The calendar page falls, and so do I, into the cold, hard month of December.
Yes, the tree is decorated. The Christmas music plays when we enter too warm, cinnamon-scented stores to spend money on those we love — and some that we don’t. I’ll put on my new Christmas themed glasses. I’ll wear red and green. I’ll wrap presents, bake cookies, make teacher gifts. I’ll tick our way down to Christmas Day with the boys via our Advent activities and their pure, unabashed joy. I will make sure everyone has the month that they are supposed to have — the month that they deserve to have; it’s a special season. I wouldn’t take that away from my family.
I’ll do what I’m supposed to do.
But with each step, I will be aware of everything I have lost.
It’s a hard balance, the highest of holiday highs with the lowest of life lows. Balance is hard with anything, I suppose. I have struggled with the month of December every year since I placed the Munchkin for adoption at birth. Christmas does make me happy. The loss of my daughter does make me sad. Holding the two opposing realities in separate hands with the weight of everything else I am told I have to accomplish this month on my shoulders leaves me so bogged down with a myriad of emotions.
There’s the sadness that’s more than just unhappiness; it’s a deep, searing, depressed emptiness that simply can’t be ignored this month. Other months it stays below the surface enough that I’m able to function — to acknowledge it but still leave room to feel the other things both related to our adoption relationship and the rest of my life. In December, there’s just no other room. The sadness bubbles up through the thin icy layer and breaks through to the surface of my soul, my heart, my face. I don’t wear the sadness on my sleeve any other time of year, but it sits next to the Christmas pin on my jacket. They go together.
There’s the guilt that I feel this way at all. Shouldn’t I be happy? I have an amazing relationship with my daughter, my daughter’s mom, their family. I see her. I know her. My children know her. My husband knows her. They all love her so dearly. And then we get to add in the guilt that I feel as though I am somehow shorting my own children out of the pure joy of the season because, even with the brave face, there are moments in December when I am lost, looking out the window at would could have been, not entirely present. They deserve better; they deserve more.
There’s the anger that seeps in, which only serves to anger me more. Actually, during the last visit I had with the Munchkin and her family, I got irrationally angry with Munchkin’s birth father for not dealing with his own emotions enough to handle visits and thus feel the way it feels to leave a visit. Anger at him hits its highest peak in December as memories of phone calls eight Decembers ago come back into my mind and flash by like bad movie scenes. I feel angry with myself for feeling any anger with him as I have forgiven him. But the memory of talking to him in my apartment, alone, after she was born… it chokes me. I can still feel my clenched fists and jaw, that lump in my throat, that burning in the deepest center of my core. So, really, while I have memories about how angry I was with him, the anger really stays with me this month. That I can’t forget. That even though I have forgiven, the memories still come and haunt and poke and prod and shove me into the pit of despair.
And the truth is that I just miss my daughter so much in December for so many reasons. Her birthday. Christmas. All of the memories we simply aren’t making together. It’s hard. It hurts.
The duality of December — the unbelievably happy with the unbelievably sad — leaves me feeling torn. Who am I? How do I do this? How do I keep on doing this for the rest of my life? How do I be the best mom, the best birth mother, the best wife, the best employee, the best daughter, the best friend, the best of who I know I can be — when I don’t even know who I am or how I am supposed to be this month?
All of the deep, introspective self-questioning aside, the fact remains that I have to find some way to balance that duality. There is no other option. Too many people depend on me this time of year to just sit and stare at her ornament on the tree. I need to be present. I need to participate. I need to be who I need to be right now. And so, I start the eighth December of desperately seeking a balance that works for everyone else.
Maybe some year the balance will work for me to, but I just don’t have the time to worry about me right now.
