Familial Tenderness, Raw and Uncooked is Okay

My mother and me in 1988

My first recollection of Thanksgiving must have been when I was about four or five. My mother was standing and leaning down, gazing into the oven, a hot pad in her hand and a frown on her face.

The oven had not been turned on and guests were to arrive in an hour.

I felt my mother's panic that first Thanksgiving with her at the festive helm. There would be 50 more years with her planning or attending Thanksgiving dinners whether made by her own hands, together with mine, or fixed by someone else. Several years she ordered from Furr's Cafeteria, the whole meal, and we'd pick it up for her, my sister and I or my sister and brother in law. There were years when I fixed the dinner at Mom's house and one year everyone came to my place, the last Thanksgiving my daughters and I lived in El Paso. Each year means something. When I was a kid, it meant eating pecan or pumpkin pie, turkey, stuffing with celery and onions, jellied cranberry sauce later replaced with whole berries, cool whip, drinking from stemmed glasses and hearing the conversations of relatives from my Uncle Tex and Grandmother Hastings to Aunt Shirley with lopsided lipstick smudges to later my children and nieces and nephews running through the house, the warmth and confusion of familial tenderness.

My mother's last few years were spent eating at my sister's house. My mother loved Thanksgiving as do I. She loved coming together around a table as do I. She prayed no one would argue, and I had to shrug off the frustration when she began to be at the helm of the controversies and bedlam, but still I know today she wanted it to go right, as we all do each year, and sometimes it does, and sometimes it is as chilly and pale as a turkey in an oven not yet turned on.

My older daughter and nephew playing in the leaves in El Paso.

This is our second Thanksgiving without her. Two Novembers ago, I fought with her telling her the reasons why she needed to move into an adult care residence. She'd been living with my sister and my mother's stubbornness to allow the proper help was becoming a nightmare. Finally, she agreed. It was on her birthday of October 26, 2009, her 80th birthday. We had had a big birthday party for her the Saturday prior and on Monday, her actual birth date, we ate pizza with her grandchildren, one son, two daughters, and one son in law, around my sister's table, and I struggled not to cry as she sang, as we all sang little songs to lift the bruising finality of the mood. She was different that night, a resignation, a resolve, a sadness that still makes my heart choke. But she had to go. And she did enjoy her time at the facility where she stayed until she had a stroke on February 28, 2010. I held her hand and watched her pulse stop at 5:50 CST on April 13, 2010.

I hope my children, nieces and nephews remember their Thanksgivings in El Paso with the same ease and satisfactions I did as a child. It is my intent to take on that role again and to make it once more a time of refreshment and gratefulness, remembering my mother's face while opening the oven door to an uncooked turkey. It was and is the beginning of the family tradition, and it is in that honesty and stark realness and moments for laughter - as we have on many occasions - in which I vow to impose each Thanksgiving, starting tomorrow, November 24, 2011, and onward, for as many as I am lucky and thankful enough to have.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Dedicated to my birth family.