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Dalton
Roberts |
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Many of us are relieved that Christmas is over and put away for another year. On a stress test I saw in a monthly magazine a few years ago, stress points were assigned to different experiences. If you accumulated 300 points or more in a year, you were in need of counseling. Just getting through Christmas racked you up 50 points. Like most tests, it didn’t fit the total population. There are plenty of people who enjoy Christmas. Their biggest psychological challenge after Christmas is the post-partum Christmas blues. The children they see too seldom have come and gone, leaving a big vacant place in their hearts. The “merry Christmas phone calls” have come to a screeching halt. The bright, flashing tree no longer creates an atmosphere of merriment and light in the living room. Santa Claus is snoozing back at the North Pole. Thoughts turn to the bills for gifts that will start arriving in a few weeks. What we are dealing with here is the post-partum Christmas blues. Like a new mother who has gone from happily selecting a name for the bouncing bundle of joy to changing it’s diapers, the Christmas lovers are taking back clothes and other gifts that don’t fit and dragging the faded tree to the curb. It can feel like a death and a burial. My first thought is please don’t kill yourself. Statistics on suicides for the Christmas and post-Christmas period are alarming. Disorientation, I have observed, is responsible for more suicides than real trauma. I have lost several friends this way and I never want to lose another. All disorientation passes and most real traumas heal. Remember one thing: We love you even when you are depressed. We are willing to keep on loving you until you are well again. Just don’t leave us. It is too final. It will remain a fishhook in our heart as long as we live. My second thought is that this would be a good time to just list one or two ways you might celebrate Christmas next year without going through this post-partum blues. I am amazed at how many “how to” lists are ten items long. You see them on the magazine racks: ten ways to do this, that and the other. If I suggested you write down ten ways you could change your celebration, you would never get to it and through it. So let’s just go for one or two. Any action always acts as a pushed domino to bring immediate results. So just push one or two dominoes. Right now I am looking at an email from a friend who possesses a refreshing, positive outlook on life most of the time. But this year, Christmas almost whipped her. One child is a drug addict and those who are not have come for a visit and gone home. Her note to me sounds like a swan song to life. She realizes it will be another Christmas or a Thanksgiving before they make the long drive to see her. It is really her note that prompted this column. I see a normally creative, focused mind temporarily disoriented. In the years I have corresponded with her I have never seen this level of disorientation and it makes me realize how close a positive person can come to deep depression and even self-destruction. Joy will return. Next Christmas, for sure because you have always gotten so much joy out of Christmas, but there’s no reason it cannot return right now. A time of quiet reflection on the joys you have experienced this Christmas and an expectant look forward to next Christmas should ease your post-partum blues. Martha Ann Brooks and I are working on a Christmas song titled, “Christmas Next Year.” Right now is the best time to make Christmas next year merrier and to heal the post-partum blues.
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