We Give Thanks for Children

The kitchen is the best place to be on Thanksgiving day. It is rich with smells and the sounds of laughter and playful banter, children squealing as they scurry and play underfoot. The room has become a woman’s place, the aunts and mothers and teenage daughters bunching together in happy familiarity. The more experienced chefs deal with turkey while the youngest cook - a thirteen year old niece with a round baby face and stick bug limbs - has been assigned to the stuffing. When the adults aren’t looking, she slips bites of bread to the dogs and children. The countertops are coated with flour and various food bits, getting stickier by the minute. Someone spilled a little of some liquid on the floor, and now everyone’s socks are wet. Children cling to legs as the women navigate the kitchen with their slippery feet, begging for scraps. They clutch their stomachs and groan in dramatic desperation. They are clearly so hungry as to be on the brink of starvation, their terrible awful mothers having deprived them of stealing turkey parts and cranberry sauce.

The men are supposed to be keeping an eye on the kids - after all, it’s the least they could do - but instead have sequestered themselves in the living room. The football game plays on the television, capturing the attention of every male aged fourteen to eighty-two. (Except for one fifteen year old who plays on his Gameboy and would go help in the kitchen if his grandfather wouldn’t call him a pansy.) They sink deep into the couch cushions, grunting at each other as a form of communication and occasionally yelling out angrily at the TV screen. The fathers of the tiny ones cradle their passed out babies in the crook of one elbow, keeping a hand free for scooping up chips and dig. Except for their ones who don’t yet talk, the men have almost completely forgetting they have children to be minding.

That is, until one of them cries out in agony. The fathers stand to find the kitchen in a clamor, mothers frantically searching for the injured child, teenage girls standing frozen with kitchen implements in their hands, the rest of the kids cowering away from any potential blame to be laid upon them. Finally, a mother scoops up her sobbing seven year old. His hand is held out like an offering, seared a painful red and already blistering. He is crying too hard to speak, tears bathing his face and his eyes screwed shut.

It’s his grandmother who weasels the embarrassing story out of him, who figures out that the poor boy had been dared to press his palm flat against the hot stove and hold it there for at least five seconds. He only made it for two, but the other kids are already in so much trouble that they decide it wouldn’t exactly be the wisest of things to point out.

The boy is taken to the hospital by his mother, two aunts, and an older sister who sits in the backseat with him and holds his good hand. The rest stay behind, to keep dinner running smoothly. His father stays to watch the baby and the game. While the women cluck in worried voices, the men exclaim that it was just a scratch, a really just silly thing to go to the hospital over.

If the boy wasn’t clearly in so much pain, the women who went with him would think so too. The wait in the ER is long and torturous, but the boy hasn’t stopped crying yet. When his mother accidentally brushes against his injured hand, he screams bloody murder. The only one he seems to want is his sister, who sits with him held tight on her lap.

She’s clearly maternal of him, though very young herself. Twelve years old, her hair sits in a tight ponytail on top of her head. Her wrists are lined with a rainbow of hair ties. Her legs are knobby and coltish, her chest still sunken. But she holds her little brother in tender arms, wrapping him up in safety even though he is only just a little smaller than she is. She pets his hair until he stops crying, deescalates until he’s only sniffling every once in a while.

Finally, a nurse calls the boy and his mother back, leaving the girl and her aunts to sit and wait. The girl fidgets her hands, the aunts read magazines. They try to be patient. Behind a curtain, perched on the edge of a sterile hospital bed, the boy sits with his hand held out. The doctor spreads a thin layer of ointment on it, wraps it up in a gauze bandage. The mother scoops the boy up and holds him as she listens to the doctor’s instructions for care.

She gives their insurance information at the front desk, gathers up the rest of her family behind her. The car ride home is silent, the boy asleep. His tear-stained cheek rests against his sister’s shoulder, sweet and peaceful. When they pull into the driveway, his small sister hoists him over her shoulder like a sack of flour until one of the aunts takes him from her.

They walk through the door to meet their laughing family, table set, smells wafting through the air. The boy is laid down on the couch, covered with a blanket and tucked in gently. His father puts the baby down next to him, kisses them both on the forehead.

The family sits down, pulls their chairs in. Eats, celebrates. Loves.