New Year's Eve

I was never one of those kids who beg to stay up later or fight going to sleep. Bed was my safe place, somewhere to retreat with my books and a cat or two. I definitely wasn’t staying up until midnight for New Year’s Eve. Instead, my mother would give me some colored paper to cut into little pieces and at midnight she would come wake me up and hand it to me to throw over the side of my loft bed. Then I would fall back asleep. My dad didn’t live with us, but he would often come to our house for special occasions- for a while he had his own room at our place until it started filling up with all the clean laundry that my mother meant to iron but never got around to. When I was eight, the three of us had New Year’s Eve dinner, which always included a boiled cabbage that my mother would stick a gold coin in. Whoever got the gold coin was supposed to be lucky for the year. This tradition might have been fine for a bigger family, but with only three of us it didn’t feel too lucky to be faced with a rather large serving of cabbage. I went to bed as usual, woke up and threw my homemade confetti and tried to go back to sleep. But my loft bed was close to the ceiling and I could hear things going on upstairs. Not enough to make out words, though there were lots of them. I heard stomping footsteps and then the front door slamming. I didn’t know what was going on and I was shaking with fear. They never fought- usually when my mother was being difficult, Dad just went home and left me to gather up the pieces and try to reassemble my mother into a semblance of a functioning adult. I climbed down the ladder, landing on the wooden basement floor my Dad had painted purple with my bare feet, and climbed the spiral staircase. She was sitting at the table, cigarette in hand, and as soon as she saw me, she started on a list of complaints about my Dad. I would usually stay still in moments like this, feet rooted on the brown linoleum, mouth shut. But this was my Dad she was trash-talking, the person who bought my shoes and took me rowing. So I defended him. She turned towards me, turned on me. Now I was the enemy. “He’s not even your father!” she hissed, the most damaging thing she could think of. If she thought that was going to win me to her side, she was wrong. Even at 8, I was stubborn, and I knew who I loved.