entertaining fret or fret about entertaining

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Phone Calls Bleh

I just got off of back-to-back phone calls and am feeling drained and relieved and, as always, a little self-scoldy because making a phone call is rarely quite as bad as I think it will be. Honestly, even if a phone call IS as bad as I imagined (issue remains unresolved, I have to talk to someone unpleasant, I feel like I have no idea what I’m talking about), it is usually over fairly quickly. Much more quickly than justifies the days/weeks/months of procrastinating, resisting, and fretting before I make the phone call. 

One of the calls was for a dermatology appointment – I have a mole that’s being constantly irritated by non-negotiable clothing, and I would like to have it removed. Plus, I would like to get a skin check. The scheduler seemed to think I could just go for a skin check, and have the dermatologist look at the mole then; I suppose that makes sense, to have him check it out first before he commits to scraping it from my body or whatever mole-removal procedure he uses. I had been delaying this call because I have only been to a dermatologist once before, and I could NOT for the LIFE of me remember her name. So I blurted that out right at the beginning, and the scheduler was very lovely and said she could look it up, and it turned out that my previous dermatologist was no longer with this health system so I will be going to a new one entirely. 

To continue telling you overly personal and yet somehow deeply boring things about me, I figured that as long as I was on the phone ALREADY, I would try to do something that I have wanted to do since January: find a new gynecologist. I had SUCH a bad experience this past time – more than an hour’s wait, with no updates from the staff, in an increasingly crowded waiting room during a pandemic – that I was ready to leave. But I had made no progress toward finding someone new. This is the sort of thing that works best with a referral, but all of my friends see doctors in a different health system, not covered by health insurance. So! I simply asked the scheduler if she could get me in with a new gynecologist. Since I don’t need an appointment until next January, I figured I had a good chance of finding someone. And lo! the scheduler DID find me a new gynecologist and I got an appointment and PHEW. Cross two items off my list. 

The second phone call was with a company that provides entertainment for children’s parties. Specifically, they bring dinosaurs to your event and play dinosaur-themed versions of Red Light Green Light etc, and bring out fossils and talk about dinosaur facts. The dinosaurs are adult-human sized and seem to be half robot, half puppet. Carla is obsessed with dinosaurs, so I think she would love it… but I am a leeetle bit concerned that it will be too babyish for her. Like… maybe it would be ideal for the 3- to 5-year-old set. The woman I spoke to said that eight is on the upper range of the ages they serve – any older, and the kids get a little scoff-y. That was… only slightly reassuring. I mean, maybe CARLA would love it – I really think she would – but maybe her six-months-older friends would find it babyish and lame. And I think having your friends think your party is babyish and lame would be absolutely crushing at this age. Anyway, I am still mulling it. NOTE: If you would like to watch some brief Instagram videos of this company in action and weigh in on the babyishness factor, please email me and I will send you the link. 

Just as bad as the concern over how babyish it might be is the fact that the party would need to take place in my backyard. Please believe me when I say that having a party in my backyard fills me with utter dread. I am pre-stressed by even the IDEA of it. I want to go somewhere that is in the business of kids’ parties, where all I need to do is show up with a cake and some decorations, and they do everything else. And then at the end I can leave. I promise you that I will be stressed enough just doing that. 

(Last week, I did call just such a place! I had a couple of questions that didn’t have answers on their website – in fact, one question was about an add-on that was mentioned on the website, with no further details than price – so I wanted to speak to a human. I waited on hold for a long time just to leave a message. And then got an email last Friday that listed the exact same details that were on the website, and no more. I responded via email immediately, with no response; and emailed again today, only to get an out-of-office reply.)

Sadly, this is going to be a phone-call heavy week. Not only do I have a school meeting via Zoom that I have been fretting about, but I also need to call U-Haul to ask about getting a trailer hitch installed on my car. THAT is the type of phone call I hate the most, because I have no idea what I’m talking about. They will ask questions and I will have no answers. 

I also need to schedule a dentist appointment; I think I need another crown. No need to speculate on why I am dragging my feet on that one.

You know how I mentioned above that I felt a little reproachful of myself for wasting so much energy agonizing over the phone calls when really they weren’t that bad? Yeah, well, that feeling didn’t linger. 

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First Time in Target Since Early March; Not Trick-or-Treating

Man, I really hate my current blog background.

While I have gotten back into “normal” grocery shopping, and have visited Costco a couple of times over the past seven months, I have not been inside Target since the pandemic began. This is thanks to their super awesome curbside pickup offering, where you order stuff and drive to the store and someone is walking out to meet you practically the instant you arrive. (And if something you ordered isn’t actually available in the store, Target will ship it to you for free.) It’s excellent and contact free and I love it.

But.

Not EVERYTHING is available via curbside pickup. And I have begun to really need some of those things, including cleaning spray and hand soap. At one point, I was able to get hand soap via curbside, but it was only once; it has been unavailable ever since. And for some reason, I can’t order it online to be delivered. Well. They have their reasons.

So I have been thinking about making a trip TO Target for awhile now. What’s been holding me back is a) a desire to avoid most places, as per my pandemic usual and b) the last time I went there, it was such a dystopian nightmare, it really turned me off. That was back in the height of early paper towel hoarding, when the paper goods aisles were picked clean and there was no soap or Purell anywhere to be found and I was trying very hard to fill my cart with measured and reasonable amounts of cereal and pasta and wine despite the doom and dread coursing through my veins. 

A friend of mine has been inside Target several times, and, as she is still uncomfortable in the grocery store, I felt like maybe a trip to Target was workable. (Plus, she once got me two! bottles! of bleach spray on a trip to Target, and I have heard whisperings about a supply of antibacterial wipes, so… the temptation is strong.)

So I girded my… loins is the only word I am coming up with here, but that seems wholly inaccurate and also I don’t really like the word “loins.” 

Let’s try something else. I steeled my nerves and drove to Target after I dropped Carla off. 

Immediately I ran into a sticking point. There was a big sign out front that said something like, “Line starts here for our most vulnerable customers.”

It was an odd and oddly worded sign. There were no hours posted, and no one was in line… so I just… went in. But I felt oddly guilty about it. Was I intruding on Vulnerable Customers Time? I don’t know! I suppose I could have looked it up on my phone but I was a) flustered by the sign and b) dealing with partially fogged eyeglasses and b) STEELED, so I just powered through. 

A staff member pointed to a row of carts and told me they were sanitized, so I took one. There were footstep stickers on the floor in the main aisle – the one that abuts the checkout lanes – but no stickers elsewhere. 

The kids’ clothing section looked and felt normal. But then I got into the cleaning aisles and… well. It still looks like a dystopian nightmare. The soap aisle only had a handful of soap products, and what was available was more in the dish soap category than in the hand soap arena, which was very limited. I was able to get a refill of the soap I prefer in the kitchen, and a refill of a lesser-preferred soap. I am kicking myself for not getting a couple of smaller bottles of hand soap, but we do have some bottles already, and now I can refill them. 

The cleansing spray aisle was VERY sparse. Sure, there were some sprays here and there on the shelves, but I felt panicky and unsure about the items that were left. Like… there seemed to be plenty of Method and Seventh Generation products, but I’m not familiar with those as cleaning agents. And they were so abundant (“abundant”) compared to things like Lysol and Clorox that I looked at them askance; why were so many left behind? Does that mean that they aren’t actually as good at CLEANING? What do all the other Target shoppers know that I do not? And, while it may not be obvious based on my comment awhile back, there wasn’t a Lysol or a Clorox product to be found. No bleach spray, although the actual pourable bleach seemed to be well stocked. (I have plenty of that, but I really dislike and lack confidence in my ability to make my own bleach spray, so I want someone else [CLOROX] to package it for me.) 

There was a section of antibacterial wipes, although none of the brands I am familiar with. I grabbed a container of the Up & Up brand for fake legitimacy reasons; I have been skittish about buying off-brand wipes, even though they pop up pretty frequently these days. While I can look at a hand sanitizer and see that is has the correct percentage of alcohol, wipes are different. I have no idea what chemicals to look for in wipes to know that they are legit. 

The toilet cleaning options were next to nil; again, all that remained were the “fancy” cleansers that I don’t know and so don’t yet trust. I want bleach in my toilets, you know? Not citric acid.  

The paper towel aisle was empty but for one tiny corner. I grabbed a package even though I keep TELLING myself that paper towels are NOT a necessity; we have reusable paper towels and plenty of microfiber cloths and we can MAKE DO. But it is hard not to be swept up in paper towel mania. (Even when the paper towels cost SEVENTEEN AMERICAN DOLLARS OMG.) I did not look at the toilet paper situation.

There was a brand new aisle of ONLY hand sanitizer. The only brand name I recognized was Suave. The shelves carried all different brands and a variety of sizes of containers. Purell was not among them.

Most concerning – moreso than the empty shelves – was the return of signs saying that customers were limited to one item apiece. I mean, maybe Target has had those signs all along (although my friend buying me two entire bottles of bleach spray would indicate otherwise), but my grocery store eliminated those signs weeks ago. But at Target, only one canister (how does canister only have one N?) of wipes, one package of paper towels, one bottle of cleaning spray, etc.

The Halloween section was, understandably, very picked-over and messy. It’s like that every year, but it felt different this year. 

There is still no Hormel pepperoni. 

The food aisles seemed fairly well stocked: flour and yeast and sugar and olive oil and cereal and tea. They had very limited options for boxed cake mix, which seemed odd. I didn’t go into the pasta or canned goods aisles, so I can’t speak to them. I’ve heard there’s a shortage of aluminum, but there seemed to be plenty of soda. (And if you buy $20 worth of soda, you get a $5 gift card! Of course the 12-packs are conveniently $4.89.)

There were maybe ten other customers in Target at the same time. Perhaps it was always that empty at 8:15 on a Wednesday morning, but it added to my feeling of foreboding.

When I checked out, I had to wait six feet away from the register, and then wait for the staff person to call me before I could put my items on the belt. I stood there, as I usually do, to watch the prices scan on the computer screen… but I was flustered, and had just realized that I’d forgotten to scan my items through my Target Circle app (I am out of practice!), and plus I didn’t want to get too close to the checker, even though she was behind plexiglass panels. So who knows if they overcharged me. I guess I can look at my receipt, genius. But at the time I was just eager to get OUT of Target. And possibly never return. 

AFTER Target, I had to go to the grocery store. We are having a Halloween Party (ha! Not really. We are having one of the three families we have socialized with during the pandemic over for an outdoor candy hunt and dinner on our back porch. We feel that this family has been very risk-averse, and have gotten together with them twice already: once for a hike and once for lunch in their backyard. There will be seven of us total, wearing masks until we are eating, and I have configured our back porch with three tables so the adults can sit six feet apart at the big table and the kids who are siblings can sit at one small table near their parents and my kid can sit six feet away at her own table.) and I needed to get some supplies. My grocery store has really seemed to be back to normal (we can even bring our own reusable bags again!), but I checked the cleanser aisle today (I got some 409 there the other day and was hopeful for toilet-bowl cleaner) and it was nearly empty, PLUS there was a sign saying that all cleansers were only one-per-person. So. Make of that what you may. 

Plus, the pasta aisle seemed to be a little light on the pasta. Maybe it’s just a normal low before restocking, but everything feels so portentous these days.

I need more gin, but I will order that for curbside pickup from the grocery store that offers this option.

Just for completeness: For our Halloween party dinner, we are serving chicken, wild rice and mushroom soup, bread, and my favorite fall salad for dinner to the grown ups. For the kids, who are of course welcome but unlikely to eat those things, I am making mummy hot dogs and macaroni and cheese. Carla and I will make monster cookies for dessert. Since the kids aren’t trick-or-treating this year, I made up some gift bags with little treats in them, and plan to hide them around the yard. I also set up this elaborate contraption that is a bunch of plastic cups wrapped in orange crepe paper and arranged on a poster board to look like a pumpkin; the cups each have a little treat in them: candy, erasers, stickers, barrettes with colorful hair, hair ties, spider rings, glow sticks. Yes I have gone completely overboard, and yes this is basically two separate and very time consuming methods for the kids to get the same exact junk, but also I am having Feelings about not letting Carla trick-or-treat. (She has accepted this ruling without argument, by the way.) 

Oh, okay, I guess I want to talk about this, too. 

We have a lovely little cul-de-sac with wonderful neighbors who all know and adore Carla (mainly because she knows and adores their dogs). They all want to know if she is trick-or-treating this year, and I have been hedging. But she is NOT, and I feel good if sad about that plan.

A parent of one of Carla’s friends is doing the opposite. She feels that trick-or-treating is very low-risk, being outside and all, and that so many things have been taken from our kids that we shouldn’t take this holiday from them.

I see her point. And I even AGREE that I am being overly cautious here. It’s probably FINE to let your kids go trick-or-treating! No one in our county has said that people can’t do it. I haven’t read (or, to be fair, seen) any articles about whether it’s a good or bad idea. It takes place outside; the risk of contracting Covid from a physical object seems to be pretty low; the contact with other people would be fairly limited. It’s probably FINE.

And maybe it seems contradictory or weird that we are okay having dinner with another family while we are not okay with trick-or-treating. And I get that! You may be looking at me askance — I go into Target AND the grocery store in a single day, plus I am having people over for dinner? And yet I am squicky about trick-or-treating? Trying to assess individual risk is full of contradictions.

The end result is that we are still, out of an over-abundance of caution, keeping Carla home. (And we are not handing out candy. Carla and I may, if we have the energy, try to create a Halloween-y chalk obstacle course on our sidewalk, just to give kids a little something fun to do/make fun of. But we may not, also.) 

I guess what it comes down to, for me, is three things: 1) If lots of people decide to allow their kids to trick-or-treat, there will be crowds of kids on our street. Hundreds of people come to our neighborhood each year, and this year Halloween is on a Saturday AND we expect to have decent weather, so it could be MANY MORE than normal. I don’t know. The thought of Carla walking through a crush of children, hopefully wearing masks but who knows, gives me palpitations. 2) Carla’s school has been very explicit about how limiting infections is a school-community responsibility; it does not feel to me like we would be honoring that responsibility if we allowed her to trick-or-treat. Obviously, other people will have a different read. And the school has not come out and said, “Please don’t trick-or-treat.” But I am trying to take our membership in the school community seriously. 3) I do not think I can count on our lovely, kind, generous neighbors to all wear masks. Some of them have voiced opinions that imply that they do not believe Covid is being accurately represented by our media, i.e. that it will be over as soon as the election concludes, and some of them have also shared with me social plans that involved many people, which implies that they may not have the same risk assessment of the situation that I do. So having Carla go door to door where these kind, lovely people (I feel like my attempt to be really clear that they ARE kind and lovely people is now making it sound like I believe the opposite) will undoubtedly want to talk to her makes me nervous. 4) I guess there is a fourth reason, and that is that if Carla DOES get Covid after/because of Halloween, the contact tracing might be impossible.

ANYWAY. That is all to say that I am overdoing it in terms of trying to make the evening special for her and the two little friends who will be with us this weekend. I know — I KNOW — that they would have been fine if we hid a few Snickers bars around the yard and called it a day. But I think a lot of my own sadness about this year — no birthday party for Carla! no trick-or-treating! no family at Christmas or Thanksgiving! — is finding an outlet in putting a bunch of silly gift bags together for these three children.

How are YOU handling Halloween? Have YOU ventured into Target? Are you just SO SICK of all of this?

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Halloween Follow-Up and Pre-Thanksgiving Angst AND Request for Thanksgiving Advice

We are on Day 2 of a serious Halloween Hangover. Carla – whose bedtime is a strict 7:30 – didn’t go to sleep until ten on Thursday, yet still woke up at six on Friday. She was off all day – due to tiredness, no doubt – and I managed to cajole her into taking an actual NAP Friday afternoon. It didn’t take much convincing, I just said, “Carla, you are taking a nap.” And she said, “Okay,” and fell asleep pretty much immediately.

Of course, we put her to bed at 7:30… and then, at ELEVEN PEE EM IN THE EVENING, she showed up downstairs saying she had never fallen asleep. First, I find it a little hard to believe that she was awake, by herself, in her room for three hours, entertaining herself. But stranger things have happened. And, after I gave her a melatonin gummy and snuggled with her a bit and then took her back up to her room, I noticed she had a cookbook open face-down on her bed, which she claimed she had read through during her non-sleeping hours. So maybe she WAS awake the whole time. Wait, there was a “first” back there and now I have forgotten why. Presumably there was at least a “second” in mind… Well, it is lost to the sands of time.

She woke up today at a more reasonable time, but she did NOT get the eleven to twelve hours of sleep that she requires. So we are watching Barbie movies on Netflix. Well, she is watching Barbie movies and occasionally directing my attention to something extraordinary (Barbie’s hair turned pink! There’s a mermaid!) and I am typing this blog post. Okay, in the time it took to write this MONSTROSITY of a post — be warned — Carla’s movie ended and I suggested she take a nap. She agreed without argument and went upstairs… only to reappear five minutes later, yawning extravagantly and claiming her nap was very restful and she was ready to play. She is now setting up a make-up salon in her bathroom, and forging her wares out of paper. Age six is a DELIGHT.

Halloween was fun, I think. We had a few friends over – the very lovely families of two of Carla’s school friends – and I continue to find entertaining absolutely exhausting. I enjoy it, though – or, at least, I want to enjoy it  I love planning the food and buying the wine and the actual conversation when people are here. But my little introvert soul gets so completely worn out by all these extra people in my space… I don’t know. Would it get better/easier if I did it more often? Could I possibly do less in preparation, and would that help?

I made soup and bread and a veggie tray, which seems like the bare minimum. Well, I could have bought the bread, but it really is the EASIEST bread recipe in the universe. I did order pizza, as well – that’s what the kids ate, but I ordered enough for every person to have at least three pieces. And then it all slowly burnt into molten, inedible bricks in my oven over the course of the evening, so I had to throw most of it away. Horrified grimace emoji.

I could have JUST gotten pizza, right? We went to a friend’s house last year for Halloween, and they had ordered pizza and a salad. And it was PERFECT. But… well, I guess I just can’t get past trying too hard. Like, people who order pizza and a salad are already In, and I won’t be invited In unless I prove myself through baking??? As though that is a normal or reasonable barrier to entry into a social group??? What is wrong with me?????? Eye-roll emoji.

Aside from feeling exhausted by entertaining, I have come to really enjoy Halloween. It has all the fun of The Big Holidays – decorations, planning, special food – without any of the pressure. I suppose if I handmade all of Carla’s costumes, as my mother did for me, it would be much more pressure-filled. But since I buy Carla’s costumed pre-made and only have to worry about doing an appropriately tiger-y face-painting job (she was a tiger this year, which hopefully makes the previous part of this sentence make more sense than it otherwise might have), it’s very low-pressure for me.

I love all the homes that decorate for Halloween – and there’s such a wide range. We have the people with a cheery pumpkin or two on the front stoop, and then there’s the family with an entire army of zombies or skeletons posed on the lawn. It’s delightful. Carla had a hankering for “something you stick in the lawn” this year, so we found a very nice collection of ghosts – ones you could hang up OR stick in your lawn! – at Target and that was really fun to add to our outdoor décor.

The ghost brownies I made for Carla’s class party turned out well and the kids LOVED them.

Halloween ghost brownies

I also made little bags of popcorn, which Carla and I decorated as monsters, and those were fun as well. (I just wanted the kids to have a non-sugar option.)

Halloween popcorn monsters

My candy-corn veggie arrangement did NOT turn out well; my serving dishes were the wrong size/shape and/or my veggies weren’t putting on their best candy-corn show, so I just did a tray of veggies in Halloween colors: a stripe of orange tomatoes, a stripe of cauliflower, a stripe of yellow peppers, etc. etc. I thought it was festive enough, but it turns out that yellow/orange peppers and tomatoes and cauliflower aren’t particularly popular, at least not with this friend group.

The pounding rain stopped literally minutes before our neighborhood’s designated trick-or-treating time, and Carla and her friends had a great time going door to door, despite the biting wind. Then they had an even better time handing out candy to the other brave trick-or-treaters – a group of mainly older/bigger kids that arrived in swarms. I remember being that weird age between Eager Trick-or-Treater and Too Old/Too Cool for Halloween, and felt very tender toward the Big Kids, especially the ones who tried, by wearing a mask or some other gesture toward a costume… but, well, also the ones who didn’t have a costume at all, but merely gave in, possibly at the last minute, to the overwhelming desire to prolong the youthful fun of Halloweens past/collect free candy.

Now, November is upon us. And Thanksgiving is bearing down – more quickly for me than for you, because we are hosting Thanksgiving a week early (my husband is on call for the real holiday).

I am exhausted just thinking about Thanksgiving. Is this how I feel most years? Let’s see. I have been hosting Thanksgiving since 2010, and my memory of how I normally feel is that I face the holiday with pluck and enthusiasm. I should have it down to a science, what with my multi-page planning document and my detailed Week Of schedule. But this year, I just feel… drained. Not a good way to go into it, is it?

So, for the first time ever, I am considering asking for help. Gasp. Shock. Wide eyes. I know, I know. This DOES NOT sound like me. And perhaps it will not BE me, at the actual time. But the considering is the first step.

Let’s lay out my concerns/aversions to help.

  1. Differences in Technique: My mother-in-law – who has kindly and generously OFFERED to help – does things differently than I do. You may recall that I am Very Particular about things, especially when it comes to my kitchen. And I don’t want to micromanage, but I also feel very viscerally uncomfortable when someone is rummaging around in my cabinets or doing things differently than I would do them in my very own kitchen. You may be thinking, at this point, that I need to seek extensive therapy and should probably scrap the idea of asking for help. And perhaps you would be right.
  2. Space Constraints: Along similar lines: I only have the one kitchen with the one oven and stove and it’s much easier when I am the only person making the meal. It’s very simple to coordinate with myself, right? But if a whole other person is in my kitchen, chopping veggies and jockeying for the stove… well… that seems like a recipe for frustration/despair.
  3. Specificities of Taste: My husband LIKES the way I make things. Therefore, we have a very specific — I am avoiding the word “rigid” here — Thanksgiving menu, from which we rarely deviate. Could I really impose my specific dressing recipe on my mother-in-law, and expect that she make it exactly the way my husband likes it? That seems unreasonable. If she prefers, say, pumpkin pie or something chocolate for dessert… can I really expect her to make the pumpkin bars that are OUR (my husband’s and my) tradition? That seems very dictatorial of me/us.
  4. Some Sort of Mental Issue Related to Pride/Ownership: Again with the need for longterm therapy. I think somewhere along the line, I have absorbed this very strange and very stubborn feeling that I MUST do the entire Thanksgiving meal or… Or what? I lose street cred? I lose my Housewife Credentials? I don’t even KNOW. It’s just this weirdly pervasive buzz inside me that says I am the hostess, I need to provide the Entire Meal and do all the dishes and make it look effortless or else I lose. Lose what, again, I don’t know. Yet it’s THERE, inside me, buzzing away, making me feel like I am less of… something if I don’t do Thanksgiving perfectly and all by myself. This is one of those weird double-standard things that I apply ONLY TO ME, by the way – I fully understand and admire people who split the Thanksgiving duties among many, and I would gladly and gratefully pitch in with the cooking if I were invited to someone else’s Thanksgiving, and never for a single moment think less of the host. It’s some sort of weird Hostess Martyrdom that I’ve internalized somehow and I don’t understand it but nor can I rid myself of it.

Here are things working in my favor – by which I mean, that the following are present in my psyche makes me hopeful that I can get past my deterrents/aversions.

  1. I don’t particularly LIKE Thanksgiving. This is a little sad, because I think Thanksgiving used to be one of my favorite holidays. But that was back when my parents did all the work, I think, and I just had to show up? It got less enjoyable in college, when generous friends and extended family members opened their homes to me for the holiday – and I spent Thanksgiving feeling deeply, guiltily homesick. More enjoyable again when I began to establish my own traditions with my husband. And now less enjoyable again, now that it’s just A Big Day of Work. Also, I don’t really like the food! I eat turkey literally only on this one day a year. Sweet potatoes with marshmallows are fine in very small doses, but I could take ’em or leave ’em. I loathe wet bread, so the dressing is something I make but never even taste. The only things I like about Thanksgiving are the mashed potatoes and gravy. And the gravy is SO MUCH WORK and the potatoes won’t be exactly how I like them because I don’t make them with goat cheese out of respect for one family member who REVILES goat cheese. The pumpkin bars are good, but really BETTER when my husband makes them and I don’t know if he will have time/energy this year. So. If I don’t really care about the food — nay, if I don’t really EAT the food — why am I so resistant to having someone else make it???? A question for the ages.
  2. This year will be weird, so it’s almost like Not Thanksgiving, which makes me… care about perfection less. Like I said, we’re having Thanksgiving a week early. My husband will be at work all day, so he can’t help even if he wants to. My sister and niece will be flying into town at some point, so I’ll want to spend time with them rather than in the kitchen. Someone will have to leave to collect my sister and niece, someone else will have to leave to collect Carla from school, so there will be interruptions during the day. The timing of the meal will be later than normal (because my husband will be at work), so it will feel more like Any Old Dinner than Thanksgiving. All of these variables are making it wholly UNusual, so why stick to the usual plan?
  3. Plus, we have a built-in Do-Over available to us if we want it. I mean, Actual Thanksgiving will still happen. So I could save Doing It My Way for the ACTUAL DAY.
  4. My mother-in-law really wants to help, so why not give her that pleasure? As a relatively new hostess (can I still say “relatively new,” after nearly ten years of hosting this holiday?), I think I revel a bit in being The Provider. I want my guests to sit back and relax, rather than work hard in the kitchen with me. But… I think it causes my mother and my mother-in-law mental stress and even emotional pain, to sit and relax. They want to help. They have MULTIPLE DECADES of prior Thanksgivings behind them, during which THEY were the hostesses, and they have so much experience and expertise to share, and they are so accustomed to being busy that I think they feel… useless and unneeded when I shoo them out of the kitchen. Part of me feels – rather harshly – like they should learn to chill out and accept that this is the next phase in their lives, that their role now is NOT hostess, but guest and grandmother, that they should let the next generation have a turn at planning the menu and taking care of them. But… a growing part of me feels really bad and guilty and selfish about that, and wants desperately to be more generous about sharing the hostessing. God, this is all SO VERY STUPID and yet it causes me GREAT ANGST. (Also, I am feeling VERY CRANKY TOWARD and simultaneously VERY JEALOUS OF The Men, who seem to be completely unencumbered by any of this, and at least ACT totally content to simply sit in the living room watching football. WELL. There will be NO FOOTBALL this year, Men!) (P.S., in case this paragraph confused the issue, only my in-laws will be here for this Thanksgiving. I just brought my mother into it because I realized last year that she feels kind of sad and unwanted/unnecessary/superfluous when I don’t let her help with holiday meal preparation, and that made ME sad and I have been reflecting on it ever since.)

Okay. So I think I have laid it ALL OUT for you. It’s ugly and doesn’t paint me in the best light and it probably doesn’t make much sense outside of my very specific brain, but there it is.

So what should I do? How should I approach this Thanksgiving? Business-as-exhaustingly-usual? Or welcome my mother-in-law’s offer to help? And, if the latter, HOW do I do that, given the constraints above? If you were ME, with all my neuroses and particularities, how would you make THIS Thanksgiving easier and more pleasant and less tiring?

At this very moment, the biggest part of me wants to make a reservation at a fancy restaurant and have our faux Thanksgiving THERE. But I don’t think there are any restaurants that offer faux Thanksgiving. I don’t even know if the grocery stores offer their pre-made Thanksgiving meals for sale a whole week prior to the real holiday. Can I even get a turkey that far in advance???? And, really, I don’t want my Thanksgiving Antipathy to ruin a beloved holiday for the rest of my family. So I am resigning myself to making Thanksgiving dinner at home as usual. But maybe not exactly as usual…?

Help?