Holiday Hell

• December
• 16

6:00 am Christmas, Mental Illness, Survivors of Abuse, The Friday Files

The Friday Files continue …

Special occasions such as Christmas were particularly difficult when I was growing up, due to my mother’s psychiatric illness. I shared a little about it a couple of years ago in my post “The Ghosts of Christmas Past“, and how I came to hate the Christmas season, even long after my mother was out of the picture (fortunately that has changed and I have found joy in it once again!).

It is well known that Christmas can be a stressful and painful time, for those in difficult circumstances – the grieving, the lonely, the mentally or physically ill. Christmas with my Mum was no different. 

When I was about seven or eight, Mum determined that nothing but a full roast meal with all the trimmings would do for Christmas lunch, even though we were in the middle of a Brisbane heatwave.  (This was in the days before air conditioning became common place). Mum was hot, tired and cranky and soon let everybody know it! Any toddler could have taken lessons from my Mum in the art of chucking a tantrum!

No matter how much we anticipated that delicious meal, always a favourite, it tasted like cardboard and stuck in my throat when accompanied by Mum’s bad mood and rantings and ravings. Then she chucked a wobbly about the washing up.

Looking back now I wonder WHY she had to make a roast – these days, my family tends to have cold chicken, seafood, and salads for Christmas, much better for our summer weather!  (Although last year we cooked our first ever glazed ham – see pic above - and boy, was it YUMMY! Definitely going to make it again this year).

And why didn’t she just ask for help, if it was getting all too much for her? But no, like a volcano she erupted, successfully ruining Christmas for the whole family.

We kids soon learnt to tiptoe around, quietly tidying up and trying to stay out of Mum’s way to keep her happy (an impossible task, I now realise!).

Mum let all and sundry know from that point on that she “hated Christmas” and unfortunately I soon grew to loathe it too. I guess she just didn’t cope very well with the high expectations – the “perfect” meal, the “perfect” gifts, all while playing “happy families” in what hadn’t been a happy family for a very long time.

By the time I was a teenager, Mum refused to buy Christmas or birthday presents anymore as it was just too much of a hassle. It became the tradition that instead, each of us four children we were given $20 each for Christmas or birthday. It wasn’t much but then money was scarce in a sole parent family.

Although I was at an age where money probably was the best present, I still missed having a present to open on the actual day.  It wouldn’t have had to have been anything fancy.  Our Christmases seemed pretty sad in comparison to what I heard from my friends, who received bounty such as roller skates, clothes, record albums, bikes, stereos and anything else a teenage heart could desire!

But even a $20 note would have been fine if life hadn’t been in constant turmoil.

The worst Christmas of all was probably the one when I was 19. But I’ll save that story for next week, here on the Friday Files.