s mother. I am her roots and her first world; the center from which she sprang. Adolescent angst and burgeoning independence will do their part to separate us in practical and necessary ways, but I will remain, as mothers do if we are lucky, her true north. In her worldview, I am irreplaceable. It is ever so human to want that to be true universally. Ever so human to rage upon discovering that wanting it cannot make it so.
We all held hands — the farmboy and the 17-year-old and I — as I told our daughter that I understand it will be an oh-so-hard thing for her (for me, too!) to watch another woman live with the farmboy in this home of our making. I held her gaze while reminding her that we love him though, and want him to be happy, and that for him happiness means the daily constancy of a woman in his life, in this place of his choosing; that is who he is. “It will be his home now,” I said, “not mine anymore, and he deserves to share it with someone who wants to be nowhere in the world but right here beside him. So when the time comes, I trust that all of us, together, will find a way to welcome his new partner, with kindness and with grace, no matter how hard the idea of doing so feels right now. Because we are people capable of doing hard things well.”
It was a maternal, merciful act of bullshit. When I first said it, I wasn’t at all sure I could actually do that hard thing well.
The American poet, Mary Oliver, has said that to live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. That I found myself having to let go of this mortal man gutted me. That I would have to watch this other living, breathing thing we birthed together, this farm, turned over to the care of another woman felt like a secondary assault against a still-fresh wound. Over the course of my life I’ve left so many homes without a single glance backward, but this isn’t a place I lived so much as a place I gestated, a place I raised. “This place is so Ellen,” my mother used to say as she proudly showed visitors around. To spend time on the farm is to know who I am. To imagine another woman inhabiting the world of my creation rendered me vulnerable, overexposed. As if in my absence the farmboy opened my drawers to a stranger, inviting her to riffle through my possessions, dance in my clothes. An intimacy too deeply betrayed.
This isn’t entirely rational. Feelings often aren’t.
I said to my daughter, “We are people capable of doing hard things well,” back when I couldn’t fathom how I could do this monumentally hard thing without becoming embittered. I said to my daughter, “We are people capable of doing hard things well,” because sometimes we need to claim a power we don’t yet trust we have. Sometimes, when we can’t yet live up to the potential to which we aspire, speaking our intentions with confidence allows them to begin building, allows us to start summoning a strength that might someday carry us far. Over the intervening time — between the day three years ago when we broke the news of our divorce to our daughter and my first Christmas visit back a year or so later — I said aloud to myself, “I am capable of doing hard things well,” so frequently it became a mantra: an act of faith and an act of becoming in equal measure. In reassuring myself, over and over, that I am someone who can do this hard thing well I shot a mighty arrow into the future with the crooked and broken bow I had at hand. Hope aimed high and set free, that it might someday prove true.
Many Christmases ago, I initiated a collection of blessings. We were living on the farmland at the time but still residing in the trailer in a field of mud where we spent the first four and a half years, the smell of manure from the makeshift animal pen the farmboy erected under the lean-to at the entry wafting in every time one of us opened the door, while secondhand farm equipment — some functional, some raised up on pallets or cinderblocks awaiting repair — littered the weedy clumps of an abandoned crop that passed for a yard. But we were making progress. The skeleton of what would become the hay barn stretched toward the sky on the northern property line, while on a western slope the homesite took shape. Electric wires snaked between studs, and sheetrock stood ready to raise, but something essential was missing; those parts had purpose, certainly, but lacked soul. Living far away from my extended relatives, on the opposite side of the country from the playmates I grew up with, in a different state from my college friends and a world away from my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers scattered across the globe, I longed to infuse the love of all the people and seasons of our lives into our home that we might always feel them with us. So I invited loved ones to send us blessings in any form — private prayers, wishes, favorite quotes — and scaled scaffolding alongside the children and their friends (my parents, even!) with Sharpie markers in hand to permanently ink hundreds of blessings onto the white sheetrock canvas before the walls and ceilings disappeared behind the finished surfaces of fieldstone and reclaimed wood. The benedictions represent a motley collection of sentiments from people much-cherished: Some of my kids’ primary school teachers; one of mine. My east coast publisher and the farmboy’s west coast doctoral fellow. Our siblings, cousins, neighbors, naturally. But also: The wife of the younger brother of my best friend from high school. A patient I treated during my graduate school internship and the woman who sold us our chicken feed. A man with a shared surname whom my parents met while traveling through Italy; a man who welcomed them with a feast fit for long-lost relatives, which he has become to my son, who lives in Austria and hops the train south to visit the man regularly now and calls him Uncle. People bound to us by blood and by heart and by habit.
When our daughter said, “I don’t want him in this house with another woman,” it’s the thought of those blessings housed behind the walls and within the ceilings that I couldn’t shake. Blessings solicited by me, etched into place by me, intended for me … raining down on someone else.
If someone had said to me anytime during the decade+ it took to build that home and farm — when I stood knee-deep in mud beside a mired tractor, or rose at dawn to shovel rock before the asphalt truck arrived, with eyes blackened and fingernails splintered from stacking lumber — that once we finished some other woman would be the one to revel with the farmboy in the beauty of our creation, I wonder now: Would I have labored anyway? Would I have invested so much of myself there had I known I wouldn’t reap the benefit of enjoying it with him? Would I have embraced his dream and his yearnings so wholeheartedly, would I have made them mine and prioritized them alongside my own, if I’d known that when the time came he wouldn’t do the same for me?
Years ago, when I first told my daughter she could rely on me to do this hard thing well, I wanted to be a person who could say yes to all that, no recriminations.
But I wasn’t yet.
Two Christmases have come and gone since I committed the first of the preceding words to the page. It’s no longer 2023: the year we divorced, the year I departed, the year we shared the winter holiday in the house together. Instead, it’s two years later now: spring of 2025. My year and a half of post-divorce around-the-world adventuring — intersected by that Christmas trip back to Oregon — has concluded. After taking a long walk around Portugal, Spain and neighboring lands I kayaked the Antarctic peninsula, hiked Patagonia, crossed the Andes on horseback, snorkeled in the South Pacific, meandered around Mexico and Costa Rica, camped and trekked 13,000+ kilometers across the southern third of the African continent, explored folk art traditions in Appalachia, and found places to call home in Central America and Europe. These are all stories yet to be told. But what I mean to tell you now, because humility is called for, is that I couldn’t finish this essay back when I started it, nor could I begin anything else.
How I yearned to finish this! How intensely I wanted to have wrapped up the emotional work of moving on as succinctly and capably as I’d undertaken the physical transition. How I longed to have done this hard thing well already so I might let this story go and lean into others instead. But we cannot be ready until we’re ready. This hill I’m climbing turned out to be much steeper than expected. I haven’t crested it yet, and — loathe as I am to admit it — I suspect the summit and the beauty of the perspective it affords is still some distance off for me. Hope dies hard and letting go of the still-beloved is a fearful process. But I think I’m finally settling into my stride; finally mapping a path clear to where I’m headed from here.
Some decades ago, I struck up a correspondence with one of my favorite authors, Alice Walker, the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Color Purple. She reached out after reading my first book and we wound up communicating about motherhood, writing, exploration, transitions. And possessions. She spoke of her love for Hispanic telas — hand-woven and embroidered fabrics from Central America — even as my favorite tela lay folded on the edge of my kitchen counter where it had been sitting for some weeks. I’d acquired the piece in an earlier season of my life from an indigenous woman who stitched it beside a stream sluicing down a Guatemalan mountainside, just beyond the back door of the home where I once lived. I loved it. I loved everything about it: the hue, the design dancing across it, the woman who made it and the memory of how it came to be mine. I carried it carefully across international borders, through customs and immigration inspections, and with me on a subsequent cross-country move. I designed the whole color scheme of my first stateside home around it, where it had a place of prominence for years. But then one day, after much upheaval and a radical shift in my circumstances, the tela didn’t feel like it belonged with me anymore. It didn’t feel like it belonged to the person I was becoming. So I took it down, folded it up, and set it on the edge of the kitchen counter to await a sense of direction regarding the person into whose hands I might entrust it next. And then Alice Walker, who collects and cherishes telas, wrote to me. From the moment I realized how much she would love it — even, still, as it sat in my own kitchen — it was no longer mine and instead had become hers. Not because I loved it any less, but because I understood inherently that the act of sharing it, of letting it go to someone who would love it afresh, would uplift me more than holding fast to it ever could.
Sometimes such joy comes easily. Sometimes less so. Grace looks so simple, yet it is often anything but.
During all the years we were married, the farmboy and I used to marvel at how little of jealousy I have in me. I’m not prone to wariness in love, nor do I tend to envy others or covet their good fortune. But I’ve come to discover I harbor within me a fair share of jealousy’s ravenous younger stepsibling: possessiveness. Letting go does not always come as easily to me as I would have liked to convince myself (convince you) it might. Some things — a husband, the home where I raised my children, the ground I cultivated, a decade of artistic endeavor and the product of years of relentless physical labor — are so much harder to release emotionally and to cede into someone else’s hands than a piece of fabric.
But it’s well past time. The first of the farmboy’s potential partners entered his life on the heels of my departure in the summer of 2023; as much as the pack on my back, she’s part of the weight I carried as I walked across Portugal into Spain. The second waited in the wings even as I returned home for that first Christmas visit and she’s there still, becoming ever more attached to the farmboy and to the farm and to all that I, too, have loved. She’s there now where I am not and for me it will be an act of letting go of the wish for a different outcome over and over and over again. Letting go of the naïve faith I had in the potential of us; a faith I miss with a fathomless longing. Letting go of my attachment to the farmboy and to the farm and to the shared future I imagined for us that turns out not to have been intended for me.
In a determined act of letting go I bless them — him and his new partner — every morning when I awaken, before I arise. I bless them along with a gaggle of others I love or have loved at one time or another, which is to say those who vex and bemuse me, those who have alternately hurt and carried me, those I’ve forgiven and those who have offered much forgiveness to me. I began blessing the farmboy and his partner the day I left the farm, before I knew who she would be, before any of us had a name to put with the body coming, back when all I knew was that whomever she was, her arrival was imminent. They don’t need my blessing, of course. It’s me who needs to give it. I’ve needed to practice strewing blessings liberally behind me, even onto the broken and abandoned pathways, in the hope something beautiful might at length take root in the cracks to uplift us all. I bless them to resist the dark current of possessiveness in me which is, at heart, composed of fear, of insecurity. An attitude of scarcity, as if there is only one path to happiness for us all.
It’s a hard truth to come around to accepting that all is surely so very well in my absence. The house still stands. The man in it still smiles. Without me his bed and his spirit are still full and the hay gets harvested and the Christmas lights are lit, year after year, by other capable hands. Which means it’s high time to turn my gaze from the writing on the walls that once sheltered me and instead accept that the blessings I penned upon those ceilings will rain down onto whichever receptive hearts are in the room, which is as it should be. Other blessings are meant to be mine instead — fresh ones, unexpected ones (“keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable,” Mary Oliver advised) — and I need my gaze free to keep taking them in.
Out here in this unfamiliar territory I’ve befriended the intrepid, played among the penguins, stood on the edge of volcanos and welcomed the sun and every day put myself in the path of beauty with a grateful heart. And so it is that even while grieving I have known a depth of joy and serenity I couldn’t see coming. In learning to do anew for myself that which the farmboy couldn’t do with me I’m reconstructing within myself a fresh sort of confidence; a confidence that allows me to hold both this grief and this bounty together in my strong cupped hands. This, I can sip from. These dual truths I drink in: How lucky I am to have lived a life worth missing so much. How lucky I am to be able to imagine new horizons for myself beyond those borders.
Finally. Finally!
Here I am. Here, within spitting distance of the place I aimed that broken arrow toward so many years ago when I sat my daughter down to break the news to her that broke both our hearts. Here, on this path back to myself forged by my own footfalls crisscrossing these foreign lands, my promise shall be kept — to my child, to me. At long last, I can do this hard thing well enough.
Count my blessings. Don’t begrudge theirs. Let the rest go.
Such a simple statement. Such simple words that nonetheless require an almighty act of will and guts and love to actualize. Such a long time coming, the willingness, the ability, to say the words I couldn’t utter when I initially left or when I returned that first Christmas or when I started this essay that took a year and a half to write:
Goodbye house I built. Goodbye barns I raised. Goodbye fields I planted and fences I constructed and tractor I drove and land I loved. Goodbye blessings that once were mine.
Goodbye to all I cultivated there; goodbye sweet season of my life. Thank you. I release you. Let the farmboy give himself to her now; let him love her wholeheartedly. And when he does, embrace her please. Shelter her as you once did me. Shine your beauty and your bounty upon her.
Welcome her home.
*Footnote: It’s impossible to explain the end of a marriage in an essay. My desire to escape the bleak Oregon winters was, of course, merely the surface issue belying a deeper fault-line we’d been complicit in cracking open in the center of our marriage. As a dear friend said, if it had merely been my desire to travel more frequently than the farmboy preferred “that would be the stupidest reason anyone’s ever gotten divorced.” Which makes me laugh because, after breaking the news to her, my mother-in-law in fact called us stupid for months until the farmboy finally reminded her what precipitated her own divorce from his father half a lifetime ago. Her husband refused to accompany her to Alaska to spend time in her hometown with her family, but neither would he tolerate her going without him, and she insisted he had no right to exert such authority over her life. (We’re a case-study in epigenetics, are we not?, proof that a family’s modus operandi — our dramas and our traumas — will recur generation after generation until such time as someone digs deep to the source to reorder patterns and shift outcomes.)
As for the farmboy and me: I spent the better part of a year offering up every imaginable compromise that might have allowed our divergent dreams to co-exist and our disparate needs to be equally prioritized. But in the end, as happens in plenty of marriages, he eschewed the effort that would have been required to rebalance the relationship at hand in favor of the possibilities inherent in a fresh one. Fair enough. No doubt changing habits in an existing relationship can be much harder to do than starting anew. No doubt there are reasons I will thank him for this in the long run. No doubt, also, that doing that work, together, would have been of great benefit to us both.
As for the farmboy’s mother: she divorced her husband for prohibiting an autonomy she never exercised. She got her own house, but only a few miles away, and for as long as her former husband lived in what had once been their shared home she showed up there every morning. Cooked his meals. Washed his clothes. Spent the day alongside him and left to overnight in her own bed in her own house alone.
“Why didn’t you go to Alaska?” I asked the day all this was revealed to me. “Why didn’t you go do whatever it was that had been important to you?”
“I don’t know. I guess I thought he needed me too much.”
(Can you feel the weight of that statement hanging in the room? It was a hospital room. She lay in the bed. I sat in a chair pulled up close to the mattress, practicing how to change her ostomy bag. She’d be dead within months.)
“And you’re calling me stupid?” I chided.
Bless her for being game enough to smile at my cheekiness. “I guess I’ll have to reconsider that,” she said.