Family Dinner Time

We've always had dinner together as a family, both in my childhood and my adulthood. The radio or, later, the TV were never turned on during dinner. No one was ever on the telephone, or reading, or otherwise mentally absent. It was a time reserved entirely for sharing the day with other family members.

When I was a child my father served every dinner. What was put on each plate was what he thought you should have; there was never any notice taken of individual likes and dislikes. If you had cleaned your plate you could ask for a second helping, but like the first helping, what you got was decided entirely by my father and any requests for more of just one item were ignored. In addition, the focus was on nutrition, not on taste; two dishes were often served in a single pile with the comment “it all gets mixed together in your stomach anyhow.”

My mother's parents had taken a vacation in Alaska one summer, and they brought my parents a souvenir tablecloth as a gift. This cloth was a large square printed with an outline map of Alaska annotated with symbols of local economic and cultural attributes: gold panning, radium mines, walruses, sled dogs, igloos, and so on. Every now and then my mother would work up the courage to put this cloth on the dining table and face the inevitable wrangling among my 2 brothers and myself over which of us was seated at the area of greatest value. She had to make sure to leave this cloth on the table for 3 days, rotating it daily so each of the 3 of us had an equal opportunity to possess the best treasures, and (I'm sure) praying that nothing got spilled enough to require the tablecloth to be retired early.

As my brothers and I got older, and began to have our own opinions about the world we lived in, dinner times grew more and more tense. My father would not accept any opinions that differed from his own. We had been brought up to use reason and intellect to understand the world around us, and to explain and defend our views. It was quite shocking to begin discovering that our father exempted any topic on which he had an opinion from rational discourse. He might take a few minutes to try to convince us rationally that he was right and we were wrong, but loud and frightening temper tantrums from him didn't take long to follow if we persisted in our incorrect views. We also began to see that our mother, an intelligent and well educated woman, was treated by our father as though she were another child during these “discussions.” We all learned to try hard to keep our mouths shut, and to get dinner time over with as quickly as possible. By the time I left home for college, family dinners were mostly short and unpleasant.

When we started our own family, Kathy and I tried to preserve the best aspects of family dinner while being on guard against the stressful experiences I had grown up with, and for the most part I think we did pretty well. With our first child I did insist that she eat everything that was served to her, and Kathy began more and more to resist as our daughter began to develop her own tastes. When our second child began eating solid food Kathy demanded that I back off of these demands, and I reluctantly did. Aside from that, I believe we all found family dinners to be an enjoyable time together.

When our daughter was a teenager, all members of the family entered several years of therapy. I was part of a therapy group that met at dinner time once a week. Each member of the group had to bring some specific part of the group dinner to each meeting. Our contributions had to be home made, and had to take account of the food allergies and preferences of all the other group members. Our therapy leader chose this format because so many people have issues that arose from family dinners they experienced as children. As we ate, we talked about our memories stirred up by the specifics of our dinner in the group. The process of preparing our contribution also provided each of us with an opportunity each week to “act out”, and every one of us did at times act out. We might forget to bring what we promised, or bring a dish prepared by others rather than home made, or in a few incidents bring a food containing something to which another group member was highly allergic. I have never participated in a family dinner since without being aware of the issues that surfaced during these group dinners.

Written as an assignment for the writers' group at The Fountains in February 2017 on this topic.