Finding Grateful, 2013 edition
If you know me in real life or have read my blog at the end of the year in the past, you will know that I am a self-identified holiday hater. I’m not proud of that, but why pretend otherwise? To sum it up, the gradual loathing came about as a result of the death of my father on Christmas in 2000, conversion to a religion that seemed to preclude the comforting holiday rituals of my Christian, Midwestern childhood, and the responsibilities of being a parent that seem to snowball over the years at the holidays to the point where the whole season became a near-joyless rat race. And, let’s be honest, it’s hard to separate long-term grief from a family tendency towards depression and anxiety, which is so easily remedied, one night at a time, through copious holiday drinking. Strangely enough, last year, on Christmas in 2012, I was mulling over how to observe my father’s yahrzeit on the beach, when I ran into a woman I knew slightly, who was also observing a yahrzeit — her husband’s, on the first anniversary of his death. Death seems to be the presence I can’t avoid at a time when so many people around me are celebrating light and life at the darkest time of the year.
So there’s the whole history of that. This year, knowing that I become a colossal bummer to myself and loved ones around the holiday season, I didn’t try to fight it. I am expecting a baby in early February, so already 2013 had become a surreal series of running to doctors’ appointments on top of my regular work and the work of schlepping two elementary school children to school, sports, their doctor appointments, and every other domestic thing the lesser earning partner in a marriage ends up doing. I’d almost gotten the hang of it, after 11 full years of parenting and 16 years of marriage.
What I didn’t do this year was talk or write about the dread. It’s not that I didn’t want to. For one thing, I gave you the executive summary in the first paragraph. It’s really as simple as that, and there was no need to revisit it on this blog or in real life because I am too busy nowadays for any duplicate efforts. But the other reason was that too often when I confessed I hated the holidays, I would hear some version of “Be grateful! You’re so lucky!” Sometimes it was from the few family members and friends I now avoid who told me some version of this directly. Other times it was just in the amped-up gratitude ether of the season, where carols play everywhere and, starting at Thanksgiving, people of the Chicken Soup for the Soul variety begin enumerating what they are thankful for on social media and in real life.
Don’t get me wrong. Catch me on the right day on Facebook or Twitter, and I’ll be shouting out my silly, workaday gratitude list with the best of them. But it’s galling to be subjected to someone else’s supposed list of blessings when you really feel like shit.
Finding out about my surprise pregnancy in the middle of 2013 certainly changed everything. As I told a friend recently, each time I’ve had a child, I’ve had to muster up an authentic sense of hope. I always do the right thing — eat right, take care of myself and the growing fetus. But unlike other women I know, I don’t really “bond” with a child until it’s born. I’m not able to imagine a relationship when you haven’t met the other person yet. But that’s just me. This pregnancy didn’t exactly come at an opportune moment. As I have mentioned before, I am past the age I ever thought I’d be procreating. I’d finally made progress on two long projects that have been dogging me for years, the dreaded book I’ve been trying to write since at least 2003 and the weight loss I’ve been trying to conjure since at least 1992.
2013, contrary to the expectations I didn’t take the time to formulate, was a year of quiet, momentous change. I lost most of the weight. That’s a story for another time. And I wrote most of another draft of the book and came to the realization that I don’t care if anyone reads it, I just have to finish it. Because there’s this other book I really want to write, and another one after that. Like the minor assignment from the unconscious of re-reading beloved childhood books, finishing the quasi Song of Myself manuscript, aka, the Rag and Bone Man, is an assignment from the unconscious that must happen in order to move on. Both of these changes happened as a result of doggedly showing up to work every day, something that is still a novelty for me when it comes to things I tell myself that I want in life.
But back to the woman on the beach last Christmas for a moment. I think that I can trace some of what happened this year to my chance meeting with her. She and I ran into each other, both of us catching the last moments of daylight on the beach as warm waves lapped up onshore. We each recognized the other’s face and spent a moment playing the name game before figuring out that we live near one another. When I told her that I was on my own for a few minutes away from my kids to try to find the “right” feelings to observe the day my father died, nothing could have surprised me more than to learn that she was doing the same, stealing the last few moments before she picked up her own children, so that they could observe their father’s death. That moment, just a strange bit of kismet at the time, might have been the shakabuku that I needed, a spiritual kick to the head and out of those wandering and stuck stages of grief.
