Easter

As a kid and into my 20s, Easter was a love bombing day. My mother would go all out because I was born the day after Easter in 1989. Her first labor pants was when she was making meatloaf shaped like a rabbit 🤮. As someone who has rabbits and has been vegan for a long time, I think I was trying to get her to stop.  

So, as a kid, I believed in the Easter Bunny too long. Our egg hunts would include change in the eggs and the eggs thrown in the pool to dive for them. The basket was hidden in a different spot every year. We would go to lavish Easter buffets and I'd be dressed in a ridiculous Easter dress that I was allowed to pick out every year.

When I was 16, Easter fell on my birthday. In my Easter basket was a larger egg that had a new gold ring inside. I also got a car as old as I am.  

When I was 26, Easter fell on my birthday again and my mother who is a professional clown in more ways than one built these amazing balloon towers of a rabbit and a carrot for me. 

The last Easter I spent at home was in 2020 because I moved back in to help out for a year. My sister was obsessed with having ham so my mother made ham just for her. I made my own vegan baked ziti. Somehow even though my mother has a culinary degree she messed up on making the ham and my sister wouldn't eat it. So they threw the whole thing away. As a vegan, this behavior really nauseated me as now this animal died for nothing because of my ungrateful GC sister and narc mother. I also got in several heated arguments w my sister that night and my mother constantly took her side of course. Easter wasn't special anymore. The next year I was invited to a separate Easter breakfast so my sister could have dinner with my mother. I refused because it's ridiculous. Then I wasn't invited at all in 2022 and I went no contact right before Easter in 2023.  

I enjoy just having traditions with my husband for Easter and Passover because he's Jewish but sometimes I miss the love bombing of my youth. I definitely don't miss the last few years spending any holiday with them and it all started because my sister decided to not show up if my brother would be there and when that wasn't enough it was an issue if I'd be there too. Little mini narc just like her parents.  

Anyway, I get mixed feelings on Easter because I enjoyed the good times even though I see through the act now and I was very hurt by the bad times. I try to make the best of it. My husband and I will have strawberry pancakes for Easter breakfast and we will do Seder tonight right before Passover ends at sundown. It'll be stress free because it's just us and there's no real expectations and no underlying darkness in it. I like this laid back tradition but I miss the fuss sometimes.