Merry Christmas Tree…What Does Christmas Mean To Me?

Some years I’m all Scrooge, “Bah Humbug!” and what have you. I refuse to be touched by the holiday season for any reason. I get angry seeing Christmas displays up one day after Halloween. Personally, I’m not a shopper. I hate shopping. I hate parting with a penny for any reason. I grew up frugal with a mother who had beer money and champagne tastes but made that work for us. My mother taught me to buy quality over status and to bargain shop for things needed over what is wanted. As a result I still practice these habits today.

Clothes, well, when I purchase clothing I look for things that will last for years. I’m the same with shoes. I don’t wear jewelry, except earrings from time to time. For the most part I live pretty minimalistic. My worldly possessions would have fit in the bed of my truck when I got ready to move. I only used the trailer so I didn’t have to unpack my truck every night while I was driving across the country.

Once upon a time the holiday season was all about family. For me that meant my mother and I. We had our traditions that we cultivated over the years. When she was with my father and stepfather this meant extended family, cousins, grandparents, uncles, aunts, etc. When I was younger I bounced back and forth one year with mom, one year with bio dad, splitting Thanksgiving, Christmas, Spring Break, and Summer vacation.

My favorite aunt loves to remind me of the Christmas I asked for a walkie-talkie. I asked my mom, my dad, and her for the toy. It was all I really wanted. My best friend lived across the street from me and we figured that way we could chat at night. So I wanted one. I got three sets that year. The nicest part, they all worked together so guess who was able to hook up the entire neighborhood with them? Me.

The year I begged for a CD player for Christmas I only got one from my father. My family had learned how to divide and conquer my Christmas wish. Anyway, I got CDs from the rest of the family and my friends so I knew a CD player would be under the tree. Only my father left it in the trunk of his car making it the last gift I received. So after opening a pile of CDs with no more presents under the tree, I knew one was on its way. He kept up the charade trying to convince me he hadn’t bought me one.

I wasn’t fooled. He swore up and down for about twenty minutes that he didn’t buy one. I was like sure, right, whatever. Finally he fished the CD player out of his trunk and gave it to me while calling me ungrateful. I was about as grateful as a teenager could be for an expected gift, not so much, but just enough. He’d wanted to surprise me, only he always bought me what I wanted for Christmas, so really where was the surprise?

That also happened to be the first Christmas to follow when I stopped speaking to him for the first time. I chose to stop speaking with him for four years after he’d told me he wished I’d been an abortion. My father was an alcoholic, only I didn’t realize it at the time. He appeared quite successful despite his illness. He was a very proud man who felt he didn’t have a problem. I once told my father he was the most functional alcoholic I knew. He heard ‘functional’ and assumed it was a compliment. I meant ‘alcoholic’ and wished he’d obtained help for it before it killed him.

I didn’t spend many Christmas’s with him after that one. The argument that resulted from whether or not I was grateful for the gift left a bad taste and impression on me so after that, I spent the holidays with my mother until her death.

My mother and I did sushi for Thanksgiving and cornish hens for Christmas. Turkeys meant leftovers for weeks and unless we spent the holiday with friends, it was just too much work. I could cook some things but it wasn’t like we needed that much food which we would have wasted anyway. My mother and I eventually got into a few habits, traditions as a result. We’d go see a movie after eating and spending the day together. We didn’t exchange gifts. We just hung out and enjoyed the time off together. That was it.

After her death I had a hard time celebrating the holidays. Sometimes I’d go over to a friend of my mother’s house, but nothing replaced our special time together. Eventually I was just too depressed to do much around that time of year. Today, I don’t look forward to the holidays, at least not to the degree I did as a kid. The magic of the holiday season has been missing from my life for quite awhile. I get depressed when they are coming around and spend a lot of time writing, missing my mother, and now missing my father, too.

My father passed away December a few years ago. At the time we weren’t on speaking terms again. His alcoholism killed him and damaged our relationship beyond repair. I’m grateful that I chose to visit him when I knew he was about to die and we did have a forgiveness conversation the day before he died.

I guess what I need to do is start a new tradition this time of year. One that doesn’t include so much mourning of my past. Letting it go and letting the promise of a new year be the key to moving past my depression and into a new course for being the best me I can be. It’s great in theory, but how do I practice such a thing and break a bad/not good for me habit?

First off, I moved across the country this year. I’m in a new place mentally and physically in my life. So I guess that’s a huge stepping stone to changing my habits for the holidays. I’m trying to see things a bit different than I did in prior years. So hopefully this year won’t be so much about mourning and all Bah Humbug as much as what’s new.  I can’t wait to see what will happen next.

Merry Christmas Tree and may the best of my past be the worst of my future...

Kids Ain’t For Me

A woman I used to hang out with had two little girls, one with spina bifida  (four years old), the other is going to be a superstar (six years old). I haven’t a clue what career path this bright little light in the world is going to play in the future, but she and I had the following conversation one night when her mother didn’t feel like cooking. We met up at a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant that served amazing margaritas:

Cute Superstar (CS): Hey, Simone! Why don’t you like kids?  We’re totally adorable and cute. What’s your problem? (she gave me her money-making, ‘works on everyone else but never on me’ smile and raised her eyebrows up and down a few times to really sell it)

Me: I’m allergic to kids.

CS: Oh, I didn’t realize. I’m allergic to peanuts. I’ll scoot over further so you don’t get sick.

Some of you are going aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwweeee. Simone, how could you not want to be a mother with conversations like that? Um, sorry folks, kids just ain’t for me. Originally, I had a fear of getting pregnant for a couple of reasons. One might think it was because of my mother. As if she saw this as some huge failure in life and pushed me towards college and a career.

She did do that (see the contract I signed at eight years old in an earlier blog post), but mostly I had a lot of female cousins who thought getting pregnant before they could drive was a good idea while I was growing up. My peers at the time saw my cousins as ghetto, welfare moms making life choices that none of them would ever consider. In other words, I looked down on my family. I decided I would be better than them when it came to getting pregnant.

My mother and I used to have deep, informative, hard hitting fact conversations. She was as open as open could be on every subject matter. There was not a single question that could pop out of my mouth that she wouldn’t answer. Some people felt she overshared with me, but she rarely treated me like a child and I was grateful for it, especially when I consider how young I was when she died.

Her view on my getting pregnant was, “Feel free to come home pregnant. I reserve the right to scream and yell. But you can always come home. Pregnant or not.”

My mother said this statement to comfort me. We’d just learned the news that my fourteen year old cousin had committed suicide. My cousin, Tracy, had gotten pregnant and was too afraid to tell her mother the information. She choose to end her life. Tracy’s death cut at me, mostly because we hadn’t spoken since my mother had moved us back to Michigan from Ohio. I was twelve at the time of her death.

Tracy’s suicide lead to the second conversation I’d ever had with my mother about abortions. The first conversation on this subject matter came about before she divorced my abusive stepfather. In hindsight, although she never said, and I never asked, she was trying to decided what to do. I’m assuming my mother was pregnant at the time because she asked me how I would feel about a sibling.

I thought it was great. I was a lonely only child. I wanted a minion, another person to blame besides my imaginary friend when something got broken. This tactic didn’t work in our household and resulted in the murder of my imaginary friend. So to me, an actual person to blame for the busted lamp caused while I jumped rope in the living room was “Yes, yes, yes.”

No siblings every appeared in my life. My friends continued to be jealous of my lack of mini-terrorist in my home. I didn’t get that special someone to bully. The abortion part of the conversation happened because my mother admitted to me [on the car ride home] that she’d had one before I was born. I got quiet, thinking about what she’d said. I asked why she didn’t abort me after awhile. She answered the same, because she’d had one before I was born. When she got pregnant with me, she’d regretted that choice so much she promised herself she wouldn’t do it again. Her words stuck and resonated with me for years and years.

So while having the second conversation, she made sure I understood that if I ever got pregnant and came home, once she finished her screaming and yelling, she would take me to have one if that was what I decided. Only this was all theory and ended up my shaping my position on the pro-choice/pro-life debate. I was pro-choice but I figured if I should become pregnant, no matter what age, I would keep the child. To insure I never had to make that choice the moment I became sexually active I asked and obtained birth control.

Even before I became sexually active, my mother checked my wallet for a prophylactic, while ignoring the rolling papers tucked down behind it, I mean, er, uh, anyway, before I left out the house on a date. She didn’t embarrass me fully by showing my would-be suitor what she was checking for, that was between us. She did however rapid fire questions at the guys waiting for intelligent answers. When I returned home I got their review.

From the purple haired boys to the real life ‘Where’s Waldo’ I used to date, my mother always had something nice to say about the young men. She did fall in love with my beard (I dated a guy twice my age at sixteen. Nothing sexual, he really did enjoy my mind and was more of a mentor than a love interest). The beard was a great guy and today we’re even Facebook friends, he’s happily married. Though in high school he missed the function of a beard a few times, and actually brought a date with him when he picked me up.

Even though I’m in my thirties today, I don’t really see kids in my future. I’ve had plenty of friends take the plunge so there are always young minds around to warp if I get the urge. Although I claim to be allergic to children, I think I enjoy the freedom of being responsible for only my cat, Nike. I’m actually allergic to her, but I love her enough that I’m willing to be her mother, even if she did destroy a pair of Nike tennis shoes which is how she got her name.

Rain, Rain Go Away - Missing The Milestones

I wasn’t particularly depressed today. I wasn’t upset about anything. I wasn’t overly happy or mindful. I was pretty much content, yup, that was me this morning. I have plans this evening that I’m looking forward to and my family is in town so they’ve been running me ragged the last couple of days.

So, I sat down to do this week’s blog post. In an attempt to avoid discussing my family I searched wordpress for a blog topic and landed on college. Hey, I did that. I went to college. With a topic in hand I was all set to start writing.

I started my fairly random babbling about my college experience just as it started to rain here in Atlanta. I wrote about how my mother had me sign a contract when I was eight years old that I would either attend college, get a job and start paying rent, or get the hell out of her house when I turned eighteen.

The post was light, kinda, sorta and then my Muse danced over to my dark side. I felt gloomy and down, but I ignored the feelings and wrote two pages about the ups and downs of my college life. I wrote bit by bit about my freedom, my failures, my partying, my mistakes, my successes while attending college. I was plugging along, plopping down words. I typed and typed and then I stopped.

During my third year of college my mother died. That happens to be a part of my college experience. Don’t ask me why because I couldn’t say, but when I started writing about college I didn’t see that one coming. By one, I mean I didn’t think about the fact that I’d end up writing about my mom anyway if I were going to write about my college experience. Don’t ask, I don’t always credit myself with being the brightest bulb in the room.

I decided to discuss my college experience and not the family in town for a visit to avoid writing about my mom in first place. Why didn’t I want to write about my family? My visiting family is not biological family. They’re my mother’s best friend and her clan which is why I picked what I thought was a random topic and yet, I still ended up writing about my mother.

I guess the universe would like me to write about my mom and her death for some reason. So I’m going to write about that until I figure out why it seems to be this week’s subject matter.

I miss her. Not all the time, but when I think about her that’s the first thing. She was sarcastic, sometimes sadistic, beautiful inside and out, complicated, and nurturing. She was my foundation. My mother was a wealth of wisdom, knowledge, and guidance, with a wicked and often twisted sense of humor. She was my best friend, my biggest advocate, and my security blanket. She defined unconditional love and showed me what it meant.

Her passing left a hole in my heart that I’m not sure anything other than mommy memories will ever fill. To tie this back to college, graduating was my first milestone after her death. I remember the day I graduated, not really celebrating the experience because it made me think of all the other milestones in my life that she wouldn’t share with me.

I shared my first piece of writing with my mother at seven years old. It was a short story about a girl who was about to move away from her best friend (which I’d done three times in my life at that point). My mother said the piece was too over the top emotional. She encouraged me to rewrite it but tone down the emotional pain and make it more realistic.

Just because I didn’t cry rivers of tears when I moved away from my best friends because of her job, didn’t mean I wasn’t frustrated by moving so much when I was a kid. Instead of arguing with her about it, I rewrote the piece.

Over the next four years my mother passed up two promotions until her job offered her a position and salary she couldn’t turn down. Although she had to take the position, she let me live with friends until I finished the school year.

We shared a love of reading, although I tended to lean toward Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Mary Higgins-Clark, while she read Harlequin romances and Danielle Steele. Occasionally we traded books as was the case with Jackie Collins and Kathryn Harvey (Barbara Wood). I mostly wrote poetry in high school and college and when she passed I was taking a creative writing class.

The professor praised the work I created during that time. It was real and honest reflection on watching my mother die of pancreatic cancer. There was no effort to writing for me, I wrote because I was in pain, my world was crumbling and I needed an outlet. I have no idea where any of that writing is today. Probably on an ancient hard drive of a computer that died the final computer death.

I guess my mother is on my mind a lot right now because I’m hitting another major milestone in my life that she’s not around to share. I wrote a book and it is going to be published. I’ve celebrated that accomplishment a tiny bit, but again, it makes me sad that my mother isn’t around to celebrate with me.