The holiday season is here, and I have never experienced this season without some amount of grief for my entire adult life. The holiday season is very triggering for a reason: It’s all about family. ‘Tis the season to let go of your differences and come together as a family. At least that was always the case in my family growing up.

I said family three times…

Family, family, family…

That’s the problem.

What family looks like for me has changed several times throughout my life. I won’t lie, I kind of hate it, and am getting really sick of the changes. I need consistency for once in my damn life. The good news is, I’m finding that consistency and stability. This is my third holiday season with the man who is now my husband, and our four combined children. We have been building traditions each year, and this year all the kids have something to look forward to that we’ve done together in years past. I love that. Creating that consistency and stability for them is just as, if not more, important than creating it for myself.

What do we do with the memories, though? All the pictures, and videos that I recorded as the kids were growing up, in a different home with a different man, what do I do with those? He’s still their father, but the fact that we aren’t together anymore means it’s really difficult to look back at those memories fondly. I felt the same way after my family died, one after another, the holidays became strained and terrible. How can we celebrate joy, when so many terrible things have happened? How can we look back at what was once a joyous day, when everything fell apart?

I have two Gmail accounts. One in my old married name, and one in my new name. I stored a lot of my old photos of the kids growing up in my old Gmail photos cloud storage. Occasionally my phone gets confused, and I end up needing to switch to that account for some reason, and when I least expect it, it will notify me of a memory from those old days when the kids were small, and we were all living a different life, surrounded by different people that they still have, but I don’t.

Divorce is a grief I didn’t know would be as devastating as it has turned out to be. You don’t just lose your old partner, the person you thought you would spend every waking moment with for the rest of your life, you lose the people connected to them. In an ideal situation, you get to keep some of them, but there is still a great deal of loss, and I never anticipated how that would feel.

The whole thing hurts, in a new and different way than when my family died. When someone dies, there can still be some joy when looking back at old photos. When it’s loss through divorce, I’m not sure what I’m meant to feel when I see those old memories. It’s almost like those memories aren’t mine anymore. I need to pass them down to the kids and find a way to detach myself from them. They belong to the kids, not me but… that was my life, too.

Harder still, when the kid’s grandmother on their dad’s side, so my ex-mother-in-law, still insists on sending presents to my new home. It’s very sweet that she includes my stepdaughters in her gift-giving, but the emotions that flood me are unexpected and honestly unwanted.

I guess I haven’t found a way to accept it all yet, and that might be part of it.

It’s all extra confusing when I know I would never want to go back to any parts of my old lives, either with my old family because it was all kind of awful, or with my ex-husband because, it was kind of awful (we each played a part in the awfulness, but still).

I want to remember the good parts without remembering the bad parts, but that’s just not life.

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

So, the holidays are hard because of all of this loss, and all of these memories. I’ve become a bit of a scrooge, not by choice, and it’s seeing how happy the whole season makes the kids that turns me around and brings, what my oldest calls *whimsy* back into my life.

How do I, or we, because you’ve lost a lot too, or you wouldn’t be someone who reads my posts, honor those old memories without it hurting us so much that we can’t enjoy what’s happening now?

I wish I had a straightforward answer, but I believe this is a rather complicated question.

Here are some things I’ve done, or others have done, that have helped:

Allow yourself to feel what you feel. It’s an easy thing to say that, and a harder thing to practice, but it is important. I miss a lot of people, and it hurts a lot sometimes, but it’s the reminder that it’s simply ok to feel that way. It’s ok to have tears, it’s ok to share the thoughts with people around you, even your kids. It’s ok to take some space and sit in it for a little while. It’s ok.

Find a distraction. A hobby, music, movie or good T.V show. My husband is good at this one, and he’s helped me a lot through some tough emotions. He knows now that I get trapped in my thoughts sometimes, and when he sees it he does a great job making me laugh and pulling me out.

Create a new memory, and compile the good memories into something that makes you happy to look at. Make a photo book, we do this every year now, and I like having the tangible thing to pick up when I need it most. It’s like a distraction, but with memories that make me happy rather than sad.

Get outside. Nature clears my head like nothing else does. Rain or shine, dark or light, I take myself outside as often as I can, especially when I’m not feeling myself. I spent quite a while the other night, bundled in a blanket and standing under the trees in my backyard breathing in the fresh wintery air, and it revived me.

The old memories have their place in our hearts, and it’s not necessarily about letting them go, but allowing them to have their place, maybe even looking back at them sometimes, and then finding a way to move forward.

These are good practices for memoirists as well, because we live in our old memories sometimes. That’s a choice, though, at least in my experience, and it’s a bit easier to remove myself from the feelings when it’s a choice to think back and remember, rather than having it sprung on me via notifications when I least expect it.

I know what it feels like to have that wall between who you are today vs. who you used to be but rather than seeing it as a wall, maybe it’s more like a curtain. We can open the curtain sometimes and look back or allow in what we feel ok with and then gently close the curtain and let our memories exist where they are now, in the past.

Take care of yourself this holiday season. I know it’s not always easy to get through if it ever was. Hold onto the joy where you can.