Walnuts, Pies, and Resentment

I used to really enjoy Thanksgiving. As a kid I loved making paper turkeys in school. Sometimes we’d have popcorn parties in the main foyer of the Breen School, crammed together, excused from class, to watch a well worn filmstrip. The five day weekend that started when the bell rang was the icing on the cake for nine year old me. In the small New England city I grew up in, we’d take our time walking home, shuffling through the fallen leaves with our cheap sneakers and our jackets tied around our waists.

Arriving home Wednesday, my mother would be unpacking brown paper grocery bags with the radio playing the Golden Oldies while she sang along. Thanksgiving was her time to shine. She baked fresh loaves of banana and nut breads. She’d hack up butternut squashes with her tiny but surprising might. The turkey, gutted and glorious, would already be in the pan, and I could smell sauteed onions and butter as she prepped the stuffing. I’d pick at the steaming hot stuffing while she forced spoonfuls into the cavity of the anonymous bird who’d been born and raised for just this occasion. I felt no sympathy, tomorrow my dad would hack into that thing like a samurai with the electric knife.

On the morning of Thanksgiving my mom would get up early to put the bird in the oven. We kids would watch the Macy’s parade, knowing at the end of the show Santa would bring up the rear. Besides that and the Snoopy balloon, I found the whole thing a little boring.

By noontime my childhood home smelled amazing. Ma would be hustling about, reminding my father to put the leaf in the table. My job was easy. Open two cans of jellied cranberry sauce (I’d sooner die than eat the one with real bits of cranberries blended in) and dump them onto a plate and pop those in the fridge to chill. It was grueling work, but I handled it with grace and integrity.

Sometimes the ‘relatives’ showed up. My grandmother, maybe an uncle or two. They’d commandeer the parlor, playing cribbage on tv trays and filling the room with cigarette smoke. My brother and I would eat all the walnuts out of the fancy glass bowl placed on an end table.

After what seemed like days, my mother would proudly announce dinner was ready. We kids ate in the living room off the aforementioned tv trays. My mom would make our plates, insisting we have a little of everything, including the things we didn’t like. For me that was pretty much everything on the menu. I gagged at the pearl onions that stared back at me like eyeballs. The pile of stringy orange mush was lathered in butter and I used my fork to push it to the edge of my plate. The potatoes were lumpy and I’d bury those in gravy. I was here for two things, walnuts and stuffing, and we were all out of walnuts. Still, no one paid attention to me when I fed the cats my meal and scraped the rest of my plate into the trash. Later I’d eat a mound of Cool Whip with a bit of apple pie underneath and start writing my letter to Santa. I wasn’t under the illusion that Santa was real, so I always wrote my list in order of importance, knowing my parents had four kids to buy for. I also knew that we were poor. Maybe it was living in the projects that gave it away or using bread bags to insulate our shoes when it snowed, it didn't matter, I knew.

I’d go to bed, long before the relatives left, and long after my mother cleaned the kitchen alone.

I would fall asleep on the thought that with Thanksgiving out of the way, I could concentrate on my favorite holiday, Christmas! (Cue the Angels Harps) Man, I wanted my own pair of roller skates that year.

As the years wore on, and I grew up, I noticed things I never noticed back in the fourth grade.

My mom, and her ninja kitchen skills, worked tirelessly to prepare a nice meal for her family. She had to scrimp and pinch to afford to buy everything on the grocery list. No one ever helped her with the clean up, and no one ever said thank you.

When I was in high school, my mother, who worked full time, was up at the crack of dawn, just like every Thanksgiving before that, starting the oven and seemingly moving just a little slower these days. I was 15 that year. The year she collapsed in the kitchen. We kids helped her to her feet and sat her on the couch. That's about when we noticed the blood. She was bleeding heavily as only a woman can do. She was pale and lethargic. We began placing towel after towel under her, terrified at the sheer volume of wet towels we threw into the trash as the day wore on. My brother wanted to call an ambulance. My sister and I pleaded with her to go to the emergency room. At five foot three inches tall and 105 pounds, I’m ashamed to say we could not convince that woman to see a doctor. “I’m not going today, it’s Thanksgiving”

My brother put the parade on the television and sat with her while my sister and I cooked our first Thanksgiving dinner. By now, my father had left our family, the relatives had stopped coming, but my mother insisted we do it up exactly as she always had. We girls moved around the kitchen nervously, stopping often to peek in at Ma. We are not horribly ignorant people, we knew she needed medical attention, but if you knew my mother, then you know, she did things on her own time.

Dinner was served. My mother came to the table and lamented on what a good job my sister and I had done, even though we were amateurs. We did what we always did and made the best of it. We packed away the leftovers, put the turkey carcass out on the back porch for the stray cats, just as my mother had always done. .

Immediately following that dinner, but before I could make a Christmas list, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. I would not find out until a few years later how close we had come to losing her that year. The adults in my life decided to keep the worst of it from me. She had a complete hysterectomy and spent almost three months in Mass General.

She beat it.

From then on, she never cooked another Thanksgiving dinner. Instead she supervised.

For me, the damage was done, I hated Thanksgiving and still do. We didn’t lose my mother, but the mood was forever changed. Many years later she would spend another Thursday in November on the couch as she battled cancer again. A bandana tied around her head to hide the effects of the chemo, her end table littered with medications. She drank small glasses of milk as it was all she could keep down. Once again we did our best to make it a special day for her. I don’t think we bothered turning the radio on.

Fast forward a few years, and her nest; on the couch was now abandoned. After a long and painful battle with cancer, she passed that summer. I lobbied hard to skip Thanksgiving all together. I was out voted.

That year, that Thanksgiving, I cooked my first bird. Things were going pretty good so far as the prep work went. My tom came out of the oven a lovely golden brown, brimming with my beloved stuffing made with butter and onions like Mum had always done. I was mentally patting myself on the back for a job well done as I transferred the turkey from the roasting pan to the serving tray.

It was a big bird, dripping with its own juices. So, naturally I dropped that steaming hot sucker on my tiled floor. It skated across the room like it was fleeing the scene of a crime. My husband and kids bore witness which negated my first thought which was, “maybe no one will notice”. Of course I launched into an impressive series of curse words while I tried in vain to catch that slippery fucker. Using a few serving forks I ‘rescued’ that bitch and slammed it down on the counter. If I weren't so angry I’m sure I would have bawled like a baby. My family sprang into action, Ty said “Hey, ten second rule mom”. Ethan was blotting the dust bunnies off the crispy skin. Brian said “Its fine, it’s totally fine…” I looked at my husband and my sons as they promised on my mothers good name they were not going to tell a single soul. “I fucking hate Thanksgiving” I said for the one hundreth time that week.

That day, a new generation of relatives came,and they all eagerly devoured my soiled attempt at an old fashioned Thanksgiving dinner. I sat quietly, refusing the turkey, I jammed some stuffing down my throat for the sake of it. In bed that night, instead of thinking about what I wanted to buy the boys for Christmas, I cried for missing my mother, I vowed I’d never cook a Thanksgiving dinner again (And I have not).

EPILOGUE

These days, I just stall until someone invites me to their Thanksgiving festivities. It’s childish, but it works. These days I stop at the market and grab a couple of pies and a container of Cool Whip. These days, I no longer watch the Macy's day parade, and since I got my dentures I don’t bother with walnuts. These days I honor my mom, alone in the kitchen, playing her favorite songs in the early morning hours of the day, while my family sleeps.

PS

I never got those roller skates.

FIN.