I love celebrating Christmas. I love Christmas music, decorating, and treasured family traditions. But Christmas is not a joyful time for all. There are many who do not celebrate Christmas, and the Christmas-centric culture is very difficult to escape, which can make those who celebrate something else or nothing at all feel like outsiders. Even for those who do celebrate Christmas, it can be blue. Maybe it’s finances, loss of relationships, ill health, or just the stress of the season. It’s easy for a time loaded with such expectations of joy and optimism to bring sadness, when it falls short of impossible expectations.

One of the greatest lessons my husband has ever taught me is that it is possible to feel two completely conflicting emotions at once. I tend to be someone who deals in extremes, perhaps due to my Bipolar II disorder. Things are either wonderful or terrible. And Christmas, my favorite time of the year, should be wholly wonderful…right? But life, especially this time of year, isn’t like that for me, or even for most people.

While I celebrate this season joyously, I can also mourn the parts of this season that make me blue. It is not healthy to bottle up disappointments and sadness because they always tend to explode. But when I take the time to be honest about my struggles, when I take time to grieve my losses, I am still able to celebrate the good of the season. Seeing the bitter helps the sweetness seem more authentically sweet.

I mourn the loss of our second child. I mourn the fact that I miscarried so early that our child never had a name, that I never got to feel them kick, that I will never get to tell my daughter she was going to be a big sister. I mourn the fact that my health means not having a second child. I am never going to be able to take adorable sibling pajama photos on Christmas Eve. I am not going to be able to see two children growing up together. I mourn that my health made that choice for me. And I mourn that particularly this time of year.

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I mourn my inability to eat what I want, and having to be extremely careful in everything I eat. I mourn the loss of some of my favorite foods as I navigate a possible new diagnosis that means a very restrictive diet. I need to avoid high amounts of both fat and fiber, so many of my favorite foods, from cheese to raw vegetables, are on the no list. If I do eat them, it can mean an entire day of nausea, vomiting, and intense stomach pain. Many of the celebrations this time of year revolve around food, and I mourn the fact I cannot fully embrace them and eat to anywhere near my heart’s content.

I mourn the fact that my life is so consumed by illness, that I have to think about my health (or lack thereof) every. single. day. My health never takes vacation days: I am always chronically ill, and always riddled with a number of symptoms. And doing anything outside my normal routine, like celebrating, can make them all worse.

I mourn my limited mobility and that movement means pain. It took me a long time to embrace being a part time wheelchair user. My wheelchair has come to bring me a great deal of freedom, but with my joint pain and other symptoms, it is very hard for me to enjoy somewhere like the zoo at anything other than a very slow pace without it. But it also makes me reliant on others to push me as I don’t currently have a chair I can independently propel. And many places are not accessible for a number of reasons, even if they get away with it according to the ADA.

My next post will be on how I navigate the Christmas season joyfully as a chronically ill, disabled mom. But one of the first steps in that, for me, is being honest about the challenges of living with chronic illness and how they can make holiday celebrations especially hard.

Are there any ways that the holidays are “blue” for you? How do you deal with it?