The sound of shattering glass will help. Plus then we can look on the bright side and realize that with no children in the house we don’t risk someone running in with bare feet and necessitating a holiday trip to the local emergency room for stitches.
Once we get out the broom and dustpan and sweep up the shards (after all, we’re still parents even when the kids are away), our self-pity will be done and we can clear-headedly reflect on the true nature of holiday depression—an experience so pervasive of course that entire entertainment genres are based around it. We know we are not alone when it comes to hating the holidays.
Tolstoy’s oft-quoted first line of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” allows me to pivot from talking about all of us and our trash cans full of broken glass (since collectively this smashing has made us a kind of virtual, if momentary, happy family) to my own private experience of this new and real sadness in my life.
Before my first marriage, I was the classic holiday denier: the self-styled outsider who pish-poshed holiday tradition as an empty, meaningless ritual designed to leave no room for truth or independence. I continued this stance more or less even as a young married woman with a small child, conceding though, that with a baby I could understand the pull to see family more regularly, and even begrudgingly let myself enjoy the fawning over my adorable infant and my new role as progenitor/adult/fully-vested member of this society of relatives. Not until my divorce and remarriage and the ever-more complicated entanglements that have ensued do I realize that acting like an outsider in my old life wasn’t actually sad. Only a real insider, someone who knows she is accepted unconditionally, can risk declaring her outsider status and still know that a slice of pumpkin pie waits for her on the dessert table. As a stepparent, I know what being an outsider truly means.
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