Why I Do What I Do...
...when it comes to this holiday, this birth of Christ, for crying out loud, this event that is not only erroneously dated but, in accordance with my beliefs is a fairy tale. I mean no disrespect, honestly, I just want to get that out of the way before I start getting hypocritical, if only with the best of intentions and for the purposes of reinvention.
In a nutshell, I had a shitty childhood. I go on and on here, detailing and documenting and reliving for therapeutic purposes so that I might remember properly and consequently heal from the damage I've accrued, so that I might unlearn all the things that were taught and have made me compulsive in my behavior and thinking and just plain being...I've tried going to therapy, I've paid people to listen to me and I must admit that the feedback of parental-type strangers (even when they're close to my age: at almost 36, I am emotionally about 14) is only guilt-making and money-sucking and inconvenient, so I give up. This is how I'm going to make it better, by remembering and reinventing, not by feeding the so-called mental health system and becoming another case study. My doctor, the one who gives me the drugs that I know I need, takes no notes and charges no money and believes what I tell him. Good enough.
Anyway, about this christmas thing: I dig it. I dig lights and songs about snow and reindeer, I dig going out with my family and picking out a tree, I dig being in charge of its decoration and lighting and being covered with sap and the needles that get stuck in my socks, I dig smelly candles and Heavenly Hams and baking cookies and opening presents and getting all kid-like when it comes to giving-giving-giving, because the gifts I gave when I was growing up I've forgotten or got thrown out the sliding-glass door onto the deck in one of my mother's fits of steroidal anger.
So we have a tree, a real tree, a Douglas fir this year that sheds too much and smells too little but is still real, something that we didn't have growing up on account of my mother's dubious allergy to evergreens. I am in charge of stringing the lights: Three strands of plain white lights, followed by two strands of small red lights, all tangled up and waiting for the middle of January when I can muster the strength and will to take them down. On top of these lights goes an assortment of strange German ornaments that my mother insisted I take (or they would meet their fate at the city dump), ornaments that Brian and I have collected over the past five years and my favorite collection of frosted glass vegetables: a clove of garlic, a red pepper, a tomato, an eggplant and a pickle. There was a beautiful mushroom that was broken last year, there is a heavy wooden acorn and a featherweight glass one, there is a six-pack of beer and a mug of beer and if they made a bottle of vodka I'd hang that one up, too. Fergus is in charge of the bottom third of the tree where the kid's ornaments hang: the Cat in the Hat, strange plush snowmen, a Pillsbury doughboy, some hammered tin Santas and snowmen and various detrital (read: disposable) trinkets that can die with no remorse. There is a patchwork velvet skirt and there are three stockings, each filled only partway with random toys and candies but which are secretly my favorite part of the day.
So there was the violent disposal of gifts well-intended to taint the memory of something meant to be joyful, there was the inevitable disappointment that we got exactly what we asked for, that there were no surprises like our parents were paying attention to us and understood us and got us something just right but totally unexpected, and there was the inevitable inappropriateness of one specific gift that we got every year: Underwear. PS would always claim responsibility for this gift, with great pride; "I picked these out," he would say; we would smile awkwardly and quickly put the lid back on while avoiding eye contact and grasping for the next box. That was it, but it was enough; then there was the year that I understood that things were out of hand, so to speak: Thongs.
I have an ass that eats underwear, so thongs were a great invention for me because since it winds up there anyway, I figure why not put a piece of floss there to begin with instead of waiting for a bolt of flannel (or so it felt like) to creep up there, subjecting me to a day of extraction and ass picking? I discussed this with my mother (not considering that she and PS would make this a project) and since this was yet to be a mainstream item (1986: Thongs were available to whores. Period.) it required a bit of investigation on her [their] part, calling Victoria's Secret and Frederick's of Hollywood and requesting catalogues, but she [they] were finally successful and thus was born my most embarrassing christmas morning ever, the one that would burn me first but would burn me again and again in memory and would be joined, eventually, by other revelations and suggestions and inappropriate remarks that would finally sever my relationship with PS forever.
"Try them on -- I want to see what these things look like on you."
So I did. I tried them on, pulling them on under my flannel nightgown, then hiking up my nightgown in front of my mother, my sister, my stepsisters and PS, who implored me to "turn around," declared them "sexy" and "a perfect fit" and I don't recall feeling embarrassed or understanding, one bit, the impropriety of the incident -- when one grows up in a house of events like that, of continual sexual commentary, of a numbing and consequent erosion of all sexual innocence and precociousness, one stops trying to see over the wall being constructed between oneself and normal, virginal peer behavior and experiences. I was less than 16 on that christmas, but I'd unfortunately been changed dramatically years before, which is why it is only in retrospect that I can see the fucked-upness of that particular incident.
This year, and for all the years to come, there will be no modeling of undergarments in this house, sexuality will be protected and my children will grow up remembering happiness, gratitude, cookies, smelly candles and prickly needles in their socks.
No one will be hiking up anything over here this year or any other year.
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