Holiday Bonus

I'm continuing my commitment to "Mad House" -- a sort of group posting on a topic of the day -- with this post.

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Growing up, the entire family spent Christmases in Florida at my Grandma and Grandpa's house. My Aunt and Uncle flew in from Oregon, my Aunt and cousin flew in from Boston, and we, my parents, brother and I, drove from N. Louisiana. It was a 3-day trip because my Mom gets gruesomely carsick, so we would stop each night at a hotel to give her a break. We always knew we were getting close when we started seeing nothing but orange trees for miles and miles. We knew that when those orange groves stopped, we'd be at Stuart, Florida and ready for the big Christmas that we loved so much.

My Grandpa was the son of poor Swedish immigrants and spoke Swedish fluently, though spoke English just as well having been born in this country. He was the man who taught us how to laugh, as he was the most humor-filled man I have ever met. I think, like many immigrant sons, he needed that humor to balance his home life with the life outside. He was a brilliant pianist and I have no shortage of memories of standing around the piano singing Christmas carols. Uncle David played the flute and would join in, as well as my brother, Tony, who played the trombone. The year I played French Horn, I played along as well. Grandma believed in hot lunches, with the occasional sandwich lunch thrown in. Everyone brought a treat of some kind, and we never, EVER missed cocktail hour.

The memories of Christmases past is filled with laughter, music, and the smell of food.

So, it's appropriate this year that these memories, my holiday bonus, overwhelm me as we get closer to Christmas because this is the first Christmas in close to 20 years that we will gather together again -- this time here in my town -- and celebrate with each other. After my grandparents died, and my brother and I went to build our own families, we stopped our yearly Christmas gathering. Frank and I celebrated on our own, and then got together at either my parents' house or my brothers' house on the way to his family Christmas. Tony celebrated with his in-laws, and my parents would have a small Christmas here before heading to Tony's, followed by flying out to Oregon to meet up with my aunts and uncle. We've gone our separate ways, for the most part, in the last 20 years, creating new traditions and mingling the old within, but this year will be a throwback to the old, sans piano and sans Grandma and Grandpa. But I long to give my kids a taste of a big family Christmas. Because they're the only grandchildren, they will get to revel in the attention and the presents, while I get to relive childhood memories. A holiday bonus, indeed.

No Strings

"No Strings Attached" is an historical term referring to the strings attached to puppets and means that there are no conditions or terms. Another "source" of the saying, though, could come from the cloth industry where from the cloth industry, where a small flaw in a fabric would be marked by a string so it could easily be spotted. This suggests a meaning of "without flaws." Also, and totally copied/pasted from Wiktionary, "in ancient times, documents that were written on parchment had strings that were used to tie them shut, after they were rolled up. The Babylonian Talmud in Tractate Bava Metzi'a[2] mentions an example of a man who gives his wife a get (bill of divorce) with a string attached, but holds on to the string, so that he can snatch it back (apparently because he is unwilling to actually give her a divorce). According to Jewish law, this is not a valid divorce, because the man has not properly delivered the get, by freely giving it to his wife." Whatever the etymology of the term, it is accepted that the general meaning is one of getting something with no conditions attached to it, be it flaws or control by others. It's a great term, often underused, I think.

I definitely came with some strings attached. Frank and I discussed some of the ways, just the other night, in which I came to this family flawed. A general mistrust of people, incurable insomnia (except in the case where cats puke in my hair in the middle of the night -- that's definitely not incurable insomnia but a far, far darker thing), and an ability to drop people at the least infraction and turn my back and walk away. These, to me, are the darker side of MY adoption and I have my feeling that I'm not the only adoptee who has felt this way. I've often wondered how a person can trust other and subsequent people in their life when the one person they should've been able to trust the most, was not able to provide it. For whatever reason, the voice we got to know over 9+ months was gone, or the person you knew as "mommy" would not show up for much-looked-forward to visitation. That disappearance of trust has been my biggest string attached.

I've also suffered lifelong insomnia because of my inability to trust mixed in with a healthy dose of being transferred from place to place sleeping. I would wake up in new places, abandoned or just going out to eat (it was still waking up in a new place with a non-existent trust system) and all of those times added up equaled the inability to sleep.

Lastly, I have the ability to just turn my back and walk away from things that hurt me. I close myself off to those things and "banish" them from my life. This is perhaps the one string I also consider a little of a gift. As long as it's there, I also know that I accept NOT to do that to my family...especially during the hardest of times when it would be easiest to just run away. The very thing that could take me away, I use to tie myself to them.

We all have our own flaws, our own conditions, and our own terms. We all allow some amount of control of our lives to be passed into the hands of others. It's what we do with those things that shows the quality of who we are.