Healing Through Thanksgiving Together: A Guest Post

I stood in the middle of my kitchen staring out at my dining area and living room completely stumped as to how I would rearrange all of the furniture to get dinner seating for forty in what was starting to feel like an extremely claustrophobic space.

For my entire 44-year existence, we have had Thanksgiving dinner with my mom’s side of the family. For years, my mom hosted which meant my Thanksgiving mornings were filled with table setup, last-minute preparations, lots of cooking, a little bit of frantic running around, my dad hiding in the garage, and my brother asleep in his bedroom or at someone else’s house to avoid the preparation chaos. 

After my parents suffered a terrible motorcycle accident in 2009 and my mom suffered a TBI, hosting our family of 40 became a bit much for her, and it was passed on to various other family members.

Honestly, I’m not even sure how I ended up volunteering to host this massive event. It was probably my mouth–it tends to get out ahead of my brain at times. However it happened, on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I found myself standing in my living room baffled by how I would ever manage to figure this puzzle out.

Year of the creative problem-solving competition, Odyssey of the Mind, came in handy, and I finally figured out how to get my tables set up in an L so that everyone would be seated–maybe not comfortably seated but seated nonetheless.