Thanksgiving with my wife’s extended family was a tradition
already, though we’d been married only five years or so. It was hard for my folks to rationalize
having the holiday with us when attendance rarely reached double digits at my
mother’s house. We ate dinner with the
Holland side of the family on Black Friday and split the Christmas and New
Year’s holidays.
I couldn’t have felt better about the way things were
turning out. My wife, Kathy, was among
the first in her generation to marry and have children, but the others followed
shortly behind her. The Thanksgiving
gathering was full of newlyweds and newborns, so the focus was no longer on my
wife and I, or our growing family. As
far as we were concerned, that was just fine.
Content just to supervise our daughter, Lucy, in the basement, I
anticipated another delicious meal as the smell of roasted turkey wafted down
the stairs.
The basement was dominated by a full-sized pool table,
nicely balanced and lighted. Lacking in
any appreciable skill, Lucy would spend a fair amount of time just rolling the
balls across the felt, watching them carom off the bumpers. I hoped they would announce dinner fairly
soon, as when Lucy got bored, she would want to play a real game of pool. Though I was thirty years older than
she, I wasn’t particularly good at the game either and it could be tedious
trying to throw a game to a child who never sank any shots.
My brother-in-law came down the stairs in the nick of time,
getting ready to tell me the potatoes were being mashed, so it was time to grab
your Chinet platter and queue up for the buffet. But the words never got out of his mouth.
“Wanna play pool?” my sweet-faced pre-schooler asked her
uncle.
“No, not now. We’re
just about…”
“Come on,” interrupted Lucy. “Don’t be such a pussy.”
Until I saw my brother-in-law’s face at that moment, I
wasn’t aware eyebrows could go that high.
I, on the other hand, needed to rig a strap to my jaw to wench it up off
of the floor. Lucy’s loving and patient
uncle just turned around and headed back up the stairs, sparing me the need to
explain.
Of course, there was only one explanation. I wasn’t going to ask her, “Where did you
hear that kind of language?” I knew
it was me, she even said it the same way I did, though (of course) I hadn’t
known I was being overheard.
Before we went upstairs, I sat her down and told her that
the words she had overheard me using, and had herself used perfectly in
context, were unpleasant words that bothered some people. I asked her not to use them again, while
prefacing she had done nothing wrong, that it was my fault she had heard those
words in the first place. When I asked
her if she understood me, she responded, “Okay, okay. You don’t have to get pissed off about it.” I realized then that a lot of Benedryl would
become part of her night-time rituals.
We proceeded up the stairs and made generous plates of food,
supervising the feeding of our daughter as well as a five month old son. When we had finished eating and the children
returned to their play, my wife had betrayed no sense that she knew what had
happened downstairs. Because Kathy is
very close to her younger brother, I figured I’d better get in front of the
problem, so I made a clean breast of it, spilling the whole story. “Are you mad?”
“A little,” she answered.
Before I could apologize, she continued, “I mean, Lucy’s only four years
old. He could have beaten her in five
minutes. He was being a
pussy.” That’s my wife, the one who
keeps her head when those all around her have lost theirs.
As Thanksgiving rolls around again, we will again sup with
my wife’s extended family. There are
few children and fewer babies, so most of us content ourselves with supervising
fat grams and carbohydrates instead of our offspring. My brother-in-law visited us this summer and will be unable to
make it for Thanksgiving, so we won’t be able to re-hash the events of that
holiday so many years ago. And for
this, I am thankful.
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