The Secret To Surviving Family Thanksgiving

The Triple Dip Enlightenment Project

Round about this time each year, folks on the Instatoks dig up this Ram Dass chestnut

He wasn’t wrong.

It’s easy to flit and flirt around Bali, Tulum or Ibiza convinced that your flow-y clothes, medicine hats and mala beads affirm your exalted status.

But go home to share a piano stool at Thanksgiving dinner with your obese Q Anon cousin, or hear your doodley doo Ned Flanders uncle ask about when you’re coming home to Jesus, or endure your cantankerous dad’s mansplaining, or your drunken aunt’s racist jokes…

And pretty soon, your trusty Byron Katie “who would I be without that thought?” turnarounds and Eckardt Tolle’s vaunted Power of Now affirmations, are lying in tatters all around you.

Simply not fit for purpose.

We regress under stress. And few things are as thankless as Thanksgiving with the fam.

But there is a silver lining here. If we dig for it.

In witnessing our parents’ generation, and our children’s generation, smashed and mashed together in a paroxysm of family karma and dysfunction…we get another couple of bites at the Apple of Knowledge.

.

We get the chance to see our edges in starker fluorescent relief than we’d ever post on social media. And after the shock and horror of it all wears off (along with that corn-syrup and pecan abomination we gobbled for dessert), we can roll it forward.

We can keep Ram Dass’s whole enlightenment project going.

Not easy. Rarely pretty. But here’s how it can go, if we’re up for it.

First Bite: Our Own Personal Journey

We leave home and go to college. Try on different philosophies and identities. Probably have a lover or three, maybe even go grocery shopping and feel very grown up learning to cook and make rent.

Whether it’s courtesy of a therapist’s couch, a Stoic philosophy class or an eighth of mushrooms at Bonaroo, we might even gain some insights into our family of origin.

“Mom was always such a repressed stewpot of simmering rage and we tap danced around her!” you might realize while lolling under the stars one night. And “Dad was never the same after his business went bankrupt so maybe that’s why I though law school was such a good idea!”

Or “my brother was always a right little bastard and made my life a living hell for no good reason at all!”

And over our twenties and even thirties, we gradually grow up.

At least a little bit. We learn to be less juvenile and reactive.

We realize that when you split checks, you need to chip in for a bit more than your “fair share,” or the waitress gets stiffed.

Or that it’s less hassle to pay your parking tickets and income taxes on time, cuz it gets way worse later if you don’t.

Or that doing the dishes is always going to include more cleaning up after roommates than you want it to.

In general, the bulk of “growing up” after adolescence focuses on taking the edges off negligence, self-centeredness, and all around doucheiness.

That’s it.

We prune the tree of our Self. Aiming for basic symmetry. Lopping off a few unruly branches here and there.

But rarely do we uproot it or transplant a fresh one altogether.

After that, we more or less grow in place, into some functional form of Adulting that gets us an income, a roof and bed, and a halfway decent group of friends and acquaintances.

***

But then comes Second Bite: TimeBending Parenting

One of those lovers becomes a partner becomes a husband or wife.

Suddenly we go from footloose and fancy to housebound and domestic.

Out pops an infant, utterly dependent on us for everything, and we look around to realize we’re the only adults in that room!

It’s utterly shocking at first, and some part of us is screaming (silently) “why didn’t anyone brief us on how overwhelming and scary this is! How did I waste my entire high school and college never hearing a goddamn thing about how to raise the next generation of humanity!”

So we regress under that stress.

Deep in the recesses of our psyches, we search for the folder marked “Parenting” and we double click on that fucker.

And what comes out?

All the ticks, mannerisms, aphorisms and gobbledy-gook that our parents (who were probably even younger than us when they got snakebit) spewed in our general direction when we were growing up.

Bizarrely, and despite our blood-oaths to the contrary, we end up behaving exactly like our parents.

Only decades out of date.

It’s the last time we saw anyone do anything remotely relevant to our current task.

Or maybe our childhoods were so dysfunctional that we’ve committed to do the exact opposite of what our folks did.

So if you’re escaping an abusive alcoholic childhood, you might end up raising a teetotaling kid with “orthorexia” and an eating disorder.

Baptized in Fundamentalist indoctrination? You might lead a household of godless nihilism and existential anxieties.

Suffered under abject poverty? You might pass along to your kids an obsession with material wealth.

Either way–whether we unconsciously imitate the pattern, or consciously reverse the pattern, there’s no escaping the imprint of where we came from.

We still haven’t escaped the family karma doom loop–we’ve just perpetuated the photographic negative of our version.

So our kids grow up looking at us as “parents” but really, we’re often running scripts that are thirty years past their sell by date.

They’ve been sitting silently, buried in our psyches and muscle memory like some kind of Dr. Spock Manchurian Candidate. Just waiting for the secret activation code.

An example:

My kids are Gen Z, my partner and I are GenX, our parents Silent Gen (born just before WWII).

So along comes my son, and out of my mental filing cabinet comes all sorts of anachronistic shit.

From at least as far back as the 1950’s where my dad had picked it up and then downloaded to me in the 1970s!

Dusted off and just in time for the New Millennium.

“Children should be seen and not heard!”

“Their palettes aren’t sophisticated enough to warrant lobster, give them nursery food!”

“Sit up straight and use the proper fork!”

“write your thank you cards by hand or we’ll tell your relatives not to get you anything next year!”

And our kids, not realizing that their parents are unstuck in time, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five try to track us to the best of their abilities.

Only we’re moving targets too.

If my five year old son was trying to live up to the expectations of a thirty year old me, who was unconsciously enacting the scripts of a 1950s father of his own, that’s hard enough.

But now I’m 45 and my son is 20 and I’ve grown up a bit too along the way (parenting sort of forces it)

So now, even if my 5 year old son took all the lessons of my 30 year old 1950’s dadding to heart, my 45 year old 2020s self would judge that and find it woefully lacking.

He could have busted his ass to be a faithful chip off the old block, but I’ve moved the goalposts on him. He can never catch up. We can never live up. To any of it.

And so it goes…unstuck in time. Lost between inter-generational inputs and outputs.

Talking past each other, even though our meatsuits (and hearts and minds) are supposedly co-located in time and space.

Our kids model us. Not as we say. But as we do.

And not even as we do, but as was once done to us.

Way back when.

***

So that’s two bites of the apple. Our own adolescence and individuation, which gets us some of the way, but nowhere near all of the way.

And then our anachronistic efforts to parent our kids in the present and towards their futures, while still remaining hogtied to the past.

It’s confounding, and utterly humbling.

But there’s a third bite of family karma coming for us

(if we can stomach it).

And that’s the “second childhood” of our own parents.

Second Childhood refers to that last chapter of retirement and old age where all of the vigor, roles and responsibilities of our parents’ lives recede.

What’s left, we often realize, is the adolescent or childish selves they were underneath it all.

In the Hobbit, Gollum tried to stump Bilbo Baggins with the riddle “what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at midday, and three legs in the evening?”

And of course, it was us. A baby crawling, an adult walking, and an elder hobbling with a cane.

Said more roughly, “we enter this world naked and shitting in diapers, and we leave it the same way.”

And as any adults stuck in the “Sandwich Years” –caught between raising kids and caring for aging parents–knows, watching that regression of your own parents can be frustrating and heartbreaking.

At some point, you give up trying to reason with them, to change them, to get them to (finally!) see you and accept you as the person you’ve grown into, and you switch.

From that point on, it’s hospice work.

Easing their pain and discomfort as they shuffle off this mortal coil.

No longer attached to any outcomes that are meaningful for you. Or their grandkids.

And while grandmas can and do regress to this Second Childhood (especially former divas), grandpas seems extra especially susceptible.

Chalk it up to #patriarchy and a lifetime of unquestioned mansplaining.

Or maybe its that all grandmothers have, by dint of their position, endured the initiation and transformation of motherhood.

Grandfathers never had to grow up and consider the other, or the lesser.

Not to say they didn’t experience a sense of responsibility to look after their family, but as the old joke goes about animals at breakfast, the chicken’s invested, but the pig’s committed.

Mothers were committed.

Dads were invested.

And as the high watermark of earning power, professional respect, and social currency recede, what’s often left are impetuous little boys.

Prone to having their way. Sulky or impetuous when they aren’t listened to.

Not past a tantrum if it’s all going to hell.

And witnessing that in our Pater or Mater Familias can be scream-inducingly frustrating.

Unless we remember we can “take the hit as a gift.”

We can see this batshit crazy bonkers trainwreck of a family as the Universe presenting us with not one, not two, but three laps to get it right.

If not for ourselves, then for sure for our kids. And their kids.

Rather than forever judging and being judged by each other, and all of us inevitably falling short, we can try something else.

We can contemplate the idealized Man of My Clan, (or Woman of My Clan)––the very best of each generation–hovering just over our shoulder like the Force Ghosts in Star Wars. Outside of time altogether. Eternal.

Our parents didn’t pull it off. Clearly.

Trouble is, if we quiz our kids, we’d likely get failing grades too.

And the very nature of that failure is that we’ve doomed then to do unto others as was done unto them.

So there’s got to be some way to break this cycle, to figure out the Cosmic Joke and synch back up in time, in the Present, together.

To unlock the magic password and get us all out of this Escape Room of ancestral karma, once and for all.

And what might that password be?

Not 100% certain, to be honest.

This Thanksgiving, first, I’d try “F.O.R.G.I.V.E.N.E.S.S”

and if that doesn’t work, maybe “H.U.M.O.U.R.?”

Because one thing I’m practically certain of:

Whatever it turns out to be, it’s got absolutely nothing to do with mala beads or medicine hats.

Happy Thanksgiving!