Dinner Together

Last month, I read on Barbara Frank's blog about a special day set aside for families to eat dinner together. I have been thinking about how seldom we eat dinner together any more. With kids going in a variety of directions, especially wtih one working days from 6-4 and the other working evenings from 2:30-11:30, there just isn't going to be a time when we all can eat together. I figure if I can get five of us at the table at once, I'm doing okay. Six of us at once is really good. All seven of us who live here ... that hasn't been since Labor Day when one of the kids had a couple days off work. There's not a lot I can do about that. But I found a very interesting statement by Jeanne Wakatsuki in our current read-aloud, "Farewell to Manzanar." The west-coast families of Japanese descent were put into internment camps during WWII. She was describing the mess halls, and how the grown-ups ended up eating with their friends, and the kids ended up eating with their friends. Jeanne's mom tried for the first several weeks to hold the family together at mealtime, but it was a losing battle. This is what Jeanne wrote later --

Kiyo and I were too young to run around [to different mess halls], but often we would eat in gangs with other kids, while the grownups sat at another table. I confess I enjoyed this part of it at the time. We all did. A couple of years after the camps opened, sociologists studying the life noticed what had happened to the families. They made some recommendations, and edicts went out that families must start eating together again. Most people resented this; they griped and grumbled. They were in the habit of eating with their friends. And until the mess hall system itself chould be changed, not much could really be done. It was too late.
My own family, after three years of mess hall living, collapsed as an integrated unit. Whatever dignity or feeling of familial strength we may have known before December 1941 was lost, and we did not recover it until many years after the war.



When my older kids were young, they wanted to set up a homeschool commune. They wanted to pick a spot and have all their friends move to live in the same township, or even on the same square-mile section. They could enjoy the luxury of seeing friends every day. What a dream! A dream that I admit to sharing!

Of course, if we lived that close to friends, we'd have to learn to be self-controled about playtime, about visiting, about working, about school, about private time and family time and friend time. Not that we have a choice in the matter, but sometimes it's good to know that, as things presently stand, I don't have to exercise that self-control because the "controls" are placed on me by outside forces. (Well, there's always the problem of the computer....)

What I've been noticing the last several years in the younger kids, that didn't manifest itself as much in the older kids, is that they get really nasty to one another whenever we see friends. Whenever we go to Milwaukee to play, they fight the whole way home. I've taken to giving a speech on the way to a "Feed My Lambs" event: "On the way home, will you be teaching me the lesson that I am a really stupid mother for taking you to play with friends? Or will you teach me the lesson that you can play with friends and still be kind to your siblings?" The older one of the pair "gets it," but the younger one just fusses, tattles, complains, and pesters. Yesterday I noticed, however, that it's not just friends that have this effect. Visiting Grandma and Grandpa this week also caused her to be a pain in the patooty when she arrived home.

It's almost enough to make me yearn desperately for a boring boring boring routine, never to be transgressed with any excitement or outings or friends.