By: Christa Gartner Ahh, the holidays.
They are better than they used to be.
They used to be terrible.
Everyone has always had to be perfect.
Children were to be seen and not heard.
We had to be quiet and good.
It wasn't just the fact that my scary brother was always there that I hated the holidays, but also cause I was scared of people to begin with, and I was thrown together with all these other people who scared me. I was always sad. Everyone would talk to me and I never spoke.
My mother.
My poor mother.
Under the constant scrutiny of my father.
He never let her do anything but what she
was "supposed" to do.
She saw my constant fear, yet she wasn't allowed to help me.
We always had to act like everything was perfect, and while we were trying to fool everyone, no one was believing any of it. They all knew, not the details, but they knew there was something wrong. VERY wrong. If she tried, my father would yell at he and tell her that she was "spoiling" me.
Every year on Christmas day, my dad would take these moving pictures of us all opening our presents. My brother, thinking he was doing a good thing, put all those movies together and put them on a video cassette tape and passed them around for Christmas one year.
There are other reasons why the tape was inappropriate, but there was something about it. If you had seen me...
These were tapes of when I was 3 to about 7 or 8 years old. I didn't smile once. Not once in all those movies.
Not that I'm surprised. I was always miserable. I was sick every holiday. My dad never believed me when I said I felt sick. And I was the worst when driving. I always got carsick.
Between being sick, the torture from my brother and the constant attacks from my dad (verbally) we always had horrible holidays. I was just talking to my mom on the phone telling her about this essay. Her comments were always "Holidays were always so terrible". She's so right.
I'm a little better now. I spend all the holidays with my mom, of course, my fiancé, my MOM'S side of the family. I still get queasy alot, but it's not HALF as bad as it used to be. I talk to my dad as little as possible, and I talk to my brother a little more.
There's more to say on that, but I will leave that for another time.
It's nice that during the holidays, I can hang out as much as I want with my mom, and no one says anything about how much we laugh or how silly we are. If I get scared, Mom and John are right there and they make me feel better.
I love them both very much. For all the awful holidays I used to have, each one gets a little bit better every year. I am looking forward to someday having children of my own and raising them the way I always wanted to be raised. And if I'm HALF the mom that my mom is?... well, I guess I might be a pretty great mom.
ChristaReturn To: