(Photo courtesy of Tima Miroshnichenko)

I’m currently dealing with a situation regarding the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. It’s a situation that has cropped up the last few years and I’ve navigated around it. This year, a family member has forced me to address it.

We have a relative who likes to plan very far in advance. When this relative started talking about Thanksgiving, it wasn’t really on our minds, yet, as we were still at our camp and enjoying late summer.

Earlier this year, My husband and I were attending the wedding of our friend’s son, and I remembered something I had learned years ago. That a distant cousin of my husband had worked with our friend’s son. I asked our friends if he was at the wedding and they didn’t know. Ironically, the relative in question came over to our table to talk to our friends, and we never heard his name so we didn’t know this person was family.

I investigated this further with my friend’s son and made a connection with the cousin through social media. Once we had contact information, another family member took over communicating. After several back and forth conversations with yet another distant cousin, the cousin and their spouse were invited by the family member to stay for a few days to celebrate Thanksgiving. They accepted and will be staying with the family member, who has a home next door to us.

No family plans had been made for Thanksgiving yet in terms of where it would be, who was hosting dinner, what time, who was cooking what, etc. We were told that this newly found cousin and spouse were coming and this family member hoped this was okay with us.

For clarification, my husband has two siblings, and both own houses next door to us (yeah, a post will be coming about this situation some day…). One sibling lives there full time and the other sibling splits time between this home and a condo in another state. 

My son, his wife, his 5-year old and 2 1/2-year old will also be driving two hours to join us for Thanksgiving and possibly spending the night with us. After talking about prior holiday dinners, Thanksgiving in general, and how these big family dinners usually play out, we discussed that it might be better to have our own little family dinner and just visit the other relatives or maybe join them for dessert.

This decision was based on a prior experience where a Christmas dinner started over an hour late, and the children were bored, cranky and fed up with waiting. They didn’t enjoy dinner and neither did their parents, or us, their grandparents. We did not want a repeat of that for the holiday. I will also add that they will be the only children at this holiday meal.

I’m sure there are plenty of you who are thinking “So? The children need to learn to deal with this.” My response is: “I love that for you!” and please see my earlier post about what is right for us versus someone else:

My Way or the Highway (I love that for you) (publish0x.com)

We discussed the six of us having a separate dinner with my son and his wife. We discussed having a dinner at our home or us going to their home to celebrate Thanksgiving.

The next day, I had a brief conversation with the family member who was hosting our new-found cousins, explaining that we might do a separate dinner and join them for dessert or just visit during the holiday. I explained this was to make things easier for the children and us.  There was some slight push back, but I thought they had accepted this may happen.

Two weeks later I received an email from that family member.  They were hurt because they feel we would be ‘hosting’ a separate Thanksgiving next door. They said the holidays should be for family and yes, it will be stressful for two hours for us, the parents and the children, but that is normal and to be expected.

They felt it was embarrassing to the family we have yet to meet to do this, and even more embarrassing to cancel the invite (why would that even be necessary?). Ever since that original family dinner that was very hard on the small children, we have tried to orchestrate holidays for my children and grandchildren so that we don’t end up with little children attending an adult social gathering, rather than a family celebration. We've tried to make sure that no matter who eats where, everyone congregates at some point. The holiday ‘negotiations’ have been going on for a few years.

So.. now we have….Conflict! It’s stressful, but how we deal with it is important. The easiest thing for us to do would be to agree to the dinner and hope that it won’t be stressful for us and the children. It really would be just less tiring to agree…

There was a brief moment where I thought “why don’t I just host it?” I’m sure you probably thought that as well. This was my knee-jerk reaction to avoid conflict. I tamped it down.

Our table seats six comfortably, eight a little squishy even with the table leaves, and there will be 12 or 13 people total at Thanksgiving. We have less room for eating and congregating than the other family members. Also, the family member who has orchestrated this gathering has never hosted a family holiday dinner, so we think they should take a turn.

Another challenge is that this conflict is with family by marriage. The ones I have worked hard to build a relationship with. The ones I thought I had to prove myself worthy of being a part of. Can you see how I set myself up for this over the years?

I drafted a reply to the email, solicited and included my husband’s input, decided to have another conversation with my daughter-in-law about how we could make this gathering work for everyone. We came up with a reasonable solution that we would be at the dinner with understanding that it would happen at a child-friendly time and that we would not be expected to show up until dinner was ready to be served.

I also decided to try and head off any future holiday debates, so I told this family member that I no longer wish to have the stress of having to debate them about our needs at the holidays with respect to the grandchildren, and that they needed to accept what was decided was best for the grandchildren.

I thought a lot about the original email that relative had sent us over the next several days, even after I had replied to it. I was still angry about it, and I felt like I had a lot to say to this relative, in an angry way. I’d read it over and over, trying to prove to myself that I had a right to be that angry about it.

One morning, I was in bed, lying there, waiting to get up, and just thinking about this situation. I’d spent a wonderful weekend grandparenting, tired from a very active weekend with the children and grandchildren and was taking a minute to think before I got up.

As I was thinking, I had an 'ah ha" moment regarding the reason for my anger at that email. It was the idea that how things looked to these new-found cousins was more important than having the grandchildren, children, and grandparents have an enjoyable holiday. That it was okay for us adults, a five-year old and a two-year old to endure two hours of stress and anxiety, for the sake of how things looked.

This brought me straight back to my childhood.

There is a generation of elder folks who lived and breathed by how the family “looked” or “appeared” to the world. In some cultures, this is still very important. When I was growing up, how our family looked was important. It was so important, in fact, that horrible things that happened in our family were never addressed, with the excuse being “how would it look if we did something about that?”

Apparently I have another boundary to set. I will never, ever again let guilt or manipulation put me into a situation where my feelings or needs are ignored, for the sake of how things ‘look’ to the outside world. Not. Happening.

When we capitulate to these types of situations, we end up stuffing our feelings of hurt, anger, inadequacy, and shame down inside, along with who knows how many hundreds of calories we don’t need, because someone else wants to appear as perfect as possible.

This was a very long story to get to this point, but I think the evolution of events and thoughts demonstrate how easy it is to let the ‘noise’ of a situation drown out what is really going on inside us. It wasn’t until I was in the quiet of an early morning, with no distractions, that the truth really came to me.

Part of this weight loss journey will always include the question “why are you overweight?” I believe understanding the answer to this question is important and I addressed this question for myself in my very first post in this blog:

Why Are You Overweight? (publish0x.com)

It’s important to understand how our emotions play into how we became overweight and how we treat food. There is a part of me that wonders if I was overweight most of my life to show the world that in spite of my mother's need for our family to look "perfect" to the outside world, me being overweight was a defiant statement at how unperfect we were.

Understanding how we deal with conflict, stress, disappointment and anger, and whether it involves us using food and drink to cope, helps us to lose weight and maintain that loss indefinitely.  It is easier to control our behaviors and emotions when we know what is motivating them. 

At 60 years old, I’m still a work in progress, trying to figure it out. Just like you are.

If an opportunity presents itself, I will tell the family member that how things ‘look’ does not matter. I will make the point that they don’t need to put on a ‘face’ for these new cousins, that the family member's personality, heart and the general goodness of their soul are enough on their own. 

As for the rest of you, I want you all to believe this truth as I have begun to believe it for myself:

You are enough! You don’t need to look a certain way, be a certain way. Your authentic self is enough for anyone who deserves to be in your life. Your heart, mind, and soul by themselves are enough. You don’t need to be anyone other than your true self to be worthy of kindness, love and friendship.