by Margarett Waterbury

During the holidays last year, I was employed as a social worker at a nonprofit agency in a rural county in Oregon. It was not a profession I was trained for, nor was it what I ever imagined myself doing, but I would have taken nearly any job during those first grim years of the recession. The agency worked with survivors of domestic violence, which meant that the majority of our clients were young women, and most had no money. While violence is class blind, those who came to us for help usually had nowhere else to turn.

Chronically underfunded and massively overstretched, like most domestic violence agencies our office was staffed by a combination of very young, very idealistic women, the ink on our college diplomas barely dry; and a smaller cadre of older supervisors, well-meaning but lacking either the training or the natural inclination to effectively lead other people. “Restructuring” happened whenever a grant ran out, which was all the time. Morale and salaries were low, turnover was high, and employees were always looking for another job or complaining about how broke they were. For a while, my office was in a hallway where I met with clients to discuss their recent rape or assault next to a busy copy machine as colleagues walked through on their way to the kitchen. A hard-fought upgrade bought me a windowless interior room furnished with donated furniture and flickering fluorescent lighting. I brought toilet paper from home and kept it in my desk drawer as we usually ran out before the end of the week.

But I loved my clients. While I could offer little more than a receptive listener and a donated oral hygiene kit (thanks, American Dental Association), witnessing the resilience of women who had experienced profound traumas changed me deeply. I have long since come to terms with the fact that social work is not my calling – not only did I not enjoy it, but I don’t even think I was very good at it – but I am indebted to a weak economy for teaching me another way to think about class, gender, race, privilege, everything – even food.

I grew up in the coastal Pacific Northwest surrounded by what some would view as obscene abundance: sparklingly fresh salmon, halibut, and black cod; wild chanterelles, porcinis, and morels foraged in the woods behind my house; cold and crotchety Dungeness crabs so close to shore you could wade for them; forests of tart thimbleberries and elusive huckleberries. My Italian mother grew heirloom tomatoes, damson plums, and loganberries in the back yard; my grandfather made his own wine and fussed over his pepper plants. As a child, my favorite after school snack was a steamed artichoke.  Food was a direct connection to family and home, a constant and sustaining pleasure.

Like all good progressive foodies, I lamented the lack of education that kept others from enjoying a healthy diet. Friends and I had long conversations about our low-wage grocery bills and what could be done on a food stamp budget, which invariably ended with exclamations about how inexpensive and easy it is to prepare lentils. Implicit in all of this was the unsaid assumption that people who were poor and fat had it tough, but if they just tried harder, it could be different.

Each year at Thanksgiving, the agency I worked for gave out holiday food baskets to all of our clients. These were donated by a local women’s club and, like all of the resources at our disposal, left much to be desired. They came in three sizes: small, medium, and large, and each one contained some permutation of a frozen Butterball turkey, boxed stuffing mix, powdered mashed potatoes, gravy packets, canned cranberry sauce, either a 12-pack or a 2-liter bottle of soda, packaged rolls, disposable aluminum roasting pans, and a frozen Marie Callender pie (choice of pumpkin or apple crumble). Some also contained a box of satsumas, and a few lucky baskets got a bag of real russet potatoes, the kind that come out of the ground.

Despite its dreadful cultural baggage, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. I am a skilled and enthusiastic cook, and my color-coded recipe-filled excel spreadsheet is always finished weeks in advance. I start testing recipes for Brussels sprouts with pancetta or mashed purple Peruvian potatoes in September – early September. These Thanksgiving baskets appalled me.  The idea of using a boxed stuffing mix was more than anathema. It was inconceivable. To me it would be better to have nothing, no dressing at all, than a carton of those dusty crumbs. Boxed stuffing seemed an emblem of desperate sadness, a white flag of surrender to the world.

As part of being a bad social worker, I had clear favorites among the women I worked with, and Rebecca topped the list, mostly because we were the same age. A former foster child from another state who never landed with a permanent family, she had spent her teens in and out of a series of group homes. The father of her oldest two kids, who were three and four, was currently serving a long prison sentence; the father of her youngest, just an infant, had hit the four-year-old in the face so hard he left a hand-shaped bruise, which is what landed them all in foster care in the first place. He hit Rebecca too sometimes, though unlike most of my clients, I rarely worried that he would kill her.

Rebecca was also funny, relentlessly positive, and heartbreakingly optimistic about how she would someday live with her children as a family again.  Every time we met, we talked about what she could do to get her kids back. I knew her chances were slim, but she was so determined that I sometimes felt myself caught up alongside her, wondering where the crib would go, whether the kids would like the shared playground in her complex, which other kids they would be friends with.

Rebecca was a resident in a housing program we operated. It was my job to “case manage” her, whatever that means. It usually consisted of watching Disney movies together in her shady apartment while gossiping about her child welfare caseworker. Occasionally I drove her to court dates, food pantries, and supervised visits with her kids, which took place in a special room equipped with one-way glass and a small basket of toys worn dingy with desperate use.

Though she lived alone and would likely be spending the holiday that way, Rebecca received a small basket. She planned to prepare the meal at home and share it with her kids at their scheduled visit several days before Thanksgiving. I hand selected what I thought were the best ingredients. A turkey that hadn’t melted too much as the baskets sat in an empty hallway. A small bag of real potatoes. Oranges. Butter. Some sparkling cider. A pumpkin pie, which she had requested. Every kind of tinfoil pan, paper towels, and plastic cups that were available, because I knew she only had a few dishes. And, because she was my favorite, an organic kabocha squash from the farmer’s market that I picked out just for her, though I lied and told her everybody got one.

I also told Rebecca that I would help her prepare the meal. I knew she didn’t know how to cook a turkey, and I was reasonably sure she would have no idea what to do with the squash. I arrived at her apartment with my handbag full of salt grinders, sprigs of fresh sage and rosemary from my garden, Turkish bay leaves, and heads of garlic. In fear that she would not have a kitchen knife of any kind, I brought my Shun chef’s knife wrapped in a dishcloth, though I left it in the car out of some vague concern that such a sharp object was somehow inappropriate.

Rebecca knew quite a bit about nutrition. Like me, she tried vocally to avoid sugar, and like me, she often failed. I noted the new forest of Arizona iced tea bottles on her coffee table every time I visited. She knew she should eat vegetables, and often used her food stamp card at the green grocer at the end of her street. She drank skim milk for her bones, and bought Flintstone vitamins. But there were some major holes. She told me about how she tried to make mashed potatoes once, but she would never do it again because it took so long for the whole potato to get soft in the boiling water. Her boyfriend’s mother, concerned about Rebecca’s health, bought her salmon filets that just went smelly in the refrigerator. It wasn’t that Rebecca didn’t like salmon; she just had no idea how to cook it.

We unwrapped the mostly defrosted turkey in her tiny sink. Rebecca eeeewed when I pulled out the giblet packet. I gave her a line about using the whole animal, but inwardly I squirmed right along with her. We tossed it out. Instead of working from a recipe, I wanted to give Rebecca a sense of how to cook in a general, improvisational way, the way I cooked. We melted some butter in the microwave and mixed in some chopped rosemary and sage. I smeared it on the turkey, then Rebecca plopped the bird in a flimsy aluminum roasting pan and put it in the oven, which we had forgotten to preheat. She didn’t have a timer, so I made a mental note to call her in three hours to remind her to take it out of the oven.

Then we hacked the squash into pieces with a flimsy bread knife, blade bowing weakly as it sawed. At home, I would have done something elaborate: used it to fill ravioli topped with fried sage leaves, or pureed it into a coconut curry soup with mountains of cilantro and ginger. But I was determined to keep things simple, replicable, so we just cut it into quarters and put it in a roasting pan covered in aluminum foil. I told Rebecca that, when in doubt, bake something at 350 with some butter and salt, and that will usually make it edible.

After I had clocked out, I called Rebecca to remind her to take the turkey out of the oven. The next day she called to tell me her visit with her kids went well. I was overjoyed. In my mind, the children sat politely at the table drinking sparkling cider out of full and foaming cups as Rebecca carved the turkey, somehow ballooned to three times its puny size, whole and steaming, crisp skin crackling appetizingly under her knife. They passed slices of pumpkin pie to one another lovingly; they lingered after the meal. I knew her visit was not permitted to last more than 60 minutes, but I decided not to think about it.

That year I hosted Thanksgiving at my house. So many friends and family came that we had to sit on lawn chairs. We drank endless bottles of local wine and ate free-range turkey with chanterelle mushroom gravy and stuffing made with apples from my mother’s yard. It was, predictably, almost tediously delicious; satisfying and nourishing in all possible ways. At dinner I talked about my work, effusing about the importance of nutrition education and how wonderful our local food producers were and my exciting new ideas about changing the food stamp system. We all agreed with one another, flush with camaraderie and Pinot Noir.

I continued to see Rebecca weekly after Thanksgiving. For a while, we pursued many of the same goals with some success. Her visits got longer and longer, and eventually she was allowed to take her children home, first for an afternoon, then overnight, then for the whole weekend. I began to believe that she may have been right all along, that she really would be reunited with her family.

Then, one Saturday night, she hit her daughter in the face. It meant that she would never get her children back. She told me that she was just so overwhelmed. Her children had all been yelling at once, her daughter had started screaming, and she didn’t know what else to do.

Not long after, she found out she was pregnant. Her caseworker was very clear that they would take the infant at birth, but Rebecca was determined to keep the baby at any cost. Diligently, she kept all of her prenatal appointments, taking the bus an hour each way. She dedicated herself to learning even more about nutrition: the importance of adequate folic acid on fetal nervous system development, calculating how much protein she needed based on her increasing body weight. The Arizona iced teas continued to accumulate on the side table, but she was eating some yogurt for breakfast.

Before Rebecca gave birth to her fourth child, I took another job: an easier, better paying position at a consulting firm where I would work in a LEED-certified building and my employer would contribute to my retirement account. I felt a small amount of guilt leaving the nonprofit world, though I knew it was the wrong place for me. When I told Rebecca, she didn’t seem surprised: “A new worker again. I sure go through a lot of them.”

The next spring, I heard that Rebecca had her baby, and that child welfare took it straight from the delivery room to foster care. My heart broke for Rebecca, as it continues to do. It also breaks for her children, all four of them, who like her will probably never know the unmitigated joy of digging more butter clams than their little brother, or the serene connection that comes from sitting silently on a counter watching their grandmother make dumplings, or the almost unbearably intense sense of safety and belonging holidays bring to other families. Their memories of their mother, if they have them, will mostly be set in a room with one mirrored wall where all the furniture is child-sized, their mom a nervous, well-meaning giant in a place she clearly does not belong.

This year, I will go to my mother’s for Thanksgiving. It will be utterly lovely, like most occasions I get to spend with my family. As I get older, the importance of Christmas, Easter, even Halloween has fallen away; still, I believe in the worth of this holiday because it is the only day in the United States when saying “I am happy with what I have” is not a radical act. This year, I am grateful that my life allows me the luxury of finding joy in experiences beyond the sensual, that I have additional pleasures available to me than a sweet tea from the corner market. This year, I will think of Rebecca and hope that she is able to find some happiness, whatever its form. It is tempting to think she might bake a squash, but I know it is more likely that she will eat Papa John’s pizza while watching Snow White under a thrift store blanket. And it is impossible for me to judge or blame her, because I now understand that sometimes, knowing is not enough.

Margarett Waterbury is a writer and editor living and working in Portland, Oregon. She enjoys indoor succulents, bicycling, and a good tiki cocktail. Even though it rains a lot in the northwest, she does not own a single umbrella.