Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Christmas memories

Why I hate the holidays...
There are no happy memories of Christmas from my childhood. Christmas time should have been a season of great joy and excitement for a young girl. Instead, it was a time overwhelmed with brutal sadness, loneliness, and disappointment. It was an emotional roller coaster living with Mary Lou. She was all or nothing with her emotions. Up one day and rock bottom low the next.

There were only sad songs and a drunk mother.
The only constant in my childhood was inconsistency. Nothing ever stayed the same for very long.

Mamma's second husband , Bill, had just divorced her, and we moved in to a dark, cold rental house by the railroad tracks. Every time a train went by the roller shades flew up with the speed of lightening, the beds rocked back and forth, the house rattled and the ground rumbled. It felt like a tornado had it. Maybe the house knew something we did not know?

I know that you're not suppose to sing Christmas carols in June, but we did and that did not stop momma from her usual crazy antics. There were no traditions like normal people. We never knew what to expect, so we had no sense of normal. One thing that was always the same was the weekend we would buy our fresh Christmas tree. It was always cold, raining and late at night when we looked for our tree. The tree was always too tall and we would have to cut branches off to make it fit in the apartment. What a tree! It always looked beautiful to me.

My sister and I had tried to decorate the tree, but we were mad with one another. So we started to fight a little, then we pushed a little more and before we knew it that big tree had fallen over in to shambles. By then Candy and I were laughing so hard, but momma came in and said for us to finish our fight. She gave one of us a belt and the other a pointed high heeled shoe. Whew! What a horrible mess we made and she wanted us to finish it? To this day that was one of the worst Christmas days of my life.

4 comments:

Dawn Drover said...

This is really sad Pam but I'm glad you shared it. Talking about our demons is the only way to free ourselves from them.
Do you talk to your sister?

Finding Pam said...

Dawn- I do talk with my sister as she is my only sibling. Some how we both shared the same shituation as children, but she is self-absorbed with herself. I love her dearly, but she is a not the same person she use to be bc of all the years of drinking and drugging. She has two masters in psychology, but cannot help herself. She just got fired from her job bc she missed too much work due to illnesses. Thanks for the comment.

Dawn Drover said...

That's too bad. I guess we all deal differently... she'll have to come to the decision on her own. It's a crap crap crappy world sometimes...

Pay no attention to me... I am a little cynical ;)

Anonymous said...

Dawn, yea me too...cynical about life and people. That's why I love my pets so much!