Steve Axelrod describes a Christmas morning filled excruciatingly normal moments of a life gone awry.
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It was normal, that was the strangest part.
As usual I was puttering around the house while everyone else slept, taking the refrigerator dough out, rolling it flat, dusting it with cinnamon sugar, curling it up like a rug, cutting it into disks and setting each one on a pat of butter and some crumbled pecans in the muffin tins. They’d have to rise again, for another two or three hours.
The kids got up just as I was finishing, same as always. And, also as always, my job changed at that point: now I had to keep the noise level down so that Lisa could sleep. Perversely, she loved sleeping in on Christmas morning. Perhaps because it enforced a level of consideration she didn’t feel she got under normal conditions.
It was quite a challenge. Keeping eight and nine year olds from charging up and down the halls, playing with noisy toys and fighting with each other at the top of their voices was exhausting and futile. It was like trying to keep the dog from barking when she rode in the car. Short of a sedative dart or a roll of duct-tape, it wasn’t going to happen.
So the morning was stressful, as usual. Everything happened in proper order – the stocking gifts unwrapped, while Lisa took endless pictures and we drank coffee and ate the sticky buns. Of course the difference was that this year I could escape. I would take the kids for the rest of the morning so she could have her private Christmas with Ned; but by the late afternoon I would be alone.
I watched my wife, she still felt like my wife. This cosy fake domesticity was unraveling my tenuous sense of perspective. Lisa moved around the room in her casually sexy thermal underwear pajamas. I could only glance at her, the nipples pushing against the soft cotton of the ribbed top; a furtive sighting into the drooping V neck when she leaned over to pick up her coffee cup. In an hour another man, someone we had laughed at together, would be lifting that shirt over her head, easy and proprietary after how many years of mute envy and longing? Ned had circled our dying marriage like a vulture and now it was time to feast on the carrion.
Driving back into town with the kids squabbling in the back seat, drunk on chocolate santas and cinnamon sugar, I saw Ned’s truck heading the other direction. He would be unwrapping his own Christmas gift in a few minutes.
The kids didn’t like my silence. It was unnatural and they sensed something was wrong. I started singing “Deck The Halls” and they joined in happily.
We were almost a family again while the song lasted.
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photo: hajime7 / flickr
Thank you for such exquisite imagery –
The irony for me in reading this essay comes in knowing that it was written in Nantucket, where I honeymooned with my now ex, just over 19 years ago. Such a short time and so lost in the past…
Choosing Christmas morning for the luxurious sleep-in in order to send a message, is beyond gross. I had such a visceral reaction to that, it bordered on irrational.
Choosing to have the boyfriend pick you up from your home, where the eight and nine year olds are doing their best to celebrate, is grossly narcissistic. I know this sounds judgmental, and I apologize, but Kids First On Christmas! The kids come first, lady.
Exes are black holes that exist to suck you dry. First, you need to fully wrap your head around the fact that she isn’t yours anymore. You need to cut her out of your life as much as possible, and hopefully find someone else for awhile, if only for casual sex. Eventually you won’t even care if she were to get hit by a bus in front of you. That’ll take awhile, but time does that eventually. Anyway, if it makes you feel better, you came away from this better than she did. While Ned is enjoying leftovers for dinner,… Read more »
I don’t think it’s healthy to use other people to try to heal wounds from other relationships. While I’m sure causual sex makes some people feel good in the short term, it’s not really addressing the issue and you are potentially using another human being.
Steven, after reading this, I’m totally interested in reading some of your other work.
Erin — Thanks! Here’s a good place to start —
http://numerocinqmagazine.com/front-page/the-masthead/the-steven-axelrod-nc-archive-page/
diz, i hope i never get to a point where someone i know is hit by a bus and i don’t care anymore.
that is ethically really, really troubling.
just because “she isn’t yours anymore” doesn’t subtract from her (or his) humanity and importance in the world.
Eventually you won’t even care if she were to get hit by a bus in front of you. That’ll take awhile, but time does that eventually.
I’m pretty sure you don’t mean that in a literal sense but more of a, “She’s not in my life anymore.” sense right? Or perhaps the difference between a random person getting hit by a bus and a person you have a specific connection to getting hit by a bus?