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Friday, October 26, 2012

Surprise!

Last night I went to a friend's 40th Birthday Surprise Party.

Her husband was meticulous in his planning.  He thought of every detail including a map of where people should park so their vehicles weren't seen and a back-up plan in case it snowed (which it did) so there weren't footprints leading up to the house when she came home.

I was so excited!  I have always wanted to be at a party where you jump out and yell SURPRISE and the person has the look of shock and delight that people would go to such lengths to show how much they care.

Everything went off exactly as planned. 

The birthday girl came home with her two children from a long afternoon of practices and lessons and the look on her face was priceless.

As I watched her husband anxiously wait for the door to open and then the look they shared when she realized what he had done for her, I felt a tear escape the corner of my eye.

And then I crashed...

All my feelings of sadness and grief over my 40th birthday bubbled to the surface.

It wasn't just the pain of remembering that the only person who remembered my 40th birthday was Shawn - it was having to sit there in a crowd of 60 jovial people telling stories about what people did for their 40th and knowing that there was no socially acceptable way of sharing any stories about MY 40th birthday.

I mean this is a PARTY for goodness sake!

After feeling the tears well up a few times I went into the bathroom where I tried to decide between taking some deep breaths and pulling it together or staying in there and actually letting myself grieve.

I can guarantee if I could have just let it out and not had to walk out of the bathroom with a red nose, puffy lip and smeared eye make-up I would have just let it happen.

I can also guarantee that if I hadn't had the L's with me I would have just said my goodbyes and driven home in tears.

I took the deep breaths, went and had some cake (who says a little comfort food can't help!) and thought about how nice it would be to go home and let myself cry after the kids were tucked into bed.

What actually happened was that the intensity of the emotion faded once I was out of the situation.  And I came home and read the story about the mother in NYC who came home from her middle child's swimming lesson to discover her nanny had stabbed her eldest and youngest children to death.

Surprise!  Just when you feel the most sorry for yourself you can be reminded of how small your problems really are.

Monday, October 22, 2012

Damn you, Santa!

Is Santa Claus real? 

He is real to my sweet Lily-Girl.

And believing he is real is only hurting her.

I never wanted to "do the Santa thing".  I always felt that it was a bad message to send...Santa brings toys to all the good boys and girls in the world.

No.  Actually there are many, many good boys and girls in the world who won't even get dinner that night.

But Shawn insisted.  He called me a Scrooge.  He asked why "I would want to take that away from the kids".

So I acquiesced.

It seems to me that every Christmas has been a disappointment to my kids.

In movies kids see knee high piles of presents surrounding a big tree on Christmas morning.

Except it's not like that when your parents are divorced.  Your gifts get spread out among multiple celebrations.  It's hard to manage your expectations when you're a kid.

After the divorce I basically turned Christmas over to Shawn and his family.  The day itself didn't matter to me.

We had a beautiful Winter Solstice celebration with my Mom each year that included gifts as well as readings from various religions and a lighting of candles to welcome the longer days.  The kids always wondered of Santa was going to visit our house as well as Daddy's but I just told them it didn't work like that - only one stop per kid.

The December before Shawn died I decided to celebrate Christmas Day with the kids (in addition to Solstice) because I wanted to take them to the mountains and enjoy a special day with them.

Before we even hit December 24th the L's had celebrated:  Solstice with Grandma (and gifts), Christmas with Daddy (and gifts) and Christmas with their paternal Grandparents (and gifts).  They were ALL fired up because they were thinking, "This is great!  We've already received all these cool things and the BIG day is yet to come!"

They aren't spoiled kids.  Or entitled kids.  But they are kids.  And they do like presents.

On Christmas Eve, after hearing their excited chatter, I realized...they are expecting gifts from SANTA under the tree.  I had spent a lot of time selecting gifts that I thought they would love.

I didn't plan on giving Santa any credit for things I had so painstakingly purchased!

And I didn't really have a lot of extra money left to go buy more things.

And yet there I went off to Walmart on Christmas Eve.

On the barren shelves I found mostly cheap plastic junk that I am inherently against.

Finally I saw a variety of (cheaply made) board games - chess, checkers, bingo, etc and decided that maybe Santa would bring these types of things as a message that he wanted you to play nicely with your sibling.

Christmas morning arrived with excitement and the gifts were opened in no time flat.

And then my kids began acting like brats.

I finally called them out on their behavior and said, "I'm sorry if Christmas didn't live up to everything you expected."

And Lennon.  Poor boy.  He was foolish enough to indignantly say, "Yeah!  Five gifts isn't enough!"

There was a lot of Mommy-Guilt laid down in the next 30 minutes with threats of taking the toys to Goodwill for other, more grateful children, to enjoy and long statements of how they had "robbed me of any joy that I might have felt from watching them play with these toys".

We all were crying.  It wasn't pretty.

It was when I felt myself wanting to tell them, "You don't know ANYTHING about shitty Christmases!  Let me tell you about the time my Dad told my Mom to throw away all of my Christmas gifts and then beat my feet with a 2x4 all day" that I realized STOP!!  This isn't about them - it's about you!

They wrote me beautiful thank you notes and I calmed myself and apologized.

Eight months later their father killed himself.

And four months after his death the kids went off to Florida by themselves to see their paternal grandparents.

They had gone by themselves to see their grandparents on multiple occassions and had spent most Christmases of their lives there so it seemed like an okay decision at the time.

I was so, so wrong.

Lily was very homesick and cried on the phone every time she called me.

When she came home she was an emotional wreck for months.

How stupid could I have been to not realize that Shawn's parents were as deep in their grief as the rest of us?  They weren't able to provide Lily with the kind of emotional support she needed because they needed it themselves.

And this is a family whose motto could be "Suck it Up" - you just don't talk about feelings.

This doesn't work for Lily. 

She is highly emotive.

And the thing that threw her for a real loop was Santa...

Shawn's parents hung a stocking for Shawn, just as they always had.  It was comforting for them.

On Christmas morning the kids got up to dig through their full stockings.  After sorting through her assorted packs of gum, candies, toothbrushes, etc Lily discovered that Santa had brought Daddy an ornament in his stocking.

When she got home she told me this...

"I know why Santa only brought Daddy one thing in his stocking.  It was because he was bad last year."

Oh, God!  What do I say to that?

There IS no Santa!  It was your Grandma that put in the ornament because it helped her with her grieving!

But, of course, I couldn't tell her that right then.

And then there were the gifts under the tree from Santa. 

Her younger cousins who are basically hell on wheels and who had been harassing Lily endlessly had mounds and mounds of presents because...all their presents from Mom, Dad, two sets of grandparents, Lennon, Lily and Santa were all in one place to be opened on the same morning.

Lily was so upset because she couldn't figure out why her cousins got so many gifts when they had been behaving so badly.

Oh, Lily.  It's because there is no Santa and the world isn't a fair place.

Here we come up on Christmas 2012.

Lily still believes in Santa even though he has let her down over and over.

She decided not to go to Florida - even though her brother wants to and is going.  She wrote a beautiful letter to her Grandparents telling them how much she loves and misses them but that "Christmas is a really hard time" and that she is "still grieving a lot".

She specifically requested that we have Christmas at home - our home.  She wants to wake up in her own home on Christmas morning to the presents Santa brought.

Writing this, part of me thinks maybe I should try to make the big Christmas for her she's always wanted.  I can afford to spend more on presents this year than I could a few years ago.

But I also know that happiness doesn't come from THINGS and that no amount of gifts will fix the anxiety she feels over Christmas.

I need to talk with her soon (with the help of a therapist) and let her know that Santa resides within all of us.  We can be Santa to others who are in need - we've always donated to charity as a family but we could emphasize it even more this year.

We can decorate the house heavily the way she envisions a house should looke (lots of lights!).

We can do our Solstice Celebration sans gifts.

I can ask all of the friends and family who give the L's gifts at Christmas if they are willing to sacrifice seeing the kids open the gifts in person and send them to the house so they can be opened on Christmas morning.

I can give her love and hugs and time together.

Friday, October 12, 2012

Here's the Proof

The fact that I've been quiet here means a few different things...and it's not just because I've been too busy.

I have been feeling so overwhelmed by my emotions and the enormity of all the crap I have to work on that I have found myself unable to be very introspective about what I am feeling. 

I have had WAY too many times in the past few weeks when I have found myself in a very child-like mode emotionally.  This, of course, means I have been very difficult to live with and just want to shut down/run away to a place where I can be by myself so at least there is an explanation for why I feel so lonely inside.

Sometimes when you feel so alone you just want to be alone.

There may also be an element of not wanting anyone who cares about me to see how **cked up I really am inside.

Ugh!

I feel as if I've spent the past 5 years - or maybe my whole life - fooling myself into thinking I'm really okay inside...believing that the trauma I've experienced in life didn't impact me...that I am stronger than all that.  I want so badly to believe that everyone has bad things happen and that mine are not worthy of being traumatized.

But when I get in these modes I start to make a laundry list of my life and it seems pretty bad...and then I feel stupid for fooling myself.

So maybe I've been quiet in my writing because I want to prove to myself I am alone?

Friday, October 5, 2012

A Nightmare

My sweet little Lily-Girl was in tears shortly after she awoke this morning.

She told me she had a dream about Daddy.

I knew we were already running late and were going to be late for sure but I immediately stopped my frantic morning routine to go and sit on the bed and hug her.

The dreams of her Daddy she has told me of previously were happy ones where she was seeing him and hugging him.  I knew this was different.

She said, "I dreamed that he was about to...to do what he did...I was calling to him saying, 'No! No Daddy!' but he couldn't hear me."

Oh, my Lily-Girl.  I am so sorry you had this dream.

Sometimes I forget that you will have to deal with this the rest of your life in a way that the rest of us escaped.  He was your Daddy.  He loved you so much.  And you adored him.

I am sorry he was so incredibly sick.

And may you be immune to this sickness.

May you never fall into that darkness.