20 Christmases
On grief, the holidays, and the promise I'm making to myself
I’m not sure of the exact year the photo above was taken. I think it’s 1994, a few months after I married my college sweetheart. If so, I’m 23 years old, and during her visit, my mother and I would argue about spaghetti.1 On the surface, I know it sounds like a ridiculous thing to argue about, but with my mother and I, an argument about spaghetti wasn’t really about the spaghetti. For my entire life, our disagreements were rooted in her need to control and my resistance to being controlled, her critical nature and my chafing against her relentless criticisms of my life choices, from the major (going away to Yale instead of staying close to home at a college in Florida) to the mundane (not mixing the spaghetti noodles into the pot with the sauce). Later, after she died of breast cancer at age 52 in 2005, I would understand that my mother’s criticisms of me were rooted in the fear, loneliness, trauma, and deep emotional wounds she carried. But at the time this picture was taken, I didn’t understand any of that. I knew my mother, only 18 when I was born, had sacrificed for me, and that she loved me more than anyone else loved me. But she was also my greatest source of stress and heartache. Aside from the argument about spaghetti, I don’t remember any details of her Christmas visit. Thankfully, my mother and I had the opportunity to make peace before she died, but that has not mitigated my grief.
As I write this post, it’s Christmas Eve, and I’m in Texas at the home of my now-ex-husband/co-parent for our annual blended family Christmas celebration. The year 2005 marked both the end of my mother’s life and the beginning of our co-parenting relationship. Our daughters are now 21 and 26, and they aren’t interested in any other arrangement for Christmas. So I woke up this morning and made breakfast quiche for tomorrow morning, part of our family’s tradition. I did not wake up with the intention of writing about my mother. But while my potato crusts for the quiche were baking, I opened Substack and read Bridgett M. Davis’ latest post, “Holidays: Happy/Hard.” After the death of their “sister, then brother, then another sister in the span of four-and-a-half years, two of them just seven months apart,” Bridgett and her sister Rita spent the entirety of Christmas day lying in their mother’s bed, side-by-side, with the covers pulled over their heads.
I felt this image like a gut-punch. I’ve spent 20 Christmases without my mother being in this world, but I have not spent one entire day sitting with the grief inherent in that fact. Instead, I’ve been in constant motion since she died. I could relate to Bridgett writing, “My life grew around the grief.” After my mother’s death, I threw myself into my burgeoning writing career, parenting, volunteering at my daughters’ school, and a too-soon new relationship that would become a disaster of a second marriage that lasted way too long.
It’s not that I thought I could outrun the grief; I’m fully aware of grief as a constant companion. Sometimes loud and unruly, most times off in a dark corner, silent, hovering. I’ve just never really attended to my grief, not for a full 24 hours. Probably six hours, tops. That one time about a year after my mom died when I just couldn’t get off the couch and a friend came over, cleaned my kitchen, took me to lunch, and tended to my kids after school. Friends who would’ve been there for me for as long as I needed them to were (and are) just a phone call away. But aside from that one time, I’ve just never made those calls. I’m not entirely sure why, but I remember feeling that I just couldn’t afford to stop doing All The Things. Everything I was doing felt urgent. Meanwhile, I felt sad and overwhelmed. Grief was relegated further into the shadows.
Once, a few years before I ended my second marriage, I told my then-husband that I realized I’d never properly grieved. Not only had my mom died in 2005, but so had my father, and my grandmother, who helped my mom raise me. I told my then-husband that the way he mistreated me compounded my grief. His response? My grief had nothing to do with him. I wish I could say that I divorced him right after that, but I didn’t. Nor did I divorce him after he physically assaulted me. It took me a few more years before I left him. And when I did leave him in 2017, my grief intensified. I didn’t grieve the loss of that marriage, at all. Rather, it was the old familiar grief from 2005 that seemed to have grown exponentially. Still, my life continued to grow around it. And glimpses of my grief show up in the stories in my collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies––so much mother-daughter conflict, so many questions my mother is no longer here to answer, so much I wish I could tell her, mostly that I understand. I understand she did the best she could with what she had.
Since reading Bridgett’s post today, I’ve made a promise to myself, to give at least 24 hours to my grief before this time next year. An entire day to sit, lie, and/or walk with my grief. Alone or with someone I love. No devices or other distractions. Just pen and paper, in case I want to write. But not in the way that well-meaning people kept telling me I should “write through it” shortly after my mother died. That kind of writing implied to me some sort of orderliness, a finish line, a logic––none of which I associate with grief. I know grief to be chaotic, defying logic or containment, endless. And I now believe it will be okay to give myself over to this chaos for a while. I’m thinking of it as resting in the eye of a hurricane, an eerie calm, but a calm, nonetheless.
Over the years, my mother and I argued about all sorts of stuff that really didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, including how to make spaghetti and potato salad. My mother believed there was one way to do everything, and that was her way. And then there was that time she gave me a stolen ring…