Christmas snuck up on me this year like a Holiday Ninja.
He hid in the bushes for eight months, crept in through a window, and impaled my heart with a fist full of shuriken (ninja stars).
As I sat on the couch in my parents’ living room, emotionally exhausted from putting up our tilting tree, it was no surprise that bittersweet moment (tearing me to pieces) inspired me to write my next article.
Bleary-eyed but without further delay, here are my reasons for why being a single mom is comparable to putting up a fresh, real Christmas tree this year:
1. It’s imperfect, but it’s real and smells like love and joy.
Our tree slants a little to the left this year. Okay, a lot. That’s okay — the year 2020 was a little caddywhompus for all of us. The weary (and kindhearted) tree farm employees cut the trunk unevenly and screwed in the stand a little off-center. So, when we got home, it had a gangster lean like Snoop Dogg.
I think anyone who has kids can agree that parenting is not what you call label as glamorous. Being a single mom is, shall we say, even less posh. It’s messy, asymmetrical, and hefty as hell — but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I’m fighting for my life and my kids’ lives — and that’s a fact.
2. It’s expensive AF, but it’s worth it.
I don’t make a habit out of writing about my finances. But if you want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, what I spent on a tree could have bought us a week’s worth of groceries.
As an intact family, we used to put up a fake tree every year. (I see why now.) This shit-show of a year, I decided to loosen the purse strings a little and buy my kids’ a real tree — complete with all of its pine-smelling goodness.
It’s their first Christmas without their Mom and Dad under the same roof, and goddammit, I am doing my best.
I couldn’t stay married to my ex-husband. My reasons to leave far outweighed my reasons to stay; still, it was a choice. I stand by that choice, trembling and wounded, knowing beyond a reasonable doubt that I did the right thing.
“It’s cheaper to keep her.” — Johnnie Taylor
With a year’s worth of marriage counseling under our belt, I thought I could stay, and things would get better. But they only got worse. So (when it was safe) I left.
Standing up for yourself is priceless — never forget that.
3. It’s a lot of hard work, but the finished product is beautiful and bright.
It was a somber drive out to the Christmas tree farm. Buying a real tree for the first time ever in my kids’ lives without their dad was eerie (and unexpected), to say the least. No mother dreams about holding her precious newborn in her arms and how exhilarating having them taken away from her fifty percent of the time will be.
As grueling as this year has been, I believe it was necessary for growth.
I know my and my kids’ future glimmers and glows, and there is an end in sight. After the dim year we’ve had — there has to be.
I drove by my old house tonight. There was a frosted Christmas tree blinking in the front window. Wow, that was painful. I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone else was inside my house, and I wasn’t allowed in.
After those torturesome emotions passed, a sense of gratitude washed over me. That house was good to us. Those walls and windows held some of the best memories of my family’s life inside of them, and it was home for my son and daughter for ten years.
Our time in that house as a family came to an end last May, but I am grateful for the shelter it provided for many years. And for the brand new, twinkling energy that’s filled our old home.
Letting go of that house (and everything in it) was microscopically less traumatic only because my next soft place to land was my parents’ house.
A house that came, pre-filled with love and memories, that now smells like fresh pine and Christmas.
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Previously Published on Medium
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