I have seen many reproachful faces in my life — the disappointed math teachers, my father when I missed curfew — but never have I seen anything quite as reproving as the expression on the dead fish that lie before me. These trout (and the vat of potatoes boiling on the stove and the mound of spinach draining in the sink) were supposed to feed our family of seven on Friday night.
But one by one the people in the family fell away until now, as I write this, there are only three mouths left to feed and one of them isn’t hungry.
The blank silver eyes, meanwhile, look up at me from the kitchen counter as if to say: “For three lousy people, we gave our lives?”
These aren’t the only fish to die in vain. It’s easily the fourth consecutive Friday that family members who were supposed to come home have, for various reasons — all of them good — called either to say that they’ll be late and the rest of us should go ahead and eat without them, or to ask whether they might go on a play date or to an evening martial arts class or to the movies.
“Of course, sweetheart,” one can’t help but say. Home is not a prison, after all. People who work hard in schools and offices all week ought to be able to miss dinner on a weekend night occasionally.
But it’s dawning on me that the disappearance of Friday night dinners may be more than just a blip on the family calendar. It feels as though the household has moved into a new, more diffuse phase. There’s been, you might say, a tectonic shifting of dinner plates.
When our children were little, I remember parents of somewhat older boys and girls offering consoling remarks: “Oh, you’re in the trenches now,” they’d say. “It does get easier.”
I didn’t believe them, but they were right: Slowly, it did. From having to carry and laboriously secure each child in a car seat, for instance, we evolved to the stage where everyone could just jump into the car and strap him- or herself in.
From having to mash food into a puree and hand-feed it to toothless infants, we progressed to the point at which every child simply eats dinner. No one even complains any more about having to eat “the green stuff,” at least not with any sincerity.
Now, rather suddenly, it seems we’ve begun a new chapter. Not only do the grown-ups sometimes have alternate plans for a Friday evening; not only does a teenager hope to go out with friends; now even the youngest child is old enough go out for dinner and a movie. (That was last weekend; alas her host was so scared by the sharks in “Finding Nemo” that everyone had to go home early.)
Do I wish everyone were coming home to eat this darn dinner? Sure. But, unlike the trout, I have no intention of reproaching anyone. To paraphrase the old song, fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and parents gotta adapt as their children grow up.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
