So I've just picked Kovu up from pre-school and I feel a bit sad. I'm going back to work in January and so the boys are coming with me, full time (term time only but still full weeks). This in itself makes me sad because I'm not going to be with them as much as I'd like, but it's something that has to be done. So that's made me sad to begin with, and then we got home, put the Christmas CD on and are making cakes and it started to cheer me up, I love Christmas, in case you didn't know, December is my ultimate favourite month, but my cheeriness didn't last all that long before I realised I actually don't remember a Christmas with my Dad.
The first Christmas I remember is the one just after he died. Mum had her friend stay over and when we woke up she told us that she had heard Santa's reindeer on the roof so he must have been and left us presents. I don't know if she remembers this but it is a memory I hold very dear, because I was convinced I had heard them too!
I remember coming downstairs and seeing Mums big smile. How did my Mum smile that Christmas? How could she possibly muster the will to smile that Christmas? How did she put up the tree and the (minimal) decorations we had? How did she not end up making that Christmas a miserable one? How did she make it a happy Christmas memory for me. GG and Dan won't remember it because they were far too young, it was Dan's first Christmas. I cannot imagine the heart break my Mum felt that year.
I've had one hard Christmas and that was 2011, it should have been one of my best because it was my first Christmas with my big boy, but because of some silly little girl deciding December was a good month to tear my world apart, it was bloody hard to put on the smile that year. But middle finger to her wanting to destroy me, nothing she could ever throw at me could, because I look up to my hero, my Mum, and if she can make my first Christmas memory a happy one that year, then I could certainly make my baby's first Christmas a Christmas with smiles. I look back at photos of that Christmas and last Christmas, Romeos's first Christmas, and I can see the difference in my smile, it was real last year, and my eyes weren't sad anymore. I'm sure if Mum did the same she could tell when her smile became real again around this time of year.
It'll always be hard, but every year a different little thing will grab at my heart and crush it a little bit. This year it's the revelation that I don't have a Christmas memory with my Dad, and the fact that he's not going to get to watch Kovu in his first Nativity Play next week.
He's not going to get to ever see any of his Grandkids in a Nativity Play, or watch them rip open their presents or pull a cracker with any of them or hear them laugh at his Christmas cracker joke. He'll never get to see the New Year in with them, or us. I don't know what he was like when he was drunk, I don't know how bad his singing was when he'd had too many, I don't know what his best Christmas memory was, I'll never know. People can tell me stories about him but that isn't enough. It never is.
I'm hurting today.
But the boys are playing dinosaurs and making me laugh, as always, and I will ALWAYS make their Christmases as special as my Mum did, every year, for us!
