My mother's table

Happy Thanksgiving to you all! The kids are all busy writing in the Thanksgiving book, so I thought I'd steal some time to write.

Of course, I have so much to be thankful for, and I won't bore you with the details, but one of the things I am most grateful for today is to not be cooking or preparing for guests. Our turn hosting comes in just one short month, when H will have large and exotic sea creatures in our refrigerator in preparation for the Italian night of seven fishes, but today, my mother in-law has that privilege. With my family living far away, and the logistical nightmare that is traveling with three small children, I am usually found at my in-law's most holidays, and on occasion, my own family joins me there. While I am so happy to be surrounded by people I am lucky enough to truly think of as my family, sometimes, just sometimes, I wonder what it would feel like to be returning to my childhood home on a holiday to have a meal cooked by my mother.

It's an odd experience to always be a guest at someone else's table. I took for granted, the experience, when I had it, of someone cooking our family's dishes. I don't say "favorite", because, to be honest, overcooked vegetables, gluey mashed potatoes, and boiled turnips fried in bacon grease, really do not qualify. But it's the tradition of the those foods, along with the strawberry short cakes made with those weird little bowl-like cakes that you find in the produce department, that I miss. And it's not just the food. During the post-meal reminiscences I long to hear "Remember the time Mary..." or "When Kathleen was five...", and the retelling of my childhood stories, straight from the source. I wonder what it would feel like for my chldren to hear my mother tell stories of times I was naughty. (And to answer your question, I don't have a plethora of aunts and uncles ready to tell tales as all but one of my mother's siblings died in quick succession in the years after my mother's passing. In fact, my uncle died of a heart attack while we were all on death watch at my aun't bedside, casuign us to have two wakes and funerals with a week. I shit you not. It's like we're the damn Kennedys.)

This is not to say every holiday is wrought with emotion, and I sit there crying in my turkey. In fact, so much time has passed that, sadly, or blessedly, depending on how you look at it, my mother comes to the front of my mind very little. I suppose part of that is being busy with the kids. But every once in a while though, I wonder "what if?" What if she were here? What would it be like for her to greet my kids at the door in her "cooking clothes" of women's golf shirt and sweat pants and full makeup, forehead sweaty from mashing potatoes? What would it be like to get drunk on white wine with my mother and sister after dinner, one of my chldren sitting in her lap, while my husband and father did the dishes (since I'm sure my father would have been dragged into modern times by this point)? What would it feel like to be home?

So if you are lucky enough to be sitting at your mother's table today, or oyur aunt's or your grandma's, complicated as it may be, take a minute to apprecaite it while it lasts. Sure, your mother may irritate the shit out of you, and I know without at doubt were my mother still alive she and I would be aruging over those disgusting turnips.