Early in parenthood, I felt pressured to pull off gold-standard nightly family dinners. I?d heard what the experts were saying about its importance and always imagined a movie-worthy scene around the table, with our four happy kids. But the demands of commuting, raising a big family, and having a partner who travelled for work made it more like a horror film than a feel-good family drama. I was impatient with my hungry, overtired kids and short with my husband on the nights he wasn?t home in time to join us. One particularly stressful and teary evening, with a squawking baby on my hip and three other miserable children waiting to be fed, I realized the dinnertime vibe in our home was nothing like the one I remembered fondly from my own childhood. When I was a kid, my dad worked the late shift every third week. On those nights, my sister and I arrived home from school to find plates of dinner left out for us. Even though our mom was a whiz in the kitchen, she kept it very simple for our TV dinner nights. As soon as the theme song from our favourite cartoon came on, we would race from the kitchen to the couch. It always felt like we were breaking the rules, and it was such a thrill. My sister and I loved it.
It wasn?t until I became a parent myself that I understood our 1980s-era TV dinners were a break for our mom, too. In what was surely an act of self-preservation, she kept herself busy somewhere else and had dinner with my dad, long after we were in bed.
Sit-down family ...