I believe in family dinners. For most homes that is a staple; kids set the table as dinner is being finished up, and the happy family sits down and reflects on the day’s events.
It was a staple for my home as well. Growing up I was honored to be called to the kitchen and told to give everyone a napkin at the table. As silly as it sounds, that is what I looked forward to. As years passed and the napkin assignment got old, I realized there were bigger things going on at the table besides napkin placement. It was the dinner itself. Not the food, just the premise of us all sitting down and being a unit.
It was not a rare occasion for us to all sit down and eat and talk about our days. That is how I grew up. Sharing stories from my day, sharing grades I got back on tests or even just listening to my Dad talk about his job with vocabulary I had never heard. As much as family dinners were a routine for us, things changed through time.
My mom started to work full time again, I started high school, my sister started sports, and my dad’s job got moved to New York City, a far cry from his short commute he had always known. Most days I would still sit down with my sister and my mom, and we ate without my dad because he was not coming home until 9 pm most nights. Usually when he would get home, I would sit and eat with him but it was not the same as things used to be. Then our routine experienced another change. Instead of sitting at our large kitchen table, we moved locations to the kitchen bar, where essentially we would all eat in a line, forfeiting face to face interaction, and basically being served by our mom.
Then came the biggest change of them all..we all started eating at different times. I would eat after work, my mom would eat after her spin class, and my sister would eat whenever she felt like it. So most nights we would not even eat together at all.
My dad on the other hand, ate whatever and whenever he wanted. He would waltz in from work and have a bowl of captain crunch almost every single day.
This trend continued into my senior year of high school. But I wouldn’t deem this a flaw of our family because we experienced what most people experience: life.
We all had different schedules and to get us all in the same room at the same time was a challenge in itself.
But I am glad to say that although our family lost our family dinner touch for a little bit, we were able to pick up where we left off this past summer. I think the catalyst for this was my quick-coming move in date for college. Every single Sunday throughout the summer we would all carve time in our schedules to reunite and reaffirm our old traditions.
Experiencing what I grew up doing right before leaving for school was bittersweet. It was like nostalgia every sunday, yet a reminder that old habits never die.