The Perfect Family
Recently my daughter had a friend over to our home after school. He then joined us for dinner. Now, dinner at our house is no small potatoes. We have linens and good pates, cloth napkins, courses, jobs, procedures and standards. Our guest looked around at us all assembled and preparing for grace and said, “Do you eat like this every night?”
My daughter (who is 13, need I say more) responded with a sigh and a roll of her eyes. “Yes. Mom is trying to make us into a perfect family.”
Our guest looked us over again and said in a quiet voice, “Well, it sure looks like one from here.”
In a modern framework, a regular and elaborate family dinner every night is just not a reasonable expectation. Many if not most families are run by two working people. The demands of their jobs, both on their time and energy, make the Father Knows Best scene an absurd fiction. Even if one of the parents in a family stays home, the family dinner offers very little return on investment.
Now, I stay home with our kids while my husband works. I feed three relatively choosey children and I am not a very good cook, truth be told. So in order for me to sit down with my family of an evening and serve and eat a reasonably decent meal for the thirty minutes takes upwards of three hours.
I have to figure out what we’re eating. This one only eats starch, this one doesn’t eat rice, that one won’t eat cheese and I am a strict Vegan. Every meal ought to use the left over ingredients of the previous meal and each one ought to present balanced options, even if the kids don’t take them. I have to shop for these meals and try to stay inside the budget, I bring the groceries home, pack them into the creaking ‘fridge and then proceed to take them out and chop and sauté and boil them into submission. Then I set the table, set out the serving things, call the children, fill their glasses and get them all seated in their proper places.
Here you are thinking, “well, that’s her problem right there, she should be delegating those jobs.” I do, indeed, delegate the jobs which means that instead of saying, “I set the table” I should in reality say, “I nag someone four times to set the table, wash my hands, go upstairs, wait in the doorway until they get up and march them back down to do it.” In fact, delegation doubles the amount of time necessary to prepare any meal. Ask your mother.
Then we sit and there is the moment we have all been waiting for: grace. Everyone is given an opportunity to say grace but usually it is only our smallest member who volunteers to sing a ditty we are all weary of. There is some hand squeezing among the adolescents, some eye rolling and deliberately flat singing. Then we release hands and I give my nightly lesson on how we are only asked to say grace for thirty seconds a day and surely it is not too much to ask a group of people as blessed as we are to be grateful for thirty seconds. Even if all we are grateful for is the fact that grace is only thirty seconds long.
We pass and we groan at the nasty and horrible food that is placed before us. How could anyone expect us to eat our plain buttered pasta in the presence of spinach lasagna or penne pasta with spring vegetables? All this nutrition will put me off my food! I do not adhere to the “courtesy bite” philosophy. There was an historic Robertson moment where my son held one miniscule “tree” of broccoli in his mouth for forty two minutes. There was no courtesy there and the only bite was when he spit it out and I mumbled, “Parenthood bites.”
Conversation at our table is not policed. We can talk about anything we like that is not mean or vulgar. This is the point where you can be whoever you wish to be in the context of your family, but when you look around the table and see yourself in other people’s eyes, you may find you wish to talk less about yourself or use less vulgarity, even if just for these few minutes a day. I have noticed that at our dinner table – populated by two adults, two middle schoolers and a five year old, the old Jane Austen quote rings true: “In such cases as these, a good memory is unforgivable.” Don’t say anything mean about the boy you had a crush on last year. Everyone remembers.
We rarely lack for conversation. A five year old is a wonderful antidote to sullen pre-teens. Even if they roll their eyes and respond with condescension, they are participating, making eye contact, interfacing with a group of people they live with but rarely see.
I make my children stay at table for thirty minutes. Sometimes the children actually watch the clock and pop up like frozen waffles when thirty minutes have expired. But no- ah Ha!- they must be excused. I must excuse them. And I may have my mouth full. For as long as five minutes. They have learned to wait and be patient when awaiting permission to leave the table.
Then they go, grumbling about having had to do it and with nary a compliment for the chef. I wipe off the table, stow the leftovers for my lunch tomorrow, and clean the dishes. I do the dishes by hand because our dishwasher doesn’t work but I think I might anyway, because I can go over what was said at table without a tidal wave of external stimuli engulfing me. Believe me, no one is going to walk in while I’m washing, they might get handed a dishtowel.
All told, the whole process begins at 4:30 and ends at 7:30, and it takes place at least three and as often as five times a week. And doesn’t it sound like fun? Wouldn’t you like to be present?
And yet, here are some of the priceless things we have talked about at the table: what the grade cards of our own history teacher must have said in seventh grade, which Narnia characters most resemble the Physical Education faculty, which students have seen pornography on their computers and which ones have had a drink, what this person spent on her Bat Mitzvah and where that person’s non-custodial parent is moving, which neighbor pays the best for dog walking and who, in the Kindergarten Class, can read Go Dog Go and who is faking it. To my mind, any amount of work and strife is worth that goldmine of information.
Why, oh why do I force everyone through it? There is all kids of evidence that I could quote about how “dinner with the family” keeps kids from consuming alcohol or drugs or getting pregnant. I confess that I really think that if the kids at the table are getting the common American fair, the reason they won’t do those things is because they’ll stop growing up, start growing out and never get a date or invited to a party of any kind.
But it doesn’t matter because that is not why I do it. You see, sometimes we do things, not because they make sense, but because they help us make sense of things. According to my 13 year old, I impose an arbitrary and archaic tradition on my children with the rigor and fierceness of a drill sergeant. I drive almost all the joy out of it almost every day. My 11 year old sees me bowing to convention, letting society dictate my behavior and by extension, his, which is the definition of oppression. The five year old, it must be said, loves it and sings the grace with joy. And that is why I do it. Because at the table, while we are all focused on “being at the table but not of the table” we are being our real selves, interacting as a real family does. For just a moment, or thirty, or three and a half hours, we are being a family.
C.S. Lewis, in an amusing essay called The Sermon and Lunch regales us with the story of a minister who preaches a perfect family from the pulpit but in fact lunch in his home with his wife and grown children is a series of passive aggressive or just aggressive gambits that end in indigestion. Lewis proposes that we should not teach an ideal if we cannot live it.
I maintain that we do live it, we just could never preach it. It would not look very attractive on TV, even with attractive actors in place of pouty kids. A real perfect family fights at the table. They grumble over what is served and pout about their chores there. They are forced to sit there for the duration and they are released like caged animals after it is done without compliment for or comment on the job well done. That is a perfect family, do you know how I know that? Because when they are grown they know to put their napkin in their lap and to pass not reach. They know how to speak at table and they know what to expect. Out in the real world the proof of the pudding is in the eating, or eating with. And even more explicitly, I know that the chaos that ensues as our evening meal commences is the highest form of perfection because when my children look back on this time from adulthood, when they lean back in their chairs around their own tables, when they recall the “bitter butter battles” at our table, they will do it with loving fondness and refer to them as “family dinners.”
