How super glue saved my childhood Thanksgivings

For most kids, Grandma and Grandpa’s house is their favorite place to visit. Filled with toys and endless affection, treats and hugs. For ordinary people, Thanksgiving is a particularly special time to spend with family.

That wasn’t my childhood. Don’t worry — this isn’t a sob story.

My grandparents were an intense breed of Irish Catholics. With the alcohol flowing on holidays, there was much fighting. And more fighting.

A few years ago, I went to a Chinese restaurant with my in-laws on Thanksgiving, and a fistfight broke out among the servers. My in-laws were aghast. They were so ashamed of exposing my kids to this strife.

It was, weirdly, a little nice. It felt like a real Murphy family Thanksgiving.

The last Thanksgiving we spent at my grandparents’ house in my childhood was particularly tense. I found myself fidgeting with anything I could find. My grandparents didn’t kid-proof, so I found myself fidgeting with a bottle of super glue.

When the appetizers were served, my palms were wholly glued together. I passed on all my favorite nosh; all of the pigs in a blanket were scarfed down by my cousin. My mother was too caught up fighting with her parents to notice.

Dinner was served, and my mother sat across from me. She was studying to be a speech-language pathologist, and as a part of that training, she was learning sign language. She taught me a few curse words so we could communicate our frustration with each other silently and clandestinely during the meal.

As she signed to me what she thought, I sat across from her, laughing and nodding. She encouraged me to sign back to her; I kept shrugging.

She was concerned: Was I actually having a good time?

No, that couldn’t be right. Then she noticed no food on my plate and my water was untouched. She called me into the kitchen, the only private place in the house that was otherwise filled with family.

She started to interrogate me, asking what was amiss. My grandmother walked in and immediately realized what was happening; she had found the super glue bottle open and empty in the bathroom a little while beforehand.

Finally, I confessed.

The entire family eventually entered the kitchen, and a bottle of nail polish remover was procured. This was before the internet, where a simple search can tell you the solution to such a problem. We faced 15 minutes of fighting between the adults before they decided that the nail polish remover would be tried.

My hands were finally free, but the meal was cold and my hands reeked of acetone. My grandmother decided my punishment for ruining the meal would be our banishment from that Thanksgiving meal and the next one, too.

The joke was on her. My mother and I were delighted. All it took to get out of family Thanksgiving was this. Why didn’t we think of it earlier?

We headed to a Chinese restaurant, and a new tradition was born. Every Thanksgiving after that, that’s where we would celebrate. Years later, I’d be with my in-laws at one. And when the fistfight broke out, I was just so relieved that it was someone else’s family fighting that year.

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Bethany Mandel is the co-author of “Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.”