This is the first Holiday Season Rhia and I have spent apart since she was born. She and I have decorated 28 Christmas trees together. The tree is up but her ornaments are still in the box. I hung my David Bowie ornament and a few others but haven’t added a single Disney or Charlie Brown ornament. Those are Rhia’s and it feels wrong to hang them without her. It’s the same artificial tree Rhia and I picked out at “Big Lots” twelve years ago.
This is the first year she and I haven’t decorated the house with lights or watched Santa Clause is Coming to Town and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer together. We won’t be baking cookies together either. She lives in her own house now with a tree she decorated with her caregivers and housemates.
I miss her so much I ache. And I can’t bring her back to the house because it’s too confusing right now. This is the house she and I have shared since we moved to the Bay Area six years ago and every time I see her, she asks when she can come home with me. It breaks my heart.
A few days ago she asked for her Christmas Village. I’ll bring it to her tomorrow and help her set it up in her new bedroom. Maybe we can curl up on her bed and watch a holiday movie together like we did last year.
Rhia will be spending Christmas with her dad, which is good. She’ll go with him to her Aunt’s house and have a lovely dinner with family. I’m not sure what I’m doing yet. I might drink a bottle of champagne by myself and watch It’s a Wonderful Life for the hundredth time.
Again, I knew letting go of Rhia would be hard, but I had no idea just how hard it would be. Friends keep telling me this loneliness I feel is completely normal and is exactly how most parents feel when their child moves out. In time it will get easier.
In time, we’ll both figure out how to live our own lives. But right now, I just want to listen to Rhia sing Christmas songs loudly and off-key.