At first, I loved hosting. There was the alchemy of fine-tuning a grocery list, taking it from chaotic scribbles to neat abundance. I brined turkeys in coolers in my bathtub, timed side dishes in mental spreadsheets that would make a project manager weep and once made a standing rib roast in a toaster oven so small I had to prop the door closed with a wooden spoon. But each year, the gap between expectations and my capacity to meet them widened.
The goal was a table groaning with food, family gathered in gratitude, hostess serene and dutiful. The reality was me sweating through my dress, snapping at my children for underfoot crimes and performing domestic theater in a kitchen the size of a phone booth. I spent years dreaming of giving it all up, but figuring out how, when the role of holiday host had calcified around me like plaster, seemed impossible.
My family, especially my brothers, didn’t notice the way my role as the family holiday dinner host — which I took on after my parents divorced — had worn me down. My youngest brother would arrive eager to help, and I’d assign him tasks like peeling root veggies, opening wine, setting the table, which he’d execute with genuine effort and many questions. “Is this mashed enough?” “Should I open the red or the white?” He wanted to do it right, but the fact that he had to ask revealed how little he’d been expected to learn. My middle brother required no direction because he never asked for any. He’d arrive, hug everyone warmly, settle into the couch and drift into a pleasant haze. Once, I asked him to stir the gravy while I carved the turkey. Five minutes later he was back on the couch; the unsupervised gravy was absolutely volcanic.
After each holiday, I’d be left with a kitchen that looked like a crime scene. Congealed gravy in the good saucepan. Dried stuffing cemented to the casserole dish. A tower of plates that wouldn’t fit in my inadequate dishwasher, if I had one at all. I’d scrub a mountain of dishes, wipe down counters, pack leftovers, take out trash and finally collapse near midnight, my children already asleep, my body throbbing with exhaustion. In the morning, I’d wake to a spotless kitchen and feel a dull, formless resentment for the expectation of it all.
This is the trap of being the person who always steps up: No one else will. As long as I shouldered the entire burden, my family had no reason to develop the skills and awareness to share it. It wasn’t really malicious on their part. They simply existed in a system where holidays happened automatically, and they’d never been forced to examine the machinery that made it work.
The pattern is familiar to many eldest daughters, who inherit the invisible work of family cohesion through a mysterious combination of gender and birth order. We become the keepers of tradition and the executors of emotional labor, and we worry about the horrible things that might happen if we ever stopped — holiday chaos, forgotten family members or, worst of all, no longer being the woman who can “do it all.” Our competence becomes a flattering cage, and it’s hard to level with the obvious solutions: ask for help, or stop entirely.
I am here to tell you: You can step out of that cage. I have. People are surprisingly capable when they’re given no other choice. Once you refuse to be the safety net, other people are forced to catch themselves. The greatest risk is a holiday of dry turkeys, underdone pies, waterlogged potatoes — but maybe that’s just what things look like while everyone learns to cook.
I can’t say my holiday hosting ended with a big reckoning over those unwashed dishes. Instead, I was saved by circumstance: My younger brother and his wife bought a house 12 minutes from mine. With a dining room that fit a table for 12, counter space that could accommodate more than one cutting board and an ice maker built into the refrigerator, their house was the logical place to gather.
The first year I didn’t host, I arrived at 4 p.m. with a single pie: maple custard, made in a store-bought crust because I’d run out of time and then realized I didn’t have to care. For the first time in two decades, I had no turkey to baste, no timeline to manage, no disaster to avert. All those years of effort, all that expertise I’d accumulated, all those perfectly timed meals I’d executed in impossible conditions, reduced to nothing. I’d been the director, the star, the entire production crew, and now I was Extra No. 3, wandering through someone else’s show with no lines to deliver.
At first, relaxing felt like theft. But later that night, I drove home carrying leftovers in matching containers, kids drowsy in the back seat. We arrived home to our clean apartment — no dishes, no mess, no evidence that any holiday had occurred. This is what my brothers have always had: the memories without the labor, full stomachs and clean homes and early bedtimes.
Now it’s mine, too.
Elizabeth Austin is working on a memoir about being a bad cancer mom.
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