A Bittersweet X-Mas – A very personal message

I’ve been asked by family and friends, in all variations of the same sort of questions: Are you excited for the holidays?; How are you doing?… My answers depend on the recipient and how I believe they will take my answers.ie: debate them or accept them at face value.

This past year has been filled with emotional challenges that have both driven me to greater introspection and driven me into greater avoidance; often on the same event. The schism is draining me and I am more and more certain that I just prefer burying it in the past and work forgetting it all! This is a privilege only reserved to the solitary souls of the world who have none who love them and with determined beliefs in their good intentions. This is the mixed-blessings of my life.

Early this year I learned I had to make a career choice of staying in the community elementary school I love which would risk my status as an art teacher or going to a full time post in a high school with a clientele that doesn’t make my heart happy. I made a pragmatic choice to take the full-time post and compromised my happiness with a self-directed argument that it’s only for one year and I can return to what I love later on… I find myself using daily affirmations and seeking the bright side of this decision every day, so I can deliver my best to my students. I dearly miss my little kids.

On April 1st, my father-in-law passed away. While we were grateful he passed in his sleep and his last days were surrounded by family and community in Damascus, my wife and her three sisters were unable to be there with their mother because of ongoing geopolitics. I mourned this great man in my quiet way, but gave my outward energy to the tremendous sadness and guilt my wife expressed at not being there. I’m deeply grateful I could be there for her and can only hope I was of some salve to her pain. This was also a hit to my daughter, who has a challenge expressing her feelings. She’s experienced much loss in the recent life, but that’s her story to tell. She shared a little of her pain with me and did my best to also be there for her.

To console my wife, I gave in to a long expressed dream of hers to get a puppy. I was worried about my allergies and about adding more responsibility into our lives. She did the research and patiently shared it with me…we finally found the right puppy. Our little maltipoo, Whiskey is a blessing full of joy to both of us and I am very, very, very grateful to my wife for her persistence. She was right…How can anyone not love a puppy? However, my poor daughter, Sabine had a hard time with it. She doesn’t live with us for choices made a year earlier and she felt resentment that we’d welcome another being into our home and hearts. This caused me pain, and opened my eyes to looking deeper into what was causing my amazing child pain. She is slow to share, possibly because she, like most of us, has a challenge looking in the mirror and accepting the beauty in all the details of our beings. regardless, I became more determined to listen actively and ask questions that would help me do just that. I turned this guilt into something better and it’s a work in progress that gives me hope.

My daughter got another hit a couple of months later when her maternal grandfather (first marriage) passed away in the night on a day she had planned to take care of him. He was her friend as much as her grandfather. Her expression of pain was tempered by other issues with her mother. Again, I was helpless to soothe her completely and felt terribly guilty about it. That guilt eats at me and I try to do my best to give my daughter the love she wants.

Things started getting challenging professionally before this second death, partly because of local politics, partly because of the insecurity built into the hiring process for teachers here in Quebec. It pushed us to start looking for alternatives overseas. I got three great confidence boosters when I received offers for jobs in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and in a little seaside village in England. My wife and I had many discussions about this move, listening to each other through our own hopes and interpretations of the others. The process getting to these exciting jobs was another thing. The red tape and bureaucracy of the visa processes and the dismal help one gets in the application for them was draining. By midsummer, because of this an another event we decided it was time to just stay here and grow from here. 

The midsummer event was my father heading to the hospital for his final days. It occurred while I was on a planned vacation and receiving updates from my mother. The rest of my summer was dedicated to the mixed blessing of being there to give my dad comfort in a terrible hospital experience and looking for a new place to live. Bless my wife, Sawsan for reminding me (repeatedly and sometimes with loving anger) that looking for a house should be a joyful event. I feel we eventually found an amazing place thanks to her optimism. An optimism that was expressed for me, while she was still dealing with the daily sorrow and grief of loosing her own father only a few months earlier in April. An optimism that was given to me despite her own love for my father and the added sadness it brought her to see him disintegrate before our eyes. I watched my father lose his dignity in this hospital. I listened to the dismally few interactions with doctors that gave me no ammunition to console him as he repeatedly begged me to take him home and all I could do was lie that he was in good hands and to remain patient. On lucid days, he asked me questions about my life and despite my telling him only the good stuff and trying my best to sound optimistic, he saw through me and frequently revealed to my Mom that he was worried about me and that something was wrong. He felt my sadness, but didn’t;t know any more than I could admit to myself what caused. The week before he died was a daily horror of his begging for help and we asking the hospital to help… they did what they could with their resources and in my father’s unique gift, he got many of them to fall in love with his and give him more attention in the hours we couldn’t be there. This week, he cried and begged for me to take him home; he told me delirious stories of what I can only image are the alternate universes his dying mind remembered; he told terrifying stories of his paranoia that brought tears to my eyes and I’m sure that is why he stopped telling them, thank me for visiting, and would tell me to go home; he begged for some dignity; he begged me to help him die… I couldn’t give him any of this. He passed away with the doctor’s help in August while a few of us were there. All I could do was feel relief his pain was over and cry at the loss of such a beloved person.

The Christmas of 2022, we had planned a family trip with our close friends and all our kids. My daughter bowed out because she was invited to spend Christmas with her girlfriend and her family. It was a blessing the universe must have placed in anticipation for the year’s sadness. I wished she would have chosen to come when we planned the trip, hoping it would be a gift for her. The reality is she is there as I write this and is getting showered with love and an attention by a healthy and wonderful family. I am grateful beyond words that she is getting this for Christmas. It isn’t something I’ve been able to offer through my family. Next week, she is spending a solo week with her grandmother (on her mother’s side); the first time they will have an extended one-on-one time since her grandfather passed so much earlier this year. That makes me very happy as well, as I’ve really always hoped she would be able to forge solid relationships with that family.

On October 7th this year, another horror hit hard: A resistance against 75 years of oppression ignited the world and opened the frustrating truth that our so-called leaders are ruled only by personal interests to the detriment of all humanity. The oppressor, fuelled by the world’s more terrifying and tyrannical government began a genocide as insidious as the one that brought about the creation of their state. My wife is Palestinian and I must sit by and witness the terrible pain all this is causing her and her beautiful family. All I’ve been able to do is share things on social media. I believe I’ve known of the injustices of that part of the world for years, but allowed myself to be swayed by the Western propaganda machine… not because it made sense, but because it was easier. I am trying to use my own (white privilege) guilt to fuel my actions and to support my wonderful wife and her family. The pain I let myself feel is that it still isn’t enough and I keep my eyes open to where I can do more. To my daughter’s credit, she also felt the horrible injustice of the oppression of Palestine and she did something about it… keeping it mostly secret, she’s assumed a social media alias and joined in the fight in her own way. God bless and love her. In many ways, she’s mastered emotional maturity on certain things I feel I haven’t yet mastered, especially with regard to talking to family members. I’ve failed in convincing my own family with facts and written history from all sorts of sources on this injustice. It’s brought back a pain point I’ve always had with my family, that they have no respect for my knowledge. As a person who believes it is important to understand others, before being understood, this has brought me to a strange question: am I more invested in being understood than understanding? I looked back over the more heated discussions and debates to come to the conclusion that on occasion I’ve failed to understand first… I’ve also come to another conclusion: you can’t convince those who have no desire to hear other views than their own. I don’t know that I am quite ready to give up the debate when confronted with it, so I’ve chosen to remove myself from events that might inspire me to debate. I’m also learning to carefully learn who is open to the intellectual discussion… the discussion that has one goal: a greater mutual understanding.

So, to my point of the bittersweet x-mas… Personally, I’ve lost interest in celebrating this holiday years ago. My daughter and my wife, like me, have a hard time accepting gifts, and they also does this much more gracefully than I. Without my daughter here to give gifts to, there was no desire for a tree. My wife only celebrates for me and or some of our friends. We bought each other a house, and have a wonderful trip ahead of us with friends we love, so that is our gifts to each other. My dad is dead and I don’t wish to share the pain of loss I barely yet understand with others whom want to talk about the clarity of theirs. So, I’ve opted out of x-mas this year. Despite my mom’s attempts at cajoling me into it with please that I’m a missing link or that I’ll be missed. Maybe I’m not fully at ease with my decision yet, because my first impulse would be to lash back with the question of what would they miss about me? I fully accept that I am part of the cause for the distance between me and my family. Until, I heal that part of me, I am choosing to focus on the belongs I have right in front of me: a wonderful daughter, Sabine who lovingly sent me an early Merry Christmas, my fantastic and ever loving wife, who is baking blueberry muffins (my favourite) as I type this, friends who check in with messages of love, my wife’s family who treat me as their own in respect and love I want and understand. Despite feeling terribly sad today, I also feel happy for all my blessings. Thank you for letting me share this with you.