How do you go home for the holidays if you're not sure where you belong?
Early on in our marriage, during a discussion about which holidays we would spend with whose family, my husband, bewildered by my suggestion that we ditch our families altogether and just celebrate with each other at home, said: “Did you not get the Family Obligation Memo?”
No, actually, I did not get the memo. Because not every family obliges to easy definitions, expectations and obligations – and the holidays only make all the complicated traditions all the more so. Going home for the holidays can feel impossible when you’re not generic, when your home is not made of gingerbread.
I used to drive home from college or wherever I was living after college, on Christmas Eve. With my older brother and sister having started their own families, the holidays became about my parents and me: My father would set up an elaborate spread of smoked salmon, capers, lemon, cream cheese and water crackers while my mom brought the ornaments down from the attic. The three of us would decorate the tree, eat and imbibe, with the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” blaring in the background. Then, finally, we would give each other one special Christmas Eve gift – just one. In the morning, we would open some more, and eventually my brother and sister would arrive with their families for more presents – with their content lives and ways of being.
By the time I got married, it was easy enough to fit my husband into this tradition – our son, too. We spent Thanksgiving with his family in New Jersey, and a month later we drove six hours north on Christmas Eve to my hometown, and we decorated the tree and ate the smoked salmon and listened to the Pogues and we gave out the one special present.
But then my son started to get bigger, and the whiteness of the town where I grew up began to feel like an assault every time. My parents are wonderful people – intellectuals, artists – who gave me and my siblings vast amounts of freedom as children, and encouraged us to follow our own paths, without expectations of or obligations to one another. But they are not paragons of racial consciousness. My brother and sister are also good people – natives and residents of the rural New Hampshire town in which we were raised. They are not comfortable with or particularly interested in discussions of race in America.
My parents, you see, are white. So are my siblings – my parents’ biological children.
And for an adoptee, which I am, reminders of family life are not so much about being chosen as feeling kept, enveloped, even ensnared in the beautiful torture and chaos of ties that are supposed to bind – to feel known and related to these people whom you may not like all the time, but who you feel comprise the strange, complicated backdrop of your existence.
The alternative – free to show up to the family table, or not, to exist without a backdrop – ties too poignantly with the internalized primal severance most adoptees feel. Free-falling is not a good feeling for adoptees. But my parents didn’t see the individual choices they gave us as free-falling; they saw it as the freedom to be who we were, when we were. Want to disappear into the woods for hours on end? Go for it. Don’t believe in Santa? Totally fine. Want to go meet your birthmother? That should be really interesting.
Which it was.
Soon after reuniting with my biological mother at 11 years old, I felt a tremendous pull to be with her and my two half-brothers during the holidays – during every holiday, because it felt natural, almost normal even ... like everybody else every December. Although I was not immediately welcomed into my birthmother’s life, I pushed hard. I needed her love – it was enveloping in the right way, like an assault at the right time. And in this, my “real” family, expectations and obligation were paramount.
Throughout my childhood, I kept spending holidays with my adoptive family – even if they were not particularly pressed about the ritualistic need for me to be there. But I longed to be with the mother who surrendered me and the half-brothers who adored me – the family that said, increasingly and ironically as the years progressed: This is where you should be spending the holidays. This is where you belong.
There were a few Thanksgivings there that I spent with my birth family, and for several years I would spend the early part of Christmas Eve with them, too. Sometimes, it felt too painful to leave.
But as race became more and more central to my identity – to the family that I was making, biologically and free of other peoples’ expectations – it became easier and easier to leave, to stay away from all the homes in which I grew up, all the homes in which it seemed I never truly lived.
Pulling into the dirt driveway of my parents’ 17th-century colonial farmhouse evoked a combination of anxiety and nostalgia, anger and love. The small white birches and pines in nonconfigured groupings around the driveway are lit with white lights; inside, the house smells of old wood floors, oil paint and pizzelles, of happiness and settlement. But the minute I make a run to the grocery store for eggnog or extra cream cheese to go with the Christmas Eve smoked salmon, everything shifts. The faces are white. The sideward glances feel small-minded. The eyes all around me expect something they do not see. On Christmas Day, when my brother and sister arrive with their white families, and I try to talk about what’s going on in America with regard to race, the conversation falls to an awkward hush, and the gingerbread comes crumbling down.
This year, my husband, son and I are celebrating Christmas Eve at our home in Brooklyn – and Christmas Day, too, here in the home we made, for the first time, together. Maybe we’ll still hand out that one special gift, and, sure, we’ll listen to the Pogues. But there will be no model, and there will be no memo. There will just be us – a family unto itself, celebrating together.
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