It's More Than Just Lunch

I read a blog post today about about food. Not about cooking, or even so much about eating, but about how lives are interwoven and relationships are sealed through the simple rituals of dinner.

Not lunch, not breakfast. Dinner. The meal from which, theoretically, nobody needs to run off. Work and play are done for the day, and dinner is, in a sense, the day's dessert. The punctuation mark. The thing that prevents one day from running into the next as if there were no beginning, middle, or end.

If I could change one thing about how my children grew up, it would be to have insisted upon family dinners -- at least a few nights per week. We would have all come together, my husband and I and our three children, and written the day's final paragraph together. Deep down, I always knew it wasn't about the food; it was about the laughter, the arguments, the stories -- all the things that add up to connection. Period.

Family dinners in our house were few and far between. In the early years, dad was rarely home in time, and, later on, the kids' activities seemed to always get in the way. My complete absence of culinary skills or any desire to acquire them surely did not help the situation. But, again, it's not about the food. Some of my fondest memories are of our family's most legendary moments, and, come to think of it, most of those moments happened at the dinner table. On those rare occasions we were all there together.

Though there has been little progress on the official end of things in our divorce, we have taken great strides toward repairing our relationship for the benefit of our family. Not just for the kids, but for us as well. For now, the relationship just involves a shared meal, or the shared enjoyment of watching our youngest daughter play badminton. In a month we will share the joy of watching our eldest child graduate from college. For now, at least, it seems we will be able to amicably share all the fruits of the life we created together all those years ago. For now, we keep the conversation light, and we avoid all topics that contributed to the implosion of our marriage. For now.

Maybe our lives really will turn out all right. Maybe I'll even continue to read culinary blogs. Stranger things have happened. After all, it's never really about the food.