I have been dreading this Christmas, this being the first in many years with a split family. Not being together on Christmas Day is a terrible blow, and while many families endure the same thing, it still seems like an ill-omened mountain of my own imagining. Just sitting there.

I guess as a result I have been quite low at times and felt like I wasn't coping. Its taken me a while to realise that I am just in another stage of grieving, one in which a sense of loss becomes the central motif of every encounter. There are reminders everywhere but perhaps never closer than festivals or anniversaries, whose collective histories visit and revisit.

So I find myself trying to reframe circumstances and events, looking for the ways in which I have actively ignored the positive and privileged anything negative. There is nothing self-deceiving in this, for in truth, the deception occurs at the original point where I chose to hold a darkened lens to my experience.

Yesterday we just happened to be home as the RFS Christmas truck pulled by. Tom got a chance to meet with Santa and I got a chance to reflect on my forlorn condition, though this came long after the event. Yes, there is usually a silver lining and I am trying harder to find it, even if the times conspire against it.