The Last Christmas Before The Divorce
By: Valerie Kittell
Tags: Family, Christmas, Short Story, Life, Other Doors

The Last Christmas Before The Divorce

It all goes south. Actually, northwest.

Let’s just say things were not good. My Dad had moved out of the house and into a small apartment that was closer to his work, so at least he reaped one advantage from being dislocated.

My brother, (four years younger than me who I will refer to hereafter as MB) and my mother and I were left in the family domicile as they say in court-speak. My mother’s mother, Grandma, was there as well; she was on an extended visit to help my mother through this difficult time. I had been close to this grandmother my entire life. She had lived with us on and off and I saw much more of her than my paternal grandmother, known as Nana.

My father did not want to leave, and as a matter of fact, he did not want a divorce. The whole divorce thing was almost entirely my mother’s enterprise. There had been a number of preludes, so we should have been more prepared for the actual official announcement. One day, out of the blue, after my father had shouted at my brother to hurry up and come to the dinner table, which previous summons MB had not heard, my mother came out of the kitchen quivering with emotion and said “That’s it! I’m taking the kids and moving back to California!” and slammed the pot roast on the table.

Wait, what? The first thing I immediately thought of was that I personally, had no desire to move back to California. I was in my sophomore year of high school and loved my school, my friends and my boyfriend. I was heavily involved in the drama department and was generally considered to be a rising star in those ranks. I liked the Washington, DC suburbs we lived in, which seemed a lot more interesting to me than the relentlessly sunshiny San Diego tract we had inhabited before this move. MB was also doing well and had his own established coterie of friends and activities.

My father, MB and I stared at my mother after her pronouncement. My father rarely if ever yelled at MB or me and his loud summons to my brother was based on being heard as opposed to being angry. It certainly wasn’t anything that would prompt such an outsized reaction under normal circumstances.

Ah, but these were not normal circumstances. My mother had irrevocably decided that she was no longer happy in my parent’s marriage and she preferred to be a divorced mother with two children in California. That was one thing that I really hated — my mother always acted like my brother and I were cardboard cut-outs that were cameo characters in her personal drama, as though we didn’t have our own feelings and desires.

There was another major element in all of this that is too long and complex and excruciating to discuss in detail here, which is that my mother was exhibiting a whole bunch of behaviors that smacked of major mental illness entering her life and consequently ours. She had started having religious visions and discovering and decoding secret messages in almost everything she saw or heard. This was accompanied by a major dose of paranoia, most of which was focused towards my father and some of which was directed at me. My mother had a whole other life going on in another dimension which shared her existence in the normal, regular dimension with the rest of us.

The single most frustrating thing for me in trying to cope with my mother at this time was that it seemed she had the ability to turn her illness on and off like a faucet. She was completely capable of interacting with other people in public like any old regular person. She saved the weirdness and bizarro world for the confines and privacy of her own home.

The “episodes” as I came to think of them were usually kicked off with a strange expression on her face which I can only describe as sardonic to the nth degree and large strange flat black eyes. MB and I called these eyes “shark eyes” and they were our signal to vacate the premises as soon as humanly possible. If we were not able to extricate ourselves, what would follow would be a long, bizarre, dialogue/monologue/interrogation which we were helplessly subjected to and not allowed to leave. I say we, but I was the major tutee of these indoctrination sessions into my mother’s world; MB had much more success in escaping them or being allowed to escape them.

“Stay here, I’m not done,” she would say to me and I would fidget resentfully but remain seated at the kitchen table. I wanted to defy her order, but I know that deep down I always thought that there was the potential for my mother to become physically threatening and that was something I wasn’t prepared to deal with.

Anyway, things came to a head on the day before Christmas Eve. On this particular day, I was quite jazzed because an invitation to a Christmas party at a Very Cool Kid’s House had been issued to me. It was the high school equivalent of becoming one of the Vanderbilt Four Hundred in the Gilded Age. This sounds stupid now, but it was a big deal then. I was preoccupied with what I would wear, my make-up, etc.

My mother summoned me from my downstairs bedroom (we lived in a split level) to come up to the main floor because she had something to tell me. When I was in the kitchen with her she said,

“Pack a few things because we are going to pick up your grandfather and bring him back for Christmas.”

I stared at her in complete disbelief. Where Grandpa lived in the Midwest was about seven hundred miles and eleven driving hours away from where we lived outside of DC, without allowing for stops. If we left right that minute, we would get there sometime in the early morning of Christmas Eve. We would have to have some sleep or downtime which meant that at least some portion of Christmas Day would be spent in the car in transit back to our own house. Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas.

I said, “Well, I’m not going. I’m staying here. I have a party to go to tonight.”

She asked “What party? You haven’t said anything about a party.”

“I just got the invite,” I said. “It’s sort of spur of the moment.”

“Well, someone else must have cancelled and that’s why they asked you. Too bad, but family comes before party and you’re not going. Now get ready to leave.” She turned away from me like the matter was settled.

I took a moment to digest everything she had just said to me — that I was a fill-in party-goer, that I would miss my party, would miss Christmas Eve and miss most of Christmas Day because of my mother’s ill-conceived and untimely odyssey to get my grandfather.

Grandpa,honestly, was a grumpy old misogynist in the first place who did not even get along with my grandmother. When they were under the same roof, they spent most of their time shouting at one another in Polish, which is why my grandmother spent almost all of her time visiting and staying with friends or other relatives.

The next thing that happened is probably an inevitable event in the lives of teenage girls and their mothers when they are at intractable odds:

“I hate you!” I shouted to my mother. “And I’m not going!”

I ran down the stairs to retreat and lock myself in my lower level bedroom. On the landing I passed my grandmother who was coming up from the downstairs laundry room . Really, that’s it. It was a large landing. We didn’t touch or have any physical contact although I am sure that when Grandma saw a teenage girl comet streaking down the same stairs that she was climbing up, she would have pressed against the wall as a natural reflex.

My mother’s retelling of this event, which she used as a justification for what happened next, is that, in an uncontrollable rage, I tried to fling my grandmother down the stairs. This still blows my mind, to be honest. And it begs the question of why, later, did she have any desire to retain custody of a homicidal maniac daughter?

My mother followed me down the stairs and banged on my now locked door. The thumps against that door reminded me of the movie The Haunting, although I knew full well what was one the other side. No one in their right mind would have opened that portal, so I didn’t. Finally, my mother burst through and pinned me face down onto my bed and straddled me. She called for my grandmother (who had followed her downstairs) to hand her an old broken bed slat that was stored in the basement laundry room. That in itself is weird isn’t it? That she would instantly recall that a perfect instrument for delivering severe corporal punishment was conveniently close at hand? My grandmother was as, if not more, scared of my mother in her current state than I was, and reluctantly brought her the derelict board, all the while saying “No, ______, don’t do it.”

Only my mother did do it. She whacked me over and over with the slat, confining herself mostly to my rear end and the top of my thighs. When the first wave of her rage subsided, she must have realized that she had crossed an immutable boundary line into a foreign territory where our former selves dissolved and new identity cards had been issued. We would never again retain even the remnants of the woman and small girl who once actually wore a mother/daughter dress ensemble in happier days. In those moments, on that December day, my mother completed her metamorphosis and became a complete stranger to me.

To cut to the chase of that annus horribilis Christmas, we did drive to get Grandpa that day. In a strange turn of events, my mother invited my devoted, slightly older than me boyfriend to come with us, as he had his license and could share the driving. Grandma stayed behind while my mother, MB, my boyfriend and I did the trek. I spent most of the trip lying down on my side in the back seat because of my painful and bruised behind while my boyfriend squashed himself in the corner when he wasn’t on a driving shift.

We arrived at Grandpa’s house in Illinois basically in the middle of the night where it was revealed that he knew nothing about the plan to extract him and bring him back to our house because my mother wanted it to be a Hallmark Special “Grandpa’s Christmas Surprise”. Only Grandpa had his own surprise which was that he had no intention of taking the journey and was quite happy with a solitary celebration at home, thank you very much.

I realized that my mother had majorly miscalculated by regarding my grandfather as just another cardboard prop without free will in her Christmas pageant. Christmas Eve Day became a lesson in physics as an irresistible force, my mother, finally met a a truly immovable object, my grandfather. To my mother’s chagrin, no amount of wheedling, cajoling, guilt or vehemence could convince him to fulfill her yuletide vision and get in the car. It wasn’t until late in the evening that she finally conceded defeat.

We spent almost all of December 25th driving back and arriving home late Christmas night with no Grandpa, no Christmas, and basically no family because that had been blown to smithereens due to the events of the last 48 hours.

My father finally accepted that the marriage was beyond repair, since my mother (and sadly, her side of the family) resolutely refused to acknowledge that she had any mental health issues that needed to be addressed. My brother and I both decided that we’d be happier living with my father, and in a very rare decision for the times, i.e. awarding custody to the father, the Court agreed. Sans offspring, my mother went ahead and moved back to California on her own.

So, no happy ending, no Hallmark Christmas Special here. That happened the next year. See below.