The Eternal Guest Room

I always used to look forward to the holidays. I loved them all. I used to get way into them. Throw parties, dye Easter eggs, start planning Christmas gifts months in advance.

But they’ve lost something for me these last few years.

I feel this horrible emptiness around holidays now. A very profound sense of loss.

There is something about the holidays that is so synonymous with children. Nearly everything I associate with the holidays are things that are for or centered around kids.

We’re getting into the holiday season – and it’s nonstop. Halloween all the way through to Mother’s Day. Even the 4th of July feels a little sad to me.  The hardest will probably be Christmas. Two Christmases ago was our first Christmas when we’d been trying for kids; most of my family spent the holiday with my younger sister, who was pregnant. It was quite possibly the loneliest I’ve ever felt in my life. I painted the living room but it wasn’t enough of a distraction to take away how hurt I felt that year. We spent the next Christmas with my family, and of course my parents’ first grandchild, and there was something inside me that felt completely broken the entire time.

I’ve had the hope that next Christmas will be different for 2 years now – but with Christmas around the corner again, I feel I’d be an idiot to have that hope again.

I think about the things we’d be doing if we had kids. I remember how fun it was being a kid, and how magical everything seemed. Holidays have always meant Family to me. Now they’re just a reminder of what we don’t have.

Halloween is tomorrow. It used to be one of the times I really looked forward to. I know it’s completely stupid, but I’d always loved those cute little baby costumes. Facing another year of not being able to plan on that sounds like such a trivial thing, but it’s almost like a symbol of the bigger thing that we’ve lost.

I can barely stand the thought of facing another holiday season like this. And I don’t know what to do about it.