Happy Thanksgiving: A Brief History


Until 5 years ago, I really felt no connection to America’s “founding”. Being adopted, I didn’t know where I came from. My history was a fabrication. A lie. So, finding my ancestors – specifically – was kinda something. Pilgrims. Literal fucking Pilgrims. My American genetic origin story. Explains my contrariness if nothing else.

I have always found the Pilgrims (not the Puritans, they followed later and while they share similarities, they aren’t interchangeable) to be an odd bunch. Cultish. Dogmatic. But weirdly anti authority. They fled England because they hated other people’s rules after all. That’s Protestantism at its core, in my experience.

Thanksgiving in the US is a wild holiday. It became an official one as a nationalist propaganda thing during the Civil War and then it eventually morphed into the commercial kick off to the xmas season at some point. It’s a holiday that’s mostly about food and shopping for the majority of its existence, stubbornly ignoring its sketchy origin.

The Pilgrims came pretty close to dying off during their first winter. If the Indigenous in the area hadn’t taken pity on them, they would have because they were not farmers. They weren’t foragers. They weren’t hunters. They weren’t sensible really or they wouldn’t have set off for the “new world” on the brink of winter. They were city folk in a wilderness they didn’t understand at all. Believing a magical god would protect and provide.

The first Thanksgivings (they were not annual really and as time went on, they were sometimes traps) were sort of thank yous with a sizable “whew, we have food for the winter” things. Sure, they were family oriented, but like everyone in the tiny beginnings of the colonies that became Massachusetts and Rhode Island was related, so how could they not be?

But, Thanksgiving as a Pilgrim legacy of goodwill and neighbourliness, which it wasn’t at all, should mostly be a reminder to white people that they aren’t native Americans. We came here and took land that belonged to other people (no, we did not really buy it – read a book) and then killed them when they got, correctly, upset about it.

In a country where the owner class grants so very few holidays, it’s easy to understand why people like Thanksgiving and cling to the happier aspects that evolved from the initial gathering, but it’s a day with a dark legacy. No amount of pumpkin pie or Black Friday deals is going to erase that.

It’s My Mother’s Birthday Soon


I refer to both my real mother and my adoptive mother as Mom. I use “real” and “adoptive” to differentiate when necessary for clarity, but most of the time, when I say, “Mom this or that”, I could be talking about either one of them. It drives my husband a bit crazy sometimes. But today, I am talking about my real mom because her birthday looms.

Because I never got the chance to meet her, all things to do with her are grounded in the secondhand history that substitutes, poorly, for having a relationship with her. I don’t know how she felt about her birthday although according to my cousin (an incredibly unreliable narrator), she loved the cake part of it. So each year when her birthday rolls around, I am left wondering if I should mark the day. What would she have done? What would she have liked? Would she even care?

My brother, who she raised, has made a habit of decorating her grave for Christmas. He tidies it and puts up a wreath. He allowed me to participate one year. I sent him a couple of ornaments to put on the wreath, but it made him uncomfortable though he was too polite to say so. He has his rituals where mom is concerned, and I intruded on that particular one, so I haven’t asked to share that activity since.

I tried cake a couple of times. Bought a cake one year. Made a cake another year. I like cake. No idea if she’d have liked my choices. It felt weird. Like putting urns on a mantle piece or coffee table kind of weird, so I haven’t done that again either.

The truth is I am not sure what to do with my mom. Either mom, but that’s a blog for another day.

Last year, for my own birthday, which is very close to mom’s, I got myself a ring with her birthstone, mine, and my daughter’s. It’s beautiful. It doesn’t make her birthday anything more than a day to m,e but it made her a bit more tangible than she has ever been.

Mom is just not real real. That’s the issue.

She’s pictures and stories. She’s facts I have gathered on Ancestry. But she’s also gone. A literal ghost.

Maybe this year I should start writing that book about her and me, and the whole fucked up story of how we came to be separated. As it turned out, forever. It’s a story I’ve told a lot over the past 6 years, but I have never written it down.Not because it bothers me to tell it, but it’s mine, and once you’ve written something down, it runs the risk of becoming a thing of its own. A narrative that others can use.

November is adoption month in the United States, and I’ve seen some stomach churning adoptee stories being sold as heartwarming, which is just about the last thing I would want for her or for myself.

Adoption,as it’s practised in the U.S. is human trafficking, dressing itself up with language that is better left to rescue pets because it’s not as offensive when one is talking about homeless cats and dogs.

Our story, mom’s and mine, is not a Hallmark movie. Maybe that’s why her birthday is so hard to define?

She’d be 80 years old. She’d probably have cake.I don’t know that we’d be sharing that cake, and I guess that’s the issue.

December Babies And Combo Gifts – Just Don’t


December has always been an oddly problematic month for me. Not just because it’s my birth month with all the adoption baggage but also because of the holiday with its traditions, expectations, and gifting issues.

December birthdays, regardless of how close or far from Christmas Day they are, subjects those of us born in the Christian holy month to the weirdly known practice of “double duty presents”. There is this nonsensical notion that spending a few extra dollars on our birthday gifts will magically negate the necessity of giving much of anything (or even nothing at all) to us for Christmas itself.

Fortunately, my adoptive parents never bought into the notion of cheaping out on my birthday as a budgetary measure. My birthday was the same as my siblings birthdays, a day to be commemorated in a manner befitting the anniversary of one’s child arriving in the world. Even after I discovered the Santa Clause ruse, they never pulled the double duty gift stunt on me. When they decided to stop giving presents all together, they pulled that rug out from under all of their children and under the guise of “you are all adults now” and that’s a subject for another day.

However, aside from my parents and my dear godmother, nearly everyone else in my life pre-husbands and children happily bought into the practice of shafting the December born with combo gifts. To the point really where my birthday became something I stopped acknowledging when I was an adult and out in the world on my own.

There were a smattering of friends along the way. who upon discovering my apathy about my birthday and the reasons why, took it upon themselves to remedy this. It’s not lost on me that one of them herself was a December child and truly understood the pain.

I could chapter and verse the anecdotes but the point of my story is I became a gift giver rather than a receiver because giving was something I had control over.

Decades later, I still prefer giving gifts to receiving them. The most dreaded question in my world is “What do you want for your birthday?” Or Christmas. Or anniversary. I simply don’t know. Having gotten into the habit of fulfilling my own gift needs (a habit I would encourage everyone to explore really), I genuinely don’t need once a year instances to fill my material coffers.

The end result, which I am sure anyone could see coming, is people guessing and blessing me with things that make me wonder if anyone, aside from my husband, truly knows who I am at all. I can totally understand now why my adoptive dad would create a list every year and then assign each of us the present he wanted us to give him. One particularly memorable year, I was told to go to Target to get him very specific pair of jeans and my sister was instructed to buy him underwear.

“Underwear?” I asked her.

“Yep, and I am not asking questions or arguing,” she replied. “If he wants underwear in his stocking, so be it.”

My nephew picked up on this habit of his grandfather’s and as far as I know, still uses it. Oh, to be so enlightened at such a tender age.

My favourite thing, naturally, at Christmas was being the one who handed out the gifts. In this way, I avoided my own presents and could unwrap them while others were engrossed in theirs. Thus, if I was underwhelmed, or completely disappointed, in the items chosen for me, no one was any the wiser because they weren’t paying attention to me.

And it’s not that I don’t appreciate the thought and effort, though I question the thought a bit because again, does anyone even know me? I just would prefer people not give me anything just to be able to cross giving me something off their list. Take a tiny bit of time to understand why I am so indecisive about requesting presents and understand that at my core (however my core came to be) I am a gifter not a receiver. At this point in my life, I really am not going to change.