I'm a huge fan of family dinners. I grew up eating dinner as a family every single night, no exceptions that I can recall. It made no difference if one parent was out of town. It made no difference if it was a time of great turmoil and stress in our family. We sat down together for dinner every single night. I often marvel at my mother's ability to pull this off, though she usually reminds me that there was at least one period of very simple dinners like hot dogs or hamburgers most nights during some difficult times. Nevertheless I find it admirable and impressive.
I've always had a tenuous relationship with getting my act together for family dinners, or frankly, most things that traditional mothers seem to be able to pull off. I've done once a month cooking, which helped, although I found that I often forgot to plan for sides when I was pulling food out of the freezer. When my husband is out of town I have little to no motivation to get everyone to the table to eat a proper meal together and my husband has been out of town a LOT for the past 15 years. There was a brief period where he was coming home every night after a fairly normal workday and I committed hard to having a proper meal ready for family dinner most nights during that time and that was truly nice. There was also a period where he was the stay-at-home dad while I was a work-at-home mom and that was a glorious time for meals in our household. Between him being a professional chef and a penchant for domesticity that I have never had, we were having amazing family breakfasts and family dinners during that time and it was one of the best times in our family history. Sadly it was not maintainable financially, but we would both be happier with this set up.
Before we moved we went through about a year of primarily having things like frozen pizzas, frozen chicken nuggets, frozen burritos... basically the whole Costco freezer section. Interestingly, my lack of consistency in providing healthy, balanced meals has resulted in my children loving vegetables and seeing them as a delicacy worth fighting over, so I could get a bag of frozen vegetables or bagged salads and they would eat them as snacks. We didn't sit down for family meals either. I wasn't doing a lot of other family management either, to be honest. I felt like a failure and I was in a deep depression. It was a pretty bad year for the whole family and damage was done. Honestly the lack of family meals was the least of the issues.
When we moved to Houston it was a new start. The move was hard on some of my kids and I was committed to showing them what a good family life we could and would have even though everything was changing. I honestly have no idea how I did all of the things I did. I did everything. I had three kids in school and carpooled with another family, so I had afternoon pick up every day. I was homeschooling all the rest. I had the kids in extracurricular activities. I showed up for neighborhood events to try to avoid being seen as just that weirdo with all the kids, (not sure that worked, actually, but I met some wonderful people and I have some truly great neighbors). I recommitted to family dinner and worked on adding some recipes to my same boring routine. Truly, I'm not even sure how I did all of that while pregnant with twins. Then the babies were born and somehow I still kept going. Within a week of coming home from the hospital I went right back to carpool and driving for extracurriculars. I got family dinners going again shortly after that. If I could go back and give myself advice I would have advised myself to relax my standards a bit, but it's possible that my family really needed me to be all of those things at that time to recover and heal from the time before we moved.
The following year I moved the school kids back home. I loved the school they were at, but one kid was struggling emotionally and I was doing a good job homeschooling. I felt really good about it for the first time in a long time. I'm a homeschooler at heart and always seem to come back to it even though we try other things on occasion. Around this time I also picked up a part time work-from-home job doing transcription and captioning. I've worked from home during most of my adult life, sometimes out of necessity and sometimes out of needing something to do besides the kids. Working is like a little break for me, or a hobby that makes money. It's especially nice when I have jobs that I can watch shows while I work, which, unfortunately I can't do with transcription or captioning. It was during this time that family dinners started slipping again and becoming fewer and further between I'd get it together to do family meals on weekends when my husband is home but I just couldn't get it done during the week.
At first I felt guilty about this. But not as guilty as I used to. I've had a lot of time for reflection and growth and figuring sh** out in the past couple of years. The fact is, I'm never going to succeed trying to be what I thought moms were supposed to be and once I quit trying, I quit failing. This is a slight twist on the "lower your standards" rule of avoiding failure. Like, yes, definitely lower your standards if you can't meet them. I stand by that. But also, why not get some different standards that you can succeed at? Instead of feeling bad that I don't homeschool and keep house and feed the family the way I saw all the moms doing it growing up I'll play to my strengths and my creativity and frankly, I do a kick a** job at running my family. My pep talks I give myself have two main themes. One, I focus on what a special snowflake I am and how I just can't be expected to be like the traditional moms because I'm just soooo unique and can't be boxed in. (Hopefully the self-mockery is apparent here.) The other is being truly honest about what I actually do for my family and I do a LOT. I remember when reading The Screwtape Letters in high school taking note that humility involves honesty. It's not humility for a great artist to claim that he's terrible. There is no virtue in convincing myself that I'm failing my family when in truth, nearly everything I do is in service of them and I serve them well.
I don't mean to oversell it, I have a ton of flaws too. I'm physically lazy (but let me be honest even here too, I'm not just lazy, I suffer from low physical energy and physical pain - but yeah, I'm lazy too). I'm prone to escapism and wanting everyone to just LEAVE ME ALONE while I engage in mindless, pointless game apps, or binge watch shows, or whatever else. But now instead of just trying to quash my flaws completely, I've found more success in working with them and allowing time for them so I don't just crash and burn from trying to be just so darn good all the time. When I accept my flaws and weaknesses and focus on my strengths I can consistently do great things for my family.
So, bringing this back to dinner, part of my process in accepting this was first analyzing what I value about family dinner and what I think the benefits are. In my mind the family dinner is a lot about a time of day set aside for the family to come together and have conversation and reconnect after being apart for school and work all day. If dad isn't home and I've spent literally all day connecting with and having family time with my children, listening to them, focusing on their needs, talking with them, etc., the need to set aside "reconnection" time isn't quite as great. Obviously most homeschoolers I know are still having family dinner, so I'm not even close to trying to advocate that homeschoolers need not bother. However, most homeschoolers do at least have dad coming home from work every night so that family time reconnection with Dad is still a thing.
Don't get me wrong, I still see family dinner as something of value, and an ideal, but it's an ideal that I'm accepting letting go of at this time in my life. Now it's time for an indignant rant, are you ready? Do you have any idea how much I do for my family? Do you have any idea what's involved in managing the schedules of 12 people? Figuring out the individual educational needs and gathering the books and planning the time to work with everyone and making sure I haven't set up conflicting schedules so that they don't need the computer at the same time, and that I have time to check everyone's work and still teach math and grammar lessons, etc. etc.? That alone takes hours of planning. Not to mention complex chore systems that both get everything done and are fair. Teaching conflict resolution is a full time job, which I spoke about in my last podcast. I let my kids play video games so I have to have a fairly complex screen time schedule too to make sure each kid gets a turn at least once a week with an available system and/or monitor. I take two to three transcription/captioning jobs a week and the money gets set aside for extras such as midwifery bills or Christmas. Oh, and did I mention I now run a small trucking company? Yeah, I do that, which is pretty involved as well. I do the family budget too, and pay all the bills, and make all the appointments and handle anything that involves paperwork. I read all the books on demand to the baby girls, and I stay up late to chat with teenagers and young adults since apparently that's when they want to talk. And I do it all well... for the most part... I mean I'm not saying the occasional appointment doesn't slip through the cracks, but, you know. I do all that and still manage to have time to tell people on the internet when they are wrong (you're welcome). By 4 PM, frankly, I am DONE. Sooooo done. And if you think for one second (this is where I get really ranty) that I'm going to feel GUILTY that after doing all that I don't have the energy left to put together a balanced meal and sit everyone down for a family dinner, well YOU'VE GOT ANOTHER THINK COMING. *takes several deep calming breaths*
So anyway, I still want to do better in the food department than frozen Costco food, so we do it a little differently now. A balanced diet doesn't have to happen all at once, so I buy all the components for good balanced meals and we just make them and eat them sporadically. Everyone still loves vegetables, so we'll roast broccoli or asparagus or Brussels sprouts around lunch time or in the early afternoons a few days a week and have it as a snack. The kids love mashed potatoes so we'll make up a big pot one day and they'll have it as a snack or a side with whatever they are eating for lunch or dinner for the next few days. Same with rice. We make three to four big meals a week, like a big pot of spaghetti or chili or taco meat, or seasoned chicken and frijoles in the instant pots. We have one designated hot dog night. When Josh is home on the weekends we get take out one night, and we usually do one family breakfast (the kids beg to make pancakes, and I'm not going to complain about that) and Josh usually cooks something delicious. If our situation changes I'll probably re-prioritize. If I end up with kids back in school or somehow Josh magically was able to start coming home every night, I might move it up to the top of the list again, but something else would have to give for me to do that. I can't do all of the things, so that's one that I let go and I'm okay with it. I'm definitely not suggesting others do the same. But what chaps my hide is to hear a mom who is figuratively bleeding and dying daily for her family and then feeling guilty because she can't bleed, die, and meet every arbitrary imaginary standard that she thinks she is somehow obligated to meet because she is the mom.
/END RANT/
