Celebrating Leaving Your Parents With Your Parents

"...every generation moves away from the one before. It is curious that we Americans have a holiday, Thanksgiving, that's all about people who left their homes for a life of their own choosing, a life that was different from their parents' lives. And how do we celebrate it? By hanging out with our parents. It's as if on the 4th of July we honored our independence from the British by playing cricket and nibbling on crumpets.

Thanksgiving morning my parents take Owen to see the Macy's parade while Amy and I start making dinner. Let me repeat that -- my mother leaves while I cook. Specifically, cornbread dressing, a dish my mother has made every thanksgiving since before I was born. To her credit, she has not inquired about my process since she phoned to ask me if she should bring cornmeal in her suitcase. As an Okie, my mom only uses white cornmeal processed by the Shawnee Company in Muskogee. She does not even consider my cornbread to be cornbread at all because I make it with yellow cornmeal and, heresy, sugar. 'You don't make cornbread,' she told me in the same deflated voice she uses to describe my hair, 'you make Johnny Cake.' I'm standing at the cutting board chopping sage and it hits me what it means that she's letting me be in charge of the dressing: I am going to die. Being in charge of the dressing means you're a grownup for real and being a grownup for real means you're getting old and getting old means you are definitely finally totally going to die. My mother is a grandmother and my sister is a mother and I have decided the dressing will be yellow this year, therefore we'll all be dead some day. Happy Holidays!"
"-Sarah Vowell, Birthdays, Anniversaries, and Milestones from This American Life, December 14, 2001

In case it isn't obvious, when I am tired of listening to my ipod, I listen to radio online and right now I'm working my way through the entire archives of This American Life, trying to catch up with something I've learned to love only recently in an attempt to make it somehow mine historically despite the fact that we are only newly friends.

My mom is coming up to Chicago to help me move at some point and I'm very excited. Now our conversations run to things like when I'm coming to visit or when my family is coming to visit me. We've spread ourselves out fairly well with my parents in Atlanta, Laura in Boston, Christy and Alden in Houston, Uncle Bob and Aunt Janet, et al. in Idaho, Uncle Breck, et al. in Wisconsin, and so on. Uncle John and Aunt Deborah, et al. still valiantly staying in the Atlanta area and now they will be so far away....

Thanksgivings are some of my favorite memories from childhood, with Mimi (my grandmother) always cooking for all of us, even after Grandpa passed away, dinner at the home she moved to after his death, my sisters and I watching old movies that she had rented for us in the unfinished basement that never seemed creepy despite the exposed studs and insulation-exposed walls. So much light coming in from the floor to ceiling windows on the side made this impossible, I suppose. Trust Mimi to find the only unfinished basement in the world that has no element of creepiness. The food was always the same and wonderful. It was a day that no one seemed to fight. Everyone had endless amounts of time to be with family and laze the day away just lying around on couches and talking or watching TV.

It's easy these days, with everyone spread across the country and holidays comprising of family gatherings of only my immediate family members, to think that I don't have a large family or that I didn't have the same family experiences that I see other people having now. It's not that I don't have them; it seems that other people are having now what I used to have. Large, copious amounts of family members all together for Thanksgiving or Christmas or the 4th of July. I've had those memories. We're all busy and spread out now but we still love each other. I would be welcome at anyone's house, I could call anyone at any time and rebuild the physically estranged relationship into something measured with telephone bills, letters, e-mails, packages, and the elusive sense of knowing someone beyond the cursory details.

It's easy to forget but I do have family. And I also have all the wonderful family that grew from the people I'm not actually related to -- the Bullards, Beth, Lyndsey, Philip, Chris and his mom, and others. They're all part of my family. They've never replaced my original family or the people that I would list on my family tree. They've stepped in to fill the holes left behind as my family went off each in their own way to live their lives. I could never hold it against them -- hypocrite that I am, I know better, particularly in light of my impending move to Chicago.

Time to fill the holes again. I have a strange sense of being grateful - that my life is open enough to welcome people in.