Reflections on Familial Estrangement during Thanksgiving Week

Recently, a 10+ year separation from all extended family was breached, ever-so-slightly. This is my way of processing.

A couple of years ago I’d asked a then-close friend to vividly describe key good childhood memories. It was my idea of a birthday present, to write out short story versions of them for the friend to keep and return to. It was the present of preserved (albeit translated) memories: an experiment and trust exercise that was probably more about me than them.

Inevitably, having not existed in any of the memories they described, I drew upon the big green backyards and white bone airport windows of my own past. Up until middle school, I’d spent holidays, summers, and spare moments tucked away into my parents’ childhood homes. My mother’s home was suburban and flooded with white light, khaki wooden panelling, and people. My dad’s was a brownstone in Brooklyn that’d been originally procured in a card game, a dark incensed railroad layout of Italian spices, china cabinets, and lace tablecloths. Christmas trees (and meals) were massive at both places. From a young age I deeply savored visiting other peoples’ houses. I would open knife drawers, peer in empty bedrooms, note the size of the television, and count the things left on tables, a bathroom break as an excuse. I’ve carried that trait of suddenly disappearing from The Group into adulthood. Usually, that state of observation is where you’ll find me: taking inventory, preserving memories. Scanning. You know those moments as a kid where you, for no reason at all, decided to yourself that you’d capture and save that exact second to remember forever and then, somehow, you did? It was a compulsory habit of mine. Which moments can I actually remember? I remember cousins who refused to eat anything but buttered pasta, a deck being built, cars with rolling windows, and Daffy’s on 5th Ave. I remember intelligible adult arguments post-Christmas Day dinner, the 6th Ave rocket-themed Old Navy cafe (grilled cheese!), and a fully decked out playhouse in my cousins’ backyard. I thought it was so cool to have your own little house that smelled like young cheap timber and had curtain beads. I remember absolutely nothing about my interactions with external non-parental family save one, of my maternal grandmother. We were in the aforementioned Daffy’s (a department store with a TJ-MAXX-like concept, a resale store), in the shoe section. Ever since I’d seen The Wizard of Oz I’d been fully converted to the way of sparkly shoe (sparkly anything). I was obsessed. And, somehow, I’d found a pair—ruby slippers, fully glittered, buried in the basement shoe racks. They were for adult women, but my grandmother (Irene, my middle namesake) bought them for me as an ‘investment.’ She died a year later.

I’m sure those shoes got lost in the move, but I recently registered the Oz-inspired platforms Elton John wears on the cover of the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album that I keep on my mantel. Huh. An investment.

There had to have been a meal that was it, the last straw. The final Christmas Eve dinner that caused my parents to officially withdraw from family functions, for good. It might have been the year the move happened, which was less of a move and more of an escape plan into an address even I wasn’t allowed to know. I remember sleeping on what I can only describe as gymnast mats with a paint-stained comforter in what would be my room, a kitchen with a broken door. I don’t remember my parent’s answers to my questions of why I wasn’t allowed to see my cousins anymore, or why our holiday dinners consisted of 3 people instead of 15. I don’t remember if I even asked. Those days I usually just accepted things as they came without question. It’s genuinely easier that way, until it isn’t. Thinking of the timing of everything, it makes perfect sense why I stopped doing homework when I did, started forging signatures when I did, trespassing when I did. Isn’t this better, my dad cheerily asked over the Thanksgiving turkey, that we don’t have to worry about all of that anymore?

I grew up without the toxicity of an extended family, but without the beauty of one as well. I don’t know what it’s like to feel sorry when a grandparent dies, let alone devastated. I fade into the background whenever anyone even briefly dives into familial relational issues, cousin drama, or grief. I remember buttered pasta and pink playhouses, but I do not know what it’s like to know the unique experience of being uncannily, comfortably, sensibly similar to someone you’re related to simply because you’re related. I don’t know what it’s like to feel the weight or pull of your ancestors in your heart, or smell something that reminds you of your grandfather. I have my ruby slippers, and an ofrenda photo of my grandmother on her wedding day. Irene, my middle-namesake.

I receive birthday and Christmas cards from my paternal grandmother each year. To outsiders it can sound cruel to ignore such communication for so long, but you have to understand, I’m operating off of a child’s memory here. It’s hard to know where you, part of the New Generation, stand in the midst of estrangement. But I can feel time pass, the regrets of friends who themselves waited too long, and the taste of the Seven Fishes feast. I’m writing her a card (a letter, really) this year and will actually send it. In the Year of Our Lord COVID, perhaps there’s no better time for awkward, esoteric communication. It’s an investment.