'Not This Year'

"I don't want to pretend anymore that everything's fine just for the sake of a holiday."

This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

MAGGIE: Let’s start with you telling me who you're estranged from.

BRIDGET: It's both my parents. In 2022, we went for about six months without talking. This was a huge change from how my relationship with my mom used to be, because before this we would talk almost every day. If a few days went by, I would have like thoughts in my head like, “It's been a couple days, I should call my mom.” Or, “How long can I go without calling before she’s going to get mad?” It was like a war inside my head all the time. What do I need to do to be a good daughter? That took up so much of my brain space.

So, I just said I needed space and went no-contact. But then, I got back into contact because the holidays were coming. So, we talked for a few weeks and then we had the holidays. Then, this February [2024] is when I decided to stop contact with them, and decided not to get back in contact for the holidays.

Tell me a little more about why.

The simplest explanation for why I went no-contact is because every time I talked to them I felt bad. I felt anxious afterward. I felt upset. There was a lot of drama and I couldn't do it anymore. When I was younger, I felt I had to be there for my mom emotionally and for my dad. When I was growing up, my dad never said, “I love you.” If I ever cried or got upset, he didn't know what to do with me. He wasn't there for me when I was growing up. But when I grew up, he cried to me and talked about his problems.

On the other hand, my mom was like my best friend growing up and through my adulthood. But I also didn't realize how much she put on me. I remember my dad being jealous. It was like she was using me as a reason not to spend as much time with him. Looking back on it now, there was just a lot of chaos. There was a lot of anger and yelling on my dad's part, mostly, and a lot of arguing.

Are they still together?

Yeah.

So when you grew up, one day your dad started like coming to you and confiding in you?

Pretty much. We would never talk to each other about the big things up until probably about 10 years ago, when I was already grown and on my own. He had a breakdown at work, and then he got diagnosed with depression and anxiety. After that, he started to have a lot of health problems. Now, he’s just… he is scared a lot. So when he started having health problems, he started coming to me all the time for support

So it was like he would try to provoke you to drop everything and be by his side.

They both did. When I decided to cut off contact, I never really argued. My mom hates confrontation. We didn't argue or fight. I just stopped.

Let’s talk about how that translates to the holidays.

Can I say one more thing? There's another part to it. Before I went no-contact, they were so enmeshed in my life. Everything that was ours was also theirs. My husband and I have an apartment above our garage, and when we first moved into this house, my mother assumed that was going to be theirs when they got older. Also, we bought a van, and they were like, “Great! Now we can haul things and we can go on trips.” Or even little things, like vegetables from my garden. You know, if I told my mom, “Oh, we got green beans coming in,” then she would say, “I can't wait to have green beans.” My husband, my child, and I didn't have anything that was just ours.

Is this the first Christmas holiday you've decided not to spend with your parents because of the estrangement?

Yes.

Why this year, do you think?

After not talking for pretty much the whole year, my mom's never even asked, “What's wrong? Is there anything that we need to talk about or anything?” So if I were to just show up for Christmas now, that would be so awkward and so uncomfortable. It would feel like I'm pretending. I don't want to pretend anymore that everything's fine just for the sake of a holiday, just for the sake of tradition, because that's what we always have done. And holidays with my parents have been very big on tradition. It’s always the same place, the same food, the same kind of things going on. This will be the first time in my life I have not participated.

What are some of the traditions that you anticipate and think, “No, I don't want to participate in that”?

Well, it's always Christmas Eve at my mom's house and it’s always the same meal. Then, when my husband and I got married, we started having Christmas Day in our house.

So the next day, the same people would come over to your house and have another meal? The same people as at Christmas Eve?

Yeah, the same people, the next. Or the day after.

Was that something you wanted to do, back-to-back like that?

No! But the problem isn’t really that everything is the same every year. It’s that you do it no matter how much you dislike it. Maybe even, you do it because you dislike it.

One of the messages I received growing up is that life isn't about doing what you want to do. In fact, life is about not doing what you want to do. When I really think about it, I think I learned that life is miserable. I mean, we all know there are ups and downs, that life is hard. But I think I was taught that you are supposed to struggle, almost as if you have to find the struggle even when there isn't any. When you're doing things you don't want to do, then you're “doing it right.” Christmas was about doing what you had to do, not what you wanted to do. Everything was like that, but Christmas was even more intense.

We had to see all the people, visit all of the houses, make sure we had presents for every single person we knew. Not because we wanted to, but because of expectation and obligations.

We would go to all of the grandparents' houses and close family friends, because if we didn't, something was wrong. So, no one could say, “No thank you.” There was no room for “I don't want to” or “not this year.”

And when my mother took over Christmas Eve at her house, it was all about perfection. The elaborate meal, the dozens of different kinds of cookies. We always got an ornament and PJs for Christmas Eve. When you had enough or didn't really need another set of PJs, even that was hard to decline. It was all about what we were projecting out to the world, our little world. “If nothing changes, then everything is okay. We are okay.”

But when things change, when people go their own way or make choices for themselves, that's when things aren't okay. That's when you're not putting "family first."

Instead of defining “family first” as actually developing a relationship and accommodating each other, you’re saying your parents define it as the opposite. What do they really mean by “family first”? “Appearances first”? “Accommodating the feelings of elders first”?

The way it was said, “family first,” it was like an obligation and duty, not out of love and what was most important to you.

When I was a kid, Christmas was so busy. But there was never time to enjoy it. I was even telling my kid [who is 14], that when I was a kid, we had to rush to my grandparents on Christmas Day. Of course, I got up so early to open presents, and I just wanted to play with my toys. But there wasn’t time for enjoyment. We had to rush off. I just remember not being able to stay awake at my grandparents’ house, after hosting on Christmas Eve.

I want to go back to when you told your parents this year by email that you weren't going to go to their house for Christmas. So now I feel like I'm getting a sense for how this would be like a pretty big thing because you've always participated in this. What was their reaction like?

My mom wrote back and said that she's sorry she failed me as a mother, and that she tried her best but it obviously wasn't enough. And that she’s always thought that she was dumb and my email confirms it. And she hopes that I find peace in whatever I do. Sort of intimating it’s a sign that we’re never going to talk again. Yeah, it was… all about her.

I felt very guilty after reading her response. Because I'd say in the last four years or so, since my relationship to them has become so strained, that if we do address it, it's always about how they feel.

Even now, if I text my dad “Happy Birthday” or something, I'll get a response about how much he misses seeing us. “I miss having dinner with you.” So it's all about how they feel, never any curiosity about what I need or how I feel.

I actually like holidays, especially Christmas. But I hate guilt and obligation and so for the past several years, starting in November, even like the end of October I always feel my anxiety start to get high, because I know what’s coming and I don't want to be there.

So it kind of just extends a pattern that you’ve seen where they tend to make things about them.

When I look back on my younger years, I think about how I really struggled. I didn't want to go to school. It would be an argument every day to try to get me to school. I would cry. I would scream. I would throw things around. This was not a phase: it went on from fourth grade up until I graduated, and I never got like the help I needed. I was miserable and they never got me any help. I didn't feel supported. I felt like I was on my own in this chaos. I love them as my parents, but I don't like them.

How do you talk to your kid about all this?

For a while I didn't know what to say. But a couple months ago, I said, “You know, I'm sure that you realize that we don't visit as much.” Then I just went into talking about how sometimes you need a break from a relationship. I also told him that just because I need a break, that doesn't mean that he can't talk to his grandparents or can't see them. I just said, “I'm not going to go over, but anytime you want to see them, let me know. Or if they reach out and say they want to see you, I will tell you so you can decide if you want to visit.”

He does still see them and sleep over, about once a month. They live about an hour away. But he’s getting older and the relationship is changing. So, we’ll see.

Did you say anything to him about Christmas specifically?

I said, “We're going to try something different this year. Dad and I aren't going over. We'll find a time for you to go either before or after Christmas to spend with them.”

If I didn’t have my child, I would have no contact at all with my parents. So that’s hard, and I don’t want to resent him because of it. I don’t want to do what my parents did, which was drag me into their fights with relatives. I had to take my mom’s side, and it made me not have good relationships with my aunts and uncles at different times in my life.

Have you thought about putting any focus on creating new traditions this year?

We talked about it as a family, what do we want to do Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. We all decided this year we just want to take it easy and enjoy the day. I realize what I really want is to let go of traditions, even the idea of having traditions. I would love to make our holidays more flexible and fluid. Maybe one year we don't eat our turkey on Thanksgiving Day, but instead go out hiking that day. Or maybe one Christmas we travel, and the next doing something else. I don't want to “have to” do anything. I feel like we shift each year, especially now as my child gets older, I hope our plans can shift and change each year, too.

This year, the entire buildup to the holiday is just so much more relaxing and so much more about what makes us happy or what we really want to do. It’s not pretend. …

I mean, there are so many people who have worse situations.

That’s true. But also what you’ve described is basically your experience of not being seen as a person by your parents. They’ve put you in situations where it’s incredibly hard to say “no” to them because you feel responsible for how they’ll react. That’s pretty hard.

Yes, they respond to “no” with a lot of resistance. Like, “What?? What’s wrong?” It’s a big problem. That’s something else I’ve stressed with my son. I’ve told him, “You can say ‘no’ just because it's something that you don't want to do. You don’t need a better reason.”