I won’t force reconciliation just because it’s Christmas

To the person who’s choosing to be separate from someone you love during the holidays,

I don’t know why you have found yourself in this place. I don’t know how you arrived here. No one has a story exactly like yours. But I find myself standing here, too. It is a heavy, hidden place. The kind with secret passages, cryptic codes, and closed doors. I feel like no one around me can quite understand why I make this choice, but I also try to be ok with that.

There is a grief that comes from “losing” someone from your life who is still alive. Even if it’s your choice. Even if it’s temporary. Even if you don’t honestly know where this separation is going or how long it may last.

It’s been almost two years since I’ve seen or spoken to my dad, by choice. I haven’t shared writing about it since a couple summers ago because it’s so raw, and I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what’s ahead. I’m driving in thick fog, keeping my eye on that white line to my right and following it ten feet at a time.

This interim waiting time has been one of the most difficult periods I’ve ever endured.

Then why? Why do it? Life is short. People are precious. Family is sacred. Why do it?

These questions intensify for me around holidays and big life events. We’ve spent two years of birthdays, Christmases, and huge life milestones apart. He never saw me pregnant with my second baby. He still hasn’t met his second grandson. My first child has grown from a six-month-old to a two-and-a-half-year-old. He’s missed everything between learning to sit up and being able to say “excavator” with perfect enunciation. My heart breaks to think of all that he has missed.

So why? Why does it have to be this way?

Because one day I realized I deserved to love myself. And I couldn’t love myself the way I needed without some distance from him. I couldn’t love him the way I wanted to either. I didn’t know how to love without obligation, without fear, without guilt, without desperation, without transaction.

This distance is not a “fuck you.” It’s not an “It’s all your fault! You screwed up my life.” It’s not “I hate you.” It’s not “I never want to see you again.” Not at all. It is simply embracing myself for the first time. It is honoring my own deepest selfhood and listening to my feelings for the first time. I am so sorry that in order for me to do that, I need this separation. I wish I didn’t. I hate all the hurt that it causes me and others. But for now, this is what I need.

Is it selfish? Maybe. Maybe I’m excessively concerned with myself right now. I’m ok with risking that when the alternative is losing myself.

I was selfless for so long. Self-ignoring, self-sabotaging, self-harming. I put everyone else’s feelings above my own. I have spent most of my life swallowing my own pain while running to everyone else’s side to help them with theirs. I have spent most of my life saying, “I don’t know, where do you want to go?” and “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” I have spent most of my life blurting, “Sorry.” 

I didn’t know what I liked. I genuinely couldn’t tell what brought me joy, which friendships I wanted to cultivate, where I felt physically safe, what emotions I was feeling. My actions and choices were so deeply lead by fear. They were guided by what I thought I should do, who I thought I should be, and who I didn’t want to disappoint. I wanted to please everyone else, to be everything to everyone.

I was buried deep. One day I woke up suffocating, buried alive. I couldn’t breathe. I knew if I wanted my life, I had to stop hiding. I had to live in a way that felt true to me. And I needed the space to find what that meant.

I was selfless before, but it wasn’t a noble thing. It was a wounded behavior out of desperation to be loved and liked. I wanted true belonging based on being seen for who I am at my core, but I settled for approval instead, the golden retriever pat on the head. I sniffed out everyone else’s desires instead of looking inside for my own.

Now I swing in the other direction. I care most about how I feel. What I want. What I need.

It feels extreme, and it feels selfish, and it feels heartless, and sometimes I know I get it wrong, but this is what I need in order to level out from the self-damaging behaviors I practiced before.

I have to be a little selfish for awhile. I’ve learned in my healing that when you’ve been operating in one extreme, you often have to swing to the other in order to learn how to eventually live in the balance. A third place will emerge someday in the tension of the opposites, and this place will be healthier than either of the poles.

It’s not selfish to focus on myself. It’s not heartless to make choices out of self-love. 

I’m doing this for myself, but I’m also doing it for the family I’m building. I want to be able to give them a whole, healthy love because that is how my children will learn what love is. In order to do that, I need to give myself a whole, healthy love first. I need to model it. I’m clumsily tracking my way there, making wrong turns all the time.

I don’t know for sure that I’m doing the right thing here, but if I’m making a mistake, it’s my mistake. It is a mistake made with the best knowledge I have about myself and the situation. I can live with that. I want to live a life where I make my mistakes, not other people’s mistakes because I’m living by their rules and the power I believe they wield over me. I’m taking more responsibility for my life than I ever have before.

There’s a framed card at my in-laws’ house where we find ourselves around Christmas, and it says “This Christmas, mend a quarrel. Seek out a forgotten friend. Dismiss suspicion and replace it with trust,” along with a whole list of lovely things that people with warm hearts should do. I think it is a beautiful message overall. But the past two years, when I haven’t been in communication with my dad, it’s felt like this card was speaking directly to me. With finger wagging. And I feel a little shame. Shame that I’m not surrendering to the Christmas spirit. Shame that I’m not spreading Christmas cheer and manifesting an everyday Christmas miracle.

Who cares how much love you try to build in the world if you won’t even talk to your dad? Who cares what messages of love you write to strangers if you haven’t even invited your dad to meet his grandson?

Cruel. Childish. Weak. Petty.

Oh, the inner voices will hit you where it hurts the most. They will speak to your fears of the worst person you hope you’re not. 

Believe me: If I could mend a quarrel knowing that it wouldn’t do violence to my deepest self, I would. If I could mend a quarrel knowing that I could continue to trust my sense of self-knowledge, I would. If I could mend a quarrel and know that I wouldn’t relapse into pain, I would. If I knew depression and anxiety wouldn’t claim me under the emotional stress of mending a quarrel, I would absolutely do it.

I am for reconciliation where it is possible. I am for learning to mend broken relationships and to learn a new way together where it is possible. 

Right now I am too tender. I feel like a newborn adult, a fledgling person. I’ve so freshly started to grow out of the Vulnerable Daughter into my adult identity, and I need to continue to have space to explore this new way of self-governance. For now I avoid the triggers. I continue my own hard-as-hell inner work, and I embrace peace, self-confidence, and abiding wholeness where I can find it.

I don’t think distance is the ultimate answer in my case. But I won’t rush this process for the sentimentality of Christmas. It hurts, but here we are.

This Christmas, I mend a life-long quarrel with myself. I seek out my forgotten self.  I give a soft answer to myself. I forgive myself. I keep a promise to love myself. 

I give you permission to do the same. Better yet, give yourself permission.

And I send loving thoughts to the people who are angry with me, don’t understand me, or may be hurt by me. When I think of them, I try to center myself in love, to wrap them in light. I hope that they glow and that for now, the light can pass between us from a distance.

Photo credit: Ashley Prewitt Photography