Thanksgiving is coming and that is more and more becoming a hard time for me. My partner is dying (I have this on the authority of the hospice nurse; her albumin levels are dropping and her arm circumference is getting smaller). Thanksgiving was our anniversary, although I always celebrate it on November 25 because that was the date. This year the two days are far enough apart that we can have two celebrations. "Celebrating" will consist of figuring out something she is willing to eat and eating it in bed in front of the tv. Probably feeding her as well. She can use her right hand to hold a fork, but she likes being fed. Unless she is eating something sweet, hunger does not motivate her. Thanksgiving is about food and family. For my entire life I had a conflicted relationship with the former, and for good or ill, I do not have the latter. I can't remember the last time I sat at a Thanksgiving table where the people were related by blood. In high school? In my early 20s? When my grandparents were alive and my mother and her sister were still speaking to each other, we all had a meal together. I dreaded these because beginning at the age of 12, I was always on a diet. I had been overweight as a child (actually, certainly by the time I was 12, I was overweight because I was a child; if I had been an adult my BMI at that age would have put me at the top end of "normal") and yearned to be thin. I hated being confronted with mountains of food.
At church last Sunday a friend of mine said that her mother had a "gift for hospitality" and that she had inherited it. (Like so many New Yorkers, she has too small - and perhaps too messy - an apartment to "do" hospitality in, so she cooks for people in the church kitchen.) My mother, too, had a gift for hospitality. Our house was always full of people and she was always serving food. There was a nonstop feast. If I was overweight, my mother was obese. I swore that I would never be like that. My house would not be full of food. Art, yes, pets, yes, books, yes (I did inherit my mother's love of art and books). Food, no. As a young adult things were easier for me. I had learned how to say "no" to food even when it was around. I spent my 20s at Lesbian AA Thanksgivings. None of the women there were on good terms with their parents so we created our own world. I could ignore the food and dance. Or flirt. Finally, I made a modicum of peace with my mother and for years my partner and I would have Thanksgiving dinner at her house. She would invite one or two guests. By then I was a vegetarian and so my mother did not make a traditional Thanksgiving feast. That was not her style of cooking anyhow (I think when she was alive my grandmother had cooked the meal for us.) I am a firm believer that people get the punishments they deserve. Mine, for valuing cultural norms of thinness over family and good fellowship, is spending most holidays with nothing but scraps. Although I cling to how grateful I am that my partner is still alive. When she goes maybe I will leave the country that week, go to a place where no one celebrates Thanksgiving.
This may sound like a non sequitur, but I just found out that my friend Abbie's granddaughter is a Lesbian. She is still in high school. The thrill of her life, according to her mother (Abbie's daughter) is being part of an LGBTQ youth chorus. How wonderful! But here's what I wonder. I got a letter from Abbie's daughter (it was a group email sent to a large number of people, most of whom probably live in the same city where Abbie's daughter and her family live) about the chorus's holiday concert. She and her husband are "patrons". She stressed in the email that her daughter is lucky to have the "blessing" of her parents, that so many of the youth in this chorus have been rejected by their parents and that many are poor and can't get a hot meal, so the chorus serves a hot meal before rehearsal, free of charge. I wonder. When I came out and immersed myself in the Lesbian community, one of the biggest attractions was that it was a world of parent-less peers. Many of those women, too, had been rejected by their parents. Oh, how I envied them! Being a part of that group gave me the courage to push my overbearing Jewish mother out of my life and be myself. When you're a teenager, is something as much fun if your parents approve of it? I don't know, maybe times have changed. I also remember part of the fun being that we didn't have much money (this was in the 70s, when you could still live cheaply in New York) and certainly my partner and I never ate much. Probably only getting one hot meal a week (and living otherwise on nuts and containers of yogurt) at 26 I weighed 20 pounds less than I had at 12.
Was I always looking at everything the wrong way round, I wonder?
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