Thanksgiving: Moms on Strike
For most of my childhood up until my freshman year of high school, my parents house in Queens Village was the home base for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. People would show up in their cold weather finery and squeeze themselves around our giant dining room table and stay late into the night - toasting to bygone days, eating my mom’s amazing food, and generally having themselves a time. I remember being excited to watch all of these grown-ups interact up close and thrilled that I’d get to dress up in something fancy. Is Uncle J on my dad’s side gonna ignore my mom’s cousin and pretend that they’re not having affair? Will my middle sister dip into the Wray & Nephew spiked egg nog and pass out before dessert? Will my dad get drunk and high and sing old reggae songs all night? Is Uncle R back in the country, and will someone sneak him a plate at his hiding spot? And most importantly, did my mom get my favorite holiday dress out of the cleaners, the green one with lace trim? I looked like a twinkling globe whenever I wore it.
All of this excitement, however, was tempered with a healthy dose of delirium and exhaustion. Since I was about eight, my mother and I would be up early (depending on that year’s menu, sometimes we’d start everything the day before) making every single thing on that table. There’d be no fewer than 4 different types of meat. Turkey, crisped skinned and bulging with stuffing, was the centerpiece because it was the American thing to do. Also, a roast beef that she would cut slits in for me to stuff in peeled garlic, salt and chopped herbs. When she could remember to thaw it out, a glistening roast duck would join the party. I would never eat it, the iron-rich meat was too much for my palate. The violent crackling of the fat scared me. I knew that popping fat could hurt, and Daffy seemed to have a lot of it. Then, after we’d already started serving most of the food we would remember the ham, burnished with broiled Saucy Susan Apricot Glaze, pineapple rings, and laser red maraschino cherries.
For the Jamaican traditionalists, there was endless rice and peas, plus my mom’s famous curried goat and braised oxtails with silky butterbeans. Macaroni cheese. Sautéed shrimp with slices of green and red peppers, glistening with olive oil. The family sweet potato casserole, with only a few large marshmallows on top because more would just be too silly. We did it all. I know this sounds rather excessive but when you’re planning to have no fewer than 20 people at your place for dinner and when your mother has been known to make the coconut milk for your rice and peas from scratch, there are stakes in this game. And, my mother and I played to win. After many years of playing this game, though - were we actually winning?
Where were my two very much older sisters, you ask? They halfheartedly tried to feign interest in kitchen matters. After they’d set the table and clear up the dining room, they’d attempt to give us a hand. Making salad, making sure there was enough jellied cranberry sauce to pass at the table. You know, the staples. But they never moved with any real urgency. My mother’s hustle and my anxiety of trying to stay two steps ahead of her with all of our cooking and prep was enough to intimidate anyone out of the kitchen. Even though I’d make mistakes, my interest in cooking was very clear to my mom. I always wanted to be where the food was. Also, cooking a very large meal by yourself can be lonely. My dad would always make sure to be out of the house all day, only to come home, take a leisurely shower, and dress himself in his holiday best - often, last Christmas’s present of his usual fancy Ralph Lauren sweatsuit.
After so many years of my mom hoisting twenty pound turkeys out of the oven, and me crying because I forgot to make the cornbread the night before AGAIN, and her screaming at my sisters because “WHY IS IT TAKING SO LONG TO MAKE SALAD”, and her and I arguing about why we needed to make a ham every year because “We don’t even end up eating it that night anyway”, I started to really think about it. Why were we doing this? Why were we keeping up appearances for all of these people (some of whom my mom despised)? When could she take a break in between all of our hustling and bustling? Sometimes, when I’d have to wake up at six or seven am, I’d come downstairs to make a cup of tea when I’d find her at the kitchen table staring out the window, tea long cold. It’s difficult to will yourself to move. Something would just have to give at some point. And one year, it did.
In the days before that one Thanksgiving in 1999, my mom didn’t bring up holiday dinner at all. The days came and went without any talk of grocery lists or guest counts, like this wasn’t the start of our busiest season. As the time was ticking down, I wanted to say something so many times. I didn’t want to have to do all our shopping the morning of dinner, which for the record, we had definitely done the year before. Yet, I couldn’t bring myself to say a word. Look, I love turkey and gravy as much as the next person, but I also just wanted to sleep. I don’t even think any family members called to make sure dinner was happening. Not that they ever did - folks would just call Turkey Day afternoon (or Christmas Eve afternoon) to ask 1. What was my mom making? and 2. What time should they be there?
When Thanksgiving Day arrived, I woke to the smell of…nothing. No sage, no chicken broth, no gamey smell of goat or mutton, not even a whiff of celery. The absence of scent was briefly destabilizing - it smelled just like an ordinary Thursday. My mom and I had some tea together and I tentatively asked if we were going to start cooking soon. She shrugged and sipped her tea. Dumbfounded, I sat with her in silence. Several hours later, my dad eventually made his way to the kitchen, and asked 1. Where breakfast was and 2. What was the plan for dinner? She shrugged and sipped her tea, looking very calm. He stomped off grumbling about “how a man can’t even get breakfast in his own home” or something else equally useless, and I sat at the table vibrating with excitement. Was the impossible finally happening? Was my mom going on a sort of…cooking strike?
I never remembered any of my relatives offering to host any of the holiday meals, or even offering to make dishes to pass at the table. The cooking abilities of these folks was dubious at best, but I’m sure an offer would have been appreciated. To whip up these meals took time and money, and as a woman who worked full time (and who also didn’t get one bit of household help from my dad), my mom didn’t have a lot of either. As my mother was getting older, her health was beginning to reflect all of the stress and aggravation of having to absorb and swallow so much of my my dad’s family’s nonsense to be a perfect host for the holiday season. It may have seemed unfeeling of her to wait until the last minute to let folks know, but sometimes there are casualties when you have to put yourself first.
Throughout the day and into the afternoon, relatives called to ask about what was going on later that evening. The first call she received, she answered haltingly, as if she was still on the fence regarding upending everyone’s Thanksgiving meal. By the fourth or fifth call though, she sounded almost breezy; using the big cackle that she reserved when something had really tickled her :
“Did I start cooking yet? HAHAHA, no.”
“No, I didn’t buy anything.”
“Oh, I’ll figure something out, but I’m not going to make a turkey. No duck either. Oxtail is so expensive nowadays, isn’t it?”
My mom stepped out of the house for the afternoon to run some errands and she was gone until just before dinnertime. My dad had stormed out to see one of his brothers, probably hoping to crash his holiday table. My sisters, after creeping into the kitchen only to find it empty were extremely puzzled, but relieved. As they went back to their room, I overheard snippets of plans - Thanksgiving weekend was always good for partying. It seemed like for the first time ever, there would be peace and quiet in my house.
Before long, I heard a jangle at the door, and mom was back home with a few Target and grocery bags in tow. I helped her unpack because I was nosy. Nestled in the bags there were fixings for chicken soup, tater tots and a bunch of VHS tapes. They were emblazoned with stickers, so they must have been having quite a sale.
Soon enough, the house was filled with the aroma of softly bubbling soup, sizzling tater tots, and steaming mugs of sweet mint tea. I’d helped with peeling carrots and breaking down celery, talking and joking with my mom all the while, and it was so different to hear her voice tinged with laughter instead of thinly veiled frustration. Relaxation looked good on her, and it was something I’d rarely seen.
We ate our soup out of huge bowls that we set on the coffee table in front of the living room television - another first. Most of our regular meals were eaten at the kitchen table and every single holiday meal had to be at the dining room table with the china that could never touch the dishwasher. We ate the tots right off the foil, which naturally, I Pollock-ed with ketchup. While the soup cooled, we got our movie night started - the only one that stands out in my memory is the Matt Damon and Robin Williams flick Good Will Hunting. Ben Affleck also stars in this movie, and an early scene with him and Damon’s characters includes them talking about someone giving Affleck’s character a blow job. I remember praying that my mother wouldn’t ask me if I knew what a blow job was (I did and I never wanted her to know that). I didn’t want this evening of surprises ending in an interrogation into my burgeoning knowledge of sexual slang. Thankfully, she was too engrossed with Will Hunting’s journey of self-sabotage and redemption to be concerned about any of that.
When I was old enough to start helping my mom in the kitchen, I started to understand how much of herself she put into these meals, these experiences. She was expected to run a household, work a full time job, raise three children, and make gourmet level meals with a smile and a nod to the Big Man upstairs, thankful for the privilege. So, at some point the joy of heralding this meal left her. I could only be so much support, and while she appreciated my help, I knew that she felt bad working me so hard. There was never going to be a break for her, unless she broke first. So she decided to break tradition, and make a Thanksgiving dinner just for us. My mom isn’t big on sentimentality, but as we sipped our soup, the steam fogging up my glasses, the silence as we watched the movie felt like, “Thank you.”