I think about this every Thanksgiving. Somewhere a woman is crying. Some of you understand her suffering. It is gravy time.

The turkey is out of the oven and waiting to be sculpted by some proud swashbuckler. The mashed potatoes are fluffed and sitting patiently. Aunt Stephanie’s creative broccoli and a Cranberry Something are lined up and ready to go.

It is time to create that unholy mixture of meat fat and flour that will suffocate all those subtle tastes labored on by the contributors to this feast. Even if it’s the only time of the year that anyone even makes or eats gravy people expect perfection. In the end, all the guests will taste is the gravy. All they will remember is the gravy. The dinner will collapse or succeed on the perfect, silken, salty beauty of this chemical mix.

They will make little puddles of it in their crater of potatoes. They will sluice it into the moist stuffing. They will let it flood their crisp veggies and make the turkey slippery with it.

Gravy is the glue that holds the dinner together. But it is not supposed to taste or look like glue. Neither is it supposed to look like an oil slick, nor pour out in chunks. It should not be mistaken for tiny dumplings.

Thanksgiving and its allegiance to tradition – for why else do we continue to eat this stuff? – demands that the hostess or the mother or the grandmother be the gravy maker.

But not everyone knows how, nor will they ever. I have been gravy challenged since the days when cooks slid marshmallows and cream cheese inside green jello and called it a salad.  My cooking and my tastes have progressed since then.  But then comes Thanksgiving and that means turkey and the trimmings which include gravy. And while I have fond memories of my grandmother’s and my mother’s and my mother-in-law’s gravy, it now represents nothing but heartburn to me.

So there you are with everything ready and you have to take time out to have a breakdown over this brown goop which tradition dictates cannot come out of a can or a bag. Not only are you expected to do it well, you are to do it effortlessly and in those last three minutes when the kitchen fills with starving guests, swilling wine, having a great old time as you dump flour into a pool of gurgling grease. You stir. You pray. It clots. You weep, more salt for the gravy.

I’ve been pondering this question since I was a young woman hopping in my socks at the Y with a girlfriend.  Why do women like to dance more than men? I thought about it again at a birthday party for a friend,  when I excused my husband with, “You probably don’t feel like dancing,” and urged my girlfriends to put down their wine glasses and get out there with me.

I probably should stop trying to figure out dance-averse males. They have their reasons. When I asked a guy who was hanging back in the kitchen why women like to dance more than men, he laughed and gave me the Norman Mailer line. “Hey, don’t you know? Tough guys don’t dance.”

It could be that some men don’t dance because they think they have to be really expert at it. Even though we would applaud them for moving just a little, shuffling their feet even, they approach dancing like laying tile or building a deck as something that must be perfectly executed. Or not attempted at all.

I know it’s a generalization. There are men born to boogie and women who would rather clean grout than shake a tail feather. Perhaps, too, it’s only my generation.

But what I have observed is that women, more often than men, dance just for the pleasure of moving to music. They will grab hands with a three-year-old and jump up and down and call it dancing. They will hold a baby in their arms and twirl around. They will dance with their dogs, dog-willing. And they will dance with each other. Men do not kick off their shoes, yank a buddy from the bar and say,  “Let’s dance.”  At least not the guys I know.

Perhaps men worry that if they are dancing people are watching and judging. Actually if women are watching they are more likely thinking – wow, how cool, how bold, how self-assured. How lucky for her.

A friend scouts around  for men wearing Hawaiian shirts to lure onto the dance floor, figuring, I guess, that if you go out in public wearing something covered with pineapples and macaws you don’t mind, in fact, may even welcome, calling attention to yourself.

Dancing women consider it a form of self expression, not a talent show. They do not aspire to be taken for Ginger Rogers or Lady GaGa. They hear the drums and the juices start to flow.  Maybe it’s tribal.

We are fine about being amateurs. We know that dancing, except for ballroom, is an imperfect act. It’s basically improv plus hips and attitude.

There are lovely exceptions to dancing as a woman-dominated sport. A conservative friend ended up with a most liberal fellow because he taught her to tango. And is there anything sweeter than watching long time couples glide onto the dance floor perfectly in sync?

I have a card of a woman dancing barefoot in a red dress – lone dancers are so often in red dresses – painted by Anna Oneglia, with a quote by Anne Lamott. It says, “And she is going to dance. Dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when is old.”

I would add dance happy, dance to heal yourself, dance away sadness, dance under the moon, dance to bring rain, dance in the moment because you must and the world needs your good energy. And by all means, if you don’t wish to dance alone, grab another dancing woman.

The working mother who squats in the field, gives birth, bundles the baby to her breast and goes back to the job might envy the high-tech working mother who enjoys such luxuries as a portable hands-free electric breast pump. Perfect for the career woman’s busy lifestyle, it allows her to pump while on her computer, putting on makeup, blow drying her hair, making dinner and doing laundry. There is also a car adapter in case the pump battery fizzles while on the road.

Oh, the wonders of modern maternity I thought while sitting in a circle of professional women at a baby shower. It was for my daughter, a full time writer and first time expectant mother seeking advice from her experienced multi-tasking peers. That’s where I first heard of the no-hands pump from a mother of twins who employs it during conference calls and while dashing in a cab across Manhattan to a meeting.

There were no games, as decreed by the mom-to-be, no women putting clothespins between their knees and dropping them in milk bottles. No spinning pencils on a string across the belly to determine the baby’s gender. Of course today’s expectant couples can discover  early on if they’re having a boy or girl.  What’s top secret, I learned, is the name. It is not okay to share potential names and even grandparents-in-waiting will not know until the baby pops out and the parents rip open the envelope and declare, “And the winner is Ezekiel.”

Parents not wishing to burden their child with too common a name can go to a handy website and track the most popular baby names. So far, for 2011, the top four baby boy names are Jacob, Ethan, Michael and Jayden, just in case you wondered. In the early 1970s when I gave birth we had to wait until the last push and the nurse to proclaim “it’s a girl.” But we started blabbing name choices as soon as we found out we were pregnant.

Maternity trends evolve. When I was a working mother I didn’t have a breast pump that you could charge with your car battery.  That didn’t matter because I didn’t nurse. Breast feeding was an alternative but not as routinely expected as it is today.   Natural childbirth was newly in favor and that’s as earthy as I got. My pregnant daughter just now realized that she was a bottle baby. Poor kid thought I was an all-organic mom.

Among her shower gifts was a diaper bag with special compartment for iPod and smart phone. And a stylish nursing cover to layer between her and the public while feeding baby, which everyone in the room but me seemed to know as a hooter hider.

She got a lot of good advice. Someone told her about an app she can get to tell her which breast the baby last fed from. Someone talked about hiring a night nanny, who comes in for occasional night duty to relieve sleep deprived parents. Another mother offered the name of her baby sleep consultant.

But the best advice she got is not much different from what mothers of every generation have told each other. Enjoy it all. Don’t panic. Trust your instincts. Babies don’t break very easily. Take a nap when the baby sleeps. Meditate when the baby sleeps. Slip off for a 30 minute hot bath at the end of the day.

I liked this one, too:  Figure out which restaurants and stores have diaper changing tables in the men’s room so daddy can share that chore.

And oh yes, buy wine in bulk.