Thanksgrieving

From the archives, with a bit of polish

(originally posted Thanksgiving Eve 2019)

I am cautiously asthmatic with trepidation about Thanksgiving this year.

(It’s tomorrow).

I’ve been procrastinating making plans for four years, as I have spent the last four running away to Costa Rica with a band of lost boys (and girls) escaping the reality of the holiday.

Holidays + family feels like EXPECTATIONS, with the caps lock engaged. I haven’t had to think about it, and then this year, I thought about it a lot.

I do not have any positive feelings about Thanksgiving.

I dislike turkey and stuffing, and I associate cranberries with urinary health. As a child I would plead for pizza or PB&J, and now after a few unhelpful years of veganism, orthorexia, and intimate partner drama, I am now most terrified of my mother’s anxiety about getting me to eat. She will bend over backwards to make something special for me.

As an example, the Christmas before last, I inquired about the possibility of having an organic turkey rather than conventional, and my mother obliged.

By making two turkeys.

Organic for me, conventional for the three other people at the table.

My turkey was undercooked, even with an extra inning in the oven, which my mother remedied by carving it anyway, and microwaving a slice.

In tears, in the fresh hell of my former childhood bedroom, unpartnered and alone, I texted my circumstances to a friend, who commiserated and empathized about the unique and precious scene I had created in the context of my adorable family dynamics.

When I think about what matters to me about Thanksgiving, I come up mostly empty. I’m not much into pilgrims and colonization, (and my ancestors were off raping and pillaging one another in eastern Europe anyway). I haven’t landed on anything of significance other than garden variety gratitude.

I tend to partner with people who give zero fucks for holidays, and realized via this revolving door of mirrors that perhaps I also have no fucks to give about Thanksgiving.

But I do have feelings, sitting at the table with my nuclear family, 20 years into my adulthood. I am saddened by my failures in life - the opportunities I ignored, the shame at my childlessness as my parents creep towards the back half of their chapters in this life. If only we could fight over what to feed the offspring - to puree or not to puree - to argue over religious upbringing and schooling. Then I might be slightly less fatalistic - or at least - distracted.

What will we talk about? Should we discuss what to do with the china when they are gone, and they pass it to me, and I then must decide how to dole it out to my surviving friends and Insta-fans? They have taken such care of it - it holds meaning for them, and this meaning is crushing me in concept alone.

(I am so adorable in my self-pity and overthinking, right)?

Right.

(So are you.)

We get to - in fact, we MUST - make meaning of things for ourselves. And in doing so, let’s do it in a way that makes the world a little bit better?

My solution for holidays for myself is this: start with an acknowledgement of the grief that might come up - maybe introduce it to the table? Express gratitude to someone out loud. Locate some sort of excess in my life and reallocate it. Then get in the car, and drive to my parents’ house. I’m going be unnecessarily kind to other drivers on my route. I’m going to turn my phone OFF as soon as I arrive, and engage in conversation with these people who love me sideways, and eat whatever is on the table. Then I’m going to drive home, and possibly cry, and chat with friends who Get It, even if these conversations happen only in my own head.

Because in all my years in the Neverland of balmy air and Fellows on the Path I learned the important lesson that there is no going back, and that I am the architect of my own destiny.

And I choose to embrace it.

Photo credit Däg Larson