My Motherless Christmas

If you are looking for warm and fuzzy…you ain’t gonna find it here. Keep–a-goin’. This is about a phenomenon that is becoming less and less unusual…longevity. I don’t have any statistics, but anecdotally it appears to me that folks are living longer and longer. And that is causing some real problem on all sorts of different levels be it Social Security, Medicaid, long term care. The list goes on and on.

My wife and I have had that kind of longevity in both of our families. My mother died three years ago this January at the age of 89. I have an uncle and aunt who are pushing 100. My wife’s mother lived to be 84 and died this past September. The usual response is “isn’t that wonderful he/she/they led such a long life!” Well…maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. If the family is functional long life is a good thing. If it is dysfunctional, that is another story.

Both of our mothers were difficult people, and I mean that in the worst possible way. While on the surface things seemed all peaches and cream, underneath it was fairly rotten. They were both narcissists. They raised manipulation to an art form. They were both moody and you never knew what you were going to get when you talked to them. There was no pleasing them no matter what you did. Both pulled some really rotten stunts on us and our families causing scars that will be there for a long time. What is really scary is that I deal with people like this on a daily basis, most of them women. I also hear stories from my friends that mirror our experience. What happened to that generation?

Our fathers, when alive, were able to temper the problem to a degree. But they predeceased their wives by many years. Gives one pause! Once gone, the mothers’ behavior went over the cliff. After a lifetime of bickering and fighting and mind games, both my wife and I came to dread the holidays. There was never any peace. The feeling of doom began to creep into our lives the beginning of each October and by New Years it reached an unbearable level of intolerance. Add to the mix watching those around us apparently able to celebrate the season in a loving family environment…you get the picture.

This is the first year we were able to experience Christmas and New Years without the usual mother brow beating. We actually had a wonderful Thanksgiving with my wife’s brother and sister and families. Christmas was filled with our good friends. To be honest, we didn’t know how to act. Taking the splinter out of the wound is a good kind of hurt, but there is still hurt. In our case, it is guilt centered on not feeling bad that the causes of so many of our problems were gone. After all, they were our mothers. How do you deal with that?

I have always felt that Christmas and associated holidays were a set up. While some folks were able to meet the ideal, many others were left wondering what they had done wrong that they could not have what others seemed to have. Warm and fuzzy is available to some. But quiet desperation may be more the rule than the exception.

Dealing with aged parents can be both a joy and a curse especially as we are aging ourselves. Our true characters seem to rise to the surface as we get older. The sweetness in some becomes more evident, and so does the venom in others. Dealing with it during the holidays is an acquired skill. It was so bad in our families we never achieved that level of skill.

So we will deal with the guilt and move on. I may be selfish, but this Christmas at least for me, has been my best Christmas. I am hoping for many more.