Simply Surviving

This post was started the end of December 2024, but how appropriate it still seems. Because of this I am going to post it as it seems I was only a few words away from completing, and it still feels relevant.

Some days I feel like I can't do anything right. It certainly has been one of those months. But wait, there's more.

December is a busy month for many people. At our house we don't exchange gifts, but we do with others in our lives, friends, co-workers, parents, children, grandchildren, etc. so this should be easier, right?

So instead I bake, usually a dozen or more varieties of bars, cookies, biscotti and shortbread. This year, I just didn't have it in me. I made my favorite bars, one biscotti, and my daughters favorite cookies one evening. A week later I made my husbands favorite and my daughters second favorite cookies These cookies I put together in containers for a few of my friends and family and felt I had given my all. And before you ask, I didn't grow up with the cookie obsession, my dad frequently made chocolate chip cookies, homemade bread (to save money), and once made gingerbread people all decorated. My stepmother made spritz cookies at Christmas only. I didn't even do this many varieties until the past 10 years. It was only sugar cookies and gingerbread people, and year by year another, then another were added.

A friend of mine makes cookies as well. Hers are pretty, often individually wrapped, and require a variety of specific items that requires more shopping and planning than I am ever willing to do. This year she took the entire Sunday before Christmas and put cookies together all day! I felt like I was being lazy, she works 4 jobs, and has a semblance of a social life too, and is older than I am. Which brings me to what lead to this post.

As I frequently do, I started thinking about cookies and the differences between our standby's and a "don't you remember xx?" conversation we had this week and it came to me. She was adopted as a child after an extremely difficult start, then spent the years while her children were growing up just trying to survive, literally stay alive. Her spouse and father of her children was physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially abusive. She had to plan every moment of every day for years a way to stay alive, provide for, and protect her children as well as herself, while trying to provide them as normal a childhood as was possible in the situation. While doing this other cultural things going on around were missed, experiences others take for granted. I also grew up in a different world, moving frequently with different living situations, without television and other popular culture experiences many other in the 70's and 80's had, not that we were neglected, we had other things like outdoor play, games, books, community concerts, and healthy home cooked meals. The cultural experiences and eventual home life I had was (as an adult perspective) far superior to the pop culture I missed out on at the time.

I has to step aside and remind myself that no matter how difficult things have been at times in my life I have been so privileged and fortunate to NEVER have had a concern about my actual life. I never have had to think that a caregiver or intimate partner would take my life. I have never had to simply survive. These cultural experiences that both of us "missed out" on while growing up are but a vapor in life.

How many people around us on the outside appear happy and normal (whatever that is), but either inside their residences or only have the opportunity to be real to themselves internally, away from the hectic pace of their jobs, community or other responsibilities are simply surviving just hoping to wake up tomorrow alive and that it will be a better day? We will never really know.