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The Domestically Challenged Homemaker’s Christmas Recap

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photo.JPG Christmas

Merry Christmas! How was your holiday?  Oh, I am so happy that you had a great time.  How was my holiday you ask?  Well…ummm… Do you want the “correct” answer or the honest one? If you want to know the truth, my Christmas was 45% life is a bowl of peppermint sticks and elves shit mocha and 55% holy crap, can this get any worse? 

As a domestically challenged homemaker, Christmas presents many hurdles.  I never feel that I have it all together and during Christmas, whatever I did manage to get together falls apart.  What makes Christmas extra difficult is the barrage of pictures of perfect families enjoying traditional Christmas pastimes that we all receive.  They serve as a constant reminder of my own inadequacies. You know what I’m talking about, those Christmas cards and Facebook shots of angelic children baking cookies, decorating Christmas trees, sitting on Santa’s lap and their moms and dads posting things like “a perfect Christmas moment” and “Cards are out. Tree is decorated. Just one more batch to add to my already 108 perfect batches of Christmas cookies and we’re ready for Santa.” I have to admit that I have plenty of beautiful pictures of my kids doing adorably Christmassy things. But for each smiling shot I have about three other shots of a crying child. I don’t know about you, but all those Facebook posts and Christmas cards just serve to magnify my already glaring shortcomings. My messy home and crying child stand in stark contrast to the images of smiling faces  and perfect houses I see everywhere. And you know what really sucks? I try really, really hard to have everything in order and happy for Christmas. I guess this homemaking thing is just not my bag.

That said, each year the Nanni’s host Christmas Eve, and we always manage to pull it off in the nick of time, despite the fact that Giorgio works that afternoon and usually doesn’t arrive home until around 5:00 or 6:00.  This year, however, was exceptionally chaotic.  Let me just say that at 4:30 pm Christmas Eve I raced into the neighborhood liquor store to pick up the ingredients we needed to create the snowball martinis that were going to dazzle our guests with that evening. As I stepped into the store and said hello to my buddy behind the counter, I began to giggle. Not a happy giggle. The other kind. The nervous one that I can’t control. And as I was giggling I asked “Do you think I can get home, clean my house, have the kids gifts wrapped and be ready for guests to arrive by 6:30?” The problem is that as I was giggling, my eyes began to well up. Shit. I could feel the tears coming, and I knew. I knew that any second I would begin the simultaneous laugh and cry. Now that is a very poor indication of my mental well being and it only happens during the most high stress situations. Somehow, someway, I swallowed the tears, but continued to giggle. My friend assured me that I would in fact make it and what I needed was a cocktail…or ten. Ironically, given my aversion to Christmas Facebook posts (I really have a love hate relationship with FB) and my limited time, as soon as I pulled into my driveway and before I entered the house, I was compelled to post the following on FB:

I’m in the weeds!!! Okay, can’t have a heart attack on Christmas eve.  That would really suck for the kids.  I’ll make it.  Right??? Wait, Christmas shouldn’t be like this.  LOL (perhaps though I should be crying).

Why ever did I post that?  I don’t know.  Perhaps it was cathartic.  Perhaps I wanted support.  Perhaps I wanted someone else to say, “yep, I’m in shit too.”  I don’t know. I do know that a few kindhearted people actually responded with assurances that all would be well, and those comments helped. The big question, however, is how does one find herself in such a state on Christmas eve?

There are three factors the contributed to my Christmas chaos.  One, I teach college English, which means that during December I am swamped with portfolios to grade and final grades to be submitted, Two, my husband is a chef and December is the busiest time of year, so he practically lives at work during the Christmas season.  Three, my son has sensory issues.  If you are familiar with SPD, you know how Christmas can be very trying for anyone who struggles with it.  This year these three factors converged to create the perfect holiday storm.  Oh yeah, I forgot to add the fourth and most obvious factor which you already know…I am clinically diagnosed as being domestically challenged. 

So this is how Christmas played out.  Giorgio was supposed to arrive home at 5:00 Christmas Eve but didn’t walk into the door until 6:45.  Thank God I had the wherewithal to call the guests and ask them to come at 7 instead of 6:30.  We pulled it together.  The evening was fun.  We laughed, ate, drank.  Good times.  The guests departed at 11:30 and Giorgio and I cleaned until 12:00. I managed to get my little one to sleep, but my son has sleep issues and didn’t fall asleep until around 2:00 am at which time my husband and I proceeded to wrap gifts for three hours.  At 5:00 we made our way to bed.  Unfortunately, we managed to wake our son up on our way, and he never went back to sleep.  Needless to say, Giorgio and I didn’t sleep at all.  With everyone, aside from Allegra, suffering from extreme sleep deprivation, Christmas day, without boring you with the details, was challenging.  Before I passed out that night I surfed the internet for blogs on special needs children and the challenges Christmas presents.  I just didn’t want to feel alone.  I wanted some confirmation that it wasn’t just my lack of domestic homemaking prowessphoto.JPG Christmas that led to our less than blissful holiday. And you know what?  I did find some comforting stories shared by parents who are far more generous with sharing information than I am.  For that I was very grateful.  And, on a truly positive note, Allegra had a great time for herself.  She enjoyed all the preparations leading up to the big day (cookie baking, gingerbread house making, Nutcracker Suite watching, tree decorating and Santa visiting)  and Christmas day itself. 

So will this domestically challenged wretch of a woman do anything different next year?  Maybe some things, but not all . I am an eternal optimist.  I have hope that next year will go more smoothly.  I hope that our lives will be more peaceful, less chaotic.  All I know is that despite all the insanity of the holiday, we are okay. Christmas night Giorgio and I tucked our children into bed and kissed them and told them we loved them and really, that’s all that matters.  They are here.  We are here together.  The four of us.  I know I often end my posts this way, but it is how I feel. I complain about my shit, but I am a lucky woman ( a wreck yes, but a lucky person none the less).  Wishing all of you a peaceful, healthy and happy new year!

Just to Clarify, Are We “Real” Friends, “Mommy” Friends or Facebook Friends?

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I was a Facebook holdout, a lone wolf. I refused to sign on to something I simply didn’t support, something I found silly, useless, juvenile. I fought my feelings of alienation when, during playdates with our children at the park, my actual friends would meet their Facebook friends in the flesh and laugh and talk about all the great stuff they learned about their mutual Facebook friends on Facebook…huh? I was in complete denial that I felt like I was missing out, like I was the kid in high school who didn’t get invited to the party. I held on strong to my convictions and didn’t join Facebook for years. Then this past March I gave it up, signed on and became addicted. Addicted to the constant stream of virtual human contact, to the anticipation of being friended, to the excitement of “connecting” with people from my past, but mostly to the 24/7 “contact” with the world of the living because, as a stay-at-home mother of highly spirited children and the wife of a man who works long and late hours, sometimes I need a little distraction and contact with the world outside of my home.

Once I joined Facebook, I became a part of an alternate reality where some people have 500 plus friends. 500 plus friends!!! I can’t even wrap my head around that! I mean tops I’ve got three good, solid, true blue friends. I also don’t really have many acquaintances because I don’t particularly see the point. It’s not that I’m anti-social; it’s just, why would I be in a relationship that isn’t going to move forward? It’s like remaining with a boyfriend for fifteen years but never getting any real commitment on his part. I want my acquaintanceships to move forward and develop into true friendships, but, as I have come to realize, some people just aren’t interested in everything that real friendship entails. Perhaps many of my acquaintances choose not to become friends with me because of the fact that I am a weird chic and not for everyone, but I think the bigger issue is our reluctance as a people and society to foster meaningful relationships. This reluctance seems to illustrate some deeper sociological issues and gives us insight into how, why and what friendship has become. Why are we so willing and needy to accumulate “friends” on Facebook but not friends in the flesh? What does this say about us as adults and how are we to teach our children the value of true, genuine friendship?

Yet, when I think about the “friends” I have made since I became a mother, I understand how we devolved from classifying friends into best friends, friends and acquaintance categories to making the distinction between real friends and mommy friends to having real friends and Facebook friends without really making or perhaps even knowing or caring about the distinction. As a stay-at-home mom I have to say that I was SCHOOLED in what friendship has become. When my Jack was a baby, I met a group of women at the library’s Mother Goose Time and we started a playgroup. All of our children were very close in age and we began meeting regularly and friendships were quickly formed. For me, the birth of my first-born was so profoundly life altering and special that anyone I spent time with became very significant. I naively thought that the bonds I formed with other mothers during that time were quite possibly forever. Then I learned that I was a “mommy’ friend, as opposed to a real friend. References in emails and conversations made it very clear that, with the exception of myself and a few other mothers, members of our group had compartmentalized the other women in the group into a separate and distinct category. This unique “mommy” friend category made us the recipients of late night panicked calls about sick children and invitations to child friendly Halloween parties, but our part in each others’ lives ended there. Real friends were included in the rest.

So if we put up with “mommy” friendships, it makes sense that we would accept Facebook friendships–cold, impersonal relations where we bitch and talk at and inform each other about ourselves without the space nor the expectation of the reader that we will explain ourselves, explore topics or discuss anything in-depth. So why do we do it, and how is it possible that we would ever become addicted to it??? Are we so very disconnected, so very lonely? Are our expectations so very low that we will put up with and crave Facebook friendships and connections and updates? I guess the answer is yes. Yes, we want to connect with the outside world. We want to feel popular and liked. We want the “company” of others no matter how it comes to us.

Using Facebook for companionship reminds me of when I was a child and my mother would bring my brother and I to visit my great-grandmother and my great-uncle at their studio apartments in the elderly housing complex. Inevitably, regardless of the time of day, the television would be on. As children, my brother and I spent our afternoons in the sunshine playing outside. It just seemed so incredibly wrong and unnatural to us that, on afternoons where the sun shined so brightly you could see the dust of seemingly clean apartments dance in the light of sunbeams, a person would remain inside with the television playing watching As the World Turns or syndicated episodes of God knows what awful cop-buddy series was popular ten years earlier. I remember one day asking my mother why old people watched television in the afternoon and her answer was, “because they are lonely.”

Maybe that’s it. Maybe we are all lonely and needy and in want of connections to others and our past and life. So, we Facebook. Let’s just hope that when we are ninety and our great-grandchildren visit us in assisted living that they don’t find us, rather than watching syndicated episodes of whatever is popular on television today, Facebooking virtual friends; friends who never really cared much about us to have a real friendships; friends who seldom if ever visited us in person or sacrificed or shared or compromised like real friends do. Let’s hope that in addition to our great-grandchildren, we have real friends who visit us. And, above all else, let’s hope that our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren have real friends who love them with a true, real, actual love that transcends the virtual world.