The children are asleep and I think I'm ready to try writing last night's entry over.

Like anorexics, my depressive and anxiety symptoms have triggers. Last night, through no fault of the author, this entry triggered a serious attack of holiday panic.

Oh boy. Here we go. Just thinking about it...

Anyway, I have to get this out. People who enjoy the holidays seriously remind me of when I was a child and was so into them myself I actually had trouble sleeping as they approached. Xmas especially. From the day after thanksgiving until xmas I was so excited I could barely contain myself. We had one bummer xmas when I was 13 and my parents separated for awhile but even that wasn't so bad. They reconciled soon after and far a few weeks we actually thought everything was going to be okay.

Every year my mother worked so hard to make sure we had a good xmas. She baked (her cookies were the best!), she shopped herself into five or six months of debt, decorated better than Martha Stewart and made xmas truly special for my brother and I. Even when everything else in our lives was terrible we still looked forward to the holidays because of the wonderful way my mother had of making the whole thing rock. My dad worked contantly because we were always in debt and back then he wasn't the easiest person to be around anyway because he was drinking and hateful most of the time. But my mom...she went above and beyond. We always decorated the tree together. She bought new ornaments for each of us to hang on the tree every year and carefully wrapped them and stored them away when xmas was over. They had the dates on them, I remember.

Our holidays had a soundtrack too. The Bing Crosby xmas tape. I'm sure it had a title, but that's what we always called it. Our first copy of it was an 8-track (ha-ha, remember those?). Anyway, it played while we decorated the tree, while we baked and prepared xmas dinner, while we opened our gifts, and most of the time in between. There was no xmas without it. I bought a copy of it a few years ago and have only been able to listen to it twice because of the emotional impact of it. Even now if White Xmas comes on the car radio I have to change the station because if I don't I'm going to embarrass myself and make everyone else around me uncomfortable with my sobbing and sniffling.

It's supposed to be a pleasant reminder, and it is. That's why I have such a strong reaction to it. Bing Crosby's music kicks my ass every xmas. It reminds me of those holidays we had growing up - eighteen good ones (even the one we had with my folks separated wasn't a total disaster), and how it all seemed to stop right there, when I married Fuckface.

From then on either he did somethign stupid to ruin xmas or his kids did. There was always something that went wrong. No matter how hard I tried to make things nice, I just failed miserably. I cooked dinners with fighting and bullshit going on in the background. I baked cookies, I cleaned, I did all of the shopping and tried to make it good for everyone but I just couldn't. After seven years of that I just gave up. After I got married my mother carefully boxed up the ornaments and candles she had collected for me for all of those xmases and took them to my house. Eventually I had to stop taking them out to be hung because the stepkids destroyed at least one every xmas. They burned the candles and broke glass things my mom had been saving since my first holiday. FF never would help decorate the tree and his kids didn't ever want to either, so I did it by myself until John was old enough to take an interest and after that he and I did it by ourselves, with the TV playing in the background because the one time I tried to play the Bing Crosby tape I had to take it off after a few minutes when I could no longer see the tree.

In 1997 FF and I separated. My father and brother took it upon themselves to get us back together and began putting constant pressure on me. The harrassment was so intense I had to increase my therapy sessions and there really was no getting away from it since I had nowhere else to go. I lived with my parents because I couldn't afford to live anywhere else. I tried to get help from the state so that I could move elsewhere, but because I was working I couldn't get assistance, even though FF didn't pay child support until we had been apart for a little over ten months. They sat him next to me for ever holiday meal and he went to every family event, from weddings to funerals.

In 1998 our divorce was final. He still showed up on the holidays and was seated right next to me.

I'm going to admit to something right now that I have never told anyone but Larry. When he and I met in August of 1996, I immediately fell in love with him. It really was love at first sight. But I felt that I had to think of John first so I made no effort to separate from FF until he refused to attend couples counseling with me and told me, "Well I ain't gonna change." I knew then that we were a lost cause and that I wasn't doing myself or my son any favors. I knew I had done everything I could to save our marriage. It was apparently beyond salvation. This man did not deserve to be the example by which my son learned how to treat others.

Larry and I were friends and we stayed just that for a long time. When I needed him he was there and we had a really good time together. That was how it became something more. The more I withdrew from my family the closer I got to Larry.

Anyway, when we married in 1999 I expected the holiday to be really good. My father and brother still didn't have anything to do with me but I was expecting Trent and was so happy I didn't see how anything could ruin it. A few days before xmas, my aunt, who had been suffering from breast cancer, crossed over. I've already written about the holiday catastrophe that followed and have no desire to go through all of that again.

Anyway, the first xmas that has been really good since I was 18 is the one we had last year with Larry's family. That really hurts because even though I enjoyed the holiday and felt pretty positive afterward, it aches when I think that the reason the holiday was so good was because I spent it elsewhere.

In 1999 I had the sincere hope that xmas would be wonderful. Now I don't even have that. I feel like a failure because I get the blues every year and lose my drive to do anything special. I feel like a bad mother because I can't get happy when John talks about how excited he is about the upcoming holiday.

The fact is, I have a long cry about every other day during the month of December, sometimes more, until the holiday has passed and I can start to feel relief.

I feel as if I've been programmed to be this way and I don't know how to rewrite the program. I want it to be good for my family so most of the time I don't say anything and just pretend that everything is groovy but there are times when the emotions I'm struggling to keep in sort of erupt. I don't let anyone see me cry if I can avoid it. That just brings everyone else down with me. I just increase my meds and hope I can get through it without losing my mind.

I would love to have a few xmases in a row that didn't end in someone fighting, destroying anything or dying. Then maybe I could relax.

I hate the feeling that I'm ruining the holiday for anyone else but I can only control this for so long. Thankfully I've either been alone or everyone else has been asleep when I've had my attacks this year.

It feels like I have some kind of sickness that has the potential to kill the joy in whomever it infects.

We have to go out and do some xmas shopping with the kids this weekend. Again my mother is too busy to take them for the day. That's going to be hard because I can lose it in Larry's presence (he tries to make me feel better but at least he gets it), but to do it in front of my children is another issue altogether.

Please let me keep my shit together long enough to not cry in public this weekend. Please no public panic attacks this year. Please.