The Christmas I denied my son divine connection

Bringing Up Mommy

McClatchy-Tribune News Service

First published 2008

Every year when it’s time to start thinking about the children’s Christmas pageant, I cringe.

I think of the sweet elements, of course, all those precious little shepherds and angels processing to the altar with the Holy Family, their tiny voices lifted in song.

I think of the dedicated parents who manage to get all those Santa-crazed, sugar-infused kids dressed and crammed into church on Christmas Eve.

            

But then thoughts turn to the Christmas pageant of 1988.

            

I was excited that year because my husband and I were going home for the first time in years to spend Christmas with my mothers and sisters in New Orleans.

            

I was especially excited because we would be bringing a baby with us. Our baby. Our first baby. And the first grandchild in my family in 10 years.

            

At 3 months old, he was the perfect age and disposition for traveling.

            

He was also perfect for something else apparently, as two weeks Christmas, the priest at our church, along with the pageant director and two beaming members of the pageant committee, approached us and with great pomp and ceremony and announced:

            

"We want your baby to be Jesus this year."

Our jaws dropped. Our hearts sank. 

             

The train tickets were paid for. My mother was standing on her head waiting to get her hands on her new grandbaby.

"We're so sorry," we said.

The year 1988 became the Christmas our son could have been Jesus.

            

It's a reality I've had to face every Christmas Eve.

I see the procession of miniature shepherds and the angels in their glittering wings start down the aisle. And I shut my eyes tight as Mary comes carrying a child who is not mine up the aisle.

For years after that, I fantasized we'd get another chance. There was Christmas 1992, six months after we had a daughter. But then some other church family went and had a baby boy in November. And I knew even if the church elders felt sorry for us, they weren't going to choose a boisterous 6-month-old girl over a newborn boy guaranteed not to rise up out of the manger and start cooing at the crowd.

            

In April 1997, we were blessed with another strapping opportunity -- and the right gender this time. But I knew then, too: Even if Benjie was still the right age at Christmas, he weighed 9 pounds at birth and 20 pounds by October. There would be no swaddling clothes big enough to fit this babe.

            

No, this is the cross I have to bear.

Some other mother's child will get the extra boost of divine inspiration at an early age. Some other child will go on to become a holy man or a Peace Corps volunteer or just a really nice person. 

At the very least, some other child will carry with always carry with him the knowledge that the year he was born, he got to be Jesus in the Christmas pageant.

There is this one other lament: 

If he had been Jesus, doesn't that mean I would have been Mary?