The Darkest Time of Year

December is the worst.

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

CW: suicide, substance abuse

I have talked about my complicated relationship with Christmas before, but I’ve never really told the whole story of why and how it became complicated. I’ve given the Cliffs Notes version, but not the whole story. I have never written this out in its entirety.

I am not telling this story for anyone to feel bad for me. It could have been worse. I just want everyone to know that they are not alone in their Holiday Trauma. I know so many of you have experienced traumatic holidays. They always stay with you, even when you are doing your best to be jolly.

Sometimes, you just need to get it out.

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A long long time ago, in the Ancient Year of 1998, three days after a terrible Christmas, my friends and I had plans to go and see The Faculty, starring Jon Stewart and Salma Hayek. A pretty normal night on our break from school. It was a Monday night. I was 17 years old and a senior in high school. Before I left, my mother started a massive fight because I wanted to borrow $20, as I hadn’t gotten my paycheck from work yet. This was a common battle. I was expected to start paying my way very young.

I had odd jobs from the time I was 12 - babysitting, making copies in my mom’s office, stuff like that. The day I turned 16, my mother marched into Baskin Robbins and came back with an apron and hat and a schedule for me. When I hurt my back in an accident and could not bend to scoop ice cream anymore, I applied for a job at the pizza place a block down. Once I was hired there, I worked anywhere from 15-25 hours a week, meaning there were days I left my house at 6:30 am and didn’t return home until 10 pm at least. That meant that homework had to get done late into the night. I was sick and overwhelmed all the time. While you could argue this prepared me for adulthood, it also instilled the idea that if I wasn’t overscheduled, I wasn’t busy enough.

So, there I was, arguing over twenty bucks. The Christmas tree was still up. My father’s alcoholism had reached a fever pitch, and my mother was drinking a lot too. There was constant fighting. I spent as much time out of the house as I possibly could. By that point, I had sent in my college applications, and I was counting the days until I could leave.

I got the money so I could buy my ticket. We piled into my friend’s car and headed to the movie. From what I remember, we enjoyed the movie.

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When we returned home, my father was standing on the front lawn with his arms crossed. This was back before most of us had a cell phone. I assumed I was in Big Trouble for something. I was often in Big Trouble for something. My stomach dropped.

I could tell before I even opened the door that he was loaded. I asked him what was wrong, and he just shook his head and waved me in without saying a word. My brain was racing.

My across the street neighbor - the mom of my oldest friend - was also inside. She was sitting on the couch, looking about as somber as I’d seen her, and I’d known her my whole life. I realized this was very much an Adults Gathering To Tell Me Something Serious Situation.

My ears started ringing, something that still happens to this day when I feel triggered. She started telling me what happened, but my brain was only hearing fragments.

“….your mother took some pills…an ambulance came….she is in the hospital…they think she will be okay…”

I knew what had happened before she could even finish. The thing I’d been afraid of finally came to be. My mother had tried to kill herself¹.

The room went white. I lashed out at my father with a ferocity that scared everyone. I think at one point I picked up one of our dining room chairs and threatened him with it. I was ready to bludgeon my way out of it. At that time, I was fiercely protective of my mother. I was her confidante and her protector. That was my job. And in that moment, I blamed him for everything. If he could only stop drinking, she would get better. I didn’t understand that it wasn’t just as easy as stopping. I also didn’t understand that his sobriety wouldn’t have fixed what was wrong with her.

My friend’s mother broke through the rage and told me to get myself under control, because my younger brother was upstairs. My brother was thirteen at the time. WHY he was upstairs by himself is the question that should have been asked, but instead, it was time for me to suck it up for my other job. Be the adult.

I immediately raced upstairs to check on him. He was fine, but obviously not fine.

I called my friend who had just dropped me off. I think I was screaming and sobbing. All the people I was with that night got right back in the car and turned around to come to my house. I will always be grateful to them for being there that night.

Once the initial shock wore off, we were all up late smoking cigarettes and probably weed, and playing Trivial Pursuit (or was it Monopoly?)². I think my brother was in bed. Dad was sleeping it off. The hospital had pumped Mom’s stomach and said she was going to be fine, that they would update us in the morning, but she would likely spend some time in a mental health facility after.

I won’t tell you the super embarassing portion of that particular evening. It involved a drunk dad, skimpy underwear, and a Christmas tree. Let’s put it this way - there’s a reason why I am a professional at public humiliation. But I’d carry that feeling for most of my life and always wonder how to stop it. The wanting to die. The wanting the floor to open up. The shame. And also it makes me laugh, because it’s ridiculous. To quote the great Dar Williams, “Sometimes life gives us lessons sent in ridiculous packaging”.

The Christmas tree really added a nice touch.

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A couple of days later, it was time to visit my mother. She was in a shitty hospital in Bridgeport, as we were on state insurance at the time. At this point I was just surviving. I was doing what I was told. I was going through the motions, but I was elsewhere. I was excellent at dissociating by this point in my life. So when it was time to get in the car, I didn’t think to make sure my father was sober.

He started the ignition, and off we went. Then I smelled it. Vodka, sharp and sweet. He didn’t talk much, but when he did, it was obvious that he was drunk. I didn’t have a driver’s license yet, so I couldn’t take over.

There had been a storm, and the roads were icy. My father was driving too fast, and erratically. At one point, we skidded a bit, but he managed to correct. I remember watching the Christmas lights whizz by, the blinking of red and green and blue on the pavement, and being sure we wouldn’t make it. There were moments I was absolutely sure that we were going to die, and what’s worse is that it felt like the better option at the time.

We did not die. We made it to the hospital.

My mother had requested some pizza from work, so we brought her a pie. I told my boss she had a bad reaction to medication, which she didn’t believe, but didn’t press me for details. I was very used to lying at this point. For children of addicts, lying is just what you have to do to get by without anyone asking too many questions.

The hospital was shitty, and the psych floor was especially shitty. The room where families visit resembled a cafeteria, and it was behind plate glass. A TV was playing, but I can’t remember what was on it. The other patients (most of whom were very ill) got one whiff of the pizza and started hovering around us. It felt like that moment on the beach where if a seagull notices that you have a bag of chips, they somehow tell all the other seagulls HEY THIS GIRL HAS CHIPS and before you know it, there is a swarm of them honking at you, pecking, flapping their wings. Some of them smelled terrible, and nausea hit me like a brick. I willed myself not to throw up.

My mother looked at me and said, “Beth³, you gotta get me out of here”. As if I had the power to do that. My father just sat in drunken silence, greasy hair covered by a baseball cap, and in that moment, I hated him with everything that I was. I hated my life. I hated both of my parents for doing this to me.

I said I had to go to a bathroom and found a pay phone. It smelled like menthol cigarettes and vomit. I called my neighbor and told him what happened. I told him the truth; that my father was too drunk to drive us home.

“I’ll come get you,” he said.

We made it home. All I remember about that night was laying in my small bed, terrified and shaken. I didn’t want to die, but a tiny part of me hoped I wouldn’t wake up.

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A few days later, my father entered detox. He was one floor away from my mother in that same wretched hospital. One stop shop.

I don’t remember what the exact breaking point was, but his parents were involved, and they coordinated getting him into treatment. We were not really close to my dad’s parents, not in the way we were with my mom’s parents. But my mom’s parents were dead, and legally we couldn’t be left alone, even though I was more of an adult than the vast majority of the adults around me.

We were shamed by my grandparents about the untidiness of our home. What we didn’t know at the time is that no one could have expected two traumatized kids with ADHD to be good housekeepers. We needed love, not judgment. We needed care, not chores. We needed help and understanding, and received neither. There were other things, and when I spoke out about things that were said to me, I was told that they said I was lying. I was always the liar in my family.

I came home one day to find a typed letter on our kitchen sink from our grandfather, addressed to my brother. I do not recall exactly what it said in its entirety, but it was a military-style missive, devoid of empathy and basic fucking human decency. It was insinuated that our mother might not ever come back to the house, which is a god awful thing to say to a child because he didn’t clean his fucking cereal bowl out of the sink. Who TYPES a letter to their grandchild?

I tore the letter up and started making phone calls. I knew it was emotionally unsafe for us to have them in our home, and I didn’t want my brother to see the letter. I didn’t want anyone staying with us at all, but I knew that the law was not on our side. I got my mom’s friend to agree to stay with us for a couple of days, mostly by begging.

When my grandparents arrived home, I informed them that my mom’s friend was coming to stay and their services would no longer be required. They left, and my mom’s friend stayed with us for a couple of nights. I think that night was the first night I got a decent night’s sleep in weeks.

I don’t know where I got the courage. It was borderline insane of me to do this. I was braver at 17 than I am now. I also felt like I had nothing left to lose. I was wrong about that, but I didn’t care. For a long time, it was my badge of honor as a true badass. As a good sister who protected her brother. My mother and father told me all the time how “scary” I was. How people were “scared” of me. So I figured, I just scared them enough. I couldn’t really let it in that they were probably glad to be relieved of their duty. When I told this story to my therapist, she was utterly horrified that I told them to leave and they just did. I had never thought of it that way.

So much more happened. But it’s too complicated to go into here, and I think you get the idea of what a completely horrible experience this was. What’s insane about all of this is that I had to go back to school and work and act like nothing was happening. I already had a reputation for being nuts. Nothing like two parents in the looney bin to reinforce that narrative.

Somehow, we managed to not wind up in foster care. And my mother was released from the hospital. But the damage was done. My life was nowhere near done falling apart yet. Everything I knew changed in an instant. My brother and I lost our family in chunks, like a glacier collapsing into the ocean.

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So, when I say that I hate Christmas, it is not because I am a Grinch. It is not because I want to yuck everyone’s yum. And it is certainly not because I didn’t try to reclaim it. I tried to make nice holidays. I hosted my mother and friends at my home for years. I got a REAL tree (fun fact: I am allergic to pine, which I didn’t know, so I was unwittingly poisoning myself for years). I got on airplanes when I was sick. I tried. I feel like that’s going to be on my tombstone. Here lies Kari, she tried.

It isn’t just what happened 26 years ago. Every Christmas, for years now, something bad has happened. Dead cats, dead mother in law, illness, job loss, you name it. I now consider Christmas a success if no one dies, winds up in the hospital, or has a nervous breakdown. And, of course, like clockwork - I am dealing with a situation I’m not entirely sure how to handle, and I also know that no matter what I do, I lose. I have tried to always lead with kindness and empathy. I think sometimes that bites me directly in the ass.

So, for once, I am opting out of pretending that I am okay in December. I am not okay in December. I am never okay in December. It is a veritable minefield of triggers. Even when I THINK I am okay, I am not. The sight of Christmas lights doesn’t make me smile and reach for the eggnog, it actually triggers me. There’s also the overstimulation, the expense, and the general misery of the weather and the dark cold nights. A lot of people with ADHD struggle with the holidays. There is a great post over on The Autistic Perimenopause that gives some great insight into how to manage the holidays if you are neurodivergent.

But I will be okay. This is the first holiday season I have put absolutely no pressure on myself to do anything. It is going to be a quiet, peaceful holiday. It will still be hard. It’s always hard. But I will get through it. I’m doing things differently this time.

I am practicing yoga daily and foregoing the cardio/weights for the month. Linking breath with movement and downregulating my nervous system is my priority. I am writing and I am painting. I am using the rest of my PTO so I get a nice long break. And come January, when the decorations are put away, I can exhale for another year.

1. What she did was take a bunch of Xanax, wash it down with whiskey, and then panicked and immediately told my father what she had done. She would do something like this again multiple times over the next many years. I am not sure they were suicide attempts as much as cries for help or attention, but I treated it like a suicide attempt, and it was terrifying every single time.

2. It was Trivial Pursuit. I remember the wedges. I remember I had pink and brown.

3. My middle name is Elizabeth, and my mother often called me Beth. Why? I don’t know. If she was mad, it was KARI BETH.