Some of you may recall a post I’d shared recently about a very special sweater I’ve had for ages that I’d discovered had gone missing. I mourned the loss of this sweater for a long time, and contemplated how deeply it bothered me because it had originally been my mother’s sweater.

Well, an accidental donation or tossing out of this one sweater would have made sense. But I started to notice that other sweaters of mine were missing. Lots of other sweaters. Ones I wouldn’t have gotten rid of. I couldn’t find them anywhere and it was driving me bonkers! I looked in the basement and in closets and even pulled the drawers out of the sweater dresser in case any of them had gotten stuck behind the drawers. But too many of them were missing for any of that to be logical. I finally felt that I must have packed them away in a bin because they were taking up too much room in the drawers, and I could just pull from the bin whenever I needed one. Presumably I would have done this over the summer, when I’d had more free time, and then forgotten all about it because who thinks about heavy thick sweaters in July and August? No one thinks about them until they need them (which I have this week because it’s frigid out). Winter me appreciated the logic and effort of summer me, if that was in fact what I did. Except, I couldn’t fricking find said bin anywhere! So I couldn’t be sure that was what happened at all. Ugh, it was maddening.

Well, my husband finally helped me dig around yesterday and he found the damn bin full of sweaters, in a place I couldn’t reach or see. It was literally out of sight, out of mind. But hooray!

Happy to be much warmer now, I pulled on an extra thick one for errands yesterday, and today, after a little deliberation, I pulled on the teal sweater that I’d originally been so heartbroken over losing.

I wore the sweater for most of the morning, out to drop off my kid at her school vacation day camp and through the grocery store. I had it on while putting away the groceries once I got home. After everything was put away, I sat down in the kitchen, still hyper-aware of the sweater on my body while I sipped some water, and stared at the cabinet where normally I’d have arranged our Hanukkah decorations, but I just haven’t been feeling up to doing so. I haven’t had the time and really haven’t had the strength and energy. I’ve been feeling guilty about that, feeling as if now it was too late to get it done.

I abruptly had an epiphany right in the midst of those feelings. Too late to decorate? Why? Because I didn’t do it immediately after Thanksgiving, or before we went on school break? Hanukkah doesn’t even start for two days! Too late for whom? Too late for what? Whose timeline am I on???

You see, growing up in my mother’s house, Christmas was EVERYWHERE from the exterior to the living room to the bedrooms to the kitchen to the bathrooms. Dozens of huge tote buns filled with her decorations had to be dragged in from the shed to accomplish all this. Holiday decorating was a test of endurance that began practically while the leftover Thanksgiving turkey was still cooling. I hadn’t realized until today how pervasive that mentality apparently was, even though I haven’t identified as a celebrator of Christmas in about twenty years, and even though I have just one bin of Hanukkah stuff compared to the dozens of bins she had. The muscle memory that the idea alone of holiday decorating brings back to me makes me ache even more than I already do all the time. It’s actually a hallmark of a larger mental and behavioral pattern of continual overwork, of constant doing and going, constant effort to keep getting it all done, which becomes particularly frenzied at holiday time. Where did I learn this mental and behavioral pattern, you ask? I learned from the best: my mother.

My therapist tells me that the difference between my mother’s overwork and mine is that she did it for narcissistic validation, while I have gotten stuck in self-sacrificing mode for most of my life because I was raised to take care of everyone else first.

All of this to say, as I sat there in my kitchen today realizing that I am on no one’s timeline but my own, and I can put up Hanukkah decorations whenever I want or even choose not to do so, and I was struggling so hard about it because of the way she raised me, the fact that I was wearing her sweater suddenly became too much for me. So I yanked it off and threw it across the room. I’m trying to learn to take better care of myself by not overdoing it, by learning my limits and respecting them. I’m learning to save some spoons for myself. And I made it clear long ago that I’m not spending any more spoons on her bullshit. I still like that sweater and I may still wear it on occasion. But if it becomes another weight to carry, it isn’t going to stay on my body.

Moving forward with foresight now, if decorating for the holidays is important to me in the future, I will work on saving up more spoons for it, on not overdoing it with many other things so there’s still enough energy available for me to do it. (If I were to say, “in hindsight, if it was important to me to decorate, I should have saved some spoons,” it edges into this very blame-y space which is neither what I want nor what I mean to say.) Moving forward, if I can avoid overworking myself so much, perhaps I’ll be better able to remember things like getting all my sweaters tucked away in a bin for better storage, something that probably felt like an item on a list I could check off and no longer dwell on.

The holiday season, and life in general, often feel like an endless series of things we have to do. Decorate, bake, cook, shop, dress, party, host, attend, visit, call, write; squeeze in every single festive thing you can, because, “tradition!” (Ha, I snuck a Fiddler on the Roof reference in there.) Well, I am learning this, and I am passing the message on to you: no. No. NO.

We. Don’t. Have. To.

There is no have to. There’s, I can, I will; or, there’s no. You’re in charge. You define your own festive experience and it is okay if it isn’t always the exact same thing every year.

You know, saying that feels almost as freeing as yanking your sweater off and throwing it across the room.

Happy holidays to you all — whatever that means to you. Cheers.