Geez, that was a banger of a song from The Babys.
Whenever I tell people that I hate Christmas, they're shocked and then tell me that I'm wrong for many, many reasons. Someone said everyone gets the holiday blues and I should think of the positives.
It's a long story, if you want to jump out now, I don't blame you....
My grandmother died in the fall of 1966; she was 48.
It changed my family in hundreds of ways. But this is the story of how 3 people were torn apart by this one event.
A couple of years later, my mother went to Toronto to visit her father. And she had lunch one day with him and a work colleague.
The very next day, my mother started an affair with this man. It's a story she told my sister and I 50 years later, shortly after our stepfather died.
My mom was always self-centred; it's something that came across in the way her siblings treated her, and what they said to me - directly and indirectly - over the years.
But my papa ADORED her!
I'm pretty sure that my mother told my father at some time about the affair because his personality changed. He started drinking a lot and was sad and quiet.
It reached a head in 1971. My grandfather came to visit for the 50th anniversary of my home town with my later grandmother (the woman you have all come to know as my Nana - she was my mom's stepmother) and my youngest uncles.
A few weeks later, my family - mom, dad, my sister and I - went to Toronto to visit our family. But the 4 of us didn't return home.
My mother's lies started here.
My father was staying behind in Toronto because we were going to move there the next year and "he was going to find a new job and a place for us to live". Mom, my sister and I returned to the north.
One night, the ringing of the phone woke me.
On the other end of the line was the ex-husband of my aunt Betty. He had decided he didn't want her after a short year of marriage and driven her to my grandparents' home and left her there. Now, several years later, the gist of the conversation with my mother is that he wanted her back.
At this point, you might want to dispute my memory of things, but I have had an odd memory since I was a young child. I think it's why I'm good at trivia.
But I digress....
During this conversation, my mom told Uncle George that she and dad were separated. It pierced me to the core. And I said nothing to anyone - ever - until now, writing this post.
A couple of months later, my grandfather and Nana and my uncles came for our last Christmas in my home town. I do remember that on Christmas morning, there were so many presents in our tiny living room that no one could get into the room. We all sat around the edges and in the dining room opening packages and packages.
I don't know if this next event happened on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, but I went upstairs to my bedroom alone for some reason. I was looking out the window at the sunset glowing against the paper mill in my hometown. It was clear and the stars outside the window were bright even at 4:30 when the sun set at that time up north.
I could hear the sounds of a happy family below me - bubbling over with love and joy.
And it was almost like I could a voice say this out loud - this will never be yours, you will always be alone.
I was 11 years old.
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On Christmas Day, late in the evening, my father arrived at home, completely by surprise. My sister and I were SO happy!
I think he hoped to make one last grand gesture to get my mother back.
To say the attempt failed would be an understatement.
I remember my mother screaming at him to get out on the day after Christmas.
I didn't see him again until 1976.
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Easter weekend 1972, a month before we moved to Toronto, my mother brought her boyfriend to our house to meet us. She told my sister and I that we had a new father. And a month later, we moved to a new city into an apartment with our "new father".
Mother tried to enrol us in school in Toronto using his name - legally not possible - and for years our father's parents weren't able to get in touch with us directly because she didn't trust them to not tell him where we were. Only after my grandmother died did we return to our hometown to visit our grandfather. The story of how we got to see Papa again is best left for another time.
***
My stepfather was almost 20 years older than my mother, he had a grown daughter who married in 1972 and I think he resented raising another man's children.
He treated us like dirt, calling us ungrateful, lazy, fat, ugly and stupid. And not only did mom never stop him, she soon joined in.
He stopped being a jerk when we left home.
But our mother continued to hurt us at every opportunity, even when she needed us at the end of her life. Was it guilt? Who knows? Her favourite line when she was angry with us was "you're just like your father".
*****
My dad died in 2001 - he was only a year older than I am now. But he, too, found love again with someone much older than he was. And our stepmother treated my sister and I like treasures.
I had hoped the pain might start resolving first when my stepfather died in 2014 and then when mom died 3 years ago. It hasn't. It probably never will.
Several years ago, the American writer Molly Jong-Fast wrote about her contentious relationship with her own mother. She wrote something that could have been about me:
"You're supposed to be over your childhood. You're not supposed to be haunted by that loneliness you just can't quite shake."
People who tell you to "just get over it" didn't have this life. Motherhood is held out as something sacred and precious. Mothers are supposed to do anything and everything possible to love and protect their children, right?
Some of us get the mother who cares only about herself.
I have spent a lifetime trying to find a way to prove that voice that I heard in my head at Christmas 1971 that it was wrong. That I would find love and a family of my own. But I have chosen wrong or blown my chances every single time.
And this is why I hate Christmas. And why I'm unable to love anyone, especially myself.
