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Career Freedom Coaching
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"Newly relocated? Single? Holidays? Aargh! All I want for Christmas is...solitude! Single people, especially
those new to a community, experience a unique social challenge
as holidays approach. When I literally wrote the book on moving (Making the Big Move: How to transform relocation into a Creative Life Transition, New Harbinger 1999), I included a chapter on special needs of the newly-moved single person. Everyone I interviewed agreed: Skip the invitations: we'll get our own life. Most adults, even if they're single, have calendars. They know a holiday is coming. Their major issue is not, "How will I get through a holiday alone?" It's, "What do I tell the friends and relatives who call to see if I'm OK?" Not everybody enjoys holidays
with family their own or anybody else's. Some have memories of
the mom who refereed the family fights, the cousin who had to
sleep it off on the sofa and the black sheep uncle who timed
his phone calls for dinner time so he wouldn't have a lot of
explaining to do. Visiting strangers can be exhausting. Men get off easier. They watch football in the living room, drinking beer, with conversation limited to cuss words, cheers and boos. For single women, holidays mean always having to say, "Do you need help in the kitchen?" Never mind that, for the rest of the year, our dinners move directly from microwave to paper plate. Female guests also join kitchen conversations about childbirth, menopause and/or the latest deep-rooted medical exam. I have learned -- the hard
way -- that it is considered gross to respond with a story about
your dog's irregular digestive system or the time your cat got
liver disease and had to be fed through a tube. But those who can afford
a catered meal or a plane ticket are home alone by choice. They
wince at invitations to, "Come join the other waifs and
strays," or, "We're having so many people we won't
notice an extra." We'll be truly liberated when we can answer openly, "I am spending the day at the dog park," or, "I'm going to disappear into my recliner with the new Dick Francis and a bowl of organic popcorn." These are not ways of coping with loneliness but of celebrating solitude and honoring the way we have chosen to construct our lives. And the woujld-be hosts might
find themselves responding, "Gee, I wish I could join you,
if I didn't have all those darn relatives coming over."
Cathy Goodwin, Ph.D. |
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