Divorced Kid Thanksgiving
My parents got a divorce when I was really young. I actually do not remember them ever being married, I was that young. The only times I ever remember my Mom and Dad being in the same room was when Dad was dropping me off or I was in Big Trouble, and even then their contact in my memory was minimal.
(This is me in Big Trouble, when I got married 5 years ago. This is our only family portrait with me as an adult. I love both of these people so much.)
As a Divorced Kid you either end up in the middle of a fight about where you’re going to spend the holidays or you get two of everything. Two of everything sounds really awesome and all but in reality it’s exhausting.
Two separate birthday parties means, which friends do I invite to which party? Who gets you on your actual birthday? Are you going to get the same presents from both sets of family because they can’t stand to talk to each other?
Two Christmases sounds great, right? But then you have to decide who gets you on Christmas Eve and who’s house you wake up at and who is going to take you to second Christmas and how long you can spend at each house and where you get to keep the presents you got, like does Barbie’s Dream House stay at Grandmas house or do you get to take it home?
How do you explain to your Little Sister that you get two of everything? (You don’t, you just take her with you and she gets two Christmases too, thanks Grandma!)
This sounds like an incredibly weird thing to make you tired or give you anxiety but it totally does. It makes you dread holidays.
Divorced Kid Thanksgiving though is enough to send you up 5 pants sizes.
So on Thanksgiving as you know, most single families don’t even know what time they’re going to eat. There is always something wrong with the turkey, someone is always late, someone gets drunk and there is always so much food. Now go and have two of them. And you have to eat at both. And you sometimes have to cook at both. And for some reason both families want to eat at the same damn time.
By the end of the day you are so full and peopled out that all you want to do is sleep but you have two sets of dishes to wash and two sets of after dinner activities, be it watching a movie or playing games.
It gets even crazier when you get older and you get into serious relationships or God forbid get married yourself. Now you have THREE Thanksgivings to go to or if you also marry a Divorced Kid, you have FOUR, if everyone is in the same city.
I am thankful though, for all the stressful hustling and bustling around because spending time with all my family was always nice, even though it was stressful to execute. I missed it last year when Dan and I had Covid Holidays (aka, we stayed home for both Thanksgiving and Christmas to avoid giving Covid to our families and did the Holidays over Zoom.)
Enjoy your Thanksgiving this year, however many you go to!