why i hate the holidays
A post over at O’s made me think about a comment I made yesterday to my Japanese co-teacher. In our English Reading class we read and filled in a worksheet I made about the history of Thanksgiving. After the Mayflower and the Pilgrims and three days of feasting with their Injun friends and the happy intercultural happy-happying, I made sure to mention that the happy-happy didn’t last, and that within a few years the children of both sides were killing each other in King Philip’s War. Class ended before I could figure out how to translate Smallpox-ridden Blankets: Elementary Germ Warfare for Colonizers, into Japanese.
Anyway, the teacher asked me how I celebrate the holiday and I told him without even thinking that I don’t, in fact I hate Thanksgiving. Then I paused, and tried to think of a reason, and finally told him it was the hypocrisy that disgusted me, besides football and turkey. I didn’t say it incidentally reminds me of the ongoing saga of massively glossy history textbooks and non-apologies between Korea and Japan.
But getting back on the thought train, upon further consideration I will admit that highbrow accusations take the backseat in this instinctive dislike. I think, no I know, that the real reason is, Thanksgiving has always pretty much sucked in my family.
And (indulge me a bit of venom that was supposedly exorcised by the therapist) especially after my parents divorced it became just a scary reminder, of delicate breakable things. After the divorce Christmas too became horrible, I hated it and for years I did everything to be gone during that time. In the last few years I’ve almost forgiven Christmas, but still it’s a thin veil of forced cheer that barely covers empty meaninglessness.
As O put it, “…for us [children who’ve been through a divorce], that soothing layer of warmth surrounding the holidays was peeled like an onion years ago, and the season becomes an annual voyage toward the homes of our various parental units, requiring careful navigation to avoid all floating debris of our messy childhoods.”
The divorce I was party to wasn’t as bad as what she describes, and there isn’t the lasting hatred, that “gift that keeps on giving.” But all the same, one day my world cracked and suddenly felt a whole lot bigger, I felt sick and naked, and it could never be reconstructed quite the same again.
One day I invited my friend over to play, in hopes that we would have fun and I could forget about the impending divorce for awhile. It was the first time that seeing a friend couldn’t cheer me up. She couldn’t think of anything to say and it wasn’t her fault. It was the first time I felt truly alone.
I’m not trying to say life was shit from there on out. I mean, a girl I know who was fantasizing about being a prostitute and slicing her wrists in 7th grade, who stopped speaking to me the day we tried to get her some help–she was the freakish only-child result of a set of proudly undivorced parents, and she’s now she’s proudly, seriously fucked up. I’m glad I’m not her.
I just learned in the end that parents are people. They are fragile and selfish like everybody else and they do stupid things and have faults, but they are weak and I can forgive them for it. They also love me and feel bad that I and M got hurt by their ignorance. Most people probably only learn this when one of their parents passes away. Hell, if you put it that way, I learned the lesson before my mom or dad ever did.
…
On a side note, since this post’s subtheme is ‘how not to raise your kids,’ an article in the NYT about how it is most definitely a parent’s fault if their kid is badly behaved. And also how the only way to solve it is for parents to take responsibility for the shit going on in their own lives.
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