A season that arrives differently this year
Christmas is approaching, though it carries a tone that feels unfamiliar, as if the days themselves have softened around the edges since September. When our daughter suddenly lost the ability to move and found herself in a wheelchair from one moment to the next, something in the rhythm of our home shifted in a quiet but undeniable way. She is still fully herself: her wit, her presence, her clarity untouched, yet the movement around her has changed, and so have we. Each of us is finding a different pace, a different way of living with what has happened, and none of those tempos seem inclined to match.
A large family with many tempos
Our family has always been a layered one: myself, Borniet, our seventeen-year-old daughter, our twenty-year-old son who still lives at home, and our three older sons in their early twenties who have stepped into their own adult lives. We are connected, but not identical; close, but each shaped by different sensitivities. The last months have simply made these differences more visible, as if someone turned up the contrast on all our inner landscapes.
How each of us carries this new reality
What stands out most is how unevenly the heart responds to change. Our son who still lives here has taken on a quiet, instinctive steadiness toward his sister, supporting her in ways that seem to come as naturally to him as breathing, even while he pours himself into his chef training. One of our older sons finds it all much harder. He feels deeply, sometimes too deeply, and being close to the situation overwhelms him in a way that only those who are intensely sensitive will recognise. His distance is not a disappearance, not a lack of love; it is simply the way he manages to stay upright when the emotional weight becomes too heavy to bear.
Time to rethink what togetherness means
In earlier years, we never questioned what Christmas looked like. It carried its own familiar choreography: the meals, the teasing, the soft chaos of a large family slipping into its usual patterns. But this year, the idea of Christmas seems to hesitate before entering the room. Not out of sorrow, but out of honesty. As though we all feel that repeating the old form would be out of tune with where we actually are.
It leaves me with a quiet, persistent question: what does togetherness mean when life has redrawn the map? I don’t have a quick answer. Perhaps we will not all gather at the same moment. Perhaps Christmas will unfold across smaller, gentler moments, each arising when someone feels ready. Perhaps there will be no single shape this year, only the willingness to show up in the ways we truly can.
Just allowing Christmas to become something new
Little by little, I am beginning to sense that this is not a loss but an invitation. Families breathe, and sometimes the breath changes direction. Togetherness does not always arrive in one piece; sometimes it comes in fragments that are just as meaningful if we allow ourselves to see them that way.
Christmas does not have to imitate previous years. It can be slower, quieter, formed by a kind of truthfulness we may not have needed before. We do not need to force a picture of unity. What matters is that we allow each other the space to be present, close or at a distance, without assuming that only one version of love is valid.
Christmas shaped by who we are today
I don’t yet know what this Christmas will look like. It may be gentle. It may be smaller. It may help us step into the next chapter of our family story in a way that is honest rather than ceremonial. What I do know is that we will shape it from where we stand now, not from where we once stood or where we think we should be. And perhaps that is the quiet wisdom this season has always carried: not the demand to recreate the past, but the invitation to meet each other in the present, exactly as we are.
from a tired mom, moving gently with what is