Author: Sheila Quirke

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Holiday Cards as Emotional Landmines

Holiday cards seem pretty innocuous on the surface, right?  Christmas cheer, seasons’s greetings, Happy New Year and all that jazz.  There’s nothing too complicated about people you know, like, and possibly love wishing you the best during the holiday season.  Except sometimes, for some people, there is.  It can get very complicated.

On Facebook over the past few weeks, for the first time ever, I started to see fellow Cancer Mothers share their annual angst about what to do, what to do, what to do with the tradition of sending and receiving holidays cards. I have felt it myself for years, but didn’t realize others had the same complicated feelings.  When your own life does not seem to match the smiling faces staring back at you on the holiday cards, it can add an extra layer of hurt during what may be an already difficult time of year.

Some of these fellow Cancer Moms wished their friends and family understood the pain and grief they felt looking at families that were whole and happy.  Some felt the practice of sending photos cards to grieving families was insensitive.  Others felt pain when thinking about their own families, having children with special needs from surviving their cancer treatment, or being financially strapped that sitting for a photo, ordering special cards, or affording the postage was beyond their means.  There was anger that others did not even stop to consider the family that would receive the holiday card and what it might mean to them to be told “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!,” when both those things seemed so far out of the realm of possibility.

Despite never sending my own holiday cards, I have always enjoyed receiving them.  I would hang them happily, if a bit wistfully, in our front hall and admire all the happy children and happy scenes that played out before me as I walked past to pick up the mail or sweep the hallway.  I often kept the cards displayed well into the New Year, reluctantly taking them down around Valentine’s Day.

That changed last year and I don’t know why.  I didn’t open up a single holiday card last year.  Not a one.  I couldn’t.  It was too much, somehow.  I even went to the trouble of buying a decorative box to keep them in so I wouldn’t lose track of them.  But those cards never got opened.  Ugh.  Not only was there the guilt of not sending cards out myself, but now the guilt of leaving these cards unopened.  It was miserable.

Blessedly, in good times and bad, the calendar keeps moving forward. Soon the holidays morphed into winter and winter into spring and the cards that contributed to so many difficult feelings just moved to the back burner. But sure enough, it’s the holidays again.  Damn calendar.

Every year I tell myself, “This is the year!,”  It’s gonna happen.  You are gonna get your holiday ducks in a row and figure out how to make one of those snazzy photo cards that so many families do and you are gonna write pithy messages and address those envelopes and slap some stamps on those suckers.  This is the year I will scale that seemingly insurmountable Mt. Everest of equal parts organization, responsibility, and discipline that sending holiday cards require.

And you know what?  This year was the year.  I did it!  I picked those photos and chose a design and wrote a few words that integrated Donna and added a  pithy messages and addressed those envelopes and licked those stamps and posted those suckers this morning, December 22.

I freaking did it.  I am feeling so proud of myself.

Such a beautiful sight!

It truly is a Christmas miracle!

The thing I have learned about grief, am still learning about grief, is that it changes.  It ebbs, it flows.  It comes, it goes.  There is not always a rhyme or reason to it.  I sent those cards not out of guilt or obligation this year, but because this year I wanted it.  I prioritized it.  And it didn’t feel oppressive. Well, okay, the addressing did feel a tiny bit oppressive.  but the process of making them did not feel oppressive or obligatory.  This year I had a desire to participate, to pull up a chair at the holiday table, Kleenex in hand.

I’ve been working hard to monitor my Facebook use this year and it seems to have helped.  I am worrying less about what others are doing that I am not and more about what I can and want to do.  It’s working and I am grateful.  And this year the holiday cards I have received have been opened, each and every one of them.  I didn’t hang them up, but I have enjoyed looking at them every day.  They, too, don’t feel oppressive.

Amen for small victories over grief.

The merriest of seasons to you, whatever it is you celebrate.  And remember to practice gentle kindness towards yourself, during the holidays and every day.  

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Downsizing Christmas

I make no bones about not being the most Christmasy of gals.  I like the holiday alright, but I can never escape the feeling of being oppressed by it.  It kind of sucks that I have, as long as I can remember, thought of it as something to get through, to endure.  The day itself is almost universally lovely. I spend it with family I adore and have shared with them since I was a young child and I have two of the sweetest boys a mother could ever imagine. Christmas Day is the bright shining light in the whole season.  It’s all the bells and whistles I could do without.

The shopping, the wrapping, the decorating, the gingerbread house constructing, the baking, the card sending, the holiday music listening, the crowds, the elf, the ugly sweater parties, the forced cheer — the cumulative effect of all of it never fails to get me down.  It’s a shame, really, as any one of those things independently would be lovely and enjoyable, but somehow the combination and concentration of HOLIDAY CHEER never fails to do me in fairly completely.

Every year I tell myself it will be different and every year it is the same. Sigh.

This year I have approached it with a bit more strategy and that seems to be really helping.  I wrote a post about how Theodore Roosevelt has guided me this holiday season.  Pfft.  I am now relying on long dead presidents to help me cope with the holiday blues.  Whatever helps, amirite?  You can read that post HERE.  Long story short, his quote, “Comparison is the thief of joy,” has helped me tremendously.  It was a kick in the pants to not spend so much time on the Facebook this time of year, looking at all the happy, smiling families, which was only leading me to ask, “Why am I not so happy this time of year?  How am I hurting my children by lacking the cheer that seems to easy for so many others?  Why does my life always seem so complicated when other peoples’ lives look like a piece of cake?”

Wise words from a dead president.
Wise words from a dead president.

Just stepping back, focusing on myself and my family and creating joy for the four of us has created a center instead of a diffuse ball of ‘woe is me.’ Yesterday we went and bought a tree, made some sugar cookies, decorated with a little holiday flair here and there.  The tree is about twelve inches from my writing table and I am smelling its lovely scent as I type this. The most amazing thing is that doing all of that didn’t feel a bit oppressive. Not even a teeny tiny little bit.  It was fun.  Fun.  And easy.  And a little bit uncomplicated.  I feel grateful.

It struck me that what works for my family (I happen to be married to a man who believes Ebenezer Scrooge is the most misunderstood and misinterpreted and wrongfully maligned figure in literature — oy vey) is the idea of downsizing Christmas.  For the past few years I have whittled away at our holiday decorations, donating those things I haven’t used in years or anything that doesn’t work with young children.  We are down to three boxes.  This pleases my husband immensely.  Me, too, as I pulled them off the storage shelves yesterday.  Better yet, I am using maybe half of the decorations we have hung on to.  The rest are too precious to give away and too fragile for curious little fingers.  We can enjoy those again in a few years.

The result is a home that whispers Christmas rather than shouts it.  There is a small, fat tree in the living room, adorned with a cozy collection of wood and felt ornaments that each have some special meaning.  The star that rests atop is a Donna original made from cardboard, aluminum foil, and a toilet paper roll.  A simple tree that looks homemade.  It suits us.  Not flashy, but charming and lovely.  There are two stockings that hang on our bookshelves and I will never stop thinking there should be three.

We made a batch of sugar cookies and I’ll do some chocolate chip bars today.  The rest will be outsourced to accommodate all the sweet tooths in my family.  There is no shame in that.  The weather has cooperated this year, so we’ve actually been able to get outside and do some holiday visits to the Botanic Gardens train show and this week, dodging the weekend crowds, we’ll hit Zoo Lights some evening.  We haven’t visited Santa yet and neither boy really has a special holiday outfit.  We haven’t seen any of the display windows at the Chicago stores on State Street.  We may or may not get there this year.

And all of that is okay.  I’ve long thought that one of the greatest strengths a person can have is knowing their limitations.  One of my limitations (and hoo-wee do I have a lot of those to choose from!) is this holiday stuff.  Fits and spurts, people, is what I can handle.  Picking and choosing what we do and letting go of the guilt and comparisons is what seems to be helping this year.  Next year might be completely different.  Who knows?  Another thing I’ve learned is to worry about right now right now and worry about later later.

This season I will keep taking it one day at a time.  I will work to eek out all the holiday joy we can based on how mood and health and weather cooperates.  I vow to try not to compare our holiday joy to the holiday joy of others.  I will keep my head down, keep sniffing that tree, keep it simple and special, working within our own family’s means and limitations.

Whew.  Wish me luck.  And best of luck to you, too.  We got this.

Santa on Tree

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Read This Before You Tuck Your Children Into Bed Tonight

Two years ago tonight, twenty families in Newtown, Connecticut tucked their first graders into bed for the very last time.  These children got on their pajamas, some of them might have bathed, they brushed their teeth, complaining about it, I imagine.  Their moms and dads might have read them books and sung them songs.  And then, for the very last time, they turned out the light and said. “Good night.”

Those moms and dads would never tuck their first graders into bed again, as each of them was gunned down in their classroom in Sandy Hook Elementary by a disturbed young man, Adam Lanza, who also shot six brave adults at the school after killing his own mother in her home.

I changed that day as a mother and as a blogger.  I started using my voice against the rising tide of preventable gun violence in America.

Having lost a daughter myself to an aggressive brain tumor, something no one could have ever prevented, my heart broke open to imagine that twenty more moms and twenty more dads would mourn their own young child because of something that could have been prevented.  Losing a young child defies the natural order of how we all imagine life is supposed to be. Losing a young child to gun violence is, for me, unimaginable.

I can try to imagine it, but I stop myself, as it is too painful.  I look at my boy tonight, on the cusp of six himself in just a few short weeks, a gap in his smile where his very first tooth fell out last week, the curl that covers his forehead, the weary smile on his face after a day of birthday parties.

The idea of blood on him, his blood, turns my stomach.  The idea of holes in him turns my stomach.  The idea of the fear those children must have felt in their last moments on earth turns my stomach.  The idea of what the screams in that classroom must have sounded like turns my stomach. The idea of how the events that day two years ago in Sandy Hook Elementary have become a political hot potato turns my stomach.

I know some of you are tired of reading my words about guns.  I certainly know that I am tired of reading the hateful comments I receive when I write about them.  But I will keep doing it, as, to me, it seems the most effective way I can encourage change in our world.  Tonight, though, I don’t want to debate, but instead remember.  I remember those 26 individuals who died in a school in Newtown, Connecticut two years ago.

Newtown Victims

And as I remember that day two years ago, I think about those moms and dads I have never met, but who have somehow managed to wake up each and every day since and keep moving forward.  I think about how sudden and shocking their losses have been.  I think about how some of them might choose to sleep in their dead child’s bed tonight, grasping at any sliver of a chance to feel their little one close again.  I think about all the families who will visit a cemetery tomorrow, and lay a wreath on the stone of someone who was taken from them much too soon.  I think about the names and the faces and the missing teeth of all those first graders.  I think about all the tears that are falling right now, as the sorrow of their loss overwhelms.

I hope you do, too, as you tuck your own little ones into bed tonight.

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Click HERE to read a post written by Nicole Hockley, mother to Dylan Hockley, Sandy Hook victim, aged 6.

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