Not So Best Laid Plans

I knew this was going to be a bad day as soon as I booted up the PC at work this morning. I couldn't get my password to work. Dang! I kept typing it in and- dang!- nothing. Do I call the help desk, throw a brick through the monitor, what? Nothing's happening. Nothing until my office-mate walked over and causally noticed the ALL CAPS were still on.

Duh!  

Holy crap. But it got worse from there.

At my regular Monday lunch session later on with Dad, the first order of business was to finalize the Christmas Day plans. Last Monday it'd been suggested we gather at Dad's place this Saturday morning at 10. I say suggested because I also counter-suggested we might be want to hold Christmas at our house this year, so he might want to hold off making any final decisions until I got back to him. He found that completely acceptable. Last Monday

It's been 5 years since the lovely Amy and I got to spend a Christmas Day entirely at home. We generally end up going from one relatives place to the other, so we’d been considering inviting everyone over to our place this year. And last Monday, that’s kind of where we left it, open-ended for the time being, with a promise to finalize plans today when we reconvened at Mel's Diner.

However, either I didn't make this completely clear or Dad flat-out misunderstood me, because before we’d even  ordered lunch he announced that Saturday's get-together time had been moved up to 9:30.

Huh? Uh, that's not going to work for us.

Whoops. Hold on; remember, we weren’t going to decide anything until today. I had to tell him we couldn't make it because we decided to have Amy's family over at 1:00 Saturday and needed the morning to get ready for company. But the invitation was intended to include Dad and my side of the family, too. They were welcome to join us anytime Saturday and make it one big gathering. Or if it was preferential, to just come up on Sunday and we'd have Christmas with just my clan. Heck, two Christmases are always fun, right? That was the news I bought to lunch today.  

But no, there would be no fun in Mel's this Monday. My news was met with a cold stare from an upset paternal unit.  To say he wasn't pleased was as obvious as pointing out, hey, that North Pole sure gets cold this time of year." Needless to say, my Christmas tidings brought Dad neither comfort nor joy. So I spent the rest of lunch fending off barbs like "Well, we might as well just cancel Christmas this year" and trying to defend myself.

The in-laws live a half hour from us, the brother-in-law about 45 minutes, and Dad about an hour. So we're not talking a great distance either way. But here’s the rub. “Look at it from my perspective”, I tried to defend. I commute an hour to work one way, 5 days a week. And Christmas, after all, IS a holiday and supposed to be a day-off from work. For a commuter, a whole day off from being in the car sounds pretty appealing. This concept however, proved difficult to explain to a retiree. So we just knocked heads, went in circles, and I left the diner feeling pint sized again.

But I'm not really upset with Dad; I'm pretty sure this is all on me. It generally is anyway. I wasn’t very assertive about our own plans for the holiday (although we didn’t decide for sure until this morning). But I didn't have the good sense to figure all this Christmas stuff out sooner than that and at least give him the heads up. Sigh. So this really was my fault, although I’d help if there weren't so many extraneous issues and blended family needs to juggle and accommodate. Sometimes I miss those days, back when holiday planning seemed so much simpler.  

However, I don’t miss the days when I was merely my parent’s favorite disappointment (although it was kind of nice finding out today I haven't lost my touch). So it saddened me,  way out here in the middle of middle age, that one look or one word from my father can still cause me to shrivel back into the misunderstood child that really wanted to please, but never quite could. How is that even still possible anymore?

Sometimes, I'm embarrassed just being me.

But I know this is going to all get worked out, someone will compromise- probably me, as I always seem to do- and by the end of the coming weekend everyone's going to be happy and the incident forgotten. However, if over the years I've given some the impression that I don't like Christmas, its stuff like this clash at lunch that’s the reason why. These episodes, where I end up looking like– or at least, feeling like- the bad, irresponsible, or self-centered one, the role I was often cast as a kid, make me long for Christmases past.

Not the ones of childhood; but the ones where I drew holiday duty at work, or lived 900 miles away in Spokane and used that geographical distance to keep my distance from family gatherings. Back then, I often felt like an outcast anyway so staying away worked out just fine. So if, for a little while this afternoon, those hard working and far-away holidays started to look pretty good again, I hope I can be forgiven.

But maybe something good came from today's discussion after all. With Christmas only a few days away, it's kind of nice to feel like I'm ten years old again, right?

Sigh.