I'm breaking with Christmas tradition this year: I'm not eating Chinese.
For the last three years, my Christmas dinner was spent alone, hunkered down over a newspaper at my neighborhood Chinese restaurant. Sounds depressing, I know, but I was doing this by choice. The first year I did it, I had an offer from a girl I was dating to spend the holiday with her, and I declined, mostly because I wasn't in the mood for Christmas cheer. I had only recently separated from my ex, and I was trying to treat the holiday as just another day, nothing special, nothing interesting.
The next year--well, okay, that one was just depressing. But last year, again, I was doing it because I wanted to. Mom's condition was worsening, and weekend she told me the doctors had determined the cancer was "on the move," and I wondered if it would be her last Christmas, and should I spend it with her. No, she said, she also wanted to be alone. Must be genetic.
And when she died in February, I thought it was a given that I'd be avoiding Christmas with a vengeance, that even thinking of it would remind me of my loss, perpetual, unending sorrow.
Still, life progresses, whether we want it to or not. I kept sorrow away by ignoring it, distancing myself from all emotion, good or bad. It worked; things that I might have expected to send me into crying jags rolled off my back. Of course, things I should have enjoyed had little impact on me, either, but that's a small price to pay for emotional survival.
Of course, in the spirit of a hundred bad TV movies, the story ends with the misanthrope's heart melted by a woman and a kid. Tabbatha and I have had our ups and downs, but we seem to have settled into a relationship of mutual disbelief over the other's foibles. I've never dated a woman who was so into girly stuff, who actually reads romance novels, who likes top forty radio. (When I told my friend Howard she'd never even heard of Marshall Crenshaw, he responded, "Why on earth did you ever go on a second date?") She, of course, is learning to deal with a brooding loner, someone with eccentric but wide-ranging tastes, someone who might force her to listen to classical music.
Even weirder are my feelings for Paul, because I'm never comfortable hanging out with kids. Yet Paul and I hang around watching movies together, go shopping together, play together. I even told Tabbatha I'd take him to swimming lessons, for God's sake. That's not me, I don't do that. When his mom and I went through a bad patch, and were on the verge of breaking up, he wasn't worried. He told me he knew I wasn't going anywhere; who else would watch Star Wars with me?
So this Christmas, the rules have changed. Suddenly I'm forced to engage with life. It's feels strange and unfamiliar, but not bad at all.
