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Now Who Will Eat The Chicken Wings?
by Judy Fraher
One day while visiting my mother, I watched her put a chicken in the oven then she walked over and sat across from me at the kitchen table. Her hands cupping her chin, she chuckled and said, “Guess what? I eat the chicken wings now. I feel guilty if I don’t.” I looked at her, surprised and a little caught off guard. Did my mother know about the chicken wings?
When I was a little girl, my family had ignored the chicken wings. They’d sit forlornly tucked in tight against the sides of the chicken overshadowed by the moist white breast meat. Oftentimes, they’d be thrown in the wastebasket with the carcass or thrown in water to make a broth. No one had wanted to eat them. There isn’t much meat on them. They consist of a bony knuckle with flabby skin. I consider myself an expert (almost) on chicken wings. But my reason for eating chicken wings, I think, is different from their popularity of today.
*
The children busily clambered over the seats of the Desoto anxiously trying to be the first out after fidgeting in their Sunday best at church. Pell-mell they ran into the house, the waft of chicken hitting their senses. Greeting their hellos to their mom, off they ran to their bedrooms to shed those stiff crinkly dresses and hats and dress suit with starched shirt and tie. Down again they stampeded, three girls and a boy, to sit at the dining room table, hungrily awaiting their Sunday afternoon dinner, careful not to spill their glasses of milk placed in front of their plates. Their mother lovingly placed the sliced chicken in the center of the table. Like vultures circling, the children, with forks in hand, attacked the dinner. Ignoring the thick white meat, the youngest grabbed the skinny wings and heaped the two on her plate. She gnawed away on the bones.
*
I’d eventually grown to prefer the taste of those skinny little wings over the white meat. But initially I had started eating them because I wanted the others in my family to have the best. I would settle for the mediocre. Little did I realize that my mother had understood. Of course, she’d understood. Parents are people after all. They’ve hopes and desires and vulnerabilities.
My mother had been a nurturer, always eager to hold a little child in her lap and give them an extra hug or extend a hand to her peers if they’d been in need. She’d been a bowler too, bowled all her life. Before I’d started kindergarten, she’d take me to her bowling league games where I’d curl in a ball on the bench and fall asleep, the crash of the pins a faint noise.
She’d walked around with a book constantly in her hand. My father still remembers me saying as a child, “When I grow up I want to be just like mommy so I can stay home and read all day.” (Well, that didn’t work out quite the way I’d planned!)
I remember the Barbie doll clothes she’d knit for me and my sister. High class fashion dolls we played with in their knitted pink sweaters and mini-skirts. I’ve started knitting this year and I’m in awe that she’d been able to knit clothes that small! Oh, and the fashions she would sew for me. I cringe when I look back that she’d let me out of the house wearing some of them. Not because she’d done a bad job but because of the risque style! Thank goodness for my daughter, I’ve never learned to sew!
She’d cook plain meals but make awesome whoopie pies.
She’d wrap every gift that went in the Christmas stockings.
She’d never meddle in my choice of boyfriends. She’d said experience would teach me. Indeed it has.
Perhaps she didn’t involve herself enough in our lives, not like we do today with our children. I don’t believe we’d ever talked about my dreams. Maybe she didn’t want to know them because her own dreams hadn’t been fulfilled.
She had dreams of college which all came crashing down when she’d become a mother at sixteen. She’d raised four children when along came a son ten years later. She’d dreamed of a career but had an illness that prevented her from working outside the home. She’d desired a strong marriage but perhaps even there she’d sacrificed too much of herself.
Jane. I’ve only known her as a mother. I never got to know her as a woman, as a person with emotions and vulnerabilities and dreams. On Mother’s Day weekend in 1991, my husband and children had been on their way home from a Red Sox game. I’d been standing in the kitchen, listening to the buzz of a low-flying helicopter, when the phone rang. My mother’s car had been struck by a drunk driver.
In the blurry aftermath of thumping helicopter blades, wailing sirens and the silent good-bye when the good doctors and nurses couldn’t save her, raw emotions had churned inside me. But one question had lingered in my mind. Now who will eat the chicken wings?
Sacrifice, to give up something of value. My mother’s life had been ripped away far too early. And I wonder - am I like her when I bake a cake, am I like her when I lend someone a shoulder to cry on? So many questions, so little answers.
So, when I go to parties, and chicken wings abound, I put them on my plate. But when I pick up that skinny little chicken wing and gnaw on that bone, I think of my mother. I remember what I knew of her and I think about the parts of her that are in me, the woman I’m becoming. I’m that much closer to understanding her as a person.
Jane, I will always eat the chicken wings.
Judy is the mother of three grown children. Completed a course from Long Ridge Writer's Group just recently and now have the time to write when inspiration strikes.
