Glass Turkeys and Glad Tidings

When what stays the same highlights what has changed.

The metaphor:

Ah, family holidays! If we’re lucky, they’re cozy and comforting – but even then, they can also be a reminder of how time is progressing. This year, I’m thinking about what I’ve learned and what I’m still working on, and how we all have some of each, regardless of where we sit at the metaphorical table.

The story:

I’m writing from the Radnor Hotel in Wayne, Pennsylvania, where Steve and I have spent two nights during most of the past ten Novembers. Thanksgiving is the prized holiday of Steve’s dad’s family. Steve’s grandma was the oldest of four siblings who gathered for Thanksgivings throughout their adulthood, and their descendants – Steve’s dad’s siblings and cousins, with their kids – have come together for almost sixty years, carrying on the tradition of the extended family meal.

To me, traditions like this offer comfort and continuity through life’s changes, but they also make those changes noticeable against all that stays the same. Take the traditional T-shaped layout of our Thanksgiving tables. Our family gathers in roughly age order around three tables: a head table where the eldest family members sit around three sides, then a line of two tables set perpendicular, with adults at the first and kids around the second.

Each year, the tables are set with glass turkeys filled with cranberry sauce and kids-crafts name cards denoting the places. The set-up is the same, but time shifts where we sit. As members of Steve’s dad’s and grandma’s generation have passed away or stopped coming, Steve’s dad’s generation now lines the top of the T, in their parents’ former places. Steve started at the kid’s table, and as the decades passed, he and his brother started bringing home partners who now join them just below their parents.

Steve’s younger cousins still populate the so-called kids section, though they’re college students and 20-somethings now. When I started coming, they splayed out on the floor making bracelets out of multi-colored duct tape. During the annual family football game, they starred in the “special play,” happily trotting the ball up the field as adult players pantomimed unsuccessful efforts to stop them, then celebrated their touchdowns. This year, the talk at the kids table centered around young adult logistics: choosing colleges and majors, finding jobs and apartments. Soon, they’ll move up the T-trunk to the place I sit now, settling into careers and communities, maybe partnerships, maybe kids.

I still remember how intense it was to have my life logistics scrutinized: to be asked what I’d do with my English major or sized up for how serious Steve and I seemed to be. It’s scary to be asked questions you’re still working out how to answer. From a comfortable up-table seat like mine, I can start to forget the heat of these questions, the pressure and judgment baked into them even if the asker doesn’t intend it. I remember feeling like there was a race to answer them, one where even if I was on pace in some areas, there were others where I was behind.

I’m mostly through the big logistics questions – where, doing what, with whom. At least, knock on wood, for now. But that doesn’t mean I’m done developing: it just means I’m on to the stage of questions no one says out loud. Do I know myself? Do I know others and let them know me? How do I spend my time, build my community and show up for them, build a joyful, resilient, meaningful life?

Questions like these have been there the whole time, but as the logistics resolve, they seem to be sharpening. We don’t talk about them, though – at least, not at big family holidays. We ask each other about day to day things: hobbies, jobs, vacation plans. Above all, we turn to the next nearest set of logistics: asking about the next generation, starting the cycle of questions again.

Maybe this is part of why I didn’t try to know my friends’ parents better when I was growing up, why I didn’t respond to the questions they asked me with questions of my own. I shared the myopia of the young, thinking my generation held the only interesting information, but I also didn’t see adults asking each other big questions – I came to know their partners and their jobs, and then maybe I figured there was nothing else to ask them. They were set. I remember when my parents turned 40, and I thought of them as simply parents, the way I didn’t imagine the out-of-school lives of my teachers. But as I approach 40, it’s wild to realize how much development I have left to do. How many questions I still have to answer.

I was talking recently with a friend about her first parent-teacher conference. She and her husband sat down with the preschool teacher in their four-year-old’s classroom, reviewing her art and discussing her skills. The kid is ahead of her peers in some ways, like vocabulary, and behind them in others, like physical coordination. My friend knew all this, but she was relieved to hear the teacher confirm it all as “developmentally appropriate.” Her daughter has learned some things and has others still to learn: that doesn’t make her behind, it means she’s right where she needs to be, working out all that’s new at her stage.

My friend and I then compared notes about our moms, who have both learned to play mah jong and joined weekly groups. We laughed together about how cute they are and how we didn’t anticipate this particular hobby. “Well,” I said, “maybe that’s what’s developmentally appropriate for a 70-year-old?”

We took bites of our bagels, sitting together in a coffeeshop on a Friday morning. It was 9:30am, but my friend’s high up enough in her office that she can flex her schedule. I’d negotiated a four day week at my job, off on Fridays. We chewed, old friends nearing 40, thinking about the people up life’s table from us and down.

“What’s developmentally appropriate for us?” I asked her, and she smiled.

“I guess it’s this.”

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