I paid for the entire Thanksgiving feast because I had made a silent, desperate promise to myself: my daughter would have one warm, normal holiday with family, no matter how they treated me.
My mother, Linda Parker, loved to remind everyone within a three-mile radius that I was the “difficult” one. I was the daughter who left our suffocating hometown, the one who worked two jobs to support herself, and the one who, in her words, “thought she was better than everyone else” just because I refused to engage in her psychological warfare. So, to buy my way into her good graces for a single afternoon, I covered everything.