Stirring the Pot by Jenny McCarthy

doesn’t matter how hitched you are; you are some little person’s universe. Me, I give
way more
than a shit, and Evan knows it. I give great piles of it.

Giving the Bird
    MASTERING THE ART OF THE FAMILY HOLIDAY MEAL
    Step 1: Put turkey in the oven the day before the gathering. See Grandma’s recipe below.
    Step 2: Refill your Xanax prescription.
    Step 3: Be strategic about the seating chart—make sure that
you
are not next to Aunt Becky. Let your husband or boyfriend do the honors.
    Step 4: Pop a Xanax before your guests arrive.
    Step 5: Retain easy and subtle access to the booze.
    Step 6: Let someone else do the dishes.
    I mentioned earlier that I have great memories of McCarthy family meals—the noise, the giggles, the camaraderie. When it comes to holiday meals, however, I have to revise the imagery a little for you.
    My father has nine siblings. They all had four or five or six kids each. In other words, the McCarthy clan is enormous. When I was growing up, no one had much money, so holiday meals with his side of the family had the feel of a soup kitchen—sixty or more people shuffling in line toward a buffet of too little food.
    I have vivid memories of being kissed by aunts with giant cold sores. I remember the nightmare of the “kids’ table” and the cousins who could fart on command—and also when you commanded them not to.
    We kids were basically left to fend for ourselves. One year, my cousins dared me to plug in the iron and press my hand on it to test how hot it could get. It’s a wonder to me now that I have continued to choose the “dare” option in life, but I guess anything is a cakewalk after second-degree burns on your hands.
    In my memory, Grandma McCarthy is always sitting (after pushing out ten kids, I don’t blame her one bit) and some drunk is always singing an Irish tune. Someone else is often screaming at the drunk to shut up. Looking back, I’m grateful I wasn’t tortured by being dry humped in a closet by a first cousin. Second or third cousin, maybe, but not a first.
    As unappetizing as any of this may seem to an outsider,I have to admit that to me these are very soothing memories. My family is imperfect, but it’s mine, you know? From talking with friends, I’m aware that this is a pretty universal weirdness, so maybe you feel the same way. Everyone’s brand of family insanity is sacred and we are all a little biased toward our family skeletons.
    Which makes it hard, as we grow older and pair up, to create new family traditions or to adapt to your spouse’s (or anyone else’s) ideal of the family holiday meal. Add in-laws or, worse, divorce to this mix and the importance of your own traditions ratchets up even more. Not to mention that your children become like the wishbone you fought over when you were a kid.
    I’m not proud to say that when I was married I had trouble adapting to the blended-family holiday. I may not have liked Grandma’s bird, but I loved my mom’s recipe for stuffing and had been trained for years on how to make it exactly like hers. When my mother-in-law brought
her
traditional stuffing to the party, I got irrationally uppity. I didn’t like the way she imposed her past onto my present. I’m a Scorpio, so the revenge I took came naturally: I snuck into the kitchen and oversalted her dish. I took it to a criminal level. People were thirsty for days and no one but me knew why. Now they do!
    Now that I’m more “mature” and evolved (I can admit to what I did, after all), I’ve come to realize what only our loved ones can teach us. You don’t see your own assets or your own faults in any kind of perspective until you’ve seen them operating in a relative. (And good or bad, you can’t quite see your spouse clearly until you see him reflected in one of his blood relatives across the dining room table. Whether or not he sees himself as well is anyone’s guess.)
    Do you think you are an amazingly funny storyteller? Well, when you see Uncle Harold