My Housewife Tendencies Emerge

The doctor asked me three days ago, "Everything all right with your family?"

Yes, doctor, yes it is. No one in my family is an alcoholic, or has a mental illness, or is out of a job, or appears to have committed a murder. I am not the victim of abuse, poverty, or a hereditary disease. So under the Merriam-Webster definition of "family"--"a group of individuals living under one roof and usually under one head"--we are all right. In fact, we're just what Merriam and Webster say we are. A group of individuals, living in close proximity to one another.

There are other general expectations for a "family" in our culture, which aren't in the dictionary because not every family subscribes to them. In most families, the parents are the breadwinners. The individuals under the single roof all go on vacations together. And someone, either the mother or the father, is assigned the task of cooking dinner each night. My family used to subscribe to all of those. When that was the case, dinner was cooked every night by my mom. If she happened to be too busy, my dad resorted to his old standby, Tuna Helper.

This routine changed a few years ago, when my parents had one argument or another, and they started trading off weeks to make dinner. Thankfully, my dad learned to cook actual meals. To begin with, he really did make dinner every night when it was "his week." But since cooking really wasn't his favorite thing to do once he came home from work, he started making a huge batch of soup on the first night of "his week" to hold us over for three or four days. Eventually, after my mom and I expressed our dissatisfaction with eating red beans and rice for half a week straight, he consented to give us money on some nights to buy and make dinner ourselves. Now, when it's his week, I alternate eating soup with making my own dinner, or ordering pizza. My dad's duty has gradually evolved from "cooking dinner" to "providing money for food." (As a disclaimer right now, I'm not angry with him; that's not the point of this post.)

My family also used to eat together, and have conversation. Sometimes we even went on picnics. I forget when exactly that stopped being the routine, but at some point, my mom and dad began dishing up dinner and saying, "Just eat anywhere." That's how we operate now. We assume that we can eat anywhere, so my dad eats at the kitchen table alone, and my mom goes to the dining room and eats while working, and my sister and I go to the living room, where we turn on a movie so that we don't have to try and make conversation. Once in a while my mom or dad demands that we eat dinner together at the table, which is met with reluctance from the rest of the family. We sit down together and eat in silence. And just as we have stopped eating together routinely, we have stopped going on picnics, and on family vacations.

It's possible that this decline was bound to happen, and is for the best. It's possible that at heart, despite our blood ties, we really don't like each other all that much, and don't have very much in common, and don't want to exceed the Merriam-Webster definition of simply living together as individuals. If we were forced to start eating together again, it's possible that we'd never find things to talk about, and it would be a pathetic facade of familial closeness.

But I don't think so. We haven't always been so awkward with each other--we do have things in common, and although I can see faults in my mom, sister, and dad more clearly than ever, that doesn't mean I love them less. No, I attribute our gradual decline as a family to something else.

During sophomore year, I was often extremely busy, to the point that when I came home, all I wanted to do was finish my homework and go on Youtube. When my mom or dad called "Dinner!" I took my plate down to my room, and ate while watching Michael Stipe dance and mumble. This was a conversation I could handle--one I didn't have to contribute to. And the other peeps in my family were in similar situations. My mom felt the pressure to edit every company document that she hadn't written herself; my sister constantly had one test or another that she hadn't started studying for; my father was tired from another day at the subterranean programming mine.

In short, our individual lives had begun to infringe upon the time that was originally booked up with family. Thus my parents said "Eat wherever," and we all got used to it, and eating together became a chore, as did preparing food for one another--to the point where my dad thought "Why the hell prepare food anyway?" and consented to be the provider of cash.

And in that way, the dinner decline was bound to happen. Because at some point your individual life stops being as simple as doing activities in a grammar book, and having playdates, and eating chalk. These days my mom and sister and I get hungry at 7, and my dad gets home at 8. In less than two years, if I get my wish, I'll be in another time zone while they're eating.

I don't want to stop following my own ambitions as an individual, but neither do I want my relationship with my family to be one where we can only stand to be together in a movie theatre. Cooking and eating dinner with friends a couple weeks ago felt unfamiliar and wonderful, and it pisses me off that my family can't seem to do that anymore. So my question to all of you is: do you think someone can have a satisfactory life as an individual, while remaining close with their family? (And if you don't give a crap about family bonding time...fake that you do.)

-Ahaneen