When Christmas blows

Conditioning, man. What a trip.

All the family of origin holiday traditions you grew up with and suddenly you’re in adulthood & bam! You realize those don’t align with who you’ve always been, but didn’t feel free to even question them until a certain point.

I was raised good old fashioned “conservative Christian” girl. Told as a young child by my well meaning mother that her priorities, in order, were God, her husband, and us. Her 3 daughters. I would sometimes feel so anxious being made to attend anything church related as a child, that i would be physically sick. And of course, we celebrated CHRISTmas, whereby if 3 gifts were good enough for baby Jesus, 3 gifts are damn good enough for each kid. Which it truly was, as I’ve always valued things much deeper than material goods, but Jesus Christ.

To a human being, no matter the age, when something doesn’t align with your soul, you know.

A lot of us are forced to bury that knowing in order to keep attachment to our caregivers until we can’t ignore it any longer. That time came for me once I had daughters of my own.

The holidays are rough for me. Mostly the circumstances. I’m highly sensitive, suffer from seasonal as well as regular depression and have a hell of a time getting my nervous system to relax around my kids, which is when I’m triggered the most. All my energy goes into keeping myself calm enough not to scare my 6 & 7 year old while they’ve been home for Christmas Break. Not to mention on day fucking 1, my oldest puked at least 7 times, no joke. Throw in having close to 0 support, yeah. Christmas fucking sucks sometimes and it’s okay to feel that way.