Someone forgot to put the "merry" in Christmas.

Our Christmas was...well, the word that keeps coming to mind is hellish. It was literally the worst Christmas I have ever gone through in my life. It makes last Christmas look bright and cheery. It was an incredibly bad day, and not just emotionally.

Luckily, somehow the kids didn't seem to notice and came away with the impression that it was a good day, which is really all that matters. I'm very thankful everything that happened didn't affect them the same way it affected me. They got some really fun gifts and have been busily playing with them ever since.

I'm not trying to be vague, believe me. I'm just not ready to write about it all yet.  I'm in the mood to hide under a rock right now and not deal with any of this life I've been left to pick up the pieces of. I'll be fine, though.

To give you an idea of what the day was like...get this. To salvage the day, I took the kids to the movies. It was  packed theater and a kids movie (Tangled), plus it was Christmas Day so I figured people would be nice. Turns out the one place Seth DOES want to talk is in the theater, and he talked to the movie a lot. He was never screaming, and he was mostly just excited. Since the theater was so full, it wasn't particularly quiet anyway, so I never took him out. After the movie, a group of guys (with no kids with them, strangely enough), came up and read me the riot act about how I was a terrible mother because I didn't discipline my child and remove him and that I ruined the movie for everyone else.

After that day I'd already had I had no come back except for tearing up and feeling like, well, the terrible mom they were saying I was. Turns out if enough people call you that you start to believe it. We walked out of the theater and another mom tapped me on the shoulder to tell me that she didn't think Seth had been badly behaved, and that he had just been acting like a two year old and hadn't ruined the movie for anyone. It was super nice of her to say that, because by then I was questioning whether I had been an idiot for thinking I had the right to take my child to a children's movie, pay for their ticket, and watch that movie. How is a two year old calling out any different than all the twi-hards or Harry Potter fanatics that cat call all through the movie? Annoying, yes, but something you deal with when you go watch a movie in public, right? Especially a movie geared toward engaging kids in the story.

Ugh. It was just a day when everything that could go wrong did. Anyway, the kids and I are going on a little getaway this week and hopefully I will be feeling better soon. I don't know how much I'll be blogging, and I may take a short break to get my thoughts in order.

I hope you all had a great Christmas and have a Happy New Year!