How to lessen the pain for those attending someone else’s Thanksgiving

My first Thanksgiving at my beau’s family table, I hid in the bathroom a half-dozen times to check my watch. Can we leave yet?

Despite the lifelong ache to have my own regular family, with generations of happy family gatherings, and despite the steady, routine absence of all that — thank you addiction, suicides, and estrangements — I resolve to not let my dread of others’ family holiday gatherings show.

“Go where the happiness is,” the therapists chant. And I have. For decades. But the reality is that there is a muscle necessary to steel one’s heart so we can keep walking in and smiling at other people’s families. That muscle keeps getting trained. Weight trained.

I’ve hosted many non-familial Thanksgivings, full of the lonely, the broken, the single, and the alone, this year, for whate