Here They Come

HERE THEY COME

Here they come. The Holidays. They start innocently enough with Halloween, mere child’s play, and then like an unstoppable string of cars rear-ending each other, it’s all downhill from there. Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day and Valentine’s Day; I’ll be spending each one of them as a single woman for the first time in 12 years and it’s a frightening prospect, even though nothing could be as frightening as the final holiday season of my marriage.

Last Thanksgiving has to go on record as the worst holiday experience of my life, bar none. My husband and I were still living together, if you could call it that, and Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday, was only a few days away. I had no intention of inviting anyone over, because they would have had to slice though the tension permeating our house before getting anywhere near the turkey. I had received several invitations to dinner but I hated to go off and leave him alone. This was hardly an altruistic impulse on my part. Rather, I didn’t have the stomach or the patience to listen to the endless string of “poor me” songs that would have filled the air until Christmas, should I have celebrated the holiday without him.

I also couldn’t face cooking, I was way too resentful for that, so when some friends offered to drop off a dinner complete with home made yeast rolls and three kinds of pie I couldn’t say no. After they had come and gone, I decided to run out and borrow a bottle of wine from a neighbor. Remembering that I had left the food on the counter I called my husband, asking him to stick it in the oven to stay warm. “I’m busy,” was his reply. “I’m watching football.” Why did we get Tivo?” I asked in a frustrated tone. He had no reply, except to refuse. Par for the course.

A few minutes later, he called back to let me know that the dogs had eaten our entire dinner. “What?” I shouted as hot tears of resentment and anger spurted forth. “Sorry…I’ll go out and get us something.” I interrupted this generous offer with a disbelieving “The whole dinner? The one you were too busy to put in the oven? That’s just GREAT!!!!!” By this time I had pulled over to the side of the road and was sobbing heavily. But I wasn’t just crying over spilled turkey. I was crying over a ruined life, the betrayal of my trust and love and the fact that I had married an idiot!

Everyone knows that the only kind of food with which to replace a traditional Thanksgiving feast is Chinese. Everyone knows that any restaurant open on this Family Holiday will be serving up pressed turkey, salty gravy and mashed potatoes that come from a box. Everyone, that is, except the man I married; he brought it home anyway. All it took was one bite to know the food was beyond horrible.

As I choked down the peanut butter on crackers, my stand-in Thanksgiving dinner, along with my resentment and a glass of Pinot Noir, I swore that next year would be better. This was my only consolation. That, and the fact that the dogs would be sleeping for the next 12 hours from a whopping dose of Tryptophane.

                        As strange as it feels to be poised on the brink of this holiday season, on my own for the first time in over a decade, nothing can compare to the gut-wrenching loneliness I felt when I was trapped in the bottomless pit of my failing marriage. It’s no fun facing a string of emotionally loaded holidays with a man who fills the chambers of the fun gun with gloom and doom. And that final year the gun was fully loaded; Christmas was equally wretched and by New Years Eve, I was armed and ready with an Ambien, which put me in a gratefully comatose state, hours before the ball dropped over Times Square. So this year, I get to order up a new set of traditions, far from prefab turkey dinners and chemically induced hibernation and when the ball drops at midnight on December 31, I will be ready to embrace a new season on my own. I may be down, but I’m not out and as far as I’m concerned, there’s nowhere to go but up from here.