were housewives slaving away over a hot stove and then there was
I have memories of my grandfather Kirkman making mashed potatoes that were so good because they tasted like a bowl of butter. I love my mom’s brownies. My favorite thing about both of those recipes is that someone else made them for me. Occasionally I feel an urge to whip up some mashed potatoes and brownies, but I don’t ever feel an urge to scrape the crust from the baking pan, or to squeeze out some progeny so he or she can remember that while Mommy was out of town often doing stand-up comedy, she baked a mean banana bread to try to make up for her flagrant neglect.
I am a generally honest, good person who likes eating your brownies/playing with your kid for ten minutes, but that doesn’t mean I should drop everything and enroll in culinary school or start begetting future generations so that one day I can traumatize them, for example by telling them their grandpa was a no-good adulterer.
I never met my mom’s dad, Grandpa Freddy, who died many years before I was born. I’d always known my (now deceased) Nana Jean as a widow. Nana lived about an hour away from our house and had never learned to drive. Once a year, on Thanksgiving, my dad dutifully picked up his mother-in-law and drove her back to Needham, Massachusetts, to stay with us. Nana and I used to walk to the corner doughnut shop the morning of her arrival and when we were out of earshot of my mom, she’d tell me stories about her dead husband. That’s how I thought of Grandpa Freddy—as my nana’s dead husband and not a real grandfatherly type. She didn’t paint the most familial picture of that man.
Apparently, Freddy was a bit of a womanizer and cheated on my nana. When I was about nine, on one of our doughnut-eating walks, I asked her, “Is Grandpa in hell?” I knew the Catholic Church wasn’t so hot on married men having girlfriends, and even though he was my grandfather, I was pretty sure that God didn’t bend the rules for my family. Nana matter-of-factly answered, “Freddy’s in purgatory.”
She explained that it was like a waiting-room area for people who are dead but aren’t quite ready to meet God. That didn’t sound so bad. I liked most waiting rooms as long as they had fish tanks and
I never had to go to Catholic school like my mom did. My parents weren’t as religious as their parents. My parents were like middle managers to God the CEO. They passed on his orders with a shrug: “Look, I don’t want to strictly obey the Ten Commandments either but the big guy says we have to.”
But straying from Catholicism makes my mom nervous because her superstition kicks in. I’ll never forget when I told her that I’d started going to Buddhist lectures in Los Angeles. “Jennifah, you can’t do that. You were baptized in the Catholic Church. There’s an invisible mark on you that says, ‘Catholic.’ You can’t go get stamped with other religions. God doesn’t know what to make of it and you don’t end up in heaven.”
For such an all-powerful dude, God, as my mom sees him, is easily confused. I did have to go to church every Sunday, although we didn’t pray or read the Bible at home during the week or anything like that. My mom’s philosophy was: “God is busy. He doesn’t need to hear that you’re thankful for every shit and fart.” I always thought that expression should be embroidered on a pillow.
Ultimately I decided Buddhism wasn’t for me either. You still have to get up on Sunday mornings and you have to sit twice as still for twice as long. My mom also has given up going to church. She thinks the pastors are too old and out of touch. She and my dad have found the church of Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, where they are devoted to the worship of the slot machines. Another of my mom’s philosophies is: “Well, at least the church I’m
But like all good Catholic families, ours just keeps getting bigger. I’ve come to realize that my relatives apparently like to have lots of unprotected sex. The annual Kirkman Christmas party is getting so enormous and overwhelming that I’ve had to start my own tradition for that day—have a phone-therapy session with my shrink in the morning while trying to mask the fact that I’m sipping a 10:00 a.m. glass of Riesling.
Every party is the same. I say about two sentences to a cousin and then their daughter, whatsherface, is off and running across the room to put her finger in a light socket to see whether she’ll light up like the Christmas tree. The fact that I don’t want to have kids of my own doesn’t mean I want to watch someone else’s die a painful death by electrocution, so I gracefully bow out of the conversation. “No, it’s fine. You go chase her. We’ll catch up later.”
My extended family are a bunch of hospitable, sweet souls. Anyone who walks through the door is considered family. But sometimes I’m still self-conscious at the family Christmas party because I am childless. My sister Violet is childless too but she has three cats and three horses. She gets up at the crack of dawn to feed them, so people feel less bad for her. It seems like as long as you’re cleaning up some living thing’s poop after age thirty, family members really respect that lifestyle choice. My uncle Will, a stout Italian man with a white beard, plays Santa Claus every year at the party. Kirkman Christmas takes place a week before Actual Christmas, but the kids are naturally able to suspend their disbelief and accept that Santa Claus comes to Auntie Violet’s a week early to honor the fact that it’s easier to get all of the Kirkmans together on that day. Also, when you’re a kid, I guess it’s just called “believing in Santa” and not “suspension of disbelief.”
At dusk, Uncle Will heads out to my sister’s barn and changes into his red Santa suit, complete with fake white beard, even though he has a real one underneath. He brings in a sackful of presents and doles them out to more than thirty screaming, shrieking children who are freaking out harder than preteen girls and creepy older men at a Justin Bieber concert.
I stand back with the adults while the kids trample one another for a front-row seat at the Santa concert, and once they’re down, I watch them go into a trance. At no point do they seem to realize that Santa, unlike any other man, has whiskers made of cotton. Or maybe they do notice but don’t seem to care? I never thought that any of the Santas I met as a kid was
My mom always told me that the Santa Claus at the mall was a Santa look-alike who was also from the North Pole and definitely sanctioned by Santa. So I never went in with expectations and I always felt a little superior to the other kids because I knew that this wasn’t Santa and I was in on it with him. I’d sit on his lap and play the game and tell him what I wanted, knowing that he would pass it on to the real Santa but that the chump whose lap I was sitting on was not the guy who was going to be coming down our chimney.
Actually, nobody was coming down our chimney. We didn’t have a fireplace. My mom told me that Santa came in through a vent on the roof and climbed down our attic stairs (which doubled as a cleaning supplies closet). I was always very impressed with how, every Christmas morning, the cleaning supplies looked untouched. Santa got extra points in my book for being so diligent about putting things back where they belonged.
But every kid at Kirkman Christmas was told that this was
By the time Will/Santa comes on the scene, the shrieking gets out of control. I don’t remember my mother and father ever letting me shriek at high decibels in other people’s homes—even family members’ homes. I’ve never grabbed someone’s Christmas gift out of his or her hands. (Then again, I never wanted the same kind of presents that other kids got. As a kid, every Christmas I asked Santa Claus for one of those “furry clips that high school girls hang off their purses.” Santa never delivered. I learned later in life that those are known as “roach clips” and they are not just purse decorations, like some pinecone ornament on a Christmas tree. They hold your roach—aka the tiny little pile of ash and rolling papers that a joint has been reduced to after a round of puffing and passing.)
At last year’s Kirkman Christmas party, with my divorce still a secret and it being no secret that I was beyond my peak egg health, I thought it would be a good strategy to seem “normal” and “into children.” When Santa had given out his last gift and the kids’ voices were hoarse from wailing, I decided to flex my maternal side. Everybody was always telling me I’d be such a great mom and the third glass of Riesling had given me the courage to try.
