Family Dinners

Dinner with the family, supposedly one of the mainstays of American life, didn't happen very often in my house when I was little. My father worked nights, ate his main meal at noon and took his lunch to work. When we were in school, we usually ate school lunch and that was considered our main meal. In the evening, we ate a simple meal that my mother always called supper. Dinner was the noon meal. Since my older brother and sister were quite often late getting home, they ate whenever they got there.

On Sunday however, we all ate dinner together. It was usually a special meal for us and we looked forward to it, especially since it followed a long morning at church. We were always served meat along with potatoes and vegetables. The meat was usually beef prepared in different ways to stretch it among eight people. Vegetables were usually cheap so we were given plenty of those, and of course, there was always bread.

Our kitchen was small and even though we had a separate dining room, we always ate our family meals in the kitchen. My father removed the table-and-chairs set-up because we couldn't fit that many chairs in the space alloted. He built an L-shaped bench in the corner and placed the table next to it. I think we had room for three chairs at the table. The kids sat on the bench, my father sat at the head, and my mother sat next to him on the side next to the stove. The youngest sat next to my mother. It was crowded but I remember it with pleasure. The food was always good, the conversation was lively (we were all talkers), and my father often entertained us with stories of his life as a child.

We never had much money but my father had a good union job and he kept us supplied with the basics. I remember growing up knowing that we didn't have money for "extras" but I never felt deprived. It wasn't until I went out on my own that I realized my family was part of the working poor, and my mother had to scrape together enough money each week to pay the bills. There was never anything left over. Yet they encouraged all of us to continue our education after high school and managed to contribute something to what we earned on our own. I think my sense of security and well-being began at those family dinners and gave me the confidence to continue on to my future.

Presents for the Teacher

When I was in elementary school, everyone gave the teacher a present at the end of the year, I guess to thank her for all her hard work. Nothing was ever said about this but all the parents seemed to know. My mother had six kids and finding gifts for the teacher for each of her kids must have been worrisome. Luckily, the practice didn't continue after the fifth grade, and luckily, my mother had a good imagination and the assurance to act on what she felt was acceptable.

Our yard was crowded with flowering shrubs in the spring. It was a beautiful time of year and I loved to watch the blossoming of one shrub after another. If I had been gifted with a talent for painting, I would have painted these flowers. However, even though I enjoyed their color and fragrance, I wasn't prepared to see them as appropriate gifts for the teacher. My mother disagreed. Every year on the last day of school my mother sent me outside to cut a large bouquet of lilacs to bring to school. Now, I loved lilacs, still do, but I was embarrassed to bring this bouquet to school as my gift for my teacher. None of the other kids brought flowers. They all brought gifts that their mothers had bought at the local store. Little trinkets that seemed so much more appropriate for the teacher than what I had brought lined her desk for all to see. I never noticed that my gift always held center stage in a vase placed front and center on her desk.

Doctors and Sickness

When my siblings and I were sick with various childhood diseases, it was usually at the same time. I'm sure my older brother and sister brought the diseases home from school where they spread through the entire family, even infecting my mother and father at times.

We suffered through measles, chicken pox, scarletina, mumps, pneumonia and meningitis before I was seven years old. My father always blamed it on the germs hiding in the crevices of our old house which was at one time a schoolhouse. He said with all those sick kids mingling together in one room it would be natural for the walls to be permeated with sickness. Whatever it was, my poor mother had from two to six kids to care for each time, and at one time, my father, too. When we all got sick with scarletina, both my parents got sick. My mother always claimed she and my father were sick at different times so at least one of them felt well enough to care for the others. I'm not sure I believe that. Of course besides all these sicknesses, we were also infected with cold and flu viruses. I can't imagine what they went through.

When I was seven, we moved to a different town and all of us were exposed to a different set of infections. Those of us who didn't get sick with mumps, chicken pox and pneumonia  the first time got them this time. I remember my younger siblings and I being sick with mumps at the same time. I then caught a cold which developed into pneumonia and my older brother managed to get sick, too. This was his second time with pneumonia. My younger brother escaped chicken pox the first time but he caught it the second time. Again, my mother bore the brunt of the care.

In those days doctors made house calls. We lived in small towns and everyone knew each other. The doctor in the first town was a crotchety old guy, but he managed to find the way to cure my younger sister of meningitis when none of the big city doctors at the hospital could. She almost died. He also attended all of us at home when we were sick with the other diseases. In the second town our doctor was a member of our church and lived just down the hill from us. He also made house calls. One time when I was trying out my brother's brand-new birthday scooter and managed to fall and put a big gash just below my right knee, he drove to our house, inspected the damage, and then loaded my older sister and I into his car and took me back to his office for stitches. I guess he knew I would need someone to hold my hand and my sister was available. He also was the doctor who removed my tonsils. I can still remember him explaining about the ether mask and telling me to count backwards after he put it over my mouth and nose. The orangey smell is still with me.

My parents must have run up quite a medical bill in both towns, but no one that I knew of had insurance, so the doctors let them pay in installments. Even the hospitals used the installment plan for the births of myself and my younger siblings, and also for the time my sister was sick with meningitis. I don't know what they would have done otherwise.

Spankings, and other things

My parents almost never used physical discipline on us. When we were really young, my mother would slap "our little hands", as she put it, whenever we didn't listen to her and were in danger of hurting ourselves. That couldn't have happened very often because I don't remember any of it, not just about myself but also about my younger siblings. My father would threaten to spank us when we didn't behave, but I can remember only one time when he actually did. My older sister still talks about it, mainly I think because she wasn't on the receiving end and always complained that the rest of us were spoiled.

It happened one summer day after one of those wonderful trips to the lake where we went swimming and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. On rare occasions after these swimming trips we would stop at the Dairy Joy for cones on the way home, always a real treat. This day we didn't. When I realized that we weren't going to stop, I started asking why. Pretty soon my two younger sisters joined in and before long we had turned the request into a monotonous chant. We kept it up even after our father told us several times to stop. Finally, he told us if we didn't stop at once, we would all get a spanking when we got home. Well, by that time, we were enjoying the noise we were making and couldn't stop. I think none of us thought he would really spank us.

We arrived home and unloaded the car. My father went into the house and we were told to go to our bedroom, which the three of us shared. When we got there, he was sitting on one of the beds. He told my two sisters to leave the room and wait in the hall. Then he proceeded to put me over his knees and give me a spanking. I was so shocked and angry I cried even though it really didn't hurt. When he was done, I think he spoke to me but I don't remember what he said. All I remember is the ignominy of the situation, and the wish that the whole day had never happened.

The Day I Lost Santa Claus

I remember vividly the day I finally realized there was no Santa Claus. I don't remember the circumstances leading up to the discovery but I'm sure it was probably a series of little things. I do remember coming downstairs early one Christmas morning and asking my mother if I was right that there really isn't a Santa Claus. She must have decided that I was old enough to learn the truth and told me that yes, I was right. I was happy at the time because I felt grown up and would be able to join my older sister and brother in keeping the secret safe from my younger siblings. It wasn't until we were looking forward to Christmas the next year that I realized what I had lost.

As I watched my sisters and brother anticipating the arrival of Santa, I felt estranged from them and from all of the joy and excitement of Christmas. It wasn't the thought of receiving presents under the tree that kept Christmas so joyous and magical; it was the thought of Santa Claus coming to our house in the middle of the night and leaving us gifts that only he knew we wanted. Without that magic and mystery Christmas seemed kind of flat and uneventful. Thinking about the birth of baby Jesus as the real reason for being joyful didn't impress me either. I guess even as a child I wasn't really a religious person; Santa was more exciting and wonderful than Jesus could ever be.

It wasn't until my husband and I had a child of our own that I was able to recover some of that feeling. Telling her the story of Santa Claus and seeing her excitement at Christmas made even the fact that she would someday feel the loss that I had felt worth the price. And she has now repeated the whole process with her son, and I know she is dreading the day when he too will suffer the loss of Santa Claus.

The School Dilemma

Recent incidents have reminded me of my days spent at school. Even though when I was young teachers were educated to teach their students certain things, the organized school system, whether public or private, failed most of the time. Granted I did learn to read and write, but I would have learned that anyway from my mother. I learned algebra and geometry and enjoyed learning them, but the only time I have ever used them was in helping my daughter with her school work. I studied biology and chemistry and loved those subjects but I've never really needed them in my adult life. And because I love to read and I love to learn, I have taught myself more about those various subjects than I ever learned in school.

However, unlike today my teachers believed they were teaching my schoolmates and me important stuff that we would never learn otherwise. Those were the good old days when the choice of curriculum wasn't led by the various standardized tests administered by the State. Teachers and administrators had more freedom to design their own classwork and decide what they believed was important for their students to learn in each subject. I received a fairly well-rounded education and graduated satisfied that my teachers and I had done well.

It was only years later that I realized I would have been better educated if I had been homeschooled or at least given more freedom to pursue in more detail subjects I was really interested in. I know now that it is impossible to educate students by giving them a little of this and a little of that and consider it done. Most students give up from boredom or a lack of understanding, and either fail or go on to graduate not knowing they have been given little opportunity to really learn. Who knows what our country would be like now if teachers had been educated in learning and then had been allowed to teach their students how to learn.

Holidays

Thanksgiving was always a popular holiday in my childhood home.  My mother spent the day before cooking and baking while we were in school. Then that night she would bake a few more pies and prepare the turkey for the oven. I liked to sit and watch her preparations and learned most of my cooking techniques not from actually cooking myself, but from watching my mother cook. Later, when I was older, I made a few pies, cakes and brownies but no actual meal preparations. It wasn't until I was married that I started cooking for real. Even with that lack of experience I resisted my husband's attempts to turn me into a cook like his mother. She was a good cook but nothing like my own mother. I made do with some of my mother's recipes, a few cookbooks, and most important of all, the original 1940's Betty Crocker Cookbook used by my mother. I loved that cookbook; I still do. It's not in great shape, but I have all the pages complete with my mother's notes. When the publishers came out with a reprint, I bought a copy.

Thanksgiving morning we all were on our best behavior. The delicious smells coming from the kitchen were enough to remind us to help our mother all we could for we wanted nothing to go wrong with that wonderful food. The table in the dining room, which had been transformed from a place to do homework to a beautiful setting for my mother's wedding china and tablecloth, became the favorite room in the house. We constantly checked to make sure everything was as it should be.

When I was young, it was usually just our immediate family with once and awhile a grandparent or two. Later, after my sister went to college, she would bring home boyfriends to share our meal. This made the holiday all the more exciting. The boyfriend of the day was always the one she was going to marry. We always looked forward to her coming home from college to be with us once again.

I tried to carry on the Thanksgiving tradition after I had my own family but it was never the same. I was usually working and only had the holiday itself off, plus I really didn't enjoy cooking, especially large holiday dinners. I felt guilty about this and kept trying to please but after my daughter grew up and left home, I stopped bothering. My husband and I were usually invited to dinner by others and sometimes we went and sometimes we didn't. At other times we went out for dinner with my in-laws to a restaurant but they and my husband would always bemoan the fact that there weren't any leftovers. I finally started hating the holiday because it seemed that everyone around me only cared about the food and forgot about the thanksgiving part. Now I ignore the whole day whenever I can.