Grinchy-ness, Revisited
Full disclosure: I am a Grinch. I hate Christmas.
There, now I have said it out loud, although without shouty capitals.
Every year, I happily live my life, riding the ups and downs with curiosity and enthusiasm — until the beginning of December.
As the jingles jingle everywhere we go, as the lights go up and the decorations sprout on my neighbour’s lawn, a dark fog fills my heart. I feel a vague apprehension building, a sense of dread I can’t explain. I just want to be somewhere, anywhere, where this is not happening all around me.
When the children were young, I did all the things, went through the motions: the gift buying, the baking, the Christmas concerts… I didn’t want to taint them with my mood. But after they went to bed, the tears helped release the tension that had built up all day.
By now, I am sure you have noticed that I don’t shy away from analyzing my feelings. Yet, I have never really understood my grinch-y reaction to Christmas.
Eventually, I remembered that my mother hated Christmas. She went through the motions too. She only disclosed her true feelings when I was older, admitting that she dreaded the season’s approach. She just never told me why.
It just never added up. My mother and I are both well-organized people who are more than capable of managing the tasks involved in pulling off Christmas. My mother loved baking, I like cooking. Neither of us lived in dismal poverty, so offering gifts, however simple, was a perfectly viable project. We both enjoy entertaining.
Why the growing feeling of dread as December approached?
It’s only recently that I have begun to open my eyes to the impact of epilepsy on my whole family. Adding this factor to the mix of elements in the Christmas season provided me with new insight.
Most serious health conditions are affected by all the layers in our lives. Modern medicine is indeed a blessing, but its effectiveness is always impacted by many other factors. Pills and potions are most effective in ideal conditions, when life around us is well-ordered and stable. Epilepsy is no exception. The drugs I took worked best when I lived a structured, predictable life: regular meals, regular bedtimes.
Enter Christmas.
.
Réveillon, Noel, Jour de l’An: everyone gathered at my grandparents’ home every year. Jour de l’An was a two day affair, starting with the men’s tournée on New Year’s Eve and winding through the first day of the new year.
Christmas in a large, highly dysfunctional family is a tornado. In my large family, siblings often engaged in a shifting circle of alliances. As the pairings reconfigured, new exclusions occurred.
During the holidays, siblings who generally stayed away from each other as a result of their feuds were expected to gather at their parents’ home to celebrate the holidays. Every conflict, every feud, every perceived slight became magnified by close contact and alcohol.
I was excited to see my cousins, whom I only saw through the cycles of alliances formed by our parents. There were few opportunities for all of us to gather. But the heady mix of late nights, excitement and tension emitted by my repressed relatives usually impaired the potency of the cocktail of medication I took to control seizures.
Most years, the frequency of seizures increased at Christmas time. To my parents, every seizure was a setback in my progress. It meant further scarring on my young brain, more disruption of the connections of development, more visits to the hospital, more EEGs.
The fun of reunions, the energy of celebration, the excitement of the season, was overshadowed by the spectre of epilepsy, every year.
Hence, the dreaded season.
I was a child in the 50’s and 60’s. My mother’s experience was kept to herself, and the child that I was only sensed all the untold emotions without the explanations.
The things we experience and don’t understand become stories. Stories are great platforms for creative people: they can be expanded and enriched, edited and spun into elaborate yarns.
I absorbed my mother’s story without seeing the dots that anchored it, and kept it to myself, as she had.
The story has had six decades to root.
Now I know. So what will I do this year?
Well, I have just told you the story. Now that I have shared it, I hope that releasing it into the light will help it evaporate into the ether, in a mist of forgiveness that will dispel the fog from whence it came.