I think it’s official: we can put away the mittens. I never trust the sudden warm days but now that we’ve practically stumbled into a springtime heatwave I’m letting myself relax and believe that these vitamin D-rich days are here to stay.

The problem is that the first quarter of 2010 left me with post-traumatic-winter-syndrome. I tried to tell myself that I was happy to be writing in my pajamas rather than wading through slush in the city and ruining my Ugg-inspired FitFlop boots, but now that I can step outside with my bare unpedicured feet and run down our street lined with lacy floral trees to hail the ice cream man I realize that this past winter left me more shell-shocked that previous years. All through January and February and most of March, I was certain that David would stay downstairs every night playing video games while I went upstairs and overidentified with The Bell Jar.

On the outside I was acting like everything was fine, but on the inside the winter was making me think that  my life was in a complete crisis, that my marriage was deteriorating and my kids were depressed (Conrad certainly fed that flame).

Growing up, my mother was affected by the winter. She slept in on winter mornings, leaving Millie, our housekeeper, to get us ready for school and she’d become addicted to specific food, usually something sweet and trashy, like Crunch-a-Munch. We’d find half-eaten boxes of it in the car, by her bedside table and in her purse. The snack would boost her mood long enough to laugh at The Cosby Show and then she’d have a sugar crash when the 10 o’clock news came on predicting more snow and more cold. As a teenager and in my 20s I was impatient with her winter mood swings, even unsympathetic. I’d walk into her bedroom and find her asleep before dinner and think, why don’t you just go to Florida, not realizing they would if they also weren’t paying for my private school or summer abroad. My winter blues didn’t debilitate me, but they did give me the spooks and David may have become genuinely concerned when I put my own head in our oven to see how Plath did it. Honestly, I was just trying to figure out the details. Did she close the door on her head? If so, then it must have really hurt. Did she take the metal trays out?

Now that I’m aware that winter affects me as much as it affected my mom, I’ve come up with a new defensive strategy that doesn’t involve me buying cases of YooHoo. I write a monthly postmortem.

I usually write up a list of what went well and what didn’t after I host a big holiday dinner or a party to remind me what I should and shouldn’t do next time around. It’s just a free association list that says things like:

Easter Egg Hunt:

Mark pitcher with Mimosas so kids don’t get buzzed

If it works for parties, why not time periods? I didn’t write one for Jan and Feb, so I plan to write one for March and glom everything else I remember in there. I won’t bore you with the whole list but here’s a sampling:

Winter 2010

If you give David video games for Christmas you’ll only have sex every 10 days or so

When its this cold you should invest in the high end face cream

RE: Oscars. This is not the decade that you will have seen all any of the movies. That’s what the college years are for.

Hold off on buying Girl Scout cookies as long as you can because as soon as they are in the house you will eat them.

Be nice to your mother-in-law its colder, grayer and even more dreary in New England.

By April 6^th all this crap weather will be gone and you’ll actually need a pedicure.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Tips to try and share with friends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.