The Gift of Resentment

“What do you want for Christmas?” my wife asks me every December as we decorate the tree.

I shrug my shoulders. I don’t know how to answer. I’m afraid to answer. I don’t want to want anything. I don’t want to wish for something I might get. I’ve done that before, and it’s left a sad pang in my heart.

But she really wants to know, so I say, “Let me think.” And that’s always a mistake because those three words invite childhood memories to randomly flash through my body, prompted by bright red, yellow, green, and blue tree lights. Like the fact that we never had a real Christmas tree because Mamma feared the lights would start a fire. So one year she and Daddy went down to the corner automotive store and bought an artificial tree. My parents let me and my sisters decorate it however we wanted. Then Mamma doused the tree with a pine-scented spray and set a tall spice-scented candle on top of the television. She never burned it because of the whole “it’ll start a fire” fear, but the candle still made the living room smell nice. In the mornings, closer to Christmas Eve, she’d bake pumpkin or pecan pies. I’d wake up to the smell of cinnamon and nutmeg dancing in the air and feel warm and safe.

Those were a few of my favorite things.

My sisters and I got excited about Christmas just like most kids, and we wanted all kinds of things. But we knew better than to ask for anything specific. It wasn’t because we were poor. We had a home, a hot meal every day, and clothes to wear. Daddy’s job at the brake shop made sure of that. Not much more, though. Daddy’s alcoholism made sure of that, too. We were taught to never expect a gift, even though beautifully wrapped presents began appearing under that artificial tree as Christmas Day neared. When I was old enough to understand that Santa was a myth, I joined family members in their quest for the perfect surprise gift.

That was what my family decided Christmas should always be about: surprises and gags. We rarely could afford to give each other specific material items, so we focused on giving each other “gotcha” moments. On meager savings, we’d think of a gift that went beyond the unexpected and share a jubilant joke that became an instant Polaroid moment slapped into the family photograph album.

I knew I wanted to be a writer since the third grade, and the Christmas of my freshman year in high school, as I sat on the floor beside the tree, I unwrapped a bright yellow toy typewriter from my mom. She stood before me grinning, a maniacal-looking giant in an evergreen polyester pantsuit. “Sorry we couldn’t get you a real one!”

Everyone laughed. I didn’t think it was very funny. In fact, it hurt. I almost cried.

Minutes later, Mamma shoved another gift across the floor toward me.

“Here, try this one,” she said with the same crazy grin.

I was afraid to open it.

“Open it!” my sisters chimed.

I did: It was a real baby blue Smith-Corona typewriter. I almost cried.

“Gotcha!” Mamma said.

She did.

Christmas held many surprises for my family. Some were not so pleasant. Daddy’s after-work alcohol habit guaranteed it. He drank daily, unless he was on probation for a drunken driving offense. Mamma was angry daily, too. Together, they made some unsteady peace treaties on Christmas Eves so that my sisters and I could have pleasant memories—enough to last the next 364 days of a chaotic life amid substance abuse.

Mamma wasn’t a good actress, though. Her mouth curled up in an uncontrollable smirk when she was lying. She could rarely hide her disgust for my father’s addiction. She tried, though. Boy, did she try. And one year, she surprised Daddy and me with the ultimate gotcha gift.

It was the year that Daddy was tossed in jail for the second time for drunken driving. It was the year that the family was, as a result of expensive legal fees, tapped on disposable income. It was the year I was crushed when I showed up for free guitar lessons at my school with my plastic six-string and my classmates laughed. Everyone else had a real guitar. I was so embarrassed that I never returned for Lesson Two.

That Christmas, Mamma announced to my sisters and I that presents would be scarce, but that she decided to break her piggy bank and give Daddy a creeper so that he wouldn’t have to get his back greasy when he worked on cars. She’d already wrapped it by the time we came home from school, but she described it in detail: A cherry wood-base with a black vinyl headrest, smoothly mobilized by four black plastic rollers.

I was excited for Daddy. Every day, I’d gawk at the pine-scented tree with the pretty red, yellow, green, and blue lights and see Daddy’s huge, rectangular gift underneath. I imagined his surprise when he opened it.

“Daddy, I know what Mamma got you,” I’d tease.

“What is it?” he’d play along.

“I can’t tell you!” I’d cry.

The next day, the teasing continued.

“I know what you’re getting!” I’d sing. “I know what you’re getting!”

“What is it?” he’d ask.

“I can’t tell you, Daddy, but you’re going to love it!”

We did this every day, and it made me happy. The gift represented a more permanent cease-fire between my parents. It was a sign of hope that calmer times were ahead, that uncertainty and fear would dissolve, and that my parents would love each other again and that Mamma wouldn’t be so angry all the time. In a way, the creeper was a gift to all of us, and I clung to its hope with giddy excitement.

As usual on Christmas Eve, Daddy came home drunk and Mamma was mad. But there under the tree—surrounded by several other cheaply yet beautifully wrapped presents—was Mamma’s gift to Daddy. All would be right with the world soon.

We unwrapped gifts one at a time, marveling at the various looks the presents brought to one another’s faces. Finally all that was left was the oblong present. I rubbed my hands together and grinned.

“That one’s for you, Daddy!” I said.

He managed a drunken grin, barely conscious in his recliner.

Mamma walked slowly toward the tree, grabbed the ends of the gift, and slid it away from an overhanging string of lights. Excitement grew. I began clapping as Mamma hoisted the package and began walking toward Daddy.

Then she turned and walked toward me. She sat the package down in front of me as I sat on the floor, and my brows bunched in confusion.

“Open it,” she says. “It’s yours.”

I was stunned. I looked around at everyone. Daddy still wore his clueless, drunken grin. He had no idea what was happening either. But everyone else stared at me, smiling. My sisters were in on this gag, too.

Part of me didn’t want to open it. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew that I wanted it to be Daddy’s creeper. It needed to be Daddy’s creeper. And it wasn’t. Still, I was a kid and I loved gifts. It was the last gift, too, and I loved being the center of attention. But it just felt wrong.

I slowly peeled the tape off the edges of the foil-like wrapping paper, at first tearing the pieces apart carefully so as to not damage anything, then finally ripping the wrapping away in what-the-hell fashion. From the top of a cardboard box, an image appeared: a dark brown neck with white, luminescent dots almost evenly spaced, separated horizontally by shiny metal bars.

Graph paper? I thought. They got me a big, box of graph paper for Christmas?

As I tore off more of the wrapping away, a dark black hole appeared with a huge, brown teardrop hugging the side. Now the shape of a curvy woman appeared, all tied together by six shiny strings.

It was a guitar. A real guitar.

I screeched. Everyone grinned wider. I ripped the rest of the paper off, and Mamma helped me open the stapled cardboard box that housed a beautiful black case, held secure with a single clasp. I flipped the clasp, opened the case, and stared silently at the most beautiful work of art I’d ever seen.

I pulled the guitar out of its case and hugged it to my waist. It fit. I was finally old enough for a real, big-girl guitar, and as I strummed the strings randomly, I felt grown. Mature.

Mamma smiled wildly. My sisters gawked and squealed.

“We got you!” Mamma cried.

Yes, they did.

Daddy tried to show excitement, but his eyes had long ago drooped and his head periodically bobbed as he headed toward his nightly passing out phase.

I loved that guitar for years. I strummed and picked out popular tunes by ear and made up my own songs. I lugged it around to college dorms, first jobs, and multiple apartments, thinking one day I’d take lessons and learn to have a real relationship with its sound. But it never became a part of me and I never quite understood what repelled us.

We weren’t meant to be together.

The day after Christmas that year I received the guitar, my father realized that he didn’t get a gift from Mamma at all—that she spent money we didn’t have on a guitar for me. He found out that she bought the gift in defiant, “I’ll show you” resentment of all the heartache and financial troubles that his drinking had caused that year. We didn’t have the money for a guitar, but she bought it anyway.

Mamma took all the money we had in our savings to buy the guitar because, as she told Daddy, “I have the right to spend money we don’t have, too.”

I’d learn the truth years later as Mamma and I shared a plate of smoked brisket with all the fixings. We were retelling our favorite Christmas “gotcha” moments. Mine was the typewriter. Hers was the guitar.

“I really showed him that year,” she said matter-of-factly.

The potato salad suddenly tasted sour.

Before I even knew my mom’s motivation behind the guitar gift, I sensed something wasn’t right about that instrument. I never played it to its potential, and many years later, I gave it to my 15-year-old niece, Crystal. The guitar’s once-firm black carrying case was weathered and misshapen, but Crystal cherished it. She had dreams of learning to play it, moving to Nashville, and becoming the next Lee Ann Rimes.

So far, none of that has happened, and I’m beginning to wonder if that guitar is jinxed. Spiritually, it makes sense. Gifts given in resentment start out tainted, and so much negative energy went into this instrument’s purchase that maybe some of that energy was absorbed into its smooth wood and sound.

If my niece ever wanted to sell the guitar, I think I’d retrieve it—and then maybe burn it. At the very least, I’d hire an energy worker to come exorcise its demons and redeem its true worth. After all, it’s not the guitar’s fault it was given in resentment.

“So?” my wife says. “What do you want for Christmas?”

I don’t hesitate anymore. “Underwear and socks,” I say. “Warm, comfy socks.”

“Well, that’s exciting,” she jokes.

“Exactly.”

Rage Against the Christmas Tree

Thanksgiving 1990 kicked off a tough holiday season, gift wrapped by an all-too-familiar holiday depression. Irritability and irrational anger took hold: I was pissed off at society, that the day after Thanksgiving I was expected to be bustling with good-neighborly, holiday glee. I wasn't happy, damn it, and all this forced jolliness was about as disgusting to me as runny baby poop.

Vacillating between a short-fuse temper and depression, I planned to sleep away the holidays. My co-workers at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times had other ideas. They encouraged me to get a Christmas tree.

"It'll brighten your spirits," the one editor said.

"Yeah," another editor chimed in, "come on, Cathy. Get a tree. You'll feel better."

"Maybe I don't wanna feel better," I snapped.

At home the next day, I tossed and turned on my couch, thinking of childhood Christmas Eves when I’d be silly: put bows on my head, tie ribbon around my face, and wedge myself under the family's artificial Christmas tree, playing out my annual role as a jeans-clad baby Jesus. Christmas wasn't always so bad. There were some good moments. Until Daddy came home.

Until I started going to those damn Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings, I thought. Those fuckers have ruined my childhood.

"Oh, hell!" I growled, rolling off the couch and putting on my shoes. I was off to get a tree.

Minutes later, I stood in the seasonal forest that emerged every December outside the local Albertson’s grocery store. The scent of pine was invigorating. I caught myself smiling. Finally, I saw it: a big tree with few bald spots. I paid the clerk, who helped me load it onto the roof of my Hyundai Excel, and I was off, singing along out of tune with an Amy Grant holiday cassette tape. Back home, I pulled the tree off the car roof, lugged it into my townhouse living room, leaned it against the wall, and gave my two cats a “no climbing” lecture. Hand over fist, I pulled out the lights and the garland and the bulbs and the tree stand from the under-the-stairs closet. Still humming tunes from the Amy Grant tape, I loosened the screws in the tree stand and lifted the tree’s trunk into place.
 

It didn’t fit.

Dumbfounded, I stared at the tree. It didn’t make sense to me that the trunk wouldn’t fit in the stand. I loosened the screws as far as they would go and tried again.

The tree still didn’t fit.

“Huh,” I said, stunned and a bit perturbed.

Grumbling under my breath, I leaned the tree against the wall and marched into the kitchen to grab the knife I used to carve my first Thanksgiving Day turkey a few weeks earlier. Like a woman possessed by a bah-humbug demon, I assumed a deep, solid horse stance from my Taekwondo days, held the knife handle with both hands, and began carving chunks of bark from the tree’s trunk. I sliced and I shaved, sliced and shaved. After a few minutes, I stopped, lifted the tree, and tried to place the trunk into the tree stand.

It still wouldn’t fit.

“Shit!”

Rage raced through my body. I hated that tree much like Mamma hated an always-drunk Daddy. A memory flash of Mamma pummeling Daddy with a fresh loaf of Buttercrust bread sparked my next move. In a Tazmanian Devil-like trance, I took the handle of that knife and began shaving the tree’s trunk repeatedly and wildly in a herky-jerky attack, screaming a string of obscenities.

Shaving, shaving, shaving, shaving, shaving, shaving…

I snapped, and then blacked out.

When I came to, I stood frozen before a mangled and mutilated tree trunk with the knife still in my hand and sweat rolling down my cheeks. Chunks of bark were scattered all over the teal carpet. Gooey sap, too. And blood. There was blood on the knife, blood on my T-shirt, blood on the tree, and drops of blood on the carpet. In my maniacal state, I had sliced my thumb open.

I stepped back from the tree in shock. What just happened? How did I get so out of control? The rage seemed to come out of nowhere. And all over a tree? Really?

I dropped to my knees, exhausted, bleeding, and shaking. I was terrified at what I had done. But the longer I stared at the tree, the more I slowly became repossessed.

Pacing in half-moon circles like a shark preparing for an attack, I lunged forward, grabbed the tree, and placed the trunk in the stand.

It still didn’t fit.

“Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!” I screamed, stomping up and down.

I yanked the patio door wide open and with Herculean strength hoisted the tree on my shoulders and heaved it outside with an angry grunt.

“Die, you motherfucker piece of shit!”

Slamming the door closed, I stomped into the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of rum, and returned to the same uncomfortable couch where all this mess started. I got drunk and wrote stupid Christmas cards, trying to fake jolliness. I didn't realize until three months later that, in my alcoholic stupor, I had addressed some of the cards to the wrong people.

"We got your Christmas card," my sister Susan said in March. "Who's Lynnette?"

Seven months later, I stopped drinking. I haven't mutilated a tree since.

A Letter to a Student on Failure

In a recently Facebook post, I shared a letter I wrote to one of my Taekwondo students, a staunch perfectionist, after he and another classmate failed a tense and difficult promotion exam. The words resonated with readers. Some friends loved how I used my own failures to help teach the students that it was possible to recover from such a ghastly event. Others loved that my colleagues and I allowed these students to experience failure at all.

There’s a national debate these days about whether we coddle our kids too much. Buzz terms like “helicopter parent” describe moms and dads who try to protect their children from the harsh realities of life. I have no stake in “how-to-better-parent” debate. I’m not a parent. I’m just a martial arts teacher. And an imperfect one at that. My concern is for one kid at a time. My concern today is for the young man standing before me with tears in his eyes and a broken heart—that he understand “this too shall pass.”

Here’s the letter:

Dear O.,

Son, I know how you felt on Saturday. I know how hard you worked, and I know how much you wanted to complete all portions of the test perfectly. It didn't turn out that way, and that reality stings. I’ve been where you were this weekend, and there's no flowery way to say it: It hurts.

When I flunked my first attempt at black belt, I did so in front of a roomful of teachers and peers. It was embarrassing. I was heartbroken. And I won’t lie to you and say that that kind of imperfection doesn’t still make me very angry with myself. Like you, I’m a perfectionist. I want to ALWAYS be perfect. And yet, I’m too often not. In fact, far from it.

I’m sending you the below blog post so that you might know that you’re not alone, and to warn you that the drive for perfection has a pretty sharp double-edged sword. I’m still working on not being perfect—on just trying my best. Sometimes I succeed. I’m getting better at accepting who I am—celebrating my strengths, accepting my weaknesses without such harsh judgment, and enjoying the journey of discovering what I’m good at, what I’m not, and deciding whether I want to work harder to improve the latter.

You’ve come a long way from the boy who cried when he didn’t win first place in end-of-class games at Tao of Texas Martial Arts Institute. Remember that boy? You’re not that same boy. You’ve grown so much since then. And your weakest part of the test WASN’T board breaking! But I know: It’s just that days like Saturday make people like us think we haven’t moved an inch. That’s why we need mentors who tell us the truth. So I hope you get something out of reading my story. I hope to see you Tuesday.

And don’t forget one very important thing: I’LL BELIEVE IN YOU UNTIL YOU CAN BELIEVE IN YOURSELF.

http://bigbudoworld.blogspot.com/2013/05/breakthrough-breakdown.html