My husband, Neil, returned from the garage carrying the folding table. He immediately noticed Jonah sitting in his mother’s chair and the untouched containers on the counter. He looked at me, then at Bernadine. Nobody spoke until his sister Renee quietly approached me. “She did this when we were children too,” she whispered. “We always waited until everyone else had eaten.”
I suddenly understood that this wasn’t simply about Thanksgiving leftovers. It was an old family tradition that had hurt generations of children. Renee admitted she had once promised herself she would never treat her own children that way. Yet nobody had ever challenged their mother.
This Post Has One Comment