I have a complicated relationship with my mother. Strike that. I have a non-existent relationship with my mother. Too many years of trying to understand cycles of abuse, a history that is fraught and reconciling that just because someone is family does not mean you have to have a relationship with them. However, I do love my mother. I just can’t be in relationship with her.
This may seem like a strange way to start a Thanksgiving post, but it is what I can’t stop thinking about – these strained relationships and how we come to terms with them. This holiday is built on abuse, destruction and taking. It has also come to mean gathering, feasting and connecting. Giving thanks.
And pies.
I remember every Thanksgiving my mom would make pies. She would make a lot of other things – the turkey, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes. But it was the pies I remember the most. Everyone in my family liked a different type of pie so my mom would make us each a pie. Not a small, individual pie. A whole pie. Every Thanksgiving there would be apple, cherry, lemon meringue, pumpkin. Sometimes there would be two – to make sure whoever was joining us could enjoy. And usually leave with pie leftovers.
My mom had these Royal China Country Harvest Pie Plates that she would make the pies in - the ones with the recipes on the bottom of the plate. I have a set of those plates. Not the ones from my youth, but ones gifted to me by a dear friend’s mother. I had reminisced about the plates and the deep meaning of pies at every Thanksgiving. My friend’s mother, being a gifted antique shopper, found a set of them and gifted them to me so I might carry the memory into my own home. My friendship with this friend has drifted. We are not as close as we once were. But I can not help swell with love when I think of her, the warm embrace of her family and what that friendship meant to my growth.
Over the last week leading up to this Thanksgiving, I found myself making pies. I found myself thinking about how generous and loving and attentive my mother’s act was. Making each one of us our favorite pie. I found myself reminiscing about the kindness bestowed on me by my friend’s mother – her wanting me to remember some sweetness in my own history. I found myself understanding how we can hold pain and sweetness, kindness and struggle.
Perhaps that is what this Thanksgiving, during a global pandemic in a year that seems to deliver blow after blow, is about. Reworking this holiday. Reflecting on our rituals. Making meaning. Giving ourselves time to reflect with gratitude on what brought us to this moment, what helped us to survive, what kindness we might shower on those we love – and those we don’t know. And knowing we can acknowledge our dark history while imagining and working for a new future.
*written while occupying the stolen and abused land of the Piscataway Indian Nation & Piscataway Conoy Confederacy and residing in a city, our nation’s capital, that housed slave auctions and was built by slave labor. I acknowledge the Black and Indigenous lives that were taken by brutal colonization and work to turn this knowledge into action by fighting white supremacy in all its forms. Doing this work is a way to honor, to do love.