Christmas Morning in the Empty Room

Hang in there!. My Christmas reflection on grief, absence, and enduring love.

Waking up on Christmas morning in silence feels like a thudding tornado echoing through my body.

I don’t know how to feel about the day of Christmas when my children aren’t with me. It isn’t only their absence that feels disconcerting. It’s knowing they are with a person whose past actions deeply fractured our family and whose presence continues to feel emotionally unsafe for me.

The house is quiet in a way that doesn’t feel peaceful.

It feels hollow.

Heavy.

Charged.

I often ask my clients to describe emotions as objects in their bodies- not to minimize them, but to contain them and to give shape to something that otherwise feels amorphous and unmanageable. Today, I’ll describe mine.

I call it the empty room emotion with a touch of lost holiday grief.

Physically, it appears flat and black. It takes up space from my lower rib cage and spreads along my back, with poking nodules that stab where my heart lives. If I could remove it, it would look like pulling a piece of paper from a printer, smooth at first, but then it gets stuck. The sharp pieces catch at the exit, and I can’t get the whole thing out without shredding it entirely.

That’s what this kind of grief feels like.

It isn’t clean. It isn’t poetic. It doesn’t resolve neatly because the loss is ongoing. Christmas keeps coming, and so does the reality that I am a mother whose love does not get to be fully present where her children are.

There is also a unique cruelty in being expected to feel “grateful” in the midst of this.

As if gratitude should override the nervous system.

As if joy is a switch you can flip simply because lights are strung and music is playing.

For women navigating betrayal, divorce, and ongoing relational harm,

holidays don’t amplify joy;

they amplify truth.

And the truth is this: loving your children deeply while being separated from them due to divorce is a grief few people know how to sit with.

I don’t force myself into cheer. I don’t demand silver linings. I let the empty room be named. I listen to the cues my body tells me when my words will not be heard.

This is where we let hope enter- not loudly, not triumphantly, but honestly.

Hope, for me, is not the absence of pain on Christmas morning. Hope is knowing that this pain does not mean I am broken. It means I am bonded. It means I loved well. It means my nervous system is responding exactly as it should to loss and threat and longing.

Hope is trusting that my children carry me with them, even when I am not physically there. That love is not erased by geography, court orders, or manipulation. That what is true between us does not disappear just because the room is empty today.

Hope is also this quiet act of staying present in my own life by breathing, grounding, and tending to myself with the same care I give others. It is believing that future Christmas mornings may feel different, not because the past didn’t matter, but because healing is cumulative.

If you will wake up on Christmas in an empty room, please hear this: your sadness does not mean you are failing Christmas. You are surviving it and sometimes survival is the bravest form of love there is.

If you are physically alone on Christmas or emotionally struggling with a torrent of unpleasant emotions, please know there are many silent, unseen warriors courageously fighting next to you today.

You are not walking this journey alone.

I am fortunate to be able to wake up with my children this Christmas morning. I will cherish our time and look forward to trying to imprint every moment into my permanent memory.

You can meet others wandering with you through divorce due to intimate deception at Not a Casserole Widow®: https://www.coachinghope4u.com/notacasserolewidow