My Mother Set the Thanksgiving Table. I Was Already Dethroning Her.

My mother loved a production.

Especially around the holidays.

She wanted the table set properly. She wanted the food looking nice. She wanted the big Thanksgiving turkey brought to the table looking like a Thanksgiving turkey, not like some hungry motherfucker had already been picking pieces off it while it was still cooking.

Unfortunately, she was married to exactly the kind of motherfucker who would do that.

My stepfather was an alcoholic. He was violent. He had been in and out of jail because of domestic violence. My mother had ended up in the hospital more than once because of him.

And the man could not leave the fucking turkey alone.

My mother hated that.

She wanted to bring the whole bird to the table and make her presentation.

He didn’t give a shit.

He’d go into the kitchen, see the turkey still cooking, and pinch a piece right off the damn thing.

There was something almost perfectly representative about it.

She cared about the presentation.

He cared about getting a piece of turkey.

Her feelings about the presentation were irrelevant to him.

And then she’d keep trying to turn this man into the respectable man of the house.

I remember one Thanksgiving in particular.

My mother set the table. She made everything nice. She put dinner out and tried to create what I think she imagined a proper family Thanksgiving was supposed to look like.

And she set a place for her husband.

I remember watching this and thinking something along the lines of:

You fucking idiot.

By then, I had developed a fairly active internal commentary about my mother.

Dumb bitch.

Dunce.

Bat.

Boo-Boo the Fool.

Fucking idiot.

I didn’t necessarily say these things to her.

That distinction matters.

Because from the outside, I was still participating.

I was there for Thanksgiving.

I sat in the house.

I ate the food.

I answered when spoken to.

I performed the role of daughter.

But inside my head, something else had been happening for years.

My mother was losing my respect.

Not all at once.

In installments.

And that Thanksgiving dinner was one of those installments.

She seemed to believe that if she created the rituals of a respectable household, perhaps the people inside it would somehow become respectable too.

Set the table.

Cook the turkey.

Put the husband at the head of it.

Everybody sit down.

Everybody eat.

Look.

A family.

Except I knew who this man was.

I had lived with him.

I had heard the screaming.

I had seen the police.

I knew about the jail.

I knew about the violence.

I knew that my mother could set every fucking fork in America beside his plate and none of it was going to transform him into Ward Cleaver.

To me, giving him this ceremonial place at the family table felt almost absurd.

It was like putting a plate at the table for the dog and expecting everybody to forget it was a dog because now it had silverware.

Harsh?

Absolutely.

But I’m not going to rewrite teenage me into a gracious little therapist with perfect language for dysfunctional family systems.

I was a kid living inside the dysfunction.

And I thought some vicious shit.

The funniest part is that my stepfather proved my point for me.

He couldn’t do it.

He took his plate and went into the bedroom.

That was it.

My mother had set the table.

She had made everything nice.

She had created the opportunity for this man to sit down with his family for Thanksgiving dinner.

And the motherfucker picked up his food and left.

I don’t remember saying anything.

I don’t think I needed to.

Inside my head, I already knew.

See?

He wasn’t comfortable there.

She could assign him the role.

She couldn’t make him inhabit it.

And that’s one of the things I understand differently now when people talk about adult children becoming estranged from their parents.

They often look at the moment the adult child finally leaves and treat that as the beginning of the story.

Sometimes it isn’t.

Sometimes the child left internally years earlier.

I Was Still Performing Daughter

This is the part I think parents can miss.

A child can participate in the family without believing in the family.

A child can obey a parent she no longer respects.

A child can sit at Thanksgiving dinner while privately thinking her mother is Boo-Boo the fucking Fool.

Dependence creates strange performances.

When you’re young, your presence doesn’t necessarily mean you’re happy.

It doesn’t mean you approve.

It doesn’t mean you’ve forgiven anything.

And it certainly doesn’t mean you respect the adults controlling your life.

Sometimes you’re there because you’re sixteen.

Where the fuck else are you going?

You can smile in the picture because somebody told you to smile.

You can come downstairs because dinner is ready.

You can say okay because arguing isn’t worth the trouble.

You can participate because participation is cheaper than resistance.

The adults may experience all of that as evidence that the family is intact.

Meanwhile, the child may be conducting an entirely different conversation inside her own head.

I certainly was.

I was watching.

Comparing.

Evaluating.

And increasingly reaching a conclusion that would have been dangerous for my mother to understand at the time:

I don’t think you know what the fuck you’re doing.

That realization changed something fundamental between us.

My mother still had authority over me because I was a minor.

But authority and respect are not the same thing.

She could still tell me what to do.

She could still punish me.

She still controlled the household I had to live in.

But she couldn’t force me to believe she was wise.

She couldn’t force me to admire her decisions.

She couldn’t force me to trust her judgment.

That part of me belonged to me.

And once I started judging the adults instead of automatically accepting their judgment of me, my mother began shrinking.

Not physically.

Psychologically.

She stopped being Mother, this enormous unquestionable authority whose opinion determined reality.

She became a woman.

A deeply flawed woman making decisions that I was allowed, at least privately, to think were fucking stupid.

I was dethroning her.

Quietly.

The Empty Chair Comes Later

That’s why I don’t think estrangement always begins when somebody stops answering the phone.

Sometimes that’s simply when the estrangement becomes visible to everybody else.

Years earlier, the child may already have stopped trusting.

Stopped confiding.

Stopped admiring.

Stopped believing.

Stopped expecting anything different.

But she still comes to Thanksgiving.

So everybody thinks everything is fine.

Then adulthood eventually gives her something childhood didn’t.

Power.

She can leave.

She can decline the invitation.

She can stop answering.

She can refuse to perform.

And suddenly the parent experiences a consequence.

Now there’s an empty chair at Thanksgiving.

Now relatives might ask questions.

Where’s your daughter?

Is she coming?

Do you two not speak?

And the estrangement can appear terribly sudden to the person who wasn’t paying attention while it was being built.

But the empty chair isn’t necessarily where the story started.

Sometimes the story started years earlier, while the child was still sitting in it.

Sometimes she was right there at Thanksgiving dinner.

Eating turkey.

Performing daughter.

And thinking:

Boo-Boo the Fool is at it again.