This is a holiday tale about every other holiday. Stepparents have to think in terms of “every other”: if your children have ten more years under your roof that means only five more Thanksgivings, which elevates a seven-year-old to the ranks of “have you started to consider your options for college yet?” and points out with harsh lighting and no makeup how quickly all of life passes by.
Except for the Thanksgiving when your children are with their other parents. That day, that four-day weekend drags endlessly, each hour bloated and exhausting. This surprised me. I had anticipated that a respite every other year from family, travel, too much food ill-prepared, would be a guilty pleasure. The first year my husband and I were together, before we married, our children were each with our exes for Thanksgiving and he and I, in the excited flush of a new relationship, booked tickets to New Orleans, ate burgers for Thanksgiving dinner, wandered the city, listened to music, stayed out dancing till 4:00 a.m. and slept till noon. It was spectacular.
Our New Orleans adventure was pre-Hurricane Katrina, making the trip even more marvelous in retrospect, and turned it into a gem in our memories, this moment in time captured before forces of nature made it impossible to have such innocent fun in the city again. New Orleans has become the perfect metaphor for all the every other Thanksgivings that have followed.
I know holidays are very emotionally tricky for children of divorce. There is a lot of good advice from psychologists and social workers about techniques to help children cope with the sadness or anger or confusion they might feel, and I recommend following all of it. This, however, is not an advice column. Instead of advice, I’d like to extend an offer to every stepparent reading this piece. If you don’t have the children this Thanksgiving and find yourself once again disappointed because the anticipated sense of freedom and joy you expect doesn’t materialize on this day; when everyone else you know is tucked away in some cozy house with family, family you’d even crave fighting with because that would at least be human connection; when the phone doesn’t ring because nobody calls on a holiday and the stores are all closed and you haven’t cooked because there’s no point in cooking for nobody and your spouse is depressed because he misses his children and you are depressed because you miss yours and because your spouse is depressed—then join me in a selfish, self-pitying moment, let’s say at noon, when we all pick up something highly breakable and smash it against the wall because having a family of our own was supposed to mean we’d never feel this lonely again.
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