Thanksgiving: Fail

I did not have a happy Thanksgiving. It's making me feel like a total heel. While everyone else gets into the Holiday Spirit and decks their halls and still happily waxes about gratitude, I am sort of bah humbugging through my days and fixating on the fact that last weekend pretty much sucked.

I am writing about it not to garner sympathy, because as I am well aware, I am inordinately blessed. I am not fishing for pity or flattery or, most of all, criticism, thanks much. I am writing to process, because I want to do better. You know, preferably at this next small holiday coming up in just about 26 days.

Holidays are hard for everyone in some way, and I am no different. My family and I have a love/hate thing going on, wherein I love them but, you know, they drive me completely insane in a way only someone's family can and they push every button on my personal emotional keyboard with alarming dexterity and expertise. Starting out the holiday, I am already at DEFCON 3 knowing that it is going to involve all the interaction with the different personalities in my family members and their particular ways of rubbing against the grain of my own.

I love to bake, I am not so hot on cooking. But I have learned a lot in the past few years (thank you, Pioneer Woman!) out of necessity, because my grandmother -- who used to do every single bit of our holiday cooking -- is finally too old to continue, and my mother does not cook. Like, at all. Not exaggerating here. At. All. A lot of Domino's and Taco Bell in my childhood, people.

So Husband and I cook or bake the majority of all holiday meals now, sometimes supplemented by my sister-in-law. Thursday was a work day for us, then, as we scurried around the kitchen mixing, baking, sauteing, folding, kneading. As we worked, our children, no doubt ramped up on holiday hormones and cousin excitement, trashed our house and broke out into frequent, loud, screaming, wrestling, I'm-going-to-kill-you fights. This led to me and Husband fighting over who needed to abandon his food to go Deal With the Children. One child, you know, still had stitches holding his arm together. Another is still growing back his fingernails. We couldn't afford a Thanksgiving Day trip to the ER.

By the time we were heading to my mother's house that afternoon, I was completely broken. I had screamed, threatened, ruined a batch of Parker House rolls, thought many mean thoughts about my brother and his lack of help watching my children while he decidedly did NOT cook, and tried on thirty different items of clothing in my bathroom mirror, cursing my fat cheeks and the way everything I own does not fit right AT ALL.

I let Firstborn out of the car and he ran into my mother's house. I sat in the car and cried, my forehead on my steering wheel, for twenty minutes before heading into the house. I struggled not to convey my mood to the entire family, but I don't think I was very successful. I felt detached, as if I was slipping into a dark hole and watching my family from below, the entire day.

I need to figure out a way to make holidays work. Whether it is lack of strategic planning, time management, patience, tolerance, or acknowledgment of my own limitations, this is just simply not working for me, or anyone else in my family. I didn't enjoy my dinner, I didn't gaze lovingly at my children, I didn't enjoy my extended family. The simple truth is that there are no do-overs for this time. As stressful as holidays can be, my parents will not be in this age at which they are young enough to enjoy us and old enough to appreciate us for much longer. My children will not be young and excited forever. And Husband and I are watching our thirties slip through our fingers like so much sand.

I need to find the sweet spot -- the place where holidays are special and substantial, but not so much work and chaos that they leave me feeling like a blob of nerves.

For Christmas, I'm thinking pizza. Pizza and black yoga pants. At my own home. On paper plates.