Pieces from emails written in December of 2008.

My daughter’s hamster died in my hands at 2:30 this morning.

I really hate Christmas. Admitting that I hated Thanksgiving seemed to go a long way toward enabling me to finally embrace that holiday, but I think Christmas is just too big for reverse psychology. I’ve been wallowing, truthfully. And trying to deny it and act like nothing’s wrong, and getting frustrated when I make all the right moves and do everything correctly and it still can’t make this holiday feel good.

Maybe you’re right, about Christmas being melancholy to anyone over 15. It sure sounds right. But I’d really convinced myself otherwise for a few years, there, I thought it was stressful and overly full but a good time, I thought I’d made it my own. This year my heart just hasn’t been in it, though, it’s all been one long stretch of going through the motions and even the thought of having to sit through two movies tomorrow seems more then I have in me.

It’s been a long fucking year and I think I’m just kind of over it, you know?

But then I made the real fatal error of the conversation and mentioned how negative she’s gotten, how she’s isolated out there on the river and she has way too much time on her hands to pick over things (yes, as a matter of fact I was speaking from experience) and make things seem worse than they are and I knew it couldn’t be good for her health. It’s all true, and she ate it up, glommed onto it like a lifeline, the one thing she thought she could do to win me or something, and then in true mother fashion twisted and perverted it. The last two times I’ve seen her she’s been aggressively, psychotically cheerful, she’s been trying so hard to prove to me that she’s turned over a new leaf and is never negative about ANYTHING that it makes my teeth hurt. It’s so fucking fake, I can’t stomach it. I don’t even know how to interact with it. It brings back nightmares of my childhood where she would pull this whole Jekyll/Hyde act, transforming in an instant whenever company came over into this sort of Mom-bot, this perfect hostess that I guess people bought into but to me it was just so very not real, and scarily so.

If you ask me, when it comes to Jekyll and Hyde, Jekyll is far more evil and terrifying to me because he’s hiding the bad stuff, he knows it exists and he just thinks he can pretend it away and not be sullied by it. Hyde might be loathsome and evil but at least he’s honest about what he is. I preferred my mother negative, at least it was real.

Is it bad that I’ve single-handedly drank an entire bottle of Dark Rum this holiday season? And bought more?

Well I’ve felt trapped in a loop of questioning years for ages now, easily since my Dad died but possibly even before that when my life path changed drastically from student and theatre major to married mother-cum-housewife. There have been answers in places, growth and movement but just in pieces, in moments, and so often not the kind of lessons that stick. Usually the kind that come in the form of a realization that you’ve struggled toward and suffered into and finally reached that golden “Aha! Now I get it!” And six months down the road you’ve panted and struggled some more on something that is certainly altogether different only to reach the end and discover it’s the same damn golden Aha that you’ve already handled, still has your fingerprints, you thought it had changed your whole life view but you forgot it and had to live toward it all over again from another goddamn angle. Those are the answers I was mostly getting, the one step forward two steps back variety. So this year has been really different for me, there have been shifts inside of me, really profound, solid shifts. Those realizations haven’t just been dried leaves on the wind, they’ve been marble, carved to fit inside me and stay.

And most of them have been positive, they’ve been necessary, they’ve been answers I’ve been waiting a very long time for, and I can feel them settling into me and assuming my shape, I can feel how real they are. And that’s good, right? It’s nice to have some answers finally, it’s nice to feel all of these sudden strides. But on the other hand, I’ve just been pummeled. It’s been never ending. And I am just exhausted.

It’s been a long fucking year.

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