Thanksgiving Without Mom - Who will make the Gravy?

My mom wasn’t exactly the stereotypical mom. She wasn’t quite a domestic goddess. She had a fridge magnet that read “Four Dirty Words: iron, dust, wash, cook”. We had a family joke: when my sister (who is a terrific cook) finally moved out on her own at age 35, a friend asked her if she was missing her mother’s cooking.  Actually, my sister would visit my parents’ house at least once a week, and she would make dinner for Mom and Dad.

Mom almost always worked full-time outside the home. She encouraged me and my sister to “help” with the cooking and housework from the time we were very young. I can remember ironing dish towels and pillowcases when I was 6 or 7. By the time I was 10, I had a favourite recipe for chocolate chip cookies. I admire my mom’s patience as she taught us to do all the stuff she hated to do. I wish that I had followed her example with my daughters. Unfortunately, I have not had the patience to teach domestic skills. It seemed like I was always in too much of a hurry to let them “help” when they were young enough to want to help. Now I have two teenagers who have no idea how to use a salad spinner, and they won’t eat an apple unless I cut it up for them. I have a favourite saying: “First the kids want to help, but they really can’t. Then they are able to help, but they won’t. There is no stage in between.”

This attitude has come back to bite me now that I have Parkinson’s disease and I really need my family’s help. They are finally learning some domestic skills, but I have to be very organized with chore charts, and I have taken to bribing them with money to get them to do their chores. I’ve had to force myself to lower my standards of how clean my house needs to be. I am constantly having to curb my impulse to redo their chores.

After I was married, we often had Thanksgiving dinner at my house. My sister and I usually cooked the turkey, made the salad and mashed the potatoes. My mom wasn’t the kind who takes over her daughter’s kitchen. My mother-in-law is like that, and I don’t mind at all, but my mom just wasn’t like that. She was certainly capable of cooking, and she usually asked if there was anything she could help with. I usually asked her to make the gravy. She made really good gravy.

Update:  I wrote this article almost three years ago, so we’ve had two Thanksgivings without her. (Thanksgiving is in October in Canada.) Last year, my sister made the mashed potatoes and the stuffing, I made the salad. Dad helped us with the turkey. My sister made the gravy. It was good, but not as good as Mom’s gravy.

This year, my sister and I made the meal together at my house again. As we were setting the table, we realized that neither of us had thought to make gravy! We just used turkey drippings, which is not nearly as good as gravy, especially Mom’s gravy.