I’m about to have Thanksgiving at home with 
my daughter for the first time since her mom and I split ten years ago. Ours is a gender reversal of a typical divorce situation: usually it’s the mom who does the everyday caregiving, and the dad who gets holiday time with the kid(s).
I grew up in an isolated nuclear family. No relatives came for holidays. My dad, who was always off working or away on some mysterious other business, would be physically present for holidays, but his mind was elsewhere. Instead of holiday cooking smells, the house was notable for my dad’s loudly booming classical music.
My mom, who hated “women’s work,” would announce that she had done the very minimum—for instance, quickly boiling chicken instead of slowly baking turkey. “Done, enough, finished!” she’d exclaim, as if we were all rooting for her to get out of that sexist kitchen prison. And we were.
We ate like the animals in “The Fantastic Mr Fox.”
As soon as we could decently say we were finished, my younger brother bolted out of the house to hang out with his many friends, and I retired to my room to draw comics.
…Until I was about thirteen, when I took over the dishwashing so my mom wouldn’t have to bother with it. This wasn’t, as you might think, simply cheerful pitching in. No. I was trying to rescue my mom from her deep depression, and model what I thought was feminist behavior to my dad.
That my dad worked sixty-hour weeks to support us, and was every bit as imprisoned in a thankless role as my mom, somehow didn’t enter my calculations until I was much, much older.
And that both my parents, if they were somehow made differently, could have enjoyed working and doing for their family, was also something I didn’t understand. I didn’t know that doing for those you love could be joyful until I grew up and fell in love. And even then, I didn’t totally understand until I became a father.
…
From my still-bewildered perspective, I had a wonderful marriage with my daughter’s mom until everything suddenly fell apart. It was like plunging into an alternate universe. And felt like falling down an endless well. My love for my daughter, and her need for me to be here—stable and strong—is all that saved me, I know.
During the next ten tumultuous years, one thing was constant: I spent most holidays alone.
Given how little most of them had meant to me growing up, this was less of a problem for me when I just hung out at home, than when I tried to do better by joining other people at their festivities. There is one exception—a gentleman in Chicago whose family makes me feel like one of them, with whom I have passed a joyful Thanksgiving, and where I am always welcome.
But other times, when kind friends and acquaintances opened their homes to me, and I took a subway into another borough, say, to spend the holiday with their friends, whom I did not know, the warm laughing flesh surrounding me actually made me feel my divorced aloneness and temporary childlessness much more profoundly. I really did better just slurping down Ramen alone at home, as sad as that surely sounds to you.
For I had spent many hours as a child alone in my room, drawing, and they were good hours. As a young adult, I spent many hours alone writing unpublished fiction and producing music with no commercial potential that went nowhere except my own headphones. The point being, I don’t mind alone. Alone is familiar. I’m happy parenting. I’ve been happy when I’ve been in love. And I’m also quite happy alone. It’s only the contrast of missing someone that makes it bad.
…
But this Thanksgiving, I’ll be with my daughter. A 14-year-old vegan.
So yesterday, in a low-key way, because doing things up in a big way is not our style, I showed her a dozen or so vegetarian Thanksgiving recipes I’d been saving for probably five or six years, and we picked four of them to make together on the big day. Four simple vegetarian recipes. Not much work or time required. Like momma used to make, only meatless. Things we can make together, because the kitchen belongs to everyone.
Somehow this story, which was supposed to be one sentence—Yesterday my daughter and I planned our small Thanksgiving dinner together—has turned into yet another episode of All About Me. But the day itself will be about us.
…
To those who celebrate, whether alone or together, at home or far from it, Happy Thanksgiving.
For Jim Coudal.
