Oh There's No Hell Like Home for the Holidays

 

Honesty time.  I loathe holidays with my mom.  

It is an annual tradition with Mama that she must not be happy for the holiday season and that the more people who will cry or shout or scream with her the more successful she considers herself to have been in portraying herself the victim of everyone else's angst.   It took me many years to understand that she fed off the drama she caused.

It's not relegated to just Thanksgiving.  It goes on all through Christmas.  Six weeks of pure tee hell.

In 61 years the only two free of drama and tears was the one I spent with another family ten years ago and the one Thanksgiving John had off that we shared here at home alone, just the two of us.  

Oh.   I forgot one other Thanksgiving that she did none of those things.  It is known in my family as 'The Weirdest Thanksgiving Ever'.   The kids actually brought it up this past weekend.   That Thanksgiving, my brother's girlfriend invited all of her out of town family to come to dinner at Mama's.   They all showed up.  

No one introduced themselves to us and any intros we tried to make on our own were rebuffed.  Their family sat down en masse at the table and waited to be served.  They trash talked Jews, Blacks, Political affiliations,  Southerners, (they were Midwesterners),  and religions.  They talked loudly and raucously amongst themselves of their own family.   They openly criticized the food. When they were done eating, they got up en masse and went outdoors.   At no point did they thank Mama or anyone else who'd prepared the meal, not one picked up their plate to carry to the kitchen or offered to help clear up,  nor did they say goodbye.  When they were ready to leave they simply left.    

I remember my own family, my brother, his daughter and her husband, Granny, Mama, and a friend of ours home from the army and about to ship overseas to Iraq, all sat scrunched in corners of the room and barely ate we were so astounded at the heights and depths of rudeness and out and out arrogance displayed.  Even my short tempered brother was silent, unable to find words to express himself that day and that man is never at a loss for words to slay others with...

At the end of it, Mama sat smiling in her corner of the room as though she'd had the grandest time ever.  She'd been beyond exhausted by her own food preparations and had waited on those strangers as if she was hoping for the biggest tip of her life and hadn't yet registered that she'd not even been thanked.  

I used to take it to heart, certain that I was the one responsible and truthfully that was the way it was made to seem.  Had I been  a better daughter, had I made my family do what they couldn't or didn't want to do, had I breached the gap with my brother that he himself insists upon, had I been the perfect daughter instead of the one she had, had I not married whom I did, had I stayed married to my first husband, had I done more, looked better, been thinner...Well truth told, had all of those things been true, she would still be unhappy and negative and bitterly blaming everyone else, but mostly me, for her own hurts and failures and unpleasantness

Facts, all of them.  So yes, I dread holidays even if it's meant to be just the three of us at her home.  But never mind.  It is what it is and will be what it will be and nothing I can do will stop it or turn events to a lighter, brighter view point.   Oddly enough, accepting that gives me a sort of stoic peace.  Instead of wholeheartedly tensing my emotions and then reacting myself, I can just let it happen and go on through the day.  

And even knowing this, even feeling a measure of peace over it all, I do not want to give over my entire holiday to this sort of thing.  

Which is why on Saturday, I did something I've never done before.  I invited my children to my home for a family day and I didn't invite my mother.   It was the nicest holiday I've had with my own family in a long time.

Last year, after making a meal for 18 and congratulating myself on how well it had all gone, my children and John  came to me one by one, in private, after the dinner was over, to share that Mama had been snipping and sniping to them.   She'd insulted one, attempted to stir up a fuss with another, tried to get John to be upset over a situation that we'd agreed we'd let play out as it was meant to play out, and had even aired her personal point of view to one guest about another guest.   I had been so happy at how well it had all gone and I was devastated (and no doubt so devastated because I was worn out) to hear that my pretty family meal had had an underlying nastiness that I was unaware of until it was all over.  I vowed then and there that it was the last such holiday that would be ruined for my family.  

Do I feel guilty?  I do.  Relieved, too.   If anyone's day is ruined this year, it shall be mine because I let her ruin it.  But it will not be ruined for anyone else.   That much power I have taken for my own.