Do You Remember the Time?

You can’t help it. The holidays bring out the best and the worst in people. Out comes the turmoil of emotions we keep nicely separated into the small squares and organizers of our minds. Out come the lies and sometimes, out come the truths – the really harsh truths – best left unsaid. All the long, unfulfilled year we wait and live and live and wait and do not do much of anything to change it. The stillness of what is familiar versus the movement of what is not.

But then, the holidays arrive and the whole neatly organized drawer of emotions is tossed up into the sky. We let our organized lives topple to the ground un-rescued. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Glaring at you more than anything that is present and tangible, is that which is absent and unreachable. The ones we have lost and can’t bring back, no matter the strength or faith of our prayers. The ones we didn’t quite appreciate enough, and believe that if given just another hour, perhaps we could change it all. We want that chance to go back!

Funny how no matter what family surrounds your life, the moment you realize you’re not listed in their “special group” you suddenly know. There it is – unmistakable – you’re not in anyone’s special group because the top of your totem pole fell away. You’re not in the Top Ten list of that intrinsically tight-knit group. The original group, not the one you marry into.

So what then?

What do you do when it all falls apart and you’re left to watch it crumble helplessly? Some people can’t handle it and like turtles they squeeze into a protective shell and hide away from the world. That would be nice and easy. So now you are given a card printed in bold. It says ‘Adult’ on it. And so you must grow and change whether or not you’re prepared. You must climb up your own totem pole. You must balance on it and hope not to fall. You must wear the masks and walk the walk. You want to watch yourself sometimes and laugh. What a funny, funny little girl.

Sometimes you can’t see it, but you are special in someone’s group. We’re always special. Yet there is that part of our past that is never replaced with our present; the original past. The past we first knew. The past we were born into. It’s the past we first came to love on that clear day when we suddenly understood. The life we first lived. The people we once were.

I’m reliving holidays past in my mind now. I am seeing the moving picture show of what I already lived. And I am longing for it because of who was there and not what was happening. There is nothing is lacking in my life right now that I could actually point out, but magical pasts are hard to recreate.

Perhaps hindsight is not so much twenty-twenty, but oddly blurred to seem more enchanted than it actually was. After all, don’t all little girls love fairy tales? That’s why it unnerves us when the fairy tale doesn’t have the ending we expected. But how dare we expect seamless perfection when the chaos of reality is so much better? I have all that I need but I lack what I want. Yet what I want will more likely leave me fiercely unfulfilled. A Catch-22, who knew?

It is hard for me to admit it and terribly cruel of me to write it, as well. I love my husband. He could not be a better man and partner. He could not love me more. He is the stability to my insanity and the rock on my fickle, flowing river bank. To him this entry is unfair, but only if he believes he plays any role in my sadness at all.

When we’re little, we want to be bigger and we want to know more. We think happiness is there for the asking, when we’re grown. But there is so much to being grown that isn’t in the princess diaries. When our outcome falls short, we wish to go back. We wish upon a star. Did that ever work at all?

At the end of this year I will mark another holiday season half-heartedly celebrated because of the missing pieces – my mother, a child of my own and that heavy-handed, intensely powerful word: Family. At the start of the New Year I will count my blessings, because there are so many. I will be grateful. I will begin again...