Today’s Holidailies prompt requests advice for surviving the holiday season.
My best advice is to learn how to say “no.” So much of holiday stress comes from overcommitting. Yes, I’ll make the cookies. Yes, I’ll make something for the office pot luck. Yes, I’ll put up all the decorations. Yes, I’ll attend this…and that…and the other. Yes, I will put up with Auntie Mabel’s and Uncle George’s political/racist/sexist/homophobic rants and go to their house for the sake of keeping peace.
There’s no law saying you have to do all of that. There’s no law saying you have to sacrifice your own enjoyment of the season by running yourself ragged and spending time with people you find ghastly.
On that last point, the last time I spent Christmas Day with anyone other than myself (and Inigo, when he was alive), it was with an ex-boyfriend’s family. Several members of his family irritated me and seemed to get off on trying to be offensive and push people’s buttons. For example, one of the cousins and I don’t eat meat. Their way of expressing their opinion about that was to wave turkey legs in our faces on Thanksgiving. Real juvenile stuff.
On this particular Christmas, in 2013, Barack Obama was in his second term as President and some people in that family didn’t like him, including my ex’s father. Someone in my ex’s family—probably his mother or someone else who was on my Facebook at the time and saw me celebrate something Obama did—VERY IDIOTICALLY told him I had voted for Obama. Now, see, for the first few years of the relationship, I actually liked my ex-boyfriend’s father: Like his son, he told funny stories about the jail where they both worked. He had a dry wit and interesting hobbies, and he and his wife loved to collect all kinds of antiques and collectibles that they picked up at estate sales and painstakingly organized throughout their home and in the basement.
Unfortunately, once he found out I voted for Obama, every time I saw the guy, it was “your boy did this” and “your boy did that.” I had managed to tune him out for a while, either ignoring his digs or saying things like “I’m so liberal, I believe you’re entitled to your opinion.” Then slowly but surely, the hate started to come out. It was always there, to hear my ex-boyfriend tell it, but now his father and other people in that family felt neither compunction nor allegience to good manners and it became pretty apparent that there were a lot of racists and homophobes among them. Not all, as some of the cousins were pretty cool, and more than one confessed to finding the bigots annoying. They appeared to be in the minority howver, and of course the bigots would have shouted them down or even targeted them if they said anything.
And this Christmas the bigots were in rare form, especially my ex’s mother’s brother and my ex’s father. They stopped shy of using the N-word outright, but they didn’t have to say it. It was there in their undertone. Unfortunately, my ex and I were seated between them so I was hearing it in stereo. Better yet, my ex had told me he voted for Obama both times, yet his family didn’t know. (Looking back on it, and the general lack of integrity he revealed to me over the last couple of years of the relationship, he might have been lying to me. I’ll never know.) So there I was, 47 years old, kneeing my 37-year-old boyfriend under the table to try to get him to tell his family to lay off. Finally I said, “Yeah, well, your son voted for him, too,” which got me both a bug-eyed glare from my ex and kneed under the table myself. So I kneed my ex even harder, like, “Then tell them to shut the hell UP!”
No balls, that guy. It was his mother who put a hand up and said, “TOM” and he reined it in.
Until everyone else went home but my ex, my ex’s brother, my ex’s brother’s girlfriend of a couple of months, and me. Then O Holy Night, what diatribes we were subjected to. I don’t even want to share what he said here. It was beyond vicious. It was also malicious and aggressive toward the brother’s new girlfriend. She was a vet tech and this guy told a story of how my ex-boyfriend’s pet gerbil had some kind of growth over his eye, so he put it in a shoebox, took it out to the backyard, and shot up the shoebox. The poor thing wasn’t dead when he opened the box, which he described in detail, so then he shot at it directly. Why on EARTH would someone tell that story in front of a newcomer he KNEW was a vet tech? Not only was I incredulous at the whole nasty display of cruelty, myself, when I searched her face, I saw there were tears in her eyes. Needless to say, she broke up with my ex’s brother shortly after that.
If I had only been dating my ex for a couple of months, I’d have been out of there, too. I already had seven years in, though, and my ex lived far enough away from his parents that they couldn’t just drop in and ruin a date night.
I did, however, refuse to see them again after that. About a month later, they invited my ex and me over for dinner after my ex and I had a dental appointment near their house. I had told my ex repeatedly that I wasn’t up for going, both because I tend to feel sore and don’t want to eat after dental appointmens, and because, frankly, I didn’t feel comfortable around them if his father was going to behave that way. My ex relayed none of this to them (see? no balls). Then he was nearly an hour late picking me up for the appointment, whereupon he told me we WERE going to his parents’ house afterward. As I was already weary of his various and sundry other crappy behaviors and in that place where a woman thinks “if I’m going to be alone in a relationship, I’d rather just be alone,” and come on, if you know me at all, you’d know that I will not be coerced, forced, or otherwise dragged anywhere because a man says so, I don’t care WHO he is, that was the end of that relationship.
Looking back on it now, and having spent the last six years writing about mental health and neurological conditions, I have more than a sneaking suspicion that my ex’s father’s behavior had to do with his health. He had been recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and both the condition and the medications for it can be disinhibiting. My ex’s parents may have been feeling bad about the whole thing and were trying to make it up to me, too, as apparently they picked up some of my father’s artwork to gift to me. I didn’t know that at the time, though. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be subjected to another string of epithets and invective.
And if that’s what you might be facing this holiday season, you don’t need to subject yourself to it, either. Protect your peace, even if it means hurting a few feelings.
No snowflake tonight. I didn’t finish it last night. But here’s my fortune from tonight’s takeout. After reliving all of the nonsense above in the telling, I’ll take it.
zenzalei 