The only someone to watch over me was me, and everybody knew it. Conversational gambits at holiday dinners were confined to safe subjects guaranteed not to draw any attention to the fact that I'd never be on the receiving end of a silver seafood fork. Allow me to elaborate:

Uncle Sol: "Say, did you know that Dalmatians tend to be hard of hearing?"
Me: "Umm, no."
Uncle Sol: "It's true."
Me: "Okay."
Uncle Sol: "So [long pause], how's your bicycle doing?"
Me: "Pretty good…yours?"
Uncle Sol: "Great."
Me: "Great."

They tried, I tried, we all tried, and the harder we tried, the more strained it got, until one day, I had a baby of my own, and suddenly my relationship with Johannes was deemed legitimate and motherhood took me from screw-up to grown-up in the eyes of the people whose respect I craved most.

That was a few years and a million somebody elses ago. Jules is in preschool now—and (as we go to press) still single, though she has been seeing one Mr. Bennett Orenstein, who is not only potty-trained but was recently awarded a medal for swimming with his face in the water.

I know that someday soon my girl will come home with a construction-paper Pilgrim hat and a pipe-cleaner turkey and they will become the centerpiece for our own Thanksgiving dinner, complete with our own traditions. We will invite all our friends who, thanks to divorces and long distances and family dynamics, find themselves free that night. We'll raise our glasses and drink to being who we want to be. And then we'll sit down to a large platter brimming with fettuccine Alfredo and all the trimmings. Once an odd duck, always an odd duck.