Boxing Day Blues
Today is Boxing Day, as you know, and I’m still discovering how quickly a festive season can pass, just like that, seemingly in the blink of an eye.
It feels very wrong to me.
Today my eyes are red-rimmed and tired. It is 6:41 pm and I’ve had a small breakfast, a small lunch, a few cups of tea, and still no supper. I’m (still) in my pyjamas. I feel down and exhausted and empty, not unlike the feeling you get when your best friend has just left after a fun-filled sleepover.
On Christmas Eve C and I and Lucy and my parents (they were with us for a few short days) drove to Barrie to have Christmas celebrations at my sister’s house. Four of us even made it to midnight mass, which I haven’t done in years. We were ten people altogether; only my sister in England and her family were missing. There’s always someone missing, but we did make videos and take lots of photos to send and I read aloud her card and emails from overseas. It was a good time. But we drove home last night because I had to work today to keep on schedule.
I miss my parents, I miss my family, I feel upset that already—ALREADY—the days off are over, and I go back to work at the clinic on Monday, and back to attending to deadlines, the stress of which never really left me. So short a time not working I feel I haven’t had it.This is why I’m tired and down, not because of the holiday toll, though it was emotionally draining for me.
I think people should get two weeks or more off work for Christmas. I wish it were possible. In fact, my personal grown-up Christmas wish is that Christmas could be officially two weeks long, no working at all, everyone in my immediate family plus the kids in a huge house. Then we do all the meals prep together, even shop for gifts together, and there’s no driving back and forth and bickering over who gets to see whom and so on. It would be so ideal Thomas Kincaid would paint it.
I’ve been told I have unrealistic expectations of life. And the depression of that is hitting me today. Christmas is over. Religiously, I guess it’s not (we were always taught that Christmas is not only one or two days ), but I am also struggling with religion, among other things.
Today has passed the way the time with my parents passed, the way Christmas passed. The hours went by so fast I felt like Scrooge on hearing the quarters chime—confused that I had somehow lost a day.
I don’t want to edit papers today. I’m so blue that all I want to do right now is curl up with the dog and C and sleep as though I hadn’t a care in the world.
Hey, it’s okay to feel this way. Just plan on bouncing back – you will. It just isn’t always easy.
I’m sleeping on a mattress in the basement of my old house that my soon to be ex lives in with the kids hours after my parents grilled me about the whys and how comes. I don’t want to work Monday either (and I’m not -we are closed all week). But I also don’t want to be here. I can do it though. I’ll bounce back.
Bretthead: Of course you’re off all week, because you are the best boss ever. In a different life, I’m sure I would live near you and work with you and laugh a lot—and have two weeks off at Christmas.
Is it true you can plan to bounce back? I just feel I have to, because, you know, there’s always something that has to be done, people you need to be up for, etc., and living that way lately, pushing myself to keep ploughing through and through and through to the next thing, has really run me down. I’m tired and bouncing back is getting harder each time. I’m sure I will bounce back, but you know that spot you get in when you don’t feel as though you can (make it through the morning, let alone whole day)? Even though you know it’s a phase and you just will? I’m there. Still, I know I will never take a day off work, just not edit or call in to say, “It’s a bad day. I can’t get out of bed. I can’t get dressed. I just can’t come in.”
I imagine how hard it is being in the basement of your old house. How long are you there for?
PS. Did your parents grill you in favour of you staying or try to tell you not to?
I don’t know how anyone could say that you have unrealistic expectations of life.
What does that mean anyway?
I mean, are we to work for “the man” for 35 years so that we can perhaps enjoy a further 10 years before we die?
If that’s a “realistic” expectation, I want no part of it at all.
My only expectation is to enjoy my life and do what I want to do as much as possible – how can that be unrealistic?
If that’s unrealistic, then we’ve been sold a lie or are slaves of some kind.
I think it was easier to have this kind of life when we all worked on farms or as craftspeople of some kind. You were with your family all the time.
Somewhere, we went off the rails…
Brett: Perhaps as cynics or those who don’t believe we can create our own reality we would say what we truly want is unrealistic: the fact is that no matter what many of us want, no matter what we even believe, most of us do not have what we desire and will probably forever remain in the rat race. I don’t know why; probably various reasons. I find it increasingly depressing the more I contemplate my mortality.
I do want to believe that my life not only can but WILL change enough that I will enjoy some type of financial freedom. It does happen to so many people, after all. In my case, as in that of countless others, I need to find a way of making much more than I do for that to happen. Some days that really seems impossible and I become tired of looking for or trying to create opportunities rather than being able to recognize them as they come my way, if you see the distinction.
Ach. Sorry to be such a downer today! I’ve spent the entire day on just one paper, the one I began yesterday. I had hoped to get at least two done. And I was even totally focused today!
PS. I must admit, I don’t want to be with my family all the time. That would drive me bonkers. My family gets along fabulously when we’re miles apart most of the time and then we get together a few times a year. I just wish those times could be a little longer, or simply that my time off could be satisfactorily extended.
My folks are here for a week. How long am I in the basement? Metaphorically?
We are going to spend a couple nights at my condo too, in which case I’ll be on a mattress in the boys room or in the family room! I feel like a college kid!
It’s been a rough holiday. But this is the path to a better place. My Ps grilled me mostly for understanding. They know the decision is made and it’s not good to analyze. They just have nothing to do but wonder about stuff.
As did my parents. They knew there was nothing that could be done, really, but they still asked. I think they had a hard time letting go. Now that I’ve been with Colin for ten years (holy shit!!), and they do like him very much, they’re starting to at least get his name right…
