Not a Wasted Word

This is a piece I wrote for the magazine. I haven’t asked what their policy is on posting pieces elsewhere (this will be printed and our content is currently unavailable online–that is supposed to change soon), but I figure it’s fine to do so here because it will never get back to them. I might take it down in November, when the issues goes out. Until then, enjoy (and comment if you’re so inclined, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic).

Family dinners were a big part of my life growing up. Every night we came together around the table to connect with each other and enjoy my parents’ incredible cooking. The table was always impeccably set, the kitchen somehow already clean before we even sat down to eat, and the meal perfectly balanced and homemade. Despite her full-time job and my father’s frequent business trips, my mother made it seem effortless to assemble all of us around the kitchen table. I grew up taking delicious family dinners for granted.

Fast forward a couple of decades and suddenly I am the mom whose job it is to get family dinner on the table. Despite the increased presence of fathers at home, the majority of cleaning and cooking remains in the purview of the mother—and I am failing. Miserably.

I will admit, family dinner was a torch I was never interested in receiving, though I knew it would eventually be passed. Almost immediately upon leaving home I realized I had no interest in cooking for myself; I was completely content to heat up a can of soup and eat it in front of the television. Nothing about cooking was enjoyable and the fact that it took three or four times longer to prepare a meal (and then clean it up afterward) than to actually eat it solidified my aversion. Cooking required way too much effort, and the stuff out of a package tasted pretty darn good.

This was all fine and good when I lived alone, and when I got married, thankfully my husband never seemed disappointed in my lack of culinary enthusiasm or skill. It wasn’t until I had children that my distaste for all things cooking really became an issue.

Now, with a four-year-old poised to internalize our routines, I recognize that I am failing at one of my most important jobs as a mother. Increasingly, this gaping hole in my parental resume causes shame and a significant amount of guilt. Something has to be done.

The Pinnacle of Good Parenting

In my attempt to address this shortcoming, I have come to believe that family dinner is the ultimate embodiment of good parenting, and I panic over the distressing fact that we are not having it. If I can rectify this one glaring, daily mistake, maybe I can silence the judge and jury in my head that have already declared me unfit to parent. At the very least, I’ll have better evidence on my side when I make my formal appeal.

I’m not sure if I am reaching back into my own childhood when I put family dinner on the ultimate pedestal, or if my dinner worship is based on those vague notions we read and hear enough that they eventually become parenting gospel. Either way, I am sure family dinner is the cure to all possible parenting failures. Sitting at the intersection of balanced nutrition and quality time with kids, family dinner is the apex. The problem is, I don’t think I will ever reach the summit of this towering behemoth. My anxiety is considerable, my attitude bordering on defeatist: How can I possibly make family dinners a regular occurrence when my preschooler doesn’t want to eat anything, my husband gets home from work late most nights, I work full-time, and, most importantly, I really don’t want to cook?

So, I do what I always do when I am facing a personal crisis: I start reading, talking to other people, and reading some more. I must know anything and everything about family dinner, and it turns out, people have a lot to say.

Falling in Love with Family Dinner

Early in my search, I am directed to Dinner, a Love Story, a blog (and now book) by Jenny Rosenstratch. Ugh, I groan. Who creates a whole blog as an ode to family dinner? But Jenny’s blog is more welcoming to culinary-phobic mamas like myself than I am expecting. On her “about” page, she lists all the reasons she knows I will want to “fly the white flag” and I find myself nodding my head in vigorous agreement.

“Your kids refuse to eat anything, your fridge is full but your brain is blank, you don’t know how to cook, you have no desire to cook, you have a big project due tomorrow, you have no help with the cooking or the planning, you can’t even get everyone seated at the table at the same time, let alone eating the same meal.” Yes! I think. This is an impossible endeavor! I begin to wonder if maybe family dinner isn’t worth all the sacrifice and that we would do better to focus our efforts elsewhere.

Except that Rosenstratch absolutely thinks it is worth the effort. In fact, she made a promise to herself after becoming a mother that she would only work full-time if she could manage to get food on the table most nights of the week. Obviously, she isn’t struggling to make family dinner happen, but her blog—full of quick, healthy recipes and useful tips—makes it clear that she is a powerful ally for those of us who want to commit to family dinner but don’t quite know how to execute it.

One of the reasons family dinner scares me so much is that it is presented, at its most basic, as a meal with at least one vegetable artfully integrated into a cohesive whole (that a preschooler will supposedly eat). As a woman who only overcame her picky eating tendencies in college, I have zero experience creating healthy meals, let alone the kind other people (ahem, preschoolers) might want to eat. The whole enterprise—finding recipes I can tackle, keeping fresh fruit and vegetables stocked, and actually preparing it all in a pleasing way during the limited time I have every evening—seems downright impossible.

The Stress of Cooking

It turns out I am not the only one who finds executing the many components of family dinner stressful. Recently, a study called The Joy of Cooking? came out of North Carolina State University. The authors argue that the time it takes to cook, and the burden of pleasing all members of the family, makes it increasingly difficult for mothers to create the home-cooked meals that are idealized by public health officials and the media. A quick synthesis of prevalent messages today suggests that home-cooked meals are the solution to most childhood health problems and to the current childhood obesity epidemic, and mothers are responsible for providing them. As the authors of the study put it, “one could say that home-cooked meals have become the hallmark of good mothering, stable families, and the ideal of the healthy, productive citizen.”

It helps to have definitive research corroborating my theory that there exists an ideal vision of family dinner and that mothers are expected to provide it. (See? I’m not just making this stuff up!) I’m even happier with the author’s suggestion that we should re-imagine family dinner “outside the kitchen” and envision “more creative solutions for sharing the work of feeding families.” Maybe without the pressure to make this all happen in my own kitchen, I won’t be so afraid to attempt it myself.

It’s Not What You Eat, It’s What You Say

The thing is, I don’t just want to attempt family dinners—I want to eventually excel at them. Fortunately, not everyone believes the foundation of family dinner is a perfectly balanced, home-cooked meal. In fact, there are those who believe that a successful family dinner is more about quality time with loved ones than quality cuisine. If that’s the case then maybe, just maybe, I stand a chance.

In The Secrets of Happy Families, Bruce Feiler agrees that family dinner is essential—he cites research showing that children who eat dinner with family are less likely to do all the things we don’t want them to do (drink, smoke, do drugs, get pregnant, commit suicide, or develop eating disorders) and are more likely to have all the things we want them to have (larger vocabularies, better manners, healthier diets, and high self-esteem). Evidently, there is even research indicating that how often children eat dinner as a family is the “single biggest predictor of better academic achievement and fewer behavioral problems.”

Luckily for moms like me, it’s not what we eat, but how we spend the time eating that makes family dinner so crucial. Feiler argues that it’s the time spent together, the connections made, the family history shared, the conversations had, and the “intergenerational identity” created that makes family dinner an indispensable tool in the parenting arsenal. He also offers that many of the benefits of eating together can be enjoyed without sitting down together every night.

My informal polls of friends and GGMG members suggest that most parents already seem to understand this. When I ask other moms what they hope to achieve during family dinner, almost nobody mentions eating an organic, home-cooked meal. Instead, most parents want to check in as a family, hear about everyone’s day, connect with their kids, engage in meaningful conversation, talk about current events (if not while their kids are young, then when they are older), and solidify a family identity and belief system. Teaching table manners and including children in setting and clearing the table are also goals. It is clear that for most people, the traditions that are forged are what really matter, not what is served.

Most moms I talk to are similarly open-minded in their expectations of what family dinner looks like. While some families only consider a meal “family dinner” if all members of the family are present, most moms assert that if one adult is sitting at the table with the kids, it “counts.” Other common expectations are that dinner be a technology-free affair (no TV, phones or iPads present) and for all family members to participate, even if someone is not hungry. As for where family dinner takes place? While most families agree that when at home, family dinner takes place at the table, restaurant meals and even picnics in the park are considered family dinner if everyone is there to enjoy them.

The more I talk with other mothers about family dinner, the more confident I become that I can actually pull it off. Already we have migrated most of our meals to the dining room table (we used to feed our daughter mostly at her smaller table, or—gasp!—in front of the TV) and we are maintaining our new no-book-reading-at-the-table rule (though off-the-cuff Batman and My Little Pony stories are still requested). During every meal we share our highs and lows as we help our daughter develop her recall and conversation skills. We have the basics down; we just need to make it happen more often.

How to Make it Happen

Thankfully, almost everyone I talk to has great tips for how to make family dinner more accessible, even for the busiest, most culinary-averse families.

Keep the pantry and freezer stocked. Be sure to always have staples on hand, like oil, basic seasonings, dry pasta, canned sauces, pre-cut frozen veggies and easy proteins (frozen chicken or tofu).

Plan ahead. Keep a calendar of what and when you plan to cook and shop accordingly.

Enjoy leftovers. If what you’re making freezes well or will keep in the fridge, double the recipe and enjoy it a second time.

Embrace one pot wonders. Include a couple of one pot meals that incorporate all components into the rotation; if it can be ready in the Crockpot when you get home, even better.

Combine prepackaged and fresh foods. Add chopped veggies to a canned sauce or thawed chicken to a frozen stir fry. The I Love Trader Joe’s Cookbook series has great ideas for this.

Have breakfast for dinner. Serve Sunday morning breakfast on Wednesday night. It’s easy and everyone will love it.

Enroll support. Get help from a food service like Munchery, which does the heavy lifting (chopping and measuring veggies, etc.) for you.

Eat when your kids are hungry. If that means dinner is earlier than you used to eat it, so be it. If your kids are hungry, they’ll probably eat.

One of the best tips I got was to stop focusing so much on family dinner and start thinking about family meals. If the most important aspect of family dinner is to connect, it doesn’t have to happen in the evening. We’ve been enjoying big family breakfasts on the weekend for a while now and it’s nice to know that those are just as effective at establishing a family identity and belief system. I appreciate concentrating on when we can all come together instead of succumbing to the pressure to make family meals happen after long days of work and school.

Months after our commitment to embrace family dinner, we’re getting there. Now we have a white board for planning out two weeks worth of meals before we go shopping; it helps to see where my husband and I will be every night and know when we’ll be able to eat as a family. I ordered a Cooking with All Things Trader Joe’s cookbook (we shop there almost exclusively) and we’re making Sunday trips to the farmer’s market part of our routine. They are baby steps, but we’re taking them in the right direction and for the first time in my life as a parent, I don’t feel like I’m failing at one of my most important jobs.

Family dinner (or better said, mealtime) is absolutely an integral part of every happy family’s dynamic, but for reasons and in ways different than I originally suspected. It doesn’t matter when or where you eat it, or how long it took you to make; it’s not the quality of the food that’s most important but the quality of the conversation. Basically, the most important part of “family dinner” is the first word—not the second. For that, this mama is thankful.

I’ve been thinking, and reading, a lot about friendship lately.

One book is all about dealing with the loss of an important friendship. There is a lot about why friendships fail and one of the biggest reasons is that one or both of the women’s lives change, leaving them with less in common.

And is has me begging the question: Can we be friends with women who aren’t like us?

The answer is obviously yes, it can be done. But is it done that much? Ultimately, at the end of the day, do we have a lot of friends who are very different from us? Do those friendships last?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I try to make new friends. In my attempt to get to know more women in my area I invited all the mothers of kids in my daughter’s preschool room to a monthly dinner date. This spring most of the kids in her class turned four and suddenly we were going to birthday parties every other weekend. After two years “together,” I finally started getting to know the other parents and realized that I enjoyed their company. But it was hard to really get to know them at a chaotic birthday party, especially when I had to manage my own children, so I set up the dinner date hoping to befriend some of the moms that way.

The moms in my daughter’s class seemed like a great place to start making friends because we already have so much in common. Of course there is the obvious similarity–we have all have four-year-old children–but there are other correlations as well. Because my daughter’s school is open from 8am to 6pm, most of the families are dual earning and the moms work outside the home. I tend to find it easier to relate to other WOHM because we are dealing with analogous issues and have complementary schedules. Also, most of the families live relatively close to the school (or at least on the same side of town) which means they lead similar lifestyles (*cough* make about the what we do) and none of them are particularly hard to meet up with.

These are of course very basic parallels, but they feel important to me, and I can’t really imagine how I would meet women who didn’t share these basic experiences, let alone build a friendship with them.

I’ve even been noticing myself drifting away from women who are different from me in the blog world. When we were all dealing with infertility and/or loss, if seemed like we had so much in common and our shared struggles–and feelings of marginalization in mainstream society–allied us. Now that infertility is not the main focus of our lives, our differences are becoming more apparent. I’m realizing the these women lead very different lives, and sometimes have very different beliefs, and  I wonder if I have much to contribute to the conversation, or if my point of view will always be welcomed and valued.

It’s not that I don’t want to be friends with people who are different. I do, and I am. Life would be boring if we only spent time with those who share comparable experiences. I cherish friendships with women who come from a variety of backgrounds and cultures, with political and religious beliefs that don’t mirror my own. I am friends with women who aren’t mothers and never plan to be, who work in fields that diverge significantly from teaching, who make decidedly more money than I do (though very few who make considerably less…). Yes, not all my friends are exactly like me, and yet…

And yet as time marches on, I see and hear less from the people whose lives have diverged from my own, and I gravitate more toward the people whose lives are comparable to my own.

At the end of this month I’m spending the weekend with a friend from college who now lives on the opposite coast. We’ve seen each other annually since we graduated over ten years ago, but never for more than a dinner alone. I have to admit, I’m nervous to spend 48 uninterrupted hours with her. Our lives are so wholly different: she doesn’t have kids and doesn’t plan to, she works in a field I know little about, she enjoys a dual-earner-no-kids life with a significant disposable income and she travels around the world constantly. Our daily lives are so divergent I worry we will find no common ground. What will we talk about for all that time? What will we do?

I think the reality is, you have to have at least one big thing in common to be friends with them, preferably more. For a lot of mothers that one big thing is motherhood, but I suspect that as your kids get older, there need to be other commonalities for the friendship to flourish instead of falter.

Making new friends is hard. I find that if just one thing doesn’t match up it becomes almost impossible to build a friendship. One colleague at work lives too far away for us to get together (plus her daughter is already in 3rd grade, so her schedule more open than mine) while another doesn’t have kids and doesn’t plan to, and spends most of her free time with her husband. A third has a son my daughter’s age, and lives two blocks away, and even dealt with infertility (and she is awesome, I love her) but she’s an introvert and a homebody and she rarely wants to meet up. Through my daughter’s school I’ve met a few mothers that are potential friends, but one is stuck at home because her husband works long hours, another cancels a lot, so it’s hard to make plans. A third already has a ton of friends and is always busy and a fourth isn’t great at following up. There is even a woman who has two kids the same ages and sexes as my own, she lives close by, she is a teacher, and she is always game to hang out, but we just don’t seem to hit it off.

Everything has to line up just so, and even if it does, a friendship may not happen. It makes me want to throw in the towel and give up. And it makes me wonder if it’s worth investing in friendships with women whose lives are really different from mine. Can we engage in a constructive dialogue? Can we ever really be friends?

Do you have a lot of friends whose lives are significantly different? What brings/keeps you together? What eventually pulled you apart?

Medical science has created all manner of diagnostic tools over the years. There are blood tests that detect the slightest traces of hormones or other markers in the blood, and machines that provide images of our bones and internal organs. There are already so many tests doctors can preform to help make diagnoses, and they are developing more every day.

But there is no test for depression.

What they do instead is ask a bunch of questions and use the answers to point to it. They verify that the symptoms are present and then tell you that those symptoms are caused by a certain thing.

It is an inexact method with numerous flaws: the questions are subjective, the way doctors interpret the answers possibly more so. The questionnaire attempts to determine thoughts, feelings and behavior patterns that some people are better at recognizing. Each patient has a different baseline experience of “happy” and “sad,” their daily energy and attention level, how interested they are in doing things and how much joy they derive from what they do.

We understand that depression can be caused by–result in?–hormonal imbalances in the brain. Doctors prescribe medications that supposedly correct these imbalances, but there is no test to detect that they exist in the first place, or that the medication is correcting them. There are no CAT scans or MRIs that offer  physical proof of depression, a specific pattern one can point to and exclaim, “yes, there it is.”

This makes diagnosis–and treatment–difficult.

You’d think that after almost 20 years of living with depression (I consider myself living with it even when it’s in “remission”) I’d be an expert at recognizing it. And I am. I am quick to notice familiar patterns in my thoughts or moods, and “treat” them (when possible) with increased sleep and exercise, two things I know help ease my symptoms. So yes, I know how depression usually manifests in my life and I am quick to recognize it.

Except what if the symptoms I recognize as depression are just manifestations of who I am? I was diagnosed with clinical depression at 16 and I have been treated for it with a combination of therapy and medication for the majority of my adult life. I have never experience adult life without the specter of clinical depression lurking– I have no baseline “before” to compare the “after” to–and I’m starting to wonder if I even know what it really looks like anymore.

I have always wondered if my symptoms stem from depression, my nature or the stress of daily life (and my inability to cope with it). No human being is the same, we all sit at different places on the spectrum of “normal” (and one could write a book about how we determine “normal” and the damaging implications of that arbitrary categorization). Extreme cases of depression are easily recognized–I don’t wonder if someone with debilitating clinical depression is actually suffering from a disease–but for someone like me, who sits (with proper management) on the highly functioning side of the depression, it’s harder to determine what is the disease and what is just the person. Maybe, instead of falling on the highly functioning scale of depression, I actually fall on the lower functioning scale of “normal.”

One could argue that the two should not overlap, that suffering from–frequently or intermittently–the symptoms of depression and being clinically depressed are not the same. One is a serious mental illness, the other is… I’m not sure… some people’s natural disposition? The effect of an over-stressed life?

The distinction would matter less if the treatment were not the same. I have been taking medication for depression and ADD (another disorder that is diagnosed symptomatically) on and off since I was diagnosed in my teens. I can’t recall with real accuracy exactly how many of those years I was taking something, but I would be surprised if it were less than half. Was medication really necessary for all of that time? Is it necessary now?

There are times in my life that I can point to and say with absolute certainty that I NEEDED to be on medication. My freshman year of college I should have been on something and was not. My junior year in Spain I absolutely needed to be on something but the complication of living, and getting prescriptions filled, abroad made it impossible. My sophomore and senior years were much better, of course I was taking medication then.

There is no doubt in my mind that I had to take Zo.loft when I was pregnant with my daughter. I fought it and fought it but in the end my anxiety was crippling and I just couldn’t cope. I know now that I needed it, precisely because I fought going on it for so long.

Perhaps it is for the times when I can say with certainty that I needed to be taking medication that I question the times when I’m not as sure. Right now I am taking something, but do I need it? There is no doubt in my mind that this medication improves my quality of life, but is it necessary? My washing machine also improves my quality of life, and in this day and age–especially in this country–people would be appalled to learn that I do laundry by hand. There is an expectation that a washer and dryer will be available, if not in my home than at a laundromat. We simply do not live without that convenience anymore (but I have before, for a summer in Mexico where I washed most of my clothes in a concrete basin on the roof and hung them to dry).

Is my medication a metaphorical washing machine? Does it raise my quality of life to a level we expect, while remaining, strictly speaking, not necessary?

I will say that I do see my medication as a washing machine. It’s not, say, a dishwasher, which I have lived without for an entire decade. Sure I wished I had one, but I got by just fine without. It was mere inconvenience, its absence did not change the landscape of my days.

There have been times when I’ve been off my medication and functioning fine. The years I was trying to get pregnant I managed, despite the stress of trying to get pregnant and even secondary infertility. I was able to stay off medication for my second pregnancy and I was very grateful for that. There were a couple of years, in my mid-twenties when I didn’t take anything. So I know I can manage without medication, but I also know that I always end up back on it. And there were years when it wasn’t available and I suffered greatly for it.

Recently I tried to bring cut my daily intake from three pills to two. I thought I was doing fine and then after two weeks the thoughts started invading. I recognize depression as an attitude, a way of thinking, that is defeatist and devoid of hope. Everything seems unmanageable and I don’t see any way to make it better. I stop wanting to do things that usually bring me joy–or at least improve my mood. I cry a lot, for seemingly no reason. I am easily hurt by others and I feel like no body cares.

In the beginning, I recognize these thoughts and feelings for the lies that they are. I see through their false facade and I use self talk and cognitive behavioral therapy to impede the progress. But if I can’t quell the onslaught, it becomes harder and harder to recognize what is going on. Eventually I am drowning in darkness.

There are definitely triggers–stressful situations that make my depression more likely to emerge–but there are times when it comes on without provocation, when I’m taken by surprise. Those are the most unsettling.

I’m just starting the book Coming of Age on Zoloft: How Antidepressants Cheered Us Up, Let Us Down and Changed Who We Are by Katherine Sharpe. The author is my creative non-fiction professor. I don’t really believe in signs, but I do make note of meaningful happenstance and I know I can make this strange coincidence-I’m taking a class by woman who wrote a book about something I’m currently very interested in–meaningful in some way. In the introduction she writes:

This is a book about what it’s like to grow up on antidepressants. It attempts a faithful description of an activity that has become remarkably common–using antidepressants as a teenager or young adult–but still engenders intense, complicated, and often conflicted feelings, both in the young people who do it and the adults who are involved in their care. … Rightly or wrongly, antidepressants command powerful emotions; they can lead people to examine their deepest assumptions about themselves and the world.

Well, she’s definitely right about that.

I am experiencing a considerable amount of trepidation in reading this book. I’m scared that I’ll walk away with a changed attitude and that my actions will then have to reflect that change. I worry that my life will be harder, and less happy, at the other side. But I need to ask these questions, even if I can’t answer them. This is my life, and some choices require very careful consideration.

 What is your experience with depression, anxiety or mood disorders?

What are you thoughts of the prevalence of anti-depressants in America?