Thankgiving's Peculiar Grief

The temperatures have turned cool and comfortable. New orange and yellow colors have begun to show themselves in the trees. Jeans are the wardrobe of the day. And all around me there are pumpkins, pumpkins, pumpkins. It is the emergence of my favorite season. Fall.

Already you can hear folks referring to the coming holiday season. Halloween, with all its frightening finery never seems to be included and I suppose for good reason. I love the way the sunshine has changed, too. The fall sun is softer, shyer somehow. So even the court where I live has a more dreamy lighting scheme.

I’ve put out the fall placemats—obnoxious neon orange plastic covered with a harvest of smiling pumpkins. There’s a candy corn candle on my table, along with a small ceramic bear dressed like a mummy standing next to a gravestone candle holder. In the living room, there’s a fall floral arrangement. And on the sliding glass doors there are window cling leaves and pumpkins that the girls put up.

I relish the rebirth of fall each year, even though the fall colors are a sign that the trees will lose their leaves and winter will come. I enjoy fall through most of the month of October. But eventually I have to face one of the days where I can’t forget I’m divorced. Much of the time I don’t have to think about it. There’s one more helpful adult in the house, and we get along with him really well. But even the beautiful arrangement we have worked out among us takes a back seat every other year. In divorce speak, this means that Morgan’s holiday time must be fairly divided.

Thanksgiving is coming, and I don’t have Morgan this year. My favorite holiday is tainted by grief, the reality of a divorce, and the separation of young sisters.

I love that Thanksgiving is all food and football without the pressure of gifts and elaborate decorations. I love that the table is laden with the year’s finest carbohydrates and for a day I can forget that they are not my friends. I love to see my nieces and nephews and step into their lives for a day. I love that my brothers have families to share their time with, and I love my Green-family famous cranberry cream cheese pie.

But this year when I sit down in the midst of family, my own will be incomplete. My 11-year-old will be missing because it’s Bob’s turn to take her to Pennsylvania to see his family. It’s fair, but it’s still painful. And it’s a reminder of the brokenness of years past. The day is incomplete without my Morgan. And it feels wrong to be away from her. I suppose that in years to come it’s possible that one or both girls might be elsewhere on Thanksgiving or (gasp) Christmas. Boyfriends will appear and covet their time. Trips with college friends will be more convenient on the long holiday weekend. And one day the girls may have to decide between their husbands’ families and ours. But all of that is down the road. When your oldest is 11, you still think she’ll show up, her smooth face lovely behind tiny glasses.

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Our divorce agreement specifies that Morgan will spend two nights a week at her dad’s house. Years ago, she used to do that. Now Bob’s work schedule is such that he goes to work around 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning, sometimes earlier. He works his overtime on the front half of the day so that he’s available to pick up Morgan and sometimes Kelsey from school. So she really can’t spend the night there comfortably. (What would be the point of having her up that early? She’d be miserable.) And anyway, Bob is often here in the evenings, so she’s not getting that much less time with him.

Our divorce agreement also specifies that Bob will pay 2/3 of Morgan’s extra expenses and I’ll pay 1/3. We’ve never stuck to that agreement either. Originally, when I was a single mom making less money, the 2/3–1/3 division seemed fair. But from the very beginning, we’ve split things 50/50—school tuition, orthodontic work, dance, and oboe.

I think the only items we pay attention to in that damn agreement are that she should be with Bob on Father’s Day and with me on Mother’s Day and that we need to make equitable arrangements on the holidays, which brings us to Thanksgiving. Every other year she goes with Bob to visit his folks. Every other year I decide how I feel about the holiday season based on whether it’s the year I “get her.”

Christmas is different. Because I’ve never wanted to deny Morgan her father, we have Bob over to our home every Christmas morning to make things as normal as possible. It was an adjustment at first. But it was worth it, because we give Morgan gifts from all three parents—Chris, Bob, and myself. I make a special holiday breakfast each year. We read Luke 2 and the kids act out the story using a child’s nativity set. Then we set about the long process of opening gifts. We’re that family that opens things one at a time so everyone can appreciate the gift. We get refills of coffee, we sneak another orange roll, we relax. In the evening Bob usually goes to a friend’s house, and we go to Chris’s parents for dinner. On the 26th each year, Morgan and Bob head to PA to celebrate Christmas there, and Chris and I take Kelsey to Ocean City to spin down after the busyness that Christmas brings.

If you’ve read my posts at all, you know we have a pretty awesome thing going on at my place. We’ve worked it out so that our little stew pot of a family is palatable nearly all the time. But there are still consequences to the divorce. There is still grief. I don’t begrudge Bob his trips to see his family for the holidays. Not at all. I just grieve that it means I won’t see Morgan. I grieve for Kelsey who has to hear the explanation about why her sister is going away this year. I grieve for Morgan who will be without her mother on the fourth Thursday of November.

These are the moments that remind you of the massive internal earthquake that divorce causes. There aren’t any visible quakes anymore. But inside, in that private self that you rarely share, the cracks are still visible. On Thanksgiving, I’ll feel every one.