Happy Thanksgiving

Trigger Warning - this may pop your bubble for the holidays. Both will always co-exist, you should enjoy it, and you should also acknowledge the history and traumas that arise from it. Be kind to yourself, you're worth it.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Every year, I get ready to prepare for the family gathering, brining the turkey, working on the fixin'. It's tradition. It's what we do. We gather, we give thanks, and we eat.

My mother reminded me that on Vetern's Day, she and my dad (along with my two aunts) arrived in the US. I grew up hearing the stories of their first Thanksgiving, and how they didn't know how to eat the turkey. It was a funny story, but it was the story you tell to your kids.

As I'm putting down my daily driver mask, I asked myself, what's the context of that story given all the inner work I've done recently.

It's 12 days from Vetern's Day to Thanksgiving.

So that Thanksgiving Day, my parents (and I as a baby) sat down to eat food that was foreign to them, celebrated traditions that weren't theirs, and gave thanks because it was customary. They were practicing the traditions of the colonizers that founded the US of A, 12 days after they arrived.

So go back 12 days, they just landed on American soil, 7,000 miles from their home, after spending six months at a refugee camp in Indonesia.

Go back 38 days, my mom gave birth to me at the refugee camp, where the nurses didn't speak her language, and the facilities were less than modern.

Travel back six months, and my parents go into a riverboat and sailed out into the open sea where more than 50% of the attempted refugees were parished at the bottom of the ocean, where men were beaten, women were raped, and unspeakable things happened.

So back to the Thanksgiving table.

For everyone else, this was their tradition.

For my parents, the atrocities and turmoil of their life were masked with the Hallmark Card of Thanksgiving. No one wants to hear about the horrors at the pristine table, the blood spilled in the war, and the effects a century of colonization had on a people. That really poo poo's the celebration. In fact, please don't every bring it up again. That's a party pooper story.

So instead, keep the mask on. Wipe down the counters, clean the windows, leave no speck of dust anywhere. That's the American way. Everything is organized perfectly, a well-designed decor to mask the history.

Hiding the Grief

Growing up, there was always an inner conflict. On one side of the mirror, I see this perfect image of a perfect culture. The set table at Thanksgiving, the perfectly crafted dishes that gave that nostalgic aroma of turkey stuffing.

And, in the corner of my eye, on the otherside of that mirror, I'd see the sadness in my mom's face.

Sometimes I'd near muffled crying, or wiped up tears.

It made no sense.

The juxtaposition of recipes and layouts followed to the letter, and the sadness and unmetabolized grief ruminating through the space created conflict.

Does not compute.

Something must be wrong.

They must be wrong.

Yet even though I wore my mask to be like American society, there was a rumbling within, the loss that my parents carried sat within me as well.

No one had the tools, nor the awareness to do anything, other than to keep calm and carry on.

So year after year, I gave thanks.

And year after year, that mask got heavier.

Cracks in the Illusion

The simulation worked year over year.

Then things started to glitch.

When the pandemic forced me to slow down, little signals started to show.

Serving the turkey felt scripted. We just did it. No purpose, no reason.

And when you zoom out and see it from the third person, we were dead bodies performing an act. Happiness was manufactured. Thanks were read from the script. We were together, yet we were alone.

When I put down my Thanksgiving mask, the one that helps me excel at cooking that bird and serving eight dishes all at once, there's a sadness that no one saw it. It couldn't have been any other way but the way it was, and the sadness exists because there was no room for it back there back then.

But there is now.

My mask is down.

I can acknowledge what happened, and I can be sad, and I can grieve what we didn't have.

AND

I can enjoy the turducken that's about to be plated.

BOTH, can co-exist.

Happy Thanksgiving.