Dear Santa, I Want My Power Back!--Guest Blog Post by Mel Toth

In subtle and not so subtle ways, I have been trained to look outside myself for what I want. 

As a little girl, I was trained to believe that someone, somewhere -- or perhaps, more precisely, everywhere -- was watching and evaluating me, determining what I deserved. At Christmas time, we called that someone Santa Claus. The rest of the time, he was just God.

Both incidentally and intentionally, I was trained to believe in the magic of bearded, old white men. 

I was trained to believe that the fulfillment of my desires were gifts bestowed upon me from someone else, particularly those two guys. 

I was trained to believe getting what I wanted was a privilege earned by being good, and if I did my part by being a quiet little rule follower, I would be rewarded, if not here on Earth then someday in Heaven.

I was trained to believe if I did not play by the rules, I would be punished, if not here on Earth then someday in Hell. 

I was trained to keep myself small in the face of God’s bigness, to remain forever a deferential child at the mercy of my Heavenly Father. 

I was also trained to believe in Mary, the Mother of God, and to aspire to be like her, who with perfect submission had accepted His will be done unto her. With Mary came belief in the miracle of a virgin giving birth, accepted long before I fully understood what being a virgin or giving birth even meant. As with so much religious dogma, understanding was not prerequisite for the value of virginity and the ideal of female submissiveness to be emblazoned onto my consciousness. 

Believing in the miracles of Jesus’ conception and birth opened a can of contradiction of which I was unaware for many years. Now at 44, after years of rejecting all the contradictions of Catholicism, I am finally attempting to unravel some of them.

While I was trained to believe that Jesus, the Son of God, required an Earthly mother, my religious instruction made it abundantly clear that God the Father ruled His Kingdom without a female partner. This now seems wildly and purposefully imbalanced, yet it took me a very long time to see the contradiction. How could being the Mother of God not qualify Mary to also be revered as God the Mother? And why has it taken so long for me to discover this is a question that has been asked by many women for many years?

In a world that generally reveres a mother and a father as fundamental to being a family – total bullshit, just to be crystal clear -- why don’t more people think it odd that the human family represented by the Church has a dad but no mom? Why are we fed an image of God as the ultimate single dad, backed up by his one begotten Son and the power of the Holy Spirit, with the one who birthed Jesus edged of the equation?

The answer: patriarchy. 

The problem: I am so steeped in patriarchy, it is hard to see it. 

The first challenge: waking up to my own intentionally programmed internalized patriarchy. 

Every other challenge after that: building a world where patriarchy is no longer the dominant power structure. 

In the small world of my Catholic upbringing, patriarchy was not in my vocabulary. Ever the good little Catholic school girl, I unknowingly marinated in the patriarchal teachings of the Church, actively seeking to prove my goodness through my participation. I memorized the words and followed the rules and believed with all my heart in the power of things unseen. I accepted God and all His mysterious ways because I trusted what I was taught and the people who taught me. I had faith in the invisible power we worshipped and believed in its magic. 

This is perhaps the most important legacy of my upbringing as a Catholic: it is not hard for me to believe in the power of things I cannot see. It is so easy for me to believe magic is real. Disassociating myself from organized religion was never about denying the world of Spirit but an interpretation of it that I could no longer abide.

I don’t remember exactly when I stopped believing in Santa, but sometime around age ten I started questioning everything, so let’s say it was then. Letting go of Santa meant the house of magical cards was crumbling so naturally the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy also had to go. It took a few years, but my faith in God and the Church were soon to follow, pushed out of my life by an ever-increasing awareness of the deep hypocrisy I had been conditioned to accept. 

Knowing myself as I do now, it’s difficult to fathom how tugging at one string would not inevitably lead to the entire blanket of my beliefs unraveling. Yet, I know plenty of little girls and boys survive learning Santa isn’t real without losing their faith in God or organized religion. Plenty of those kids grow up and have nice church weddings, make babies, then raise them on the same beliefs they’ve been fed their whole lives. I went to school with a ton of those kids, but even at the apogee of my religious conformity, I never felt like one of them. 

What is it in me that drives this relentless need to experience my own KNOWING? Why does it seem so easy for so many to keep drinking the dogmatic Kool Aid? Is it because of their faith? Or their fear? 

The intellectual snob in me has clung for so long to the savior of knowledge, believing I could think my way to all my answers. But maybe the comfort that comes from participating in a tradition of beliefs – whether they’re fully believed or not – is driven not by a lack of intelligence or an abundance of fear but by the essential human need to belong. 

Our primal need for belonging is so strong that it can keep us stuck in relationships with people, ideas, institutions and traditions that no longer resonate – or perhaps never have – because standing alone and facing ourselves can feel like the scariest, most dangerous place to stand. 

But what if that place is my greatest point of power? 

What if the space where I meet myself alone and unarmed is exactly where I must go to nurture my faith in the invisible magic contained within me?

What if I must belong to myself first?

The frontal lobe of my brain – my conscious, rational brain – like yours, did not reach its full development until sometime in my mid-20s. By then, my subconscious had internalized many, many beliefs which despite my conscious rejection of them, were running -- and ruining -- my life. It has taken almost two decades for me to understand that the dismantling of those erroneous beliefs is fundamental to creating everything I desire to be and have. 

Yet there is one vital belief from my years of religious indoctrination that has given me a solid bedrock upon which to build: the belief that I am created in God’s image and that the power of the Holy Spirit is in me. Admittedly, I want to insert a puke emoji here but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Saying that like the yoga teacher I now am feels more comfortable: separation is an illusion. I am not separate from God, I am God. And like God – as God – I have unlimited power with which to create. 

As a child and adolescent trying to make sense of life, believing God truly lived within me was liberating, and I know now it was this belief that gradually destroyed all the others. 

Because if God is good and created me in His image and infused me with His Holy Spirit when I was baptized then I am good and full of potential and inherently worthy simply because I exist.

It was a long time before I conceived of it that way but even as a kid, being made in God’s image was a sticking point, that one thing that led to another that led to another…

Because if I’m good and worthy because God made me like Him, then why did Eve eating an apple way back when smudge my soul with original sin? 

And if Jesus was born and died to pay for our sinfulness, why am I still considered a sinner by default?

And if I can talk to God and Jesus whenever I want by praying, why all the hullabaloo about confessing my sins to a priest in a dark little closet? Why isn’t a chat with God about how sorry I am enough? 

Why all this talk about the Golden Rule of loving my neighbor as I love myself, but all this communal rejection of people who are not like us because of their sexuality or choices about their bodies? Aren’t we supposed to be loving them because they’re made in God’s image, too?

I wonder now how often Little Me asked those questions out loud and how often she just sat with them swirling up her insides. I honestly have no idea, but I know it was at least a little of both.

The questions that would take way, way, way longer to formulate are the ones I am sinking my teeth into now, like:

Why was I instilled with the beautiful ideal of loving my neighbor as myself, without any instruction on how to love myself? 

And how come I’ve been told for my whole life that I am like God, made from God, a part of God, but every image of God I’ve ever been shown is a man? 

Of course, these were not the kind of thoughts my underdeveloped frontal lobe could articulate, but my adolescent brain certainly could articulate the cognitive dissonance of hypocrisy. It sounded something like: FUCK THAT BULLSHIT. 

I was done with Catholicism way before I done with Catholic school, however. It wasn’t until after graduating from a Catholic college, then spending the next four years teaching at a Catholic elementary school that I finally severed my ties to all religious holidays except for Christmas.

Cause hey, why throw the out holiday with the hypocrisy? Christmas is cool, right? I like gifts, cookies, and a reason to have dinner with relatives I rarely see. Holidays – already commercialized nearly beyond recognition as holy days – don’t need religious significance to be meaningful, do they? Why can’t I be part of the traditions I like and reject the historical religious tradition from whence they came? 

Well, of course I can; this is America, bitches. 

So, I ditched Christ and kept the Christmas.

For years, I enjoyed the nostalgia of showing up for family festivities, and had fun creating my own festivities with friends. I held on tight to the last threads of Christmas traditions, straddling the line between secular and spiritual, because I could not let go of the sense of belonging those traditions had once provided. 

I was so hungry for love, connection and belonging that even a small, annual watered-down taste of what I once cherished sharing with my family felt worth it. Until it didn’t. A glacier doesn’t just fall off into the sea one day but slowly, over time, tiny fissures become fractures that became small cracks then bigger cracks until there are so many splits in the ice that it finally let’s go and floats away. 

As my family continued drifting further and further apart, I was more than happy to float away. 

I have been floating away from Christmas for nearly 20 years. Once I married a Jew, all bets were off. Ski travel on Christmas paired with Mexican food – a once upon a time ago father son tradition – was my perfect out. 

My extended family did not seem to notice my absence, nor did I really miss seeing them. This was hardly a surprise; even though I had spent almost every holiday of my life with my dad’s family, the fact that I had never even received an invitation to a holiday that was not extended through my parents made it a lot easier to let go of my happy family fantasy.  

Each Christmas since getting married, I have felt relief at having an opt out, but also sadness along with a prickly nostalgia for what once was and what has never really been. I always hoped having our own kid would transform my relationship to holidays but that was not the way the cookie crumbled. 

Being child-free with a Jewish husband who cares about Christmas only because I do means if I want Christmas magic, I must commit to creating it for myself. Coming to this realization has taken years. 

Still, old habits die hard, and every few years my good old Catholic guilt has brought me back; not to Church – Goddess forbid – but to my mother. 

Letting go of my flimsy connection to aunts, uncles and cousins had not been hard but disappointing my mother each time she asked what I was doing for Christmas was. 

I first attempted to rectify this by becoming the holiday hostess, believing if I could control how we celebrated, our celebration would feel less fraught and more meaningful. This was semi-successful but ultimately felt like more evidence of my role as the family dragger. Dragging everyone into my vision of Christmas – or family life in general – was not a sustainable effort, especially after my parents moved out of my state.

Long distance relationships are complicated, whether the distance is 200 miles or 2000. Once every parental visit was by necessity a slumber party, doing anything together was a much bigger, more complex commitment typically beginning with anxiety and ending in depression. 

These were not easy hurdles to navigate. Unravelling why I felt compelled to keep jumping those hurdles has been even more difficult. But perhaps most difficult of all has been attempting to explain these struggles to my sensitive, hyper-emotional mom, who just wants to be with her kids on Christmas. 

So much of my writing is an attempt to understand and explain myself to myself and my mother. I both want and do not want her to read these words – to read any of my words – because I do not want to cause her pain. For so much of my life, when faced with the rock of hurting another and the hard place of hurting myself, I have chosen self-annihilation. Nowhere is this more true than where my mom is concerned. Yet without taking the risk of speaking my truth, I know our relationship will never progress beyond its current manifestation, and I want so badly for our relationship to progress beyond its current manifestation. 

I have been my mother’s dragger so many times, in so many ways but you know that saying about leading horses to water. The hardest part of my own healing journey has been accepting that I can truly only change myself. The second hardest part has been learning enot to hurt myself for the perceived sake of others.

This pandemic year, by far the weirdest, scariest, most disturbing year I have lived through on this planet, has given me an unexpected holiday gift: a legit reason to stay home and celebrate Christmas alone with my husb. 

After weeks of painful mental and emotional gymnastics, I finally allowed COVID-19 to let me off the hook, and my mom and I agreed to stay home and celebrate separately. So now this Christmas is totally up to me and I have decided to make it an experiment in giving myself everything I want. Sure, there are some presents involved but this is not about buying all the stuff on my wish list. 

This is about stepping more fully into the truth that I am not a pawn but a co-creator.

This is about owning that I am and I create.

This is about taking back the power I was trained to give away and owning it so I can make my own wishes come true. 

From this vantage point, I see now hoe all those wish lists I wrote to Santa and all those hoops I was trained to jump through to win rewards, were a method of using my desire to control me.

I was trained to look outside myself for what I want, and that subconscious programming has kept me small.

I was trained to look to my parents, God, Santa, or a prince that would someday come to fulfill my wishes, and that subconscious programming has kept me dependent.

I was trained to believe power came from outside myself because the truth of my power as a co-creator was conveniently – and from a religious standpoint, I fully believe, intentionally – glossed over in favor of a hierarchal model of power where I, the lowly female child, was always at the bottom looking up, hoping, wishing, praying that some power beyond myself would swoop down to save me, showering me with rewards and making my all dreams come true.

I was trained to willingly give my power away, in exchange for the possibility of getting what I wanted. Now it’s time to say: FUCK THAT BULLSHIT. 

Now it’s time to start addressing my wish lists to mySELF.

Now it’s time to use my God and Goddess-given power to align my energy with my desire so I can step confidently in the direction of my dreams. That sounds like a merry Christmas to me.