Ninja-Mam and Sons
love you to the moon and back
The Fading Away of Christmas
For me Christmas has always been a time of excitement and magic. The days before were filled with a good kind of chaos, getting everything ready with the last minute ‘To-Do’ list. Collecting the order from the butchers, making sure we had enough sprouts, seeing friends and family and just everyone being happy, stressed and tired but nevertheless full of joy and good wishes.
On Christmas Eve I’d feel so excited I could burst and I’d be certain I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I remember the family gatherings, the laughter and warmth and the flowing of advocaat snowballs!
And even when I stopped believing in the big man in the red coat, I still saw how special a time it was.
When I was younger, it was spending the time together as a family and then once my parents were gone it was creating my own magic and reflecting on memories of how they’d always tried to make it special for me despite never having a lot of money. It wasn’t about that, it was about the magic.
So once me and ‘The Wife’ adopted Bubba that’s what we wanted to do, for it to be special for him. To have that magic and to see his eyes shine with excitement and wonderment.
It’s not really worked out like that though.
The first Christmas he had with us, I have to admit, we did go a bit crackers, we wanted to spoil him and it backfired on us massively. He was too overwhelmed and he pushed back, there were meltdowns and it was just awful but we learnt.
The following year we scaled it back, no matter how big we wanted to go, that wasn’t right for him so we kept it low key. We stayed home, just the three of us and had as ‘normal’ a day as we could.
We’ve kept it as low key as we can ever since. Once he started school all the Christmas week activities started – a week which for an adopted kid with Autism is chuffing hard. Hard on us too. He’d come home unregulated and overwhelmed, carrying the constant shame of being disciplined at school for being unregulated when the very reason for that was the change in routine and the addition of a ton of glitter and Christmas crafting! (I hate glitter!)
He self-sabotaged because his early years trauma has instilled in him that’s he’s not worthy, he’s not worthy of love, of having a nice time, of getting nice things. To him he’s ‘Not good enough’ – so don’t get me started on the whole ‘Naughty and Nice list’ thing.
Introducing Squeak as a baby at Christmas we thought we could ‘sneak a bit of magic’ in. And I think we did, just a little. Squeaks challenges are different to Bubba’s so he gets the excitement – he’s been waiting for Santa since August!
But it’s still hard.
Now with the pair of them Christmas comes with staying away from Christmas markets and church services because of their different sensory triggers, keeping them separate to avoid the fights, resentment over who gets the most attention, the screaming if Squeak comes within a foot of Bubba… actually it’s not just hard, it’s awful. It’s become a time to endure and usually we can’t wait until it’s January.
I don’t know what’s happened to me recently though, maybe it’s because I’ve been doing a lot of mindfulness, a lot of studying of special needs, a lot of deep breathing but this year I’d accepted what it was going to be like – that I’d get my head down and push through like always. It’d be horrendous but It would be what it always is and then it would be over.
But yesterday ‘The Wife’, who’s normally very laid back and positive, pointed out ‘The Magics gone’.
That was a shock for me. For her to say that.
She’s normally the one getting excited, dragging the decorations out of the garage and covering the house in lights. She’s the one that opens the boys advent calendar when I forget, who reads ‘The Night Before Christmas’ to Squeak even though he’s been asking for it since August.
She’s usually the one picking me up, telling me we can keep going, but as I say, this year I’m the one that’s gone all Zen. I’d not seen it but she’s right. It has gone and I’m not sure how we get Christmas back, not with Squeak being more challenging than ever and Bubba still not engaging with us to ignore him when he’s pushing his buttons. Squeaks very perceptive with the old button pushing.
And that makes me think, if we’re feeling like this then there’s certainly hundreds, thousands of parents and caregivers across the country experiencing the exact same thing, many of them worse than us. They’re enduring not enjoying. For them it’s a time for high emotions, pressure upon pressure and not a lot of fun.
I’m not asking for sympathy here I’m just asking for you to be kind and to try and understand them.
For some people in many different ways Christmas is a hard time. They don’t want it to be but it is so maybe the magic for them, the magic for ‘The Wife’ is ‘to be seen’, to receive a smile and maybe to ask ‘Are you Ok?’
Ninja-Mam and Sons 