The Year I Slept Through Christmas

1983 was definitely the year I slept through Christmas.

I checked the calendar. Yep, Christmas fell on a Sunday that year. And, I recall where I was the surrounding years.

Oh wait. It actually might have been 1982. There’s a chance it was that year. But, I really think it was 1983. Not sure where I was 1982.

Christmas of 1981 I had taken a bus to Boonsboro, MD and spent the holiday with my Aunt Virginia, Uncle Bill and Laura and Tilghman. I have clear memories of that, and I’m positive it was that year.

1984, I was involved with Jim (my first husband) and spent that Christmas in Quakertown at his father’s.

So, that leaves it to be 1983 or 1982.

Really, I have no memories of celebrating Christmas either of those years. What stands out in my memory is that I slept through the entire Christmas Day. But, not before staying up til around 4 or 5 am as I recall, the night before.

It just had to be 1983. Because, not only did I stun myself that I slept through Christmas Day, but, that I could have gone to a church service that morning, but did not.

During those college years, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship held prime time in my campus experiences. And, I started to attend Newark Christian Fellowship (The Barn, in Kemblesville, PA; now known as Vineyard Christian Fellowship) during the spring semester of my first year, which would have been 1982.

There was another student in my bible study group that attended there, and I was curious why she closed her eyes, raised her hands and worshipped as she did in our small group. She seemed to have some type of joy that intrigued me, and though we weren’t particularly encouraged to attend this non-conventional church group by the campus ministry, there were a number of students that I seemed to connect with and gravitate to that attended there.

Initially, they were meeting on Sunday evenings in the Episcopal Church on South College Avenue in Newark. I pretty much recall my first visit there being around Easter 1982 and shortly thereafter the building was ready in Kemblesville to host the somewhat young congregation. Some of the best and most fervent years of my young Christian life were spent in this faith community.

I was married there in June 1985, and both of my sons were born during the time we attended there. The group seemed to provide me (and many others) with a sense of family/community I so desperately needed and had never experienced. Jim and I left this church in 1995, along with a number of other families, when the congregation went through a lot of upheaval and changes. This happens in congregations.

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The dorms would have been closed down at the UD for Christmas break. Which for me meant that I would have to stay at my mother’s house. I always took winter session, so that I could keep living on campus.

While there is a 5% chance that the day I slept through Christmas was 1982, let’s go with my 95% correct recollection it was 1983. It is likely that both years were about the same and there may have been some overlap of recollections.

When I think back on these days, I sometimes wonder what I ate. Obviously, I ate something. My mother never was one to cook what one might call a regular, home-cooked meal. When I was growing up, my father did all the domestic things in addition to his full-time job and caring for me in a number of meaningful ways. After his death, my mother cooked things from cans or heated things up. She may have cooked hamburgers or chicken but I have no clear memories.

This is huge in my mind of those times. Because I know that I ate. I do remember making Hamburger Helper and spaghetti in those days. I may have fried steaks. Why can’t I remember beyond the kitchen being always piled up with stuff, and dirty, and more…

I lived alone for about two months my senior year of high school when my mother was in the Delaware State Hospital from about January to March that year. I think of a lot of things from that time which I will write more of another time. But I often wonder, what did I eat?

Again, I recall being good at making Hamburger Helper…and I think I must have experimented cooking other things I had seen my father cook. I don’t know. To this day, I make amazing “this and that” soups with leftovers and little meat. Something my father did quite often.

As the dorms closed down and roommates and friends began heading home after their finals were over, I am positive I slept at the dorm until the last possible day students were to be out. It’s funny the recurrent dreams we have over the years–one repeated theme is always of me trying to move all my stuff out and cleaning and cleaning and cleaning….big shower rooms and people leaving and empty rooms and conflation of furniture and spaces and boxes and stuff and…and…somehow in the dreams I am one of the only people there and not yet cleaned and staff are coming and going…something to that effect!

There is a possibility that perhaps in 1982 I tried to get/put up a tree but I don’t recall. In 1983 (let’s just assume it was that year) I don’t recall a tree, nor any special food bought or cooked, and, I don’t recall what my mother was doing. She was somewhere in the house doing whatever she normally did. TV’s were likely on, the house was likely cluttered (the hoarding became increasingly prominent as the years went on after my father died).

What I recall was going into “my” room (which then was the master bedroom, with a double bed) and of course a lot of stuff was piled in there. I had my guitar and my Bible–the NASB to be exact. AHHH…this might confirm in was 1983. I think that is about the year that this would have been a new “toy” for me. I was going through the book of Jeremiah, highlighting stuff…or Isaiah…or both. I remember using colored pencils to try to indicate what type of text it was. I had some type of system that involved colors! The colors are still there, but very faded now.

I was majorly absorbed in the prophetic writings. They fascinated me, and, they somehow spoke to me.

Metaphor…the poetical…the promises…the mysteries…the trying to interpret. That was the best!

What did it all mean?

I probably thought I knew more than I knew then. Definitely, I didn’t know what I thought I knew…being a newbie convert and all. Still, we all ponder a number of things together…don’t we?

Forty+ years later…

In my mind’s eye, the days in late December 1983 were short, cold, dark.

I was in that room and I think I had locked the door to keep her out. I just wanted privacy.

In the bedroom closet were photo albums and boxes of photos and stuff. I remember sifting through it, looking at old photos and staring especially at ones with my father in them and me as a child. I would have been twenty years old then. Oh to be that age again…but only to be who I am now!

Don’t we all wish for that? Youth is wasted on the young, as they say!

I remember the lights being on in the room and perhaps my mother and I had fussed at one another…she never liked me to look through albums and stuff without her supervision. I think around that time I began demanding photos of my father and other things, and she did reproduce some for me. I know that her life was so difficult and complicated too, and her own forms of sufferings. I am continuing to explore and discover various layers.

But, that doesn’t change the facts that she was difficult. Things were not normal, and, quite depressing.

I looked through the photos and I remember being in-and-out of my bible, reading. And, playing guitar. There is a little short song I recall composing that night. I was no real guitar player, nor vocalist, but I did play for my own enjoyment back then. Perhaps I thought I could be musically creative–I loved the guitar-driven praise and worship that I was experiencing on campus and at the Barn.

Other people seemed to write songs. Maybe I could do that, too. Maybe.

The song was simple, and I was pleased I made it rhyme. Later, in my mid-twenties, I did it in calligraphy and stuck the parchment in my journal from that time. I did sing it at times, back then. Last year, I was looking through old journals and found it. I scanned it and added the notation of the melody, and put it up on Etsy. Perhaps, someone might find it and like it–who knows. It is (somewhat) easy to create listings. Just put stuff out there.

I seem to keep doing that, in all different sorts of ways.

But that night. I remember feeling so heavy in some ways. All kinds of emotions, thoughts and…questions. Questions about my life and about my future. All the kinds of things a twenty-year-old thinks about, and more…

I remember that there was going to be a Christmas service at the Barn the next morning, and this is why I’m 99% sure (ha, I know I know…it all doesn’t add up…but…that’s how memories can be! yes…it WAS 1983…) it was 1983 because there seemed to be a kind of excitement that Christmas was actually going to be on a Sunday.

I had a vehicle (ha ha…”if” it was 1983!) and I had every intention of waking up and driving up to the Barn to experience some type of joyous Christmas service…even though I found myself staying up so late.

I’ve always been a night owl…but…back then…I equally could sleep quite a lot, too! Didn’t we all?! Well. A lot of us.

I remember when morning came I kept hitting my snooze. And diving back into sleep…dreams…escape…somehow when morning came it didn’t seem to matter much whether I went.

I had lost my desire somehow.

Somehow, I just kept going back to sleep. I had already missed the service, so what did it matter. To be fair…now that I write…perhaps there was some snow falling and I wondered about driving up there. But, maybe not. I suppose I could Google “weather December 25, 1983 Philadelphia”...but…I won’t.

It doesn’t matter.

What matters is that I slept all day. I had the door closed and I’m sure I heard my mother up and down or whatever was going on. I don’t think I got up to eat. I just slept.

And then, when I probably had slept a good 12-14 hours, I decided maybe I should get up!

It was so disorienting. Darkness was falling again and likely I went into the kitchen and made some food and encountered my mother in some way. And likely, I ate and went back into the room and shut/locked the door again.

And that was just the 25th. Surely I couldn’t get back into the dorm until the first week in January. My campus memories are so much more vivid than my winter break days. I was working though, and perhaps that’s why I don’t recall a lot about being home there. I probably took all the extra hours available at my job(s) and maybe even visited some friends. I just can’t recall.

This year Christmas will also be on a Sunday.

This year, the first year since likely around 1982/1983, I have the feeling that Christmas doesn’t hold for me what it holds for others. Even in my college days, I found it odd that I was in that experience that seemed in stark contrast to others my age.

This year, I see images on social media of other women my age–even ones I went to college with and knew when my first marriage/kids were young–having experiences I am not having.

I know that I am not alone in this. I know there are others–so many others–who are hurting in various ways and going through the motions, perhaps. Like sleepwalkers, sometimes we are…

But that year…1983. I was a literal sleepwalker through it all. And from that time, I took something away.

It wasn’t much perhaps. Just a little song. A little song that in the past couple weeks I’ve actually played on my piano while my morning coffee brews.

So.

There’s THAT.

I don’t feel not “whole” –I mean, not in the general sense. God has done so much in my life over the years. I don’t feel empty, but, I do feel broken.

I experience so many broken places these days. And this produces a kind of anxiety. An anxiety that is a very real and rational response to the amount and types of broken things that are in and around me.

Every where I look, something seems to be broken. Or at least half-broken. Definitely, not functioning in the way it should be functioning.

And for that. I suppose this Christmas will not be as broken as it was in 1983. But, it will still be, half-broken, more-or-less…