Dashing Through the Nope: A Gentle Holiday PSA

I’m easing up the throttle this week for American Thanksgiving, also known as the tippity-top of the holiday coaster drop. It’s an apt metaphor because for a lot of people what these weeks feel like is a ride with sudden drops from various heights, a series of dizzy loops, a couple of sharp turns into tunnels, and at some point you stop and start again in reverse. It. Is. A. GAS!

I’m already seeing a lot of conversation online about sidestepping the pressure of the most jolliest merriest WOND-er-FUL time of the year. I’m a big fan of these peppermint pink permission slips. When it comes to this topic, my motto is “MORE AND OFTEN,” which, coincidently, is also my stance on pie for breakfast. I’d like to offer up my own two bits to this discourse because I think that looking after our mental and emotional health, especially during this festive stretch, is, like the Jelly of the Month Club—the gift that keeps on giving the whole year, Clark.   

My dad passed away a few days before Christmas in 1993. Not preferred. Zero stars, would not recommend. One of the things I learned was that there is the trauma of the loss itself and then there is the story you tell about it. These are related, but are also discrete entities. The story is shaped by a million nuanced elements: your relationship with the person; where you happen to be in your life when it happens; your beliefs about death; and everyone’s favorite: cultural conditioning. I told a lot of stories about that event for a long time. They changed depending on who I was telling and why and what I wanted them to think about me and, predictably, how far along I was in processing both the grief and my complicated relationship with my father. Each iteration contained a shard of the real, but none of them were actually true.

Getting to that story meant becoming buddy-buddy with my ooey-gooey, scared, scarred, knocked around heart. Sorry Mulder, the truth is not out there, it’s very much in here. Since I had spent many decades becoming a grandmaster of the art of stifling stuff in that area, opening up to myself in that way required picking a lock, solving a troll’s riddle, and performing what felt like some serious Indiana Jones-level machinations. You know that early scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when he handily scoops up the Golden idol, enjoying six seconds of smug satisfaction before all hell breaks loose? It was a lot like that, except weekly and with a therapist. I didn’t live happily ever after in a snow globe Hallmark holiday movie reality. I finally had some healing that stuck. It lightened a lot of other parts of my life and, crucially, it helped the season feel less emotionally cluttered and mentally onerous.  

In those first dozen or so years after my dad died, I could have used the permission to do whatever I felt like, whatever I needed to do, during the holidays, no matter how weird it looked or how it inconvenienced others. It would have saved me a lot of stress and energy and pain from having to solder on my jingle bell rock game face, which definitely clashed with the bleak, grey futuristic onesie I was wearing underneath.

I want to leave you with a gentle holiday hack maybe you’ll find helpful in your seasonal journey. It comes in the form of a short story.

The time: June of 2001. The place: Washington, DC. The scene: My friend and her boyfriend moving me out of my apartment to drive me back to New England for the summer before I started my PhD program in Chicago.

I barely had two sticks and a lamp to my name, so everything fit in a family-style minivan. We left the city early in the morning. To refresh—this is 2001, highway technology along with every other technology is in its infancy. There is no EZ Pass. This matters.

The first leg of our journey requires us to hop on a toll road until about New Jersey. The boyfriend is driving. My friend and I are chatting. We’re approaching the set of tollbooths. There are three. Two are in service. One has a big, blazing electronic red “X” lit to denote OUT OF SERVICE, also STOP! DO NOT PASS GO! The boyfriend is driving toward the big, huge as a Vegas casino red “X.” My friend and I both notice, but keep chatting. Telepathically we do that friend thing: He’s going to change lanes, right? He can see it’s closed, right? Right. Sure. Of course! He’s not a maniac.

And he keeps driving through the booth with the red, red, red Grand Canyon-sized “X.”

“Umm, so, like, what?” I say. She says something similar, but in much shriller tones. I would later find out that they were on the brink of breaking up. This road trip had been Griswolded from the get go.

“What’s going to happen when we get off at our exit?” I ask.

“We’ll just say we don’t have it,” the boyfriend answers quietly through clenched teeth and set jaw.

“What? Wait. What? Can you do that?” my friend and I start cackling at him like hens, because neither one of us had ever encountered this situation and, again, telepathically as well as very vocally we are babbling to the effect of, wait how can you NOT HAVE IT? And this is basically what we proceed to harangue him with for the next 60 miles:  

How can you say you JUST DON’T HAVE IT? Like, who does that? Oh! I’m sorry, we had it but then…NOPE! WE DON’T HAVE IT! Do YOU have it? Hey, no, I DON’T HAVE IT. It was HERE, I think, maybe, but now WE DON’T HAVE IT!

We’re endearing. Clearly.

By the time we roll up to our exit we’ve settled down—a little. My friend and I are both practically hovering over our seats in anticipation of how this is going to all shake down. Boyfriend plays it cool as a frosted pint glass.

“Ticket,” says the attendant.

“Yeah, sorry, we don’t have it.”

The woman in the booth sighs and tells us we’ll have to pay the whole ticket. That’s it. That’s all that happens. My friend and I are flummoxed that we weren’t asked to pull over and then disappeared into the wilderness along the edge of the New Jersey turnpike (people have for much, much less).

Though the actual resolution was quite anti-climactic, it: 1. gave us a story that we’ve dined out on for all these years hence and counting (sorry not sorry ex-boyfriend!) and 2. provided us with a vital shorthand to add to the already bananas lexicon of our friendship. From that moment forward, if one of us was tapped out or came up short or pooched something or just needed a lifeline all we had to say was, “Dude, I just don’t have it.” We both immediately knew and could more easily accept, forgive, or depending on the situation, sideline our own stuff to lean in closer and listen and support.

I give this to you in the spirit of this season of having it your way, which is maybe not having it at all.

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Lens Zen!

What happens when you take two secrety spies and add one big deal holiday….

©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

Natasha! Important message from HQ of very real Aluminum Siding Company that is also our real bosses! Instructions to host most normal American Thanksgiving holiday. List of supplies. Hmmm. Where to get turkeys and what is “stuffing?” Tell no one! -Boris

©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

Boris! I am in park with Boris Jr. I hoped he would know turkeys to invite, but it seems he only know other duckies and a couple of geese. We invite all for the most normal of American Thanksgivings. For mission I watch important training video: A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. I get bags of vital American vegetable the bean jelly. Maybe “stuffing” is secrety code? I wait. Tell no one! -Natasha

©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

You are genius solnishko, Natasha! I break “stuffing” code: stay in PJs all day, watch movies, eat pie for breakfast. Please to make sure my Stars War jammies—the Han Solo and Chewies, not the Yodas--are not still in laundry basket. Orders are orders! Tell no one! -Boris