Working: An Alone Day Holiday

This year I decided to give myself the gift of spending a day writing an essay. It’s not the first time I’ve spent Christmas alone, but it is the first time I’ve spent so much time focusing on why I prefer it this way. Cheers to everyone spending the day apart from loved ones. It doesn’t make you unloveable. xoxo, Cox

This is the first Christmas that both my dad and my sister are married and spending time with their chosen families. They’ve chosen to spend the day with the people that make them happiest, and I’ve chosen to spend it alone. I love my family, but I also love being alone on Christmas more than I love being with them. My dad is good at being a husband, my sister is good at being a wife. I am good at this.

The three of us became the people we are now, two that are similar and one that is different, in the four years I was in college. Those years in which we started to struggle through recovering from my mother’s death.

At the end of my senior year of high school my mom died very suddenly, after a short, unforeseen illness. She died simply because she had a secret expiration date no one knew about or could have known about. She was healthy. She hardly even drank. She never smoked. She drove slowly. She taught first grade. She loved her daughters, her husband, and her parents. She wrote hand-written cards. She closed her bathroom door and sobbed next to the tub when other people’s children died.

She was gone at 48. That year I was 18. My sister was 13.

She was in a coma the week college acceptance letters came back, so I never told her which one I would be moving away to. Before she died I had wanted to go to a private school out of state; deciding what college to go to was the first major decision of my own life I had to make with just my dad. While she would have been emotional about the choices, he was entirely pragmatic. We talked about cost. I remember it being a very short conversation in his bedroom, on one of the first days after the funeral it was just his room, not their room.

I ended up going to a public school in state.

For the first year after my mother’s death I refused to talk about my mother’s death. For the first year after my mother’s death when someone asked me about my mother (Where does your mom live? What does your mom do?) I would respond “I don’t talk to her.” Which was entirely true. She was DEAD! Of course I didn’t talk to her! It was also an entirely insane and deceptive thing to say and I knew that. Insinuating some sort of rift between a terrible living mother and me was better than explaining the permanent separation death brought between a very good mother and me.

My first year of college I dutifully got up and went to church alone on Sundays until I got confirmed; I had declined to get confirmed the year before in High School. My father sent me a bible engraved with my name once I became a real adult Episcopalian.

That year my other college friends would complain about how much their mothers called to check on them, how annoying it was to have so much parental meddling. I had no one to complain to about having the opposite problem, so I said nothing. My sister and dad were not the phone call kind.

What I needed to do in my first year of college was grieve, but I had no way of knowing how do that. So I’d spent a year avoiding loss entirely. I was trying to make religion work for me but it was not helping. Mom lived carefully to preserve her life and she died anyway. I was surrounded by college students doing the opposite. Staying up late, skipping class, binge drinking, fucking, cheating, blacking out, smoking… They felt so alive! I wanted to feel invincible too, but I knew that life was far more fragile. I dug deeper into my denial and became an expert at faking carelessness.

Then I came back home from college to live with my dad and sister and, overnight, all my coping mechanisms became useless. I was living with the two people that reminded me of my grief constantly. I loved them but I did not love being with them.

That first year I was gone, my dad and sister had been coping together. They’d grown a connection to each other in a way I hadn’t expected. I felt shut out from their new partnership and I didn’t know how to tell them that or ask to be let in. I had always been closer to my mom. Dad now felt like a stranger after two semesters of talking very little. We had been so close when my mom was dying, but now that closeness felt lost, too. I felt wretched for wishing I had that connection back, which further convinced me my dark thoughts should be kept secret.

At college my life had been a big secret from my dad and sister. Now we were back under the same roof and I craved more secrecy. I found a pattern that suited this need perfectly.

That summer I threw religion away completely and turned to bulimia.

The summer of bulimia I was determined to be thin without working out and eating healthy food. I would binge drink and eat terrible food and then take syrup of ipecac to un-do it. I did not have to live by rules, I could cheat. I could cheat and win and be rewarded.

Cheating meant I could go to the pharmacist and say I needed ipecac for my dog, which was a way to re-enact an errand I had run with my mother years before. Our dog Duncan ate chocolate and we needed to make him throw up so it would not poison him, so we picked up the ipecac to pour down his throat and induce wild vomiting. My mother and I watched Duncan gag, heave, and empty his stomach across the lawn to ensure his survival; he would out-live her by six years.

That first summer home from college I was rude and angry. My dad and sister had moved out of the family home we had shared with mom and into a condo. Life in the new condo felt temporary. I was sure that I would be fine when I moved back to college in the fall. When my dad and sister avoided me because I was being intolerable it strengthened my belief that I was alone in life anyway. They had each other because they needed each other. If I had no one, I would make sure I needed no one as well.

When college started up again the bulimia stopped, but my unhappiness didn’t. I was in the tricky position of being out of energy for denial while also terrified of anyone seeing me sad. The first year of college was blissful because I was not in touch with reality. The following two were hell. In the fourth I finally started seeing a therapist.

That last year of college I put less and less energy into faking a life of careless partying and managed to do work I was proud of. I was happiest writing something that I thought sounded really intelligent. I started to spend the bulk of my time alone reading and writing. It felt like everyone around me was building their most important life-long friendships. They were. I am currently not friends with any of the same people from college.

At the end of college I moved to New York. It felt alive to me.

After about a year there I fell in love with an older man whose mother had died two years before. At that time mine had been dead six. It was the first time I felt understood by another human being, fully. He cried a lot in front of me, in ways I could never cry in front of another person. I was obsessed and transfixed watching him sob. It was so honest, and it was also so different from me. We were different in a lot of other ways and the relationship failed after about a year and a half.

This was around the time my dad got lung cancer. He didn’t even smoke.

I felt some sense of power from the break up. I had returned to what I knew, which was getting through the worst of things alone. My dad and I lied to my sister about the cancer for the first few weeks because she was in Spain and we didn’t want to scare her. At the same time I was a very bad sister, I became a very good daughter again, like when mom was dying. At the same time I became a very bad worker during the day and avoided doing anything productive by reading blogs at my desk in a communications job.

By the time dad’s cancer had gone away his girlfriend had become a real partner to him. I had felt closer to him when he was sick, but now that bond was going away too. I stayed in New York until my dad got engaged. Then much like the summer after the first year of college, I started to crash again.

I moved to Detroit. My dad got married. I came back to the condo and stayed there alone the day after the wedding while he and my stepmom were in the hotel. I spent that day bingeing whole bottles of wine, eating an entire cake, reading and re-reading the letters my mom wrote me at summer camp, crying, and puking.

I took my mom’s camp letters back with me to Detroit when I left the wedding weekend. My sister and I started talking more and she even came to visit me. I didn’t tell her what I had done the day after the wedding, but we did talk about the wedding. She and I grew our partnership. She was already in a committed relationship with the person she would later marry, but this was something that only the two of us could understand.

At the wedding everyone around us told us it was so great our dad had found someone! In his 60s! What a joy to be getting married again! To me dad’s wedding felt like being at a bad college party again. There was a lot of noise and booze and people laughing and smiling and I felt like the only one feeling awful. All I could think about was how my mother would have felt at this party. She would have been miserable. I felt like enjoying the wedding amounted to celebrating her death. In the months after I continued to feel miserable and look for distractions, but the luster of parties was now lost. I needed something else.

My first fall in Detroit I started a blog about real estate. I worked. One blog post is nothing, it’s pointless and it is perfect. It’s a task you complete in 20 minutes and then it is over. Then you do it again. Thinking about life in years, days or hours had been hell for me since my mother died. But I could get through 2o minutes. Then I could do it again, and again. Accidentally, I built something out of nothing. And it took off, it did really well.

As the blog became wildly popular, controversial, influential and important it also quietly saved my life. My torment had become my gift. I was used to feeling alone and alienated so I could say the things others did not feel comfortable enough to voice. I finally felt confident, unlike that college girl who had faked her way through parties.

My life in Detroit marked the beginning of my dad’s marriage, and the years that followed leading up until now were a mix of successes and failures, but most importantly they were the years I learned to take care of myself. Then I forgot, then learned again, then forgot. Progress is not a straight line.

This July my sister got married. I vowed that I would handle it better than my dad’s wedding. Before the wedding a male friend noted that my sister was five years younger and getting married before me and said “that must be hard for you.” I laughed and told him that was a sexist thing to say. I was right. But so was he.

It wasn’t hard because she was younger, it was hard because from age 13 on she had been working on how to be a good partner and she had achieved something that seems to still mystify me. It was hard not because I felt romantically behind, but because I felt emotionally behind. I let myself feel this, but I didn’t let myself get jealous. I found a way not to let this stop me from having a truly happy and celebratory wedding day with my family.

When I came back from college that first summer I was devastated that my dad and sister had formed a support system without me. I acted like a jealous teenager. That’s what teenagers do, they get jealous. They are mean and stupid. I thought I was so different from everyone else, but I wasn’t really that special at all.

My sister and my dad became the sort of people that take care of other people. I am different. My struggle is to take care of myself. But the differences between us don’t mean we can’t connect, too. Preparing for the wedding this year meant spending a lot more time with my dad and my stepmom this year than I ever have in my life. We made progress. It was good, and bad, and good again. Progress is not a straight line.

By struggling so secretly after my mom died I learned to rely on myself. When I built a career in blogging I also did it by myself. Most of the successful things I’ve done were at times in which I felt entirely alone. I’m happy with that; I don’t want the type of partnership my dad and sister have in their marriages, but I no longer assume that I’m shut out of bonding with them or anyone else. Previously I wasn’t included because I wasn’t there. Much like my mother’s death, the coping with it was completely unplanned.

Being alone on a holiday can feel like failing or it can feel like succeeding. In any case, it’s not what you see blasted across social media, cards, or movies. To me it feels peaceful this year. I’ve been closer to my family this year because I asked to be. I can be alone now because I asked to be. Our relationship won’t fail because we are different, and the ways in which we are different will feel like a lot, then a little, then a lot, then a little again. We made a lot of progress. I’m celebrating that in my own way today. I am celebrating myself.