You either have the kids with you or you don’t. You aren’t having dinner with your in-laws or combined family. There are so many friends that you stop talking to because they were HIS friends first. You’re still broke from paying a lawyer or a therapist. You feel depressed. You don’t feel like doing the performative aspects of Christmas, like putting up a tree or lights outside. You don’t know how many gifts you can afford or if your ex is going to even buy the kids anything useful or in the right size. You hate his new girlfriend’s fucking guts. You hate his siblings. You hate his parents for raising such an asshat. You don’t want to resent any of your husband’s nieces or nephews because you were their “Auntie” before all this shit went down, even though they don’t know if they are supposed to even talk to you anymore. (They don’t.)

You almost want to work through the holiday so you don’t have to celebrate it. You watch the constant reel of Christmas posts from your friends who are still happily married, newly married, or who just had babies this year and are wearing some Christmas onesie/sweater/antler headband/Snuggie combo and who are freaking out and throwing a fit in a mall Santa’s arms. You hit “Add to Cart” on Amazon to minimize the trips to Target or Penneys or Walmart because there’s no parking, Lyfts cost a grip, and it’s too goddamn depressing to brave the crowd of demons that leave the displays all picked over and keep trying to run you over with their carts. Your social media becomes a waking nightmare of hollow greetings and Christian guilt posts that you’d better be grateful for family and friends and Lifetime Christmas specials. You don’t give a fuck what Kris Jenner bought her grandkids. Yet you read the clickbait articles anyway. 

If you’re me, you listen to your piece of shit ex lie for three weeks that he is planning to take the kids to his brother’s on the weekend of Christmas, not Christmas Day. You plan out a homecooked menu of good food and buy wrapping paper at the last minute on an afternoon when you are scheduled to work on Christmas Eve night. You listen to your ex call you and tell you “all my brothers and sisters are going to Dax’s house tomorrow. It’s fine if I take the kids, right?” He does this after all the shopping and mental calisthenics. He does this because he knows your oldest son is the only one planning to stay home, playing video games and screaming into his Xbox headset and smoking up in the garage. He knows it is too late for you to make alternate plans because you have to work. 

So you stay home. Alone for a good chunk of the afternoon. Making a perfunctory lunch of soup and sandwiches. You’ve kissed your younger kids goodbye and watc hed them dash out the door because they can’t wait to see their cousins and open the mountain of gifts from their aunts and uncles and their dad’s heinous fucking girlfriend. You have to call her his fiancée now. 

You tolerate a call from your dad with the rest of your stepsiblings calling out to you in the background because they have you on speaker. You end the call after three and a half minutes. You cry in the kitchen. Make coffee. Cry in the living room. Make fucking soup. Cry a little more before calling your mother and talking for an hour. Ask your son to stop swearing into his headphones like a heathen while you talk to his grandmother. Take the call into your room, in the dark. Try to dampen your complaints and sound less like you’re dumping your problems into your mom’s lap, because you don’t want to bleed on anyone else.

You miss your sister and her jokes and her Victoria’s Secret gift cards that she sends you every year. You think about her every time you use the small blue leather purse she bought you two birthdays ago. She knows it is your favorite blue, because sometimes you’re not that edgy bitch that wears black every day (except that you have become that bitch, wrapped up in black every day because it’s a security blanket that makes you feel invisible. Stronger. But you’re just in mourning.)

You know the old Christmases where you decorated the tree and wrapped the gifts and baked the ham and the pies and dressed the kids in their festive clothes and bundled yourself into the family truck to spend the day at your in-laws were never going to be enough for your cheating husband.  You were never going to be enough. You were never enough.  You were never loved, because he couldn’t do this to someone that he loved.

You dodge the voice mail from your lawyer’s paralegal and decide that the update phone call can wait until after fucking Christmas. Delay the inevitable for a few days. You go to work. You put on your work smile to the extent that you can tolerate it. You answer call lights and phone calls and order supplies and patient meal trays and listen to higher acuity patients screaming for help even when everything they need is in immediate reach. Your favorite staff talk about how they can’t wait for a glass of wine when the shift is over. You just want the holiday to be over. You root through leftover Christmas cookies and chocolate in the break room, check your phone, and just try not to fucking cry at work. You talk about the divorce instead of the stuff you bought your kids. You smile when people pat your back and say “maybe this year will be better.” You don’t believe them.

And because you’re a glutton for punishment, you stare out the window. The sidelight window in the front door. You stared out this window twenty six years ago, when your husband bought the house. You had lived there three weeks. Just hung curtains and vertical blinds, a clear sign that you were unpacked and ready for company. You wore your favorite pink leggings and one of his soft shirts while you waited for the coffee to brew in the kitchen. Your stomach is a little swollen, a hint of bloat that’s not super noticeable on your size seven frame, Three weeks later, the EPT stick turns pink. Two pink lines. No health insurance. Just graduated from college and pregnant. Unmarried. But you don't know this while you stare out the window at the fresh, perfect sod in the front yard while the rain is coming down. The coffee tastes funny when you drink it.

It’s raining today, and cold. Not weather for celebrating or driving, or for visiting anyone. You despise the quiet as much as the noise from the television and Xbox. You don’t raise a stink about it when your oldest eats the rest of your Oreos that you just bought the day before. 

“Enjoy them. We’ll enjoy them,” you tell him. “Why not? We’ll just enjoy them.” You don’t get mad at his red eyes and loopy smile he gives you as he takes the last two cookies that you’ve shaken out of the packet. Your ex told you to stop buying cookies. The kids eat too many of them. You don’t give a fuck. You’re going to buy more tomorrow morning after aqua aerobics. And they’re going to be fucking delicious. You’re not mad at your son for getting stoned on Christmas Day. You’re just mad at his father for ruining another Christmas. This is his true pastime. Listening to your best laid plans and derailing them completely. Always the last to know, never in on the joke. You ARE the joke. You glance curiously at the Dutch Bros gift card your ex sister in law sent you for your birthday, asking how you have been doing because she hasn't heard from you. She hasn’t called to ask. You hope you never hear from her again. You spend the card on a Carmelizer and don’t eat again until four PM.

You pray that the stores stop playing Christmas music within the next forty-eight hours. You hope that by New Years’, your neighbors have taken their lights down because your own house looks so dark and empty on the street in comparison. No bright colors. No happy lights. No inflatable canvas horrors deflated like homicide victims across the lawn in the light of day.

You’re done. You’re so, so done. You hate your ex and your Christmas birthday and Christmas Day with a passion that defies description. 

You just wait for it to be over. Maybe you can start some new traditions next year. Not your ex’s. Not his family’s. Or maybe your plans will be snatched out of your hands again. 

And you wonder if you should even make plans. 

Off the rails.

It’s all run off the rails.