My neighbor is tall, charming, charismatic, socially adept - the sort of person everyone finds engaging. I suppose it helps that he has an accent. We often drink tea before and after dinner, the habit of which keeps Mondays an honored momentum keeper in the week. On Mondays we dine. We have daughters (indeed the reason we met, in our neighborhood park) who share a keen and kindred ability to suspend worldly care and play imaginary plots or marvel at nature's wink or spend so much time developing a story it's impossible to stop them for meals. But that's what we do. We trade dinner duties on alternate Mondays, in a surrogate reclamation of the family meal which is stunningly stagnant when it's just one parent and one child.
For the past year and a half this somewhat simple weekly ritual has rescued the particularly challenging absence of family dinners. As a kid my dad was often away at dinnertime coddling and relishing his business, a one-man enterprise of guns and ammo and army surplus. On the occasions he did eat with us, spilled milk was the curse of any mealtime comforts - and with four kids at the table I do recall a lot of such spills. As a grown parent and a partner, mealtimes long carried a conflicting element too. Food is fuel, but around the quality of its preparation and its provenance, my parenting partner and I long suffered. Needless to say, family dinner often came at a price. Once mealtimes became a mother-daughter affair, outright obstinance and distaste still came to the table over the years, but I avoided imposing rules like timed requirements for staying at the table or eating everything on one's plate (I know I'm not the only one with stories about getting uneaten dinner for breakfast the next day, having to eat anything unless it made you vomit, or the endless feeling of twenty minutes as a kid although for my mom it must have felt like vacation to get twenty minutes of guaranteed seating!). But mealtimes get lonely without a grownup attending now and then.
Monday dinners with my neighbor came along just before my oldest daughter went to live with her dad. A night off of cooking one out of every fourteen days has obvious perks. Thirteen is less than fourteen! The less obvious and parallel elements of appreciation and housekeeping conversation emerged. While the inventive littles frolicked as fairies or sisters trapped on a mountain or storekeepers of vintage and collectibles, our kitchen tables served up a missing link for adult conversation and camaraderie made most special by the pure delight of the single block's commute to get there. Fancy that, an easy platonic dinner date by foot.
Dinner is as dinner does; there are nights when it feels like one extra thing, too much to accommodate at the head of a busy week or the recovery of a relentless weekend. Yet we usually do it anyway, now stabilized by the propriety of habit and the maturation of weathering each others' human moods. Without a doubt, the concurrent satisfaction of a ritual parent and child playdate is a lifeline to sanity. It's my great fortune to note this pleasure, the months of Mondays amid multiple households, work schedules, significant others and lessons of one kind or another. Monday evenings are a bright spot.
May your own incarnation of Mondays take shape for you.
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