Change
The Sacred Family Dinner
Our everyday dinner table set with dishes that don’t necessarily match
“The family that eats together, stays together”
When I first became a parent, that old chestnut resonated with me anew and I embraced its ethos as a guiding principle.
From Rudolf Steiner, to countless articles, to at least one dedicated Facebook page, I was convinced of the value of making family dinners a priority.
But I’ve come to think that, though a lofty goal, it is perhaps an unrealistic one that only adds pressure to women’s traditional responsibilities, and doesn’t take into account the close proximity of families living together in lock-down.
When you’re spending all day with your immediate family, is sharing a meal at the end of the day really the best way to connect?
Don’t get me wrong. I love eating with others, sharing laughter and conversation while nurturing our body’s physical needs – an age-old ritual in most if not all cultures.
But more often than I care to admit, family dinners, when our children were very young, felt more like a 3-ring circus cajoling toddlers to eat broccoli, and dealing with spills, fatigue and tantrums.
And now that our homeschooled tween and quarter-time-at-school teen are also home most of the time, like us, and engaged in the flow of their own projects, the dinner hour is not necessarily the time when they want to eat. Getting everyone to the table would entail a different kind of luring, cajoling, and persuading that was both exhausting and discouraging and it made me wonder why I was so attached to the idea of a family dinner.
In our family, all four of us have been living full-time in a small place for nearly a year and it has not been without its challenges. But we have come up with a few strategies to make living in such close proximity more manageable, none of which revolve around dinner.
Our priority was to be intentional about gathering, and not just for an obligatory daily meal. It wasn’t about us not wanting to be together, but about shirking a cultural obligation that wasn’t serving us anymore.
Now, we all eat whenever we want – we’re more like being room-mates in that regard. Our kids are old enough to be responsible for preparing food for themselves, so there’s no question of them starving. And since we, the parents, are home most of the time now too, we can monitor any nutritional intake or lack thereof or can help or give other input as needed. The kids are also responsible for going out and doing their own grocery shopping if they want to eat something that’s not in the house.
And we’re finding new ways to be together. If someone is eating but we’re not hungry we might just sit down and have a chat with them anyway. Or we might go out for a walk or a bike ride, or just sit and have a talk at any time of the day. Or we might play a board-game at what was previously the dinner hour, but is now free of any stress from cooking and cleaning.
We’ve also worked out ways to share devices and spaces, a process that keeps evolving and keeps us working together to find the right balance. We have short, impromptu dances in the kitchen, day and night, to help dispel any lethargy or frustration. And we have weekly meetings to discuss any conflicts that have arisen, come up with protocols for managing them, and plan the week to come.
Because we now connect at various times throughout the day, eating dinner together didn’t feel as critical as before. Personally, I find it immensely liberating not to think about dinner and I simply make myself a quick peanut butter and jam sandwich or go without food entirely in order to stay in the flow of my own projects, free of any obligation to stop and rustle up dinner.
Yet after all was said and done, I still longed to gather and eat together, stuck on the promise of cultural and social nourishment. So after the dust had settled and I had the mental capacity to think about fine-tuning the dinner thing, I told the others it still wasn’t quite working for me. I wanted shared family dinners – just not every day.
Everyone agreed, and we decided to keep celebratory dinners that happen throughout the year, and have at least one family dinner a week.
Each of us is now in a team of two and we take turns, on alternating weeks, being responsible for dinner one night a week – cooking, setting the table, and cleaning up – even, sometimes, lighting a candle or two. And we all agreed to stay at the table, for conversation afterward.
As a result, our dinners have taken on greater depth and meaning – the spiritual nourishment they were meant to have all along.
In this Covid era everyone is, of necessity, becoming more creative about family traditions and agreements, including coming up with new ways to make daily routines work for them. I’ve heard of at least three families who eat dinner while watching tv or other media, although I wonder if any of them think it’s ideal.
Social analysts say we need to be flexible in this Covid era and in times to come, and that by being willing to re-imagine, change, and adapt we’ll be in the best position to face the many challenges and uncertainties of the future. It’s exciting to give up obligations that don’t serve us anymore and to make changes that minimize stress, tweaking them over and over again as circumstances dictate and benefitting from the energy that comes from being open to change. Switching things up is empowering, and reminds us to keep growing and evolving because it’s never truly finished.
I know our own routine will probably morph again as we have more freedom to gather with others, and when we’re not all together for so many hours of the day.
But for now, it works and it makes me laugh when, almost every day around noon, we all congregate, organically, in one tight little corner of the kitchen where the sink, the cutting board, and the dishes are located, weaving in and out, and bouncing off each other like satellites.Then, little by little, cupboard doors are closed, chairs are pulled back, and we find ourselves sitting around the table, eating together.
Just like a family dinner.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )
Edgymama 