It’s nearing Christmas and I can feel that pinch.
That sharp, cold nip of loneliness creeping in again.
I’ve had a few weeks’ break from that gnawing feeling… but the Christmas season somehow drags it back to the surface. There’s something about December — the lights, the adverts, the family gatherings, the slow drip of “perfect” photos on social media — that makes the fact that I am alone impossible to ignore.
Not just single.
Not just parenting solo.
But alone in the sense that there is no real family who can truly be there for me. Not in the way that heals, supports, or lifts. Only in the ways that reopen wounds in an already frayed nervous system.
Most of the year, I can tuck that reality neatly beneath the surface. Push it down just enough to function. But Christmas won’t allow that.
Christmas exposes the empty spaces at the table.
And yet — thank God for the other story woven into this season.
The story that doesn’t pretend life is gentle or fair or tidy.
The story of Jesus’s birth.
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Reading the nativity again recently, I saw it from a completely new angle — not the serene, glowy, children’s-storybook version… but through the eyes of a young, frightened, exhausted, very-pregnant girl enduring things no woman should ever have to endure.
Traveling miles, full-term, on a donkey.
No comfort. No midwife.
No clean room.
No dignity.
No rest.
No mother to hold her hand.
No family to advocate for her.
And God… allowed it.
If there is ever proof that God does not play favourites, it is this:
He allowed His own Son to be born in a filthy animal’s feeding trough.
We soften it with carols and candles and nostalgia.
“Away in a manger…”
But let’s be honest — away in a manger?
Away with it, I’d have been screaming.
We don’t get the inner monologue of teenage Mary in labour.
But having done labour twice… one can only imagine the fear, the pain, the disorientation.
And Jesus? You don’t hear Him emerging years later in rebellion saying,
“Thanks, Dad, for the animal trough. Couldn’t even give Mum a clean room?”
It is simply… quiet trust.
Not because the circumstances were good — they weren’t.
Not because the pain was small — it wasn’t.
But because sometimes God allows what we would never choose, for reasons He doesn’t give us access to at the time.
I honestly don’t know why He allowed my story to unravel in the ways it has.
I don’t know why the loneliness sharpens at Christmas or why certain losses never seem to fully heal.
But Mary’s story gives me permission to say this:
If God did not spare His own Son from the messiness, the lack, the pain, the indignity… then maybe my messy story isn’t evidence of abandonment.
Maybe it is simply evidence of being human in a broken world —
and loved deeply in it.
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Christmas doesn’t magically erase loneliness.
It amplifies it.
But it also whispers something steadier:
The holiest story ever told began in a place no woman would choose.
And God was still there.
So maybe — just maybe — He is still here too.
In the pinch, the ache, the empty spaces, the unreturned calls, the family fractures, the nights where silence feels heavy.
Maybe the Saviour who entered the world in a feeding trough
also sits with the woman who opens December with a sigh she can’t quite name.
And maybe… that is enough for today.
Love
MumDoc ❤️
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