Christmas Decorations, My Mount Everest

I knew parenthood would require bravery, but I didn't sign up for attic ladders.

Photo by Markus Henze on Unsplash

“Mommy, you need to be BWAVE,” my three-year-old shouted. The volume of the shout was expertly calculated to nearly shatter my left eardrum but not quite wake up his sleeping baby brother. Not sure how he does that, but I hope it means talent just runs wild through the family.

“I’m going to be brave, Andy,” I said.

“BUT SHE WAS NOT BRAVE,” said the narrator-voice in my head. (It’s only weird to have an internal narrator if you audibly reply to it. I looked it up.)

“Brave” did not describe the way I was gripping both sides of the sagging ladder that goes up to our attic, and willing myself to step onto the first rung, and not succeeding.

Heights are my Waterloo, my Achilles heel, my Everest. (Except I would never willingly climb Everest. Too high. Plus, there are no bathrooms.)

Climbing a shaky structure of elderly wood to a drafty garret dusted with mouse droppings is not on my list of pleasant ways to spend the morning after Thanksgiving. But I’d promised we could put away the Christmas decor, and Captain Hook never breaks a promise. (Of course, I am not Captain Hook, so I give myself a bit more wiggle room in that department.)

Ladder-climbing in my household is usually carried out by my husband, Rob, who is fearless, nonchalant, and veritably skips up the skittery steps with feckless ease. In the year and change that we’ve lived in this house, he has ventured upstairs and downstairs, there and back again, with the regularity, if not the gravitas, of Mr. Carson at Downton Abbey. Snow gear, outgrown toys, baby accouterments, and the boatlike luggage carrier for the top of our car have all swung from his practiced hand. But on this day Rob was at work and had forgotten to bring the Christmas boxes down from the attic before he departed. I was left, bereft, to stare baldly into the face of the collapsible climbing structure that unfolds from our hallway ceiling. The greatest forces of whoever it was that defeated Napoleon would pale in comparison.

“MOMMY,” Andy shouted once more, hopping into the hallway with the vigor and singular focus of a seagull that wants a French fry. “Go up! I will stand WIGHT HERE.” He planted his small bare feet on either side of a ladder rail. I gasped and pulled him back. If the whole caboodle collapsed while I was up there, he would be crushed in the splintering disaster and would probably somehow go up in flames.

“You stay in the doorway,” I told him. “Your mission is to watch carefully and make sure the Christmas decorations don’t, uh, come down by themselves.”

“Otay!” Andy shouted. “And you be BWAVE, Mommy!” He stayed in his assigned position in letter if not spirit, hopping from one foot to the other and absently drumming on the doorframe with a toy wrench.

I had told him I was going to be brave because I do not like going up ladders, but that I would go up the ladder anyway to get the boxes. I talk to him throughout the day about anything on my mind (these topics are legion) because it’s supposed to build his vocabulary and foster a stronger bond between us. Someday, I intend to exploit that bond to make him go up the ladder and get the Christmas decorations. It’s called teaching responsibility — another good vocabulary word.

The expanded vocabulary hasn’t yet progressed to such phrases as “I will be glad to go to bed and get adequate rest, Mother,” or “Certainly, I will tidy away my toys without indulging in a screaming meltdown” but Andy has the word “brave” down pat. It’s personal for him: as we’ve been slowly working on potty training, he’s had to conquer his fear of the tall grown-up toilet (perhaps my acrophobia is genetic — ooh, “acrophobia” is a good vocabulary word too), and gather the courage necessary to stop a fun activity and engage in the drudgery of personal hygiene.

Fear of the potty sounds silly to the average adult, who probably doesn’t even remember a time when they were in diapers. But fear of perfectly safe attic ladders would sound silly to someone who cleans the bug guts off the windows of the Empire State Building. We all have our crosses to bear, and by the way, some of us are afraid of bears.

I ascended slowly, one sock-clad foot above another. Gentle reader, you need not know how much I weigh, but suffice it to say it is roughly the same as my husband. This thought, once a millstone ’round my no-longer-so-slender neck, was now a comforting pillar of strength. If the ladder didn’t fail under his weight, it would surely hold up beneath mine.

Unless, of course, cumulative stress broke the camel’s rung today. But I would not think about that.

I made it to the top, and I did not lose my breakfast. My pen shall draw a veil over the hellish process of unzipping the insulation cover and struggling through its gap. But I hoisted myself to the narrow strip of wooden floor, flanked on either side by cotton-candy insulation, and I beheld the boxes of Christmas ornaments, stacked at the far end of the attic.

“What you doing, Mommy?” Andy called from below. A little pitter-patter struck dread into my heart. He was approaching the base of the ladder. I could not pull him back now.

“Stay where you are, Andy!” I shouted down, attempting to mask the tremble in my voice. “I just have to walk across the attic and get the boxes. I will be back soon. Stay still! You stay still and I will be brave.”

Brave. I am brave. I am like Frodo taking the ring to Mordor. I am Sybil Ludington riding through the night to warn her neighbors of the oncoming British. I am Elizabeth Bennet standing up to Lady Catherine de Bourgh. I am… a chubby polar bear distributing his weight evenly over thin ice, as I saw in a viral video just the other day.

I dropped to my knees and creaked my way, gingerly as a duck on wet cement, across the floorboards. Nothing gave way. No fearsome crash through the living room ceiling, no unforeseen and inexplicable explosion, dousing from a broken water pipe, or release of murder hornets.

Below, Andy blew tunelessly into a harmonica and shouted, “Where you are, Mommy?”

“Coming, Andy,” I stuttered, dragging the box behind me as I made my way back (still resolutely on hands and knees). At the ladder hatchway, I was forced to again confront my mortality: the death-defying feat of getting back down, this time with a plastic storage bin in tow.

I gripped the rail with one hand, storage bin in the other, and not-so-deftly swung one foot over the insulation cover, searching for rungs and desperately hoping I would not find a centipede in the process.

“I’m being brave, Andy,” I called down.

One of Andy’s favorite books is Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco. The protagonist, deathly afraid of thunderstorms, nevertheless manages to join her stalwart grandmother in gathering ingredients for a Thunder Cake before the storm hits, and confronts a bevy of other fears in the process. As they wait for their chocolate strawberry cake to finish baking, the grandmother says, “You’re not afraid of thunder. You’re too brave!”

“I’m not brave, Grandma,” says the little girl. “I was under the bed! Remember?”

“But you got out from under it,” Grandma reminds her.

There’s so much in this thunderstorm-filled world to frighten a three-year-old. I couldn’t tell Andy to be brave when climbing onto the potty, or when trying a new exotic food like green peas, or when walking past a leaf blower on the sidewalk, if I couldn’t show him what it meant to be brave when I didn’t want to be. So I got out from under the bed, metaphorically speaking, and hauled the box down the ladder.

Words fail me to describe the experience, mostly because I have placed a mental block over my emotions at the time. I only know there was no literal screaming, crying, or throwing up on my part, and that I reached the bottom without catastrophe or implosion or spontaneous combustion on the part of the seventy-two-year-old ladder.

“Wow, Mommy!” Andy shouted, as I dragged the box clear of the hallway and sat down, dizzy and a little nauseated, on the sofa. “You did it!”

“I did it,” I said. “I did it!” It felt good to bask in my toddler’s praise, if only for a few fleeting seconds before I realized this was just Box One of Four.

“I can’t do it again, though,” I whispered.

“Let’s put up the Chwistmas twee,” Andy was saying, yanking unsuccessfully at the lid of the bin, which I knew contained only lights and a little basket of artificial holly. The artificial tree, vivisected and robed in three giant black garbage bags, still lingered above stairs. With it sat three more boxes of doodads and trinkets. I had been brave once, but even my heart-swelling love for my firstborn son could not compel me to screw my courage to the sticking place again.

And lo, an opportunity to further increase Andy’s vocabulary appeared unto me, and the glory of the term “deus ex machina” shone upon us — for my heretofore unmentioned best friend, my Thanksgiving houseguest, emerged from the bathroom where she had been taking a shower.

“Maybe Auntie Melody will go up the ladder for me,” I told Andy, “because I am done for the day.”

“Sure,” said this angel of light who feared neither height nor depth nor centipedes, and she toweled her wet hair and did according to what she had promised.

“How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!” wrote Jane Austen in Persuasion. Austen was cracking witticisms about human nature over 200 years ago, but the line rings true for me today as I make excuses for myself on a regular basis. Perhaps I am but a cowardly lion of a parent, but I think I can reasonably model for my son that it is important to be brave while also showing him that we are all finite. The world is terrifying, to be sure, but those who love us are there to help us through it — even when we grow up. And if I can teach him that it is a good and sensible thing to ask for assistance when you have been brave enough for one day — and that this advice will not apply to the consumption of one (1) bite of green beans — then I shall have succeeded in at least one important area.

Oh, and while I’m at it, I’ll be teaching him about foresight: I set a calendar reminder and made sure that my husband was available to take the tree back up to the attic when Christmas was over.

If 2024 is lucky, it will see me climb that attic ladder one more time at most, and I do not intend to squander that courage in the first weeks of the new year.