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Steeling myself for Thanksgiving with my father and his wife and her family.  Despite how terrified I was of my father as I teenager, I actually get along with him pretty well now.  As my brother said a few years ago, he’s like this smart guy with cool interests and a weird sense of humor, and you sort of forget he’s the same guy from our childhood.  And I try to like his wife.  She’s smart and driven and not at all like the kind of second wife that a lot of my father’s friends found.  But she’s also abrasive and argumentative and likes to pick stupid fights, and can’t turn it off for holidays.  And it pushes all my buttons.  Around her, you  need to just bite your tongue and be sure that nothing you’re saying sounds like a complaint.  (There’s a story about her younger son, who ran into some problem during his PhD and ended up living in a storage unit and eating food straight out of the can, and he wouldn’t tell her, presumably because that would be too much like complaining, and when she found out, he just asked her to get hims some canned peaches.)

But she also seems to have calmed down my father a lot, so I guess that’s good.  We had kind of a weird interaction about ten years ago, when I was still living in San Francisco.  It was Christmas and everyone had had too much to drink.  Or maybe it was just me, and of course, my father.  Somehow, me, my brother and my father got into an argument about who was taller than whom, so the three of us had to take turns standing back to back to figure it out.  And when I was standing back to back with my father, he reached back and goosed my ass.  Which I ignored, because, honestly, he seems kind of harmless now that I’m an adult and don’t live with him.  But his wife got really upset at him and gave me this look like, “Aren’t you going to stop him?"  And I just wanted to say, "I’ve been dealing with him being grabby since I was 13, when it was terrifying, and now it’s just mildly annoying.  And, anyway, don’t you dare make this about me."  But I didn’t say anything.

I kind of hate holidays.