I want it on record that I did not start the group chat. My mother started the group chat, three years ago, to coordinate a single grocery run before Thanksgiving. It was called “Turkey Day Squad.” It has never been renamed. It now has eleven people in it, including my aunt’s second husband, who joined during a different family crisis entirely and simply never left.
This year, the trouble started at 6:40 in the morning, when my cousin Priya sent a message meant for her sister. It was supposed to say something private about her mother in law’s stuffing. Instead, thanks to the special chaos of phones that autocomplete the wrong name, it landed in Turkey Day Squad, in full view of the mother in law in question, who reads every message the second it arrives because she “doesn’t want to miss anything important.”
For about four minutes, nothing happened. That is the worst kind of silence. Then my aunt Denise, who has never once let a silence go unfilled, sent a single word. “Priya.”
What followed was not an argument, exactly. It was more like eleven people slowly realizing they had all been holding onto something for ten years, and Thanksgiving morning was apparently when the dam gave out. My uncle brought up a loan from 2016. My grandmother brought up a loan from 1994. Someone, and to this day nobody has confessed, sent a photo of the actual stuffing, seemingly just to make things worse, or possibly to prove a point about the amount of butter used.
I was standing in my kitchen in sweatpants, watching this unfold on my phone, when my wife Anna came in holding a pie and asked why I looked like I was watching a car crash in slow motion. I turned the phone around. She read for about thirty seconds, handed the pie back to me without a word, and said, “We’re leaving in twenty minutes.”
By the time we got to her parents’ house, the group chat had somehow expanded the argument to include a disagreement about a wedding gift from 2009 and whether a certain someone had ever really apologized for it. My phone would not stop buzzing. I put it face down on the counter like that would help.
Here is the thing about a family group chat exploding on a holiday. Everyone still has to show up to the same table. You cannot un-invite someone over a text thread. So we all sat down, eleven very tired, very over-caffeinated people, plus assorted spouses who had married into this, at one table, and for about thirty seconds nobody said anything at all.
Then my grandmother, eighty one years old, the same woman who had brought up a loan from before I was born, looked around the table and said, “Well. The stuffing does have a lot of butter in it.” And somehow that broke it. Someone laughed. Then someone else laughed. Priya put her face in her hands and said she was sorry, sixty different ways, and her mother in law said it was fine, it was fine, everyone says things in group chats they wouldn’t say out loud, which is, frankly, the most honest thing anyone said all day.
We ate. It was a good meal. Nobody brought up the loans again, at least not out loud, though I did catch my uncle giving my grandmother a look across the table that suggested round two was being saved for Christmas.
On the drive home, Anna asked if I was going to write about it. I said I wasn’t sure there was anything funny about eleven relatives detonating a decade of grievances over autocorrect. She said that was exactly why I had to write about it.
She’s usually right about that kind of thing. It’s a little annoying.
