Imperfect Pieces

I celebrated my fifty-fifth birthday yesterday. I am five years past qualifying for an AARP card and just moved into getting 10% off at Ross every Tuesday. Life is good…especially on Tuesdays. In five years, Ben, Jerry, and Mrs. Fields get on board.

This birthday celebration may be my all-time favorite…not because I received some amazing gift (although I have now discovered my Frida tendencies with my new magnifying mirror and have spent time daydreaming about my own poetry book while reading rupi kaur!)  It is not because  I was taken to a fancy restaurant (We have developed the term twice-baked turkey since after we started carving ours, we noticed a flow of pink juices that prompted a trip from the turkey roaster to the oven!  I have now finally used the Cast Iron Dutch Oven that seemed so important to buy two years ago!) It was not because I finally hit my goal weight (unless I am counting reaching an all-time high for 2018 so I can celebrate my loss even more! I no longer have a muffin top – I’m carrying around a full-on pound cake.)  Nope…it was because I had a revelation while I looked at my family.

I have seen pictures of my friends dinners with a beautiful table set…menus written on charming framed chalkboards…and centerpieces of flower arrangements in carved pumpkins. That’s as far as I got this year – the pumpkin, not the flowers. A lone pumpkin was my only Thanksgiving decoration and I didn’t even buy it…my husband did…probably after he surveyed my amazing friend’s pictures and decided that I needed some help. 

Our house has never been one of Norman Rockwell paintings. This year is no exception. Our kitchen appliances of twelve years finally just gave up this year, a week before Thanksgiving. Actually, the dishwasher took a dive three years ago and we started doing dishes by hand. The microwave stopped working two years ago and we simply reheated food on the stove. The freezer had one intact shelf so upon opening it, you had a carefully navigate a large pile of frozen items to find what you needed. None of these things prompted us to buy new appliances. Martha Stewart, I am not. The final straw? I opened the oven and the handle came off in my hand. Finally, we had reached a level that even my Alabama/Kentucky roots couldn’t handle – duct tape on the stove. It was time…By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, we had a new refrigerator, new oven, a gaping hole where the broken dishwasher had been, and a floor full of plumbing tools that Eric was using to re-establish a port that had been closed off during our last plumbing emergency. Did I mention that our house is 60 years old and acts like an arthritic senior with bowel issues?

Fortunately, we had decided that Thanksgiving would be on Friday at our house. I’ve never been one to fight for time so we decided that our boys would spend Thanksgiving day with their significant others’ families and we would celebrate Thanksgiving and my birthday on Friday. I think we may have established a new tradition. No one truly wants to choke down two Thanksgiving dinners. I mean…on a stressful day…I have the capacity but it’s really not healthy. 

I spent the day prepping food and carefully navigating tools on the floor. I boiled spuds for mashed potatoes, baked yams for Sweet Potato Souffle, and mixed together non-romaine salads. (How ironic it would have been to have avoided the E-coli with the lettuce only to give my family Salmonella with under-cooked turkey!) We were ecstatic to hear that our oldest was released from work early so we would actually be able to eat before the planned 6pm.  And…no…we were still prepping until around 630pm.

I held my grandson as everyone ate and I just stood back and watched. I watched my three sons who have rallied around each other this year while one of them struggles. Our world has been rocked lately, and we have had to pull together more than ever before. And this is where my revelation came.

I looked at my sons wrestling each other and throwing out sarcastic comments. I watched my husband hold our grandson with a look of wonder on his face. I watched my daughter-in-law nurse in a completely welcoming environment. I watched the girls laugh at our son’s child-like behavior in amusement. I looked at each one of us in the room and thought back to times when each of us has shown our imperfection in various ways…moments of weakness or irritation or selfishness. Somehow, however, all together, we make something…perfect. We make moments in time that linger in our minds as pure happiness. And that is what I felt, while I surveyed my family…pure happiness…and a renewal of hope that everything will be OK. 

So this year will go down as my favorite birthday. This crazy medical-emergency laden, appliance breaking, family struggling year will live in my mind as the year that I saw us as perfect…right where we need to be…together. Nothing in our situation had changed by the end of the day (which, by the way, did not end until midnight!) but I still felt refreshed. Tired…but emotionally refreshed. 

I’ll pull out the Christmas decorations today and start planning our next get-together. We know it will be either Christmas eve or the day after Christmas. Let me have the non-holiday gathering. And let it be perfect…just like this one was.