Last night, as I lay in a sick, cold-medicine induced haze, tears slipped from my eyes. Holidays looming ahead stir up angst, and once I’m hidden from the world, in the dark, I can’t help but cry.

In the light of day, in the logical moments, I know that things have worked out well. I would not want to be doing the custody thing with kids, so it’s better that it never happened for me and my ex. I honestly don’t want to raise children anymore, I don’t feel I can do it. I’m mostly at peace with the way things turned out, but not totally. When we get to the time of year that revolves around family even more than usual, I feel the sadness set in.

I wonder who I do this for. There are no little smiling faces to look forward to at Christmas, no silly turkey crafts with tiny ones next week. The decorating, memory keeping, baking, caroling, and so on; who do I do it for?

I suppose on some level, I do it for me. Still, it feels silly to do it for me. I feel melancholy that the stories stop with me. I have no one to share all the ornament histories with, no babies to take to Santa. There isn’t that humming excitement.

Everything seems to revolve around it. From midnight mass to decorating the tree to the holiday stories, and at times throughout November and December, it is just too hard to bear. I don’t have family here, and while I have some acquaintance type friends, I don’t know who I can let it out to.

Sometimes, I just want to sob over it. Get it all out, all the hurt and loss. Mourn the children that never came to be and the pregnancies that went the way of all things. To choke out that I’m a failure as a woman and I was as a mother and that I am responsible for those losses. I want this friend to listen, and hand me kleenex, and remind me that life sucks sometimes and that it isn’t fucking fair. I want them to convince me that I would have been a great mother and that somehow, someday I’ll get through this time of year without sneaking out into the snow to freeze the tears before they fall.