I absolutely bloody love Christmas. I really do. Presents, pantomimes, tinsel and trees, every ritual fills me with elf-like glee. So people moan about the commercialisation, blah blah blah, but it’s CHRISTMAS!!! Helen loved it even more. Having Millie and Matt allowed us to rekindle childhood delight that had never much dimmed.
Even with this backstory, I am shocked when two days before Halloween Matt chirps, “Look, Dad! It’s nearly Christmas,” pointing at a tree twinkling merrily in a window.
“It’s just a tree with lights on!” I reply, dismissing his thought too quickly, so challenging Matt’s youthful determination never to be wrong. On this occasion, this desire triumphs over his equal determination never to walk a step faster than needed. Bounding up the final steep steps of Whitby’s surprisingly named Khyber Pass, he reaches the tree pointing, “Look, Dad it’s got a bloody fairy on top.” So now “Christmas creep” has strayed into parts of the year where it doesn’t belong. In this case, it is made more ludicrous by the tree’s sparkly contrast with the “black with everything” Goth patina that covers Whitby especially at this time of year.
Reaching the car, I make a mental note to watch my swearing in front of Matt. The much bigger, darker note, though, is of a new weight on my shoulders as a dark cloud descends. Matt’s tree has highlighted the impending reality of spending our first Christmas without Helen as our festive cheerleader.
There is a myth that to offset the pain of injury, you can pinch yourself and focus your mind elsewhere. But how far do you go? As my friend Pete observes, “You don’t need a Nobel prize to know that if I cut my finger and you kick me in the balls, then I’ll forget all about the finger.” Even so, the premature Whitby tree did me a favour. The fear of team Golightly having a miserable Christmas without Helen has totally overshadowed the worry that, by Christmas, the words of Wham Rap!, “I’m a soul boy, I’m a dole boy”, could apply to me.
At work, my unwillingness to travel for the kids’ sake has come home to roost. “I’m afraid we’ve decided to move your role back to the US, Adam,” says my boss. I had hoped this would happen as a consequence of my no longer travelling but it is scary, even with the generous redundancy terms on offer. This may mean the end of my career, as I’m not sure that I’m prepared to work the long hours again while the children are children.
My employers have been great though. They behaved in a way that suggests they really are a “people business” irrespective of the less-committed version of me they experienced, pursued as I was by the demons of Helen’s cancer diagnosis shortly after I joined.
“Aren’t you worried you’ll run out of cash and have to sell the house?” tell-it-how-it-is colleague Roger asks, but beautifully the answer is, “No”. Perhaps selfishly, I subscribe to the thought attributed to Dostoevsky, “The soul is healed by being with children”, so I’m looking forward to it, and can park money troubles to a point in the future when my own soul is less frayed.
As for the kids, the idea of my income plummeting, with a reduction in what we can afford, is I hope offset by the fact that they will see more of me. A dad is for every day not just for Christmas, despite what the new Sainsbury’s ad suggests (a good effort whose great observation is far removed from the judgment bypass it had with its first world war ad in 2014).
I do believe that by putting myself out there workwise, something will turn up. More pertinently, Millie and Matt’s happiness at the first Christmas without their mum far outstrips any working-life worries.
So shoulders back once again and start planning the best Christmas possible. It is what Helen would want – indeed, expect – me to do. I’ll take my lead from George and Andrew on this one: “Make the most of every day. Don’t let hard times stand in your way.” Whamtastic!
Adam Golightly is a pseudonym
