the holiday hell hole is gone

My daughter told me in 2001, as I dropped her off at Cornell, that she never wanted to see me again. She was 19, not yet a full adult. I did not believe she would shun me forever. She has not interacted with me since, except for me to complete financial aid papers while she was still in college. I wonder if she ever considered the deep love that allowed me to ensure her education was paid for, while her father refused to participate in financial aid, even after she had told me she would never see me again.

I have had many years to keen in grief. And the holidays are still harder for me than the rest of the year. In the beginning, however, I would be engulfed in heartache before Halloween, dreading the upcoming holidays. Every note of every holiday song I happened to hear, every well-meaning question such as "Have a happy Thanksgiving" stabbed me, even gutted me.

I would hunker down and avoid human contact, unfit for human interaction and crippled by my emotional pain.  I came to think of the span from October through after New Year's as the holiday hellhole.  And it was a hellhole for me.

I had just completed a graduate degree when she left me, ready to launch into a new career. Actually I had already launched that new career. But as it gradually saw that she was not coming back, that my only child would go on shunning me, I spiraled into horrible depression. I never got that new career going. I was well and truly too unwell to work.

Writing this is bringing me down, making me cry. And all I really wanted to write is this:  It is Thanksgiving tomorrow and I am not in the holiday hellhole.  I am not in intense emotional pain. I grieve. I wish my daughter would act like a daughter.  What might that look like? An occasional phone call. A birthday card. Let's get crazy, maybe a birthday gift. An occasional visit, face to face.

I seem to be accepting she is gone gone gone, forever.

I am grateful this Thanksgiving that I am not in the holiday hellhole. I am not happy to no longer have a daughter but I am not in the holiday hellhole. Progress? I am not sure.