whiny product of a broken home

I was having a conversation yesterday about the importance of Thanksgiving as a family holiday. My MIL was the child of immigrants, who grew up in Cambridge (kind of the Berkeley of the 30s), so Thanksgiving was not particularly important to her growing up. When she became a mother, she and my FIL lived 3,000 miles away from their own parents, so they didn't make a big deal of the holiday--no travelling home and having a huge family event. She was interested in what my experience had been, and whether I missed having a big family event.

In a word, no. One of the things about being the child of what used to be called a 'broken home,' is that all holidays are complicated. For a time, my favorite holiday was Halloween, because it was the one holiday that my parents didn't care about at all--the one holiday they ceded to their children. There was never any bickering about who got to sort the candy. We spent most of Thanksgiving and Christmas trucking back and forth the twenty miles between my childhood home and my dad's bachelor apartment. Later, when my mom got remarried and I moved in with my dad, I spent those holidays driving my brothers back and forth between both of their houses. So I don't miss that at all. And I definitely don't want my own kids to have to experience it, either.

But something struck me this afternoon, as I was thinking about that conversation yesterday. The first time that I ever ran away from home was on Thanksgiving, when I was about 14. And I didn't remember that yesterday. There was a point in my life when I thought I would never be able to think of Thanksgiving, without remembering myself trudging through that cold gray afternoon on the way to a friend's house. But I didn't think of it once yesterday.

That's a pretty phenomenal thing, in my emotional history. A sign that, with enough time, all wounds are healed.