Holidays growing up were horrible. The Drunk would pick a fight – usually with me – and wouldn’t stop until someone – usually me – was crying. My mother would be screaming, literally, that we didn’t spend enough time eating after she spent two days cooking. The Drunk would complain because my mother used boxed mashed potatoes and would tell her she had three daughters so there shouldn’t be boxed mashed potatoes. Notice that my brother, who could have crapped in the middle of the living room rug and it would have been okay, didn’t have to do anything. Many times, I got the flu a couple days before Christmas. Being too sick to notice the hell that was going on around me was good. Very, very good.
Every year, the deep, unrelenting depression and nightmares started the third week of November and lasted until New Year’s Day.
I was the odd kid out and I was 34 before I knew why my mother and The Drunk hated me. Turns out, while my younger brother, sisters and I have the same mother, I’ve got a different father. One Christmas eve, my younger brother said The Drunk’s advice to him was to have fun but be careful. I was appalled and said that kind of advice leads to someone knocking on your door 20 years later and says s/he is your daughter/son. The Drunk said, I mercifully forgot what, caught himself, and said that might happen to him. That’s when I knew I was someone else’s kid.
It’s not easy being someone else’s kid.
Finally, Jim and I decided a solution to the hell that is Christmas was to take a vacation and be gone at Christmas. We traveled to assorted places. Kentucky is closed for Christmas except one truck stop in Lexington that served the best biscuits I’ve ever had. One year, we stayed at a resort in West Virginia and the resort restaurant, decent but not memorable food, was open. Another year, we stayed in Freeport, Maine. The only place open was LL Bean. No restaurants. Jim found a convenience store that was open for a few hours and bought us day-old sandwiches. We sat in our hotel room ate day-old sandwiches and watched A Christmas Story. I thought how pathetic it was that being in a hotel room eating not quite stale, forgettable sandwiches was far better than being with family.
Then, I moved 2000 miles away and there was no more Christmas Hell.
I thought.
I was wrong. The misery of complex PTSD is that it’s hard to treat and the flashbacks last a lifetime. I’ve been married for 50 years and gone through nearly 20 years of therapy and if there was a way to stop the flashbacks, I’d have found it by now. The flashbacks are no longer debilitating, but now they come in clusters.
About 20 years ago, I discovered that my grandmother’s really bad German was actually Yiddish. And who spoke Yiddish in 1888 when the family left East Prussia and came to the US? Not German Lutherans which is the story the children and grandchildren were told. There’s an unbroken female line from my great-great-grandmother, who left East Prussia with her husband and 10-month old baby (my great-grandmother) to me. I am Jewish. Formal conversion, which I call reversion, was 11 years ago. I’ve celebrated Hanukkah ever since.
Still, the flashbacks come. Jim and I love to binge on baking contests. While I enjoy seeing different ways to make things, watching the Holiday Baking Championship can be painful. Sometimes, the contestants explain the inspiration for whatever they just made is a lovely family memory of Christmas past. Where do the producers find these people? Or are the contestants lying? Or do I have to live in a cave to avoid the flashbacks? I insist on having a normal life and not running from the triggers. I refuse to give the triggers the power to contract and constrict my life. That helps, but doesn’t cure cPTSD.
I detest Christmas.
Deb's Art 