The Unbearable Weight of Holiday Pity
How's everyone doing after Thanksgiving weekend? Did you get through it okay? I sure hope so!
I spent a nice Thanksgiving with my partner, eating all of our favorite Thanksgiving things and then relaxing together doing exactly what we wanted for days. It was perfect.
That was not the case when I was younger and felt obliged to spend holidays with extended family, where the Thanksgiving feast was served with a heaping helping of judgement about my reproductive choices — along with an assortment of various other family dysfunctions.
It's frankly a relief to have come to an age (and a confidence) where all of that has been put in the rearview mirror.
But now the judgement and questions about whether we're having kids has been replaced by a special brand of holiday pity that we haven't had kids.
If my partner and I tell people asking about our plans that we are spending any holiday, but especially Thanksgiving and Christmas, on our own, we are inevitably met with a concerned or sorrowful face, followed by an outpouring of grief that we're going to be "alone" on a holiday.
And if we are asked after the fact how we spent the day, and reply that we spent a quiet time at home together, the grief is accompanied by a retroactive pity invite: "Oh no! If I'd known you were going to be alone, I would've invited you to our place!"
There is no accompanying awareness that all such an invite would have done is obliged us to come up with an awkward declination. Because we weren't "alone." We were together, with each other, precisely as we wanted to be.
One of the things we hope to normalize in this space is that the definition of "family" can include people without children. For many childfree couples, the answer to "when are you going to start a family?" is "our family is already complete." But never is that reality seemingly less acceptable to other people than around the holidays.
That refusal to accept a completed family without children is expressed far too frequently as an intolerable pity, for spending our holidays exactly the way we want to spend them.
And it's often expressed by people who spend their holidays surrounded by family they don't even like, can't wait to get away from, and about whom they complain bitterly to anyone who will listen for the entire holiday season.
What's wild about this entire terrible dynamic is that, if my partner and I had kids, and we were spending the holidays at home with just us and our kids, no one would feel sorry for us. To the contrary, people might be inclined to say they're jealous that we didn't have to juggle multiple extended family affairs with distant relatives whose company they don't enjoy. The only difference between pity and envy is that we are childfree.
Within that difference is a judgment about my choice, an assessment that it is the wrong choice as viewed through the lens of one's own priorities, and an aggressively condescending expression of sadness that I've failed to live up to expectations designed for your life, rather than my own.
If a person who has chosen not to parent indicates they are living a life without children, the sensitive and decent response is not pity; it's joy that they've gotten exactly what they wanted for themselves.
To that end: Thank you, I had a lovely Thanksgiving at home with my partner. How about you?
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