Family

Complexity in December

Photo by Kira auf der Heide on Unsplash

It’s December again; that time of year. Christmas. My 41^st birthday on New Year’s Eve (yes, really). My older half-sister’s 54^th birthday two days before Christmas. My mom’s neediness and desire for doing everything Christmas-related. Britney’s parents’ holiday party on Dec 23.

This of course, after Britney and I were married on October 14^th and did our 83-person wedding reception in Santa Barbara on November 19^th, not to mention Thanksgiving.

I both like and loathe December. What I appreciate is the (silly and artificial though it may be) Christmas “spirit,” everyone smiling, the warmth of humans for once, the X-Mas music in coffee shops, restaurants and stores, etc. I also like the California cold weather, which is warm to everyone else in the nation. I love the late fall, early winter multicolored leaves that scrape along the cold, abandoned streets, etching themselves into my consciousness, that rush of cold wind battering your red face and ears, tingling with coolness. I cherish wearing warm clothes, bundling up, and going on my classic long walks. (I’ve always been a big walker.)

What I vehemently don’t like is everything else: The superficiality of giving and receiving gifts (I’d rather my family members pay for my writing, or ask me about my personal life); the forced time with a fractured and divided family who never talk about anything authentic; the fake cards exchanged which say nothing about how you really feel; the theatrical nature of it all. It often feels, to me, like I’m acting on stage. Especially with my family. We’re a small, mismatched batch of ludicrous misfits. I’m really the only one—with the exception of my female cousin and my maternal uncle—who calls out the bullshit and tries to make contact with reality.

For many people Christmas is a warm, loving time of family, good cheer, joy, peace and giving. Yet for many others—including me—it’s a time of exhaustion, weariness, frustration, and social acting. My mother—a Baby Boomer—is in love with convention and tradition. Always has been. It’s her generation; it’s in her blood, her DNA. It doesn’t matter what I think of my sister, or what my sister thinks of me, or that my sister absolutely failed when it came to being there for us when our father was dying. What matters, to my mom, is that the social act is played effectively.

This taps into my deep-seated rage which I’ve felt towards my family—particularly my mother—nearly all my life.  It’s always felt to me like my mother is saying this: Yes, I know I screwed up a lot when you were growing up, and I know I never took responsibility for that, and I know it kills you to have to pretend and act superficially around us at Christmas…but it’s got to be done because that’s how things are. It’s a sort of shocking rejection of my existence in a way, dramatic as that may sound. A denial of my suffering and pain.

And, look: In a way she’s of course correct. It is the way it is. What do I actually expect my mom to do? Is it rational to hold onto these ancient resentments? Shouldn’t I be over it all by now? Can’t I forgive her, forgive them, forgive myself?

I do love my mom—more than words can express—and my whole family, and we have to do this social song-and-dance because that’s what you do at Christmas. For a decade—during The Drinking Years—I missed many a Christmas and most Thanksgivings. When I did show up I inevitably got drunk and caused a scene. In that sense I feel I owe it to my family to be the adult, the sober grownup, and show up, to do my social duty.

And really it’s not all that bad. I have good (though surface-level) conversation with my cousins, my brother-in-law, my niece and nephew. Not with my sister, though. She has 1,000-foot walls. She uses denial like a serrated knife slicing through yellow cheese. She is not a deep person, at least not externally. Even my brother-in-law once told me he can only get so deep with her before the walls come up.

My sister hasn’t had a drink in almost 2.5 years, since her daughter—my niece—made a serious attempt to end her life. She’s even doing therapy. What she truly needs—in my judgmental yet probably accurate opinion—is Alcoholics Anonymous. But to each their own. People find the door on their own and either open it or walk away. She thinks she’s “too good” for AA. I once thought that, too.

So anyway. It’s Christmas again. Somehow we’re here once more. Time seems to move faster and faster as I get older. Where did my thirties go?

I’m not the Grinch. I have major gratitude for many, many things in my life, including my complex family. I have a beautiful, loving wife. Three cats and a dog. A house. Health. A mother that, despite her flaws, would do anything to help me if I got into a serious bind. I have reading, writing, Substack, etc.

Life is good. And emotionally challenging for me. I am vulnerable, sensitive, and too self-aware for my own good. That is ok. It is what it is. Every day is a new day. The clock hand ticks by faster and faster, annihilating yet another day and night. Before I know it I’ll wake up and be 50.

That’s why I don’t want to waste my time on social theatre. I want to live right now, here, in the moment.

I want to deeply, authentically connect with myself and with others. I want to expose my rich inner world externally.

That’s why I write.