Christmas Past and Present

The Holidailies writing prompt for today is Home Alone.  I saw it this morning and have been turning it over in my head all day.  There are a few directions I could go with it.  I guess that's the point of a prompt, to get you thinking, get your creative thought processes in gear.  But see, I've been trying to stick to lighter subject matter.  Ever since I ended up in that last hole, and had to wonder how much of it was the fact that I was opening up doors I'd kept closed for a long time in posts here.

But as much as I'd like to go the 'what I'd do with a day alone at home' route, that's just not where my head wants to go.  So let's go ahead and expose a few more skeletons and hope for the best. 

The year I was 16 I spent Christmas alone, away from home.  I was in the psychiatric hospital I've talked about before.  My mother, a single parent with 3 other children at home, made the 2 hour each way trip a few days before.  She brought my presents for me to open, most of which I wasn't allowed to keep anyway.  So she took them home with her.   My father had been allowed to plea bargain on my abuse case shortly before Christmas, although I wouldn't find out about that for a while.  Needless to say, he didn't come to visit me either.

I did make it home for the next Christmas.  I'd learned what was expected of me, said what all the experts and doctors wanted to hear, and gotten out.  But things at home were chaotic at best.  I snuck out one time too many and ended up getting permanently kicked out of my mother's house a few days after Christmas.  She slapped me across the face and called me a whore. 

I spent the next 5 Christmases in varying states of sobriety, mostly trying to ignore the date.  If I was high enough, it worked.  One year Tony, my husband (at the time) was in jail, his mother bailed him out the day after Christmas.  Another year we got a free tree on Christmas Eve from a lot that was closing down.  I think that was the only time we ever had a tree.  A church gave us gifts one time.  That was the same year as the tree.  I know the first year I spent it in tears, all day long, at some guy I didn't even know's house, while Tony was gone all day, trying to score.  

Christmases since I've been with S have been completely different.  Good.  Family oriented, even before we had our own family.  I've stopped dreading December.  But this year... his Mom and Dad will be here, something I'm looking forward to.  But so will my mother and her husband.  And that, I'm not.  I'm worried about how my mother will react to not being the center of attention.  What she's going to do to embarrass me, how she's going to ruin things this time... she's got a track record of it.  If we're lucky she'll find some excuse to not show.  She's done that before too.  And while I feel guilty for thinking this way about my own mother, I can't help it.  So this year I'm just hoping that everyone else doesn't end up wishing they'd stayed Home Alone.  And that's not the way I've come to enjoy feeling about Christmas.