December is a weird month. I like Christmas and in the same breath, all the holiday joy reminds me of loved ones who aren’t with me anymore. The darkness of winter, the time change, and dreary gray days have felt like my mind washing over my environment when I get sad.
My grandma passed away on December 18, a few years ago now. Before she passed, our family holidays moved from being at home to being celebrated at a nursing home because my papa had broken his neck and wasn’t able to recover fully from the injury at 80 years old. The season has felt a little empty now for seven years. It hasn’t been all bad, my husband and I have created new traditions and I’ve found a lot of joy in rejecting the tradition and finding new ways to enjoy the season. Making things and being generous to others, whether in my community or social circle, has been the best way to make this month joyful for me personally.
Potato Technology’s A/W 2022 was about this exact point, I wanted to make things for the people who showered me with love and encouragement as I found my way back from grief to a new normal. The last Christmas season before the pandemic, we made cards for a local nursing home and that is still one of my favorite Christmas memories of the last seven years.
That was the same year my brother came to visit me on Christmas. We never spent a holiday together in our 26 years of being brother and sister. It was cool and also hard to process. I think there will never be enough time or enough normalcy to make my relationship with my brothers feel whole because we didn’t get the chance to have that and had to make our own traditions with our separate moms. My sister’s existence with another mom makes the entire thing more complicated, as I have been both shoehorned into that nuclear family even though I don’t belong and have been passed over for the normalcy of my sister’s two-parent home.
My dad and my stepmom don’t understand boundaries. If I put up a boundary, they tear it down. They even weaponize this time of year to make me feel guilty. Before I cut off contact it was guilt to be at their house in south Georgia for every Thanksgiving and Christmas on my dime. This irks me because they are incredibly rich compared to me and most people in my life and it’s unfair to place these financial and emotional expectations on me. Since I have cut contact because I got tired of the toxic environment, I get a reminder of my failure with a Christmas card and sometimes a present. The card used to come from my dad but as I have not done as he wished, it now comes from his wife and has become more cutting.
I’m not sure if it will come this year but it hangs over my mind as I feel grief that my dad can’t be in my life without hurting me, and if I take a step back from the dysfunction for my own sanity, I receive nasty cards reminding me how it is all my fault. Merry Christmas, you’re failing us as a daughter. In reality, the situation is complicated and I am sure at fault for things but the sheer inability to acknowledge that it takes two people in a relationship to make it or break it baffles me.
I think all this baggage could be why, I am utterly distraught that my friendship with a friend I met in college which was honestly always dysfunctional, and probably better for both of us to go separate ways, has ended abruptly. Even though I saw it coming and was honestly on borrowed time, the fact that it fell apart at this time of the year is bringing me quite low. I don’t understand how it all happened as quickly as it did. Because I’ve lived so many years now with those nasty Christmas cards, I can’t help thinking this is all my fault and that I didn’t mean much to her anyway. Which is crazy because I know that our friendship did mean a lot.
Man, this time of the year is not as holly or jolly as those songs claim. It is complicated because it can’t be perfect like the movies tell us it will be. If you are having a hard time, know that I’m here for you and I’m sending you love through my keyboard because I am not doing well either. Thank you for spending a bit of your day with me.
One Rabbit Riot 