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.

Turns out, in Portland, the joke is on us. That, and about a foot of snow.

Last week the local news weather types cried wolf for days and with every flurry we were sure Arctic Blast '08 was bearing its abominable teeth. And we, in our fair city of three snow plows, responded by closing everything. On one of my kids' snow days it didn't even snow.

By Friday, everyone knew the hype was nothing, but the week was already a wash, so no point in having school or doing anything else really. On Friday, the whole week seemed like a nice excuse to slow down and take a couple lazy at home days before revving up for the holidays.

Then came Saturday. And it snowed. It snowed and kept on snowing straight through the night and all day Sunday. Biggest snow Portland's seen in 40 years. Suddenly, it was not just an excuse. There was a foot on the ground and we really were housebound.

All the packages full of Christmas gifts from my in-laws are holding on some UPS snow route and they, the in-laws, are due in tonight on Christmas Eve.

I'm secretly hoping they don't make it. The gifts, not the in-laws. My fantasy is the whole family, Sam's, here and hardly a package to open.

The over-the-top-ness of this holiday, not even my holiday, is too much for me. Call me a Grinch, every year I have a little less tolerance for all the stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff.

Like the Grinch, I want to see how they react to Christmas without all the ribbons and bows.

My kids rip into the shiny paper and I see boxes of pieces of stuff that will by spread all over my house by the beginning of January, and swept into the trash by spring.

How can anyone appreciate anything when they have so much crap?

None of these things are special. They are just more. What my kids know is if they break or lose something, it's okay, there's more in the closet and another one coming.

My in-laws come for Christmas next week. It's not my holiday, Christmas, and I despise the excess of it, but I'm a sucker for tradition. Also, the tree smells nice.

It matters to me that my girls keep the customs of their grandmothers and their grandmothers and their grandmothers before. That they remain linked, and that they understand all the cultures that made them.

I can share only half, the Jewish rituals passed down through my people. So, I'll make potato latkes and spin the dreidel with them, light the menorah each night and teach them the blessings.

But I'm grateful Sam's parents can visit with their red velvet cake and, hopefully, stories waking up Christmas morning when they were kids. Pass down what I can't.

I bitch about Sam's parents, resent the "stuff" passed on to him and so to me, because it happens this way: what you do not deal with, the problems you don't stand down, they don't disappear, they are passed to the next generation.

Merry Christmas.

There's a present for you. No, for real.

I'm looking at it as a gift this year, an opportunity to better understand why Sam is who he is. To understand why I chose him as my partner, and after leaving him, why I made the same choice again.

Some people say we marry our parents; another perspective is we partner with people who present a chance to work where we need it most. We seek, not only what we know, but what we know will force us to grow.

And we go back until the lesson is learned.

What I've learned: I'm not going to change Sam's family. No matter what I do, no matter what truth I try to shock them with, they will never get real. They will always avoid the uncomfortable and when the small talk plays out, 99 times out of 100 they'll choose silence over depth.

While I'm still spewing gratitude onto the page, I must thank FWW co-founder Debbie Nigro's daughter Alexis for stopping by to share her view of the Thanksgiving Day Tour De Family last week.

Of all the things I've gained from spending hours here at FWW, and there are too many to detail in the space of one post, the thing I most love is the perspective it brings.

The moments when my understanding of myself and of the world is expanded by getting close in on a point of view I have not lived. This is truly a gift.

So thanks, Alexis, on behalf of every parent who has ever agonized about leaving a marriage for fear of how it will impact their small kids. Thanks for reminding us not only that this change does not have to undo them, it can actually be a positive.

It's easy to forget how it's us grown-ups who attach all the baggage, feel all the agony of unmet expectations, in a split. It's our vision of the way things should be that gets torn in half.

Young kids only know what they know. To them, their family and their homes look exactly as they should look. Are exactly as they should be, the only way they ever could be.

My kids split time between two households for two years. One was 20 months old when we separated, the other was four and a half, and guess what? Sure, they like having all of us together in one house, but I'm not sure they like it better than having two places.

They like it differently.

And take note all you parents who are terrified about shattering the only reality your children have ever known; it is possible for you do it without shattering them.

My kids have told me more than once these last few months back together that they miss their old houses. They liked having two houses, two neighborhoods, two sets of friends, two different lives.

Warning: Gushing ahead. Forgive me in advance for the gooey prose you are about to read, but I'm still basking in the afterglow of Thanksgiving gratitude and the truth is, every once in a while I can't help myself. All the sappiness builds up in me and just I have to go Hallmark.

Why fight it, I say.

I have so much gratitude itching inside me right now it's going to spill right over into the next post. I can feel it.

Plus, it's just plain nice to break from whining about the don't have's, and the things I've given up and monotony of struggle. Blah, blah, blah, blahty-blah.

This is what I do have:

I have two of the coolest kids anywhere for daughters and I have time with them everyday. Even when I don't really want it.

I have a husband who takes them out of the house for hours every chance he gets because he likes hanging with them. And also because he understands now the finer points of maintaining my mental health.

I have two bathrooms. Let me say that again. I have two bathrooms with two toilets that flush. No waiting.

I have central heat and a lovely fir-tree view out my office windows. (And I have an office.) 

I have two healthy parents who I will never understand, but whom I know support me unconditionally even when they think my decisions are crazy-insane.

I have friendships with roots that run so deep and roots grown so inextricably through each other that those friends have become my family.

I have access to archive.org and streaming audio of almost every Grateful Dead show ever played. And I had the good fortune to attend 30-some of those shows, in varying states of consciousness, before Jerry Garcia died.

I have my family living all in one house, healthy, in a way that is possible only because I once left.

Friday morning and I'm giving thanks for Turkey Day with our best friends yesterday. Sam and I have lived a thousand miles or more from our families of origin for the last 14 Thanksgivings.

Getting back to our folks — especially now that it requires four tickets — is a once-every-few-years event. Out in Portland, where most of our closest friends are in the same gravy boat, we've done the traditional feast together sans the annual family drama almost every year.

Sometimes I miss my family, mourn the chance to have my kids hang out with their cousins, but when it comes right down to it, my favorite way to spend the holiday is right here with the extended family we've created.

And this year, our first year back together, it was nice to be on neutral ground. No moms or dads or in-laws for anyone to please. Where our kids may not have blood relatives, but they do have a circle of friends they've known since birth. And the same kind of familial love that goes with it.

Plus, we'll have enough of that next month.

Early morning I'm up before dawn, and up before the kids — trying to be up before them anyway. There bunked-up in the other room and their chatter is all holidays.

Roxie says, "And Hannukah, too, don't forget."

Lila says, "And Christmas is in Hannukah this year."

Then two little voices together: "And Grammy is coming!"

And I may not be excited about this with them, but I'm equally excited for them.

Thanksgiving week has all the wind knocked out of me. Could just be my reaction to going down, down, down the rabbit hole. The Holidays are here.

Only thing I know is the only thing I want to do is curl up under my big old comforter and sleep. It’s the lack of time that has me feeling so defeated. My kids don’t have school all week and we don’t have childcare, don’t have the money for the extra child care, I should say, so what happens? I don’t have time to work.

We are caught right smack in the center exactly what I feared getting back into this. I have no time to work because we can’t afford to cover the business hours I need so jobs are left unfinished leaving me feeling further defeated and my pay further behind, which adds up to less childcare that we can afford and fewer things completed. It goes on like this until I’m right where I am now.

One big miserable puddle of blah. And I blame it on the marriage, when actually I should blame it on me.

My reasoning, skewed as it may be, is that when we were apart a couple things were absolute: I had several days every week to work because the kids were with Sam and I had to make it work because the alternatives were homelessness and starvatation.

This week, I’m giving thanks for my two beautiful, healthy girls, and the ability I have to back up, reconsider, and try it again. But I'm also questioning how much of my current situation is a self-fulfilling prophecy and why I can't have the structure to make room for work in the same way I did when I was separated.

I have to fess up. My secret is not much of a surprise, I'm sure, which hardly makes it a secret, but still I'll feel better straight out saying it. I want my apartment back.

Hold on, now. I'm not saying I want to leave Sam again. That's not it. And I'm not saying I don't want to live with Sam anymore. That's not it either.

I do want to live with him, just not all the time. I do not want to live with anyone all the time.

Maybe this makes me a loser, but it's the truth, so I'm saying it.

I spent all morning re-arranging my office and you know what? In the end I realized creating what I want there is impossible. No matter how many ways I move the furniture, it's all still in that one room, in that one house where we all live. All of us. Together. All the time.

Here's my fantasy: Sam and I get an apartment a few blocks from our house, and we furnish it with the leftover stuff we didn't sell in the garage sale we never had after we moved back in together.

I stay at the apartment a couple nights a week, he stays at the apartment a couple nights a week (if he wants) and three or four nights a week we all stay together, one big happy, nuclear family, at the house.

The girls have each parent five nights a week and two parents about half the time.

Before we separated I'd never lived alone, had no clue how amazing, how liberating, solitude can be.

We have all these ideas about how marriages and families should look, but the reality is parenting small children is brutal. Many of our families are fragmented, parceled out across the country. Thousands of miles apart.

There's no reprieve coming from grandparents, aunts and uncles, or older cousins. No one to take the kids for a couple nights or a couple hours. No villages to raise our children. Our therapist is always asking what we can do to create more space for ourselves.

I told my mother-in-law a little lie on the phone last weekend when she called to talk about which American Girl doll should she get Roxie for Christmas. Sam's parents are visiting for the holidays.

We decided on Kit, the Depression-era girl. I said I thought Roxie would like that. Kit would be fine.

I said, "I'm so excited you are coming out for Christmas." It was a lie. And I said it again.

Not a total lie, but mostly more false than true. It's been weird with my in-laws since the split and reunion.

I used to say Sam's parents were much easier visitors than mine. Even enjoyed them. They like their time in the mornings and they stay in a hotel, not my house. Most of the places where my parents are anxious, they are easy-going.

At least, I thought they were easy going.

Actually they're just unwilling to acknowledge anything difficult. My mother-in-law has built herself a happy little Donna Reed world and just you try smuggling any unpleasant kind of truth past that white picket fence.

Try having a conversation about anything real. Oh-no-no. Ignore it, whatever it is, it will go away. If not we can always pretend.

Early on in my separation I gave her a stuttering, obviously uncomfortable five-minute apology for something I thought I'd mishandled. Said this was unfamiliar ground, and I was sorry. Nothing I did or didn't do was meant to hurt or offend, it was just, I didn't know what to do.

She said, "We'd like to have portraits taken of the girls, if that's okay."

Not "Thanks." Not "I appreciate your candor." Not even "OK."

I wasn't sure I'd spoken out loud.

It can make you crazy.

We haven't talked about the separation. We sit down like I did not leave Sam for two years. But it's there in the room, just under the over-stretched veneer.

Probably be there for ever. Unresolved emotions always at the door.

Off topic here, I know, but my mind is still spinning around Obama, President-elect Obama and the Democrat's election night party last Tuesday in Portland. Until I write this, I won't be able to write anything else.

I took Roxie down to the Oregon Convention Center for the big party, past her bedtime before we even got there. She's been hooked on Obama since the primary last winter, back when she was half-way through kindergarten.

That this will be her earliest political memory. This election. This night. This president. Wow. I mean. Wow. Me, I'm stuck with a 36-year-old snapshot image of Richard Nixon's motorcade passing. Warren, OH, five days after my third birthday.

But, Roxie. She's got Obama and I know just the moment I want her to hold, the one she'll detail when she tells my great-grandchildren about the night he was elected.

There are 7,000, maybe, 8,000 people at convention center and John McCain is on both big screens conceding the race. We're at back edge of the crowd where it's less claustrophobic, Roxie on my hip so her head is the same height as most adults in the room.

You can't hear McCain over the noise.

There's an older African American woman, late 60s, early 70s, coming out toward the edge from deeper in the crowd and she stops in front of Roxie. Two teenagers behind her stop, too.

The woman takes Roxie's hand and holds it, looks her brown eyes into Roxie's blues.

She says. "We did this, baby. You and me."

And, I realize, for the first time in their lives I have hope for world my girls are growing into.