A Lively Holiday Season

When I was a kid and the holidays were on the horizon, I’d feel this weird mix of excitement, dread and stress. Until I was six, I believed in Santa, and The Naughty and Nice List, and the North Pole, and Rudolph and all of it. And then my mom started dating a man named Frank who hated kids and didn’t really like women, either, as it turned out -

(I feel like I have to interject here. About ten years ago my mother called me one night and told me she had found Frank on Facebook and I needed to go look at his page right away. We had not talked about Frank for decades. She said she’d had the sudden urge to look him up, and was shocked to see he was gay. I want you to know that I was not shocked at all. I hope he found a lot of happiness. He was definitely not happy when we knew him.)

And because I thought Santa brought me this tutu I wanted - and not Frank (who liked me to be quiet and stay in my room, and liked it even better when I was at my dad’s) - I wouldn’t thank him. It didn’t make sense to me that I should be thanking Frank, when Santa had put it there under the tree for me. So my mom told me in her terrifying quiet rage voice that Santa didn’t exist, and I’d better march myself out to the living room and thank Frank very much if I knew what was good for me. She called me “young lady” which was never a good sign.

Fucking tutu.

Holidays had become stressful along with everything else by then. Finding out Santa wasn’t real in that angry way was shocking and sad, and I didn’t know where to put the feelings. I had my “mom’s house” - the apartment we’d all lived in together until my dad left - and my dad’s place, about fifteen blocks away. There were different rules in each house, I couldn’t keep the schedule straight, I always forgot something I wanted at one place or the other, and my parents fought bitterly in front of me - so pick-ups and drop-offs were not easy. Living without something I wanted or needed for a few days was better than giving them a reason to have to interact more.

Holidays were laced with anxiety for the reasons they might have been if you grew up with divorced parents and went back and forth every few days, alternating holidays each year, like you were a prize no one would relinquish. The nutcracker that went on the mantelpiece, or the star on top of the tree. This thing that seemed essential, but once someone had won the right to it, just sat there. Everyone wanted their fair and equal amount of time with you, even if they spent it focused on their own shit and you were supposed to stay out of the way and not cause trouble. Or help in ways no kid should have to help.

There wasn’t room for uncomfortable feelings, so I learned to keep my feelings to myself and just go where I was told to go with a smile on my face. If I did anything else, it made things worse. If I seemed sad or angry or troubled in any way, my dad would sob in my arms and say he didn’t want it to be like this, and if only my mom had not been so angry about his “lady friends” we could be having holidays as a family. Terrific. Isn’t it fun when you express grief or rage, and the other person manages to make themselves the victim? Please pass the gravy. As for my mother, she would not tolerate anything but a holiday that looked picture-perfect from the outside, and if I ruined that with my messy feelings I’d be banished from the kingdom.

As I got older, I’d be on the lookout for my mother’s drinking (guaranteed, just unknown how bad things would get), and my dad’s behavior - which controlled my stepmom’s joy or depression. My brother came along when I was ten (thanks to my mom and stepdad. My dad had a vasectomy by then, so my stepmom didn’t get to have any kids, though I suppose she could have left. And I say that as if leaving is easy when you’re in an abusive relationship, and some of us know very well it isn’t easy at all). My brother was the best thing that had happened since my grandmother died, but then I hated missing any part of the holidays with him.

Look at his little face.

I went from worrying about my dad when I was at my mom’s house, to worrying about my brother when I was at my dad’s house. Eventually I realized it made sense to be worrying about my brother, but my dad was a grown man who ought to be worrying about me.

By the time I was a teenager, I knew when my mom or dad got the ornaments out of the closet each year, the season of repressed emotion, constant vigilance, and a little bit of hope and joy had begun. Fa la la. It took me decades to allow myself to feel my feelings, or even acknowledge I had any. Once I had a therapist tell me my smile was like a wince, and I thought about that for a long fucking time. Smiling as a survival tool. Being nice so you don’t end up dead. I’m a grown-ass woman now, and I love a stress-free holiday. I’m kind, but I’m not nice anymore. If you want to piss me off, tell me how to feel - tell me to relax, tell me not to be angry, tell me to breathe, tell me to smile.

But sometimes I still have to fight against the urge to make everything okay for everyone, or to manufacture certain feelings because it will make other people comfortable. I know how to put on a happy face, I know how to accept apologies that are never offered, I know how to pretend someone gives a shit about me when they’ve proven they don’t, time and again. I know how to do both sides of the equation so I can stay in a relationship with someone who does hurtful, awful things but doesn’t do them on purpose, and won’t ever be accountable. It’s just their trauma, their painful childhood, their inability to attach to their primary caregivers at an early age, see. They’d be kinder, if only. It comes from years of telling myself my mom loves me, she just says and does certain things because she’s drinking. If I wanted to, I could be the Queen of It’s All Good. I know how to spin the plates, I just won’t anymore.

I share this because I felt some (internal) pressure to write an uplifting holiday essay. Something that would hit your inbox and give you a little faith. A hopeful, touching piece about how love always wins and kindness is everything. I’d love to write that essay, and I could if the world were worlding a little better. I know I’m not alone in this because I have friends who opted out of their usual big holiday celebrations, and have been struggling because this year is the mixed-baggiest year for merry and bright in a long time.

I think a lot of us are doing our best, making space for all the different feelings, and letting that be enough. That’s been my approach, and I have had a really wonderful holiday as a result. I hope you have, too, or that you still are. My son is home for winter break, so both kids are under one roof again, and it’s the best. I could just stick with that, and edit out the sticky parts. That would feel like the kind of holidays I grew up with, where we’d arrive at the home of close friends of the family, and my mom would hiss in my ear to smile for chrissakes.

Anyway, two things can be true at once. You can have a beautiful holiday, bake all the cookies, bake a helluva good apple pie, string up the lights, wrap the gifts, eat all the food, hug your people, text or call the ones who are far from you, play Trivial Pursuit for hours, and still feel forlorn in your soul over the state of the world. And since that’s the reality, that’s the only kind of essay I can write. It’s a struggle because I’m in this zone of not wanting to immerse myself in the news, but also not wanting to bury my head in the sand. And you’d have to bury your head in the sand this week to miss the House Ethics Committee report released about Matt Gaetz, finally.

I know I won’t be of any help to anyone if I bite every time there’s something to be enraged about, because it’s an onslaught, and I think we’d better get used to that for the foreseeable future. A steady diet of oh-fuck-now-what is as bad for you as smoking three packs a day, I feel pretty sure about that. Maybe we should be giving each other (Second Term: The Apocalypse) Rage Survival Starter Kits this year. I could probably organize that. A month of yoga, breathing exercises for grounding - calming your nervous system and getting a good night of sleep, mudras to fight the patriarchy (instructions: turn the palms of your hands toward you, make fists, then send your middle fingers straight up to the sky with gusto - breathe deeply). Meditations for surviving and thriving in an oligarchy, mantras to repeat when Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are sucking the life-force out of everything. Namasté.

It turns out you can be mashing sweet potatoes with Christmas music in the background, while thinking about the state of the world and a guy you dated who became a billionaire. He was “just” a millionaire when we were together. I was seventeen. He was thirty-nine, so I had the satisfaction of outdoing my parents, who had nineteen years between them. Life hack: it’s hard to say anything to your kid when you did the same thing yourself, and the kid you’re talking to is the result. Also, “dated” isn’t the right word for what happened. Dating suggests two people making a choice to spend time together - not one person using every mental, emotional, and financial advantage under the sun to manipulate and prey on someone less than half his age.

I could tell you a lot of things about why I finally said yes to him after I’d been declining his advances for months, but we’d be here a long time, and it’s in the memoir, anyway. I’ll just say that yes was the beginning of three years of absolute hell, which was most of the time I was in college. When someone has twenty-plus years on you and their own apartment, a house in the Hamptons, two cars, a marriage-and-divorce in their rearview mirror, two restaurants and a third they’re building out - and you are a teenage kid who just started college and really ought to be a senior in high school, you do not stand a chance. I moved into his place at the end of my freshman year.

What prey looks like.

I spent three years trying to be enough for him. Trying to get him to be faithful to me, trying to not lose my mind when he said he wasn’t seeing other women, trying to get him to love me. I wish I could go back in time as I am now, knock on the door of that apartment, and get that younger version of myself the fuck out of there. I almost didn’t make it out of that relationship alive, that is how much that man screwed with my self-worth, and that is not hyperbole. It was not a fair fight and it never is when a grown man goes after a teenage girl. It’s a disgusting thing to do, to rob someone of something they can never have again - the person they were before you showed up with all your bullshit.

Which is why the Matt Gaetz thing makes me sick on a level I find hard to articulate, in the same way I was horrified to watch the entire country blame Monica Lewinsky the way they did, instead of the man who took advantage of his position, took what he wanted, and left her hanging out to dry. See? I don’t care about the political affiliation of predatory men. Wrong is wrong in red or blue. You know what happens when cases like these make the news? You start seeing comments from people talking about the age of consent, the girl’s background, whether the man knew her age - and they come from men and women.

If you were lucky enough to grow up with parents who were loving and stable, or at least stable in their love for you, that is fantastic. But if you’re a girl in this culture and you come from a not-so-stable family of origin, the kind that causes you to wonder what your value is, or how to be valuable to people you love - and then the world at large tells you your value is in how you look, and that’s where your power is, too (except it’s confusing, because your power can be turned against you and used to justify the inexcusable behavior of boys and men around you)...you’re going to be very lucky to grow up unscathed. Most of the women I know are scathed. And getting up and getting shit done every day in spite of it.

Consent implies understanding - you are knowingly agreeing to participate in something. You are cognizant of the parameters, of what’s at stake, of the possible long-term side effects. If the restaurant guy had handed me a contract on our first date that said he was going to spend three years tearing me down emotionally, mentally and physically, that he was going to cheat on me regularly and then lie to my face about it (causing me to question my sanity and end up sobbing underneath his marble-topped eat-in kitchen table more times than I can count), if he’d said he’d be so cruel to me it would feel like getting punched in the gut when I least expected it, and that sometimes it would be hard to breathe…I guarantee you - even at seventeen when I was riddled with self-doubt - I would not have consented to that. By the time I knew the rules of the game, I was already beat.

The girl Matt Gaetz raped - because it is statutory rape when you’re a grown man and you fly a minor across state lines, drug her, and have sex with her twice at a party in front of other people whether you pay her or not - did not consent to any of that. I know nothing about her, I don’t know about her life, what she’s been through, how much love or support she’s had along the way, or anything else. What I do know is that she is not the one who should be judged in this situation. The reprehensible pig of a man who took advantage of her, is.

I watched women all over social media turn on Blake Lively this week. I have no skin in this game except that I’m a woman, and I have a daughter. I tend to think women ought to stick together, having been on the planet fifty-three years. I don’t know Blake Lively, I’ve never followed her stuff, don’t know much about her. But there is a whole article in the New York Times because she stood up for herself on a film set, and two men - her director/costar who purports to be an ally to women - and the film’s producer whose name I can’t be bothered to google, thought they were going to take her down because she had the temerity to request some things.

For example, she wasn’t okay with unscripted improvisations that included kissing her costar. When they filmed childbirth scenes, she wanted something to cover her vagina between takes - other than the teeny fabric genital cover they gave her. She wanted the producer to look away while she was topless in her trailer having body makeup removed, but he wouldn’t. Oh, and she didn’t want to see a video of the producer’s wife giving birth, even though he’d shoved it in her face with no warning. This is a woman who’s had three kids. She knows what happens during childbirth. Also, most women I know who have birth videos don’t want their partners flashing it at colleagues without their consent. These seem like pretty reasonable concerns.

Thing is, the film in question was about domestic violence, and I guess the director and the producer didn’t want bad press. So, as any true allies to women will do, they hired a “crisis PR team” because they were afraid Blake Lively might go public about the environment on the set once the film came out. The best defense is a good offense and all that. They decided a smear campaign against her was the way to go, and two women on the crisis PR team they hired tried very hard to help them.

Most women don’t get an investigation and article in the New York Times. Most women are not going to be able to “subpoena the receipts.” I saw women online taking the men’s side, almost instantly. Blake Lively is a mean girl, she’s problematic, she didn’t even talk about domestic violence in the interviews about the movie, she just talked about her haircare line. We’re never going to change things if women jump on the bandwagon to tear other women down, and only change their minds when they’re confronted with proof, in black-and-white.

Anyone can say they’re an ally to women, but it doesn’t mean they are. See also: people say all kinds of shit on the internet, just take a look at the Tinder profiles of people you know well.

Women and children are not protected in this world, and if you’re paying attention, you’ll be confronted by that reality every day. When it comes down to it - unless a woman can prove she’s been harmed, or that her child may be harmed, everything is set up to protect men. They don’t pay a price for molesting, attacking, assaulting, trafficking, raping or killing us, unless there is irrefutable proof. If it’s your word against his, good luck. Even when there is proof, the price a man pays is always weighed against the cost to his fucking potential. So my inherent worth is less valuable than your supposed potential, that’s the message I have to integrate, and then get on with my day.

We’re in this weird waiting period. Chaos is coming, and probably worse than that. Every day there’s some new horror, and I highly suggest you watch your intake. Feed yourself relief, joy, art, conversations with good friends, walks in nature, music, and some silence, too. Try to be gentle with yourself, say no to what insults your heart, and yes to the people who delight you. If you have a mess of feelings, let yourself be messy. Eat the pie. Remember we’ve gotten through hard times before, and we’ll do it again. We’re still here, right? And maybe, check on your neighbors, especially the ones who are old and alone. If there’s going to be a safety net for anyone, anywhere, that’s how it will happen. The rest of it we’ll figure out, together.

If you’d like to meet me in real time to talk about the importance of feeling your feelings, I’ll be here 12/27/24 at 11:15am PST, or you can wait for the Come As You Are podcast version which goes out Saturdays. I’m heading to Croatia in June and it’s going to be amazing if you want to come. And I will meet you in the comments as always. Thank you so much for your re-stacks, for reading my stuff, and for being generally awesome in every way. I appreciate you all so much. Can we buy a piece of land and form our own country?

*Santa pic in thumbnail credit: Photo by Danielle-Claude Bélanger on Unsplash