The ACOD's (Adult Children of Divorce) Guide to Surviving Thanksgiving

How to Hold it Together when Everyone's Pulling You Apart

Thanksgiving. It's a beautiful holiday-candles on the table, the turkey, golden brown and fragrant, all the special dishes you remember, the family together being a family and being grateful. But if your clan is more like the Osbornes than the Osmonds, or if Mom and Dad have split and Mom married a guy with ten kids and Dad moved to Wisconsin with his new wife who keeps insisting that everyone fly out to be with them on Thanksgiving, or if your significant other is also an ACOD and the two of you are at odds about which side of the family gets the honor of your presence, then deciding what to do can make you, well, a little queasy.

Hopefully the following suggestions can help you weather the domestic storms that holidays can spark for ACODs and let you emerge with the minimum of hurt feelings while actually enjoying yourself.

Queasy situation #1
There's No Place Like A Broken Home For The Holidays

Holidays are especially hard for ACODs. (It's the rare adult who isn't one these days.) Sometimes all it takes is a stroll past the display of canned pumpkin and pie crust mix in the supermarket to trigger memories of warm family times when you were together (after, of course, your brain has censored out those scenes of the arguments and broken dishes and your mother's tightened jaw and your father disappearing into the den after dinner to watch football leaving everyone else with the cleanup).

Now everything has changed. There's no "home" to go home to. Mom and Dad are living apart and all that remains are the memories. No wonder so many people get depressed around the holidays. (Probably whoever invented the concept of "Black Friday" was an ACOD, too. They don't call it "retail therapy" for nothing.)

But remember, you've changed, too. You're an adult now, and your siblings are adults, and possibly married with children and forming traditions of their own. It's OK to be nostalgic (hence the popularity of the memoir), but you run into trouble when you let it rule (and ruin) your present. It's a challenge, but the more you can accept your current situation, the easier it will be for you to move on.