Extroverts, optimistic party planners, and other menaces

Disclaimer: It's the mad, misguided Christmas season, and that can mean only one thing—Mel is in rare form and her bad side is hanging on the clothesline for all to see. And this rant has nothing to do with Jesus, for whom I am very thankful.
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Christmas inevitably brings many stress factors. Not just the shopping, the over-spending, the regular-and-expected lying to children, the preparations, the baking, the decorations which might be skipped in years past but are now par for the course with a child in the house... Those are all festive yet exhausting. But the biggest stress inducers by far, for me at least, would be the multiple social occasions that pop up and the people who pressure you to attend them.

I'm an introvert. I've confessed that here before. It doesn't mean I don't like people; I genuinely like a lot of people. I even admire some of them, emulate a few, respect several... But anyway, being an introvert simply means that I am not fueled by my time around people. I find that it makes me weary. I am fueled, fired up, and energized by time alone or with just a close friend of two.

That said, you can imagine that the Christmas season is fraught with peril for people like me. Suddenly, a relatively open schedule is littered with events, parties and dinners and family occasions. It's hard to squeeze them all in, but more than that, it's difficult for someone like me to embrace them and anticipate them with anything other than a heavy sigh. I already know what they will entail. There will be long hours of conversation, often about things I don't know (at the many occasions that my happy, friendly, extroverted husband has been invited to); there will be lots of fattening, rich, sugar-laden food (that I will have to avoid so as not to aggravate my prediabetic condition); there will likely be other women I don't know fawning all over my guy, which makes me a tad uneasy. There will be several events which don't allow children, and that's fine here and there but introduces some friction into the works because although they're not my events, I am expected to find childcare—which can be challenging anytime, let alone at Christmastime...

To make matters more complex, my spouse loves people, adores these gatherings, and is happy not to miss a single one. Indeed, all the people who are like him, who also happen to be planners (thank Heaven the spouse is not), are delightedly setting up all sorts of fun evenings (and some daytimes) in which every attendee can come and happily revel in the wondrous company of all the other scintillating people.

Well, here's a newsflash: some people just don't revel in it. Some people find it tiresome after awhile. Maybe even after a very short while.

Just because people have good intentions does not guarantee that they always have good ideas. Sometimes, other people need to be honest and explain the flip side of all this Christmas activity. I don't want to be a hermit, but I am worn out with biting my tongue and saying yes, with shouldering blame for simply being who I am, for the implications from others that I am a strange, twisted, mean-spirited misanthrope when all I really want is meaningful time with my favorite people instead of frenzy.

That is all...for now. I apologize for being a damp dishcloth.

Happy, happy
Joy, joy.
-Ren and Stimpy

Wow, I'm old, but it ain't so bad

This past weekend was full of surprises.

I'd been denying my advancing age for several weeks. I figured, if I don't mention it, no one else will remember it. We're all busy, I'm not the kind of person who demands a big fuss, money's tight, etc.

I was wrong.

I was completely bamboozled over the weekend when I walked into what should have been a music rehearsal and found instead an assortment of family and friends who lay in wait with cake, presents, and shouts of "Surprise!" And Sunday was spent at, of all lovely things, the symphony. Aaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh.

So, being an ancient hag has its advantages. I don't recall anyone going to this much trouble when I was 20. Not even 25. You have to hang around much longer than that to earn a big shindig like this.

I wonder, if the Lord's willin' and the creek don't rise, what might happen when I turn 50?! I'm not going to rush to get there, but hey, it does change the way you think about it.

Happy tidings to all, and thanks goes out to those who participated in any way.

Surviving a birthday

We celebrated on Saturday. The rescheduled party went off without any major hitches, or at least that was my impression. Candles were spat upon, cake was eaten, presents were torn open…and the kid had a blast.

The funniest moment was the cake. This is the first year Marcus has given a hoot about cake; the first year he wouldn’t touch it, the second year he wouldn’t touch it, and now? He’s discovered how wonderful it is. But the cake itself wasn’t the funny part: it was his befuddled expression as he stood on a chair, sampling some icing, taking in our off-key happy birthday serenade. He was a bit uneasy—excited but concerned, happy but not quite comfortable with the whole center-of-attention thing.

It brought home to me the fact that we adults tend to dramatize events to the point of excess sometimes. I had started to build up the party a bit much, and then the whole fever/postponement occurred, and we sort of dropped the subject so as not to make him terribly upset about the delay. Honestly, he didn’t mind; he barely mentioned the fact that the party hadn’t happened, even though he’d talked about it and he had seemed to be anticipating it. His dad and I were more disappointed than he was. (Mostly, I was bummed because this meant the duplication of cleaning tasks that I’d thought were complete for awhile…)

But the new party date loomed, and I couldn’t help bringing it up again, several times. It took me until the day before the rescheduled affair to discern his party skittishness. I finally came out and asked him, “Do you want to have a birthday party?” And his answer, in a clear little voice, was surprising but not terribly so: “No, not really.” I had to stop everything and explain that no party meant no big cake, no presents, no fun visits from family. That changed his mind some, we talked more, and finally he was saying, “Yes, I do want to. I do.”

But his uncertainty was evident again, if for just a moment, as he contemplated the cake, the crowd, the song, the fact that it was all for him. And then, he got over it. He ate some cake, scurried away to lay low, played with his new loot. The big solo minute was over, and now he could simply luxuriate in the benefits of temporary stardom: a sugar high and new toys.

I’ll have to remember not to talk so much about upcoming milestones, changes, big deals. There must be at least a little bit of me in that kid—I recognized that expression on his face, and I’ll remember next time that less information isn’t always a bad thing.