I remember the day I brought home a giant cardboard box filled with pieces of a new kitchen table. I barely got it in the car at the store by myself. I asked my then husband to carry it inside. We already had a decent, very solid, last a lifetime table. It was square and held eight people. We were a family of six so you would think that should be plenty big enough. This new table would easily fit fourteen! The look of shock on the kids’ faces when I explained we would need to tear down the wall between our kitchen and dining room for this new, unnecessary in their eyes, project!
After I turned 18, I moved across country to go to school and that is where we stayed when we started our family. I had moved a thousand miles away from my family and all the traditions I grew up with. My dad had 9 brothers and once they got married and started having kids there were a lot of people when we got together. They didn’t have much but what they had a lot of was love! I missed that. I remember the table overflowing with food on holidays and Saturday night card games and how excited I was when I was finally big enough to sit at the table and play Euchre with the grown-ups. I remember the stories and jokes told around that table when it was time to leave but nobody wanted to leave. Most of all I remember there was always laughter. That room that looked like chaos was so full of love. Everyone was welcome around Grandma’s table.
My kids grew up on this side of the country, but I wanted those same kinds of memories for my children. I could tell them about it, but I wanted them to really understand that same feeling of being a part of it. That meant, step one, I needed a table big enough to hold that future dream.
SO began the process to take down the wall and creating a space to hold such a big table. The kids had fun swinging the sledgehammer in the house and not getting in trouble. They didn’t want to give it up and take turns. We look back and laugh at asking if anyone turned off the electrical circuit just moments before Logan found out that nope that step definitely got missed as he touched the two live wires together. I remember climbing up into the hot attic full of itchy insulation to reroute said electrical line safely into a different wall to move the light switch and add a new outlet. I decided that was not a space I wanted to climb into again and had a deeper understanding of why electricians get paid so much. Taking down the wall and patching the walls we left in place took the whole weekend. It was a long weekend. The do it yourself shows always make it look so much easier. We decided we would save the floor project for a different day.
A month or so after bringing home my prized new possession, I finally got to build my beautiful black table. It was so long with the leaves in it that we ate on only one end of the table. That left room for puzzles to sit out or board games on the other end. Our tv was hardly on as we spent hours playing board games as a family and that was what I had wanted! We also started a new annual tradition; one day each Thanksgiving, the table would be covered in graham crackers and piled high with more candy than we could possibly use. We would spend hours gluing the grahams and candy together building houses, trains, tree houses, bobsled runs, and even zoos out of those graham crackers and laughing at ourselves when they would come crashing down. More importantly, we were building the same kinds of memories I cherished from my childhood.
Then life changed, as life usually does, and kids grew up and moved out followed by several divorces. The number of people around the table shrunk. My sister came for a visit and we talked her and her family into moving across the country. I was happy, I finally had my sister around again that shared those same memories. Our number grew. They joined us for holidays and it made the table feel full again. Brittany moved back from Utah with her new little family to join us around the table last year. Like my grandmother, my table was also a place everyone was welcome.
Sometimes you work so long and so hard for so many years that you forget to pause and see what you have created. My nieces came for a visit last summer, so all my kids and my sister’s family all came over to spend the day. It was in one of those small moments that I realized after 13 years of adding spouses and grandkids, divorces and weddings, I finally felt my moment of my entire family around my table together. I saw that future I had dreamt of so long ago. I looked around to realize that all that chaos of the day was the same love I felt around my grandma’s table many many years ago and it was so worth the wait! It was a room full of chaos and love and at the end of the day everyone sat around the table laughing and enjoying each other’s company, not wanting to leave.
There will be more moments and more memories made. Amanda is about to get married and we are happily adding more around our table again. There will always be room for more and if there isn’t, then I will have to go on a new quest to find an even bigger table.
Finding My Beautiful 