For a long time, I thought every family in our country lived just like the ones in Libelle, one the weekly women’s magazines.
Everyone except us.
I was gutted.
I wanted so badly to be just like them.
My mother never knitted soft-coloured jumpers like the mothers in the photos. She’d get bags of sheep’s wool from a farmer and whipped up some scratchy, ugly shit from what she’d spun herself.
She didn’t do stencilling, she made weird pottery.
She didn’t try out fancy recipes, she just chucked whatever into a pressure cooker. She didn’t quilt bedspreads or crochet curtains.
She covered the walls of our house in bright green, and my father painted a piece of art onto the door.
We didn’t have a cosy watercolour birthday calendar.
No little knick-knack display on the wall, no floral crockery.
My mother never brought fresh flowers into the house. She didn't do slimline snacks, and discount vouchers for Family Days Out ended up straight in the bin.
Instead, we had black linoleum in the living room and a steel office cabinet against the wall. There were old ice skates hanging on the wall, and when it rained, we were allowed to roller-skate indoors.
We’d visit grandma every now and then, but never with home-baked cookies.
Our Christmas tree wasn’t decorated according to the latest fashion. Not according to any fashion, really.
We were just winging it.
When we went for a picnic, the lemonade was warm
And there was sand in the sandwiches.
Ants crawled over the blanket. Wasps everywhere.
It never looked like that in Libelle.
You never saw my father relaxed and smiling, doing something with the kids and a coloured beach ball.
You’d never see him standing by a barbecue with a spatula, either. Actually, you barely saw him anywhere near a barbecue. Or at dinner, for that matter.
He was working.
My mother lived her own life, and she often forgot to hang the key in the shed. When us kids came home from school, we couldn’t get into the house.
Luckily, we were good at climbing, and usually there was a small window left open upstairs.
Sometimes she’d whip up a dessert from a packet of instant pudding powder. We thought it was amazing.
Our absolute favourite meal was macaroni with cubes of spam and cheese, covered in ketchup.
We were just winging it.
But at Christmas, my mother suddenly Stuck to Rules
We didn't know which rules exactly, but there must have been a lot of them. Apparently, we didn't meet a single one.
She probably had a picture of her own Libelle family in her head for Christmas.
She piled frustration upon frustration, stress upon stress, and tantrum upon tantrum.
The tension was palpable all through Christmas, and eventually she’d storm out of the house, nostrils flared, face bright red.
"I'm going to get my own flat!" she’d scream.
You never heard the magazine mums talk about thát.
"Go ahead," we’d call after her.
The idea felt like a relief.
But that wasn’t what she wanted to hear.
After a few hours, she’d always be back.
And only after my father brought her cups of tea and she’d had the chance to shout some more, life went back to normal.
A bit, anyway.
It took a while before I understood why I preferred to skip Christmas altogether. And then another long while before my relationship with Christmas was restored.
And only recently I realised that the magazine family was nothing more than an editor’s fantasy. Those families were just models posing for a photographer.
It was a real shock, but the relief was bigger
It released me from the obligation to do anything at Christmas. Nowadays, I just do whatever I feel like.
I don't force myself to go to my mother’s for Christmas anymore.
I don’t have to go to church either, or do any of the other things that were once imposed on me.
Sometimes we stay home.
Sometimes we go somewhere.
Sometimes we do things together, sometimes alone. Sometimes we invite someone over.
And sometimes we just hang, with a movie and the wood burner on.
I still don’t have any floral crockery, and I’ve never made room for a cosy watercolour birthday calendar in the loo.
Yet, I’m pretty happy
My sister tells me our mother still storms out of the house with a bright red face at Christmas.
Some things never change.
You could fill an entire Libelle issue with it.
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