Holiday Grief Attack

I did not expect to be on my couch, in front of my (adorable, 5 foot) Christmas tree, face in hands, wracked with gut-heaving sobs on a Friday night. Did not see it coming. I have not cried like that in years. It felt and sounded like pure loss, just pouring out from the core of me.

Friday evening started a little differently -- I was late meeting Bryce for Mexican dinner because I got my hair done. And by that, I mean that I no longer have my silver highlights, instead I have some fun multicolored hair, which is tomorrow's post. We had our dinner, which was completely delicious, and then we decided to go home the way we used to when we lived at our old house.

The reason was an annual pilgrimage to the Holy Molar.

What is the Holy Molar, you might ask?

It is a light display between the restaurant and our old home that I suspect is homemade, and is basically a nativity scene... but, as you can see below, the manger has a striking resemblance to a tooth.

Behold, the Holy Molar in yellow. And also a new red camel and JOY sign.

One year there was a giant pink angel that resembled the Tooth Fairy. It was glorious. 

Anyway, we decided if we were going to go check on the Holy Molar, we should definitely go swing by our next door neighbors for old times' sake and pretend to be carolers. 

So we did. 

It was fun to surprise them, and super odd to have our old house look not so very different (my gardens are still there, my little section of white picket fence is still there, the shed is all lit up and they lit up the pine tree next to it). 

What planted a seed of horrific loss for later blooming though was when we asked how the new neighbors are. I guess the moral of the story is don't ask questions that you will regret, but really I had no way of knowing the impact the answer would have on me. 

Remember when we were selling our house and the people who bought it had two boys, and one was a little tow-headed boy with curly hair who looked just a LITTLE too close to the child I'd imagined we'd have had biologically? Because the Universe isn't at all a big jokester. Good one, Universe. 

Well, the youngest was described as a "mini-Bryce" who is constantly building things and engineering things in the backyard and asking for boxes and tubing and all kinds of things in order to make inventions. He's all kinds of science-y and they were like, "It's like Bryce never left!" 

I think you can see where things started rupturing deep inside me. 

The pressure continued to rise as then they told me that the older son, who is in 7th grade, loved climbing out the upstairs bathroom window to read on the roof. "He reads all the time," they said. "They love all the bookshelves," they said. 

It all stayed tamped down until we got home, but the rumblings were definitely there. 

I don't know about you, but when I am sad or dealing with grief I don't really want to deal with, it comes out sideways. It comes out as supreme bitchiness. 

Bryce looked at my hair and said, "I see the red, I see a fair amount of purple, and there's the blond bits!" And all I heard was "purple," and it made me mad because when I said I was going to bite the bullet and get some fun color in my (finally 95%) virgin hair I'd been growing out for over a year, he suggested that getting some purple in it would make me look old -- like I was trying to be "young and fun" but instead it would just look like TRYING. Harrumph. I don't 100% agree with that, but my plan wasn't solely purple tones anyway. 

But when I heard him say that, I heard, "I DON'T LIKE YOUR HAIR" with an undertone of "YOU'RE OLD AND WE COULDN'T HAVE BABIES SO YOU ARE COMPENSATING WITH YOUR MIDLIFE CRISIS HIGHLIGHTS." 

That is totally not what he said, and so he was flabbergasted when I snapped at him and said "IT'S NOT PURPLE!" (even though there actually are purple highlights in with about 3 other colors, but not in a circus-clown kind of way). He said "WHAT is GOING ON with you?" 

And then I started to cry. I couldn't get it out verbally, which was probably frustrating, but it was just so painful and so deeply held that when it started erupting I couldn't stop the flow to explain. 

These people who moved into our house, the one we had before that saw all of our family building efforts die a horrible death, HAD THE CHILDREN WE'D ENVISIONED. They had a little sneak-out-the-window reader and a little invention-tinkerer. They had a bookish kid and an engineer-in-training kid. Who knew that that was the moment where I remembered that I used to sneak out my bedroom window and sit on the roof of the pantry to read, get a moment of quiet time, and perhaps in college to smoke a disgusting Parliament Light on the sly. That last bit sort of ruins the fantasy.

My shitty brain then immediately took me on a mental journey through what it will look like when the kids run down the stairs Christmas morning and see the tree and the presents all laid out and these people, who I do not know and have nothing against, will have the holiday moments we always wanted in that house but never got. 

It was a horrible trip hosted by the Ghost of Christmas Never, You Infertile Sap. He's a dick Ghost.

So at first the tears came flooding out my eyes while I heaved, and then it became full-body wailing, and I just felt so sad and gutted and like I was feeling all of the losses compounded with interest. 

Bryce got it, though, and just sat next to me, rubbing my back, allowing space to just feel everything and let it all out. Unfortunately by the end I was a wet, snotty, mascara-trailed mess, but I felt lighter. 

And then I looked at our tree, and our beautiful house, that is definitely HOME, and felt like I could breathe again. I didn't feel quite as haunted. 

Which is funny, because Bryce said, "Don't worry, that house is haunted. It won't be as awesome as you imagined it." 

I hope it was only haunted for us. I hope that this family has their lovely holidays and their family moments and their secret reading hideouts and their backyard building projects without any shadow of the losses that made staying in that house unbearable and unsustainable for us. I hope that the move exorcised that, and we can be happy in our new life and they can be happy in their life that just strangely echoes what we wanted ours to look like once upon a time. 

I'm encouraged, because while Friday night was rough, and I felt like I'd been torn apart inside, we watched some silly TV and went to bed and I felt perfectly fine yesterday. It didn't feel fresh, or raw, or anything. It felt like I'd released something toxic, almost like when you're sick (or to go back to college, hung over) and you feel so much better after you finally throw up. 

And now I can enjoy our Christmas for what it is, and spend no more time on what it is not. Unless there's another moment that hits me right in that tender spot, but I know I'll feel it, release it, and then be just fine with where we are now. I can be kind to myself when these things happen. Which wasn't always the case before.

It's an odd sort of holiday gift, to be at a point where these grief attacks can happen, but not disrupt all the goodness of this season for us.