Left-overs

The good news is my small house can hold nine people for three days and really not feel crowded. And the bad news, it feels sort of empty when everyone goes. What made it worse was Raven having to fly to Boston for a conference Sunday night, so today we were really thrown back into the non-holiday world abruptly. My oldest son has a cello lesson with a teacher who is across town, and because traffic can be pretty gnarly the hours right after school gets out, we’ve settled on evening lessons. When Raven is in town, the whole family goes together for sandwiches and then Raven sits in the van with the younger brothers while I go in and take notes on the lesson, good Suzuki mother that I am, but tonight, we had dinner at home, and I suspected that the younger two would fall asleep in the van, so I bathed them and put them in pajamas, and they’re snoring away while the eight year old reads and I take advantage of having the laptop with me to catch up on the blog. Actually, as I figured out how much time I had to get dinner made, homework done, practicing with the violinist and violist, taking out the trash in the rain, and the bath in the time between getting home from school pick-up and leaving for the lesson, it occurred to me that I could never leave instructions for a babysitter for all the things that have to be done, and they’re dumb little things, but there are dim rainy days in November when your sinuses hurt and getting the smallest thing done seems impossible.

So I eat leftovers and dwell on the holiday. Thanksgiving morning we got up and drove in two cars to Multnomah Falls to show my sister the falls, which are lovely, and the Columbia gorge, which is scaled in a way nothing is in New Mexico. I drove up with my mother and sister, while Raven drove the minivan with the kids and my father and once we were there we decided that my father, my eight year old son and I would stay and hike to the overlook at the top of the falls while everyone else drove back to the house to start cooking. Coming back down the hill, my son picked up on the fact that my father was greeting everyone with a “Have a happy Thanksgiving” and he decided that was something he could get into, and he greeted people with such enthusiasm as he bounced down the trail ahead of me that the smiles on their faces as they came up towards me seemed like reflections of the smile I couldn’t see on his face. And it was such a lovely thing to be sharing this with my son when sharing hikes with my father was an important part of my childhood and adolescence, the two of us in the Sandias, talking or not, but sharing it. And among the other things I was grateful for was how being a family means being in different combinations all the time as well as being all together, that I was sure that Raven and my mom cooking together would have a fine time, that each of my sons was working on his own special relationship with his aunt, that there was time for each of us. So it was one of the more thankful Thanksgivings I have had.

I had an interesting phone conversation with a writer, Julie Tilsner, (who has a blog of her own) working on a magazine article about mommy guilt. She asked why mothers feel guilt and I didn’t have a great answer, but it feels like one of those questions that will be recurring in my journal for a while. I don’t know how universal it is — it seems like it could be one of those Puritan inheritances, like a work ethic, or something vaguely religious where we’re always being reminded of our deep unworthiness, one of those inabilities to reconcile injustice in the world — having the things we do and still not being happy, or on the happy days, having the things we do, and reflexively having this emotional equivalent of the sign against the evil eye in hopes of forestalling loss, or perhaps it is not being capable of doing all the things we think we are expected to do. I resist on my feminist grounds the guilt about eating what I want, and also, I think the guilt about being an at-home parent who takes time to pursue her own interests and maintain her own well-being, but those are works in progress. Still, I think there are other lurking guilts that sound like defensive reactions when I justify owning and driving a minivan, not being green in absolutely every way possible, not providing identical childhood experiences for all four of my children, neglecting to provide them with any form of athletics whatsoever, failing to provide the older two with a second language, for enjoying the fruits of a school with an active, involved set of parents while feeling an absolute dread of the PTA… A lot of these come from looking at other people who seem to manage the things I would like to do so gracefully and forgetting temporarily that they, too, have had to compromise somewhere. That in my best world we would all be free to make the decisions that are best for our own families and in line with our values and be respected for them, that each individual decision would seem like a referendum on other people’s decisions. So, still no snappy conclusions. Guilt would be a useful thing if it were a just a symptom for something we are able to do better at, but I am at a balancing point right now, my needs and my kids needs have produced the life we have right now. The one where I am sitting in the car writing a blog entry while my son finishes his ‘cello lesson.