A Thanksgiving lesson or two

Holiday memories are dancing through me. This might be a good sign.

I'll tell a Thanksgiving story, since it's turkey time.

My daughter had never been around a baby before Isabelle joined our family. Katie was always crabbing when Isabelle was around. "Don't ever expect me to babysit!", Katie liked to exclaim, even though no one ever asked her to. "Rugrats, that's what babies are. I'm never going to have kids!"

Margaret and I always thought Katie was jealous of our adorable Isabelle. Katie did not remember that we had doted on her as much as we then doted on the Bibbster. We probably worshipped Katie even more attentively because she was the first niece. Katie was a fine, fine specimen of super deluxe babyhood, I assure you.

Until Isabelle came along, Katie was the only girl that my sister, my brother David and I adored unreservedly. Suddenly, she had to share our definitely doting hearts with the gorgeous plumpling/interloper, Isabelle Valentine.

Oh my gosh, I.V. was a stunning delight. She was also a super deluxe baby. All the babies in my clan are super deluxe babies. Isabelle was born with the most hair I've ever seen on a baby, dark and curly. Her eyes were big and blue. Nowadays, she is blonde but back then, she had thick, dark hair.

Isabelle openly adored Katie. In her little world, Katie was the only other child. I always thought that Isabelle noted that Katie was from her generation, not mine, that she and Katie had bonds of young femalehood or something. Katie was the closest person in size and age to Isabelle. Plus Katie was a teenager, cool and vivacious. Katie is a natural brunette with big brown eyes but at the time of this Thanksgiving, she kept it blonde with foiled highlights (that I paid for).

When Katie walked into the room, Isabelle only had eyes for her. When Katie would flounce up to the top story of our house, her private domain, Isabelle would follow her to the bottom of the curving stairwell and cry out for Katie to pay attention to her. We kept the stairwell blocked when Isabelle came over because otherwise, even though she could barely crawl, she intrepidly tried to climb up the stairs after her cousin. Our curved stairway was particularly treacherous because the stairs were open: our darling delight could have fallen.

At this time, Isabelle was not exactly talking. She was making lots of lovely sounds and all of us, even Katie, had no trouble carrying on intelligent conversation with Isabelle.

It was so adorable the way Isabelle adored her big cousin Katie. It was equally adorable how Katie believed she had no use for Isabelle.

Until Isbee's first Thanksgiving.

Isabelle was nine months old. There are many schools of thought on what is the most perfect age of a baby. My sister says that I think every age a kid can be is perfect, she says I have no objectivity in this regard. I confess to a slight bias about nine-month-olds although two-year-olds dazzle me, of course. And three year olds. Nine-month-olds are all roly-poly perfection. They light up if you smile at them. They interact verbally, albiet not so much with words. And they let you bury your face in their tummy so you can make them laugh and as they laugh, they tend to crab your hair with their chubby fists and wrap their plumply perfect legs around your head as well and when they laugh at what you are doing, you are in a perfect heaven.

Isabelle's first Thanksgiving had a tense beginning. My mother had come to Minneapolis to spend Christmas 'with the girls'. Margaret and I should have known better but we had little fantasies that our mother would morph into a good grandmother and gitchee-goo our daughters. We are still waiting for mom to pay attention to our kids and ourselves. as it happens. But for some reason, probably because Isabelle was new and my sister's fantasies about a real grandma were freshly minted, we had invited mom to spend Thanksgiving with us.

Mom arrived a couple days early. On the day before Thanksgiving, with Katie at school, Margaret, Isabelle and I took Grandma to The Mall of America, the ultimate shopping experience. We stopped at a Starbucks and while my sister was in gettingn our lattes, mom picked a fight with me. I don't remember what she said, just that I was blindsided by her cruelty. "Mom," I said calmly, "I am not going to rise to your bait. We are going to have a great day together."

When my sister returned to the car, Mom twisted around to face her in the backseat and said, "Your sister's mental illness is in full bloom today. Hoo-boy, it's going to be a rough day."

"What did you do, Therese?" asked Margaret. She handed round our coffees, questioning with her eyes in the rearview mirror.

"I didn't do anything and, as I just told Mom, we can put this behind us and have a good day together."

"Your sister is lying. She picked a fight with me when you weren't here and now she wants to wiggle out of it."

I was crying by now.

"Well," said Margaret, "I wasn't here but can't we just put whatever happened behind us and do as Tree says and just have a fine day together?"

Mom was temporarily defeated. I think this was the first time she had ever blindsided me and I had not freaked out. In the past, I would have responded to her verbal abuse with heaps of my own invectives. In the past, I would have been screaming insults and my sister would have believed mom when she said I was acting crazy. But when Margaret had gotten pregnant with Isabelle and the rest of our unhappy clan disowned her, I had invited her to come live in Minneapolis so I could help her and have her and the baby near me to love. We were still uncertain with each other, after a lifetime of seeing each other through our family's dysfunctional lens but by the time mom showed up for Isbee's first Thanksgiving, Margaret and I were friends, perhaps for the first time in our lives.

"Shall we go to the mall? Or go home?" I asked, dangling my keys in the air.

"Let's go to the mall. I think Isabelle wants to meet Santa Clause," said my sister, gurgling as she spoke and nuzzling our Bibbsey.

We made our way from St. Paul to the freeways leading to the great Mall of America. There was an awkward silence in the car. I can't speak for Margaret but I was praying that I would remain calm, that we would get past the unhappiness and, yes, still have a nice day.

Mom took a sip of her latte, which was piping hot. "What is this?!" she snarled, "This isn't what I asked for."

"Yes it is, Mom," said Margaret cheerfully. "I asked you if you wanted regular coffee or a latte and you said you wanted a latte. That's a latte."

"Well," mom said, still snarling. Her lip actually curled. "This is not my idea of coffee." Then she rolled down her window just a few inches and stuffed the cardboard coffee cup out the small opening. We were on the freeway, going at least fifty miles per hour. The hot coffee whipped back on the car, a light spray coming back into the car. Mostly on mom.

"Your sister is crazy, your sister is unwell, I can't drink that coffee, I can't spend the day with your crazy sister, I can't live another day being the mother of your crazy sister," mom spoke in a kind of chant, with hysteria rising in her tone. She went on and on, her claims grew wilder, as did her voice. She was hysterical. She started screaming, "Let me out of this car immediately. Stop this car right now."

It was horrible, especially since Isabelle, our darling, was in the backseat hearing it. I was still on a freeway, driving fast. I told mom I would pull over at the next exit, that I would take her back to my house or wherever she wanted to go.

She started trying to open the car door, as we zoomed along. She was twisting and turning and moaning. She was shrieking and with each breath she said something unkind about me. Only me.

When I came to an exit ramp, I pulled off, stopped the car and turned to Mom and I said, "We are in Bloomington, which is a long way from my house. You can get out if you want to but I will take you back to the house, Mom, if you would like me to."

"Take me back to the house."

I did. We all sat in a stony silence.

When we got to my house, I gave her a spare set of keys and told her to make herself at home, that I was not going to come in and listen to her abuse. This was literally the first time in my whole life that I did not get sucked in by mom's behavior. Until this day, after a life time of conditioning that started in my crib, I always believed her when she said her unhappiness was my fault. I had never seen her so hysterical. It seemed to me that when I remained calm, she flipped out, as if I had altered the nature of her reality or something. I was crying, hard, as I waited for everyone to get out of my car. "You really can't talk to me this way, Mom. It's not right. We both need time to calm down." This was also new behavior: normally, once mom and I got triggered, I would have been railing at her a long time, out of control, unable to compose myself, unable to stop ranting until I grew exhausted.

My sister took her daughter and rushed to her car, fleeing the scene.

It felt great to drop her off and pull away, to take care of myself instead of her. It was an early, unfamiliar taste of my personal power to feel calm while my mother was being mean to me.

I stayed away for just an hour or so. When I got back to my house, mom had packed and left. Both my sister and I were shocked, that she would be so disruptive with a holiday and the kids.

When mom got back to Chicago, she told her side of things to my brother Dave, who made several angry phone calls to yell at me for ruining his holiday. My sister got on the phone and told David it was not my fault but my mom has blamed me for every thing that ever went wrong ever in our entire family's history all my life and this was all David knew. He added to my suffering when he told me flatly that he did not believe me and he did not believe Margaret, that he knew that I had been my crazy, destructive self.

Margaret and Isabelle came over Thanksgiving morning, as we had planned. We readied our feast together. At first, I think, Margaret and I were acting cheerful and chipper for the kids benefit. In our family, until this point, every holiday was punctuated by some crazy scene like we had experienced the day before. I don't think either one of us had ever experienced simply going forward and forgetting the ugliness of the fight. As the day unfolded, as we settled into adoring Isabelle and Katie and fixing dinner, we realized we were having a very nice day.

Katie, in full-blown adolescence, stayed upstairs most of the day. But there was a balcony on her floor that overlooked most of our living space. She talked to us from time to time as she moved about her part of the house.

The smell of our meal filled the house. Our love for each other helped us push the ugliness away. We stopped clucking about what had happened with mom. David stopped calling to yell at me.

Katie finally came down, just before we sat down to dinner.

As she plopped onto the sofa, right next to Isabelle, she was all smiles. My Katie has the most beautiful smile I've ever seen. She wore braces for about four years and I loved her smile the best when she had braces. She would look all cool and sophisticated and then smile, revealing the braces and she looked young and vulnerable and not at all grown up. In my mind's eye, as I recall this day, Katie had the braces on but in real life, her braces were gone by the time she started high school. Anyway, she smiled my beautiful Katie's smile, as she slid next to her infant cousin.

Isabelle instantly began glombing onto Katie, patting her, cooing, seeking Katie's attention.

Katie looked around, questioningly.

"You don't know what to do, do you?" I said to her.

"What do you mean?" Katie said.

"You don't know what to do with a baby. Let me show you."

I came over to the girls, knelt down in front of Isabelle, pulled her down so she lay flat on the sofa and I buried my face in her tummy. Isabelle gurgled her delight and wrapped her hands and legs around my head. After a few moments, I pulled my head back and then buried it once more in Isabelle's tummy.

"You try it." I said to Katie. "I call this 'the tummy test'. Isbelle, can Katie test your tummy?" It is also possible to blow on the baby's tummy, right on their skin, if you really want to have fun.

And she did. Katie buried her face in Isabelle's tummy. This made both of the girls very happy. They played like this until we sat down to eat.

After dinner, I offered Katie another lesson. I showed her how to play peekaboo with a baby. Again, Katie played with Isabelle.

Isabelle was ecstatic. She had been worshipfully watching Katie for months and Katie had never before given her much attention.

Soon the girls, my lanky teenager and our crawling infant were romping through the house, with Katie calling "I'm going to get you!" and Isabelle squealing in flight but also delight. Over and over, Katie would 'get her', take her down on the floor, bury her face in her tummy and then start all over.

When Margaret and Isabelle left, Katie said, "You know, Mom, I always thought that people played with babies for the babies' sake. I found out today that people play with babies for themselves, not for the babies. That was so much fun."

My mother raised six children (I use the word 'raise' loosely) and I don't think she ever figured out that she could have fun with her kids, for her sake, not just ours.