And instead of during eating season, preparing said eats, I am thinking about my mother. My quite dead mother. The mother who I found out had died as I prepared my Thanksgiving meal 8 years ago, in a different house, in a different life, as a different me. That me, also, had just the evening previous cut and laid out 4 cups of half inch bread cubes to stale for the butterscotch bread pudding, double recipe, to be prepared half with and half without chocolate chips.
Oh. Also, I got married. It's been a busy year. He does not drink alcoholically, he does not hit, he does not lie, he does not call me names, and he does make me waffles. Really good ones. With ice cream on the top. As that's better than I've done in the entirety of my dating career the last 5 or 6 years, I did a wise thing and married him. I am still a neurotic single mother... but now I share a bed with a neurotic single father, and together we are a very happy hot mess.
But that is a different update.
So... right. Before I slinked my way back to this computer, I was contemplating waking my husband up to tell him about my mother. Not mentioned in our vows, however, was a promise to wake the other when we feel an overwhelming urge to blubber out "My mother learned how to read well to read me bedtime stories" and thus 'asking' without at all asking, them to get their head that quickly in the game and know exactly where we're at. And then to understand why we're extremely angry at them, as of course we know we will be.
And so, I reasoned that this abstract waking may not be very fair, and left our bedroom.
On the way to the kitchen, I saw my cat. Not the old black one with the sagging belly and puffy fur that was there when my mothers death was announced to me, sitting on the couch next to my toddler, but the new sleek black one who was brought to me three years ago by a cheating boyfriend, and who I could not turn away because like my husband, he was a boy who actually seemed to adore me. And I thought about telling this furry boy (who no longer seems to adore me but rather, I suspect, is using me for dry cat food and a warm crotch to sleep on when I am laying on my back) about my mother. "She was a trucker for a period, you know...that was when she lived by Coney Island and made my brother and I boxes with our names written on them in glue that she covered with sand from the shore. I lost mine when I was hitchhiking a teenager to make to to my brothers graduation"
But by time I'd made it to him, my new hostage was gone.
However, I was left thinking of my brother also-- I thought I could maybe text him in the middle of the night... "Hey, remember when Momma was a carnie and she brought us those giant stuffed animals, that big gray dog and what was the other thing? A bear? Remember when she came to visit and her husband got drunk and passed out on his horn in his car for like, 10 minutes?" But, that's not reasonable behavior. Not at 12:40 on Thanksgiving morning.
Guess what is reasonable behavior, according to me, at 12:40 on Thanksgiving morning, then?
Perhaps you guessed, say, sitting on the floor of my kitchen, so close to the Internet, to eat hazelnut ice cream in my panties. And if you did, you would be right.
But in my thoughts, not once did I get angry. Not at her having been gone so often, not of her forgetting birthdays, not of her ultimate decision to drink herself to death when it came time to choose between the disease of her liver and the disease of alcoholism. Not even at myself for all of the years I didn't send birthday cards, for not reaching out better, more, for being a shitty daughter because I'd deemed her a shitty mother. I did think, though, of my stepchildren, how I know she would entirely enjoy them. And my daughter, how madly she would love her. And my husband, how much he would appreciate her no frills nature. And I thought about how much she would like the life I made for myself, the integrity I at least try to live with, the maternal part of me I so resented her for not having that I couldn't recognize that she wanted so much to possess.
And I thought that 8 years, and entire life, later, gentler, more forgiving, more grateful...I like to think that today, it wouldn't be the frustrated obligatory love between a child and her live away mother. Today, I believe entirely that she would like me. And she'd feel like I really like her too. Because I think who I am today really really would.
And so it's thanksgiving. And I hate thanksgiving. But maybe this year I won't hate it as much, as this year I have gotten old enough to find that I am grateful.
