Heartache.
What an inadequate expression of pain. Generational heartache is heavy, and physical, a sagging weight on your chest. That is what my heart felt like yesterday. Holidays hurt and I am left trying to figure out why.
Yes, I miss my mom and sister, but more so I miss the traditions that my father relentlessly enforced. It is complicated. Growing up I felt controlled by his insistence that we all share all holiday meals together. Those traditions were important to him. I never asked him why just resisted being controlled. But he had no mercy, not for other plans or other people in our lives. Bring them along he always insisted. And now I long for them like an abused child longs for the love of their abusive parent.
On Easter we gathered and living in Texas we got new outfits for church, we ate lamb with mint sauce.
He made us gather.
And now, the lack of tradition creates a crater inside me. I am so averse to being controlling, that we don’t do it at all. I don’t want to insist and I don’t want the hurt of family choosing to be elsewhere. And to labor over a giant meal like my mother always did, only to have family eat and disperse as quickly as possible seems like too risky. Why do I protect my heart at all costs? Or perhaps I’m simply too lazy and I do not want to do the work.
And it is work. It was easy for my father to insist when he wasn’t the one spending all day or days in the kitchen.
I don’t want to become my father a dictator of tradition. I don’t want to become my mother a slave to tradition.
I am left with a hole so cavernous I can hear the wind blowing, whirling, and lashing. I was physically ill for days thinking about it all, so complicated, so twisted, and so hard to understand.
I am broken by my upbringing and unable for whatever reason to create our own traditions. It is too painful to be rejected and that is why I think my father just made us. As crazy as that sounds, perhaps I get it now.
I know I do not want to be that person. Fifty-four and both parents dead and I am still trying to figure myself out.
Logic & Imagination 
This was both lovely and haunting, Melody. Thank you for sharing. Don’t stop writing, as you have an ability to write so poignantly.
When I moved to Madison my mother freed me from obligation to family stuff on holidays. I almost always went home for Christmas and Thanksgiving, but it wasn’t the same as they had moved to a retirement home and had even those special meals provided for them. I claimed Easter as my holiday and went out with friends here.
My brother and I have often talked about how much we miss the extended family celebrations we had when we still lived in Des Moines, Iowa and grandparents were still living and aunts and uncles were still around.
As a single person without family near by, it has been hard to establish traditions. Almost impossible. I’m thankful for friends who have included me in their family celebrations.
Thinking about you and your pain. Bless you!
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This means a lot, Ginni, coming from a fellow writer.
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