The Thanksgiving holiday is about gratitude. Which can make it worse.
For years, I avoided Thanksgiving. I said it was about the food. I claimed that as a vegetarian, I could not share a table with my meat-eating parents.
For years, I avoided Thanksgiving. I said it was about the food. I claimed that as a vegetarian, I could not share a table with my meat-eating parents.
I endured the experience through high school, but once I was in college, my parents went to relatives’ homes while I flew to Europe for the cheapest international travel week of the year. We’re not close, I explained to anyone who asked. After graduate school, there was a decade of "Friendsgiving." Massive dinners at my apartment for all the vegetarians, vegans and orphans: those whose families were far away or nonexistent.
The gratitude I feel now is genuine — but it is not for being chosen to be adopted.
But it wasn’t just that I didn’t like turkey or football. It was that, growing up, I was not especially thankful. The spirit of the holiday evaded me.
Instead, I felt filled with a sadness I could not name. A sense of loss so deep inside me, so primal, so raw, that I’d lived with it day in and day out. What’s wrong? people asked as I edged into adolescence. Nothing, I always answered gloomily. I could never articulate exactly what it was I felt so acutely, yet was trying so hard to ignore. But little twinges of grief shrouded in anger reached my heart whenever I heard variations of several themes.
Rating: 5