I was rereading this bit from my OP for this thread…
- Quote :
- Now holiday blues is the feeling of loss or sadness that you have over the holidays when, for whatever reason, you can't be with those people who have been or are special and significant. And holiday stress...is when you have to be with some of those people!
…and it got me thinking (always a dangerous situation). Added to the general holiday stress, 2011 hasn’t been the best year ever for a lot of people. Everything from a spate of natural disasters to political/economic turmoil to personal losses and health crises have many of us uptight, and it shows up in the ways we relate to each other on message boards even.
For me, for some time now, my holiday circumstances have had to do, more often than not, with spending these special days alone. For the most part, I’m happy with that. I’ve learned over the years, to appreciate the time I have, on these days, for quiet reflection.
There was a time when I found myself in a position not unlike the mother at Solomon’s feet, when the wise king drew his sword and offered to cut the baby in front of him in half so that both of the women claiming it could have a share. I made the choice I felt I had to make, for their sake.
I wish I could say I quickly learned to accept my choice with grace, but the truth is, I did not. I almost lost my two daughters in the process, but one day, I remembered seeing a poster on the wall of my oldest daughter’s dorm room:
If you love something let it go. If it comes back to you it’s yours, if it doesn’t, it never was. I knew that her purpose for posting it had to do with her father’s choosing to leave his family while she and her brother and sister were still children, but in those somewhat later years, it was more, from my perspective, about me being willing to let them go. So, I found the strength to do just that, and after a few years, they did come back; but, in the meantime, I had learned the positive value of a quiet holiday with time for contemplation and for looking forward to another year, and making plans for that year. Sometimes I think that it is the reason why God fixed our major holidays at the end of the year, so we could get all the stuff finished and start anew.
I find myself remembering an eye-opening comment made to me one evening by a childhood friend of my brother’s. It was made on an evening during the years my hubby and me, along with most of our contemporaries, were trying to find a second adolescence, as if the first hadn’t been agonizing enough. We had developed the habit of going, with friends, “across the river” on Saturday nights. When you live on the southeastern border of Texas, that generally means going into the state of Louisiana with the intent of having a very good time. Louisiana has always been a bit more lenient with its drinking laws. When we were really young it meant that we could drink legally before we were 21. Once we were older, it meant, for our generation, at least, that we didn’t have to sit down to a meal, or belong to a private club, in order to have a cocktail or two (or more) while we were out on the town.
At that time, an evening across the river meant starting out at, say,
Les Champignons in Lake Charles, for a gourmet seafood dinner, and, on the way home, stopping in at one of the Cajun honky-tonks closer to the bridge to have a few drinks, dance the bump, and,
laissez les bon temps rouler (pronounced something like lah-seh-ley-bon-ton-rou-lay, and meaning, if you speak French in the manner of Acadiana, “let the good times roll.”)
So, on one of those evenings when the children were still very small, which meant that all we had to worry about where the children were concerned was the fight between the two sets of grandparents as to who would get the honor of hosting the Saturday night sleepover, we found ourselves at a little nightclub in Vinton, Louisiana, and happened to run into this childhood buddy of my brother’s, who was going through his second or third divorce and in that phase where you just generally spend your free time making an a** of yourself, who decided to join us at our table, and in a slurred voice asked of me, “Do you know what I remember about you most as a kid?” I innocently responded, “No, Butch (yeah, that was still what everybody called him), what do you remember?” He frowned one of those half-drunk frowns and said, “You were always crying.”
It was not the answer I expected. I wondered how he could think that. After we left and started home, though, I began to remember, and it was one of those moments of enlightenment we sometimes have in life. It was true. I literally cried my way through my childhood. It was part of the baggage involved in being the one who carried all the family “stuff.”
It would take more than a few years, not to mention oh so very many more tears, but somewhere along they way I finally got that it was not my job to do everybody’s crying for them, that I didn’t need to carry all their cr**. Somewhere along the way, I started giving it back. I started saying what I thought, and how I honestly felt, and allowing them to do their own crying. And they weren’t always pleased about that. Such an attitude still upsets some of the people I know, including many I care about. There was a time when it upset my daughters so much as young adults that they decided to walk out of my life. That’s when I remembered that poster on Lynn’s wall. That’s when I began using the holidays for contemplation and genuine relaxation. That’s when I found that the ones you truly want in your life will eventually return and if they don’t, well, they weren’t really a part of your genuine life anyway.
Like, it has been hitting me lately that I no longer enjoy decorating a Christmas tree. I'm not sure I ever did. After the girls “came back,” we started a routine, where we found a time during the holidays to do it together, but, while everybody was working hard to make it fun, down underneath, it just wasn’t – even doing it together. During one of my contemplative states last year, I started to remember something that might explain why. It was after my mom had come to live with me. She was complaining, during the day we had set aside for decorating the tree, when we could all be together to work on it, that her hands hurt too badly from her arthritis to help. So, instead, she sat at the breakfast table, a cigarette in one hand and a glass of bourbon and water in the other, and while we decorated the tree, over and over again, she sang, apparently to herself(?), “Anything you can do I can do better.(I can do anything better than you.)” The three of us had a chat about that a few days after I recalled that earlier evening, and we all agreed that there just might be something to connect Nana’s attitude, not just on that night, but on so many evenings in past years, to the tension that had always underlain the annual decorating of the Christmas tree.
So, a few weeks ago, when I told Lynn that I was thinking I might just get one of those pre-decorated trees-in-a-box, and asked her if she thought it might be OK, she said, with a bit of an ironic tone to her voice, “Are you kidding me??”
So, today, the tree came in its little flat box, and was up and on in a matter of minutes, and every time I look at it, a little sense of blissful glee runs through me. It’s a very pretty tree.
You know, this holiday stress thing affects all of us, in one way or another, for a lot of reasons. No matter hw much we grow, and learn, and change, generally for the better, there are times when those old triggers just pop back up, and the days between Thanksgiving and the New Year are among the biggest times for that to happen.
So, we can push the reality of our feelings aside and be our own victims, or we can face things openly, and shed a few honest tears, even, and then, just let it all go, and relax, and find ways to make the days fun, even blissful. It’s especially good to realize that your happiness doesn’t depend of the actions or feelings of other people, that you can set those boundaries between where you end and they begin, and enjoy their company when it is available, and take advantage of the times when it is not, to just do your own thing, whatever that might be.
Just me going on....
Ann
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