Maeve Higgins: Those who make life bearable and beautiful deserve our Thanksgiving

We should be thankful to anyone who cares for our children, all of our children, throughout the world, in all the ways they need to be cared for

The work that mothers do is extraordinary.

It’s Thanksgiving weekend here and to me that simply means some time off work, and a dinner with friends.

Aside from the feasting and fun, I’ve discarded the holiday’s original meaning. In short, the day marks a time in 1621 when the Plymouth colonists from Europe and the Native people, the Wampanoag, shared a feast in Massachusetts.

This followed several life-saving acts of kindness by the native people who taught the Europeans, who were dying of malnutrition and illness, how to survive by growing corn, fishing, and taking sap from maple trees. The Thanksgiving narrative is part fact, part myth.

Historians are still trying to figure out the exact truth of that time, with the story’s layers added over the ensuing centuries. We know that the colonists who took over the land and formed the nation did so strategically by committing genocide.

The geographer William M. Denevan writes: “The discovery of America was followed by possibly the greatest demographic disaster in the history of the world.”

Thanksgiving: It's not all about the big dinners with friends, or it shouldn't be.

Research by some scholars has population estimates of the pre-contact Americas to be as high as 112m in 1492, while others estimate the population to have been as low as eight million. 

In any case, the native population declined to less than six million by 1650. It’s a shameful and dark part of American history that remained hidden for too long.

So, what is there to do on Thanksgiving? Is anything worth keeping? I’ve adopted the part where people think and talk about what they are thankful for.

Over the years, I’ve been advised by various therapists, friends, and Instagram posts to keep a list of things I’m grateful for, but I’ve never quite managed it.

My nature is too cynical and lends itself to logging gripes rather than gratitude. I’m much more inclined to ruminate on small slights and large injustices done to me and others. Cute, right?

But something has been brewing for a while now, starting a few weeks back.

I was on tour doing comedy shows and getting a big clap from hundreds of strangers after I told my little jokes and stories on stage. At the same time that I was touring and getting acclaim for my work, my sister was looking after her little girl, who is seven, and was sick with Covid-19 for the first time.

Because she was vaccinated, my niece wasn’t too symptomatic, but she had a stuffy nose and a temperature and was tired. Of course, she and her siblings had to stay home from school, and my sister had to look after them.

I FaceTimed them one afternoon, and as I chatted with my niece, she showed me the art project she had just finished. “Mammy helped me!” she said, her cheeks bright pink and lips chapped. 

In the background, I heard my sister reasoning as best she could with her two-year-old. His arguments seemed weak; he wanted to play outside but insisted the TV still had to be on inside.

But she talked it out with him, and they reached some deal, then my sister’s hand swooped into view on the phone screen, quickly and efficiently applying lip balm to my niece’s lips. The relief on her little face was instant, and she kept chatting away happily.

The lip balm happened so fast that its significance didn’t register with me until later that day. As I took a train to my next show, I thought about how that one small act of caring was surrounded, past and future, by hundreds of other acts just like it. I thought too about what we are rewarded for and thanked for and what we are not.

Nobody gives you a round of applause when you finally get a colicky baby to sleep or winkle out the fears of an anxious 10-year-old.

There is little point in waiting for thanks after biting your lip instead of snapping at a sulking teenager.

I tried to log all the little acts of care that made possible the moment of relief for a sick little girl. Remembering to buy a lip balm, putting it somewhere easy to find in the kitchen, catching up on work calls between peeling apples for snacks, taking the sick one’s temperature, and making sure that she and the three other children have a calm and happy day; how is this possible, let alone a regular occurrence? Work like that should be the stuff of legend, but instead it’s just another blurry day of caring for children.

In her poem ‘Good Bones,’ Maggie Smith writes:

The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children.

I’m not interested in deifying motherhood. That is grotesque and has led to all kinds of trouble for us women.

I’m simply confirming that the work mothers do is extraordinary, and they don’t get enough recognition for that. It’s hardly groundbreaking to state this, but it’s erased so often that it is worth repeating.

I’m thankful to anyone who cares for our children, all of our children, throughout the world, in all the ways they need to be cared for. The tragedy is that it’s not always possible, but it’s valiant and vital work, and I’m thankful to those who do it.

Maggie Smith finishes her poem about children like this:

I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.