For years I tried to cure my dysfunctional family with elaborate Thanksgiving dinners, until Thanksgiving became my own dysfunction.
Beginning two weeks before Thanksgiving, I avoid looking at, much less reading, all food sections. But this year, Thanksgiving, like everything, started early, mere days after Halloween, and with it all those “Here’s how to make Thanksgiving dinner without meat/outdoors/on the moon” pieces that inevitably have me reaching for the Xanax.
“I’ll just do it,” I said one year, echoing codependents throughout the ages. “It’ll be fun,” I said, unaware of the burden of self-appointed control and inevitable resentment I was shouldering, possibly forever. “Let me do it.” Because if it was cold, or the cream sauce was runny or the turkey was dry, then Mom would get mad, and the whole point was to keep that from happening.
When I had kids it began to make sense to alternate holiday dinners with family; as I was not about to give up Christmas dinner, which I truly love, I surrendered Thanksgiving. More than that, I began to see how much of my Thanksgiving cooking had been driven by anxiety and fear, a self-concocted need to please, appease and prove ... what? That I could do it? That I could do it anywhere and alone? That I didn’t need help, that success is measured by levels of exhaustion and the use of every pot, pan, dish and glass I own? That all this somehow proved something?
And I recognize now that as a child I believed that one Rockwellian moment could counterbalance all the messy dysfunction that came before and after, and I tasked myself with creating it.As an adult, I realize this kind of thinking is absurd, dangerous and damaging; the only control I have is over my own self, my expectations and the pressure I put on myself to meet them.
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