Sink or Float? Surviving the Holidays Like Goldfish Can't

I love some of the traditions of Christmas.  The decorations.  The family-specific rituals each of us creates for our families, borrowing from our parents, borrowing from our spouse.  Tradition anchors my memories of Christmases past. 

But tradition can also be the anchor that drags our spirits down. The holidays are stressful for everyone. We're all trying to jam so much into them. And it's all good stuff. Like...how is it that we reach a place where you try to jam so much good feeling and holiday spirit into it that it ends up going so wrong and creating so much stress? It's like eating too much because you love it.  Like we're fucking goldfish and if it's in front of us then we MUST eat it until we gorge ourselves and die.  Maybe not EXACTLY like goldfish.  But you get it.  Christmas cards and parties, decorations and obligations, finding the right gifts and getting them wrapped...when it's all over and the tissue, bows and wrapping paper drift gently across the gift-strewn wreckage of your house like tumbleweeds across a post-apocalyptic landscape, maybe then you can look back and smile at all the joy. Or maybe not. Maybe you'll look ahead to the clean up. The putting away. The diet. Whatever.

It's okay to ditch the anchor. It's okay to create a happier healthier holiday for yourself and your family.  One of the best and most ironic lessons autism teaches is to abandon traditional parenting methods in the face of  neurology and look for new/different ones that work for your family. It teaches flexibility in the face of rigidity.  It teaches us to look for a "better" way, instead of the "traditional" way. To focus less on the tradition and more on the results. What works for some or most DOESN'T work for you.  It's okay to stop trying to make shit that doesn't work work.  I'm not saying this very well no matter how many times I rephrase it...if you don't see the irony, trust me it's there.  I know irony. 

It's okay if you didn't send Christmas cards.

It's okay if you didn't make cookies.

It's okay if you buy the "weird" present that your child wants instead of the "normal" present that you WANT him/her to want. 
It's okay to skip the holiday party because sitters are impossible to find at christmas.

It's okay to skip church.

It's okay to decorate less.  Or decorate differently.  Or decorate late.  Or skip decorating.
It's okay if your child didn't sit on Santa's lap. 
It's okay if your gifts are in gift bags instead of wrapped in paper.
It's okay if you give gift cards or money.  

It's okay if you can't afford to give what you really WANT to give.

It's all okay.  Celebrate in a way that actually feels joyful.  Abandon the stress and the rigidity of tradition if it makes you and your family happier...healthier.  How many of your traditions are for you?  Because it's the way YOU were raised, not even because you or your kids want/need them?  How many of your traditions do you KNOW you actively have to push energy into almost constantly in order to maintain?

It is a week before Christmas.  Less than.  I got the Christmas cards out.  I'm making Christmas Eve dinner.  I have the gifts bought (not wrapped yet).  Decorations have been up for weeks...two Christmas trees.  Teachers' gifts are on their way to school in my daughter's backpack.  Two Christmas parties yet to attend; both are this weekend.  I'm living the dream over here in Single Dad Autism Parent land.  Except that I'm fucking stressed out.

I am stretched THIN.  I could do it, so I did it.  And now I'm at the end but I don't have anything left.  Not going to church on Christmas Eve this year.  Even thinking about it causes me stress.  So I'm not doing it.  Because I'm done.  DONE.  This Christmas will be awesome...probably in the way that winning your first marathon feels like...YES!!  I WON!!  Now I'm going home and I never want to put on another pair of running shoes again.  I didn't take my own advice...until now I guess.   

It's more important to me to maintain my sanity and my holiday cheer than it is for me to go to Christmas Eve Mass.  I probably won't take my decorations down until March.  Maybe not.  Maybe I'll leave them up ALL FUCKING YEAR.  Christmas cookies that Emma and I were going to make?  Meh...maybe. 

My point...my POINT is...you don't have to get to this place.  You don't have to jam all this fucking cheer down until you bloat like a goldfish and float to the surface of the holiday aquarium.  LET GO of the idea that you NEED to jam all this shit into the holidays in order for it to be...HAPPY.  BECAUSE...are you happy?  NO!!  You're fucking stressed out!!  I know!  I'm in your tribe!

Okay...anyway.  I'll close by saying...I.  LOVE.  CHRISTMAS.  Love it.  It is my absolute favorite time of the year.  And I love THIS Christmas even if what I've written above might make it SEEM like I don't.  And even if I AM capitalizing every third word so you can see how emphatic I am.  I love this season.  But it seems to me it is a bitter irony that this season we love can be destroyed by too much...cheer.  So...learn the lesson that having an inflexible child can teach...try a new way to reach holiday happiness.  Ditch the traditions that only LOOK good on Instagram and Facebook and find NEW ways to reach for something less...surface.

PS...I'm so torn about the fact that I'm comparing traditions to an anchor that holds you down, and then comparing them also to fish food that bloats you and makes you die and float on the surface.  We're floating...we're sinking...WHAT IS THE FUCKING ANALOGY JIM??  SINK OR FLOAT? 

I don't know...But if "It" taught us anything, it's that floating is bad.  So whatever.  Sorry about the analogies.  Focus less on tradition and more on happiness.  Create true happiness for yourself even if it doesn't make for a good facebook pic. 

The actual End.

The Fabulous Stains

"Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains", was a movie that came out in 1981.  It was about punk rock and about feminism, and a super young Diane Lane played the lead.  I'd never hear of it, but maybe 1985 or '86, they showed it on USA network's Night Flight.  I never really understood Night Flight, but it was trippy late night TV mostly centered around music, but I'd often watch the obscure movies they'd show.  In the case of the Fabulous Stains, I'm pretty sure I just wanted to see if they'd show Diane Lane naked.  They didn't. 

None of this has anything to do with the post today...except the title. 

This morning I was looking out the kitchen window at my crappy patio table.  It was covered in mildew/moss stains from constant exposure to wet weather, and I had an epiphany.  "I'll bet Tilex would clean that right up!"  So after the kids were off to school, I got the Tilex from my bathroom and sprayed half of the table down.  I gave it a few minutes to work, and then, sure enough, the stains cleaned up almost without effort.  I was so excited I went back in the house, retrieved the Tilex and sprayed down the rest of the table.  It was good as new. 

I beamed.  At one point I brushed against the table and I remember thinking..."I gotta be careful" because I was wearing a good pair of pants and Tilex would bleach the shit out of them.  I also remember after thinking that I should be careful that "I probably shouldn't wear pants like this when cleaning with bleach."

Anyway...magical.  The stains came right off.  I took the Tilex back upstairs and was brushing my teeth.  In the mirror I could see my closed bathroom door.  It had a dark smudge on it very similar to the outside patio table and I thought..."I'll bet Tilex would clean that right up!"

The stain on the back of that door has been there...sort of present but somehow beneath my notice...for years.  It came right off. 

So THEN i thought...I ought to just clean this whole fucking door!  I was so excited.  Mad with cleaning power.  And as I wiped the sponge down the door panel, a large foaming splotch of Tilex dripped on my pants and IMMEDIATELY stained the navy blue pants pink where it landed.  Did I mention expensive? 

I was still sort of happy about the stain cleaning, but in the end I just sort of transferred stains from the patio table and door to my pants.  And now I have to get new pants.  I changed out of my navy pants and put on a lighter blue/grey pair I had before leaving for work.

I just spilled oil on them. 

So anyway.  Stains.  Fabulous.

In a Nutshell

"So little to do; so much time.  Strike that.  Reverse it." - Willy Wonka

 Well we made it.  If you're reading this, we have not been obliterated in a nuclear war over some dipshit's twitter account.  Or, I suppose if we have, then Blogger's servers are robust as hell and your post-apocalyptic priorities are seriously out of whack.

We're in the home stretch of 2017 and it's been a doozy.  This is not, however, an end of the year wrap up.  Mostly just checking in.

I'm older and fatter than I was last year.  I KNOW WHAT I SAID!  And it's still not an end of the year wrap up.  Just...sayin'.  I'm going to attempt to jump back on that old wagon.  The diet and exercise wagon, I mean...not the fat wagon.  Although, if we're being honest, the fat wagon sounds pretty kickass and would also be an awesome band name.  "Fat Wagon".  I digress.  My metabolism has finally caught up with me and I'm going to take my own advice and not wait until the very end of the year as my "starting point" to resolve to get more fit.  Now is as good a time as any. 

Lily is still sleeping weirdly, but I actually think that's gotten a smidge better the last few weeks.  She's been falling back asleep quicker after waking at 3:30 or 4.  That's good stuff...if it lasts.

My home computer was on the fritz, so I had to take it to Best Buy.  They couldn't do anything with it and sent it to some data retrieval company.  They told me it would be anywhere from $250 - 5000 and I was REALLY hoping it wouldn't be $5,000 because... I had a bunch of pictures on there of Leslie and the kids that were duplicated nowhere else.  And I was thinking...I might actually have to pay $5,000 if that's what it takes to get those back.  Even though I don't really look at them, it's nice to know they're there for me and for the girls.  The charge was $450.  I was "happy" with that, honestly.

Now I'm thinking about getting my first Mac.  I've been a PC man all my life, so this change is big.  But it's probably time.  I've been using the lack of a decent computer as my justification for not starting my great american novel.  So I'll remove that hurdle and see what hops in front of it.

This time of year is stressful for lots of reasons, but mostly for me it's just how much shit you have to jam into the remaining time.  Lily's birthday is in a week and a half so that just gets added to the top of everything else.  And buying for her has never been easy.

If there's a saving grace to being slammed schedule-wise it's that it's easier to overlook missing people in our lives.  Obviously I miss her presence, but apart from that sort of...ambient grief, Leslie was a huge part of making the holidays go smoothly for the girls and me, and I'm constantly worried about how the holidays are affecting the girls in that regard.

The weirdest thing for me is how smoothly and effortlessly I can navigate my day without giving it a thought.  Like at times it feels so easy.  But also, if I stop at any point in time, I only have to focus on the loss for a minute.  Not just thinking...Leslie's gone...more like examining our lives without her.  And the tears are flowing.  How can both of those things be at the same time. 

It's like a scab that never fully heals.  Sometimes it itches a little and you think...I'll just scratch the edge and it'll flake right off, but instead it rips away and starts to bleed.  Meh...I'm looking for the right analogy.  That's not it.  Because I want to scratch that itch from time to time.  And I think it's a healing process, not something that makes it worse.  I'll come up with it.

I still have no home health nurse for Lily.  It's been since September.  I started out guns blazing.  I called every week for an update.  A few folks sounded positive.  But then one by one they either bowed out or said, "we'll start recruiting for the position" and I never heard back.  Now I call every few weeks, the list of agencies who haven't outright rejected her case slowly dwindling.  I have to keep calling, at some point my parents are going to burn out.  But they've been handling it since then.
I have to call the neurologist about Lily's epilepsy.  They were supposed to attempt to push through the blood test on my insurance and then notify me, but I haven't heard for months.  This is to determine what medicine she can use as a maintenance drug for seizure control.  It seems...importantish...since they tossed out the term SUDEP during our appointment.  And yet...here we are.

I tried making an appointment with a therapist to chat about 'things', but my first choice was a bust schedule-wise, and my doctor gave me a second name on a sheet of paper that I promptly lost.  It turned up a week or so ago and then I lost the damn thing again.  And there's no magic to this particular person.  My doc actually was like, "Oh!  I had a really great therapist to recommend to you but he died, so here's the name of someone who makes rounds here at the hospital instead."  Not much of a recommendation, but at least it's a name.  And the fact that I know that name is floating around somewhere at home is actually stopping me from just finding someone and calling them.  At the same time, I never remember to look for it when I'm there.  Meh.  I'll get there.

Lily had a great Halloween...visited every house in the cul-de-sac...HAPPILY.  She dressed as Anna from Frozen (second year in a row, but the costume had to be biggie sized).  I didn't dress up...

my attempt at pennywise

stranger things...

Emma finished "Sleepy Hollow" and next week are auditions for the musical.  "Anything Goes"  We'll see how auditions go.  I really hope she gets a part she'll enjoy.  So many talented students at her school, but I think she's one of them, and I'd like her to at least get a taste of the 'limelight' in high school.  This year has been SOOOOoooooo much better for her gradewise.  I don't know if it's just understanding the expectations of high school better?  More mature?  Whatever it is...keep it comin' baby!

Emma and I drove to DC for a "road trip".  We stayed at the W and their rooftop bar overlooks the White House.  That sounds more impressive than it was.  You could see it.  But it wasn't like you could launch water balloons at it.

We went to this cool exhibit of "nutshells".  This woman basically recreated crime scenes in dollhouse form to help the FBI train crime scene investigators wayyyyy backintheday.  It was neat, if somewhat morbid.

We piggybacked that with a trip to the Holocaust Museum.  That is a well done museum.  Probably could have spent a lot more time there, but we needed to check out and head back.  All part of my..."dedicate some time to Emma" campaign.  I need to ramp that up a bit.

Bought a new car.  Finally did what I said I was going to do early this year.  Sold my Altima and then traded the minivan in to attempt to buy one car that:  I could commute in (gas mileage), drive in the snow, drive to the beach.  Got a Subaru Forester.  It's super nice.  I already love it. 

Alright...anyway...busy month.  More later, but I already blew off buying candy for the kids' advent calendar to write this post, so time's a'wastin'. 

Merry ChristmaKwanzakka