GUEST POST: Amy Lane of 'Regret Me Not'
Doesn’t Everybody Shop at the 7/11?
By Amy Lane
Hal and Pierce get together during the holidays—hopefully it’s one of their best holidays ever just because they’re together at the end of it, right? But one of the scary things about the holiday season is that ever-present fear of letting the season fall flat.
What if… oh my God, you don’t get the shopping done? What if you forget to make cookies? What if you fall asleep on Christmas Eve wrapping presents and the kids come in and see you mid-Santa?
What if it’s 11:30, December 24th, and you realize you don’t have anything to put in their stockings? Nothing. DeNada. Not a thing will fit?
Oh my God. Oh dear Lord. Oh my Giddy Aunt! This is a disaster! A catastrophe! A fuck-up of disastrous proportions! They’re going to take away my parent card, my babies will hate me, I’ll be paying therapy bills forever, holy Jesus fuck me with a chainsaw I FAILED SANTA 101!!!!!!!
Breathe. In and out. Breathe. Look at Mate.
Mate is shrugging and saying, “I’m sorry, I thought you got that.”
Cry.
Look at the clock in desperation. Say, “I’m going to go get something.”
“Wha…”
“I’m going to go get something.”
“It’s 11:30 on Christmas Eve!” Now, this was fifteen years ago—we only had two kids back then, but even more important, Wal-Mart wasn’t just around the corner, and Rite-Aid did not yet stay open until ass-crack on Christmas Eve.
I found myself at the one place with a light on as a beacon of hope: the 7/11.
I run inside and buy every Christmas themed candy I can find—M&M’s, gummi worms, Reeses Peanut Butter Cups—anything with red and green on the packaging, I snatch up.
I’m desperate.
We get home and I wrap it all, shove it in the stockings and cry myself to sleep.
I’ve done the worst thing a parent can do.
I failed Christmas.
Except I didn’t.
Yeah, sure—the kids weren’t overwhelmed by stale gummi worms in their stockings, but they got better stuff under the tree, and they don’t remember that year now.
They had gifts.
They had decorations.
They had family to visit after us (because obviously we weren’t competent on our own) and they had a dinner and a home and pets and love and hugs and clothes and safety. No drunken parent was going to crash their Christmas and beat them. Dad wasn’t out on a hunting trip, nobody had to steal presents from someone else, we weren’t at the track adopting a losing racing hound. (Yes, I stole those from famous Christmas specials, why do you ask?) They’d had six stories and two songs and a shit-ton of Christmas specials before they went to bed that night, and they would wake up and destroy a pile of wrapping paper and get warm clothes and love and a few dreams in the morning.
I’d fucked up—but I’d just fucked up ten minutes of their lives. I had the whole rest of the parenting gig to fix things.
And that’s one of the most important Christmas lessons anyone can learn. Making life perfect is impossible. Making Christmas or any holiday perfect is impossible. Hell, expect gangbusters at your wedding, it doesn’t matter how miserable you make people planning it because something’s going wrong.
It just is. If you don’t fuck it up and need forgiveness, somebody else will fuck it up and need yours. That is just the way of things.
No season, no holiday, no relationship is about perfection. It’s about celebrating the season or the holiday or the relationship in spite of the fact that perfection is the last thing human beings can achieve.
I’ve screwed up the occasional Christmas challenge since then. One year my oldest got nothing but clothes and Legos. We got him something really awesome the next day, and he forgave Santa completely. We also started making piles to look at beforehand, so the Christmas optics were completely equal and that never happened again. (Goddess forgive us, we’re Libras, that’s what we do.)
But even when we started round two of the impressionable Santa loving child stage, I didn’t forget that one lesson.
It was never going to be perfect. But any holiday that got me extra hugs throughout the day was a success.
Hopefully it’s a lesson my heroes learn in Regret Me Not as well.
Title: Regret Me Not
Author: Amy Lane
Published: December 4, 2017
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Cover Artist: Reese Dante
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Length: 119 Pages
Tags: Gay; M/M; Holiday: Christmas
About Regret Me Not
Pierce Atwater used to think he was a knight in shining armor, but then his life fell to crap. Now he has no job, no wife, no life—and is so full of self-pity he can’t even be decent to the one family member he’s still speaking to. He heads for Florida, where he’s got a month to pull his head out of his ass before he ruins his little sister’s Christmas. Harold Justice Lombard the Fifth is at his own crossroads—he can keep being Hal, massage therapist in training, flamboyant and irrepressible to the bones, or he can let his parents rule his life. Hal takes one look at Pierce and decides they’re fellow unicorns out to make the world a better place. Pierce can’t reject Hal’s overtures of friendship, in spite of his misgivings about being too old and too pissed off to make a good friend. As they experience everything from existential Looney Tunes to eternal trips to Target, Pierce becomes more dependent on Hal’s optimism to get him through the day. When Hal starts getting him through the nights too, Pierce must look inside for the knight he used to be—before Christmas becomes a doomsday deadline of heartbreak instead of a celebration of love.
Meet the Author
Amy Lane has two grown children, two half-grown children, two cats, and two Chi-who-whats at large. She lives in a crumbling crapmansion with most of the children and a bemused spouse. She also has too damned much yarn, a penchant for action adventure movies, and a need to know that somewhere in all the pain is a story of Wuv, Twu Wuv, which she continues to believe in to this day! She writes fantasy, urban fantasy, and gay romance--and if you accidentally make eye contact, she'll bore you to tears with why those three genres go together. She'll also tell you that sacrifices, large and small, are worth the urge to write.
For more from Amy be sure and visit her website.
