[Editor’s note: ‘Upon a Midnight Clear’ is an essay collection edited by Vancouver author JJ Lee. The book features the work of regional authors sharing true stories of memorable holiday seasons. This essay, which appears in the book as ‘Advent,’ explores the potential that new places and experiences hold for us to get to know ourselves again.]

I wanted to experience Europe in the winter. I craved beauty. I needed clarity. And so, I decided to take a year off from work as a naturopathic doctor in Calgary. One of my former residency students had graduated and was willing to cover my practice. My daughter, Zoe, was four years old, and I wanted to spend time with her before she went to school.

In Calgary, I couldn’t tell why my life was falling apart. I was working so hard to be successful, to make enough money, to be a partner and a mom. I was exhausted.

My medical practice was growing, and I loved my patients, but I felt like it was always hard. I had moved my clinic twice but still worked with conflict as a co-worker. I had a great husband, but he was always gone to Europe, or China, or the United States for work, and with a new house and a young kid, we needed the money.

When you run your own practice, there are never days off, and I worried about my patients constantly. Despite working full time, I did the lion’s share of the parenting decision-making. I had gone back to work when Zoe was four months old as we couldn’t afford otherwise, and she had been either with a part-time nanny or at playschool since.

I had had a traumatic pregnancy, as my appendix burst after I gave birth and I became septic, and I had never recovered my health. I became angry, resentful of my husband and his freedom and his travel, and I hated being that person, but I didn’t understand why I had to sacrifice my job so that his could be more successful.

Slowly, I fell apart, pieces chipped away with each trip he took.

I began to have panic attacks, which could take days away from me. You know what they say, you can change your hair, your husband or your home, but not all at the same time. I’d had enough haircuts to know that I had to make a different choice.

Things couldn’t go on like they were, and so, I decided to change my home.

If Zoe and I left for a few months, it would give Jason a chance to work as much as he wanted in the busy season, and me a chance to see if I could find a way out of the crazy life I had somehow gotten myself into.

Suddenly, Madrid

This was before the days of Airbnb, and I searched around a sabbatical homes website for affordable, beautiful places to live in Europe that were empty in the winter. I found houses in France, Belgium and Spain, and I offered them one-third of the proposed rent in exchange for an easy and consistent tenant.

I got one enthusiastic reply. A woman in a small town in Spain would love to have us at her house, a restored convent, in exchange for watching out for damage in the rainy season and not making any demands.

And so, I found myself one night in November in a busy Madrid square hauling my luggage off of the bus from the airport with a giddy and goofy four-year-old trailing behind me.

I wandered around the square looking for the street where our hotel was located, as Zoe hopped from stone to stone. Evening lights exposed pockets of young adults in warm yellow for a moment before they moved on to their destinations. Daytime performers packed away equipment. Old men sat smoking on the fountain edges, faded in the dusk. I imagined their fingers stained tenaciously yellow.

My big black roller bag clip-clopped over the cobblestones as Zoe trustily plodded along behind me, pulling her own animal roller bag in one hand and holding her LeapFrog Leapster in the other.

I loved being able to spend time with her even though we were so tired, and she seemed to be born to travel. It was hard always being away from her at work.

I had a decision to make. I didn’t know if I wanted to make her proud that I worked hard and had a successful career or if I wanted to just be with her.

On a whim, alone

In the hotel, I put her to bed and looked out the window as the evening transactions were beginning in the busy street below. It was a foreign landscape for me, and I was here alone.

A creeping feeling of loneliness filled me. If Jason was going to be gone so much, I wanted to see if I could be more independent, but I was exhausted from travel-parenting, decision-making and the work of handing over my practice.

I couldn’t believe that I was allowed to be gone from work. I was going to try to live in a foreign country on a whim, alone. What had I just done? I had left my home and my partner to try to figure out how to live again.

Zoe and I recovered in Madrid for a few days. For some reason, I had thought that Spain would be like Mexico, vibrant and boisterous. I’d studied medicine in Phoenix, and had worked with and seen Mexican people as patients, so I spoke mostly medical Spanish.

But instead of extroversion, what I found in Spain was a deep pride, a reserve, a cautious kindness.

I took Zoe to the Prado museum where she drew pictures of The Garden of Earthly Delights and delighted the museum workers. We walked the stone streets and ate Spanish treats. Tradition seeped into me like molasses; there was old stonework and dark paintings, and beautifully dressed people engaged in serious chats. Sharing all this culture with a four-year-old is like sharing caviar with a monkey, but I hoped somehow that it would stay with her.

Southern Spain in the winter is like an inhale, a long slow deep breath in, a break, a respite.

I’ve never experienced Spain in the summer. I imagine it’s chaotic and hot, and beautiful of course, but the Spain I know is still and fresh and cold until you light the fire.

We took a train to Seville where we were going to stay until Christmas, inching our way into the south. Seville is the fourth-largest city and the capital of Andalusia. It was the capital of Muslim Spain and the launching point for Spanish colonization of other countries, as it sits on the River Guadalquivir, which leads directly to the Atlantic Ocean.

Due to the mixed occupation history, Seville has stunning architecture. It was the location of the filming for the kingdom of Dorne in Game of Thrones, and wandering around the city was like walking into history.

The Alcázar is a Moorish Renaissance palace that you enter through blue and green tiled hallways. You walk through a series of courtyards, and then into the lush and miraculous garden. It is one of the most beautiful places in the world.

The apartment we rented was a two-storey two-bedroom, filled with the kind of furniture you can only imagine exists: a chair that looked like a velvet red shoe, a black plastic chandelier, a table made of some kind of exotic wood heavily coated in resin and in an ’80s thought-bubble shape. Nothing fit together and yet everything fit in a certain garish style. The cold tile was suited to the hot summer days but not to our November escapades.

I looked over the French door balcony and watched young adults passing below me through the narrow street. Seville seemed to consist mostly of the young on their way to something.

The Christmas markets started early, wooden booths that filled the town squares. Now I understood what the “European markets” in Canada were trying to simulate.

Individual stalls sold Catholic wares, most of which I had no idea what their purpose was. There were also stalls of bread, chestnuts, wooden toys and nativity figurines. Nothing was cheap or plastic.

People flocked to the squares and we stood among them, fearlessly crushed in a type of communal joy resulting from the kind of human proximity that existed before COVID.

Christmas in Spain felt like a song

One Christmas fair took place under Las Setas, giant mushroom-like concrete structures that formed a canopy and held a restaurant you could walk up to. Camels spat at us from pens underneath the mushrooms and we waited our turn to have a chance at the Shrek bouncy castle. We bought braided bread and roasted chestnuts and wandered amongst the Roman statues and modern concrete.

Work stopped for the holiday season and so Jason met us in Seville close to Christmas Day. I waited anxiously in the vaulted train station as Zoe looked through toy shops. Relief flooded into me as he stepped off of the train. My experiment to be independent made me realize how much happier I was when he was around.

But if he wasn’t the problem, then I had to wonder if I was.

We celebrated in that apartment, cutting ornaments out of cardboard paper and stringing them up onto our paper tree with red ribbon. The gifts we found were well made and small, as when we returned to Calgary, we would still have to fit everything we had into the bags we came with.

With Jason back, everything was an adventure. I didn’t let myself think about why I left Calgary, focusing instead on the joy and movement of experiencing the holiday season in a different country.

The image I hold now of Christmas in Spain is quite different than back home with the green and red and mall shopping, and the furious drive to get gifts in time.

Spanish Christmas felt more like a song with a healthy dose of eating at cafés.

Even though it was fun, and Spain was beautiful, I was still exhausted. My goal for the trip wasn’t just to have an adventure. I had to figure out how to get my life back. If Jason wasn’t the problem, what was?

A part of me needed beauty

We made our way to Jimena de la Frontera on Jan. 4. The train south from Seville gave us a glimpse of low orchard trees in a rocky and rolling green landscape. Everything looked rich in the way that olive oil looks rich, satisfying and filled with nourishment.

I wanted to just lie down in those hills, rest between the trees like fallen leaves. Once we figured out how to make connections between two train stations miles apart, the trip was fast and efficient.

Jimena de la Frontera is one of the oldest towns in Europe. It lay small and beautiful on the side of a hill, white-walled and brown-roofed. The train platform was at the bottom, and the road wound up towards the square, which is the only flat spot in the town. In the square, metal multicoloured fold-out chairs sat by café openings and children played soccer, and somehow avoided losing their soccer ball down the slopes.

We walked up a slightly inclined cobbled street in the sun. There were no breaks between the houses, just slight differences in doors and balconies. We found out that the whole street used to be a convent, since lovingly separated by an architect into units.

Our house had a thick, arched, wooden door, and we entered a terracotta-tiled hall with a rich red carpet. On the main floor a kitchen, dining room, small living room with a fireplace, and a piano room surrounded a small courtyard that beckoned with plants, a table and chairs, and a cold pool. The second floor was an open space with high ceilings and thick wooden beams. Two bedrooms with gauze falling from the ceiling to cover the beds, and a bathroom with a claw-foot tub stood off to one side. A terrace opened into the courtyard.

I’m not sure what grace allowed us to be in this place but the part of me that needed beauty sang in response as we walked through the rooms. We woke the next day to the sounds of excitement in the streets outside. When we emerged from our house on the morning of Jan. 5, the town was restless with preparation.

In the square were more bouncy castles, this time SpongeBob-themed. Kids ran through the streets with sculptures made from strung-together cans; we followed as they converged into a noisy parade.

Musicians played flamenco guitar as they walked. Jason took some cans from a recycling bin, found some string and made a small sculpture that Zoe could drag through the streets alongside the can-toting children of Jimena.

We had awoken to a festival that celebrates Epiphany, the Three Kings Festival, La Fiesta de Los Reyes. The three kings were the Magi, the men who visited Jesus in the manger.

In southern Spain, this is when the kids get their holiday presents, which are left in their shoes (ostensibly by the three kings) the morning after the parade. It was deafening, and exciting. The next morning Zoe woke to find some hastily bought presents in her shoes, a second Christmas, a new tradition.

Andalusia, southern Spain, had welcomed us, and we were gratefully there. Jason and Zoe were having the vacation of their lives, but now that the holiday was over, I grew desperate to be alone.

I wanted days and days of solitude, I wanted not to think, not to take care of, not to consider. My deep need to please and help others meant that it was difficult to understand myself around other people.

I needed to be alone to figure out how I could again become the person I used to be, that spontaneous, sensitive, goofy person that loved adventure. The price of clarity is selfishness.

A rhythm of simplicity

And so when Jason left to go back to Canada, it was both a sadness and a relief. Zoe and I settled into a calmer living. I wanted to hire a babysitter for a few hours a day so that I could write, but my landlord explained to me that because we were staying for a while, we were considered residents, and so when school started Zoe was invited to join the other four-year-olds.

Children are very motivated to talk to other children, and her desire fuelled her learning. The teacher was kind, beautiful and tough, perfect for my exuberant child. Zoe glowed in the life that Spain was offering her, in a way that didn’t happen in Calgary.

Finally alone, I imploded as I turned my attention to my chosen deep dive, researching a novel on the Roman empire.

The days became a rhythm of simplicity. Wake, eat, walk my daughter to school down the hill along the stone roads in the misty morning. Wait with the other parents as the children are lined up and taken in. Shop in the street market or the store for bread, wine, cheese, fruit and vegetables. Work in the morning researching my book and then writing in the room with the umber walls and the tile floors. Gather my daughter and play or walk. Eat dinner, put her to bed. Make a fire in the big stone fireplace. Drink a glass of wine as the sun goes down.

I was in Spain, on sabbatical. I was lucky and on vacation. I had chosen this. This was part of the life I wanted to live.

But as I lived this beautiful existence, as my crazy Calgary life faded, as I spent more time alone, I could no longer distract myself from a deep uncertainty.

I wrote and I researched and I felt a calm that I had not felt in a long time. Because of this calm, a small thought began to surface, an unwelcome thought. The more time I spent alone, the more I could hear it. I ignored it at first. I made ratatouille. I took little trips. I played and walked with Zoe.

It wasn’t one large event that made me notice. It wasn’t the joy of Christmas in another country. It wasn’t the boisterous parade of Epiphany. It was instead the absence of events. It was the quality of the air after all the holidays had finished. It was a fire that I built myself in the stone fireplace. It was the richly woven red and blue rugs on the tile floors.

One evening, after I stoked the fire, as I looked into the courtyard and the fading light, I let myself say it.

I didn’t want to be a naturopathic doctor.

As I was finally alone, I could no longer lie to myself that I had not come to Spain because I was on vacation. I had come to Spain because I was a failure. I was a failure because, if Jason wasn’t the problem, then I was.

I had gone through eight years of post-secondary school, and I couldn’t hack the stress of the job. This wasn’t really a sabbatical year, it was me figuring out how I could possibly keep going doing what I was doing.

My sister once said that in our family we have to leave the country to get drunk for the first time. I imagine that this was the same thing. The shame of failure meant that I had to leave to admit it. The shame of failing was too great to do it in Canada.

I didn’t leave my work to a colleague because I had planned it.

The pressures of my job were causing me to lash out, to party too much and to blame Jason for my unhappiness. I was both driving myself at work and then driving myself socially to make up for the fact that work never became easy. But I kept pushing, staying in a toxic clinic until I had a breakdown, and ended up desperately casting around for a way to save face.

I wanted out.

But I had spent eight years getting my doctorate, and my identity was connected to this job. I wasn’t a quitter; if I left my work, then I was a failure.

A lesson in success and failure

You see, growing up, failure was something other people were allowed to do. My family felt the ache of judgment deeply. Any shame my father perceived was met by the answer of my ringing successes. I was family pride personified.

We were moving houses, again? I won a speech contest. My dad lost his business? I got better grades.

My mom was sick? I excelled in university.

Succeeding was my answer to our chaotic world.

My dad was white, my mom was Métis, and they both grew up poor and proud. They were hard-working and they made themselves independent. The burden of judgment was always on us though, and I knew my parents felt it. We were fierce in our defiance of what was expected of us.

I recently spoke to Marilyn Dumont, the great Canadian Métis poet, at a Métis women’s event in Alberta. She talked about that burden of judgment on Indigenous people, and said something like, “Growing up, that white gaze was always upon us. We wore our Sunday best every day because we had to, because we were watched more harshly than the other kids.”

We never talked about being Métis in my family, but there was always that sense of needing to prove something to the other families.

I look more white than my mother did; although I have her tanned skin, I have my dad’s blue eyes, which makes me look more Caucasian. My older sister mimics the whiteness of my dad’s line, she burns in the sun like white milk in a hot pan.

But no matter our skin, we still feel the burden of our ancestry. That need to make money. That need to prove ourselves. We never talked about our problems in public. We never told other people if we needed money.

We never relied on anyone. We were a team, and that was all that mattered.

I have friends who have no problem failing spectacularly, even humorously. They have a buoyancy to their failure that feels like a balloon in a festive crowd, drop and be bounced up again, over and over, held up by family privilege.

It’s easy to fail faster when you are allowed to do it over and over.

I had no contingency plan. My parents were gone; I had no backup other than my husband and four-year-old kid.

My decision to take a year off was looked down on by Facebook friends: how dare I stop work for a year? Even though I had worked since I was 14, even though I had worked through school, even though the entirety of our existence in Spain cost less than the price of just child care per month in Calgary, I was judged for dumping the costs of our lives onto my husband. I cancelled my Facebook account, preferring instead to live my shame in secrecy.

The town of Jimena is old, and the Andalusia area has a long history of diverse occupation. The woman down the street dug in her courtyard to build a pool.

The workers first found Islamic stones, and then underneath that they found a Roman road, and even deeper, they found an ancient milling stone belonging to some long-forgotten culture.

Each piece of land has been owned a thousand times. There is some comfort that, in such a place, we are just momentarily on the land, that the land lasts, and we are temporary.

In Canada, I always felt the need to create something new, something from nothing.

In Spain, I was allowed to just live and live lightly. Things did happen — the rains caused flooding in the house and all the carpets had to be taken out and dry cleaned, we had to move out for one week to accommodate a different booking, a neighbour brought us to some Roman ruins to help in the research for my book — but overall, it was a gentle waterfall of joy, one calm adventure after another.

I couldn’t imagine not doing the profession that I had spent eight years studying for, but slowly I began to envision different ways of living, a way of living the way you wanted to.

A woman in her 30s lived across the street from me. She was born in Britain and she spent most of her time in Africa working on a wildlife reserve. Her life was lived in no English-speaking countries. Her house was filled with air and plants. We sat on benches in the sun, calmly talking about choices. She had chosen a quiet life, a life filled with open spaces and physical work. A life different than what had been expected of her.

The truth came to me as we spoke. I had always tried to find a profession that would allow me to live the life I wanted. It never happened.

The profession never transitioned to something easy. I loved my patients, but it was always hard.

The last year had been especially hard.

A patient whom I loved had died of cancer. I was just treating her for side-effects of her medication, but we became close. She was resourceful and she fought and rallied and fought again, but she wasn’t yet 40 when she died. It rocked me.

In addition to this I hated asking patients for money. I hated that naturopathic medicine in Canada was so misunderstood and controversial. I hated that I didn’t have time to spend with Zoe as she got older.

But, as I spoke to my neighbour, I realized that things didn’t have to be hard. In the calm that came post-Epiphany, I had found my epiphany.

At the end of the winter, I returned to Calgary as the snow was melting. I asked the woman who was running my clinic if she wanted to buy the practice and she said yes.

La vida es buena, especially on days that include tapas.

Excerpted from ‘Upon a Midnight Clear,’ edited by JJ Lee. Copyright 2024 JJ Lee. Published by Tidewater Press. Excerpted by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

Happy holidays, readers. Our comment threads will be closed until Jan. 2 to give our moderators a much-deserved break. See you in 2025!