By Molly Flinkman
@molly_flinkman

The first holiday I spent away from my husband, Jake, was the Fourth of July back in 2015. 

We were recent transplants to a new city in a new state and days earlier, Jake had begun a four-year emergency medical residency program (which is the official way to say he had just sold his soul to the local hospital system). Every single thing in our life was new terrain, including the fact that, while we watched sparklers dance in the night sky, Jake would be nowhere in sight.

Still, it was a holiday, and because I love everything about a holiday, I was determined to celebrate it. So I dressed our girls—two and seven-months-old—in their patriotic best and made Jake take a picture with us on the front porch. Then, he left to tend patients burned by barbecues and misfired explosives, and the girls and I drove an hour south to spend the day with our extended family.

At one point that evening, I stood in my aunt’s kitchen with the baby on my hip, pulled my phone out of my pocket, and scrolled through various social media feeds. They were, of course, full of pictures and videos of our friends, family members, and distant acquaintances gathering together. While I’d anticipated many of the changes associated with Jake’s residency, I had forgotten to consider this: for everyone else in my life, not much had changed. Their holidays remained an expected time of togetherness, and the backyard parties we had once attended were still happening in our absence. For us, though, holidays were now a lottery—time we hoped to spend together rather than expected—and I felt this new reality palpably. Irritation and self-pity and loneliness washed over me with overwhelming force, so right there, next to the blue peninsula counter, I deleted all my social media apps—a practice I would continue almost every time Jake was scheduled to work a holiday.

Since that day, we have spent our fair share of holidays without Jake. One Memorial Day, I heated up plates of leftovers and wished we could eat the hamburgers I could smell from our neighbors’ backyard. On a more recent Fourth, we sat around a hospital table and ate snacks Jake scrounged together from the physicians’ lounge. We spent one Thanksgiving with a fellow residency wife whose husband was also scheduled to work because we learned early on to lean into people wherever we found them. There were Easters when I schlepped all the kids to church by myself, first days of school when I walked them to classrooms alone, and the birthdays I willed myself to believe the day itself didn’t matter.

For Jake, the day truly doesn’t matter. Maybe this is his natural optimism coming through or maybe it’s a mindset he forged in the fire of 100-hour work weeks, but no matter where it comes from, Jake is able to make the most of a holiday wherever he finds it. It hasn’t happened yet (by some strange miracle), but one of these days we will celebrate Christmas morning on December 28th, and for Jake, it will be exactly the same as December 25th.

Why can’t I seem to feel this same way? Why is this same sort of positive thinking so difficult for me to adopt?

In addition to the inherent jealousy of knowing everyone else is still together in normal fashion, I just love a holiday. I want to celebrate them on their assigned day; I want to celebrate them with our favorite person.

Last Thanksgiving, it was winter warm which, for a midwesterner, means it was technically freezing but also the sun was shining, so it was warm enough to get outside and walk to the park. We chased the steam of our breath the entire way there and kept scarves tight around our necks. We FaceTimed Jake from inside a tube slide to escape the wind. On the way home, my daughter said, “So, this is just a regular day, but it’s also Thanksgiving?” We ate turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes with my parents that evening, and it was a good, regular day. Also, we all wished Jake could be there. It was both things: good and not exactly how we wanted it to be.

Our four kids hate the days when Jake has to work—holidays or not—because his twelve-hour shifts and hour-long commute means they barely get to see him. They are prone to whining and bouts of pouting on these days and tell me often, I wish dad was here. Then I say, me too, because we are the same, the kids and me; I have just learned to do most of my whining and pouting inside my head. But then we talk about how we can feel sad and also choose to still look for the good in our day. I am careful to let them feel their feelings, and I also don’t want them to wallow.

Can’t it be both things? 

The first year Jake and I were married, back in the early aughts when time was ours and we saw movies in theaters in the middle of the week, Jake was sent out of town for work for five days. FIVE DAYS! I was beside myself. I wept in our bedroom while he packed to leave. How would I possibly endure that separation? How could my life be so unfair?

It’s tempting to roll my eyes at 2008 Molly. Like, pick yourself up off the floor, lady. Your life could be so much worse.

But I don’t. And I won’t. Hard is hard. What I have learned better in all these years since is how to hold both gratitude and disappointment in the same hand. I understand more clearly now that contentment is not negated by an acknowledgement that this really sucks.

Jake is scheduled to work again this Thanksgiving. My parents will be in town, and hopefully the sun will be shining. Sometime in the day, we’ll drive trays of foods filled with sugar and butter up to the hospital—a small extension of thanks to others who have sacrificed their holiday to provide care to our community. Then we’ll go home and eat our own plates of sugar and butter with more of our extended family. We’ll watch football and play games and the kids and I will miss Jake and the way he makes us all feel lighter. I’ll mostly stay off social media and when I put the kids to bed, at least one of them will ask, Will we see dad tomorrow? 

Not tomorrow, I’ll say, but you’ll see him again in a few days. And then we’ll all feel the sadness of that for a few moments because a five-day stretch without Jake still really sucks. 

Someday, our kids will be grown and all these days—both the holidays and the every days—will be filed away as memories. I can’t predict how they will categorize each holiday they remember but I hope they will have learned to acknowledge that a single day can be many things—that the file folders are big enough to contain both moments of joy and disappointments at the same time. 

It can be both things, I will continue to tell them now. It can be both things.

Molly Flinkman is a freelance writer from central Iowa where she lives with her husband, Jake, and their four kids. A lover of houseplants, neutral colors, and good books, she loves to write about how her faith intersects the very ordinary aspects of her life and hopes her words will encourage and support other women along the way. You can connect with Molly on Instagram or through her monthly newsletter, Twenty Somethings.