Three Kinds of Dressing

A friend and I were talking about how we spent Thanksgiving. They spent the day cooking with their dad: two different kinds of potatoes and three different kinds of dressing.

Three.

The kind of detail that shouldn’t matter, but somehow it landed like a reminder of the life I didn’t get.

I ate Thanksgiving alone this year. By choice.
I had three invitations, actually.
Apparently, I was popular, which feels like a cosmic joke. But I picked solitude because that’s usually where I feel safest. And honestly? It was one of my best Thanksgivings. Quiet. Simple. No performance required.

But even though I enjoyed the silence, something about their reflection stayed with me. The easy togetherness. The kitchen noise. The parent-and-child choreography you only get when you grow up with rituals. I never had that. Not then, not now.

We didn’t do family holidays when I was a kid.
No big dinners.
No house full of people.
No shared recipes passed down over decades.
Nothing that resembled the stories other people seem to treat as universal.

And the older I get, the more I realize you can’t go back and build a childhood retroactively.
You can’t borrow someone else’s family for a holiday.
You can’t slide into a warm memory you weren’t part of.
You can’t force a belonging that never formed.

Maybe I’m built for quiet. Maybe all that family noise would’ve been too much anyway. But I still wish the option had existed—the sense that somewhere out there, a room existed where I naturally fit.

Sometimes the grief isn’t about being alone today.
Sometimes the grief is for all the versions of yourself that never got to exist.

And you can love your solitude
and still ache for the moments you never got.

Both can be true.
Both usually are.