Tonight I am once again taking the path of least resistance in writing this blog: I am going with simple gratitude. I am grateful today for having my daughter with me for the holidays. Now that she lives on the West Coast and I’m on the East Coast I see her about every six months; not nearly enough for my liking, but it is sort of how it is. We did a little Christmas shopping and bought a Christmas tree–both activities brought out the Scrooge in me. The longer we went, the crankier I got, which she endured mostly with good humor. Some of my crankiness can be attributed to exhaustion–it’s been a long, tiring stretch at work and I need the holiday break–but much of it is directly related to the season itself.
I used to love Christmas, especially the gathering of the family together each year. Except for the year my sister and our parents and I lived in Uganda (1972) the year my brother was in the Marines (1975) we all gathered–my parents and the six of us kids–each year, either back “home” in Indiana, or out in Washington, DC where my older sisters live. As the years passed and various ones of us got married and had children, the gatherings got bigger, noisier, more boisterous and more expensive, impractical, and inconvenient from a travel perspective. Still for the most part, most of us managed to get together each year. But in my mind our family gathering began to lose steam when my mother died in 1995 and completely came apart after my father died in 2010. In many ways Mom was the glue that held us together, and while we still gathered each year, the energy and spirit of the season had changed; something had been lost.
My siblings may not agree with me on any of this, and indeed it is simply my perspective. Most of us would say that we are family oriented, and this is probably true. But while my energy has been focused on the larger extended family, for some of my siblings their individual family units are their priority and the extended family is secondary. And as I think about it, this makes sense. I have the smallest individual unit in the family–me and my two kids; and when it comes to Christmas time, it has shrunk down to me and my daughter. With my son living nearly 2900 miles away in California and working a job that doesn’t allow him holidays off, this is the second consecutive Christmas that I have spent without him. So I think about family gatherings as being larger than my daughter and me. This year, four of the six siblings will spend the holiday together, hanging out, playing games, seeing movies. Two years ago was the last time all six of us gathered with the usual mayhem and pandemonium that happens whenever you get that many people together in one place. It was a blast, and although 2011 was a very difficult year for me, I was able to put all the drama aside and have a good time with my siblings.
I am grateful for family in whatever configurations I find them in. I’m looking forward to spending a few days with as many of them as we can muster. The more the merrier. I acknowledge that some of this for me is another opportunity to let go. No, things are no longer the way they used to be. It is time for me to let go of what was and embrace what is. Easy to say, more challenging to do. But I’m working at it even while I’m working on being less of a Grinch and more peaceful, calm and perhaps even a little joyful this holiday season. It is definitely a goal worth working toward. If I approach it with a grateful heart, I have no doubt I can achieve it. And that is a beautiful thing.
