I had a weird dream last night.

I had people over for Christmas (which could easily be the weird part in itself, since we’re Jewish and don’t celebrate Christmas at all). One of the people in my house was this young boy, maybe 11 years old, who seemed troubled. Dream-Me knew instinctively that his parents were separated and he was having a hard time with that. At some point, he found me in the kitchen and told me he wanted to go to Colorado to live with his dad. Dream-Me sat him down and told him that, having been in exactly his shoes when I was his age, he needs to really consider what would be best for him, long-term, and understand that whichever path he chooses, it’s not something he can just undo later, there are consequences to such choices.

I woke up before there was any resolution to the dream, and its vividness is unsettling to me. It’s Christmas Eve, so instead of bothering my therapist for dream interpretations today, I’m going to try to work it out for myself here in this post (buckle your sleigh bells!).

The first bit was terrible advice to give this dream-boy, really; 11-year-olds generally don’t have the ability to consider long-term effects of their actions, they can’t see that far ahead. Goodness knows I couldn’t, when I was that age and going through that situation. But the second half of my dream-advice is worth parsing out.

My father left my mom, brother, and I in Massachusetts when I was 11, to go live with a woman and her two daughters in Southern California. That’s the most straightforward explanatory sentence I’ve ever written about what is actually an extremely complex and traumatizing long-term issue – a decision that had ripple effects spread out across many years. Keeping things simple for this post, per the subject of this dream I had, I’m focusing specifically on one detail of that saga: how my father’s hinge-like decision led to my own hinge-like decision of following him west when I was a kid. At the time, all I knew, mostly subconsciously, was that I didn’t want to be with my mother, and this new man she’d brought into our lives. I didn’t want to leave my home state and move to an unknown place with said new man and his family who I knew instinctively to not be good people for the most part (not that I was asked, of course). If I was going to move either way, I wanted it to be with my father who had been my friend and ally up to that point. If I had had the foresight to know how things were to go in California…well, I likely would have made the same choice, actually, but, it would have given me pause.

It’s hard to figure out what you would have done with foresight, when you already have the hindsight of knowing everything that happened in the end. I’m 34, and I have the big picture; it was a much smaller picture when I was 11. I only wish my instincts had been harkened to; if I’ve learned anything, it’s to trust my gut when something or someone doesn’t seem right. That’s become a tough but crucial lesson in siphoning toxicity from my life, because narcissistic abusers make a point of sowing self-doubt and breaking self-confidence. They train you to believe your instincts are questionable in lieu of trusting them instead. It’s been a vital component of survival, regaining trust in myself.

Even hindsight is not always 20/20. Sometimes when we can look back and zoom out, there’s too much that’s happened to try to untangle it all. Sometimes it’s all so snarled and snaggled, there’s no way to find the beginning of the thread – like Cobble’s Knot in Maniac Magee (a great middle-grade fiction novel by Jerry Spinelli, I highly recommend it! I had a great time teaching it to my sixth graders last year). Anyway, even so, there are certain moments, certain choices, that we can often find at the core of all the chaos. Even amidst all the rubble, there are epicenters from which damage can be said to originate.

If we maintain an awareness of that tendency, that possibility of such impact when we make decisions, hopefully we can try to tread more lightly.

Maybe that’s what I was trying to communicate to that little boy in the dream before I woke up. And while I don’t really know why this dream came to me last night, I’m going to take it as a sign to offer some unsolicited holiday advice here: tread lightly. Be mindful of how your actions and decisions can impact others, at all times but especially during the holidays – particularly, be considerate of how what you do and say will impact the young people in your life. Holidays are beautiful and fun but they can also be really difficult, really overstimulating, even intimidating to little ones. Here are the three holiday don’ts: Don’t force affection on kids, don’t demand they react in certain ways, and don’t get upset with them when they don’t meet your expectations of what you think the holidays are supposed to be.

Actually…as a teacher, I’m really not one for leading with “don’t” – it’s better to start with the instructive word, not the negation (for example, “walk please” instead of “don’t run”), because by the time you’ve finished saying the word “don’t”, they’ve stopped listening. At least by leading with the action word, they hear that first before they tune you out, ha! So, let me rephrase those three don’ts so that they’re three dos: do ask permission before getting affectionate with children, do give options for how they can react and respond, and do keep an open mind, and open communication, about what the holidays can be that will be meaningful and safe for all.

I’ve written before about how difficult all holidays are for me, and Christmas is no exception. In fact, as far as difficult holidays go, Christmas is probably the hardest for me. I no longer celebrate it, haven’t for years, but thirty years of very intense jolly jolly programming is pretty hard to delete from the hard drive of my psyche. Christmas memories alone are their own Cobble’s Knot in my mind. So, like with all holidays, I’ve figured out how to approach Christmas in a way that balances out allowing space for the few genuinely good memories as well as the plethora of bad ones, while not actually celebrating it at all because, like I said, being Jewish, we don’t do that. For years now, every Christmas Eve, I’ve made a big pot of tomato sauce, something I always find therapeutic. For most of the year, I work really hard on my mental health; today is one of those days where I have found it’s important to tread lightly with myself.

May everyone have a peaceful and comforting holiday season.