Thanksgiving 20/20
When I was growing up, Thanksgiving was hands-down my favorite holiday of the year. The table of food overfloweth and we got together with relatives on my dad’s side we only saw once a year. I slept in, relaxed, and had few responsibilities. No gift giving to think about, just getting together and eating and spending rare time with family living farther away. It was sacrosanct, we didn’t meet up with friends during that time and we blocked off that whole weekend entirely for family. There was no present under a tree, but being present was key.
Until I got married, this exact same ritual took place in Virginia virtually uninterrupted for almost three decades. In retrospect, the cousins on my dad’s side of the family all married relatively late in life, leaving this tradition basically intact for a very long time. My sister married early at 25 but her husband’s family never gathered for holidays, so we never lost them and instead gained a permanent new member. (His parents are pragmatic immigrants who didn’t want their son to fly back to the West Coast at peak airline prices). No one had kids til they were in their mid-30’s.
I only missed one family Thanksgiving in 2005, the year I went to Japan to teach English. That year, long before Zoom was a thing, I video chatted with my family back home in VA while in the living room of my tiny Japanese apartment and felt incredibly homesick. I tried not to cry on camera while my cousins waved at me from the family shindig. I moved back to the U.S. the next year. Things went on much the same even as I went to grad school in Philly in 2009, and moved to SF in 2013. I always made it home to VA for Thanksgiving.
2016 was one of the hardest years of my life. I planned our wedding, which was incredibly stressful due to many things including being new to wedding planning and the SF area, and new to my fiance’s family background and how one plans a wedding in the long tail of a divorce thirty years ago. (On the flip side, as a new mom I now have a better appreciation for how difficult it can be for a parent to let go of their child and watch them launch off like a rocket to build their own family unit.)
Three months before the wedding I got mugged at gunpoint, but I still somehow managed to pull off a promotion at work (because you can’t plan when your big visible project comes along!), and also dealt with a colossal best friend break-up with someone whose I realized would always prioritize her own needs at my expense. 2016 was the year all systems broke down because I didn’t have adequate boundary drawing skills, and it was a turning point for realizing this.
2016 was the year I needed to come home to a comforting family Thanksgiving. Holidays off were never to be taken for granted again once I married a medical worker, but we managed to pull off a trip to VA. I knew that our longstanding tradition was probably in its last days, since my parents were getting ready to sell their home and move somewhere warmer. I myself knew that my days doing Thanksgiving in VA were numbered after getting married and gaining in-laws.
Instead, when I arrived in VA with my new husband in tow, a trip long fought for and planned for due to his work schedule as a nurse, I found that somehow our family had been surreptitiously cast off from the rest of the family who gathered at my cousin’s house. A gathering that my parents and my sister and I had not been invited to. There was some kind of grudge that had been building for years on the part of one branch of the family and the rest of the family bent over backwards to avoid conflict in the traditional problematic Asian way.
After 7 years in a row of traveling home for Thanksgiving come hell or highwater, this was supposed to be one last big Thanksgiving gathered together at my parents’ house but it didn’t happen. I kept asking about Thanksgiving plans and everyone had been dodgy, until one of my cousins finally admitted to me that the rest of the family had made plans to gather without us while declining our invitation to host. I was the most enraged I’d ever been with the older cousin (less a cousin than my big brother) who hosted the alternate Thanksgiving (which had been requested of him to accommodate a family member nursing grudges over perceived slights).
I was so angry that I snapped a plastic fork in half and stormed out of the dessert cafe where my sister the peacemaker later tried to gather us all anyway. My sister and her husband hosted a small Thanksgiving at their house instead with just eight of us including two visiting cousins from my mom’s side, the smallest Thanksgiving dinner we’d ever had.
The cousins apologized for excluding us, their best (avoidant) way for dealing with a difficult situation, and I think we all realized that family unity needs to be fought for and can’t be taken for granted. Peace gestures were made. The cousin who ‘fessed up had already grown up estranged from most of the paternal side of his family, and didn’t want that to happen to the maternal side too.
In retrospect, Thanksgivingpocalypse had been years coming, a product of an inability to deal with conflict, grief, trauma, or mental illness in a healthy way. My paternal grandparents were traumatized from WWII, losing a family fortune, fleeing on a train in the middle of the night when the tides turned. Their six kids were traumatized from scarcity, fighting for resources and attention in a huge family and immigrating to a new country, because immigration to a new country itself is traumatizing. We were all traumatized from my uncle’s lifelong battle with depression that culminated in his taking his own life successfully in April 2007. He was the youngest of the six siblings, my grandmother’s favorite, my dad’s lone brother.
It is easier to practice avoidance or scapegoat new members of the family than it is to examine deep rooted inherent problems in one’s family of origin. In marriage I joined three large new families with their own sacrosanct traditions, and I finally saw things from my mom’s point of view. She was someone who joined a huge family of six siblings and largely left her own family of origin behind. How painful it was for her to consistently be excluded from the siblings only pictures, or for her to be left out of the tight-knit sorority of my dad’s four sisters but with no sister wife of her own since my dad’s only brother never married.
In the 3 years following since the Incident, my parents moved to the West Coast and we left the East Coast tradition behind. My husband and I navigated new Thanksgiving traditions, mostly a very packed week of activities spanning 4 family branches since we have all local families. My husband’s maternal family has a huge Thanksgiving lunch. My dad’s side of the family does Thanksgiving dinner together, and sometimes we see my mom’s side. My husband’s dad’s family gathers too.
Last year in June my aunt in VA unexpectedly passed away at 73, one who had often hosted the sacrosanct Thanksgiving dinner. She was the second oldest of the six siblings, the social glue of the family, her home a place where we frequently gathered. At the family dinner after the funeral, my oldest cousin made a toast to family and its importance. As a family we were again bonded by trauma.
Five months later, as we wondered what Thanksgiving would look like without my aunt, to my surprise some of my dad’s family travelled out to the West Coast. We had a flavor of old Thanksgiving in our new homes on the West Coast. It was jam packed with the kind of whirlwind fun and FOMO of a family visiting for a week from across the country, a rare visit. It was the grieving of a family trying to create a distraction from the huge hole in our hearts from my aunt’s empty seat.
This year, even as I breathed a sigh of relief that we didn’t travel or make plans for the it, and Thanksgiving food was all ordered and picked up, my heart grieved a little thinking about the alternate non-Covid reality. If it weren’t for the pandemic, a place where my wandering mind has gone not infrequently in 2020, my 8 month old daughter Maddie would have been bringing joy and delight to many relatives and people would be passing her around and taking pictures and oohing and aahing.
Thanksgiving 2020 is like none other, but it was okay. It was actually for the best in some ways. This year, the pandemic draws the boundaries and is the willing scapegoat. The fall guy with no feelings. Baby Maddie has a heart defect which makes her more vulnerable to both Covid and other illnesses like RSV, for which there actually is a vaccine but the insurance company has initially denied coverage. Out of pocket, it’s $2000 per dose, and needs to be taken once a month for the rest of the 4 month season. In the meantime, we’re awaiting our pediatrician’s appeal to the insurance company, which denied her coverage because this is technically her second RSV season though she was born at the tail end of the last one and not diagnosed with her heart defect until a month after it ended. RSV was the reason my nephew spent his first Christmas Day in the hospital last year, so I know it’s nothing to mess with. Sheltering in place and avoiding others right now is the wise decision no matter what.
At Thanksgiving 2021, baby will still be cute. She will be more mobile, but still adorable and able to be passed around. We have much to be thankful for this year, with the safe birth of our long-awaited baby even during a pandemic. And also, we have the time and space to reflect on what kind of traditions we will pass onto our family. I hope she will have healthy boundaries and learn to face conflict with love and grace instead of avoiding it out of fear. I hope she will know how to address emotions and feelings as being valid, and learn how to take care of herself even when loved ones around us don’t have that mentality or practice.
The best way we can be present for our loved ones is by keeping ourselves healthy and whole. Life giving and joy filled family relationships will truly be something to give thanks for.
