Dinner Time

(Please note, I wrote this several years ago when the war in Iraq was at its height of casualties.)

Family Dinner is an oxymoron to me. Eating together as a family at home has not been an experience I ever enjoyed or struggled to have, but it certainly is food for thought....

While growing up, eating in our family was a solitary endeavor. I came home first from school, so I ate first. We had a small kitchen with a round table for two and we were a family of 5. My mother was constantly cooking and serving us individually as we arrived home from school or work. My father required total quiet and efficient service during his meal time. Eating at the dining room table was never a consideration. The "dining room" was reserved for doing homework.

Unfortunately, as time marched on our family grew smaller rather than larger because of the untimely passing of my father. Yet, our eating habits never changed. My mother, my two brothers and I still took turns. Yet, eating alone was never lonely. We had added the all important tiny television to the kitchen counter. That TV became each of our dinner companions. We were silent as we took our turns eating. Over the years, I ate dinner with local television anchor teams, or Walter Cronkite. Sometimes I ate slowly so I could hear how many soldiers died in Viet Nam, watch the colorfully clothed protestors marching, or check on the weather reports during the unpredicatable Chicago winters.

Now I have my own family and a big kitchen with plenty of room for our four family memembers to sit together if we so chose. Perhaps because of the way I gew up I never really try to create the "family dinner" I saw on television shows like Little House on the Prairie, My Three Sons or the Patridge Family. My husband works long hours and often grabs a sandwich at Subway on his way home. I do not allow my children to watch the evening news. It is simply too disturbing and difficutl to explain. They are unable to sit together peacefully for any length of time anyway. I have no desire to be a referee or to try and explain what war means and how we got in one yet again during my short life time.

Luckily, the large screen television in the family room is easily visible from our kitchen. My son, the older child dominates the remote from the kitchen table. Sponge Bob is my choice for his dinner companion. He would prefer cartoons filled with gross humor and animated violence. My daughter, the youngest, retreats through the doorway at the other end of the kitchen to the living room where she is served on a TV tray placed in front of an old blue leather recliner. Her television is smaller but she has her own remote and that is all she cares about. We rarely eat the same foods. My son sticks to pizza and bagel dogs. My daughter prefers cereal or macaroni and cheese. I sit and read at the kitchen island, eating salad and intermittently wondering how many people have died in Iraq and Afghanastan thus far.

When we first moved out to the the suburbs in 1997 we were invited to dinner by our next door neighbors. There were two parents and five children. All the kids had some role in preparing the meal or setting the table. Everyone sat down together, ate the same food, and talked, sharing the day's activities along with the meal. It looked like a lot of work, but the effort seemed worth it. Those were the best behaved children I had ever seen. They obviously knew the value of a family dinner.

We were amazed, but sadly unchanged. Just yesterday, we quietly took our places at Subway, at the kitchen table, at the TV tray in the living room, and at the island and ate in peace and quiet with the exception of some laughter from Sponge Bob. There never has been friendly conversation at the dinner table of either the family of my childhood or the family of my adulthood. This time around I managed to turn the war off, at least on the television set if not in the real world.