The elephant at the table

My mother wanted to buy me a new faucet when my old one broke, but she wanted it to be just like hers—the kind with the built-in sprayer. I preferred a rustic Italian design with a separate sprayer. She kept pointing out all the advantages of her model, not because she was trying to boss me around, but because in that moment, she couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that even though fifty percent of our genes were identical, our taste in small kitchen appliances was not.

With Thanksgiving around the corner, I’ve been thinking about why there’s so much pressure for sameness in families—a pressure that ratchets up during the holidays. This is what I’ve come up with so far. If you have more thoughts, I’d love to hear them. 

Family members share genes, memories, and experiences, which feed into a shared identity. Our families are extensions of ourselves. We’re like little tribes; if there’s a disaster, we’ll band together. The more alike we are, or so the thinking goes, the better we’ll cooperate, increasing our chances of survival. In peaceful times, our unity gives us a sense of belonging and ease. 

Thanksgiving morning at my aunt’s house in Memphis, Tennessee, 1962. I’m the one wearing glasses.

So what happens when the family sits down for a holiday feast, and there’s not one black sheep at the table, but several? When the liberals and conservatives are more or less equally divided? Maybe the two sides have promised not to talk about politics, and maybe they’ll succeed. If so, politics often becomes the elephant in the room, precisely because it’s so important. It determines whether you have health care, what kind of schools your kids go to, where the next nuclear bomb will drop. Each side of the family is anxious to correct the other’s idiotic and perilous worldview. When discussion does break out, it turns into a shouting match. 

Shouting matches estrange us. We may still see each other socially, but we probably won’t be very close. I became estranged from a cousin—and by extension from his family—after a hostile email exchange about Hillary Clinton’s rumored child pornography ring. It’s sad; one of my sweetest memories from childhood is of Thanksgiving in Memphis at my aunt’s house.

If politics comes up in the family, I say let it come up at Thanksgiving instead of by email. We can read each other’s faces across the table. There are other people around to moderate. We’re more likely to apologize if we’ve upset someone. We could even get to know each other by listening to those we disagree with until we understand their point of view. We usually don’t do this, I think, because we’re afraid they’ll mistake our understanding for agreement.  

What if they do? It’s still a win. Most of us think the same old thoughts day in and day out, especially when it comes to politics. Thanksgiving is a time when people gather around the table. Who among them can teach you something new about the way of the world? 

What I learned from my father cut two ways

I once asked my mother what the biggest challenge of her life had been. Without hesitation, she said, “Your daddy.” 

Which explains why my relationship with my father was fraught with anger, hurt, and confusion as well as gratitude and love.

On the good side, Dad loved to play. He stoked my imagination with fanciful figures, monster chases, and Ferris wheel rides. He helped my sister and me with our homework, taught us to question received wisdom, and instilled a love of adventure. He was an unusual father of daughters in the mid-twentieth century, and he gave us the best of himself.

Many a Saturday morning, we made up stories about our special characters. I was Gertrude, Dad was Herman, and my sister was Eloise.

He wasn’t so generous with our mother. While fostering our self-esteem, he shredded hers. He had her waiting on him hand and foot. He flirted with other women, came on to his sister-in-law, and eventually left my mother for a long-haired manic-depressive whom he married and divorced within the space of six months. 

Decades after he broke our little family up, he admitted that although he was a good father, he’d been a terrible husband. I wanted to tell him that to be a really good father, a man has to be good to his wife.

After all, how did he expect me to grow into a confident woman when he destroyed the confidence of my closest role-model? How did he think could I love him wholeheartedly when he kept humiliating my mother, whom I also loved? How could I not be angry, when, once I became a teenager, he wouldn’t stop complaining to me about his girlfriends, no matter how many times I asked him to stop? 

A few years after I became a wife and mother myself, I began to resent his visits because he expected me to fetch and carry like Mom had. I fumed at his every request. They were for things he could do for himself, and they sparked memories of my mother waiting on him like a maid.

Like me, a lot of my friends have had complicated relationships with their dads. What was yours like? How do you understand it now?

Looking back, I’m glad my father was my father, flawed as he was. When I was little and couldn’t sleep, he would pick me up and sing “Old Man River” off-key. He taught me to love the mountains. He encouraged me to be who I am instead of trying to fit in where I don’t belong. And through it all, he made sure that I would never let a man treat me the way he treated my mother.