Grandma-to-be resents son’s plan to nix holiday traditions
DEAR CAROLYN: My son and daughter-in-law are expecting a baby in the spring. My son recently told me they do not plan to have a Christmas tree or have Santa as part of their holiday at their home. My son grew up practicing a Christian religion but after marriage chose a different Christian path.
I understand some of the religious reasons behind their choices. But there is other reasoning that seems extreme and bizarre to me. It saddens me that some of our family’s traditions will not continue, but I’ll get over that. Their household, their traditions; our household, our traditions.
What I am having difficulty working through is:
■ The embarrassment I feel. I do not want my friends or extended family to know about this choice.
■ My growing resentment toward my daughter-in-law for changing his religious path. I did not feel this way before the Christmas decision.
■ The gap I think will continue to widen given some of their beliefs.
I hate having these feelings. How do I stop them? — Grandma
DEAR READER: You talk yourself into your daughter-in-law and her ways. Actively.
Because you have nothing to gain — and this entire family to lose — by pursuing other lines of thinking.
I know you know this, since you’re asking to change your feelings vs. change your daughter-in-law. And that is to your enormous credit.
But it is clearly an emotional issue with such high stakes, over — I hope we can agree on this — a tiny part of your lives, since Santa is once a year for only a handful of years. So the best approach I can offer is for you to go a step beyond “stopping” your feelings (impossible) to outright invalidating them (possible).
Let me explain.
I am not dismissing how you feel. I don’t know your backstory, motivation or the emotional associations you have with your traditions, so my invalidating your feelings would be presumptuous and wrong.
But it’s not wrong for you to do it to yourself. You are entitled to judge yourself as harshly as you want if you, for example, prioritize your Christmas practices over embracing your daughter-in-law in full.
I suggest this because it works: To maintain a grievance against someone requires wanting, on some level, to remain aggrieved. We have to think we are in the right; we are victims; we are entitled to what we want.
So what I’m suggesting is a self-administered sledgehammer to the ideas or values behind your grievance. Replace them with the kind of values you think would create the feelings you’d rather have. Go full bonkers and talk to yourself in the mirror: “I am someone who embraces love.” “I am someone who welcomes other faiths, traditions and cultures.” “I take pride in how flexible I am.”
And, please, humor me with this one: “I will be embarrassed when I am thoughtless, or cruel, or rude or out in public without pants, but I refused to see well-meaning differences as cause for embarrassment.”
Conviction makes repetition makes habit makes change.
Please also note that your son, an adult, changed his own religious path. So if you’re going to resent anyone for this, choose to resent him.
Then choose not to resent anyone. That is (ahem) as Christmas as it gets.