Cordy looked at the clock and sighed. She didn’t mean to sigh audibly, but it eeked out before she could prevent it, and it was loud. So loud it surprised even her. The clock said it was almost 8:30. She became aware that a mild depression was settling over her. Trying to assess where this feeling was coming from, she looked away from the table where she was sitting with her three children, Thad, Ashley and Alice. These children were her pride and joy, and the products of her love and life with her husband Jed. They had been working together on a puzzle, joking about the events of the day. As she surveyed the living room, she saw the entrails of the gifts that had been ostentatiously piled below the tree that morning. Now, as the kids were finishing up the last few pieces of the puzzle Grandpa had given them for Christmas, she thought, ‘What could be a more fitting way to spend Christmas night?’ Her husband Jed, who had been nursing a cold for the last week, had snuck off to his parents’ to catch the end of the basketball game. Everything checked out. After a long day with the family in which everything had gone just about as well as it could have, she was left with a cloud weighing on her, and she realized the only medicine might be going to bed early. That’s what she usually did when she felt depressed. What a shame to end today like that.
She deliberated what to say to let the kids know. Of course they’d let her do whatever she wanted—they were sweet kids. But they would also know something was up. They were smart kids, too.
“Look guys, I’ve gotta go to bed.”
“What? Why?” Ashley was their middle daughter. She was 14 and in the middle of her freshman year of high school. Of the three kids, Ashley had the easiest time saying everything she was thinking. “It’s only 8:30.”
“I’m just really tired.”
Silence took over for a minute. “Okay, sure,” said Alice, the youngest, but then she focused her eyes on her mom’s face. In 6th grade this year, Alice was just starting to come into her own as one of the big kids. “Did you have a Merry Christmas, Mommy?”
“Yes, it was nice!” Cordy faked a content smile. “It was a nice day with everyone. I’m just kind of spent and I need to go to bed. The three of you can stay up and do whatever you want- I don’t mind. I’m not sure when Dad is coming home.”
“WhatEVER we want?” Ashley chided. “Sweet.”
The oldest, Thad, was a senior this year. Upon hearing the news, he didn’t take his eyes off the puzzle, but pursed his lips. Nodding slowly to himself, he placed the puzzle piece he was holding. Then he got up silently and started doing the dishes.
When Cordy felt like she could break away from the conversation with a clean conscience, she walked over and picked something off the couch, skulked up the stairs, threw the something in the trash, brushed her teeth for half of the allotted time, and piled herself under her covers with her jeans still on.
When she woke up the next morning, there was a man in her bed. Jed’s tall round shoulder was outlined in the light of the window. He was a side sleeper. She hadn’t heard him come in last night at all. But she was used to sleeping through his walking around in the night, because ever since his medical residency he sometimes had a hard time staying asleep. She quietly sat up to grab a book so as to not wake him, but when he heard her rustling he also began to stir. He slid his sleep mask off his face.
“Hello, my Friend,” he said in a cockney accent. That was his usual greeting. His nose still sounded a little stuffy, but it seemed like his head-cold was receding.
“Hi, good morning. Who won the game?”
“We did, but it wasn’t very close. I was kind of hoping for a more exciting game. But oh well.”
They laid there and snuggled quietly for a few minutes. “Something’s wrong with me, Jed.”
“Huh?”
“Something’s wrong with me. I’m not really doing okay.”
“Oh. What’s the matter?”
“I hate Christmas.”
Jed exhaled a little chuckle. There was some sort of let-down like this every year.
“I’m serious. I hate it. I hate it so bad. I never want to do it again. I want to take all the Christmas decorations and burn them. What’s wrong with me?
“Come on, Cordy. You don’t hate Christmas.”
”I knew you would say that. This is what I’m trying to get through to you, Jed. I really hate it, with a pure hatred. Every year I try so hard and I think I’m going to conquer it, and every year it just gets worse for me. And I believe in Jesus, and I believe in Ebeneezer Scrooge and the Grinch and all the change-of-heart stuff. And I still just can’t stand it. I’m like the Scroogiest Scrooge of all the Scrooges. Christmas represents all of the most beautiful promises and no emotional delivery. At all. I don’t know what to do. I can’t just not hold Christmas for our kids. But I can’t stand it. I can’t do it one more year.”
”I’m not really sure what you want me to say.”
“I’m not really sure either. I just feel like this year, we did all the things. We listened to all the albums, we watched all the movies, we checked off everything we were supposed to to feel the Christmas Spirit. I thought it was going pretty well but I still feel so empty. It’s like taking three thousand dollars and throwing it down the sewer. I feel like I want to stand on the top of a department store building with a PA system and announce to the whole world, ‘THIS WHOLE THING IS A SHAM!! Just go home and save your ever-loving money. NO ONE needs or wants all this CRAP you’re buying.’”
”This IS serious,” Jed said as he weaved his arm through the blankets and around Cordy’s waist. “I think you might be missing something.”
“Are you even listening to me? Aren’t you the least bit concerned? What am I supposed to do?”
“Yes!! Yes, of course I’m listening. Look Honey, it might go better next year. Just because you hate it this year doesn’t guarantee you’re going to hate it next year… every Christmas is different. You know?”
“Well, don’t you even want to help me figure out what went wrong?”
“I mean, sure. What do you think went wrong?”
Cordy paused. “Hmm.” She exhaled with her shoulders as she began to think about it. What went wrong? She laid in silence for a minute and thought.
“I think it was maybe the tie.”
“Okay,” said Jed after a second. “The tie.” He was trying desperately to orient himself in the conversation. “Oh. The tie you made me? It’s fine, Cordy. I’m going to wear it.”
”No, no, no, no,” she said. “No. I don’t want you to wear it. It’s the worst. I never want to think about it again. I already threw it in the trash when you were gone last night.”
“Cordy, this is so extreme. So you made me a tie. So it’s a little funky and I’m not really sure what I can wear it with. It’s a fine tie. There are stories of dissatisfied gift givers and gift receivers that occurred all over the country yesterday. This is normal!”
“No. No, no,” Cordy repeated. She was shaking her head in disgust. “No, I can’t handle it. Some years I think, ‘Maybe it will feel more like Christmas if I make something homemade.’ But I should have actually pictured how that was going to go down. It’s not really about the tie. It’s just your response that I can’t handle. I can’t stand the thought of you wearing something I made out of obligation, like how a parent feels when a kid brings something home from art class. I’d rather have it in the trash.” She started getting a little teary. “To be honest, gift giving to you in general has always been a little difficult for me. I know you don’t want anything that someone else picks for you, and you’re perfectly capable of buying anything you really want.”
Jed tried hard to take all this in. Cordy was his wife, his life-partner of 19 years. She was capable and articulate, an astute mother and partner that usually held it together pretty well. He knew there was more to the story and there was a longer discussion brewing. What should he say to ignite it and get to the bottom of the conflict?
”So,… it’s not really about the tie?”
She took a deep breath in and held it for a bit while she thought. Then she let it out in a strong heave. “No, I don’t think so.” A pause.
“And, it’s probably not really about Christmas, either. Right?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head, no. “It’s that I can’t get the reaction out of you that I want and that I need.” Then the floodgate opened and the tears started flowing freely, down her face, into her neck. This was a big problem for her. Big enough to ruin Christmas, this year and all the years after.
“What?” Jed was genuinely surprised. He didn’t sense that they had drifted apart in any way over the holidays.
“I just can’t elicit the kind of reaction in you that proves to me that you want to be with me.”
Jed was crestfallen. He started trying to replay in his mind the last week or so, to find the footage of when he had failed. “Cordy,… I’ve been sick. And I’ve been working. What kind of reaction do you want?”
“It’s not about you magically producing some kind of reaction that’s going to satiate me… it’s that I can tell when a person is genuinely excited about something. And you’re not, and I haven’t been able to create that in you. It’s like my own little personal tragedy that I’m carrying around that no one knows about.
“It’s like this: You’re doing all the things you have to do to get through Christmas and I’m doing all the things I have to do, and we’re both sacrificing all this time and energy to make it a good season for the kids. And I don’t want to sound ungrateful. But I feel like we’re both spending all this energy and we’re missing each other. It’s like that stupid Gift of the Magi story. It’s like, I have to be the one making you happy, and you have to be the one making me happy. But in the execution of those tasks, we miss each other. If I knew that I was the one bringing you joy then all of this celebration would be worth it. That’s all I really want for Christmas, truth be told. And when I can tell that I’m not really having that affect on you, then none of it matters. It’s like a cruel joke. A sham.” She was sobbing now, and rolled over to face away from him. “We promised each other we were never going to let our marriage sink into mediocrity, where we would just be putting up with each other. But the execution of normal life just takes so much out of a person. There’s not enough left at the end.”
Jed sat, thoughtful for a moment. He could go on the defensive, and try to explain why his behavior actually did prove he was excited about her. What he wanted to say was that everything he did was for her, that she was his main motivation for all the best masculine behaviors he had undertaken through the years. But he’d been around the ropes long enough to know that proving her wrong was not going to be productive, nor would it sooth her troubled soul. He did care deeply about how she was doing.
“Look. I’m sorry you’ve been feeling this way. I know I’ve been at low energy levels since I’ve been sick.” He paused. “You say that normal life takes too much energy for there to be any excitement left in the marriage. But I don’t believe that’s how it works. Or not how it’s supposed to, anyway. I think… I think that the marriage is what’s supposed to fuel energy for normal life. I’m serious. I think the more we talk like this and take care of our marriage and keep it… I don’t know, polished,.. healthy, flourishing,… the more the normal life tasks are completely manageable and worth doing.”
She was listening, and her sobs had started to subside.
“I AM excited about you. I may not always show it perfectly in my face and in my voice. But maybe in those moments you could translate my work schedule as my undying love. And our house. And our cars.”
“Okay, but is that a cop out? Workaholism is a destroyer of marriages. And it doesn’t provide the kind of connection necessary for a marriage to actually thrive and be fun. I know you’re not a workaholic, but I think a lot could get lost in translation if we do it that way.”
He considered her point. “I’ll try harder to show it in my reactions, okay? I really will!”
Cordy rolled back over and faced him. “You don’t really have to do anything different. I already know all that stuff. I think it just helps to have you know what I’m feeling, and vice versa. In the knowing-ness, that’s where the closeness exists.”
“That’s hard for me. Because I can’t always know if I’m doing it correctly. I’d much rather have you say, ‘I need you to go to the grocery store and pick up X,Y and Z.’ Then I know I’m doing a good job.”
“Well, you’re asking me to translate your undying love. Maybe we could make a deal out of it. I’ll try to know what you mean when you’re slightly more distant than I want, and you’ll try to know what I mean when I bring up a complaint. Namely that I want our marriage to be as good as humanly possible because it’s my most precious relationship. And when it’s not, I just can’t handle it. And if we lose each other in translation, we pause and wrestle it out until we understand each other better.”
Jed smiled. He liked her use of the word “wrestle” right there. He almost tackled her right then, but he paused. “Okay, but I have one more thing to say.”
“Okay, what?”
“When I asked your dad if I could marry you, I remember he said to me ‘Yes, that’s great, I’m sure you’ll be very happy. But I want you to know something, Son. Women aren’t really in love with their husbands. They’re only in love with being in love.’ And I thought at that time, ‘That sounds like a very cynical way to be married.’ But I want you to know I’ve thought a lot about that since then. And you know what I’ve thought about it?”
“What?” Cordy asked, skeptically.
“Well, first I’ve thought, that’s not really true. But secondly, I’ve thought, even if it were true, Thank God! That’s what I’ve thought. Thank God someone is in love with being in love. I’ve definitely been the beneficiary of that. I’ve felt it in myself that I would definitely go along with the status quo if things were less optimal. But your vision of marriage and how good it could be never lets us slip for very long. So whatever emotions you’ve had these last few weeks, I want you to know that I recognize that they’re necessary, if the end result is better understanding and closeness. I’m not saying this as a general rule for all couples because everyone is different. But for you and me. I’m sorry your feelings have been bringing you pain. But they’ve always served as a pretty effective barometer, and I’ve learned to trust them.”
Cordy moved closer and gave Jed a big squeeze. There would be a desirable outcome to Christmas after all. Maybe it wasn’t hopeless that she would find the willpower to “do Christmas” again next year.