Sort of Home for the Holidays
I’ve never been a huge fan of Thanksgiving. I don’t like to feel like I’m about to explode and that’s pretty much unavoidable when you put a mountain of mashed potatoes in front of me. To make matters worse, I’ve been a vegetarian/sometimes pesscatarian for the last few years, so I miss out on the one thing that used to define Thankgsgiving for me—midnight cold turkey and mustard sandwiches. But food porn aside, the one thing I really enjoy about Thanksgiving is just being inside the cacophonous tornado that is my family. I’ve had twenty-two Thanksgivings, two of them have been spent away from my family, one in Newcastle and, this year, in Boca Raton. In Newcastle I had a group of people who were all missing their families and we all created a weird Frankenstein of a family. But this year, I’m alone. But I don’t feel like I am.
Through the wonder of the internet, which I criticize too often, I was able to spend Thanksgiving with my family. My disembodied head sat in the middle of the table, quite the centerpiece, and I was able to watch my family stuff their faces while I ate my self-prepared meal of crab legs, mashed potatoes, and white wine (I didn’t make the white wine). Every now and then, everyone would leave one room and go to another and I would hear someone shouting, “Bring Caryn in here!” as if I were some quadriplegic confined to a wheelchair. Sometimes I would be left looking at a bowl of gravy while off-camera I could hear my siblings singing. I got to look enviously at my sisters from-scratch, chocolate cake while I ate my so-so, Publix, pumpkin pie.
Aside from my mom who limited herself to waving and saying “Hi Caryn! You’re so pretty!” everyone else acted as if it were completely normal. Nobody paid too much attention to me like it was something special that my head could make it to Thanksgiving. We talked about the same things we always do and I’m sure after we broke the connection we all went to take the same glorious nap in different states. And I know this might become the norm for me for the next few years. It’s one of the bad things about grad school; even when you have two extra days off, you still don’t have the time or the money to go home. So you do what you can to reconnect with your family. And for an hour and a half I was there in the middle of the yelling. There, but not really.
