Skipping Christmas

Over the weekend, while on the Metro, a little girl reminded me of one of the freedoms of being an adult. She wanted to sit on the yellow seats at the far end of the nearly empty car. Her dad, sitting with her younger brother in the blue seats, and clearly on his last nerve at the end of a very long day, asked, "why do you want to sit in the yellow seats?"

The little girl paused, looked around searching for a rational answer, and came up with, "because I want to."

When you are ten, like the little girl, everyone tells you what to do and when to do it and how to do it. You feel powerless. You think, "when I grow up, I'll do what I want." You think that being a grown-up means being able to do what you want to do, when you want to do it. Of course, your parents laugh hysterically, and reply, "that's what you think." Then, you grow up yourself and find out that grown-ups actually have many responsibilities and obligations and people telling them what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.

Yet, every now and then, you have opportunities to do things that you yourself actually want to do, just because you want to do them. Like sit in the yellow seats. I think you should take those opportunities, just to remind yourself that you are, in fact, a grown-up. You should also NOT do things that you don't want to do, like not sit in the blue seats.

That is why I'm skipping Christmas this year. I'm not going to Texas; and I feel liberated.

Because I am me and because I know my parents, especially my dad, whom I take after in this regard, I had to have a million reasons before I could let myself skip Christmas.

First, every year, I have to gear up for the visit. I have to psyche myself up, stock up on happy pills, and prepare for the wave of guilt and depression upon my return. I don't fully recover for weeks, sometimes even months. If you add together the build up to the visit and the debriefing at the analysts after the visit, you find that a three day visit (fish and house guests rule), takes up about three months of my energy. That's just wrong.

Second, those three days seem so extra stressful. The atmosphere seems poisoned by the keyed up need, because of the holiday, to play the "happy, jovial family." All quirks are cranked up to eleven. My brothers and father go to great lengths to be as crude and anti-intellectual as possible to assert some ideal of salt-of-the-earth masculinity. They then implicate my nephews, both five, into their performance, getting the boys to show off their newly learned skills of flipping the bird or saying "fuck" and, worse, The Shocker. My mother reverts to a teenager, which beats the ten year old she used to become when her parents were both alive and physically able. She pretends to be shocked, talks over other people's conversations, and abuses her now widowed and disabled mother should she be present. I try to disappear into a book, as I did my entire youth.

Everyone awkwardly attempts to fit into old family roles that no longer fit because we have no idea how to behave toward one another as adults. We have no intimacy. We are simply acquaintances because we once grew up together, like old high school friends who have grown apart over the years and only have that one experience in common.

This has not been as obvious when I have visited at other times of the year. The same traits and sense of alienation are there, but they aren't so pronounced. I can manage them better.

Third, all of this holiday travel and angst occurs immediately after the semester ends. I mean immediately. This year, our deadline to turn in grades is something like the 28th of December. Our year-end portfolios are due shortly thereafter, in the first week of January. So, right there, the two weeks leading up to Christmas are a haze of frantic grading, fielding student disasters, and preparation of the portfolio. Anyone who has ever been in the academic world in any capacity knows this end of the semester crunch. Afterward, I just want to collapse with a bottle of wine and mystery novel for about a month straight, with maybe a little bit of home decorating thrown in for fun.

Fourth, there are the airfares. I have driven all the way there, sometimes in one shot to Baton Rouge; but I just don't feel up for a two to three day car trip twice in one week. Then, I considered flying. I insist on flying non-stop because the transfers are where things can go terribly wrong. One delay in the network of flights that lead to yours, and you end up taking three separate flights, sitting in the center seat, and flying half-way across the country and back when you were only supposed to take two, sitting by the window, and flying 1/4 of the way across the country. Non-stop flights are slightly more expensive, but even if I took the cheapest fare available with two connections, I would still be paying 2 1/2 times as much as I would if I travelled in February or March. So, I decided to visit then, when I will need a break from the grey winter here.

Fifth, we have my nephew Boudreau, and the fact that he is part of another family connected only to my own through his mother (they are about as dysfunctional as mine, but in a different way). That means that he has other relatives to visit at Christmas. If I go at another time, I get him all to myself! I almost never get to see my other nephew, the Spider. His father and I are the most alienated from one another, and he won't be there at Christmas anyway.

Finally, we have that nasty spelunking procedure that will occur around that time. I really don't want to travel while facing that. Of course, I'm telling the parental unit that it's happening right before Christmas because the lie will parry any of the "solutions" to the other problems (other than the family personality issue -- I always keep that to myself because to do otherwise would be an exercise in futility and pointless pain). The fact that this is occurring in my nether regions means that all discussion on the issue will stop cold after its mention. If you have to deal with squeamish sexists, you might as well use their immaturity to your advantage.

There, I have amassed all of these excuses for not going to Texas at Christmas. The family is extra dysfunctional at the holidays, I am under too much stress at the end of the semester, the airfares are too expensive, I want more time with Boudreau, and I'm having a medical procedure done in a place on my body that no one wants to know exists.

Mostly, I just don't want to go. Since I'm a grown-up, I can make that call.