When I grew up dinner time was a fixed ritual in our lives. My parents worked opposite shifts and it was the only chance we had to sit together. It was normal to hear my mother making the correlation between the moral decline of our society, the rising divorce rate and the disappearance of the family dinner. It made heavy dinner talk for young hearts.
There were rules for our family dinners. Attendance was required except on the rare special occasion. (We knew that calling home and asking to have dinner at the neighbor’s on a random Tuesday was a futile attempt to shake this family tradition.) There was no music or television on during dinner because the point was to focus on the family. (Pun intended if you catch my drift). We always prayed before dinner and had to wait until everyone was done before we asked to be excused. Manners were a must and if we couldn’t be polite we were off to sit by ourselves on the front stairs. (I’m exhausted and feeling slightly suffocated just thinking about it.)
I know what you might be thinking; I was blessed for having such a nice family tradition and it’s not that I am not thankful or that I don’t acknowledge it can be valuable to slow down our lives down to eat with our family. In my experience it just felt forced. It’s not that family dinner isn’t a good idea, rather it seems awkward to try to make people get along by forcing them to do something. We probably would have come voluntarily to most dinners if we knew a hot meal was placed on the table every night at five. Even if we ate dinner at a friend’s house twenty percent of the time; wouldn’t our authentic presence at the other eighty percent of family dinners made the absences obsolete?
So it is funny to find myself worrying about the lack of regular family dinners in our home. As Solshine and Koala have grown I notice that we sit formally for dinner maybe twice a week, and even then, ‘formal’ is probably not the word to describe it. My family is so different from the authoritative background of my youth. Besides our philosophical and dogmatic differences, there is also the fact that food and diet have been thrust into the forefront of our reality. Shake and bake doesn’t cut it these days and I’ve made a simple list so that you might understand part of our predicament.
Me
J. Stone
Did you notice we are exactly the opposite? I can’t tell you how many times we have sat down to a big meal only to find that it hurts J. Stone’s stomach or irritates my system. Even if we were to make separate meals we even prefer to eat at different times: he prefers a large breakfast, small midday meal and a snack in the evening and I wake up a bit nauseous, eating lightly in the morning and building up to a bigger meal in the evening.
It is challenging to align our eating and over the years we have just gotten used to eating for ourselves with the occasional meal that overlaps. Now that we have children, I do think about the value of regular mealtimes and whether skipping the tradition might be harmful to our family unit in the long run. Maybe it was more important in my childhood because our family’s time together was infrequent due to school and my parents working full time with two opposing work schedules. J.Stone works seasonally and rarely works over 30 hours a week, I either write from home or the library and the kids are home-schooled. We spend many, many hours together. Could it be that stressing over the lack of the family dinner might be what preempts our undoing? Maybe for us the family dinner is just over kill.
Sometimes things magically line up. The table is cleared, everyone approves of the food and we sing our little ‘give thanks’ song. I cherish those times and I want them to be enough. I want to release my mother’s voice in the back of my head, insisting, that letting the family dinner slide could be the undoing of my family. There’s more to life than dinner, right?
(Disclaimer: I did have many wonderful family meals with my parents and brothers and I do think gathering with friends and family over food can be a wonderful and healing tradition. I’m just saying…..)
Related posts:
- Working with Family Happy Monday Everyone! I’d like to welcome any new readers...
- Vegetables and Family Togetherness I’m having a baby any day! While I’m busy nesting...
- Family Band In honor of my boys’ birthdays, (which happen to be...
- Elimination Diet Update Our Elimination Diet was perfectly aligned with our 21 Day...
- Daily Rituals We are a pretty go with the flow kind of...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
There is more to life than dinner. It is lovely to share food with others. It is nourishing to connect as a family. Do the two have to be combined? I don’t think so. I’ve seen your family and think you’re doing just fine without regular family dinners!
i think family dinners are more important when kids are at school and parents at work all day; when families need some down time to reconnect and just find out about each others day. but the fact that his work schedule islight and the kids are home, i think negates the necessity of stressing over sitting down at a predetermined time. the point is connection and you have that.
we tend to do family dinners at the table. i like the habit of all three of us sitting down together at once since we’re pretty independent during the day. sometimes things change and we eat seperately or one of us isn’t home for dinner or we eat at the coffee table or the breakfast counter. i think if i became all nazi-regime about a tradition i enjoyed it would take the enjoyment out of it. also it’s nice to have some days where we miss that tradition only to come back to it after a while.
i think if your mother’s voice creeps in again, you should mention all the times you *do* spend together and not worry about that whole 15 minutes you don’t.
or you could just start a family breakfast. they tend to be easier to prepare for different palates anyway. :)
~tara
Hi, I found you through The Organic Sister and had to comment with a smile about this post. I too have angsted in the past about our lack of family dinners. We usually eat dinner while reading books. More often than not, we are eating different foods. When one of us is finished, we get up and move away. We are homeschoolers and together all day every day. To us, family dinner time is a restful quiet replenishing time. It has huge value for us in that.