![\"Santa_Claus\"](\"http:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/Santa_Claus.jpg\")
<\/a>\u201cGood-bye, Hello\u201d was published in the anthology The Santa Claus Project<\/i>, edited by Marsha and Matt Schmidt, AuthorHouse, 2012.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The January that he turned nine, my son Jude learned there is no Santa Claus.\u00a0 He found a half-used roll of \u201cSanta\u2019s\u201d wrapping paper hidden in the back of the linen closet, unhappily drew the logical conclusion, and confirmed its accuracy with a direct question to his father.<\/p>\n
Jude came into my bedroom and woke me with the devastating news.\u00a0 He was crying.\u00a0 For days after, at odd moments, he\u2019d make almost bitter, sidelong remarks related to his discovery.\u00a0 \u201cSo,\u201d he said one day in the car as we were out on errands,\u00a0 \u201cThe Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy — that\u2019s you guys, too, right?\u201d\u00a0 He ruminated over which of his friends might be in the know and which not.\u00a0 Several years earlier, he\u2019d had a heated argument with a Christian Scientist child whose family didn\u2019t subscribe to Santa Claus.\u00a0 When the boy\u2019s mother had stepped in to support her son\u2019s claim that Santa didn\u2019t exist, rather than being convinced by her adult authority, Jude was incensed at her ignorance, and his anger at his little friend morphed to pity.<\/p>\n
Watching Jude slowly settle into the revised version of his world, I tried to recall my own unseating of Santa at just about the same age.\u00a0 I was the oldest in my family, the first to unmask the fantasy.\u00a0 Thinking back, I conjured up two scenes, both of them in the bathroom.\u00a0 In my childhood home, busy with six children, privacy was a temporary structure designated more by narrowing your scope of attention than by shutting a door.\u00a0 But for me and my mother, the bathroom constituted an inviolate space for serious, private talks.<\/p>\n
In the first remembered scene, I am standing in the dark hallway outside the closed bathroom door.\u00a0 It is late on Christmas Eve, and down the hall, my brothers and sisters lie heavily asleep, tangled in sheets and blankets and one another.\u00a0 Earlier in the evening, we\u2019d all carefully chosen long black socks from my father\u2019s drawer and laid them out on our beds for Santa to find and fill.\u00a0 From inside the bathroom, I hear rustlings, whispers, even giggles.\u00a0 I open the door, and blinking in the sudden brightness, I see my surprised parents bending over the closed toilet seat lid, on which is piled a jumble of small objects wrapped in aluminum foil.\u00a0 On the edge of the sink rest two lumpy socks, already stuffed with treasures.\u00a0 My father holds another sock, still limp and empty, in his hand.<\/p>\n
In the second remembered scene, some days later, my mother reclines Cleopatra-like in the tub.\u00a0 The room is steamy and redolent with Sardo bath oil.\u00a0 She looks at me tenderly, with concern, and asks me what I, many years afterward, will ask my own child.\u00a0 \u201cYou sort of knew, didn\u2019t you?\u201d\u00a0 Jude will answer no, he had no idea.\u00a0 I do the same.\u00a0 I sit on that toilet seat lid in the small, humid bathroom and deny any suspicions, deny curiosity, deny my own rational powers.<\/p>\n
Of course, somewhere inside me was a weak perception that I had known the facts, but I didn\u2019t want to admit it.\u00a0 I wished to be innocent of my own disillusionment.\u00a0 Somehow, I was aware I was relinquishing more than Santa Claus.\u00a0 It was a first step, albeit a small one, outside a protected world, outside the beneficent arms of generous, reliable elves and complicit, shielding parents.\u00a0 How could I want to take even partial responsibility for such an awesome act?<\/p>\n
The step away from Santa was a step toward life on my own, a step toward sex, truth, death.\u00a0 It was the first edging away from guarantees.<\/p>\n
Am I giving my nine- or ten-year-old self too much credit?\u00a0 Yes and no.\u00a0 All these concepts were not there, certainly.\u00a0 But I did feel a sharp trepidation.\u00a0 I sensed significance.\u00a0 And loneliness.\u00a0 Inevitable separations had begun.<\/p>\n
I became, with this bit of knowledge, separated at once from my siblings.\u00a0 Now I had to connive to keep the elaborate secret from them.\u00a0 As the oldest, I was used to duties.\u00a0 I pushed the swings, combed out the snarled braids, folded the diapers, fixed the sandwiches, read the stories.\u00a0 But this was a duty of a different order.\u00a0 One I couldn\u2019t beg off or pass on to someone else or forget to do.<\/p>\n
There was a shift, too, in my relationship to my parents.\u00a0 In essence, I was inching towards them, towards the adult world, but I felt parted from them.\u00a0 A magical link had been broken.\u00a0 And, in fact, the adulthood on which I was embarking was not theirs, would never be theirs, so I wasn\u2019t really joining them, but setting off without them towards some as yet unformed community.\u00a0 Perhaps for the first time, it sank in that I was growing up and that it was an unstoppable process, one that I wasn\u2019t sure I was going to like.<\/p>\n
In the week after Jude was forced to let go of Santa, I wondered if any such uneasy feelings had been behind his tears and remarks.\u00a0 He certainly was maturing, moving on, and not just because of this.\u00a0 He was still the little boy, affectionate, playful, free with his tears.\u00a0 But I had been seeing him pull in more, too, take painful or difficult situations on his own.\u00a0 And though he would still come to me for comfort, sometimes I had to go to him and press it upon him.\u00a0 He would accept it.\u00a0 It even calmed him some, but there was in his acceptance a politeness, a keeping to ritual which made me feel he was letting me comfort him for my sake.<\/p>\n
He was beginning to see, I think, that his solutions and sorting outs are ultimately on his shoulders.\u00a0 What a lesson to have so young.\u00a0 Yet memory tells me it does begin then, and experience suggests it is begun young because it takes so long to learn.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n