The Christmas Dinner No One Came To

I did not shout, I organized

In January I called a lawyer.

Not one of the ones in town who golfs with Mark’s father-in-law. I drove to Waterloo and I found a woman there, a family and estate attorney with gray hair and reading glasses on a chain, who listened to my whole story without once looking at her watch, and when I was done she took her glasses off and said, “Well. Let’s make sure your wishes are your wishes.”

That was the first time in ten years that anyone had used the word wishes to me. Not obligations. Not what’s fair. Not what the kids expect. My wishes. I nearly cried right there in her office, and I do not cry easily anymore, I used it all up that Christmas.

I did not do a single dramatic thing. That is what I want you to hear, because I think people expect a story like this to have a scene where the mother throws it all in their faces. There was no scene. I never called and screamed. I never sent an angry letter. I never told a soul in the family what I was doing. I just went to work, quietly, the way I have done everything hard in my life.

I pulled every file out of the locked cabinet under the stairs where Tom kept his papers. I sat at the kitchen table for weeks with the account statements and the deeds and the beneficiary forms spread out in front of me, and I read every line, and where I did not understand something I wrote it down and asked the lawyer in Waterloo the next week. I learned more about my own money in two months than I had let myself learn in the ten years since Tom died, because for ten years I had been keeping it whole and tidy so that my children would have it, as if that were my one remaining job.

In February I signed the papers. New will. New beneficiaries. A trust, set up the way the lawyer and I decided together over three long meetings.

I did not leave my children out of pettiness. I want to be careful here too, because this is not that kind of story and I am not that kind of woman. I left each of them a letter and a keepsake, something of their father’s that I knew they would actually keep. For Mark, Tom’s watch and his good hunting knife. For Paula, her grandmother’s cameo and the quilt off our bed. Small things. True things. Things that said, I was your mother and I loved you, which was never in question. What was in question was the money, and the land, and the lake, and the house, all the things they had been counting, and those I did something else with entirely.