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Holiday woes Queries for Carrie November 2006

Query: My mom acts like I’m still a kid. I can’t make my own plans for Thanksgiving without her reacting as though I’d disowned the whole family forever. When she was my age, she hadn’t gone home for the holidays in five years. Just this once, I want to do what my boyfriend wants to do for Thanksgiving. We’ve been together for two and half years—it’s not like I just met him or anything. What do I say to her to make her cut me some slack?

Adult on Adelphi

Carrie: Uh-oh. Sometimes the holidays are hardest on the empty-nesters. Certainly, it’s time for you to begin taking up your own life’s controls and making your own rituals and traditions. While any victory you harvest this year may be pyrrhic, lay the groundwork for convincing your mother to create her own new traditions around the holidays.

She may want to try getting away with friends on a cruise or to a resort where the meals are included, so that she’s not signing up to cook in a strange kitchen to keep the Rockwellian vision alive. If you’ve got brothers and/or sisters, or if your mother does, enlist them in assisting you to show her that she can have rich and lively times at the holidays without their having to depend exclusively on her family of origin.

Try to avoid rubbing her nose in her own past as compared to your present. You’ll be right, but it won’t feel good on either side.

Query: Once again my partner dithered about requesting the time off to which he’s entitled and now we can either spend twice what we have to travel at the holiday, or we can sit home and have a late meal alone. Thanksgiving happens every year. Why does it always seem to take some people completely by surprise?

Baffled on Buffalo

Carrie: I’m not quite certain on what point you seek advice. While it’s hard to believe for the rest of us, though true all the same, some people aren’t calendrically oriented. If your partner is of that ilk and you know it and have known it, then you need to take positive action on your own behalf.

Make travel plans for one. Make them early and share your decision with your partner. If he’s motivated by your concrete behaviors, then he’ll be able to join you, and with only slight adjustment to your itinerary. If you long for him to be equally engaged in your travel plans, then you’ll want to start early in talking about places you would both like to go.

I wonder if he is slow to finalize his plans because he doesn’t particularly care for the ends to which all his means are being applied. If it’s typically one or the other of your families to which you travel for this holiday, this may be his own passive-aggressive way of taking control of a situation he would resist more openly if he felt like he had support from you.

You may want to try a detailed post-mortem well after the holiday dust has cleared, with a therapist acting as referee. It’s time for both sides of the equation to be laid on the table.

Query: I’m divorced. I’m a dad. I’ve met someone with whom I feel that ‘spark’, and my life is getting interesting again. But I feel peculiar keeping this from my kids. We’re so close, and I don’t feel right leaving them out of this part of my life—especially since it could have a big impact on theirs if everything goes on as it’s begun. How do I break the news that I’ve met someone to them?

Honest on Houston

Carrie: As an adult, you can understand that this might just be a rebound situation, or that you may not be as compatible as you’re assuming in the first blush of acquaintance. Or other home truths may come to light which will make this connection impossible/undesirable as a long-term-relationship. So you break the news to them about five or six months from now, that’s how.

It takes about that long for most of the ‘honeymoon’ stage of infatuation to wear off. At that time, you and the person of your heart may look at each other without the rose colored glasses and find that neither of you is able to be all that to the other. This is a good rule of thumb with new connections of every sort: potential business partners, friends, bowling cronies, haircutters, whomever.

You don’t want to get your kids in a ruckus, one way or the other, over every new fling and flame in your life. If this one’s really the one, you’ll still be able to share the rest of your lives together—starting in the springtime. If not, you’ve saved your kids and your relationship with them unnecessary stress.