Battling Christmas Angst

I look at the Christmas pajamas I've purchased this year. Are they too feminine? Are the colors wrong? Will my choice start another fight on a day that should be about peace?

I take out the ornaments from years gone by. She made these for me in elementary school. I turn them over in my hands and think about what was once our happy family.

I second guess each and every present I've purchased. There are some things she wants that I just can't buy, because I know they are emblematic of this lost person she has become, not the person I nurtured and raised. She still wears makeup. Will it offend her if I buy that? Will that piece of jewelry be considered too girlish?

I pause as I begin wrapping those gifts. Oh God, I think. This wrapping paper has a pink background and Santas on it. Is this going to upset her? Will she think I am sending a secret message? I make sure to wrap some of my son's gifts in that paper. I scold myself for even worrying about this.

I write her nickname on the gift tags that accompany her presents. Will this be controversial? Will she secretly or openly seethe at this? For she has asked us to stop using her nickname and to use the name she picked, a bastardization of the name we gave her.

I think about my aging and ailing mother-in-law, and how my daughter won't be joining us on a trip to visit her this year. She chose friends over family this holiday. I wonder if she'll ever see her grandparents again.

I look at the board game sitting on the shelf, the one that we played five years ago over holiday break. The one where my older son had said, "let's do boys versus girls" and she called him a transphobe. We don't play games together at holiday break anymore.

I look at my piles of homemade Christmas treats that I've baked by myself the last few years, because she has no interest in carrying on my mother's legacy. I wistfully think about doing this with my mother, and how special it was, and wonder if I will ever get to do this with my daughter again.

I think about the Christmas letter I write to each child every year. I don't know what to say. There is so much tension, so many topics that cannot be discussed, so many things that can set her off.

I long for Christmas past.

But all I really have is Christmas present.

I refuse to let a sacred and beautiful time of year be ruined by this cancer that keeps metastasizing in our home. So, I keep wrapping, baking, praying, and dreaming.

I dream that Christmas future still has her in it, part of our family, healthy and unharmed. A Christmas with my daughter, who loves herself just as she was born - just as God made her — perfectly imperfect.