• This #@%‼& time of year is so %❃⇓¶‼ because...
• If I hear one more holiday &@Ð‼¶@ I will totally...
• How could three ₪§‰¶Ω▒❃ months of the year get so ¶⇓©‼€ ...
• The ℘Æℑ‼χ‽₣ commercialism shoves out of the picture people who are struggling everywhere that the real ideals are about and that is really ∅‼∀≠∏❃¶ not how it should be...
• so ΨΞ⇔ẳểĦ⅜¿ overwhelmed with the □◄‡❃∑≡❃≥± of family and friends and job...
• Why do people always have to ❃₪§‰¶Ω▒ just at this time of year...
At your leisure, join us below the orange-peel for a couple of viewpoints/stories of ours, or go straight to comments to express/vent your own contributions on the subject of holiday/special-occasion stresses generally or/and this season's holidays in particular.
KosAbility is a Sunday 7 pm eastkost/4 pm leftkost volunteer diarist community of, by & for people living with disabilities, who love someone with a disability, or who want to know more about the issues. Our use of "disability" includes temporary as well as permanent health/medical conditions, and small, gnawing problems as well as major, life-threatening ones. Our use of "love someone" extends to cherished members of other species.
Our discussions are open threads in the context of this community. Feel free to comment on the diary topic, ask questions of the diarist or generally to everyone, share something you've learned, tell bad jokes, post photos, or rage about your situation. Our only rule is to be kind; trolls will be spayed or neutered. If you are interested in contributing a diary, contact series coordinator postmodernista.
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postmodernista: HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS, or WHY THE HOLIDAYS MAKE ME NEED TO BE IN A HOME
Each set of my grandparents remained married to each other for the duration of their lifetimes. My parents divorced when I was 3, and that created the circus of the holidays we all lived with for most of my life. There would be one with my mom's parents, brother and family, one with my dad's family (a BIG family), one with my stepdad's family, and one at home. Throw in school and church holiday things, and that put the c in circus, a great way to spend the holidays for a little girl growing up.
Now let's throw in some mileage for the various parties, from Lubbock to Houston to El Paso, Austin and points in between, my divorce and children, and that stepped it up a notch or three. Add in me and Texan, Texan's parents and brother who I adore, and our 8 collective kids and spouses, 2 grandchildren, 4 of our kids in college and 2 in the military, keep in the mileage (though no more El Paso, thank FSM) some old and new family relations pathologies, former in-laws, work schedules, coordinating between the various groups, my propensity to throw up when stressed, and now we've got a real show.
Somehow, perhaps in a misguided attempt to offset all that, I have this insidious need to be an organized and spectacular perfect person that I am not. The pies and cakes and dressing must be made from scratch, by gawd- no store bought convenience for this girl (my only compromise is that I'm willing to buy the piecrusts; history has demonstrated that people will eat the pies whether or not I pour my heart into scratch-made crusts). An Alton Brown recipe for the turkey and green bean casserole, and there must be ham as well. No shirking on that, slow baked, overnight, with brown sugar, mustard, and pineapple. All the sides, appetizers, a couple of cakes, and there it is. The PERFECT holiday meal. This is what we've done for most of the past 8 years- Texan works the holidays so that we don't have to travel, which keeps me mostly sane, and the throwing up to a minimum.
Here is the downside:
I suck at housekeeping, and he's worn out by the time the actual holidays arrive, so the house is a hovel, and so intimidating that we leave that aspect to the in-between spaces of checking pies, turkey and ham. For several of these years, the morning of looks like a Tom & Jerry cartoon, sliding across the floor tossing books, clothes, cleaning sprays and rags between us as we frantically attempt to hide all the household sins and make things shine and smell good. On at least one occasion, I was yanking my dress over my head as he met the guests at the door, having struggled into his own nice clothes still wet from the shower.
But hey! I've only caught the potholders on fire once......
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mettle fatigue: THE RELIEF OF SOLITARY HOLIDAYS
Back when I worked for a non-profit health organization, part of my job was to staff meetings of support groups. Between making sure the carpet got a quick vac once-over, enough chairs and tables arranged as each group preferred, lighting they needed (the Lupus folks needed fluorescents off & brought lamps with them), the sign-in & liability-waiver notebook open to the right page with pen attached, the hot-water urn going with instant coffee and tea bags and sweeteners and stirrers and napkins and cups alongside, the donation jar in place, the group leader or speaker confirmed to show up or a sub arranged, bathrooms clean, signs with arrows positioned helpfully; and staying ready to solve any problems that might occur while I continued my deskwork, I rarely got to hear much of what was talked about. (This turned out ironic, because the organization's central focus was the 150+ kinds of arthritis and related ills such as chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, lupus, and Lyme Disease. Not even that many years later, I wished I had grasped more at the time...).
But during meetings of the fibromyalgia & chronic fatigue support group, I did learn how non-unique my own holiday stress was: one member who had barely dragged herself there one day was too debilitated to handle the sound of multiple voices, the shifting conversation, and the metal folding chairs with no support... My desk chair had arms, so I slid it out from my desk for her to use with her feet up on a box of office paper, and a different chair at my desk while I went on with my work, one ear listening for calls from the meeting in the next room. So it was several moments before I realized that this disabled, weary, disillusioned young wife was trying to tell me something that was unexpectedly familiar.
She was explaining, in an apologetic tone that pierced to the heart, that holidays and other high-expectation social situations, including the meeting she had come to for support, were never actually pleasant or restorative experiences, far less fun, not even her own birthdays. Family and friends put across that she was expected to "celebrate" it the way they preferred, do the work for it given to her whether she'd had a say in it or not, dress & do hair & make-up according to their ideas of what's celebratory, smile, be lively and please others no matter how many tens or hundreds (or thousands) of miles the travel to get there or what damage it did to her energies, her financial situation, or even her relationships with supervisors and fellow teachers about taking time off from the job. Be interested in everyone else, congratulate them on their achievements, sympathize with their problems and sorrows, keep silent about her own life and concerns - no one wants to hear what matters to woman with a job and a nice husband and no children to worry over, and no one should have to feel as if they owe her any appreciation or respect or help - she owes it all to everyone else because she has things "so good"
At the time of our talk, she had recently resigned her job in desperation to avoid a threatened bad evaluation due to her illhealth, because a bad evaluation would harm the future employability she hoped to regain. Instead, she had been doing unpaid office work for her husband's general building contractor company. But although he had initially agreed she needed to protect her working reputation by leaving her job 'til she got better, he was out of patience now with her "invisible" illness, and was siding with his mother that she should not only be working for his business but also running extended-family errands, babysitting the kids of his sisters and brothers for nothing, and generally be at all their beck and call since she was no longer bringing home a paycheck and had no kids to raise. After all, keeping house for him and her shouldn't take up much of her time or energy, she should have plenty to spare for everyone else's needs, especially make holidays fun and pleasant for them, since she wasn't "working" anymore.
She sat in my office with a face as pale as skim milk, her hair hanging mousy and lank down her back, so limp in that chair that I was afraid she was going to slide right out of it and I'd need to call 9-1-1. But she had been diagnosed with CFS, she explained, so there really was nothing any medical care could do for her. And that was the crux of her dilemma. When the doctor said there was nothing medically that could be done and she should have rest, protection from stress, and chores only at her own pace, what her family heard was that there was nothing she needed, as if she was not actually ill. After all, didn't they all wish for more rest, less stress, and only the chores they felt like doing? Now, a few days earlier she had found herself flat on the kitchen floor with no recollection of how she'd landed there. She was afraid to tell her husband because he had been talking about divorce if she didn't "shape up", and even her father-in-law's protests that the doctor's instructions weren't being followed hadn't made a dent in the rest of the family's demands and expectations of her. Her own parents had little sympathy or interest, with two older brothers and their wives and children to be concerned with.
The support group met twice a month, so I got to know her more over following weeks, because after the presentation by whomever was the speaker and the initial discussion, voices would grow loud and often angry, people moved around a lot getting their refreshments and their "seventh inning stretch", and at that point she would come and sit in my office until she felt able to drive home, and I would give her Cuppa-Soup and cheese-crackers I kept in my desk for "emergencies". She cut her hair short with sewing scissors because she couldn't keep it clean or styled anymore and her husband wouldn't give her money for a salon to trim it. From blouse and slacks she couldn't get dry-cleaned or iron on her own anymore, she went to t-shirts and jeans, and from flats and hose to sneakers and socks. Sometimes she had bruises from lurching against furniture in trying to avoid falling. I met her father-in-law the day he drove her to our meeting for fear she'd have an accident if she drove herself, and he said he learned a lot from the discussion but he didn't think his wife or son would understand anything he intended to tell them.
Finally she didn't come two or three meetings in a row, and I worried that the worst had happened. My phone messages went unanswered. A few months later, though, she called to say her husband had filed for divorce. Surprisingly, her mother-in-law had gone all up in arms on learning that her son meant to leave his illl ex-wife with no financial means and nowhere to live: her parents-in-law found her one of those slightly-dilapidated little courtyard cottages from the 1920s that California used to have a lot of, moved her in, got her a lawyer who got the disability process going and made their son agree to a quick decent alimony settlement, and her mother-in-law was doing some of her grocery shopping for her (she was amazed especially at this!) and taking her to doctor appointments. She said she hadn't gone to any family holidays because her ex-husband was bringing his fiancee to them (his secretary, of all the hackneyed cliches) and instead of feeling left out because of that, she had been surprised to find that especially on holidays being alone could be wonderfully refreshing and restful. She remembered my saying that I used to love Labor Day, Christmas, and New Years' Eve best for exactly that reason, the only holidays or occasions my own family put no demands on me for, and I could make excuses to friends and boyfriends and just curl up with a good book and cocoa and cookies. So she wanted to tell me a new book she had read over Christmas and New Year's in case I hadn't heard of it yet - she thought I might enjoy it. (Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, now 20 years later about to be a tv series or some such.)
We stayed in touch a little bit after that, usually talking about books fun to read. Then, as her health improved, she began to return to teaching, if with great difficulty, and in the last phone talk I remember, she said she'd met a quiet, gentle high school math teacher who also liked staying home with a good book on holidays, after roomsful of teenage students every working day and hours of grading papers afterward.
When I remember her, it's as that nearly-pale-as-death burdened sick creature slumped in my office barely able to raise a mug of soup to her lips; but when I think of her, it's as a smiling reader curled on the sofa in the glow of the lamp, with cocoa and cookies on hand, knowing the world will always be there waiting when she's ready and able to go back to it.
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Those are our stories. What's the hardest thing about your holidays, anniversaries, birthdays, and other occasions that we all want to enjoy or are expected to "celebrate normally" ... but can't the way healthy people can? What helps with those problems, what doesn't help that you've tried but might work for others, or what would you change about these occasions if you could?
Or what thoughts would you like to vent, expletives-deleted or included? Be it a sorrow or loss, we're a shoulder to lean on for each other, after all. And don't worry, go ahead and blow off that head of steam boiling in your furnace if that's how you feel. Holidays can be awfully hard. Together we can make it a little easier.