I'm 16, my parents are divorced, and I have a license and a car. How our holidays work is we switch off every year, but my dad doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving (on the grounds that he hates most of the food, but we still sorta get together with my grandmother) so I spend every Thanksgiving with my mother.

I've been a vegetarian for a majority of my life, mainly because I hate meat and so I cut it out of my diet completely. It's been about 10 years since I've eaten anything with meat in it on purpose. This is relevant to the story because I don't feel like my dietary preferences are respected during Thanksgiving. Almost everything has meat in it. I'm left with mashed potatoes and bread, and I really don't like the texture of mashed potatoes either so I'm stuck with bread. I've tried to discuss with my mother, but she doesn't really respect my diet either, and her family thinks it's just a phase. On top of that, her family is extremely Catholic. That alone doesn't bother me, but I'm gay, and they're very homophobic. They don't know I'm gay yet, but it still gets really uncomfortable.

My friend Logan, who is vegan invited me to his house for Thanksgiving. His family likes me and they are respectful of his veganism, so there's a lot of vegen food there. There's fake meat (which I don't like either) but they also just have normal food that happens not to contain meat or meat substitutes. Naturally, this was appealing and I told my mom that I'd prefer to go to Logan's house for Thanksgiving because I feel my diet is better respected there.

She told me the usual, that I was a kid and not supposed to make those kinds of choices, that there is still food I can eat (but as mentioned before, she means mashed potatos and bread), and that I should cherish and spend time with my family. I want to enjoy Thanksgiving, but I just don't feel like I'm respected or being listened to at all. She wanted to make me go with, but I just drove to Logan's house anyways. The food was great, and I felt genuinely welcomed. His family didn't really mind that I was there.

Im currently typing this from my dad's house, as I ended up feeling guilty and didn't want to face my mother again. I know I shouldn't have just left, but I just felt really frustrated.

I just want to know if I'm the asshole. Should I have just listened to my mother and dealt with it for another year? Or were my actions reasonable?