The Christmas Dinner No One Came To

They meant it, for about a month

You have to understand who these people were to me, or none of the rest of it will make sense.

When Tom died, my children were good to me. I will never say they were not, because for a little while, they were. He went in the morning, the way I said, standing at the bathroom sink with his tie half done, and by the time the paramedics were kneeling over him on our bedroom floor I was holding onto the door frame so hard my fingers cramped and would not straighten for an hour afterward. Forty-one years we were married. I did not know how to stand up in a room he was not in.

My children carried me through that first stretch. At the funeral, in the fellowship hall of the Methodist church where we were married, with the ham sandwiches and the cold cuts laid out on the long tables and half the town filing past, Paula held my hand and said, “We will get through this together, Mom, all of us.” Mark put his big arm around me, my boy who had grown into a man taller than his father, and said, “You are never going to be alone. I promise you that.” They meant it. I believe to this day that in that moment, in that church basement that smelled of coffee and carnations, they meant every word.

And for a while they kept it up. Paula brought casseroles over on Tuesdays, the funeral-potato kind with the corn flakes on top, and she would sit at my table and let me talk about him. Mark came out on Saturdays and ran the mower and cleaned the gutters and checked the oil in my car without being asked. The grandchildren came and thundered up and down the hallway in their sock feet the way children do, and for a few hours at a time the house would sound alive again, and I would go to bed those nights thinking, we are going to be all right, the four of us, we are going to hold each other up.

Then the casseroles stopped.

It was not sudden. Nothing about it was sudden, and that is what makes it so hard to point to. The Tuesday casseroles became every other Tuesday and then became a text that said sorry Mom crazy week. The Saturday mowing became a phone call telling me the name of a boy down the road who would do it for twenty dollars. The Sunday dinners, which had gone back and forth between my house and Paula’s since the grandchildren were born, simply stopped happening at all, and no one ever said we are stopping, they just quietly did not start again.

Mother’s Day turned into flowers that arrived in a box from a website, with a little printed card that said Happy Mother’s Day in a typeface, not in anyone’s handwriting. My birthday turned into a text message with a heart on it. Not a call. Not a voice. A heart, the kind you can send to your dentist.

For years I made excuses for them. This is the thing no one tells you about being a mother. We are experts at it. We can take a scrap and turn it into a whole meal, we can take a text with a heart on it and tell ourselves that our daughter is only busy, that she loves us, that she thinks of us, that the silence is a season and not a decision. We turn neglect into a story we can live inside. I did it for years. I got very good at it.