Family Dinner
Every night at dinner, I ask my family the same set of questions.
“How’s everybody doing?”
“How was everybody’s day?”
“What was the best part of your day?”
Always in a series, always in that order.
The first question is generally met with grumbles and mumbles. Sometimes even a “here we go again” style eye roll.
The second question is often answered in a single word, sometimes even a single syllable.
And I know to expect all of that. As much as I want more, those are just the introduction, and everyone at the table knows that just as well as I do.
The third question, though, is where things start to shift.
No one word answers allowed. No cop-out answers, either.
Dinner time in my house is about so much more than a meal. Even when the kids have activities that require a shift to our schedule, I do my best to preserve family dinner, or at least ensure that no one sits at the table alone while they eat. Dinnertime is different. These questions are different. Hearing about the best - and worst - part of each family members’ days is about so much more than just learning the mundanities of what happened in the preceding hours.
Knowing what makes them happy or sad or scared or annoyed… knowing which teacher is my son’s favorite, which classmate made my daughter think about something in a different way, which project is taking the most of my husband’s concentration… that’s about connection. I may never meet that teacher or classmate, but now I have context into how my child is feeling during the hours they are out of the house. I may not understand the details of that project my husband has spent all day agonizing over, but now I have a glimpse into how heard, seen, or valued he feels during his work days. These answers are more than words to me. The nightly questions at the dinner table let me see a side of each of the humans that I call family that I might otherwise not even have known to exist.
So while these three questions are the same every night, the majority of the time they lead to more questions. Unexpected questions. Questions I’d never have thought to ask. And I treasure that time, because I learn things I never knew that I didn’t know.
The questions themselves are not all that important to me. And, to be honest, sometimes the answers aren’t, either. What matters is that we take time each day (ideally) to remember that each of us at that table is a fully fledged human being with likes, dislikes, interests, feelings, frustrations, senses of humor, phobias and so much more during all of the time that we are not at that table. The details of the answers are vehicles for connection, snippets of their personalities. Asking these questions allows me to learn what lights them up in new and unique ways. Remaining curious as to how their world is shaping them, how their experiences are changing them, and how their lives are evolving brings us together in invaluable ways.
As my kids get older, I know that the number of family dinners we have left together is quickly shrinking. And I also know that as busy teenagers with complex social lives, they most likely think that these questions are annoying, and that it’s just something that their clueless mom makes them do. But I hope that as they move on through their lives, they remember that there is always someone ready, willing, and able to hear about their day. And, even more so, I hope that, when they move out of this house and prepare to create homes and families of their own, maybe they’ll ask their new families some questions at dinnertime, too.