December 1996 to December 2006, Arlington, Massachusetts

By Sandra A. Miller

The Christmas letter from my husband’s ex, Sherri with an i, came every year for eight, like the stomach flu. Unwanted. Inevitable. Nauseating. It made Aunt Marie’s annual box of cranberry fudge bombs look like manna. But nothing could stop it from drifting into our mailbox in a gilt-lined envelope about a week after Thanksgiving. All the reason I needed to despise the Christmas season and question my husband’s judgment around his previous relationships.

Sherri was the three-year college girlfriend. A prima ballerina with straight-across Degas bangs and perfectly turned-out toes that would have made me look like a duck. And while Mark had dated her nearly two decades before, I hated that I was still paying for it emotionally in the otherwise most wonderful time of the year.

I would see the return address, usually a custom label she’d purchased because the free ones from the March of Dimes obviously weren’t good enough for her. And when I’d see it, I’d let the rest of the cards fall on the table and hold this one by the corner like it had been double-dipped in anthrax.

“Don’t open it,” I’d tell myself. “You’ll just regret it.” But like a chocoholic and Godiva, I couldn’t even have it around the house. I’d tear into it, as if slicing at my own flesh, and unfold the two full pages I’d come to expect, one of text, one of carefully selected digital photos arranged to best show off Sherri and her family’s talents: being perfect.

And where would my otherwise sensible mind go as I perused those pictures the way I once read that Hef examined potential Playmates’ breasts under a magnifying glass? Well, I’d do a few things like mentally transpose my husband’s face on top of her husband Martin, in the family shot, and say things aloud to the photo like, “Fine! If that’s what you really want, then just leave me and go be with Mrs. Perfect.” Or I’d see her daughter Amy in her Nutcracker costume (a prodigy at 6) and her son smiling over a book, reading four levels beyond my son who’s the same age, and I’d think, how did I ever birth such toads?

Reaching that low, I’d call Mark at work and say in my best singsong rancor, “It’s here.” In the next beat, I’d go Sarah Bernhardt on him, deep dramatic voice, hand splayed across my chest, this close to swooning as I delivered the choicest tidbits.

Henry, preternaturally adept at crooning “Happy Birthday,” is ready to lead the singing at his own 2-year-old rodeo birthday party next week. Martin’s biggest fear is the horses might gallop into our new built-in swimming pool.

Our last vacation in the islands was delicious. (see photo 3) Too delicious perhaps. Photo reveals bikini-clad Sherri winking at the camera and heaping her plate with seafood buffet.

“How could you ever stand to talk to this woman let alone date her?” I’d yell at him. “How could you drag her into our lives and let her do this to me Christmas after Christmas without apology? This is the year I’m sending it back with a big black X through it.”

“Please tell me you’re not jealous of her?”

“No, I’m not jealous. I’m just repulsed.”

“She wasn’t that bad in college.”

“She had to be. This is not behavior she learned in her 20s.”

Mark and I never believed that ex’s were for hating. We had one each at our wedding and still count those two people among our close friends. But Sherri was something other. If Scrooge had his ghosts of Christmases past, Sherri was our ghost of relationships past, haunting us, well me, with stories of her own flawless life. Even if Mark didn’t pine for her, even if I thought her letters and lifestyle were insidious, I still resented her for entering our home, uninvited, every holiday season and practically peeing on my rug.

Then this past Christmas something happened. The card didn’t come. I watched, waited, sifted through catalogues as thick as dictionaries thinking maybe the envelope got swallowed up by pages of Pottery Barn decor. But, no, December 25th zoomed past and I had absolutely no idea which cruise line Sherri had used that year or whether Henry had made his grammar school debate team. I mean did little Amy finally land the role of Clara?

“New Year’s,” I told Mark. “She’s either in the islands or having triplets who will go to Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. She’s just running a little late this year, I’m sure.”

“Who?” Mark asked.

The New Year came with its usual champagne daze. The card did not. Ditto for Valentine’s Day.

“What do you think happened to it?” I wondered to Mark mid-February. “Do you think she took us off her list? Broke up with us?”

“Do you really care?” Mark asked.

Yes, I did.

Well, last week, I got my answer. Mark’s college buddy who was in town told us she had divorced her perfect life. She pulled a Little Children, ran off with a stay-at-home Dad with one kid and an uncertain income.

Mark was shocked, then maybe a little amused even, but when he looked to me to share the giddiness of gossip, I could conjure none of it. Suddenly, I realized there was no pleasure for me in Sherri having the human attributes of imperfection and regret. She perhaps even felt the fierce ache that must come with hurting children through divorce. Or more eye-opening to me: She perhaps even felt.

I also realized my husband hadn’t dated Cruella De Ville’s long lost sister in college and I had no reason to blame him for something he didn’t do or feelings he didn’t have.

“Do you think next year she’ll send a letter with the new husband and kids,” I asked.

“That would be pretty tacky,” Mark said. “So maybe.”

Still I felt nothing at the thought of receiving that letter, which is how I knew the ghosts were gone. Gone gone gone. And I knew that, though months away, I could cheerfully spend my next Christmas season in the present, with my loving husband devoted to me, and our perfect children who could neither dance ballet nor debate.

Sandra A. Miller has written extensively about sex and relationships, often her own. Recently, Sting’s wife Trudie Styler turned one of Miller’s personal essays into a short Hollywood film called WAIT, produced by Glamour Magazine. Sandra and her psychologist husband offer other couples a helping hand at their relationship self-help site HaveAQuickie.net.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, March 19th, 2007 | Email This Post

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