THE CHRISTMAS PRINT
“Maybe it reminded her of our house in a tiny upstate New York town…the place where my family was the happiest we’d ever be.”
Christmas, 2003. I was 43, happily married, raising two sons. Mom’s package came on time, like all her gifts since I’d left home at 17. Inside was this small print of a winter scene. Maybe it reminded her of our house in the tiny upstate New York town where we lived from 1965 to 1971. We moved away when I was 10, but I consider it the place I grew up, the place where my family—mother, father, four boys, four girls, two dogs, one cat—was the happiest we’d ever be. That house was especially magical at Christmas: decorations everywhere, music playing, a fire always blazing. Even the booze was less toxic at Christmas.
Back in those days, in the ‘60s, my mother still managed to clean, shop and prepare meals for the ten of us. She had once been very pretty, sweet, shy and very smart, class president in high school and college, then a registered nurse devoted to her patients. But her life was tremendously difficult. She was raised by very stern, emotionally cold parents and sexually abused by her father. She started drinking in college, married at 21 or 22 and immediately began having children; seven of the eight of us were born in eight years.
My father, an ob-gyn, was also a daily drinker, but he could “handle it.” Mom couldn’t. She suffered from depression, and drinking made it worse. She became unable to practice the most basic self-care (bathing, haircare) or life skills (cooking, shopping, housework)—fundamentals she was therefore unable to teach me. By the time I was 12, I usually found her passed out on the couch when I got home from school. She had no friends, my father was cruel to her, and we kids were not kind. Yet, despite everything, she was unfailingly so.
After my parents divorced, in 1982 (I was 22 and living alone in New York City), my father bought Mom a condo about 30 miles from Snowmass-at-Aspen, Colorado, where for many years we’d had a wonderful place on the mountain, spending our summers and several weeks skiing every spring. She hadn’t asked for the condo. She was too depressed and too far gone into alcoholism to ask for any of the financial benefits she was entitled to. But I wonder if some part of her hoped to somehow build a life for herself like the beautiful-ish one we’d once had.
When I married and had my own family, no one from my family visited us or really acknowledged us much at all. But my mom—who couldn’t afford new clothes for herself, who had to iron other people’s clothes to survive—Mom never forgot us. She never failed to send small, sometimes homemade, cards and gifts for our birthdays and holidays. In turn, we went to see her about once a year. She always had a fire burning for us, and she made us tacos and fried eggs with toast, foods I’d loved as a child. I cried to think she’d gone out and bought the ingredients for those dishes in anticipation of our visit.
I was at her side when she died, one week after her 72nd birthday, one month after she was diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer. She’d neglected—or couldn’t afford—to see a doctor, and never complained till she collapsed on the stairs. It would take years of therapy for me to forgive her (and myself) for all that I didn’t learn, all that I’d endured.
The little print was her last Christmas gift to us. I imagine her finding it on a dusty shelf in the decaying store in the dying strip mall behind her condo—the kind of place you pass with a sigh on your way to somewhere else. It’s a reminder of her efforts—despite depression, poverty and alcoholism—to show me and my boys we were loved. Knowing she spent time thinking of what I might like, thinking of me as she walked alone in the cold to the store, fills me with all the love any mother could give a child. Especially at Christmas, I wish I could put my arms around her and thank her for all the years she tried hard to be the best mother she could be.
—Mary J.
Mary J. is a semi-retired LCSW and recovering addict who lives with her husband in New York City. This is her first publication.
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What a beautiful gift this is, Mary! The frank and accurate introspection is what got me, here: "I cried to think she’d gone out and bought the ingredients for those dishes in anticipation of our visit," and here: "Knowing she spent time thinking of what I might like, thinking of me as she walked alone in the cold to the store, fills me with all the love any mother could give a child." Congratulations, and happy holidays to you.
There is such tender love amid the sadness in this story. It only proves that despite the darkness sometimes caused by our human weaknesses, the spark of love is still able to shine through. Thank you for sharing your Mom's story.