A Thanksgiving Treatise (or Turkey Day with the Grown-Up Kids)

There are certain things my adult daughters and I have agreed to disagree on, and thus; avoid conversing about altogether on Thanksgiving.

We get along SO MUCH BETTER when certain topics are off the table. It ain’t denial – we all know where the other stands – lets call it relationship maintenance. These things have been hashed out MULTIPLE times, and are only really good for raising blood pressure and driving a wedge between us.

Your typical Thanksgiving table talk is rife with strife, amirite?! So as in years past, I have issued a brief and snarky outline of acceptable Thanksgiving dinner topics for my lovely but liberal daughters and their paramours, because nobody really wants to see Old Mom stroke out at the table during the festivities. It makes it much harder to pass the gravy.

Let’s all try to get along on on this Thanksgiving Day, the year of our Lord, 2017:

1. The Kardashians. Oh Law, how are they still making the list? Why do they keep replicating? No, we will never be anything like the Kardashians. Why? We are not rich. We are not (quite as) bitchy to one another. Our bootys are not as high as Kardashian bootys, nor as round or firm and NEVER WILL BE. Do I really need to go any further? As such, I don’t care what Khloe or Kim or….(I only know two, sorry) are doing these days.

2. The presidency of the United States. Yes, everything sucks, politically. All of it. We have differing reasons WHY we think it sucks but I’ve been an American a long time, and I can assure you that someone will always be elected to office who SUCKS. Trump, Obama, Biden, Michelle, Pence, (fill in the blank with your favorite Libertarian) – all suck mightily. Lets not waste time stating the obvious. Last year, multiple people at this very table threatened to move to Canada is things did not go their way. Those things did not, yet here you are, right here at my table. So hush.

3. Giving us the rundown on the ‘gender identity’ or ‘fluid sexuality” lifestyles that the kids you went to high school with have adopted. I don’t want to fixate on it, but not for the reason you think.  I made those kids oatmeal raisin cookies when they were little, and took them to pumpkin patches and watched them grow up. I love them, and not one iota more or less because they’ve changed. I get it that this issue is a VERY big and legitimate thing, but I don’t want to hear about the sex lives or choices of my heterosexual friends, thankyouverymuch. Being tran / pan / bi  / sexual, queer or gender fluid? You just do YOU! Evaporating every part of a human being except for their sexuality is tragic, because they are so much more than just that one identity. We get it. It isn’t’ ‘just a phase.” It’s long ago lost it’s shock value. Please pass the cranberry sauce.

4.  Refugees, Syrian or otherwise (although I’d love to chat about The Fugees – the R & B group that features Lauryn Hill. Anyone know what they’re up to these days?)

5.  If you feel strongly enough about the backstory of Thanksgiving, remember that not one single person alive today ever had a hand in decimating a population. I wholeheartedly agree that what was done to the native population was HORRIBLE, and is one of the very reasons I TRUST NO GOVERNMENT. Rather than guilt-tripping everyone at the table, feel free to boycott the turkey and sides and pie, and take a box of lucky charms up to your room and eat dry cereal all by yourself, you anti-Colonialist. We’ll save you some plain water. Really, we’ are all fine with that.

In conclusion…..the list also encompasses avoidance of:

6….. Terrorism talk, twerking, why being a vegan is preferable to being a barbarian, what you did when you got drunk last week, Global Warming, and  (if applicable) why you don’t shave your legs anymore,  why I will not get matching tattoos with you (keep this one on the back burner, though, kids. I’m intrigued,)  Any and all ‘shaming’ –  Body, lifestyle,  turkey. Also, I’d really rather not have a rundown of all the genetic material that I’ve passed your way that is sub-par. Sorry about all of that. Thems the breaks, kids.

7. I know you have “cramps” (and have every Thanksgiving since your menses) but you CAN help clean up after the meal. Its a very good way to display camaraderie with your family, and participation is a VERY feminist thing to do. Thank you.

Lets try to be cognizant of how very BLESSED (yep, I SAID it!) we are to be family, because we are an AWESOME family. We put the “fun” in dysfunction, and do so brilliantly.

We’re not ‘lucky,’ because everything wonderful that makes up our relationships did not come about all willy-nilly, but has been formed over years and years of fierce love, fierce opinions, fierce loyalty.

I am so blessed to be your mama.

No – actually WE are BLESSED. All of this straining and lurching forward and falling back – again and again choosing each other – that’s a supernatural bond. We laugh all the time, we love unconditionally, even when that looks really messy. We each have the other’s back EVERY day, no matter how much we disagree.

Lets nomnomnom out on Thanksgiving dinner, eat too much pie. Loosen our belts. And go back for seconds. Lets laugh and hug and have seconds. And thank God for allowing us the privilege to do so.

And after dinner, if you’re really lucky, we’ll break out Cards Against Humanity and play a round of wildly inappropriate cards with your own mother, and you’ll try to tell me what certain things mean, and I will block my ears and say NO DON”T TELL ME!  and we will laugh to the point of choking / and-or peeing.