A Family Christmess

Posted by fxckfeelings on December 6, 2010

Everyone from Mariah Carey to Charlie Brown has told us that what Christmas means is a happy, if not the happiest, time, and that you’re supposed to spread that happy to your neighbors, parents, and children. Most of us learn at an early age that Christmas is a mixed bag, and that the unhappy spreads faster than the happy, mostly among family members. Instead of focusing on good cheer, decide how best to use the holiday to express the Christmas spirit which, for those of you with some dysfunction in your families, means finding the best compromise between sharing a holiday together, protecting yourself from bad behavior, and avoiding the songmanship of Mariah Carey.
–Dr. Lastname

My 16-year-old daughter is a good kid, but she’s always been hell on wheels about breaking the rules. I always worry about her, because her father was sick and school is hard for her (she’s very ADD) and it would take very little to get her to drop out. The more I do to make sure she gets up on time, however, like driving her to school when she’s late, the more she misses the boat by always getting one absence more than whatever the school allows, so now I’ve got regular meetings with the principal (she refuses to show up) and neverending special ed plans. She’s really a nice kid and behaves well when she’s staying with her friends, but with me she’s often mean and nasty and swears all the time, and I just laugh it off. Now Christmas is coming, and I’d like her to be able to visit Mexico with a friend’s family, if she can just keep out of additional trouble. My goal is to avoid provoking her into doing more dumb things, dropping out of school, and getting into major trouble.

It’s clear that you love and accept your bad-ass kid, and that’s probably the most important part of any relationship, because non-acceptance is deadly.

You accept her, she accepts that you love her. She just can’t accept being told what to do.

You’re probably afraid that provoking a confrontation will send her out the door into a pre-Christmas blizzard instead of going to sunny Mexico. There’s no guarantee it won’t, but there’s promising evidence that she has good self-control when it counts; otherwise, she wouldn’t get invited south of the border in the first place.

Think of her as addicted to the thrill of being a bad-ass, despite the trouble it gets her into, and the remorse she feels at swearing at her mother and acting like a jerk. Your feelings tell you to avoid confrontation and make her feel better, particularly since you empathize with the pain of her problems with her father and ADD. You mean well, but it’s more likely that you’re feeding her addiction and making it harder for her to control herself.

So, instead of being soft, stand firm. Figure out the rules you think she most needs to follow and convince yourself that they’re worth enforcing, even if it reduces her Christmas booty and stirs up her Christmas demon. Remember, Santa is not the boss of your Christmas; he works for you, the mother, to help you civilize your kids and tame his evil Christmas counterpart, the one Charles Dickens forgot to mention..

Decide what’s right, and act like you know what you’re doing. Don’t explain and don’t get scared of her threats, and if you think she’ll test you, have your responses ready, and make them calm and supportive. If you’re confident, she’ll be more likely to accept your opinion and a white Christmas instead of a warm one.

STATEMENT:
“I love my daughter and fear that her bad behavior will put her in danger; but I owe it to her to draw the line on bad behavior and show her that I believe in the benefits of rules more than I fear her response to them. I want her to have a happy Christmas; but making gifts conditional on decent behavior is a bigger gift and, with luck, she’ll get all her gifts eventually.”

My mother is an intense, well-meaning woman with obsessive compulsive disorder and a need to create a perfect Christmas. She acknowledges her problem, but she doesn’t do much to stop herself. She is so obsessive about Christmas that it’s suffocating to everyone else and upsetting to her when anything goes even slightly wrong (which it inevitably does). My wife dreads spending time with her around the holidays, and now that our older son is old enough to pick up on this sort of thing, we don’t want to ruin his holidays as well. Still, if we don’t go, Mom’ll be destroyed, so we don’t have a choice. My goal is to get my mom not to just admit she’s OCD but try to do something to keep it from making all our lives hell on the 25th.

The good news is that your mom acknowledges she’s a Christmas-zilla and that she knows her unfortunately un-secret self is linked to obsessive-compulsive symptoms, not to a deep belief in the power of the Great Christmas Tree, so you can discuss the matter without making it personal.

The bad news, however, is that she’s more concerned about satisfying her monster’s need for a perfect, perfectly controlled Christmas than about the impact her perfectionism is having on the family. That’s where you come in—the Grinch who stole neuroses.

As a father, you must decide for yourself what constitutes an acceptable Christmas. One good thing about raising kids is that it gives you the right to make your own decisions, regardless of what your mother thinks or feels or says.

Whatever you decide is the limit of the acceptable, spell it out. Your goal isn’t to make her happy; it’s to make Christmas work for everyone, which, with her dreams of a perfect, joyful Noel, will probably make your mother more happy in the long run.

Remember, you’re trying to save Christmas, not destroy it, regardless of what your mother feels, so be positive; you love spending Christmas together, but there are changes that need to be made for it to work.

Too much perfection can make Christmas a perfect hell, and you can’t let that happen, so just give her a list of what’s necessary and close the conversation, to all a good night.

STATEMENT:
“I want my kids to share Christmas with my parents, but not if it drives everyone crazy. Together with my wife, I’ll decide what’s acceptable and let my mother know that I respect what she’s trying to do but that she’ll have to keep her perfectionism within certain well-defined bounds if she wants it to work for my part of the family.”