Christmas as a divorced Dad

 Christmas as a divorced dad

For those who know me well, they know that I am no fan of Christmas. I love what Christmas means — the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ — but the secular part of it has never sat well with me since my divorce. Christmas went from the best day of the year, full of happiness and love, to one marked by emptiness and sadness. 

Virtually from the start, I would let my ex keep the kids on Christmas. I didn’t think it was fair to take them away from the Christmas they had already started at their mom’s house, surrounded by the gifts and excitement waiting for them there. I also knew, deep down, that there was nothing I could give them that would compare.

I was always struggling to give them what I could. My wife did a great job of buying things throughout the year when costs were lower, but no matter what we gave them, it always felt inadequate to me. I carried that quietly, like men tend to do.

Most years, I let my kids stay with their mom on Christmas, and I worked. Some years, I would seek out someone who wanted Christmas off so they could be with their kids. Other years, I just filled a vacancy. The holiday pay helped, and that mattered too.

The truth is, not being able to provide the things my kids wanted ate at me more than I ever let on. It caused depression and a deep sense of inadequacy, but I never talked about it. Men don’t usually do that. We don’t complain. We don’t tell people what’s bothering us. We push it down, suck it up, and keep moving forward. We might want to scream sometimes, but we don’t. We’re expected to be strong, to show no weakness, and to just keep plugging along.

For a long time, not being able to provide the things my kids wanted weighed on me more than I ever admitted out loud. It brought with it a constant feeling of falling short in a way that truly mattered.

The past couple of years, though, have been the best Christmases I’ve had since I was a kid. My kids have blessed me with gifts that came from the heart — gifts that actually meant something.

There is no better feeling than having your kids give you a gift. It isn’t the gift itself that matters to me. It’s the thought behind it. The simple fact that I mean enough to them for them to want to give me something from the heart.

And in the end, that quiet truth reflects the heart of Christmas far more than anything that was ever under the tree.

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