I need your advice. My parents are bugging me to come home for Thanksgiving. The thing is, as a kid I always hated holidays. No, I loved holidays; what I hated was my parents. Growing up, I was ignored on holidays except when my mom would order me to wait on my brothers and dad. As an adult it’s no better. My family spends most of the time talking about work, but I’m not allowed to talk about my job because it isn’t a “real job,” since I do low-paying social work. (My dad and brothers work in computers.) Despite my mom being so sentimental about Thanksgiving, she and my dad don’t “do” Christmas because it’s “too much trouble” to buy gifts. And several years ago my mom curtly told me the day before my birthday that we wouldn’t be celebrating my birthday, “since no one will have a good time.”
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I’m an adult. Do I still have to swallow my mother’s lies, my father’s tirades, and their insistence that we’re really a happy family? The only thing making me even consider going home is the guilt. My brothers are no help–they’re too spineless to stick up for me. Please give counsel, and soon!
You don’t need my advice, GMADNYW. What you need is your very own spine. No one can force an adult to go home for Thanksgiving if he or she doesn’t want to go. Therefore there’s no need to bore me, my readers, and the whole friggin’ planet with a long list of scab picking about your awful parents, your miserable childhood, your miserable holidays, dad’s steak dinners, and all that unwelcome career advice. So your parents are grade-A, gold-plated, lemon-scented assholes. Then don’t go home for Thanksgiving. If they lay a guilt trip on you, try saying something like, “You know what, mom and dad? You suck. The only way I’d spend Thanksgiving at ‘home’ this year is if I knew for a fact that Russian security forces were going to fill your house with gas and put me out of my fucking misery.”
- Lap dances at strip clubs in Montreal are on average 50 percent cheaper than at clubs here in Toronto.
Finally, I agree that dreamy Prince Harry would make an excellent choice for Canadian head of state–provided, of course, that he will marry a French royal and produce lots of bilingual royal babies. So how do we get a “Make Prince Harry the King of Canada” movement off the ground?
