It’s Not a Wonderful Life

It was not a very merry Christmas.

I’m sad to say it never really has been. In fact, Christmas has started to feel like a curse in my life.

When I was a kid, Christmas always started out great. We always had a lot of presents, even though our family was very poor and we struggled to get the things we needed, let alone the things we wanted throughout the year. We also had traditions. My whole family met at my grandmother’s house for a huge dinner.

Yet somehow, an unspoken tradition also developed that the day always ended in misery. Sometimes it was a simple fight. Usually, it was a lot more violent. Food fights. Tables being overturned. Guns being pulled. Blood being shed. Police being called.

I thought I’d escaped all that once I moved away from my family, but I haven’t. Every holiday seems to be accompanied by some kind of misery. One year, it was getting kicked out of my house even though I was still a student in high school. One year, it was fighting with my best friend in a foreign country where I was all alone. One year, it was unemployment. For two years, it was the hopelessness of infertility. Many years, there were bitter arguments.

This year carried a double punch: I had a miscarriage a couple of weeks before Christmas, and the day after Christmas, my husband moved out of the house.

It’s been a hell of a year — a hell of a life, really. I’m feeling a little numb right now and not quite sure what is going to happen. I’m feeling sad, angry, disappointed and a bit hopeless.

I’m not sure why I’m posting this. I’ve always been an open and honest person, but I’m just not at the place where I want to go into all the details about this just yet. But it still doesn’t feel right to not mention it and go on acting like nothing has happened. I don’t really want to try to bring the funny or post about adorable/crazy toddler things when I really feel like it’s all a sham.

I guess the upside to all this is that I see that I have friends who really care. I tend to be disappointed in people and to keep them at a distance, so it’s nice to be able to be surprised by them.

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