It is hard to believe that this year is almost over already! Thanksgiving has passed and Christmas is just weeks away! These holiday seasons are always my most difficult for seasonal blues and feelings of being over whelmed. I use to retreat into some dark corner of my mind and walk through the motions of thankfulness and holiday cheer. Or I'd panic! More often I'd panic and try to hide! As a little tike I'd hide in bed or in front of the TV. As I grew up, I hid in a bottle of booze or worse. Eventually though I feared hiding as a form of living death and prayed for help. God gave me wise teachers and I learned a new way to believe. And over the years I've learned new ways to get through these last two holidays of the year.
Over the years, I've learned that darkness can be lightened, no pun intended, and I actually get glimpses of real joy and a warming to the soul during these holidays now. But first I had to understand there was baggage with abuse and severe trama that matched the severe abuse I had suffered those early years. I had to also understand how 'triggers' could set in motion unreasonable, predictable reactions in certain situations for me. When I was a child, these holidays were more nightmares...rarely a celebration of thankfulness and the birth of a baby Jesus.
Over the years, I've learned to identify and recognize the 'triggers' and I've learned how to not react. Instead of reacting, I now try to identify, recognize and apply a new tool to respond with healing. Many such tools were acquired and more tools are continually added in my ongoing self review and desire to leave the blues behind and feel the liberating joy these holidays can bring. I'm learning to let go of the memories that haunt the mind of an abused and broken child. I'm learning to forgive....starting with myself and going backwards to that little girl who wasn't as bad as she thought she must have been, to deserve such horror, and to forgive the ugliness of alcoholism and it's accompaning dysfunctions. It's been a slow, continual process, for me, but now I can look back and see change and I can believe.
So Thanksgiving is over and the kids who came to eat turkey with us, have gone home to decorate thier homes for Christmas. The once noisy chatter of grandchildren is silent, in PoPo's home, and the computer has once again got NaNa's full attention ... though her Facebook addiction is to PoPo's chagrin. It it is important to note that my blue scale, so far this year, is tolerable and truly enjoying the house full of family was more than a treat, it was magical and healing. No pretend motions through the Thanksgiving long weekend off. I refused to focus on anything negative and ate everything, til I thought I would burst! No panic, just thoughts of love and gratitude for these gifts God bestowed on me. Family. Still a slightly dysfunctional family but less on the dark side and more, now, on the humorous side.
I wish I could promise to hold on to this light mood and have Christmas find me in full adoration of the celebration of Christ and singing the holiday songs with gusto!! But I feel that nagging dread and it has been haunting me, whispering to me that something is coming. Something very difficult. Oh...may it not be! May it just be a feeling of dread that, already, the end of this year is near. May it be a dread of the work ahead that coming to the close of 2009 has spurred in me. And most of all, may it be unfounded dread. Maybe I can just put one foot in front of the other and learn a new dance to take me, all in swirls and dips, to the start of new beginnings that could be welcomed in with 2010 and to the end of any 2009 lingering dread. Maybe I could dance such a dance through the dreaded year end holidays and close my inner eyes to the painful little girl memories and open my heart eyes to the healing older woman. A woman who survived and is full of hope .... even when I find things hard to believe.
