Thanksgiving was the day my daughter decide to become a vegetarian

 

Thanksgiving was the day my daughter decided to become vegetarian.

It was just going to be the two of us. For the first time, we weren't going to travel to my parent's house for the big dinner, but she still wanted all her favorite foods. I bought a little turkey, made cornbread stuffing,and the Cajun spinach recipe from my sister-in-law. I don't remember making my grandmother's rolls, but I must have, as those are the magic, spirit-invoking addition to the dinner.
As I cooked in the little galley kitchen of the condo we shared, Sarah watched cartoons in the living area. The two of us had moved into this space with nothing but her crib furniture a year or so earlier, when I had determined that life with her alcoholic, musician-father was not contributing to the growth of either of us. I was 27; she had just turned four.
Earlier that year, we had taken a tri-generational trip with my mother to Disneyworld. Sarah had balked at a huge joint of meat that had landed on our table in a restaurant in the German section of Epcot. She had made small, childish noises about not eating meat before, but she had insisted, in that way only a four year old who knows she will always get her way can do, that even though we were not going to Grammy's house this year, she wanted a "real" Thanksgiving. So, even though I was cooking just for myself and my little girl, I was determined to make this a special meal.
I watched a cartoon about saving the Thanksgiving turkey with one part of my brain while I made the finishing touches on the meal. It was an old one, where Miss Peach's students make him into the star of their play in order to save him from being the meal. When our turkey was ready to eat, Sarah would have none of it. What was I to do? On the one hand, I had worked for hours to give her what she said that she wanted, but now she was invoking her sensitivity to animal rights.
I had a lot of leftover turkey.

This wasn't the first Thanksgiving that I thought of this morning. I actually was thinking of the last one I remember spending with ALL of my family at my mother's house. It was six years ago, before Sarah graduated from Rice and before my ex-husband and our boys moved back to where I grew up. You could say that particular Thanksgiving was the beginning of the end. Sarah graduated that spring and went off on her own adventure; my mother would hang up on me and refused to speak to me again in December; and although we would still make the move back to the Houston-Galveston area, something inexplicable at the time would seep into my marriage.
My mother and I made the regular turkey, but Sarah brought her own turkey. She had shot it herself with her college room-mate's father. She was still a vegetarian then, but since she had shot this bird herself, she was determined to eat it and wanted us to have some, too. Wild meat didn't taste the same as what we were used to. This time it was her turn to have leftovers.

This is my first Thanksgiving not to cook. My first day to not have a huge bird defrosting in the sink and a day of cooking in front of me. Instead I am curled up on the Corry's comfortable couch while Jim flips channels to catch all the parades and Valerie starts on the green-bean casserole that will be her addition to her son's wife's dinner.

Yeah, things change.