The Aftermath
Is Christmas a day or an event?
It’s been a week or two or three since I last wrote. In time perception, not actual fact. Most of the week I was in the depths of fibromyalgia flares and symptoms. Then, when I sat down to fill my pill sorter for the week I realized it had been a week or 10 days since I last took my fibromyalgia medication. (Hand slapping forehead!) Well, now I know the medication works anyway.
I had written down on my To Do list that I needed to get out the next bottle and finish putting it in my pill sorter. That’s all very well and good, but with all that was going on that critical day went by and I thought I needed to do it for the next week. My lesson is to put a date as well as a day on my list.
Even though I suffered a great deal without the medication, the consequences in the big picture were actually quite positive.
With all the craft shows I was doing and preparing for family to visit, I had no more energy left to think about decorating and preparing for Christmas. My only contribution was to set up a gift wrapping station and that worked out very well for everyone. Other than that, I suggested to my kids some ideas of how they could decorate and I gave them the keys to the shed so they could access the Christmas items.
At one point, they had managed to bring one load into the garage, but it did not move from that spot. It frustrated me, but I had zero energy to make anything happen. Eventually, their dad got involved. He’s not used to taking the lead because I’m always so on top of things, and this is one major drawback to being highly sensitive.
Because we are aware of so many more details than most people care to consider, those around us tend to get out of our way and let us dictate how things are to be done. It’s nice to be able to use our skills, but most of us don’t want to lead 100% of the time. Those around us can’t tell that’s how we feel, and many of us may not realize it ourselves.
In many ways it is easier, we tell ourselves, to do it on our own so we don’t have to worry about hurting feelings or stepping on toes or compromising. We can just do it our own way and it will come out exactly as we want it to be. When it is over we are exhausted and either wonder why or blame those around us for not helping more. We expect that our partners should see that we need them and we don’t think we should have to spell it out.
But, guess what, our family and friends are not mind readers. They do not know all that we are considering and even if they want to help, they often don’t know where to begin. If they ask us how they can help we often push them away rather than step back and give thought to where they can fit into our scheme and how they can contribute.
One of the wonderful side effects of limitations is that I have to accept I can’t do it all on my own. What I am just now learning to do is delegate in a way that combines me getting support with others feeling valued by being able to contribute.
I’m really not sure how this new way of thinking came about. Perhaps because the last month has been so intense and I haven’t had the creativity to assign duties. Instead, it came down to survival and I began looking at not what someone could do to help, but at what I didn’t need to do myself.
At the Christmas party for my women’s group, as we were setting up and I still had a list of things to get done I took a moment to evaluate my list of responsibilities to see where I did not need to be directly involved. I was able to delegate quite a few things and it was refreshing to not be so overwhelmed as ladies began to arrive. Not only did I end up with fewer duties, but ladies who had finished their tasks came to help me with mine. It was a great time of natural cooperation that I have been seeing more and more in our group.
With the success of this new way of delegating, I began doing the same at home. As Christmas was approaching I looked at what I didn’t need to do and delegated that out. It started with me using labels on the Christmas card envelopes instead of hand writing them. I don’t like using labels, but I had to make things easier so I sucked that up. Once the envelopes were labeled, I sorted out hubby’s family and friends and gave him half the pile of cards to write. In year’s past we shared this duty, but since he left it’s been all me. This year, I reversed that trend.
(Although I did write the letter and inserted appropriate photos. I just can’t help myself when it comes to being creative.)
He didn’t mind and I think he enjoyed thinking about these special people he was writing to. With him being so separate from family events by living in another country, he doesn’t experience that time of thinking of those outside our immediate family like the rest of do naturally through various family events and celebrations. I’m the one doing the birthday cards and buying gifts. He is rarely aware it is someone’s birthday. I could look at that with resentment, and I have in the past, but now I am seeing it could be a loss on his part, something he is missing out on, rather than something he is getting away with.
All of life is about perspective and how we choose to look at things. Christmas this year is a perfect case in point. When we celebrated a bit of the Season with their grandmother last week, my son and girlfriend told us they were headed to Disneyland right before Christmas, arriving home Christmas evening. They both had to work the day after Christmas which presented us with quite a challenge: how to have a family Christmas between when they returned home and had to go to work. I was so ill with fibromyalgia symptoms that I wasn’t really processing all this information. Dear hubby had to make it all work out.
He agonized over how to make it work and there was no obvious solution. There was compromise no matter what was decided. Then, my son came up with his own solution and made the whole thing work after all. Except we’d be celebrating Christmas on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas).
It didn’t matter to me, but my daughter, 22, got a bit upset and said we are supposed to celebrate Christmas on Christmas Day, not on any old day of the year. She has a point. These days are designated and we traditionally honor those days by celebrating that day, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out. With five people (six with the girlfriend), we can’t satisfy everyone all the time and while my HSP brain strategizes mightily to satisfy as many as possible, I’ve learned to accept it is often not possible.
With that day of postponement, hubby decided we’d get a bit of decorating done and enlisted our other son’s help. I think this is the only Christmas I have experienced without even a semblance of a Christmas tree. They put up an ornament tree, so I guess that could count, but it wasn’t in a centralized position with packages nearby. I use it to hang large and valuable ornaments I have collected so the cats can’t get them, but this year it holds a hodgepodge of ornaments.
Very homey and whimsical. Very hubby-ish, with a discordant feel to it. He chooses each ornament for itself with no thought to the whole. Yes, it makes my mind tweak, but after being separated for almost 15 years now I can smile about it. Afterall, he did take the initiative to at least put something Christmasy out. So our decorations were an ornament tree and a fake poinsettia plant that was in my donate pile (my son didn’t know that and I didn’t tell). We didn’t even sit down to open the cards we’d received until long after the family festivities were complete.
At least we did have Christmas. I was so barely able to function that minimal involvement doesn’t adequately describe how little I did. The best part was, as I receded another leader had to come forward. So the kids supported dad as best they could while he tried to run the show. He did a pretty good job of it all, I must say.
Since he was cooking the main dish, Beef Wellington (which only takes about four hours to make), I delegated one dish to my son and my daughter assisted me with the two other dishes we were making.
My daughter and I have made one of the dishes many times and we pretty much split the recipe into the things I can do sitting at the table and the things she needs to do because I can’t, as well as getting me everything I need for my part. The same was true with the other dish, which requires a large amount of liquid that is too heavy for me to handle. It worked out well and I like the way everyone got involved.
At the last minute, his dad decided to make the dish my son was going to make in order to get my son to do some better cleaning in the bathroom. It had the same effect, with my son having a role in getting ready. He kept popping his head out to discuss current events around the world, which happens to be his passion. The kid cannot remember to close a bottle or zip a storage bag, but he can tell you about what’s happening in most countries around the world.
This was the first time he interacted with the rest of the family in this way. He’s 26 and he would always do his responsibilities quietly on his own and would rarely stick around family meals long enough to have a conversation. In the last year, though, something changed. He has been talking to me about all kinds of things and I have sensed the maturity taking place in him. He is more secure in who he is and has more confidence to be present around a group of people. It was really nice having him be involved and chatting with us as we worked to make Christmas happen.
Fortunately, by the day after Christmas I was feeling much better due to having realized my medication mistake the evening before. I wasn’t back up to snuff, but not as bad as I had been. I kept my head down and stayed in the background as much as I could. It felt really, really nice to let someone else deal with navigating our family of strong personalities. Sitting back and not being in the thick of it made me realize that I am not just overwhelmed because of my sensitivity. These people could be overwhelming to just about anyone.
My boys are so loud and so competitive, and the girlfriend fits right in there with them. They’ve made an art form out of slinging insults. This was never our way when they were growing up and I marvel at how it is so automatic for them. Even for my daughter, who grew up fairly separate from her brothers. Competitiveness has always been a part of the boys’ relationship, but I thought they’d out grow the derogatory comments. Maybe they aren’t there yet, I hoped, but then I saw a text from hubby’s younger brother and I knew all hope was lost.
At first, when we sat down to eat, I worried it would be unpleasant due to my out-of-the-house son criticizing me for every suggestion I made. He’s been giving me a hard time whenever I make a comment about how to do things saying “it’s not all about you, mom.”
It hurts when he says it, but more than that is the confusion I feel. I’m only doing the obvious, like moving the dishes around to make room for the meat that hasn’t been put on the table yet. Or waiting to say the blessing until we are all at the table. How are those things wrong and selfish? So, it was a relief as we moved past my involvement and I was able to fade back into the background.
Later, I talked with hubby about it and he told me about a phenomenon of young men being misogynists. Apparently, it is very prevalent and I’m not just being overly sensitive about the comments. I really don’t like the idea that I raised two sons in an egalitarian household only to have them take on this misguided way of looking at women.
Hubby and I were never concerned about gender-labeled activities or roles. We are each very clearly our gender, but either of us could cook, clean, change a diaper or hammer a nail. I was the one with the most knowledge of home repair due to being raised by a single, fiercely independent, mother, along with inheriting my mechanical way of thinking my father and grandfather passed on.
I have to admit, though, that my out-of-the-house son has always leaned toward gender role distinction. One time when he was young-ish, mid-elementary, I’d say, I got out the tools to fix something. He told me I couldn’t do that. I asked why not and he said because I’m a woman. My jaw dropped! I couldn’t believe he said that with such sincerity.
Even before that, though, he had his ideas of how things should be. He was maybe five when I was getting my hair trimmed in a local hair cutting salon. He loved looking at the bridal magazines and seeing all of the princesses in them. That was his ideal. Women were princesses and men were heroes. He was used to seeing Caucasian models and once in a while a black or Latina model, but when he came across an Asian model he pointed and asked me what she was doing in there!
I know racial identification happens fairly early and I was very surprised at his reaction. Likely it was because it was so rare to see an Asian model in a wedding magazine at that time, but the fact that he had such a negative reaction to it worried me at the time. Then the “you’re a woman” comment a few years later. How could this kid already be so set in his ways of seeing race and gender?
It continues to boggle my mind because his girlfriend of three-four years is a very strong, independent, woman. They met in the police academy and she has been a police officer since graduation and intends to remain one her entire career. She is no diminutive woman staying at home barefoot and pregnant.
My son is demanding and critical. He is vocal and tells everyone how it should be. He is highly sensitive and knows it on some level, but that sensitivity word equals weak in his mind so we don’t use it. I talk about how he feels more and thinks more deeply, which he completely resonates with. So, how can he be so offensively opinionated at the same time?
Well, now that I write that, I realize my dad was exactly the same way. Processing and thinking on a deep level that had most around him shaking their heads. Having come of age in California when he did and having been the son of white itinerant field workers, he grew up with a strong prejudice against Mexicans (all Latinos were Mexican, no matter where they came from).
Toward the end of his working days, he was on a project with a few Mexicans and worked directly with one who was an immigrant that spoke decent English. One evening, out of the blue, he pronounced that not all Mexicans were bad. He proceeded to talk about his coworker and how the guy was a hard worker and had integrity. I think he was honestly surprised to find that a Mexican could be a decent guy and you could tell he had given it a lot of thought. There was no grace for other Mexicans, but this one he could trust.
Which means I am sandwiched between two highly sensitive men of different generations and who never knew each other, but both have similar ideas of a woman’s role in the world and distrust immigrants of all kinds. What is going on here? How is there only one generation of openness toward all kinds of people, their choices and their roles? The scary thing is that it isn’t just in my family. I see the pendulum swinging away from the love and peace message I grew up with and it just plain makes me sad.
Sadness and despair were pretty much what I was feeling, too, as the day of Christmas came closer and closer. I was feeling so much pain and feeling so ill. I had no physical energy and no mental energy. The kids would not decorate or do anything to make the house feel like Christmas without my guidance. We went out looking at Christmas lights and I didn’t even enjoy it. That is so NOT me. I’m usually like a kid with all the lights and twinkles and glitter of the season.
I’m so glad I figured out what was going on and able to feel at least halfway decent by the time we finally celebrated Christmas. As we sat down to open gifts, there was a mini debate over who would play Santa. The last few years it has been the girlfriend, but she declined this year. My daughter did it before that, but she also declined. The son that lives with me wandered in last and had nowhere to sit so we made him Santa by decree.
This young man who had been so anti-social in years past took on the role and did an excellent job of evening out the gifts so no one person opened too many gifts at one time. In the end, I was the one with the most gifts! How did that happen? I’m used to being a minimal receiver because I’m the one that does the gifting for the whole family. This year I felt rich with all I had received. But, somehow, hubby misplaced his gift for me that I had so thoughtfully bought on his behalf. How do you lose a box that is clearly for Christmas when you have traveled with one bag and live in one room?
Still, I felt the message that I am loved. The gifts I have received were thoughtfully given and it makes me feel special that people thought of me and who I am as they chose the gifts. Although I noticed a funny undertone to the gifting this year. I thought I had bought some pretty great and unique items for people, yet the things I thought would thrill them were received in an underwhelming manner. And I feel somewhat the same about the gifts I received.
My daughter came to me and asked why I had gotten her the gift I had. It is a clock with the theme of the Nightmare Before Christmas, one of her favorite themes, laser cut out of a vinyl record. She collects vinyl, so I thought these two things together would be cool. But, she pointed out, she already has a clock. My brain went Thunk! Yes, she has a very cheap clock on her wall, the cheapest clock I could find at the time.
In my mind, take down the cheap clock and put up the really cool clock. Nope, that won’t work because where the clock is situated is too close to the door. Okay, take down the cheap clock and put the cool clock somewhere else. But, that’s not the point. I’m fixing a problem that doesn’t exist. The issue is not the clock per se. The issue, it turns out, is that I didn’t buy something off of her wish list.
She didn’t make her wish list until a few weeks before Christmas and I had already purchased the clock by then. She knew I had purchased her gift already and she had pestered me for hints. She doesn’t remember any of that, though. She has holes in recording memories. Still, something bothered her. She seemed unsettled. It seems to me that is how we all felt and I had to wonder why.
It makes me wonder what it’s all about. Is this something society is feeling in general that is being revealed within my family? Is it something off within our family? There are issues in relationships that are not resolved but are not so major as to throw off our entire dynamic. Is it because my son and girlfriend went to Disneyland, spoiling our traditional Christmas celebrations? Is it because I was not running the show this year? So many possibilities!
Leaving me to live with what I see without knowing the why. This is the uncomfortable part of being highly sensitive. We see and feel and sense all kinds of things, but often we don’t know what they indicate or why they are there. It is like parenting on a big scale. As parents, we get used to seeing a child upset and not knowing why. We know that if they want to share it with us they will and we have to give them the option. It is important to allow them to be in charge of their own person and do it in their own time.
When I detect trends like these, it is even more difficult because often no one in my immediate surroundings sees what I see. If I bring it up with other HSPs, sometimes they will have noticed something similar, but we still don’t know the cause.
As I sit here thinking about living with this mystery, I think of how my being raised Catholic has made it easier for me to be comfortable with it. In my religion we grow up with sacred mystery being front and center. We are encouraged to sit with the mystery, to ponder it, to feel it, to become reconciled to it, knowing we will never know the answer as long as we may live. While I wish with all my might I could see beyond the ordinary mysteries that confound my mind, there is that part of me that is ultimately okay with allowing a mystery to remain a mystery.
In the end, I revel in the things that have been revealed to me. That I see that I am loved. That I see that I don’t have to be in charge of everything and the world will not come to a halt if I am down for the count. That I see that Christmas is not a square on the calendar, but a moment of the heart when I am able to exchange loving gestures with special people and stuff myself with yummy comfort food.
These are some pretty big lessons and a good way to begin a new year. I am loved enough to feel free to focus on my well-being and not be so consumed with all I was responsible for when my family was younger. I can trust that life will continue to happen even when I am not dictating every little detail. My lane has been redefined and now my job is still stay in it and not get distracted from it.
My hope is that by following this formula I can become more well. There are steps I have yet to take on my journey of living my new reality. There is room to grow and what do I love best but to grow, grow, grow! So, the gift I give myself this Christmas is the gift of caring. To stop ignoring my well-being for the sake of others and to now flip that around to pay attention to myself for the sake of myself, and others.
The best way I can show love to my family at this point is to get a handle on my health. A couple of years ago, my daughter told me that it was important to her for me to take care of myself and I am now ready to take that step. In writing this I am taking a major step by acknowledging I need to take much better care of myself. Now, I just need to make it so.
