bittersweet

[maevele]

if I have to use one word for how I feel about thanksgiving, that's the word. Yeah, I'm thankful. My kids are healthy and awesome, we have a nice place to live, and I have awesome friends to spend the day feasting with.

But, the history of the holiday always hangs heavy over me. No matter how we spin it, try to remove ourselves and reclaim it, it's a holiday based on genocide. On being thankful for what we stole, what we killed to claim is ours. And I can't ignore that, and I can't let my kids not know that, so part of the holiday is always that ugly history lesson. And then it hits me on a personal level, what it must have been like for my g-g grandma Rose to prepare a thanksgiving feast to help the family she was married into celebrate the conquest of the family she wanted to have, of her eldest son's father's people. (From what we can tell, her father forced her to marry my white great gr grandpa when she got pregnant by the NA man she wanted to marry. If I think of how that son must have felt at thanksgiving, the bitter gets bigger)


And then on a purely personal level, I get bitter because it was thanksgiving week 5 years ago when my stepdad disowned me. I called to see when to come over, and he told me not to bother, we weren't family. We haven't spoken since, and I haven't seen my nieces since. And that still hurts, actually. It makes me even more thankful for the chosen family I get to spend the holiday with, but it still hurts under that.

Comments

[trinker]

*hug* offered.

[eriktrips]

I find the mythology behind the holiday hard to come to grips with myself. I mean, the mythology is obviously made up, and the history is there for anyone who wants to read it, but many people I know try either to do Thanksgiving "ironically" or to resuscitate it by saying it is a "time to reflect." But if we were to reflect honestly I don't think we could be so bland about what the day is supposed to celebrate.

So I am trying not to. Celebrate, that is. I don't think it is a holiday worth reclaiming under some ecumenical ideal that we are still centuries away from achieving culturally and I don't trust irony not to reinscribe the original offense.

Still, it is hard to try to have a "normal" day. The familial crap is always its own problem and impossible to sidestep it seems. I wish that we did not have to inflict this on ourselves so regularly.

I hope you have a good day with your chosen family.

[sophygurl]

It's unfair that family can hurt us so much. Glad you have a good chosen family, but it doesn't make the other part hurt less, I know.