When I was in grade school and high school, it was always assumed that nobody in my family would schedule meetings or social activities on Sunday afternoons and evenings. We used to go to my grandparents’ house and drink cool drinks like Coca Cola with lemon and ice water. My grandma’s towels always smelled like they had just come out of a load of fresh, laundry, even if they had been in her linen closet for a long time. I used to promise myself that the towels in my future home would smell that way.
Sometimes we would watch sitcoms like “Home Improvement” or “Boy Meets World.” At dinnertime, we ordered pizza from Papa Murphy’s (vegetarian for me and my mom and pepperoni for everyone else) and my grandma would always have to pull a thick stack of coupons out of her drawer and hand them to whoever ran over to the shop to pick up the meal. Later, when the whole house smelled warm and delicious ( like cheese and tomatoes and peppers and mushrooms) my grandparents always exclaimed how they were getting the best pizza in town from Papa Murphy’s. Even though I knew it wasn’t necessarily the best pizza in town, I would always pretend that I agreed with them and sometimes I believed it for awhile, too.
After dinner, I usually fell asleep on the floor of the living room, listening to the comforting voices of my parents and grandparents. As I was drifting off to sleep, my mom would say something like, “Oh, it looks as if Joanna was tired.” My grandma would respond, ‘Well, it’s hard work being in school all week. You learn things in the classroom all day and then come home, have a snack, go to sports practice, have dinner, and do homework until bedtime. Being young is like having a full time job.’
And those things – the things that made up a child’s life – were so cement in my grandmother’s mind. Those were the things her kids had done. Those were the things she assumed all normal American children did. I’m sure she knew about the kids who didn’t get to come home for a snack that someone had prepared for them. But when she talked about childhood, it was normally assumed that children got to play softball after school because their parents encouraged them to be part of a team and bought them a mitt and baseball glove. And of course, that all parents made sure their children sat a dinner table and ate a nutritious meal before laying out all their homework on a clean desk to write with sharpened pencils.
I knew that those things weren’t true of every family. But I always drifted off to sleep feeling like they could be.
Yesterday, my own family was watching a movie before bed in the living room. Both my mom and I fell asleep about halfway through and didn’t wake up until the credits were rolling. As everyone got up to go to bed, my mom said, ‘I like falling asleep while the family is all together watching a movie. It feels so safe.’
And I could identify with what she said so much that it overwhelmed me with this emotion that I think was love.
