Bitchy McBitcherson's Blog

Tag: dysfunctional

  • Setting Small Goals

    Today I hope to ship multiple packages.

    This sounds so simple, and yet is so ridiculously problematic for me.

    I am not kidding, two of the packages I need to ship contain things that I MOVED HERE because I did not manage to ship them to the intended recipients prior to the move, and frankly it is stuff that had been sitting around the other house for a very long time, unsent.

    There is just something about having the stuff that needs sending, an appropriate box, tape to seal the box, the address, the time, the memory, and the energy/patience to deal with the post office, all coming together in the same spacetime, that proves more difficult than it should be.

  • Yep, still typing

    This year marks the 12th Christmas we have not celebrated. We talked about it. We thought about it. We determined it was not providing us with the purported joy. We agreed. We decided. We quit. We told the people we felt we needed to.

    Our daughter is 11. She grew up not celebrating. While the concept of a child, and what I would teach them, was part of the decision, as a person she has been one of the difficult aspects of it. The feeling of being different, of not being normal, can be hard on a child. People like to poke at differences. They want to know why. They want the difference explained and defended, or *fixed*. They think they have the right to that.

    One December when she was 5 we went to get her picture taken at some crappy in store photo place. She was cute when she was 5 though, so any photos would do and the cheaper was much better for the wallet. A few reasonable sized photos, plus 200 little useless throw away ones so they could advertise a large bundle, for $4.99. It’s a long way from art, but it made my grandmother happy. The button pushing salesmonkey asked her what she was doing for Christmas and she shrugged and responded that we didn’t celebrate Christmas. Salesmonkey freaked out. “What do you mean?! What do you do?!” Salesmonkey stares at me wondering why my child is retarded and lying, “You do celebrate Christmas, don’t you? Why is she saying that?!” I shook my head. “Why not?!!!” Salesmonkey wailed. The kid was traumatized.

    A few weeks later, in January, we were at our favorite (at the time) sushi place. One of the chefs asked her what she had gotten for Christmas and she froze up. She did not want a repeat of the last scene. He asked again. She looked at me. He looked at me. Her behavior was quite odd. She was always extremely friendly with this chef and now it looked like she didn’t know how to speak. “We don’t celebrate Christmas,” I told him. He looked at her and smiled warmly, “Neither do I.” She beamed.

    One of the things that catches attention from certain people about not celebrating is the “not Christian” aspect. Most of the Christians we run into are used to being in the comfortable majority in the country. They’ve heard of the other big religions, but we don’t *look* (Muslim, Jewish, or one of them there “eastern religions”). This means we might be something else, something worse. I’m already long comfortable with the fact that in pretty much every aspect of my life, I am something worse, but this is another area that is harder on the kid.

    Like with most things, we couldn’t leave well enough alone, and we chose to homeschool. Now, most things about homeschooling are really wonderful, and we have some terrific friends who homeschool. However, there is a rather large sized portion of the homeschooling community who are not just “I was raised Christian, so I mark the Christian box” but are instead fervently Christian. We interact with these people at group events, classes, field trips, sports days and more. “What church do you go to?” is commonly asked within the first 5 sentences by many of these people. Now I cannot begin to give a rat’s ass about somebody who doesn’t want to talk to me anymore because I don’t go to church, I mean, really I am grateful if they are going to weed me out for that reason. Still a kid likes to have friends, and more than that. A kid does not like to be teased and bullied. Ever seen a 10 year old, and more than a foot taller, boy get physical with a 7 year old girl because when he asked if she believed in Jesus, she gave “In my family religion is personal and we don’t talk about it outside the home.”as her response? Well, I have.

    Over the years we’ve learned little tricks. Stick her in a Harry Potter t-shirt when going to an event with a new group. It keeps a certain element from even starting to interact with her. Avoid events from Thanksgiving through mid January. I don’t enjoy being out and about then anyway. We won’t lie, but why invite trouble, when it always shows up of its own accord. Yet here I am writing it out on LJ and posting it public. I asked her. None of those kids should be reading my posts anyway, but somebody might. Does she care? She said to post. At 11 she is obviously a lot more immune to the reactions on this subject than she was at 5.

    Things I have been called (not in jest) because I do not celebrate Christmas have included:

    • Grinch
    • Scrooge
    • smart
    • lucky
    • heathen
    • crazy
    • child abuser

    Yes, I’ve been told it is child abuse to not have her celebrate Christmas. Some people have cried actual tears upon hearing that we don’t celebrate.

    One relative lets their kids think we are Jewish so they don’t have to explain something else.

    My MIL quit giving us birthday gifts. Oh wait. She didn’t quit. She has become chronically late with them. She sends us gifts at Christmas, wrapped in Christmas paper and writes Happy Birthday on the cards. In case you are wondering, our birthdays are in July.

    Mainly people want to know what we DO instead. We don’t do anything specific. We are glad to have a day when people don’t tend to call, and we often accomplish stuff around the house and catch up on to do list stuff. The only thing that makes it different from other days is the fact that other people are busy celebrating it. If we eat out, we don’t have many options, but we’ve learned that we can usually find a Chinese restaurant open.

  • I’ll Have a Hot Buttered Rum

    I am not Christian. I understand that a lot of people around the world celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday. Admittedly, I celebrated long after I realized I wasn’t Christian. Back when I decided to stop celebrating Christmas, I was still trying to achieve some sort of balance with certain factions of my blood relatives. They were very religious. It was an important holiday to them, and the secular celebration of it bothered them. I wanted to show some respect for their beliefs. I was planning to start a family of my own. I was trying to grasp what it was I was going to tell my child if I didn’t want to do the Jesus Christ’s birthday thing. I felt like it was more respectful of these relatives’ beliefs if I simply walked away from celebrating the holiday, rather than transforming it into a celebration of something that did fit into my world view better. In the intervening years I’ve gotten a far better picture of what those relatives, whose feelings I was worried about, really feel about me, and I am far less concerned now about trying to respect their beliefs. Still it did play a part in my decision.

    There is also a little thing oft referred to as family politics, as if regular politics weren’t ugly enough.

    My parents are divorced. They have been since I was very young. Where was I going for Christmas? Should I trade off every other year? Should I spend it with the one I wasn’t living with at the time? When I was a child they worked it out amongst themselves. If they argued about it, I was unaware or have blocked it out. I spent Christmas where I spent Christmas and probably got spoiled a little bit extra over the holidays because of it. I had fun with the people I was with. There were presents and twinkling lights, and a good many more sweets than I normally got to have. I missed the ones I wasn’t with. It was a “family holiday” and I was from a broken one.

    By the time I hit adolescence, the presents and the sweets mattered less to me. I was very aware I wasn’t Christian, although I wasn’t ready to tell people that yet. Instead I was trying to come to terms with this “Spirit of Christmas” or “Magic of Christmas” thing that people would go on about. It wasn’t what I saw. What I saw, was that the people who understood me, the people that I wanted to spend time with, were all stuck in a house with their relatives, while I was stuck in a house with my relatives. Yes, I was at that age when my peer group was becoming a stronger influence, than my parents. That was only part of it. I had also started to become a lot more aware of the various dynamics in the relationships around me, and I could see that I was not the only one who was not brimming with joy at every familial interaction. I was seeing things in the marriages of my relatives. I was hearing the exasperated tones. I noticed that people who rarely had a drink of alcohol had one for the holidays and that it was more a matter of dulling their senses than celebration. You shoved all the extendeds into one house together for a week and things got… tense. A game of Pictionary could end with somebody in tears, and I don’t mean one of the children. Once I was old enough to drive I would escape to spend time with my friends as soon as I could get away.

    When I met the person who would become my husband, it seemed inevitable that we would celebrate Christmas. We both always had. As we started to build our lives together we needed to sort out how we would celebrate the holiday as a family. As it happened, his parents divorced long ago too. So now we had 4 groups to choose from and no way to please everyone. It wasn’t just the basic 4 sets of our parents, we still had at least 1 grandparent living for each of those 4 parents.

    The first year we put up our own tree, which was fun and exciting. We got it for 5 bucks and had a lot of fun decorating. My mother bought us several very nice ornaments which was a gesture I really appreciate. We didn’t go visit her since she didn’t live locally. We had our own gift exchange at home, and we made some rounds to see the local friends and relatives.

    The next year my mother agreed to bring her family (both of my parents started new families after I was grown) to spend Christmas with us. I have to admit, this felt like a milestone. My mother and her family travelling to spend the holiday with us told me she believed I was a grown up, that she accepted my relationship, and knew I was really establishing my own household. It meant a lot to me. We got ourselves another 5 buck tree and decorated it. I planned my dinner menu (centered around a lamb roast). It would be our first Christmas that we were hosting. We also invited his mother and her husband. They said they would come. We did not invite my father over, who was also local. He had recently married a Buddhist they were still sorting out the Christmas thing. (I think now they celebrate it when they were spending it with my grandparents, and don’t otherwise, but I’m not certain. We have more interesting things to talk about.) This worked out better for us since we had a small apartment. On Christmas his mother didn’t call and didn’t show up. We waited a while and finally he called over to see when she’d be arriving, and she told him that she wasn’t feeling well.

    The next day we found out she was pissed off and offended that we were arrogant enough to think we could host our own Christmas. She had not gotten to have her own Christmas until she was married and had a child, and her son should come to her house for Christmas. The fact we had out of town guests did not figure into it. They were my guests.

    It became a bit of a thing, and she wouldn’t give us our gifts (including those by other people that were sent to her address) until we came to her house. At this point we were irritated and in the midst of a solidly petty and immature reaction ourselves, so we avoided going to her house completely. We’d meet for breakfast out at restaurants. It was many months until we ended up at and her house and got those gifts. Some were baked goods which were far from fresh at that point. Ghost of Christmas Past Shortbread Cookies, made with real butter and quite rancid.

    The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth, literally and figuratively. To top it off, between the general stress of the season and the overwhelming workload of college life, we left the tree up long beyond the point of no return. We had managed to put the ornaments away, but once you pass the time that the garbage people will collect it on trash day, it became an effort to get rid of it. We didn’t have a truck to take it to the dump ourselves, and we were expending a lot of effort in a lot of other areas of our lives. The needles dried and many fell. The tree began to look much like a giant sized Charlie Brown tree. It stood as a reminder. When we got rid of it (way before we got those gifts, mind you) we knew it would be our last real tree. Before the next Christmas came along we’d already gotten the rest of the way through our decision making process. That was the last Christmas that we celebrated. It wasn’t particularly terrible. There were plenty of good parts to it. There just wasn’t the sort of personal meaning I was looking for.