Eating at the Grown-Up Table

I was thinking about when it was that I actually felt like an adult for the first time in my life and the answer came to me surprisingly quickly. It was on Thanksgiving, I was twenty-four years old, and I was "alone" on a holiday for the first time. I wasn't really alone, but I was in an unfamiliar place, and instead of being surrounded by family, I was with people I had just met.
I worked in retail back in the mid-seventies, when malls were sprouting like kudzu across the south. I actually worked in a bank by day, but I had to take a part time job in a shoe store in the mall to make ends meet. I was already a single mom and the pittance I got for child support barely covered child care. I quickly found out that most of the chain stores in the mall paid much better than banks did, so I made a strategic career move. I left the bank and went to work as a manager-trainee for a men's store out of California that had already opened in a few locations in the southeast. I was hired to help open a new store in a brand new mall about thirty miles away. It meant that I would have a longer drive to work every day, but it also meant that I could survive on one job. What I didn't take into consideration were the dreaded retail hours, which didn't exactly coincide with being a single parent. Those were tough times. Luckily I had my mother close by to help, but ultimately, although I wasn't ready to admit it, it wasn't a good fit. A few months later, when the company dangled a manager's job in front of my face, I couldn't turn it down. Never mind that it was in another state where I didn't know a soul and would have no family to help me, the money was too sweet for me to pass up. So one week before Thanksgiving I set out on my new "adventure". Sadly, I had to leave my daughter in my mother's care for a few weeks because it was retail and we were going into the Christmas season., and I had to find a place to live and I had to get her enrolled in daycare. And since my hours were not going to be the normal nine to five, I also had to figure out what I would do after the daycare closed for the day. Obviously, it wasn't going to be an easy transition and if I had really thought it through, I probably never would have accepted the job. But I didn't and I did, and that's why I found myself sitting in the apartment of someone I barely knew on Thanksgiving Day, surrounded by strangers. It was a group of single, twenty-somethings who, like me, were fairly recent transplants, and they all seemed to be enjoying life. While the Eagles sang, "New Kid in Town", they were sipping wine, laughing, talking and cooking. And although the traditional Macy's parade was on, the sound was muted for the "cooler" music that we all loved. Everyone did their absolute best to try to make me feel less homesick and sad over missing my daughter and more festive and comfortable about being where I was. And though I didn't feel like smiling very much that day, I was thankful for those kind people and the friendship they so graciously offered. I remember thinking how remarkably adult we all seemed, and that the familiar smell of Thanksgiving floating through the air was a testament to that. And I remember thinking that if I can just survive 'til Christmas, then life will be good again.