What We Bring to the Table

Thanksgiving has a way of bringing families together and sometimes bringing every old family role right along with them. I know this from experience.

Years ago, I was in the car with my parents, my sister, and my brother-in-law coming back from a Thanksgiving gathering when my sister decided to rank our intelligence. Apparently, my brother-in-law was somewhere around an 8.5 or 9, while I came in around a 6 or 7. First of all, who rates people’s intelligence in the car? Second, there are about a hundred different ways someone can be intelligent.

And for the record, I love my brother-in-law. I always learn something when I talk to him. I’ve even joked that if they ever get divorced, I’m Team Brian. So, this was about something else entirely. My sister had unknowingly, or perhaps very knowingly, landed on one of my oldest wounds. Growing up, I was the “smart one.” She was the “popular one.” Things came easily to me in school, and somewhere along the way I attached some of my worth to being intelligent.

I had had a couple of drinks and I am a lightweight, so that did absolutely nothing to improve the situation. I got angry. I said things I probably shouldn’t have said. And the next morning, I felt awful about my behavior and needed to apologize. Apparently, there wasn’t a single piece of paper I could find, so I wrote on a paper bag and left it in the kitchen for everyone to read while I went for a walk.

That memory makes me laugh now, but it also reminds me how quickly we can become younger versions of ourselves around family. We can have decades of life experience, careers, relationships, failures, successes, healing, and growth – and somehow one comment from a sibling can make us feel twelve again.

Recently, I looked at my mother’s and sister’s Human Design Profiles, which describe some of the ways we naturally interact with others and move through life. They both have a quality connected to problem-solving. People often look to them for answers and solutions. Suddenly, some of the unsolicited advice I have received over the years looked a little different. It doesn’t mean I suddenly enjoy unsolicited advice. Let’s not get carried away. Yet it gave me another way to see them.

I can also see qualities in my sister today that I genuinely admire. She has taken her own experience with divorce and difficult transitions and now helps other people navigate those experiences while taking better care of themselves. When I think about it, we are actually doing something very similar. We have both taken challenging experiences from our lives and found ways to use them to help other people. I did not see that one coming.

Family members can become frozen in our minds as the person they were years ago – the bossy sister, the difficult child, the fixer, the quiet one, the pain-in-the-butt younger sister. Meanwhile, everyone has continued becoming someone. This Thanksgiving, maybe gratitude can include noticing that. Who is sitting across the table from you now? What have they lived through? What qualities do they bring that you may have stopped noticing?

We can still get irritated. We can still take a breath, go for a walk, or remove ourselves when we need to. Awareness simply gives us another choice: to look beyond the old role and become curious about the person in front of us. Sometimes that little bit of curiosity is enough to create compassion toward ourself and others.