A Single Mom's christmas list

What do you want for Christmas?

I didn't used to hate this question, though I always found it awkward. I loathe it now. What do people want me to say?
     "Oh! I'd love a cute pair of red flats!"
     "I would love nice maple cutting board. I love to cook!"
     "I'm dying for a new attachment for my stand mixer!?!"
I always feel obligated to ask for things that feel like gifts to give. People like buying you things that they think are a treat or things you wouldn't buy yourself. But do you know what I really want for Christmas?

I want groceries. No seriously,  I want groceries. I don't want to have to play "what else can we put on top of rice" game, and I don't want to tell my son for the umpteenth time that we can't go to the store and buy fresh fruit because mama doesn't get paid for another week. I don't want to get everything on my grocery list in my cart and then try figure out which third of it to put back. Do I put back the cheese, juice and broccoli, or the apples, milk and tortillas?

I want the money to fill my cavities. My dental insurance only covers one cavity every THREE YEARS, and I have 4 cavities. I have had 4 cavities for a year, and they are starting to get painful. I would seriously love to fork over the cash and have the pain be gone. You weren't going to spend $400 on my present??? Oh, how forward of me.

I want you to come clean my house. Not because I secretly hate you and want to see you toil cleaning up my messes, but because I am fricking tired, and I just can't do it all. Not even with a toddler who knows to take a rag to spills and pretends his plastic golf bag is a vacuum cleaner.

I want socks and bras and underwear. Please, PLEASE can you buy them for me? Taking a toddler into a women's clothing store is my worst nightmare. I can never seem to justify replacing the bras that are only kinda pokey, and the underwear that is totally the wrong size, but not disgusting enough to be thrown out.

I want more sick days. I use all of my 2 official sick days and most of my paid time off on sick days for both me any my son. We always get sick in tandem, and that always makes for double the days needed off of work.

Among other intangibles: I want to feel less lonely, I want to leave the house on time (OK even half of the time having on-time departures would be nothing short of a miracle). I really, really want to be told I'm doing a good job, but don't know how to ask for this, and then feel that the reply is genuine. I would really like to feel like less of a burden to society, but I know that I'm asking for a lot here.

So I guess I'll settle for asking for cooking classes, bath salts and fancy coffee. Because if I ask for what I really need you might be uncomfortable. And then we might actually have to do something or feel responsible as a society for forcing single moms to fit their square peg of a life into a round hole of convenient holiday gift giving. Please just give me the gift of being able to ask for the help I need and not simultaneously feel bad about it. That's what I really want.

After bedtime.

And then the peaceful, still silence turned into a suspicious, suffocating silence. One that breeds silent rage and shrewd doubts. While seated in the same position, all the emotion that had been stuffed away over the past few hours poured from her chest to the floor as her brow slowly tightened with the familiar stress lines that were above and beyond her anxiety medication's job description to control.
She surveyed her life with cold eyes and wondered what she should chose to see in the constellation of her life. Was she the seated queen? the loving mother? or was she the vain maiden? or worse, the betrayer? And in the midst of her genuine angst in figuring which story was the right one to tell herself so she could muster the courage to get out of bed the following morning, she admitted to herself grudgingly what the constellation really was: a web of unrelated spheres of burning plasma and light in an unimaginably vast, cold and dark universe. Nothing more, nothing less. They had less in common than the categories from the Jeopardy episode she watched on the DVR tonight. They just were - where they always were, doing what they always do. They told no story. They told no lies.
It was usually in these moments that she knew she was obfuscating the truth she intuited long ago. The one she knew was inevitable. The one she hoped wasn't true. The stories and the visions of patterns in the night sky were a way to bury the only outcome with others that were more hopeful, more sing-songy, more palatable.
She curled her toes a few times trying to resist sitting with this truth. A few tears managed to leak through before she rose to pack the lunches for the next day. And switch over the laundry, and lock the back door. She turned out the dreary kitchen light and stared through the pass through at the string lights around the porch. They twinkled knowingly back at her. She crawled slowly into her purple sheeted bed comfortable in her voluntary self delusion, and praying that she didn't really know what her future held.