My mom used to call me well before the trees began to shed their leaves. “What do you want for Christmas?” 

I dreaded the call. Year after year, I would tell her it was too early to ask. I was just trying to survive Fall semester. As a student and then a professor, I was always just trying to survive Fall semester. 

Our understandings of the season were out of sync, and in the gap between our views coursed a less-than-subtle annoyance and a strong temptation to trivialize her request. By the time I was old enough to be reached by phone for my wish list, I had taken up residency in new communities wherein we would critique consumerism and effortlessly cast judgments upon a generic category of people susceptible to Hallmark’s spin on the holiday season. 

Still, I returned home for the holidays almost every year, in part because I knew how important they were to my family. And, in part, because I am still my mother’s daughter in many ways, and even with critiques of capitalism on my lips, I can’t help but feel a little kid-like enthusiasm for those last couple of weeks in December. 

My mom loved the holidays. She had shamrock décor for St. Patrick’s Day, baked cookies in the shape of severed fingers for Halloween, and owned an impressive array of holiday vests, earrings, and accessories. We celebrated Sweetest Day in October, and I received gifts from my parents on Valentine’s Day. (“Gifts are your family’s love language,” my spouse once told me with the clarity that comes from learning a family’s culture as an adult.)

Christmas was, by far, my mom’s favorite holiday. Well after my sister and I had moved out, she decorated her townhome as if she still had small children she needed to fill with holiday cheer. Garlands adorned banisters, little villages of papier-mâché choir singers appeared throughout the house, a stuffed Santa and Mrs. Claus made by my grandmother accompanied wooden reindeers attached to their sleigh. Her artificial tree anchored the scene, covered in ornaments sourced from different eras and places: the mouse in the ski boot from my middle school ski club years, a tiny bone with the name of our family’s first dog in the center, a toy wooden bird I purchased in Portugal.

As a child, I was thoroughly awed by all of it. I religiously watched and rewatched Christmas specials. I went to holiday craft fairs. I made paper chain advent calendars, so that I could indulge in a nightly ritual, a mini-celebration of the simple act of inching twenty-four hours closer to Christmas. I retired to bed on the evening of December 25 with a slight sense of melancholy, knowing that I was the furthest in time I could possibly be from our next Christmas festivities. Even as I aged into adulthood, I promoted my family’s holiday parties with fervor, drawing on childhood memories of these fêtes and exaggerating their grandiosity to my partner while we drove back to Ohio. 

But something had also shifted. Nothing large or substantial enough to prevent me from participating in family gift exchanges or driving all over northeast Ohio to attend relatives’ holiday parties. Still, I had changed enough to bring an air of “judginess” with me when I returned to town, a judginess aimed largely at my mom, the orchestrator of so much of my family’s festiveness. I would roll my eyes internally at the seriousness with which she approached shopping lists, limited-time sales, dinner invitations, and other forms of holiday preparation. I cringed at what I considered to be reflections of the extent to which she had absorbed uncritically the norms of commercial capitalism, electing, conveniently, not to scrutinize my own holiday behavior very closely. (Or, at minimum, to assume that my awareness of the season’s consumeristic spectacles somehow made my involvement in them more tongue-in-cheek than impugnable.)

Judginess. Eye rolls. Cringes. These are teenage words and actions, exhibited by my adult self years after I exited that life stage. 

Still, these lingering traces of teenage haughtiness seem appropriate in retrospect, gesturing, as they did, to a host of under-processed adolescent feelings. Feelings about who she was. Feelings about who I was. And questions about who we were in relation to one another. 

I’m a product of 1990s pop culture. It was the decade that took me from seven to seventeen and shaped my understanding of adolescence. In the largely white, middle-class teenage world on my television set, teenage years were supposed to be a time of angst and rage, filled with slamming doors and “I hate you” outbursts. Rebellion took the shape of neon-colored hairstyles and punk rock attire. 

I never dyed my hair bright pink or embraced grunge. As far as I can remember, I never told my parents I hated them or slammed the door in their faces or acted moody or sullen around them. 

How strange, I used to think to myself, that I never seemed to go through that phase with my family. I could not point to any dramatic blow ups or fights. I couldn’t easily identify any sharp breaks. We were always close, I would say of my relationship with my mom during my teenage years, recounting the ways my mom would sit down with me for a snack and the chance to hear about my day after I returned home from school.

Instead of high drama, I let distance unspool my relationship with her, and, as the states between my parents and I grew, I grew and changed too. I took on new identities so slowly and so gradually that I barely noticed. All the same, a space was created between me and my parents, a gap just large enough for judgments to take hold. A critical distance, I might label that space now, if I wanted to be impressive; the degree of detachment required to critically evaluate something. Though, in this case, if I'm honest, I mean the distance needed to criticize one’s parents. 

I don’t know how to explain the sequencing, whether the geographic and emotional distance created the space for criticism or the criticism did the distancing. They seemed to work in tandem, one signaling the presence of the other. Both announcing that our relationships had changed. 

There were no pyrotechnics. No moments of high drama. None of the signs ‘90s pop culture had provided for recognizing adolescent identity work. But, appearances to the contrary, I never skipped that phase; I just misrecognized its form. The need to define myself played out through a million small and prosaic proxies. A teenager’s need to communicate I am not you suffused politely muted tensions surrounding decisions over where and what to eat together or how I spent my time in town or when to start preparing for Christmas. 

Under the surface of my awareness, I shaped my identity amid covert fears: the fear of being defined by my parents and the fear of rejecting them. I was threatened by the thought that I was them (the die of my identity already cast) and afraid to do anything I thought might jeopardize the ties between us. Subtle critiques became the tools I needed to carve out a middle course between mimicry and total detachment. Judgments built the buffer I needed to assure myself that I was immune to the shortcomings I unsympathetically ascribed to my family. 

I am not you. Nascent identities hinged on fragile efforts to hold myself apart, to create just the right amount of critical distance.

My mom died during the height of summer. We had been given just enough notice to make it back to my hometown for her final days. While driving to Ohio, I tried to recall everything I knew or had learned about dying, death, and grief. Memories of my grandparents’ deaths fused with things I read or watched, fiction and nonfiction, popular discourses and academic texts alike. I knew enough, I thought, about some of the things I would be called on to do to gird myself for them (or, more truthfully, to invent creative ways to avoid them). It was the parts of the process that I had forgotten about or failed to anticipate that leveled me. 

For example, I remembered the vigils, the hours sitting with a family member to keep them company as they died. I could anticipate that my sister and I would sit by our mother’s bedside as friends and family said their goodbyes, and we tried to deny that we would have to say our own. We kept ourselves occupied as people came and went, managing the in-home care team, making lists, sending people on errands, using any and all forms of busyness to keep moving and outrun the emotional heaviness in the family room. 

I had forgotten about the parts of the Catholic funeral Mass. I had forgotten or failed to anticipate that my sister and I would be expected to walk behind our mother’s body as they rolled her casket into my childhood church for her funeral service. The eyes of family and friends trained on the two of us, two daughters newly without their mother, while we walked hand-in-hand down the aisle of a familiar church behind her casket. 

I knew to dread the act of cleaning out our mother’s house, especially sorting through the holiday décor. So many beautiful voices have highlighted the ways the presence of the deceased’s objects–both mundane and cherished–can gesture to the permanent absence of their owner. I could hardly bear the thought of unearthing each ornament, each piece of handmade wall art, each garland, from their careful packing, knowing that my mom would never handle any of these objects again. Knowing that, like the ghost in A Christmas Carol, each object would invite us to relive memories of Christmases Past. 

I knew memories of who my mother had been would join us in that room; I forgot, or failed to anticipate, that I would be asked to confront who I had been as well. But those memories came unbidden too; and memories of my mom and memories of versions of myself jumbled together. The plastic cookie tray recalled the days my mom would spend baking cookies for Christmas parties. The porcelain tabletop tree reminded me of how I used to sit as a child, mesmerized by its delicate jewel-colored bulbs, resisting the urge to touch them. 

And somewhere in that room, amid the heaps of seasonal adornments, I sensed the adolescent who so blithely deemed so much of this stuff uncool and unimportant, who cringed judgmentally as she grew up, embarrassed by the “naïve consumerism” of it all. 

There were no pyrotechnics, no moments of high drama, as we sorted through my mother’s holiday décor. Only the startlingly painful realization that the dismissals that had come so easily no longer held any appeal. The eye rolls. The cringing, “judgy” posture. The soft put-downs. The comfort I took in being seated on my high horse. All tactics used to hold myself apart, to push away. Whatever their value had been in carving out a sense of self amid the false binaries I had created, I sensed they no longer served their purpose. They had all been means of distancing. And, at that moment, fresh from completing a multitude of different rituals designed to help us say our goodbyes, the very last thing I wanted was her further away from me. 

I took the Christmas tree. We set it up every year. It is the only holiday décor we display in our house, save for the weekly appearances of the Shabbat candlesticks. On a December weekend, we assemble my mom’s tree, hanging ornaments as I narrate their origin stories, or at least the ones I can remember. We carefully place the most fragile bulbs on the top third of the tree, while our toddler pulls sturdier ornaments off the lower branches and rearranges them to suit their liking. 

Perhaps because their birth and my mother’s death occurred within the same planetary rotation around the sun, I think a lot about letting this child go. When they were in their infancy, I once quoted a line from Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere in a thank you card I was sending to a mother of a college-aged kid. Describing a child’s slide into adolescence, Ng compares the mother’s adjustment to decreased physical touch and increased distance to “training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.”

I shared the line in the spirit of connection, as if it captured some kind of a parenting truth that we both understood. Though, when I sent that card, my child was still a baby, physically glued to my body for large portions of each day, and my relationship to that truth was more imagined than lived. 

I take talk of letting go to its logical extreme, envisioning our last goodbye to one another and what I’ll say to them if I’m able. I think of the thread imagery in William Stafford’s poem, “The Way It Is,” and imagine talking about thread. I would tell them that someday the thread that connects us will unspool past the place where we can see each other. 

I’ll say to them that I know that the grief of goodbye can make you feel desperate to want to wind the thread back, to snap it back into its place quickly, with all the urgency of a retracting fishing line, to close that gap between us. But maybe it is possible to do otherwise when things can’t be changed. Maybe it is possible to find a way to rest and take comfort in the knowledge that that thread between us is, has been, and will always be there, unalterably connecting you and me. Two separate and flawed human beings who–whether by chance or design–are connected to each other in this very particular way. 

It can withstand every act of exhalation, breathing room and distance into the relationship and giving you the freedom to become your own person. You. I. We aren’t wholly defined by the thread’s presence. And it cannot be severed. Not by distance. Not by death. 

The scene in my head is a little unstable. It is blurry, shape-shifting, half-developed. I tell myself that I’m talking to this toddler, gifting them something that will help them find peace as they grow into their own person, and we take our leaves of each other. I’m trying to gift them freedom and security to get us through all kinds of letting gos, the large ones and small ones. I’m trying to call something productive into being so that they have a richer way of thinking about independence, identity, and connection, something greater than the fears that tell us to cling or cut ties.

I tell myself that I’m talking to this toddler, but, really, I know I’m drawing this scene for myself, drafting the words I need to hear to make sense of all the same. 

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T. Donofrio is the Esther and Robert Armstrong Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Coe College, where she teaches Communication Studies courses and researches efforts to make meaning of atrocities and mortality. Her scholarship has been published in multiple academic journals, including Women’s Studies in Communication, the Western Journal of Communication, and Voices of Democracy. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Maryland and resides in Iowa City, Iowa.