A colleague of mine asked me if I planned to go home for the holidays this year. Most people I know are taking the necessary precautions and avoiding large get-togethers due to the novel coronavirus and we will be doing the same. But the truth is – I wouldn’t have gone “home” for Thanksgiving anyway. I haven’t been “home” in almost a decade.
I remember the last holiday I spent in my mother’s house. I was seven months pregnant with my first child – a little girl we fought long and hard for. My pregnancy was hard, physically and emotionally, and we had a break in doctor appointments just long enough to make it home for Thanksgiving.
As I think of that day now, I remember standing in the living room I grew up in, hugging the striped maternity shirt stretched tight against the form of my daughter. I was thinking of the Thanksgivings my sisters and I had when we were younger. We always eagerly sat together at the “kids table” and were always, always, always in trouble for laughing too hard and too loud. Our lives were chaos even then, but we were naïve to the heartache and abuse we were enduring. And we never seemed to grow tired of each other’s company. During every holiday dinner, at our eventually too-small table, the four of us laughed.
My mother’s voice cut into the memory of my sisters; it had been months since she saw me, but as she rounded the corner into the living room, she criticized my weight and how I carried my baby and the ugly shirt I was wearing. She reminded me that my sisters and I ruined her body and I could thank my baby for the same.
She interrogated me on my birth plan, determined to change my mind on only allowing my husband in the room when the baby was born. She screamed that I was selfish and that she loved my older sister more than me because my sister gave her that experience. She demanded to know the baby’s name, which hadn’t yet been decided, and convinced herself that everyone knew except her. I was ungrateful for the sacrifices she made while raising me, she yelled; she never treated her mother this way.
She paced around her deck, cigarette in hand, sobbing and swearing at me, even though I could hardly hear her through the wall. She threw the sliding glass door open and cornered me, exhaling her cigarette smoke into my face – because I was “too worried about all the little things that might hurt the baby” and because “it was [her] house.”
And I cried.
I cried because my mother intentionally blew cigarette smoke into my face when she knew how hard I was trying to protect the little person inside of me (and because I felt like she proved I couldn’t). I cried because I was embarrassed my husband saw it all happen. I cried because my sisters weren’t there to laugh with. I cried because I knew my daughter would never spend a single holiday in the house that I grew up in. And I cried because I knew I would never be back either.
My daughter was born a few months later and I cut contact with my mother entirely. It wasn’t because of that Thanksgiving or any other particular day. There wasn’t a final argument or a last insult. It wasn’t even because of a lifetime of abuse.
It was because, as I held my tiny baby’s body for the first time, I knew I needed to be the mother mine never was and was incapable of being– because when our daughter shows up at our house with a huge belly, I will make her favorite treat and kiss her forehead and hug her while she tells me about her life. I will tell her she is beautiful and glowing and that my grandchild is already so lucky to have her. I’ll help her think of names if she hasn’t found one that feels right. And she will feel loved and safe.
Instead of going “home” for the holidays, I made a new home. And I hope my daughter will come home often.
Until then, I hope she spends every holiday laughing with her brothers (and cousins!) at the kids table, even when her knees are too tall to fit under it.
