Here come the holidays, heading straight for us as sure as sure can be. This time of year is a hard one for many, especially those of us who know that our holidays are far from the ideal of the delightful sleigh ride in the snow, jingle bells jingling as we travel to grandmother’s house bearing brightly wrapped gifts with love, laughter and warmth like a wool blanket protecting us from the frigid breath of winter. So here we are, holidays approaching like a train with us on the train tracks once again, hoping for the best.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Having grown up with a father who was an active alcoholic and a mother
\nwho was mentally ill, I have unpleasant memories of too many
\nChristmases when there was drunken embarrassing behavior including verbal arguments and physical fights between my parents. My father drove while drunk. He would get physically ill. I remember too well the sounds from the bathroom as my father’s stomach rebelled from his drinking so much. The next day there would be the hangover and the mood that goes with the hangover. I would be very very quiet so not to disturb anyone. When they weren’t fighting, our house was very very quiet.<\/p>\n
When I became an
\nadult and was on my own with my daughter and her father, we always put
\nup a tree and I would decorate with antiques including antique toys.
\nWe’d put out presents and visit his relatives which was fun. The dark
\nspot in those Christmases past was the behavior of my mother and\/or
\nfather when I would make time to see each of them (they were divorced
\nthen).<\/p>\n
\nAfter I divorced, moved away, and remarried, I enjoyed putting up a tree for Christmas again<\/p>\n
\nI like to keep Christmas very simple. Sometimes I put up a tree and
\ndecorate it with ornaments I’ve saved for years. For a few years now I
\nhaven’t put up a tree. I feel sad when I don’t put up a tree. Christmas
\ndeserves a tree. I deserve a tree. Sometimes I think that if I have a
\nsufficiently plain Christmas then somewhere somehow my mother won’t be
\nmad at me. Because I think she is forever jealous that the rest of the
\nworld has a better Christmas than hers and maybe if I had a plain
\nenough Christmas she’d stop being mad? And be happy? I know that isn’t
\ntrue. (She’d be unhappy no matter what.) But sometimes I wonder why I don’t let myself have more fun with
\nthe holidays and maybe that is why. <\/p>\n
\nI sometimes think of contacting my mother again. She might be addled.
\nShe might not remember me. She probably doesn’t remember why I stopped
\ntalking to her. I feel sorry for her. I feel sad but also self
\nprotective. In my previous post I’ve told you some things about her
\nillness. <\/p>\n
\nThe underpinnings of the current estrangement from her began a few days
\nbefore Christmas 2001. I had been feeling full of sorrow for the people
\nin New York who had lost relatives on September 11th. At the same time my
\nmother had begun to behave very negatively again. I was having a hard
\ntime feeling sympathy for her complaints after the tragedy of September
\n11th. <\/p>\n
\nI lost my patience when she called me a few days before Christmas. She
\nwas weeping because she said that her brother would not buy her a car.
\nI won’t go into all the details of why that was an absurd thing to be
\nweeping over other than to say that it hadn’t been that long before
\nthat she had sold her car after complaining about it and the
\nexpenses of driving and car maintenance. I responded with, "You are
\nchoosing to be miserable." And I hung up on her. Which ignited her
\nfury. She left multiple nasty messages on my answering machine every
\nday up to and including Christmas. On Christmas Day she left five
\nmessages, all horrible. I wanted to tape them all and save them to play for
\nanyone who might not understand why I had had it with my mother. My
\nhusband talked me out of taping them.<\/p>\n
\nI had so had it with not being able to have a nice holiday without my
\nmother doing something awful. I wrote her a letter telling her she
\ncould not do that any more. I was so upset with the messages that I
\ndidn’t even want to hear her voice. She said she was sorry. The
\napology was insufficient for me. I would only communicate through
\nletters for months. She went back and forth between trying to be nice
\nand then bordering on nasty, just barely restraining herself. In
\nSeptember 2002 she wrote a letter calling me dumb and stupid. That was
\nthe final straw for me. I wrote her to tell her that she could not do
\nthat and that I was no longer talking to her. <\/p>\n
\nA cousin subsequently called me to talk to me about my mother but I
\nwouldn’t talk to her. I later felt terrible for refusing to talk to my
\ncousin (who is about twenty years younger than me) but her call
\nreminded me of calls that her own mother, my aunt, would make to me
\nmany years earlier to try to get me to do something to make my mother
\n"happy". I didn’t want to have to defend myself to my cousin too. <\/p>\n
\nMy mother called the local police to "check on me". After they
\ncontacted me several times to see if I was "okay" (or did my husband
\nhave me buried in the cellar?), I told the police that I was
\nfifty-eight years old and old enough to decide not to talk to my
\nmother. I suggested that they call her psychiatrist.<\/p>\n
\nThe holidays are a time when I try to get through the days with the
\nleast possible trauma. I just want quiet days. If I visit with friends,
\nthat is great! I love that when it happens. But I want no trauma on
\nholidays, especially Christmas! I may or may not have a tree but I want
\nno trauma! I want peace. Quietness and peace. No nasty messages on my
\nanswering machine. No phone calls from the police. No weeping over the
\ninability to afford a car. No threats and insults. Just peace.<\/p>\n
\nWhat do you hope for on your holidays?<\/p>\n
Ginny<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here come the holidays, heading straight for us as sure as sure can be. This time of year is a hard one for many, especially those of us who know that our holidays are far from the ideal of the delightful sleigh ride in the snow, jingle bells jingling as we travel to grandmother’s house…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,69],"tags":[46,177,54,41,182,231,153,230],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories-of-estrangement","category-weblogs","tag-blog","tag-christmas","tag-estrangement","tag-family","tag-holidays","tag-journal","tag-mother","tag-weblog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}