Our Christmas Angel

This is a true story. These events really happened to me and I'm telling this story because I promised a good friend I would tell her the story of why I don't believe in ghosts but I do believe in angels.

This story isn't an attempt to convince anyone of anything. It's just me telling my story.

Before she became pregnant with me, my biological mother was in college and became part of a study on the long term effects of psychedelics on college students. At some point during this study she became pregnant with me and a twin sister. Once she was aware of this condition she informed the people conducting the study and they urged her to simply terminate the pregnancy and continue in the study.

She did as they asked, somehow I managed to survive but my sister did not.
This was prior to Roe v Wade so my guess is the practitioner botched something up in the process, either way he was convinced he got us.

Believing the pregnancy had terminated, she continued in the study. Eventually she realized she was still pregnant but by then I was about 8 months gestation and it was just too late to do anything about it.

Somehow during this time she had a vision that I was not a human, but some sort of other "being". Honestly I don't remember but either way, the point was she had developed full blown schizophrenia due to her continued use of psychedelics.

This is not a pity me story, but keep in mind from the moment I was born, my biological mother believed sincerely I would bring about the end of the world as we know it. So I went through a lot of abuse from infancy to early childhood. Abuse for which there are plenty of scars to remind me of what I can remember and medical records to document the rest.

Eventually this culminated in my removal from her custody, where I was placed in the care of my grandparents who were more than kind to me and raised me as their own. My mother in the meantime was in and out of hospitals but the reuniting period, always ended with her trying and usually just about succeeding in ending my life, so eventually that stopped too.

We were estranged most of my teenage life. By the time I was an adult, what the psychedelics had left behind had been pretty well destroyed by the medicines they used to treat schizophrenia. I had written her off as a lost cause and just ignored her through my adult life.

One day I dropped by to visit her because I had heard she was doing better and I thought she should finally meet her granddaughter.

She did seem a bit better, more lucid, more healthy.
She asked me if I could ever forgive her. I told her flat "no".
A week later she died.

This was January 2006.

I dealt with a mix of emotions. Mostly just that she had sought my forgiveness and I could never find any way to forgive. I felt guilty about not caring. It was a strange time for me.

Eventually I landed a job with a company in Wyoming and we moved there to live in what amounted to an "encampment" while we looked for a home. The house was a doublewide trailer. It was nothing fancy but it was decent setup, I had no real complaints.

When we moved, it was just after Thanksgiving. We didn't own much at the time, but we didn't need to. The company provided all the furnishings, we just needed to buy food and they setup a weekly stipend while I worked my way through the process of onboarding and getting into the official payroll. The joys of working for a multinational conglomerate that had outsourced payroll to the lowest bidder.

The stipend wasn't much, just $100 a week. But you can live alright on that even with a family if you know how to plan and prepare.

Two weeks before Christmas the fridge broke and we lost all of our food.
Now to put it bluntly. This was Wyoming and it was winter time, so not everything was gone. Also I'm pretty big into prepping and making a larder and keeping food storage. So we were never in danger of going hungry. But what was ruined was all the fixins for Christmas dinner.

In my house there are two meals in this life that belong to me and me alone. These are Thanksgiving Dinner and Christmas Dinner. I know it's silly, ridiculous really. But something about this had me doing some serious soul searching, because there was no way to buy the ingredients I needed.

The company replaced the fridge less than a week before Christmas. But to say we were strapped is putting it mildly.
I did something I don't normally do. I knelt in prayer. I asked God why all these weird things were happening? Was there something I needed to do that I just wasn't?

If I told you that I had some profound spiritual experience right then and there I'd be lying.
What did happen was that some 30 minutes later my Grandmother (the one who had adopted me, so I call her my adoptive mother) gave me a call.
She was upset. She told me that the Christmas tree had tipped over and all the ornaments had broke.

In our family we had a tradition of making ornaments each year.
So you're talking 60 years of family history sitting in shatters on the ground.

I don't know why, but I packed the family up into the station wagon and we made the 800 mile trek through Wyoming's most interesting shades of sheet white winter weather, arriving safely at my adoptive mother's house about 2 days before Christmas.

God bless her heart, she had managed to glue everything back together except for one ornament. One ornament I had always taken for granted. It had just always been there, I had never even thought to ask.

She was really upset and I managed to finally figure out why.
Before she got sick, Christmas had been my mother's favorite holiday. She lived the spirit, gave freely of her time and would sometimes spend a month in her apartment in January without heat so she could afford some surprise or another for some random neighbor, because tragedy loves Christmas.

This particular ornament she had made the year before I was born, the last year that she was really "Ok".

Except it wasn't the last year she had been "Ok".

I was told that the previous Christmas she had started seeing visions of angels and spirits, but the outright psychosis had mysteriously cleared up a couple weeks before Christmas and that year she had been calm, functional, normal, herself. She had one last Christmas, before dying alone and cold in her apartment because she had bought a new wheelchair for a neighbor who was sorely in need, rather than paying her heating bill. Her death had been a suicide.

That night I had an epiphany. I needed to forgive her. She was sick, she had no control over herself, she had no power to change any of this of her own accord.

More importantly I realized that the person who had tried repeatedly to kill me, was never my mother. It was some monster that had somehow inhabited her skin. Ending her own life was the only way to win against the monsters and demons that plagued her.

The next morning there was a picture I had never seen hanging on the wall near the entry hall.
It was my mother as she had been before I was born.
My adoptive mother had found it that morning in some obscure corner of the house or another and decided it looked nice there.

I was struck by how beautiful this woman had been and I looked at my own daughter and realized that she would grow up to look a lot like her. This was a woman I had known my whole life, yet had somehow never met.
She had evidently worked at a Woolworth at the time. The picture was her standing in her work uniform close to Christmas time because she had one of those goofy Santa hats on. She was running checkout #12

Fast forward a few hours...

Christmas Eve, Walmart. If there really is such a thing as hell, those three words pretty much sum it up.
My wife had decided to surprise my mother with a new tree topper of some sort.
I was certain a root canal would be a much better use of my limited tolerance for pain that year.
But she insisted and really, there's no telling this woman no.

The flaw with this plan was that Walmart wants a lot of money for Christmas ornaments the DAY BEFORE Christmas.
The other flaw in her otherwise impeccable plan was we had $10 left on the stipend that week, since gas for 800 miles in a 1990s era station wagon wasn't free.

Despite our best efforts to find anything for $10, let alone a quality tree topper. One never materialized.

Then the nightmare happened...
My little girl bolted!

She had straight up disappeared and vanished in a puff of whatever little girls disappear in when they dematerialize like that.

What felt like hours later, but was only a couple of minutes, a Code Adam was called, the store was in complete lock down. They found my daughter, in of all places the toy aisle on the far end of the store from where we were at.

She had found a "dolly" and was playing with it. This "dolly" was actually a very nice porcelain angel. A very expensive porcelain angel unboxed and in the hands of a 3 year old we had lovingly named "Bella the destroyer", for good reasons I won't bother you with.

I told her to put it down, there was no way we could afford it.
She screamed, freaked out and said "Grandma!"

Trying to calm her down I said "No we can't afford that for grandma! I'm sorry sweety we just can't."
She said "Grandma gave it to me!".

Of course I knelt down to give the child a lecture, but as I looked up, I noticed that the aisle we were on was aisle 12.

Ok so now I'm just shaking my head because this was exactly what I mean when I say magical thinking. There is no way that 12 had any significance, but it kind of stuck in my craw. I decided to put it down anyways because there was no way we could afford this thing, even if there was some strange feeling when I held it. A feeling saying that somehow my daughter wasn't lying.

A feeling reminding me that
"Bella never lies about anything...".

We made our way to the front. My wife found a nice tinsel star to go on top of the tree as we were about to checkout.
This is Walmart, it's Christmas Eve, the lines were long, but we somehow managed to finally make our way to the front. The tinsel star rang up as $15 dollars. We only had $10 left. My wife began to argue with the cashier, the sign said "$5" etc. In short we were your typical redneck family in Walmart on Christmas Eve.

While we were standing there, the store manager, the one who had found our daughter came up to us.
"I'm sorry sir, but did you know your daughter dropped this?"

It was the porcelain angel again. This thing was easily going to cost $100, if a stupid tinsel star was going to be $15.
I told her
"I'm sorry if she broke it or took it out of the box or whatever, but there is no way we can afford that!"

She looked puzzled for a minute.
"No! You don't understand, your daughter had this when we found her and it's not a thing we sell here, I can assure you. In fact I've worked here 5 years and I've never seen anything like it. It's absolutely unique!"

I spun around for a minute, I couldn't really process what was going on. Sure enough though, we were at checkout 12. I pretty much gave up any hope of holding onto my critical thinking skills at that point.

We thanked the manager and made our way out of the store and back to the home I had spent so many Christmases in. We wrapped the angel as a present and put it under the tree.

In the morning our 3yo daughter insisted on being the one to give the present to "Grandma Great!", insisting it had been given to her by "Grandma".

She unwrapped it and tears flooded her cheeks. She sniffed it, held it close to her cheeks and then gave it a big hug.

I asked her why she was acting so strange and she explained that last year at Christmas my mother had told her she knew she would die soon. She made a promise last Christmas that she would find a way to let her know if there was really life after death.

Not that I needed proof of this mind you, the woman who raised me was pretty much impervious to the whole life after death question. Her thoughts had always been "It's a nice story we tell ourselves, so we aren't afraid of it when it comes and it always comes".

She had lost a lot of family, we had lost a lot of family. So if she changed her mind suddenly it was shocking, but entirely up to her.

To prove it to me anyways though, she dug around in the old photobooks for what felt like days, while I made for the kitchen. When it comes to Christmas dinner, the preparation starts at 9AM if we're to have supper by 6PM.

Finally around 2 or 3 she found what she was looking for.

This particular angel really was unique, in addition to sharing her hair color and eye color and shape of the face. This angel was wearing the exact same costume that my mother had worn in a Christmas pageant at age 12.

The last year my Grandmother's father had been alive. He had been an avid photographer. The last photo he had taken was my mother, age 12, at the Christmas pageant smiling. Funny thing about him, he had been a minister and had promised my adoptive mother that if there was life after death he would find a way to let her know. It was the fact that he had never kept his promise, that she had decided there must not be anything there when we close our eyes for the last time.

You're free to believe whatever you want of course, but the word Angel literally means "messenger".
As for me and mine, I think it's safe to say we most certainly got the message.
We got an angel for Christmas.

note: I'm rerunning this at the behest of my family. I originally posted it here. https://steemit.com/story/@williambanks/an-angel-for-christmas
This post is 100% steem powered!