Christmas Eve

Many years ago, my mother and I were coming back from doing some Christmas shopping, I think I was twelve or thirteen. Now my mother has always listened to country music, and despite being raised on it, I hate the vast majority of country music… I can handle Keith Urban, Dixie Chicks, Allison Krauss, that’s really about it… but we are sitting in the car and she says:

“Alyssa, if some relatives were to give you CD’s for Christmas what would you want?”

And I’m thinking to myself… after years of having it drilled into my head.. I decide to make a joke in my ripe young age.. and say:

“Anything except George Strait, Brooks and Dunn, Reba McIntyre, Pam Tillis….”

She cuts me off in my listing of everything SHE listens to, and says:

“Hey – it’s better than some of that BE BOP JU JU music you listen to!!”

There was several moments of silence before I burst into laughter and she followed… Wtf is be Bop Juju???? Who is the headliner artist who set the genre for Be bop ju ju Music? Does Be Bop Ju Ju have it’s own section at Borders? Barnes and Noble? Virgin Records?

We laughed at random points in time for weeks after that, remembering the Christmas Eve shopping excursion where my Mom made up a word. A word that has lived in infamy.

I remember the Christmas when we lived in the upstairs apartment, (attic), of a house down the street from my grandparents, we put up a tree and listened to Christmas music and danced around like crazy people -despite the fact that it was also the year I got all pukey, but I remember that far less than dancing around to the music coming from my Mom’s boom box.

You know, from Childhood, I have a very hard time remembering many of the gifts given to me… Some big gifts I remember, or things I pined after for many months…but in reality. They are but little specs on my Christmas experience as a child.

Now that I am an adult – and have Christmas to provide for my own child, and potential future children – I want to work twice as hard to create memories that will be rock solid for my daughter. Today we are going to go home and blast Christmas music and bake cookies and dip pretzels into vats of chocolate and I might even let her have a little taste test of some of the chocolate. These are things I desperately want her to remember. I want her to forget that I had to go into work for a little while on Christmas eve, i.e. where I am now, I want her to remember the day we put up the tree and busted out the cam corder and listened to Christmas music and put up lights and decorations and the tree… Baking cookies on christmas eve, stealing pieces of the batter, licking the bowl after all the chocolates been scraped out… taste testing one from each batch just to make sure it’s good.

People have asked me today why I’m in such a good mood to be here at work, and I don’t really give them a response, but in reality, it’s because there are several people here at work I care deeply about as my friends… and I mean hell, we see the people we work with more than we see our own families…. so many of these people have become very close to me in one way or another, so I really look at working on Christmas Eve as being able to see those people on a Holiday, I might not get to see otherwise.

Merry Christmas to you and Yours. <3

“Thinking about suicide after Fiance left”

This is a search engine term that I could not ignore. I saw this and my heart suddenly sank, I felt like I needed to find this person, tell them how wrong they are about life if they are willing to sacrifice their life to put the pain away, how much it would hurt people if they did such a thing – and to remind them how time will heal their wounds…

I came across this search engine term, I’ve been having a hard time keeping up with them lately, sitting down in the evening with my hot cocoa scanning for something interesting and by George, I found nothing interesting, I found something devastating.

Regardless of what gender you are, no other person’s presence or lack thereof in your life is absolutely no reason to end your life. Under any circumstance, children or not..

I hear you – you’re saying “This bitch, has no idea what she is talking about, she’s never felt it, she’s never experienced it.” Wrong. I’m not going to go into great detail – but I have been there and I do have a child. I was ready to give up, give it all up…over something that ended up working itself out and all the chips fell back into place and life went on to form a much more beautiful, happier, fulfilling marriage for me. I never would have known that was coming or seen it had I ‘offed’ myself. I laid in bed for hours, after 10-11 days of nothing but soda – and felt like the world was closing in on me and thinking about how I could just go to sleep and not wake up the next morning.. I prayed for it.

How selfish of me. I had a small child who NEEDED me and how dare I ever think of something so selfish. Shame on me for ever thinking of such a thing. The guilt haunted me for months after.

I felt this way until I woke up one morning and said to myself “Today will be different.”

I got my ass out of bed, showered, ate the biggest meal I think I’d eaten in my life, and wore my nicest suit to work and decided enough was enough. I was going to survive the biggest devastation and disappointment and “loss” in my life. By FORCING myself to do it. Because I knew that life would go on, regardless, one way or another I’d survive.

Despite the fact that the situation I was originally in completely changed and things went back to “normal” six weeks later, I had still made the decision to survive weeks before that. I had become strong enough to handle life if he never came home – I could do it. But it took hitting rock bottom for me to see the teensy tiny glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

You have to find something to grab onto long enough to keep you alive long enough to get through the devastation period, even if it is something so ridiculous unhealthy as to say “We could end up back together if x and y and z happens…” Just long enough to keep you from doing something crazy. Because I promise you once you come out of the devastation and survival modes kick in you’re entire outlook on what is coming ahead changes.

 You only get one chance at life, one, there is no point wasting it over some other physical entity that probably wasn’t right for you to begin with. I promise you there will be others – I promise you time will heal your wounds even if it doesn’t seem like it now, I promise you there will be another to fill the void of sadness and loneliness…. when you’re ready.

I always feel like I’m speaking to people who were/are just like me. I feel loss and devastation over the smallest of things, even the craziest little change of plans type situations. That’s just me so I relate to people on this level who hit a low and think it’s all over. I’m working on this – but I like to share my experiences in hope that it might help somebody else who was in my shoes once. I got some amazing help and advice from people and a friend became my backbone to get me through.

Find a way.