By Jose Cardenas

When the leaves begin to fall from the trees and the crispy air beacons the holidays ahead, my heart begins to fill with dread.

I watch Hallmark Christmas movies, where families gather around the dining room table in laughter and joy, but they only remind me of the heartbreak I suffer each year when we attend family functions of our own.

My wife and I have a special needs daughter who has never found a place in either my wife’s or my family’s hearts. With her quirky behavior and lack of social skills, family functions are not places where we as a family belong.

She looks forward to seeing her “cousins” and uncle this or aunt that.

But my body becomes tense driving to the designated house where Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner will be.

I hurt when I see her “cousins’” one-armed embraces when my daughter attempts to give them a hug, their tight-lip smiles and dismissive “that’s cool,” when my daughter inevitably says something odd.

They walk away and leave her standing there. I watch my daughter look around for someone else to approach.

The last time we went to a family Christmas dinner, a couple years back, I stood in a corner watching her at one end of a folding table set up for the teens.

She tried to participate in the conversation as the others glanced at her like she had horns on her head. They slowly turned their shoulders and their chairs.

My daughter ended up in a corner, looking up at their backs occasionally, but otherwise watching her phone and nipping at her Mac and Cheese.

As a special needs child, I always knew my daughter was not the easiest to interact with and could even be a pain.

But, if, “family is everything,” as I had often heard them say, I reasoned family members could try harder to embrace the least fortunate in the clan.

Over the years, I realized that family holiday gatherings have the same dynamic as any social group. An in-crowd develops, and someone is left outside. In both mine and my wife’s families my daughter has always been tolerated, but she has never been loved.

Holidays are painful reminders, but the journey to her social isolation is peppered with painful scenes.

It was clear since she was little that my daughter wasn’t quite right. Prone to fits, we saw she also couldn’t pick up reading and writing the same as other kids.

That’s how the process of being abandoned by family and friends began.

There were the Christmas cookie-baking sleepovers her grandmother organized for her other three granddaughters our daughters age but did not invite her.

One Thanksgiving dinner, I sat at the table facing the wall where her grandmother had a shrine with pictures of five of her six granddaughters. The missing granddaughter was my kid. “I need to get a picture of Rylee,” apparently self-conscious, she said.

Desperate to find play dates, my wife asked if our daughter could spend the night at the grandmother’s house of another set of cousins. “I just don’t have any room,” was the excuse that grandmother would give.

We started to see kids outside the family separate themselves from her, too.

When I picked her up from dance, the teacher invited the parents into the studio at the end. I swallowed hard every time I walked in and saw eight or ten girls giggling in a group all the way to the right of the barre.

My baby smiled at me nervously, all by herself, all the way to the left.

As the years passed, I dreaded Christmas with my wife’s family so much that one year we decided to take her to spend the holiday with my family on the West Coast.

I had not seen my family in years so it was the first time they would meet my daughter who was now 10. I was disappointed that my family didn’t warm up to my daughter anymore than my wife’s.

In a painful picture, my daughter is standing with her new “cousins,” in front of the Christmas tree. My sister’s two sons have an arm around each other, loving brothers, smiling brightly. They stand a good foot away from my daughter, showing her the affection one might expect for a stranger who just walked in the door.

My daughter stands alone, as in the dance studio, clasping her hands.

During Thanksgiving one year, I noticed a trick some of her cousins on my wife’s side of the family played on her to get rid of her for the day.

They pretended to play hide-and-seek with her in the big yard overlooking the river and made her constantly be the one searching for the rest. Eventually, they sneaked inside the house together and left her outside. My daughter continued to look in vain and then started to cry.

I tried to console her, but she pushed me away.

At a wedding a couple years back, I saw how they tried to ditch her another way.

“Your mom is looking for you,” was what they would say. My daughter went looking for my wife, and when she found out it wasn’t true, the cousins were gone.

Two birthdays ago, my wife invited her cousins and other relatives to my daughter’s birthday party. At midnight the day before, my wife was still frantically calling people to beg them to come. Some had not responded at all.

“This is the worse birthday party,” my daughter cried the next day when only a few of us were there. One of her older cousins in her twenties and her mother gave her a hug.

Last summer, at church camp, one of her cousins told my wife bluntly at the start of the week, “Keep Rylee away from me and my friends.”

Her niece was embarrassed of her daughter in public, which made my wife cry.

My daughter is 18 now, her mind younger than her chronological age. She has [LEARNED?earned] to be less social, asking less frequently for friends or cousins who deserted her long ago.

Sometimes I get irritated at my wife for doting over her nieces, buying them numerous presents for their birthdays and hanging their pictures on our walls. No one asks how our daughter is doing, I tell her, invites her to hang out, or requests pictures of her to put up.

Except for a handful of special education kids at school, my daughter’s companionship comes from me, my wife, her cat Diamond and her phone. My daughter’s last birthday party was just a simple dinner, cake and presents in our house with my wife and her mom.

We are finding different places to spend the holidays, too.

Last Christmas, we exchanged presents on a beach front patio on a beautiful sunny morning in Saint Maarten. We went snorkeling, zip-lining and rode four-wheelers across both the Dutch and French sides of the island’s landscape.

After the cousin told my wife to keep our daughter away from her and her friends, we decided to find a different place for Thanksgiving and Christmas this year too. If they are ashamed of my daughter, at church of all places, they won’t see her at family functions anymore.

When everybody is freezing on the East Coast, we will open presents, this time on a balcony overlooking the Pacific Ocean, go see monkeys in the rainforest and take a ferry to Taboga Island to spend a day on the beach.

Slowly but surely, we are finding places to spend the holidays where my daughter can be herself without being judged, where we, as a family, belong.

Jose Cardenas is a service member who lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter whom he adopted at age 3 when he married her mom. Though deployments often take him away from home, he sees his most important mission, together with his wife, helping his daughter transition into an adult.

Like what you are reading at Motherwell? Please consider supporting us here. 

Keep up with Motherwell on Facebook, Instagram and via our newsletter.