15 December 2005
Passing on Tradition, Or Not
by Linda Breitag
Listen to an audio version of this MOMbo essay.
I ate two Thanksgiving dinners this year, even though I don’t really need the extra food. The first, on Thursday, was a dinner with friends whose daughter is one of our daughter’s best pals. The other adults there were mostly Buddhists, holistic healers, and funky artists. Luckily, we joined the guest list late enough so I didn’t have to make any food. Instead, I brought a box full of Lake Superior stones and driftwood, and made a winding centerpiece the entire length of the double-long table. Then I put one or two beautiful leaves on each plate, just so. It was a true Martha Stewart moment, and fed my artistic needs, which are slightly higher than my need to cook, as you may have guessed. The cranberry sauce had curry in it, and we all bellowed Cat Stevens songs after dinner, with 7-year-olds in dress-up clothes twirling and leaping in our midst.
Then, on Saturday, we joined my parents in their new duplex an hour away. My mother, age 77, made the entire dinner herself, and I took a bath while the table got set. When I emerged, peaceful and steamy, just in time to fill the water glasses, she gave me a big smile. I reflected on my great good luck in landing this mother, who asks only that I show up to be loved. And I don’t even have to show up on time. There was no “Oh, you’re spending Thanksgiving with people you met three years ago, when we just uprooted our lives and moved a thousand miles to be closer to you and your child?” Instead, I get a bath and the same familiar, delicious, comforting food of my childhood, right down to the cranberry Jell-o “salad.” And I still don’t believe this, but my dad and my brother loaded the dishwasher. That’s right, basically I did nothing. (The water glasses did look good, though.)
I am so not gonna be this kind of mother to my kid. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had plenty of problems with my mother over the years, from trying unsuccessfully to get her to read nihilistic Beckett plays during my first Christmas break from college, to excoriating her for that one time she washed my mouth out with soap. But the thing is, she lived long enough for me to have a child, and, as family therapist Robert Frost put it, “that has made all the difference.”
These days, when I think of my mom, who had four kids by age 30, did all the housework and cooking, and had a full time job teaching other people’s kids, andget thisdidn’t complain, I’m humbled. Like, way humbled. Like, what planet is she from?
A few weeks ago, I was driving my daughter to school when, out of a big reverie, she said “I can’t wait for Thanksgiving!” “Why is that?” I asked, expecting to hear that she was looking forward to a break from school. Instead, I got “Because Mormor makes the best food!” Then, because my poor only child has already inherited my guilt genes, she hastily added, “I mean, you make the best food, uh…from recipes (yeah, like once a month, I think to myself), and Daddy makes the best breakfast (true), but Mormor makes the best old-fashioned food. You know, like…meat! And Jell-o!”
Here I have to add another memory seared into my mothering brain. I was all excited, not too long ago, to find a sale on Pad Thai kits at my coop. You know, a meal in a box, where you soak the noodles for five minutes, sauté some tofu, then cut open the packet of sauce and stir it all together with chopped peanuts and bottled lime juice. It’s easy, just like the Hamburger Helper of my youth, only nobody has to die. (Yes, my mother used Hamburger Helper. And TV dinners sometimes, too. She worked full time, for heaven’s sake.) Anyway, when I served it to my family, I was proud and excited. I mean, it looked like real food, almost gourmet, and it was so easy! And on sale! “Isn’t this great?” I enthused to no one in particular. Then my daughter, who loves Pad Thai, looked at me in a half-pitying sort of way, smiled a syrupy little smile, patted my arm, and said “It’s not bad, Mom…for you.”
Oh well. To my credit, I didn’t even really feel that bad when she said it. Okay, I’ll never ever forget it, but at least I think it’s funny. Kind of.
Anyway, no mother can do it all. And some of us can’t do more than about 60%. Now there’s something to remember for the holidays.
In my defense, I spent a few hours the other night assembling an Advent calendar of sorts for my daughter. In my new-mother zeal a few years ago, I made this thing I remembered from my own childhood. (Yup, my mother again.) It’s a bizarre little affair involving walnut shells. You have to crack a walnut in half, take out the nut, then put a couple of M&Ms in there along with a little something written on a tiny piece of paper. My mother used scripture passages from the Lutheran lectionary, but recently, on a tip from a friend, I read the book of Isaiah in its entirety and now I know what scary stuff Handel left out of the Messiah. So since I’m currently confused about the whole God thing, instead I wrote things like: “How can we help a hungry person today?” and “Name two things you love about each person here.” Then, you take the walnut halves, and I can’t emphasize enough how long it takes to crack 25 walnuts into perfect halves, and you glue them back together around a ribbon. Without dropping out the candy and without accidentally gluing the little non-scripture thingy onto the ribbon either. In the end, you get this 7-foot-long string of walnuts which you then have to find some place to hang.
So, you ask, why on earth would I make this thing? Well, duh: my mom used to make it. Every day at dinner during Advent, we got to crack one open, read the scripture, and fight over the M&Ms. I was sure it was some cool thing my mom had learned from her Norwegian immigrant mother. And here I was, passing it along. What a mother, holding high the torch of family tradition.
While talking with my mother the other day, I mentioned the walnut thing. “You’re doing that?” she asked. “Well, sure,” I said uncertainly. “I remember it from my childhood, and I wanted to pass it on.” (I didn’t add that, actually, I’d hoped my child had forgotten it this year, but oh no, it is now riveted into her holiday expectations.) “It’s some Scandinavian tradition, right?” I added. My mom laughed. “I got it out of some magazine. McCall’s, probably, or Redbook. I don’t even know if I did it more than once.”
Okay… Now my daughter will have something to both love and curse me for, when her child begs for the river of stones centerpiece, or the ungainly walnut thing some budding Martha of the fifties invented in the languorous days before she had children. I just hope I live to see it. But maybe your kid won’t feel the need to do that, I hear you thinking. Ah, but I didn’t tell you? When I emerged from my pre-feast bathtub, what was my daughter doing? Coloring and cutting out beautiful paper leaves, one or two to lay on each plate, just so.
Linda Breitag is a mom and a musician. She's a regular contributor to MOMbo. Her podcasts can be heard here. |
