Home for the holidays

I watched five different news stories this morning about holiday travel. All bad stuff, of course- airplane security, traffic, bad weather, gas prices- but it still made me wish I was going somewhere for Thanksgiving. I have no shortage of out-of-state and -country friends and relatives whose holidays I could rudely interrupt. But, as I was unemployed during a summer we capped off with a three-week trip to China, I don't have the requisite funds to leave town, no matter how many exclamation point-accented discounted airfare emails I receive from Orbitz.com. Plus that whole getting-time-off issue is not easily managed when you've only been working two months. So much for going home for Christmas.

This year's Thanksgiving will be much like last year's- an Italian-American dinner at Grandma's on Thursday (turkey and pasta), then a Chinese-American dinner at Phillip's folks' house on Friday (turkey and the wonderlicious sticky-rice stuffing). We'll have another dinner Saturday night when my in-laws throw a Thanksgiving potluck for 20 guests, including the teenagers newly arrived from Hong Kong last year who barely spoke English and preferred Phillip's mom's Chinese cooking to Thanksgiving dinner.

It'll be a lot of driving and stuffing ourselves (okay, maybe that part's not so bad), but what I'm most looking forward to is Friday, when we'll wake up at my in-laws' house and everything will be quiet and soft and smell like turkey. I'll wake up first, because I don't sleep well in strange beds, and I'll tiptoe out of the room because I don't want anyone to hear me. Phillip's parents will be downstairs cooking and reading the paper with the TV on. I'll sneak down to say hello and then I'll go back up because ew, I have to take a shower. But I might put my pajamas back on afterwards and spend the morning as part of the couch, watching a movie we've been saving just for Friday and browsing through the stack of Thanksgiving weekend sale ads. It will be a slow lazy day and I will love it, because it is nearly impossible for me to have slow lazy days anywhere else.

I realized this about a year ago, when we went to visit Phillip's parents' one Saturday and I fell asleep on their couch. I might not have even been unconscious for very long, but I remember waking up with a start and realizing, wonderfully, that I had fallen ASLEEP! I know that doesn't sound like a big deal to most people, but it is huge for me. Even before I was a highly anxious person with five hundred times the normal amount of adrenaline pulsing through my body, I couldn't take naps. Naps are how everyone I know got through college, but I was in bed at ten and up by eight and going all day. Lying down for a nap meant staring blankly at the ceiling and making mental lists of all the things I could accomplish in the time I would spend napping on the couch. Even on Saturday mornings, when my husband rolls over to turn off the alarm  he forgot to turn off the night before and instantly goes back to sleep, I am wide awake planning my day. Free time is empty anxious space that needs to be filled.

Except at my in-laws' house, where free time means sitting on the couch under a blanket watching the promotional DVD Phillip's dad brought back from his most recent trip to China and falling asleep because it's showing waterfalls and lakes and wildflowers and narrated in Chinese. Or watching dinner get made or looking through photo albums or half-listening to Phillip and his dad talk about how to invest money. I'm not restless there like I seem to be everywhere else.

Visiting my parents is a lot like this, except for the fact that they live in Europe, a place where one is not supposed to stay inside all day watching TV.  The last few times I've visited I've been on a Trip, intent on showing Phillip everything I know, wanting him to try the coffee and the pizza, marching him all over town and pointing out all the things I remember. There are things to do when I'm there, but even so I try to wake up early every morning, because that's the restful time, the time to talk to my mom and not go anywhere. If my parents lived near me I'd probably feel the same way about "going home", like someone else is taking care of everything. If someone else takes over the 24-hour vigilance I'm always keeping, I can fall asleep.

This time last year was a scary time for both of us, our plans up in the air and not even an entire church of candle-holding vigil-keepers could help me go to sleep at night. Things resolved themselves and I'm a lot better. Not completely, but enough to not freak out about four unstructured empty days over Thanksgiving, enough to look forward to it. At the risk of being disgustingly and embarrassingly cheesy, I'll be thankful for Friday.