Descending and Emerging

Solstice, the Holidays, and Faith in the Present Moment.

(Content Warning: This post engages with the topics of suicide, alcoholism, and eating disorders)

Whenever Christmas gets close, I think of my mother. Not that I don’t think of her often, nearly every day, otherwise. But during the holidays I remember all my holidays with her, how disastrous they always were— her getting blackout drunk, us fighting. The last few years before her suicide were the worst, when her drinking was at a fever pitch. There was that restaurant in Denver, Christmas night, when she called me a stupid little bitch. I left her sitting alone at the table, guilt saturating my chest and lungs, suffocating me. All night she sent texts, my stepfather, from whom she’d gotten divorced, sent me texts. What do you expect, to be treated like gold? She asked over text. And my stepdad: how could you just leaver her there? She’s in the hotel bar, crying. I’d escaped to a bar, too. Across town.

Every Christmas, ever since I was little, I was responsible for my mother’s feelings. Her feelings of inadequacy and anger which arose as we set up our Christmas tree, or as I unwrapped my Christmas presents, when I was young. Just me and her, never enough money. I was always so grateful, but I could never be grateful enough. I learned, through Christmas, to plaster expressions onto my face. To feign excitement and joy. Just as she had, probably. To plaster them hard enough in the hopes that they would transform her face, her feelings, too.

Our last Christmas together was in Seattle, in 2009. We went to the Capital Grille. She always wanted to go somewhere nice. A few weeks before, she had told me she had cancer. I hadn’t been planning to spend the holiday with her; I’d been going to therapy, trying not to drink, living in Denver. But with the new diagnosis I needed to come out. She drank the whole time I was there, waking up with a full glass of Riesling instead of coffee, watching her cooking shows, talking about Giada.

By the time we arrived at the restaurant she was blacked-out. Not unfamiliar territory for me. For the three nights prior she’d melted down spectacularly, in various modes. Crying, screaming, slamming doors. It was me. It was her siblings. It was her friends. We had all abandoned her.

Talking about the cancer was like trying to hold a ray of light— impossible. There was nothing to grasp. Her answers were minimal. Evasive. I concluded she must be lying, then questioned my conclusion. What kind of child thinks their parent is lying about cancer? This was our way. I saw the truth, and then I questioned the truth, and my seeing. She had taught me this.

I wasn’t a child then. I was twenty-nine. And I was twenty-nine when she shot herself. By then I had moved to Seattle. By then I had moved from Seattle to Fairbanks. I recall those three months in Seattle like I would a vivid dream. I drove out from Denver and convinced myself I would save my mother. I arrived in Seattle to find my family was unwilling to help her. I took a job as a night housekeeper in a local gym and slept most days in a basement bedroom I rented out, dreaming of my mother in a shallow grave, reaching up towards me, pulling me in with her. I drove to her house and cleaned, clanked bottle after bottle into her recycling bin. Gently asked her if she’d see a doctor. Sometimes we argued. One day, she told me she wished I wasn’t her daughter anymore. We had too much baggage. It was too hard.

Before I moved to Seattle I registered for a Burlesque class, then quickly cancelled. Same with a writing class at Hugo House. These are like bursts of light. Rays of hope. That thing inside me (my actual self) that still wanted something good. Something normal.

During our last Christmas dinner my mom told me she knew I was still throwing up. When I ordered dessert she slid the bowl away from me. You don’t really need this. She hissed at me: I’ve read all those books about having kids with eating disorders. They all say I should change. But it’s you who needs to change. The words stung but also, I thought, she has a point. I am the problem.

I left the restaurant but did not leave her. I stood outside in the rain, staring at a new building being constructed across the street, a glimmer of Seattle’s soon-to-be transformation. I turned and stared through the window. There she was, in her old fleece jacket, her face mottled and swollen from alcohol or cancer or both. Alone. I could see through her. The way she held her chin up, trying to look like she belonged there, which made it apparent she didn’t. I did the same thing in fancy places.

If I left, she would be alone. So I stayed.

She shot herself in May. It’s such a long story. I was right about the cancer. She didn’t have it. She lied, up until she was no longer here. In her suicide notes she wrote I am sorry I lied about the cancer. An autopsy confirmed it.

Every Christmas, my mother sitting at that table in that fancy restaurant paints itself across my consciousness. She is not here anymore, and never will be, and everything we did was final, yet I am still here, and this is my eleventh Christmas without her.

the last picture my mom took of me, on our last Christmas night together.

Solstice, and Releasing.

I can’t do anything about any of that. I cannot deny it, or I will die. I cannot let it drown me, or I will die. Through the past eleven years, living with the truth of my mother and her lies and her suicide, I have learned this: there is no answer. We think we know things, but we know nothing. The world could be chaos. Maybe it is. Anything can happen. We can lose everything in one moment. There is nothing good without the terrible, and vice versa. And everything we think we want? We don’t know if we really want it, because we don’t know what “it” is.

All we have is the present moment.

Today is the solstice, the shortest day of the year. It is 3:11pm and dusk is settling outside my window as I write this. Today I saw my rheumatologist and we decided to try a new medication. Is the goal remission, I asked? And he said yes.

There is so little we have control over. We try to pretend. We live in the future and past, trying to make sense of what has happened or predict what will happen.

But everything we know for sure is right here, in this moment. Our breath. Our bodies.

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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about rest. What it means to rest. How I prove my worth to myself by denying myself rest. How this doesn’t work anymore, and my body is demanding rest.

Our culture tells us: to fix ourselves (for of course we are in need of fixing) we must do something. We must exercise, produce something material and tangible, keep a clean house, hack our lives.

But what if we don’t need fixing?

What if the problem is that we are trying to fix ourselves? That we are creating future selves as aspirations instead of accepting ourselves as we are?

What if we were to rest for a little bit longer each day, instead of this frantic forward motion which doesn’t propel us forward at all, because growth is not linear?

This is what I am asking, on solstice. As the sky darkens outside. The air crisp and cold. The holiday lights sparkling.

Can I stop? Sometimes?

Can I let myself be?

With love,

Stacy