A Thanksgiving Time Warp
The time-travel genre used to irritate me. But now I get it. As I scramble around in the last quarter of my life, I search out books, TV shows, and movies where characters fly to the past, future, and back trying to fix their present. We all live many lives. And looking back and reliving a piece of our past can be a fix for how we see ourselves now.
Thanksgiving 1997, in our big, beautiful house in Pasadena.
It’s a great day - our home filled with friends, relatives, and kids of all sizes. Everybody’s happy, and I’m trying to be as well. But even though I’m in the kitchen cooking, which is what I want and love to do on Thanksgiving, I’m not. My happiness is caught up in fried brain wiring and escalating confusion. I’m holding a full hot pot and there are laughing obstructions between me and the sink and I yell.
“Kids! Get away from the goddamn pies! I told you already!”
Margaret swoops in and shoos out the little dressed-up mob of our kids and guest kids through the swinging kitchen door as I tumble a pot of hot, boiled Yukon Gold potatoes into a mixing bowl, turning my head away from the steam.
“You all right?” she asks.
“I’m fine, fine...where’s the butter and milk?”
“Next to the mixer” she says.
“My martini?”
“Behind you, next to the sink,” Margaret says, and takes the potato pot from me as I take a slug of gin. “How many is that?” she asks.
“This is only my second, hon, and no more today.”
There’s a beat as she looks at me. Has she been counting? She turns to the stove. “I’ll start taking things out,” she says.
“Everything but the gravy,” I say, “that’ll go out with the potatoes.”
Margaret heads into the dining room with string beans and sausage stuffing as I start the mixer and pour the butter and milk in with the potatoes. As soon as the kitchen door swings closed behind Margaret, I pour more gin into my glass. Maybe it was more like three. Anyway, this only makes it three and a half, or four and a half. I’m not sure. I thought I’d stopped lying. I have, except about drinking.
It’s Thanksgiving and drunk or sober, I’m acutely aware that I’ve got a huge undeserved mountain of luck to be thankful for. I’m still a couple of years from getting my diagnosis, and anyone can see I’m on a roll. I’m a showrunner on a hit TV series. My wife and I have two gorgeous kids. We’ve just moved into this sprawling classic Pasadena house with a circular drive where we park our German cars. Friends and family gather around the dining room table to toast us and each other. Everyone will be honestly grateful for the blessings life has bestowed on each of us.
But in the kitchen, as I spoon the mashed potatoes into a serving bowl, I know there’s no amount of thanks I can give that can make it right that this life I’m living here is mine.
Other people might be fooled for a little while, but I know what a screw-up I am, and soon they will, too. I wasn’t just having trouble multi-tasking; I could barely task half the time. I'm always back-filling for important things I forgot and mistakes I made, even though I get to the office hours before anyone else to organize and nail down each day before it happens and practice looking like a calm, articulate showrunner in the bathroom mirror down the hall from my office. There is no way that I’ve earned the fairy-tale life I’m living. And when that comes out, boy it’ll be a mess.
As it turns out, I did end up losing that particular job on the hit series, and after a couple of other show-runner jobs, I ended up leaving the business. But it wasn’t because I was discovered to be a scatterbrained, worthless fraud. Well, I did go through a period of calling myself that in the shower, but that wasn’t really the truth.
I wasn’t an idiot. I couldn’t handle the pressure.
Four years after this dinner I got diagnosed with ADHD, depression, and chronic anxiety. That helped me get a grip. Then getting on meds, finally getting sober, and getting into therapy put me on the never-ending road to being honest with others and comfortable with myself. Still on it. But for just an instant, a glimmer of truth shone through on that Thanksgiving in 1997.
I brought out the mashed potatoes and gravy; we all said grace and toasted our thanks. Then, as another scatterbrained-worthless-fraud tape-loop started playing in my head, I realized the dinner I’d made was perfect. Every dish - the gigantic beer-basted turkey, the sausage stuffing, the acorn squash, the sautéed green beans, the mashed Yukon golds, and the made-from-scratch gravy all had wildly different cooking times and prep. But they all hit the table perfectly done, hot, and all at the same exact time. This takes skills like multi-tasking, concentration, and my old bugaboo, time management.
At that Thanksgiving table, I got the first inkling that whether we have mental or physical disabilities or not, our life keeps coming ever faster with deep joy and tragedy and shallow distractions tumbling over us with equal confounding force that can knock us flat. And the strength and clarity to stand and ignore the distractions is only ours when we are true to ourselves and bound to those we love. That glimmer of truth went away for a few years, but I remembered it in time.
Thanksgiving 2023, in our nice, comfortable house on the edge of the woods in the middle of Georgia.
This year it’s a small group. Our two kids are grown, one newly married and all three have moved back in with us. They need to get settled someplace safe to rebuild their own strength and clarity before venturing out into the world again. As the five of us eat, joke around, and relax, I’ll make sure to take a moment to be thankful for that glimmer of truth back in 1997 that guided me on the road to this wonderful life.
Revised from a chapter in “A Chicken in the wind and How He Grew, Stories From An ADHD Dad” An earlier version of the post was published in additudemag.com