Christmas Lights
I admittedly am the girl who puts her Christmas decorations up the second that the last Snickers bar has been distributed from my Halloween treat bucket. I probably would have done it sooner this year had my daughter not forbidden me from even looking at the pile of Rubbermaid boxes in the basement filled with ornaments and glittery reindeer trinkets. I haven’t always been this way, though. I spent so many years barely willing myself to put a tree up, sometimes only dragging out the 3′ tall fiberoptic tree that my dad bought me for my college apartment seemingly 100 years ago. The Christmas spirit was just not always easy to find for me. I regret this now, especially considering that many of those years were when Kylie was little. I always wanted Christmas to be magical, and I guess that I did okay in pulling it off for the most part, but maybe now I am trying to compensate for the years that I let it all slide just a bit.
I was driving home from work tonight, and in the back of my mind, I found myself thinking that I just couldn’t wait to get home, put on my ratty pajamas and plug in my Christmas lights. I have two Christmas trees, one in my dining room and one in the living room. The living room tree is full of a rainbow of colorful lights and ornaments that I have collected for myself and my girls over the years. Many have our names on them, including the ones with my mom’s own handwriting notating the year that she picked them out. Every year, I am so happy to unwrap the little red house with the year “1982” written on it. I have tried to carry on the tradition with my own children, selecting a special ornament each year that I can dedicate to them, reminiscent of something that they loved or celebrated over the year. Again, this is something that I really bombed at a decade ago, but I am getting better.
The dining room tree is a little more elegant, but not by much. The tree is tall and super skinny, something that I would have found ridiculous a few years ago. The lights are white, and it is covered from top to bottom with the whimsical Hallmark ornaments that I collected while I worked there. They seem almost repetitive to a degree, but they make me happy. A four-car train wraps in a semi-circle around the bottom. I always wanted a train to chug along underneath my tree, but space simply doesn’t allow it to be operative.
Tonight, I am hoping that the glow of lights brings me just a tiny little bit of joy. This year has weighed so heavily on me, and I know that I am not the only one. I am tired of wearing a mask and worrying about the pandemic. I am weary and worn at all of the fighting and arguing about politics. I am exhausted from feeling so lonely. I started a new job a couple of months ago, and it has been draining on every level. I was so excited a year ago to leave the retail world in my past, but I found myself leaning back to it midway through the summer. I gave myself permission to try something new, and I found that I also had to grant myself the grace to say that it wasn’t the right move for me. This is not my dream job, but I don’t even know if I can identify what is. For now, it is stressful and chaotic, but it is where I need to be, and that is enough. Even there though, I am somewhat free floating. I spend ten hours a day with people who really don’t know much about me, and it really isn’t appropriate to form relationships.
I am nearing the end of the fall semester with school. I went back on a whim in May, desperate to feel as though I was doing something that counted, that mattered in some little way. I have teetered with the idea that a degree will serve me no purpose at this point, but I feel so disappointed in myself that I have not managed to achieve this. I feel like a whole lot of wasted potential, as ridiculous as it sounds to say it out loud. I have been incredibly successful in so many ways, and yet deep down, I feel like I have failed in almost everything. Why is that voice in my head so full of negativity? This semester has left me tired, frustrated, ready to throw in the towel every single Sunday night when I am desperately turning in assignments at the last possible second because I procrastinated all week. I have been angry at myself for not planning better, starting earlier, doing more. But some nights I get home from work having left my house more than twelve hours prior, and I just cannot make myself care about whatever topic I am supposed to be engrossed in. It’s just one more thing to suck up what little free time I have. I have already registered for classes for spring, and everything is fully covered financially. Why am I hesitant to go through with it? Why am I so hell-bent on self-sabotage and letting myself see something through to the end?
The girls have been having weekly FaceTime calls with their dad, every Sunday like clockwork. Well, exempting the Sunday where he forgot to rearrange his plans because he was getting married. As usual, the girls were on his back burner. He forgot all about them. Noon came and went without a word. The funny thing is that they didn’t even notice. The other funny thing is that none of this would be happening at all if it weren’t for his new wife. She arrived on the scene and wanted him to be super dad. It is not in a good mom’s DNA to be with a guy who is a terrible dad, and I think that she is a good mom to her son. But now she feels like she has to mold him into this shape that she has to present to her friends and family. This is why we are in the situation that we are in. It’s like she’s a puppeteer and only after she showed up did he have any capability of seeing the value in having a relationship with his children. The two of them came down for Halloween, a quick three-day trip that allowed him to spend seven hours with them before he went back home. I had to work, but Kylie was home with them for the majority of the day. To say that the girls were anxious about the visit is an understatement. Now they are reduced to a slew of photographs that she can post on Facebook. “Look at what I have! Adorable twin girls!” Jenelle’s posts scream. One of the commenters stated that she didn’t even know that Captain Douche had kids. What a surprise. They have always been a secret.
Fighting with the Captain is proving to be as emotionally draining as I expected it to be. He promised that he would take things slowly with them, which was what we agreed on when I granted him the opportunity to meet them over the summer. He assured me that he wanted to focus on the relationship that he was building with them, and that their comfortability was his priority. After the Halloween visit, he did a complete about face, planning to come for Christmas and spouting plans to take them back to his hotel to open presents and go swimming at the pool. He also threw out the suggestion of taking them to the Great Wolf Lodge, which is a couple of hours from here. I vetoed all of those ideas, expressing that the girls were not ready for any of that. The level of comfort that they feel toward him is nowhere near what he wants yet, and it frustrates me that he is unwilling to take a step back and consider that he cannot expect them to immediately feel this connection to him. He wants their relationship to go 85 mph, but the girls are only trucking along at around 35 mph. When I explained this to him, he accused me of bullying him, saying that his wife has encouraged him to stand up to me. He is threatening court, and I told him that I hope his attorney is half the pit bull that mine is. I regret that I allowed him to come back, but I really wanted to know that his absence was not due to my actions. It was only fair that I gave him the chance, even if it didn’t come from a place of really wanting to know his daughters. If he didn’t have a wife to push him, I wouldn’t even be writing about any of this now. The twins started seeing a therapist last week to help them through this weird bump in the road. They didn’t ask for any of this, and yet they are feeling the anxiety that comes along with having a stranger who appears disguised as a father.
I am going to allow my Christmas lights to distract me tonight. I am going to pretend that their warm glow outshines the dark fears that cloud my mind and my heart. I want to forget about work stress, school stress, parenting stress. Maybe that is why I put my decorations up so early every year. I am craving the brightness. Eventually, I may be one of those crazy people that leaves them up all year.
Who is going to stop me?
