'Tis the season of childhood and childless triggers

How to tend to your heart at Christmas time

Photo by Laura Beth Snipes on Unsplash

It was the early nineties and Mum had sold our family home in Liverpool and bought a caravan in North Wales. Dad was still in Liverpool, living with his wife in my late Gran’s home, where he’d moved when my parents divorced. I was aged eighteen/nineteen, finishing up at Oxford University for the Christmas break and trying to figure out where home was, or at least where it would be for the festive period.

In the end, I chose to stay at Dad’s because my friends lived nearby and we had a well-worn tradition of binge drinking in the pub on Christmas Eve and staggering home across town, singing ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’ at the top of our lungs, occasionally slipping into the back of a church and giggling through Midnight Mass.

Only Dad’s place wasn’t home to me. I’d only slept there a few times, even though he’d moved back there when I was around eight. We’d always visit on Saturdays for lunch, often involving tinned mandarins and condensed milk from a can, and again on Sundays after church for a roast, when I’d take it upon myself to harvest mint from the garden and mix it with vinegar and stacks of sugar.

But we’d always sleep at home - at Mum’s place - which, thankfully, wasn’t too far away.

I guess I’d taken my home for granted up to the time I went to college (which, I imagine, is a normal thing for a child to do). Although my pre-teen and teenage years were quite unsettled - we moved with Mum numerous times after my parents split, to increasingly smaller homes, once via a rental flat - I’d always had somewhere to lay my hat, a bedroom with walls plastered with Duran Duran posters, or painted pink with a carpet to match, depending on my age and stage.

But when I left for Oxford and Mum followed her heart to the Welsh coast, swapping bricks and mortar for a caravan (that’s a static RV for my North American readers) on a site that closed for several months each year, I felt a touch homeless, especially at Christmas time. At least I see that now - I felt very little back then.

On this occasion - my first Christmas since Mum had sold up - I made my temporary nest in Dad’s spare room, clinging to the edge of the oversized mattress at night, big cardboard boxes of stuff hemming me in.

Fortunately, the sleeping arrangements didn’t matter too much. As per the tradition outlined above, I got plastered on Christmas Eve and stayed out until the early hours.

What did matter to me was waking up on Christmas Day and finding my Dad and step-mum leaving the house together, off to look after her horses. They’d be back later, Dad said, without any reference to presents, to what time we might have lunch or to whether we’d be eating at all.

Looking back now, my hard-headed self can say, ‘fair enough’. I was officially an adult. What was I complaining about? I had a roof over my head, even if I felt no connection to the house I was waking up in.

Yet my softer self understands why the absence of Christmas cheer that morning - and the apparent absence of any celebrations planned for later that day - knocked me for six.

Discombobulated, I rang Mum in Wales, forgetting that she loathed Christmas and was happy to ignore it (although I’m sorry to say that the words happy and Mum rarely appeared in the same sentence). My mother had her own family traumas and Christmas heightened them. My brother, too, was far away, spending the festive season in his college town.

Coming off the phone and looking around Dad’s empty kitchen, it was clear I’d be spending at least the first half of Christmas Day alone.

What happened next is rather hazy but I remember a few things vividly:

• Feeling confused and lonely

• Crying a lot, first on my own and then on the shoulder of a friend who lived around the corner

• Gatecrashing said friend’s family lunch and eating everything that was put in front of me and more (overeating had been my primary pain-numbing tool from around the age of ten)

• Visiting another friend’s house that evening and drinking so much booze and eating so much sugar, after so many tears, that my face turned puffy and crimson

What I don’t remember is going back to Dad’s. I imagine I was blind drunk by the time I went home.

This is one of a number of poignant memories from Christmases past, moments when I wished I belonged to a different family, lived in a different home - feelings I stuffed down with a mountain of mince pies topped with clotted cream.

Back in my binge eating days, I would gain a visible amount of weight over the Christmas break, sometimes up to a stone (six kilos), emerging every January wrapped in a heavy cloak of shame and armed with a punishing weight loss plan.

I’m so grateful that I don’t use food to escape my feelings anymore, that I put down that unhealthy coping mechanism many years ago.

But you know what that means, don’t you?

It means I have to feel my feelings.

I have to feel the losses that resurface at this time of year; feel the absence of both my parents and all four grandparents; feel the absence of children of my own.

Yes, I am delighted to have formed a tiny family with my gorgeous husband and beautiful dog. And I accept that losing our ancestors and mourning them at special times of the year is part of the natural circle of life, an unavoidable grief.

But that doesn’t take away from the fact that Christmas can be triggering for those of us who, by circumstance, haven’t produced offspring, no matter how we got here.

Nor does it take away from the fact that our childless triggers get mixed up with our childhood triggers at this emotive time, creating a concoction as potent as the strongest seasonal punch.

Childless grief or childhood grief?

What makes Christmas more manageable, at least for me, is to accept the above - to accept that I have both childless and childhood triggers and any longing I may feel for kids at this time of year is wrapped up in my longing for a different childhood, just as any sense I have that my little family isn’t enough is wrapped up in the feeling that there was something missing back then.

Because when you grow up in adverse circumstances, peering through frosted windows into other people’s lives, watching their Christmas lights twinkle, feeling that you would feel happier there, safer there, more loved there, the longing for a different experience settles deep inside you, resurfacing now and then and particularly at Christmas.

But by asking the question - “Is this my childhood grief or my childhood grief?” (as I shared in a previous article), I am able to put things in perspective.

Every time I feel triggered by Christmas adverts featuring extended families sat around food-filled tables or see a Facebook photo of a dozen smiling faces, I am able to pause and ask whether the longing I feel for a different Christmas today is, in fact, the longing for a different Christmas back then (or perhaps a bit of both).

And the more I am willing to feel my feelings and grieve the losses of Christmases past, grieve those I’ve lost, those I’ve never had and the wounds that have been left behind, the more I can approach Christmas as an emotionally mature adult, with nuanced feelings and experiences, rather than a wounded child who sees everything in black and white.

When I do this, I can be present to the moment, to today, and to the people I love.

I can give myself, and those around me, the gift of presence - the best gift of all.