Oh the ups and downs of the holidays. In Portland we called the two week stretch from Dec. 14 to last Sunday Snopoccalypse, and those of us with small children at home and without big SUVs in the driveway? We became snow prisoners.

We pulled our children on sleds to the bus stop, and then through downtown streets and sidewalks to do the last-minute shopping. Those of us who shopped at all.

Okay, the sled detail was just Sam and me (but it sounds so Norman Rockwell and many people I know really did drag their kids to the nearest grocery store that way). Also, full disclosure, the 11th hour downtown shopping spree was more about getting out of the house than getting presents.

We're so broke we'd already agreed to exchange only a little book of the 12 things we would give the other if money and the time-space continuum were no objects. 

My Facebook status that morning after we trekked downtown on sleds said "Red Rum, Red Rum" over and over to the edge of the update space. One of my friends gave me a lot of crap about that. He said it was overdone and I needed to dial down the The Shining references.

He does not have hyper-active children. He was not held against his will by the weather for than a week with a six-year-old, a four-year-old, and a partner whom he recently reconciled with after a two-year separation and near divorce. He does not know. I was not joking.

That morning, and several before it, all I wanted in the whole wide, whited-out, world was my little apartment. And not for temporary refuge, either. Forever. I wanted it forever. I fantasized about being snowed in all alone, about being snowed in with just my kids, about being snowed in with anyone who wasn't Sam.

Every annoying little thing I have ever despised about him, and a few of the very big things, were right there locked in with me. I crashed on the office futon for two nights to resist temptation of smothering him in his sleep from the relentless snoring.

You know what? All those problems, our problems, and the patterns that create them are alive and well. Just like I thought. Right here for us to deal with. Merry Christmas.

I did not write out 12 things. I thought "a one-way ticket to Lithuania, traveling in the freight compartment without water," was inappropriate for the day. So I wrote nothing. At first.

Then I caved, because I knew he'd be writing and I didn't want to seem like a schmuck.

I gave him our house (to live in together) paid for outright, a trip around the world with a nanny for whenever we wanted babysitting, sunrise alone together in our favorite spot — way down in Southern Mexico on top of a pyramid where there is nothing but unbroken jungle spreading to the horizon as far as you can see and in every direction. A trip back in time for two weeks with his grandparents at their Carolina beach house.

For every present I gave, he had wished me something so parallel it could be the same thing. Right down to the nanny. We each made a book, the same book.

Funny how something so small and imaginary and extraordinary is enough, at least enough for right now, to counterweight the heavy pull of all the real that surrounds it.